African American Literature (Masterplots II)

MASTERPLOTS II African American Literature, Revised Edition

MASTERPLOTS II African American Literature, Revised Edition

1 A–Dre

Edited by

Tyrone Williams Xavier University

Salem Press Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Editorial Director: Christina J. Moose Development Editor: Tracy Irons-Georges Project Editor: Andy Perry Editorial Assistant: Dana Garey Research Supervisor: Jeffry Jensen

Research Assistant: Keli Trousdale Acquisitions Editor: Mark Rehn Production Editor: Andrea E. Miller Design and Graphics: James Hutson Layout: Mary Overell

Cover photo: Harlem, 1934. Edward Burra. (The Granger Collection, New York)

Copyright © 1994, 2009, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or in the copying of images deemed to be freely licensed or in the public domain. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Some of these essays, which have been updated, originally appeared in Masterplots II: African American Literature Series (1994). New material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Masterplots II: African American literature / edited by Tyrone Williams. — Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-1-58765-438-1 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-439-8 (v. 1: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-440-4 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-441-1 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-442-8 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. American literature—African American authors—Stories, plots, etc. 2. African Americans —Intellectual life. 3. African Americans in literature. I. Williams, Tyrone. II. Title: Masterplots 2. III. Title: Masterplots two. PS153.N5M2645 2008 810.9′896073—dc22 2008036694 First Printing

printed in the united states of america

LIST OF TITLES IN VOLUME page

Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Contributing Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Complete List of Titles in All Volumes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Afrocentricity — Molefi K. Asante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Ain’t I a Woman — Bell Hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 All-Bright Court — Connie Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The American Evasion of Philosophy — Cornel West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Anancy’s Score — Andrew Salkey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Angela Davis — Angela Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Annie John — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Another Country — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Appalachee Red — Raymond Andrews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 The Artificial White Man — Stanley Crouch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 At the Bottom of the River — Jamaica Kincaid. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 The Autobiographical Writings of William Wells Brown — William Wells Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The Autobiography of a Jukebox — Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man — James Weldon Johnson . . . . . 77 The Autobiography of Chester Himes — Chester Himes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . 96 Autobiography of My Dead Brother — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . 102 The Autobiography of My Mother — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois — W. E. B. Du Bois . . . . . . . . . . 110 Babel-17 — Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baby of the Family — Tina McElroy Ansa. . . . . . . . . . . Bailey’s Café — Gloria Naylor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Banana Bottom — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Battle of Jericho — Sharon M. Draper . . . . . . . . . . Beetlecreek — William Demby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beloved — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Betsey Brown — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander — Langston Hughes . Bird at My Window — Rosa Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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116 122 126 132 139 143 148 154 160 165

MASTERPLOTS II page

Black Betty — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Boy and American Hunger — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . Black Ice — Lorene Cary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman — Michele Wallace Black Men — Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Black Muslims in America — C. Eric Lincoln . . . . . . . . . Black No More — George S. Schuyler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Thunder — Arna Bontemps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Blacker the Berry — Wallace Thurman . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Blue Meridian” — Jean Toomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blues for Mister Charlie — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bondwoman’s Narrative — Hannah Crafts . . . . . . . . . . . Breath, Eyes, Memory — Edwidge Danticat. . . . . . . . . . . . . Bright Shadow — Joyce Carol Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brighter Sun — Samuel Selvon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronx Masquerade — Nikki Grimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronzeville Boys and Girls — Gwendolyn Brooks. . . . . . . . . . Brothers and Keepers — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . Brothers and Sisters — Bebe Moore Campbell. . . . . . . . . . . . Brown Girl, Brownstones — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . Brutal Imagination — Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bucking the Sarge — Christopher Paul Curtis. . . . . . . . . . . .

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171 175 182 188 192 198 202 206 212 218 227 233 239 243 247 253 259 263 267 273 277 284 289

Cambridge — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cancer Journals — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . . Cane — Jean Toomer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Captain Blackman — John A. Williams . . . . . . . . . . Captivity — Toi Derricotte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Catherine Carmier — Ernest J. Gaines. . . . . . . . . . . Ceremonies in Dark Old Men — Lonne Elder III . . . . . The Chaneysville Incident — David Bradley . . . . . . . The Chinaberry Tree — Jessie Redmon Fauset . . . . . . A Chocolate Soldier — Cyrus Colter. . . . . . . . . . . . The Chosen Place, the Timeless People — Paule Marshall Clifford’s Blues — John A. Williams. . . . . . . . . . . . Clotel — William Wells Brown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Color of Water — James McBride . . . . . . . . . . The Color Purple — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Colored Museum — George C. Wolfe . . . . . . . . . Coming of Age in Mississippi — Anne Moody . . . . . . Coming Up Down Home — Cecil Brown . . . . . . . . .

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293 299 306 312 318 322 328 333 339 345 351 357 361 369 373 379 383 387

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LIST OF TITLES IN VOLUME page

The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered — Martin Robison Delany The Conjure-Man Dies — Rudolph Fisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Conjure Woman — Charles Waddell Chesnutt . . . . . . . . . . . . Contending Forces — Pauline Hopkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Content of Our Character — Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Corregidora — Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Country Place — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cranial Guitar — Bob Kaufman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual — Harold Cruse . . . . . . . . . . . Crossing the River — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Culture of Bruising — Gerald Early . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Curse of Caste — Julia C. Collins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Daddy Was a Number Runner — Louise Meriwether . . . . . . The Dahomean — Frank Yerby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daughters — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World — Suzan-Lori Parks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dem — William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dessa Rose — Sherley Anne Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Devil in a Blue Dress — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Different Drummer — William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . . . . Disappearing Acts — Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Distant Shore — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dragon Can’t Dance — Earl Lovelace . . . . . . . . . . . A Dream Deferred — Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dream on Monkey Mountain — Derek Walcott . . . . . . . . .

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393 399 405 410 417 422 428 434 438 442 446 451

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471 475 482 488 494 500 506 510 516 520

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Salem Press’s reference publications on literature fall into three broad categories: the Masterplots family, which contains 10 sets organized around individual titles of great literary works; the Critical Survey of Literature family, which contains 4 sets organized around individual authors; and 3 Cyclopedias: Cyclopedia of World Authors, Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, and Cyclopedia of Literary Places. Together, these publications cover literally thousands of works of literature. The Masterplots series is divided into two groups. The original, core series is the 12-volume Masterplots, whose second revised edition was published in 1996. It covers more than 1,800 works of literature, from the classics to the great works of modern world fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. In the mid-1980’s, as the curriculum grew to include more diverse and world authors, Salem began the Masterplots II series to supplement and expand on the core titles covered in the original Masterplots. Sets in the Masterplots II series are organized around broad genres of literature—poetry, drama, long fiction, and short fiction—and on areas of interest—works by women, British and Commonwealth writers, and American writers, as well as juvenile and young adult literature and Christian literature. Scope and Content Masterplots II: African American Literature, originally published in 1994, focuses on works by African American writers from the earliest known colonial writings through the beginning of the twenty-first century. The set includes essays on individual titles by great novelists, playwrights, memoirists, historians, and critics as well as the bodies of work of major poets, short-story writers, essayists, and orators. Students, librarians, and teachers can explore the rich literary canon of African American writings, from slave narratives to postmodern detective stories. Recognizing the continuing redefinition of literary canons in general, and of the African American canon in particular, the set incorporates high literary works alongside significant works of genre fiction and long-acknowledged giants in the field alongside writers whose works are just beginning to receive serious academic attention. Of the 367 essays in the revised edition of Masterplots II: African American Literature, 101 were commissioned new, including memoirs by Maya Angelou, Jamaica Kincaid, and Audre Lorde; novels by Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia E. Butler, Bebe Moore Campbell, Edwidge Danticat, Ralph Ellison, Percival Everett, Edward P. Jones, Terry McMillan, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Walter Mosley; poetry by Cornelius Eady; criticism by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Bell Hooks, and Cornel West; plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, and George C. Wolfe; and young adult literature by Gwendolyn Brooks, Walter Dean Myers, Mildred D. Taylor, and Jacqueline Woodson. In addition, 20 overviews on the essays or poetry of select writix

MASTERPLOTS II

ers were updated from the previous edition. Two annotated appendixes, a Bibliography and a list of Electronic Resources, were added, as well as a Chronological List of Titles covered in the set. Format of the Essays Two types of essays can be found in Masterplots II: African American Literature. Most address a single long work: a novel, play, short-story or poetry collection, memoir or autobiography, work of cultural criticism, or historical text. Others provide an overview of an author’s work in a certain genre, such as short fiction, poetry, essays, or speeches. Each title essay begins with useful ready-reference information about the literary work under discussion: title, subtitle, author’s name and birth/death dates, type of work, date of first publication and production, and (for fiction) the type of plot, setting, and principal characters featured in the work. The main text of each title essay is divided into several sections, depending on the type of work. Works of fiction— novels, short-story collections, plays, and poetry collections—feature a first section called “The Novel,” “The Stories,” “The Play,” or “The Poems,” which describes the events or contents of the work, and a section called “Themes and Meanings,” which addresses its broader implications. Essays on novels and short-story collections also include the heading “The Characters,” which offers an in-depth discussion of one or more main characters. Nonfiction works feature the sections “Form and Content” and “Analysis.” All title essays end with “Critical Context,” which discusses the circumstances surrounding the writing and/or publication of the work, including such topics as its influences, reception, and place in the canon of African American literature and literature in general. An overview essay begins with the author’s name and birth/death dates and then lists his or her major publications within that genre. The main text that follows features topical subheadings to guide readers. At the end of every essay is an up-to-date annotated bibliography that suggests secondary sources for further study. All essays are signed. Special Features and Acknowledgments Essays are arranged in alphabetical order by title. Indexes are provided at the end of volume 4 to assist readers in finding articles of interest. The Type of Work Index groups works by genre, allowing for easy comparison of works of a similar kind; the Title Index locates specific works; and the Author Index lists all authors whose works are treated in the set. We are grateful to Tyrone Williams, professor of English at Xavier University, for his editorial counsel on this project. In addition, we wish to acknowledge the efforts of the many academicians and other writers who contributed their talents to the making of Masterplots II: African American Literature. A list of their names and affiliations follows. x

CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS Randy L. Abbott University of Evansville Michael Adams CUNY Graduate Center Tunde Adeleke Loyola University Emily Alward Henderson, NV District Libraries Andrew J. Angyal Elon University Ashley Argyle University of Denver Jack Vincent Barbera University of Mississippi

Beauty Bragg Georgia College & State University Mary Brantley Holmes Community College

David Coley University of Missouri— Kansas City

Elizabeth Brown-Guillory University of Houston

Angelo Costanzo Shippensburg University

Earle V. Bryant University of New Orleans

Amy Cummins Fort Hays State University

Faith Hickman Brynie Bigfork, Montana

Jeff Cupp University of Charleston

Thomas J. Campbell Pacific Lutheran University

Erik D. Curren University of California, Irvine

Kenneth D. Capers West Georgia College

Jane Missner Barstow University of Hartford

Henry L. Carrigan Northwestern University

Cynthia S. Becerra Humphreys College

Sharon Carson University of North Dakota

Steven Bellomy Charleston Southern University

Warren J. Carson University of South Carolina, Spartanburg

Chris Benson Clemson University

Ethan Casey West Byfleet, Surrey, England

Cynthia A. Bily Adrian College Margaret Boe Birns New York University

Rodney D. Coates Miami University

Laura Browder Boston College

Lindon Barrett University of California, Irvine

Joe Benson North Carolina A&T State University

Balance Chow San Jose State University

Thomas Cassidy South Carolina State University Lauren Chadwick Northwestern State University xi

Dolores Amidon D’Angelo Bethesda, Maryland Dean Davies Mesa State College Jane Davis Fordham University Frank Day Clemson University Bill Delaney San Diego, California Paul Dellinger Wytheville, Virginia Francine Dempsey College of Saint Rose Joseph Dewey University of Pittsburgh— Johnstown

MASTERPLOTS II M. Casey Diana University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Roy Neil Graves University of Tennessee at Martin

Bruce Dick Appalachian State University

John L. Grigsby Appalachian Research & Defense Fund of Kentucky, Inc.

Sarah Smith Ducksworth Kean University William Eiland University of Georgia Robert P. Ellis Northborough, Massachusetts, Historical Society Thomas L. Erskine Salisbury University Donald T. Evans College of New Jersey Jack Ewing Boise, Idaho Kevin Eyster Madonna University Thomas R. Feller Nashville, Tennessee Christine Ferrari Charles Sturt University Patricia J. Ferreira University of Vermont Felicia Friendly-Thomas California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Elsie Galbreath Haley Metropolitan State College of Denver James C. Hall University of Illinois at Chicago Claude Hargrove Fayetteville State University Lucy K. Hayden Eastern Michigan University Terry Heller Coe College Rebecca Bliss Herman West Lafayette, Indiana Madelyn Jablon Stockton State College John Jacob Northwestern University Alphine W. Jefferson Randolph-Macon College Paul Jefferson Haverford College Sheila Golburgh Johnson Santa Barbara, California

Stephen D. Glazier University of Nebraska at Kearney

Richard Jones Stephen F. Austin State University

Kenneth B. Grant University of Wisconsin Center—Baraboo/Sauk

W. A. Jordan III California State Polytechnic University, Pomona xii

Mathew J. Kanjirathinkal Park University Hideyuki Kasuga Ritsumeikan Asia-Pacific University W. P. Kenney Manhattan College Leigh Husband Kimmel Indianapolis, Indiana James Knippling University of Delaware Tom Koontz Ball State University Kenneth Krauss The College of Saint Rose Vera M. Kutzinski Yale University Eugene Larson Los Angeles Pierce College William T. Lawlor University of Wisconsin— Stevens Point Katherine G. Lederer Southwest Missouri State University A. Robert Lee University of Kent at Canterbury Penelope A. LeFew Rock Valley College Leon Lewis Appalachian State University Thomas Tandy Lewis St. Cloud State University Victor Lindsey East Central University

CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS Shirley W. Logan University of Maryland

Khadijah Olivia Miller Norfolk State University

Bernadette Flynn Low Community College of Baltimore County— Dundalk

Michele Mock-Murton Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Joanne McCarthy Tacoma, Washington Gina Macdonald Nicholls State University Sheila J. McDonald Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus Margaret H. McFadden Appalachian State University Ron McFarland University of Idaho Richard D. McGhee Arkansas State University S. Thomas Mack University of South Carolina—Aiken Joseph McLaren Hofstra University A. L. McLeod Rider University Marian B. McLeod Trenton State College Mark J. Madigan Nazareth College of Rochester Kekla Magoon Vermont College

V. Penelope Pelizzon University of California, Irvine Andy Perry Los Angeles, California

Anna A. Moore Denver, Colorado

John R. Pfeiffer Central Michigan University

Robert A. Morace Daemen College

Ernestine Pickens Clark Atlanta University

Daniel Charles Morris Harvard University

Marjorie Podolsky Penn State—Erie, The Behrend College

Gregory L. Morris Penn State—Erie, The Behrend College Lori I. Morris Northern Kentucky University Sherry L. Morton-Mollo California State University, Fullerton N. Samuel Murrell College of Wooster Caryn E. Neumann Miami University of Ohio at Middletown Robert Niemi St. Michael’s College Holly L. Norton University of Northwestern Ohio George O’Brien Georgetown University Thomas R. Peake King College David Peck Laguna Beach, California

Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach xiii

Cliff Prewencki Delmar, New York Victoria Price Lamar University Josephine Raburn Cameron University Thomas Rankin Concord, California Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman Charleston Southern University H. William Rice Kennesaw State University Janine Rider Mesa State College Edward A. Riedinger Ohio State University Dorothy Dodge Robbins Louisiana Technical University Kenneth Robbins Louisiana Technical University

MASTERPLOTS II Carl Rollyson Baruch College, City University of New York Cheri Louise Ross Pennsylvania State University—Mont Alto Richard Sax Lake Erie College Reinhold Schlieper Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Carol E. Schmudde Eastern Illinois University D. Dean Shackelford Concord College David Shevin Tiffin University R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Rennie Simson Syracuse University David Smailes Westfield State College Marjorie Smelstor Kauffman Foundation Ira Smolensky Monmouth College

Stephen F. Soitos University of Massachusetts Tony J. Stafford University of Texas at El Paso

Mark W. Vogel Appalachian State University Gladys J. Washington Texas Southern University

Gary Storhoff University of Connecticut at Stamford

Michael H. Washington Northern Kentucky University

Gerald Strauss Bloomsburg University

Shawncey Webb Taylor University

Ann Struthers Coe College

Lorna Raven Wheeler Metropolitan State College of Denver

James Tackach Roger Williams University Carol B. Tanksley University of West Florida

Barbara Wiedemann Auburn University at Montgomery

Betty Taylor-Thompson Texas Southern University

Roosevelt J. Williams Howard University

Lorenzo Thomas University of Houston—Downtown

Tyrone Williams Xavier University

Charles P. Toombs San Diego State University

Patricia A. Young Western Illinois University

Paul B. Trescott Southern Illinois University

Gay Pitman Zieger Santa Fe Community College

Anita M. Vickers Pennsylvania State University—Schuylkill

Laura Weiss Zlogar University of Wisconsin— River Falls

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES Volume 1 page

Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Contributing Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Afrocentricity — Molefi K. Asante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Ain’t I a Woman — Bell Hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 All-Bright Court — Connie Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The American Evasion of Philosophy — Cornel West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Anancy’s Score — Andrew Salkey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Angela Davis — Angela Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Annie John — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Another Country — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Appalachee Red — Raymond Andrews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 The Artificial White Man — Stanley Crouch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 At the Bottom of the River — Jamaica Kincaid. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 The Autobiographical Writings of William Wells Brown — William Wells Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The Autobiography of a Jukebox — Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man — James Weldon Johnson . . . . . 77 The Autobiography of Chester Himes — Chester Himes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . 96 Autobiography of My Dead Brother — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . 102 The Autobiography of My Mother — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois — W. E. B. Du Bois . . . . . . . . . . 110 Babel-17 — Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baby of the Family — Tina McElroy Ansa. . . . . . . . . . . Bailey’s Café — Gloria Naylor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Banana Bottom — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Battle of Jericho — Sharon M. Draper . . . . . . . . . . Beetlecreek — William Demby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beloved — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Betsey Brown — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander — Langston Hughes . xv

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116 122 126 132 139 143 148 154 160

MASTERPLOTS II page

Bird at My Window — Rosa Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Betty — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Boy and American Hunger — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . Black Ice — Lorene Cary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman — Michele Wallace Black Men — Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Black Muslims in America — C. Eric Lincoln . . . . . . . . . Black No More — George S. Schuyler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Thunder — Arna Bontemps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Blacker the Berry — Wallace Thurman . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Blue Meridian” — Jean Toomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blues for Mister Charlie — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bondwoman’s Narrative — Hannah Crafts . . . . . . . . . . . Breath, Eyes, Memory — Edwidge Danticat. . . . . . . . . . . . . Bright Shadow — Joyce Carol Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brighter Sun — Samuel Selvon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronx Masquerade — Nikki Grimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronzeville Boys and Girls — Gwendolyn Brooks. . . . . . . . . . Brothers and Keepers — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . Brothers and Sisters — Bebe Moore Campbell. . . . . . . . . . . . Brown Girl, Brownstones — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . Brutal Imagination — Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bucking the Sarge — Christopher Paul Curtis. . . . . . . . . . . .

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165 171 175 182 188 192 198 202 206 212 218 227 233 239 243 247 253 259 263 267 273 277 284 289

Cambridge — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cancer Journals — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . . Cane — Jean Toomer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Captain Blackman — John A. Williams . . . . . . . . . . Captivity — Toi Derricotte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Catherine Carmier — Ernest J. Gaines. . . . . . . . . . . Ceremonies in Dark Old Men — Lonne Elder III . . . . . The Chaneysville Incident — David Bradley . . . . . . . The Chinaberry Tree — Jessie Redmon Fauset . . . . . . A Chocolate Soldier — Cyrus Colter. . . . . . . . . . . . The Chosen Place, the Timeless People — Paule Marshall Clifford’s Blues — John A. Williams. . . . . . . . . . . . Clotel — William Wells Brown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Color of Water — James McBride . . . . . . . . . . The Color Purple — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Colored Museum — George C. Wolfe . . . . . . . . . Coming of Age in Mississippi — Anne Moody . . . . . .

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293 299 306 312 318 322 328 333 339 345 351 357 361 369 373 379 383

xvi

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

Coming Up Down Home — Cecil Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered — Martin Robison Delany The Conjure-Man Dies — Rudolph Fisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Conjure Woman — Charles Waddell Chesnutt . . . . . . . . . . . . Contending Forces — Pauline Hopkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Content of Our Character — Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Corregidora — Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Country Place — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cranial Guitar — Bob Kaufman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual — Harold Cruse . . . . . . . . . . . Crossing the River — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Culture of Bruising — Gerald Early . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Curse of Caste — Julia C. Collins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Daddy Was a Number Runner — Louise Meriwether . . . . . . The Dahomean — Frank Yerby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daughters — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World — Suzan-Lori Parks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dem — William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dessa Rose — Sherley Anne Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Devil in a Blue Dress — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Different Drummer — William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . . . . Disappearing Acts — Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Distant Shore — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dragon Can’t Dance — Earl Lovelace . . . . . . . . . . . A Dream Deferred — Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dream on Monkey Mountain — Derek Walcott . . . . . . . . .

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393 399 405 410 417 422 428 434 438 442 446 451

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471 475 482 488 494 500 506 510 516 520

Volume 2 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere — ZZ Packer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 Dust Tracks on a Road — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529 Dutchman — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533 Erasure — Percival Everett. . . . . . . . . . . . The Essays of Amiri Baraka — Amiri Baraka . . The Essays of Ralph Ellison — Ralph Ellison . . The Essays of C. L. R. James — C. L. R. James . The Essays of Ishmael Reed — Ishmael Reed . . xvii

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539 543 551 557 564

MASTERPLOTS II page

The Ethics of Identity — Kwame Anthony Appiah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571 Eva’s Man — Gayl Jones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 Faith and the Good Thing — Charles Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . Fallen Angels — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family — J. California Cooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Farming of Bones — Edwidge Danticat. . . . . . . . . . . . Fatheralong — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fences — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Part Last and Heaven — Angela Johnson . . . . . . . . The Fisher King — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun — Geoffrey Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . The Flagellants — Carlene Hatcher Polite. . . . . . . . . . . . . Flight to Canada — Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Free Enterprise — Michelle Cliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Slavery to Freedom — John Hope Franklin . . . . . . . . . Funnyhouse of a Negro — Adrienne Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . .

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581 587 591 597 601 605 611 618 622 626 630 636

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643 650 654 657

A Gathering of Old Men — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . Gemini — Nikki Giovanni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . Give Us Each Day — Alice Dunbar-Nelson . . . . . . Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin . . . . . God Bless the Child — Kristin Hunter . . . . . . . . . The Great Wells of Democracy — Manning Marable . The Guyana Quartet — Wilson Harris . . . . . . . . .

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663 669 675 681 688 694 700 704

Having Our Say — Sarah Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Healing — Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Heart of a Woman — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich — Alice Childress . . High Cotton — Darryl Pinckney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His Own Where — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Home to Harlem — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Homewood Trilogy — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . The House Behind the Cedars — Charles Waddell Chesnutt How Stella Got Her Groove Back — Terry McMillan . . . . Hunting in Harlem — Mat Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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710 714 718 722 728 734 739 746 752 758 762

xviii

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

Hurry Home — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 766 Hush — Jacqueline Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 772 I Get on the Bus — Reginald McKnight . . . . . . . . . . I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou . . . If He Hollers Let Him Go — Chester Himes . . . . . . . . If You Come Softly — Jacqueline Woodson. . . . . . . . In the Blood — Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Castle of My Skin — George Lamming . . . . . . . In the Wine Time — Ed Bullins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl — Harriet Jacobs . . Infants of the Spring — Wallace Thurman . . . . . . . . . The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African — Olaudah Equiano . . The Interruption of Everything — Terry McMillan . . . . Intimate Apparel — Lynn Nottage . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Intuitionist — Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iola Leroy — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper . . . . . . .

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775 781 787 793 797 801 807 812 818

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824 828 832 836 840 847

Jazz — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelly Roll — Kevin Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelly’s Last Jam — George C. Wolfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jitney — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joe Turner’s Come and Gone — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Henry Days — Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joker, Joker, Deuce — Paul Beatty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonah’s Gourd Vine — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké — Charlotte L. Forten Grimké . Jubilee — Margaret Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juneteenth — Ralph Ellison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Just Above My Head — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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852 858 862 866 870 876 880 885 891 897 903 907

Kindred — Octavia E. Butler. . . . . . King Hedley II — August Wilson . . . The Known World — Edward P. Jones Krik? Krak! — Edwidge Danticat . . . Kwaku — Roy A. K. Heath . . . . . . .

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913 918 922 926 930

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Lady Sings the Blues — Billie Holiday, with William Dufty. . . . . . . . . . . 935 The Land — Mildred D. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 942 Lawd Today — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 946 xix

MASTERPLOTS II page

The Learning Tree — Gordon Parks, Sr.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 952 A Lesson Before Dying — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 958 Let Me Breathe Thunder — William Attaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 964 Let the Circle Be Unbroken — Mildred D. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 970 Let the Dead Bury Their Dead — Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 975 Life on the Color Line — Gregory Howard Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 982 Like One of the Family — Alice Childress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 986 Linden Hills — Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 992 Local History — Erica Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 998 The Lonely Londoners — Samuel Selvon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1002 The Long Dream — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1008 A Long Way Gone — Ishmael Beah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1014 Lost in the City — Edward P. Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1018 Love — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1022 Lucy — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1026 M. C. Higgins, the Great — Virginia Hamilton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1032 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1037

Volume 3 The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins — Pauline Hopkins Maker of Saints — Thulani Davis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mama — Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mama Day — Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Man Who Cried I Am — John A. Williams . . . . . . . . Manchild in the Promised Land — Claude Brown . . . . . . . Marked by Fire — Joyce Carol Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . Maud Martha — Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Measure of Time — Rosa Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meridian — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Messenger — Charles Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Middle Passage — Charles Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minty Alley — C. L. R. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miracle’s Boys — Jacqueline Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . Monster — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Montgomery’s Children — Richard Perry . . . . . . . . . . . Moses, Man of the Mountain — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . The Motion of Light in Water — Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . Mumbo Jumbo — Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Amputations — Clarence Major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx

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1043 1050 1054 1060 1066 1072 1078 1084 1090 1096 1102 1107 1113 1119 1123 1127 1133 1139 1145 1152

COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

My Brother — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1158 My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. — Coretta Scott King . . . . . . . . . . 1162 A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave in the State of Delaware, North America — Solomon Bayley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — Frederick Douglass . Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black — John Marrant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man — Briton Hammon . . . . . . . The Narrows — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Guard — Natasha Trethewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Son — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natives of My Person — George Lamming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New Negro — Alain Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1959 — Thulani Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1183 1188 1194 1198 1204 1210 1216 1222

Once upon a Time When We Were Colored — Clifton L. Taulbert One More River to Cross — Keith Boykin . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Nig — Harriet E. Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Outsider — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oxherding Tale — Charles Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1228 1232 1236 1242 1249

Painted Turtle — Clarence Major. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents — Octavia E. Butler . . . Paradise — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Passing — Nella Larsen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Patternist Series — Octavia E. Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philadelphia Fire — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Photograph — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Piano Lesson — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Platitudes — Trey Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plum Bun — Jessie Redmon Fauset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral — Phillis Wheatley. . . The Poetry of Ai — Ai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Maya Angelou — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Amiri Baraka — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Edward Kamau Brathwaite — Edward Kamau Brathwaite . The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks — Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Sterling Brown — Sterling A. Brown . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1255 1260 1264 1270 1276 1281 1287 1293 1298 1304 1310 1316 1322 1328 1335 1345 1351

xxi

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MASTERPLOTS II page

The Poetry of Lucille Clifton — Lucille Clifton . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Wanda Coleman — Wanda Coleman . . . . . . . The Poetry of Jayne Cortez — Jayne Cortez . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Countée Cullen — Countée Cullen . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Owen Dodson — Owen Dodson . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Rita Dove — Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar — Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Poetry of Mari Evans — Mari Evans. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni — Nikki Giovanni. . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Michael S. Harper — Michael S. Harper . . . . . The Poetry of Robert Hayden — Robert Hayden . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of George Moses Horton — George Moses Horton . The Poetry of Langston Hughes — Langston Hughes . . . . . . The Poetry of June Jordan — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Etheridge Knight — Etheridge Knight. . . . . . . The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa — Yusef Komunyakaa . . . . The Poetry of Audre Lorde — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Claude McKay — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Haki R. Madhubuti — Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . The Poetry of Thylias Moss — Thylias Moss . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Dudley Randall — Dudley Randall . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Carolyn M. Rodgers — Carolyn M. Rodgers . . . The Poetry of Sonia Sanchez — Sonia Sanchez . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Melvin B. Tolson — Melvin B. Tolson . . . . . . The Poetry of Derek Walcott — Derek Walcott . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Alice Walker — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Sherley Anne Williams — Sherley Anne Williams The Poetry of Jay Wright — Jay Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Al Young — Al Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Volume 4 Possessing the Secret of Joy — Alice Walker . . . . . Praisesong for the Widow — Paule Marshall . . . . The President’s Daughter — Barbara Chase-Riboud. Purlie Victorious — Ossie Davis . . . . . . . . . . .

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Quicksand — Nella Larsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1578 Race Matters — Cornel West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1584 A Raisin in the Sun — Lorraine Hansberry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1588 xxii

COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

A Rat’s Mass — Adrienne Kennedy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reckless Eyeballing — Ishmael Reed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflex and Bone Structure — Clarence Major . . . . . . . . . Right Here, Right Now — Trey Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The River Niger — Joseph A. Walker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rivers of Eros — Cyrus Colter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RL’s Dream — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry — Mildred D. Taylor. . . . . . Roots — Alex Haley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Runner Mack — Barry Beckham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom — William Craft and Ellen Craft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sally Hemings — Barbara Chase-Riboud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Salt Eaters — Toni Cade Bambara. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Phillips — Andrea Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scenes from a Sistah — Lolita Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Season of Adventure — George Lamming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seduction by Light — Al Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seraph on the Suwanee — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . Seven Guitars — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Shadow Bride — Roy A. K. Heath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window — Lorraine Hansberry . . . The Signifying Monkey — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. . . . . . . . . . Singing in the Comeback Choir — Bebe Moore Campbell . . . . . . Slavery and Social Death — Orlando Patterson . . . . . . . . . . . Sleeping with the Dictionary — Harryette Mullen . . . . . . . . . . A Soldier’s Play — Charles Fuller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soledad Brother — George Jackson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Some People, Some Other Place — J. California Cooper . . . . . . Some Soul to Keep — J. California Cooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soul Clap Hands and Sing — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . Soul on Ice — Eldridge Cleaver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. — Martin Luther King, Jr. The Speeches of Malcolm X — Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spook Who Sat by the Door — Sam Greenlee . . . . . . . . . . The Sport of the Gods — Paul Laurence Dunbar . . . . . . . . . . The Spyglass Tree — Albert Murray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Squabble, and Other Stories — John Holman . . . . . . . . . . . . Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand — Samuel R. Delany . . . . xxiii

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The Stories of Toni Cade Bambara — Toni Cade Bambara . . . . The Stories of Henry Dumas — Henry Dumas . . . . . . . . . . . The Stories of Langston Hughes — Langston Hughes . . . . . . . The Stories of James Alan McPherson — James Alan McPherson. The Street — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Suder — Percival Everett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sula — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush — Virginia Hamilton . . . . . . . The System of Dante’s Hell — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Taking of Miss Janie — Ed Bullins . . . . . . . . . Tar Baby — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Technical Difficulties — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston . There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden — Leon Forrest The Third Life of Grange Copeland — Alice Walker . . . This Child’s Gonna Live — Sarah E. Wright. . . . . . . Those Bones Are Not My Child — Toni Cade Bambara . Through the Ivory Gate — Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . Topdog/Underdog — Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . Train Whistle Guitar — Albert Murray . . . . . . . . . . Trouble in Mind — Alice Childress . . . . . . . . . . . . The Truly Disadvantaged — William Julius Wilson . . . Two Trains Running — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . Two Wings to Veil My Face — Leon Forrest . . . . . .

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Up from Slavery — Booker T. Washington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1932 The Venus Hottentot — Elizabeth Alexander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1939 A Visitation of Spirits — Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1943 Voices in the Mirror — Gordon Parks, Sr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1948 W. E. B. Du Bois — David Levering Lewis. . . . Waiting to Exhale — Terry McMillan . . . . . . Walk Me to the Distance — Percival Everett . . . Walkin’ the Dog — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . The Wind Done Gone — Alice Randall. . . . . . The Wine of Astonishment — Earl Lovelace . . . The Women of Brewster Place — Gloria Naylor .

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Xenogenesis — Octavia E. Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1989

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Yearning — Bell Hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1995 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down — Ishmael Reed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2001 Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine — Bebe Moore Campbell . . . . . . . . . . . . 2007 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2013 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2017 Electronic Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2024 Chronological List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2031 Type of Work Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2043 Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2050 Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2057

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MASTERPLOTS II African American Literature, Revised Edition

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AFROCENTRICITY The Theory of Social Change Author: Molefi K. Asante (Arthur L. Smith, Jr., 1942Type of work: Cultural criticism First published: 1980; revised and expanded 2003

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Form and Content Afrocentricity is one response to the separation of African Americans from the core of their heritage through slavery; historical untruths; and political, educational, and economic oppression. Afrocentric studies seek to recapture, through historical and cultural awareness, a full understanding of how African Americans should view the world. In Afrocentricity, Molefi K. Asante suggests that African Americans should disencumber themselves from the Eurocentric point of view and adopt instead a way of thinking that gives primacy to the cultural achievements of Africans and African Americans. To adopt the idea of Afrocentricity, one must first accept the proposition that there is a coherent African cultural system based on values and experiences common to the people of the African diaspora. Asante cautions that an Afrocentric people should not replace its history, culture, mythology, or language. The infusion and adoption of another culture into the African experience is in direct conflict with traditional African values. People of African descent throughout the world, Asante argues, should embrace what is theirs and discard values and ideologies acquired from other cultures. Asante claims that such acquisitions serve to cripple and dilute the rich heritage of Africans everywhere. Afrocentricity is not a new concept but a restatement of ideas associated with a number of past leaders of the African American community. In his first chapter, Asante examines the lives and works of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Maulana Karenga. Asante views Washington as having accommodated the white masses in order to seek educational and economic gains for African Americans. Asante, however, asserts that economic freedom must always be connected to political and cultural freedom; otherwise, freedom does not truly exist. He views Du Bois as a largely Eurocentric thinker who nevertheless had the vision to prepare future generations for Afrocentricity, and he argues that Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement was the most perfect, consistent, and brilliant ideology of liberation in the first half of the twentieth century. Asante also asserts that King’s contribution to the development of Afrocentricity was constituted by the moral framework in which he operated and his illumination of the ethical problems that segregation manifested. Asante views Muhammad and Malcolm X as effective organizers who taught their followers to relinquish another culture’s values and to focus on obtaining their own. Lastly, Asante discusses

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Karenga and his system of ideology known as “Kawaida,” a system rooted in African tradition. Asante sees Karenga’s message as representing African genius. The totality of the Afrocentric experience, Asante says, is expressed in Njia (“the way”). Afrocentricity contains an extensive chapter on Njia and advocates its practice, which involves a ritualistic ceremony that acknowledges the value of the African cultural heritage. Asante asserts that African Americans must awaken to a new consciousness manifested in psychological and political actions. Furthermore, African Americans must accept pan-Africanism and must discard “slave names” in favor of African ones. Chapter 2 of Afrocentricity deals with language liberation, the negation of black racism; systematic nationalism; creative, recreative, and consumer intelligence; and the need to advance the theory of Afrocentricity. Asante argues that all black people must pay critical attention to what is written about Africa, Africans, African Americans, and others of African ancestry. Chapter 3 discusses how black people should deal with literature, politics, and personalities that do not reflect the historical truths of the African diaspora. Asante also describes several levels of transformation that accompany Afrocentricity. These five levels of awareness are: skin recognition, environmental recognition, personality awareness, interest-concern, and Afrocentric awareness. Asante also identifies conceptual terms that need to be internalized with the adoption of Afrocentricity. He analyzes the Christian church and its influence as an authoritative religious force within the black community and discusses such topics as negritude and Marxism. In the final chapter, Asante discusses tactics and strategies for achieving an Afrocentric perspective. Analysis Afrocentricity is a frame of reference through which every occurrence is viewed from the point of view of the African experience. Afrocentricity, however, is not the antithesis of Eurocentricity. Asante declares that Eurocentricity is based on white supremacist notions that protect white privilege and advantage in education, economics, and politics while suppressing historical truths. Eurocentricity, Asante argues, in effect declares that all other groups’ perspectives are nullified if they do not support and propel white supremacy. Afrocentricity, on the other hand, relishes letting the truth be known. One major way to acknowledge such truth, Asante says, would be through the exhaustive and accurate study of Africans throughout the diaspora. Asante asserts that a new, more encompassing label needs to be applied to black studies programs in colleges and universities. The new label, he suggests, could be “Afrology.” Afrology would then be the Afrocentric study of concepts, issues, and behaviors with particular bases in the African world. Although not an Afrocentric term, “Afrology” would be a term that would be understood in a Eurocentric world. Asante states that Afrology would be the vehicle for research and resources that would make possible the comprehensive documentation of the perspectives of African Americans.

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Throughout Afrocentricity, Asante stresses that truth is the reality from which all knowledge will eventually spring. It is, then, imperative that African Americans assess their own personal experiences, evaluate historical truths, change their behavior to reflect the greatness of their ancestry, and, finally, internalize into every fabric of their existence their Afrocentricity. Knowledge is power, and Asante expects that whites will react negatively toward a competing perspective, yet when the truth of his arguments is validated, Asante argues, the hidden truths of Afrocentricity must gain acceptance. Finally, Asante declares that skin color is not a valid criterion for determining if one has the capability to become Afrocentric. Afrocentricity is a new way of seeing oneself and is an evolutionary and internalizing process. To be black does not make a person Afrocentric; however, to be Afrocentric one must be black. Critical Context In Afrocentricity, Asante provides a conceptual framework for an ideology that is designed to unshackle a population that has struggled for centuries to realize the greatness of its ancestry. Asante offers an outline to Africans throughout the diaspora explaining how they can obtain an awareness of themselves and of their heritage. In 2003, Asante revisited this framework to determine how hip-hop and other aspects of postmodern culture related to his central thesis. His intent was primarily to make his text more accessible to a new generation of readers and to rebut two decades of criticism; his argument itself remained largely unchanged. Asante’s ideas on centricity underwent a developmental process. Through the course of visiting Africa over a period of twenty years, Asante came to the conclusion that African Americans were culturally handicapped. This realization enabled Asante to explain what happens to a people who—when they are completely severed from their land of birth and denied their ancestry, culture, language, and history—eventually become emotionally and mentally impaired. Asante explains that a people that has lost its identity lacks direction, confidence, and self-esteem. Culture, however, empowers people; it promotes identity. For African Americans and those Africans throughout the diaspora, Afrocentricity offers a systematic methodology for regaining their heritage, self-confidence, and self-esteem. Asante does not compromise his strict views on the complete transformation one must undertake to become Afrocentric. Afrocentricity encompasses the complete shedding of any thoughts, behaviors, relationships, and cultures that are foreign to the development of the Afrocentric mind. Asante’s critics are sometimes offended by what they perceive as antiwhite indoctrination and racist attitudes being embraced by some African Americans who adopt Afrocentricity as a way of life. These critics also deplore the idea of dispensing with a Eurocentric curriculum in schools and replacing it with one that some feel is not essentially correct. Asante, however, maintains that African Americans must develop an awareness that is infused into their daily lives and that school curricula provide a vital starting point for such development.

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Bibliography Asante, Molefi Kete. “Afrocentric Curriculum.” Educational Leadership 219 (December, 1991-January, 1992): 28-31. Discussion of how an Afrocentric curriculum empowers students. Also discusses how Asante began to conceptualize Afrocentricity, why African American youths are not motivated to learn and achieve in American schools, and the importance of respect in gaining empowerment. _______. “The Afrocentric Idea in Education.” The Journal of Negro Education 62 (Spring, 1991): 170-180. Outlines the principles that govern the development of the Afrocentric ideas in education first mentioned by Carter G. Woodson in his book The Mis-education of the Negro (1933). Asante examines the approach and rationale for Afrocentric education in the United States. He describes public schools as failing to accommodate the needs of all African American children. Conyers, James L., Jr., ed. Afrocentricity and the Academy: Essays on Theory and Practice. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. Collection of essays by leading academics exploring the intersection between scholarship and activism and the role of Afrocentricity in the academy. Edwards, Ralph. “Include the African-American Community in the Debate.” Social Policy 22 (Winter, 1992): 37-39. Argues that the plight of the African American in urban communities remained virtually unchanged during the 1980’s, because the African American voice was never taken seriously. Kantrowitz, Barbara. “A Is for Ashanti, B Is for Black . . . and C Is for Curriculum, Which Is Starting to Change.” Newsweek 118 (September 23, 1991): 45-48. Reactionary article on the status and the impact of exclusively African American schools in the United States. The article cites critics such as William Bennett, who perceives these schools as antiwhite, commenting on the fact that many Americans see these schools as threatening Western-civilization-oriented curricula. Mazama, Ama, ed. The Afrocentric Paradigm. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003. Collection of essays exploring the concept of Afrocentricity as an organizing principle for various disciplines and projects. Includes four essays by Asante. Smith, Willy DeMarcell, and Eva Wells Chunn, eds. Black Education: A Quest for Equity and Excellence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989. Compilation of articles portraying African American education in transition. The articles deal with the benefits of school desegregation, higher education, and the impact of federal legislation on African American education. Willie, Charles V., Antoine M. Garibaldi, and Wornie L. Reed. The Education of African-Americans. New York: Auburn House, 1991. Extensive look at the education of African Americans since the 1940’s, from early childhood through postsecondary education. Information is given on how to develop educational strategies, evaluate current programs, and improve public policy. Carol B. Tanksley

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AIN’T I A WOMAN Black Women and Feminism Author: Bell Hooks (Gloria Watkins, 1952Type of work: Cultural criticism First published: 1981

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Form and Content In the introduction to Ain’t I a Woman, Bell Hooks says that the primary intent of the project was originally to “document the impact of sexism on the social status of black women.” As she worked on it, however, her focus expanded, and she adopted a more inclusive, holistic point of view that includes the politics of racism and sexism from a feminist perspective . . . the impact of sexism on the black woman during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent feminist movement, and the black woman’s involvement with feminism. It attempts to further the dialogue about the nature of the black woman’s experience . . . so as to move beyond racist and sexist assumptions . . . to arrive at the truth of our experience.

Taking its title from Sojourner Truth’s question to white women during a speech in 1852 at the second annual women’s rights convention in Ohio, Hooks’s book attests to a long tradition of African American women fighting for their rights in a complicated web of race, sex, and class in the United States. Ain’t I a Woman is divided into five chapters: “Sexism and the Black Female Slave Experience,” “Continued Devaluation of Black Womanhood,” “The Imperialism of Patriarchy,” “Racism and Feminism: The Issue of Accountability,” and “Black Women and Feminism.” It presents a historical, social, and political critique of a systemically racist, sexist, and classist society that has excluded black women. As a black woman and a feminist, Hooks presses white women, black men, and white men to reexamine honestly their exclusion and marginalization of black women, and she presses black women to recognize their current status by learning and understanding the complexities of their history. Grounding her work in a black feminist paradigm that calls on the activism of black women in the past, Hooks begins with the American enslavement of Africans. She presents examples of the either/or dichotomous demands placed upon women of color by white women and black men who insist that they deal with issues of sex or race but not both (and who both often exclude class issues). Hooks strategically criticizes and challenges the agendas of white feminists who ignore race and black men who push a “race first” agenda by arguing that women of color should ignore African American sexism for the sake of unified racial politics. She gives notice to the black men and white women who use varying tactics to rein-

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force the peripheral treatment of black women. She focuses on exclusionary and hegemonic language used, for example, by feminists who presume they speak for all women but who ignore the concerns of women of color. She is equally critical of racial discussions that similarly ignore issues of gender, thereby causing the phrase “black people” to refer in practice only to black men. Focusing specifically on the sexist-racist attitude in the women’s movement, Hooks pushes for a voice and space for black women’s issues to be heard and actualized. Using negative popular images of black women (for example, as licentious, “mammies,” or fitting other stereotypes), Hooks demonstrates the extent to which white women and black men join, perhaps unconsciously, to ostracize, condemn, and oppress black women, expecting them to accept such demeaning and silent roles. What Hooks calls for is the removal of these negative labels to identify black women and an embracing of critical, honest examinations of black women’s worth, contributions, voices, and thoughts. She continues by uncovering the role that imperialism and capitalism have played in subjugating black women. Emphasized throughout the book is the powerful and debilitating impact that societal assumptions have had upon the formation of African American women’s identity, place, and treatment. Examining the sentiments of Black Nationalists such as Martin Delaney and even Frederick Douglass, Hooks presents the push by black men for distinctive roles for women and men within the Black Nationalist movement. In fighting to secure the vote, Douglass argued that African Americans deserved to vote as rightful men. (Douglass did support female suffrage, but not at black men’s expense.) Moreover, Hooks discusses the rhetoric and roles of black men during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Once again, black men adopted an agenda that excluded or glossed over the rights, needs, and voices of black women. Hooks asserts that men are often taught to oppress women regardless of race. Even as black men resist white oppression, they often overlook their own oppressive behavior toward black women. Hooks further states that white women have helped black men overlook this behavior, because white women focused on the sexism of white men, which continues to overshadow both groups’ oppressive treatment of black women. Taking what could be deemed a controversial stance, Hooks asserts that the women’s movement in the United States since its inception in the 1800’s has been firmly built on a racist foundation. However, the inherent racism of the U.S. women’s movement, according to Hooks, does not deter from its necessity as a means to address and fight sexism, nor does it reduce feminism’s validity as a political ideology. Historically, white women have had a perverse and distorted animosity toward black women as a result of racist stereotypes, developed by white men, that pit black and white women against one another. These stereotypes portray black women as sexually promiscuous and immoral, which further supports a white supremacist attitude by white women. Hooks goes on to discuss why white women were willing to employ black women to raise their children and care for their homes and husbands, in spite of their supposed immorality. Throughout her critical commentary, beginning with American enslavement and

Ain’t I a Woman / hooks

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continuing through the 1970’s, Hooks focuses on disparities in pay, position, promotion, and opportunities for economic growth between white and black women. She notes that suffragists aligned their political cause with that of the abolition movement, while some contemporary feminists have employed rhetoric parallel to that of the Civil Rights movement. Both groups, however, focused on blaming white men, while their own oppression of black women remained unacknowledged. Analysis Not only does Hooks highlight what separates and divides black and white women and men, but she also calls for responsibility, accountability, and honest dialogue from all. In her last chapter, “Black Women and Feminism,” Hooks recounts the feminist acts of black women throughout American history. Referencing the works and words of Mary Church Terrell, African American club women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anna Julia Cooper, and the source of her title, Sojourner Truth, Hooks provides account after account of black women’s disillusionment with the white women’s movement. She emphasizes, however, that in spite of those frustrations, these black women continued to work against sexism, racism, and classism. After five chapters of highlighting the inadequacies of the (white) feminist movement, Hooks calls for space and voice. She calls for an eradication of the fear hampering black women and a push for action to change the thoughts and behavior of white women and black men in order to achieve liberation that is inclusive of all. She does not naively expect people to hold hands and sing together; instead, she calls for an honest conversation that will push all concerned groups beyond fear, intimidation, circumspection, and stereotypes into action. She calls for black women to be seen in all their multidimensionality: as black, female, poor or middle class, and of differing levels of education. She calls for black women to look to their history for strength and to come out of the closet as feminists. She calls for a redefining of feminism to be more inclusive, expansive, and flexible to the multiplicity of women’s lives—black and white. Critical Context Written in the late 1970’s while Hooks was an undergraduate student and first published in 1981, Ain’t I a Woman presents a critical, challenging, and honest examination of the intersections that determine and identify identity, politics, and culture. By engaging carefully and in detail with the body of literature on issues of particular importance to black and white women and men, Hooks highlights the consistent omission of black women from discussions of race and gender in America. Hooks was among the first to write so forcefully on the inextricable link between race and sex on every level of American society, but Ain’t I a Woman was not initially well-received by either white feminists or African Americans in the academy. Her essays boldly accused white women of being racist, black men of being sexist, and white men of being both; Hooks even went on to highlight the often elitist and classist perspectives of

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both groups. Her book demanded a shift in critical perspective for which the academy was not yet ready. Since its publication, the contribution and impact of Ain’t I a Woman has become increasingly evident. Academic discussions of feminism, womanism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism have increased in quantity and quality, allowing Hooks’s complex analysis to gain traction and relevance. The canon of African American literature has expanded and benefitted from this groundbreaking analysis, which helped establish that there is no single, authentic composite black woman and no composite black woman’s voice. Hooks reiterates the complexities, multilayeredness, and depth of black women’s experiences and voices. Ain’t I a Woman has become widely quoted and referenced, influencing the work of others as well as providing a foundation for Hooks’s later writing. The book opened the door for increased, improved black feminist thought and practice. Bibliography Boisnier, Alicia D. “Race and Women’s Identity Development: Distinguishing Between Feminism and Womanism Among Black and White Women.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 49, nos. 5/6 (September, 2003): 211-219. Analysis of the relationship between (white) feminism and “womanism,” a term invented by Alice Walker to differentiate between mainstream feminism and that of women of color. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 1991. Important overview of the development of African American feminist theory that analyzes Hooks’s writing and places it in its larger context. “The Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement.” In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. Manifesto of black feminist theory and practice that includes an overview of the history of the movement as well as forward-looking programmatic statements. Ellis, Becky. “Why Feminism Isn’t for Everybody: ‘Any of You Fellas Mind If I Smash Patriarchy?’” Briarpatch 36, no. 2 (March/April, 2007): 8-11. Argues against Hooks’s attempt to fashion a feminism that welcomes everyone; claims that by making feminism nonthreatening, such a stance blunts its political effectivity. Hooks, Bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984. Hooks’s follow-up to Ain’t I a Woman incorporates considerations of race into a broader examination of feminist theory and practice. Yancy, George. “Feminism and the Subtext of Whiteness: Black Women’s Experiences as a Site of Identity Formation and the Contestation of Whiteness.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 24, no. 3 (Fall, 2000): 156. Reads the development of feminist consciousness by black women as an opportunity for developing antiracist consciousness as well. Khadijah Olivia Miller

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ALL-BRIGHT COURT Author: Connie Porter (1959) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Realism Time of plot: 1960’s-1970’s Locale: Lackawanna, New York First published: 1991 Principal characters: Samuel Taylor, an African American from Mississippi who goes north in search of personal freedom and economic betterment Mary Kate Bell Taylor, Samuel’s wife, a caring, dependable person whose love for her husband enables him to face his disappointments Michael (Mikey) Taylor, their eldest son, who is intelligent and compassionate Venita Reed, a young woman from Mississippi who is Mary Kate’s neighbor in All-Bright Court Moses Reed, Venita’s husband, a hard-working, decent man, who is unable to comprehend the depth of his wife’s unhappiness The Novel Connie Porter’s All-Bright Court consists of a number of stories about people, most of them African American, who live in the area of Lackawanna, New York, near the steel plant where many of the men work. Each chapter in the book is structured as a short story, focusing on a single point of view and moving inexorably through an episode or a series of related episodes to a well-thought-out conclusion. Unifying elements among the chapters, however, make All-Bright Court a novel, rather than a collection of short stories. The book is arranged chronologically to cover a period of about twenty years, during which Porter traces the life of Samuel Taylor and, later, the lives of his wife and his children—in particular of Michael (Mikey), who often appears even in the chapters that are told from the viewpoints of other characters. Throughout her novel, Porter maintains a second narrative line, reminding her readers of events in the outside world and pointing out the effects they have on the lives of her characters. At times, these references come in the form of dialogue, as when plant workers discuss the probability that the expansion of European steel plants will cause layoffs in Lackawanna. It is usually television that brings the outside world into All-Bright Court. Mary Kate weeps when President John F. Kennedy is assassinated and Dorene Taylor, Mikey’s younger sister, hides in terror, because she thinks that the war in Vietnam may come to her home. In addition to reinforcing the chronological structure of the novel, these references to outside events emphasize the

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sense of powerlessness felt by all Porter’s characters, eventually even by the determined Samuel Taylor. Samuel Taylor’s story begins when, as an unwanted orphan in Tupelo, Mississippi, Samuel decides to go north after meeting Mary Kate Bell. As soon as he has established himself in Lackawanna with a job, a house, and furniture, he returns to Tupelo, marries Mary Kate, and takes her to her new home. In the years that follow, Samuel and Mary Kate work hard. They are conscientious parents and responsible citizens. Samuel, however, is never free from worry. He is afraid of losing his income, of being laid off or fired, even of being forced to go on strike. Meanwhile, Mary Kate is burdened with almost continual pregnancy, physical and emotional exhaustion, and constant concern about her children, who grow up in an environment that promises them nothing. Interspersed with the ongoing story of Samuel and Mary Kate Taylor—who, despite a truly heroic struggle, can never improve their lot—are vignettes that reveal far more desperate lives being lived all around them. Because so many of the adults portrayed have long since given up on life, these adults neglect and abandon their children. Perhaps feeling that those children represent their only secure hold on life, however, these characters remember their offspring whenever the mood strikes them. The alcoholic mother of Mikey’s friend Dennis nastily forbids the Taylors from cleaning him up. Dennis’s friendship with Mikey ends as a result. The indifferent, even hostile, mother of a little albino girl who was left alone in an empty house decides to take the child back just when she has found love and security with Venita. Over the years, Samuel and Mary Kate Taylor come to see All-Bright Court, which once seemed to promise them freedom, as just another prison. The best Samuel can hope for is to continue in his dead-end job at Capital Steel, while Mary Kate can expect no better than to stay in her crumbling cement block house, enduring the noxious fumes, the ear-splitting noise, and the rain of steel particles that are produced by the plant on which their existence depends. The best they can do for their children is to send them away, like Mikey, to learn new social skills, new attitudes, and a new language. In the final chapter, on his way back to All-Bright Court for a visit, Mikey loses his way in a blizzard and is rescued by his father. This reunion in the snow symbolizes Mikey’s attachment to his parents. Even as they embrace, however, Mikey can no longer hear a word that his father is saying. The distance between their worlds has become too great. The Characters If, as A. C. Bradley once said, waste is the single most important characteristic of tragedy, then many of the characters in All-Bright Court must be considered tragic. Despite their own best efforts, these characters finally fail. Samuel Taylor’s dream is to feel like a real man, respected by others and, even more important, by himself. In the South, he is treated as an inferior. In the North, he believes that things will be different. For years, Samuel continues to struggle, clinging to his sense of self-worth. With each threat to his income, however, Samuel be-

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comes less confident, until at last he lives not with hope but with the bitter knowledge that his dream of equality will never be fulfilled. Courageously, he encourages his children to leave the African American community, where they will have no more opportunities than he has had, and to move into the white world, even though he realizes that as they do so, they will inevitably move away from their parents. Mary Kate and Venita both suffer not only as African Americans but also as women. Because of their limited experience, they know no other route to success than to fulfill the conventional roles of wives and mothers. Because they have no source of information, they do not know that medical help exists that could alleviate the problems that afflict them both. Mary Kate, therefore, continues to bear one child after another, assuming that she has no choice; when Venita does not become pregnant, she feels that it is somehow her fault. Like Samuel, both Mary Kate and Venita are admirable and even heroic characters. They struggle, often vainly, to make things better for others, even though they themselves increasingly feel betrayed by life. Mikey Taylor seems to be the only successful character in the novel. He is fortunate: He is intelligent, and he has parents who encourage him while systematically imbuing him with their own high moral and ethical standards. After he enters his new life in the white world, however, Mikey abandons not only his old neighborhood but also his own identity. Samuel recognizes a hollowness in his son, commenting that Mikey is merely running away from All-Bright Court rather than toward something. As he says, Mikey has no dreams. That, too, is a waste. Mikey is fortunate, however, compared to other children in All-Bright Court. One of the characters treated at length by the novel is Dennis, who is seen through Mikey’s eyes first as a dirty, smelly classmate, then as an interesting new friend. Dennis’s alcoholic mother often leaves him alone in their house, without light or heat. He is pathetically happy to be taken in by Mary Kate, cleaned, given good food, and included in the activities of the Taylor family. His mother, however, has an attack of pride and refuses to let the Taylors do anything more for him. Isaac, meanwhile, is the child of an elderly father who is not equipped to understand his precocious son. By tracing Isaac’s thoughts, Porter reveals clearly the reasons for his frequent rages. Isaac needs an outlet for his creative energies, but instead he is called a “crazy boy” by everyone around him—even by his father, who loves him but who is embarrassed by his actions. When he goes to school, he is too bright to hold himself back with his classmates; as a result, he is rebuked by his teachers for being disruptive. The final humiliation for this brilliant child comes when he is judged incapable of intellectual achievement and sent to trade school. In the chapter “Hoodoo,” Porter enters the world of another child, the little albino girl Clotel, who is bewildered because she is shunned by everyone—even by her mother, who is convinced that Clotel’s whiteness is evidence of a spell placed on the child before her birth, perhaps by her grandmother, a conjure woman. After her mother walks out, Clotel goes to live with Venita, where she experiences the loving care that she has never known. Sadly, all these stories have unhappy endings. Clotel is reclaimed by her indifferent

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mother; Isaac becomes a criminal and is sent to prison; and Dennis, who is always out foraging for food, is killed by a stray bullet during the riots that follow the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. While there are unsympathetic characters in the novel, Porter focuses most of her attention on those whose tragedies are not, in Aristotelian terms, the result of flaws in their own character. What happens to them is not their own fault. Their lives illustrate the fact that during the two decades covered by Porter’s novel, even the most promising African Americans could not often surmount the obstacles placed in their way by a racist and indifferent society. Themes and Meanings When he speaks of his desire to be a man, not a “white man’s boy,” Samuel Taylor expresses his desire for equality and dignity, a desire that motivated him and many other African Americans like him to leave the South and to move to the North. Unfortunately, in the North, they often found the same racism and economic injustice that they had expected to leave behind them. This is the subject of All-Bright Court, which focuses on how racial prejudice and economic exploitation destroy people’s dreams and poison their lives. All-Bright Court itself, which Samuel and Mary Kate find so appealing, is actually a reflection of racism. Beneath the fresh paint are structures in the last stages of deterioration; the buildings are thought to be good enough only for African Americans, and the white workers who once lived in them have been moved into new homes. This is only one example of the often subtle racism that Samuel encounters in the North. The real attitude of northern whites is symbolized by the action of the doctor’s wife for whom Samuel does yardwork during a strike. When he asks for a glass of water, she hesitates, then gives him a drink in an old mayonnaise jar, rather than in a glass. One satirical segment in All-Bright Court emphasizes how ridiculous racism is. For a brief time, a white family, the Zakrezewskis, live in All-Bright Court, where they make it clear that they consider themselves superior to their African American neighbors. Mikey does not tell his mother about the fascinating, obscene behavior of the Zakrezewski children, but Mary Kate observes enough to see the white family as an object lesson in vulgarity. There is a certain humor, as well as poetic justice, in Porter’s conclusion to their story. Because they want to live among the whites whom they consider so superior, the Zakrezewskis move to a house built over a toxic waste dump at Love Canal. This ironic ending to the Zakrezewski episode, however, also points out another major theme of All-Bright Court: that all working people, not just African Americans, are often victims of economic exploitation. At Capital Steel, the men who volunteer for extremely hazardous work in order to make more money for their families are likely to be injured or killed. Most of the rest will eventually contract tuberculosis, pneumonia, black lung, cancer, or emphysema. The company is indifferent to the suffering of its employees, however, because the white owners consider people to be expendable. Only profits count. Porter’s description of All-Bright Court as being in the

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“shadow” of the plant thus symbolizes the extent to which the lives of all the workers, black and white, are darkened by the systematic economic exploitation to which they are subjected. While much of Porter’s novel is somber, the book also has a more positive theme: the power of the human spirit to transcend its surroundings. There is a quiet heroism in Moses and Venita, in Samuel and Mary Kate. Although, as Moses says, he and Samuel have nothing to show for their lifetimes of hard work except some furniture in a rented house, neither man runs away from his responsibilities. Moreover, while any of the four characters could be excused for giving up and turning inward, they all continue to take a compassionate interest in those around them. There is even reason to hope for a change in Mikey. At the end of the novel, even though Mikey does not hear Samuel’s words, he still looks to his father for guidance through the storm. This scene may well suggest that Mikey will one day return to his heritage, recapture his sense of identity, and reclaim the best of what he learned in All-Bright Court. Critical Context All-Bright Court has been considered an extraordinary first novel. In it, critics have found the same “clear ring of authenticity,” in Jonathan Yardley’s words, to be found in the best nonfiction works on the subject of housing projects. Reviewers admired Porter’s handling of tone, noting that she manages at the same time to be both sympathetic to her characters and uncompromisingly honest about their frailties. The only major disagreement among reviewers involves a matter of form. Some critics argued that the use of vignettes diminished the effectiveness of the novel. Attributing this flaw to the author’s inexperience, they charitably predicted that her next novel would be more skillfully constructed. Other reviewers insisted that the format had great merit, in that it enabled Porter to explore a single locale thoroughly, as Gloria Naylor had in The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Interestingly, several critics note that in All-Bright Court the author herself draws upon the very heritage that her character Mikey has so cavalierly rejected, memories of rural southern life, still-powerful superstitions, and the richness of colloquial African American speech. As Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, in this first novel Porter not only created a “rich fictional world,” but she also “distinguished herself as a writer blessed with a distinctive and magical voice.” Bibliography Catano, James V. Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the SelfMade Man. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Examination of the self-made-man narrative in American culture; includes discussion of Porter’s work in the context of the genre. Kakutani, Michiko. “Black Dreams of 1950’s Turn to Rage.” The New York Times, September 10, 1991, p. C14. Argues that although Porter writes with the accuracy of a sociologist, she also has a profound sympathy for her characters. Of particular interest is Kakutani’s analysis of the complex feelings Porter’s African Amer-

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ican characters have about whites, as well as about their own African American neighbors. Krist, Gary. “Other Voices, Other Rooms.” The Hudson Review 45 (Spring, 1992): 141-142. Analysis claiming that Porter sometimes presents her characters on a superficial level, but that she does capture the spirit of a world that combines “Southern rural lore and urban ghetto realism.” Calls the book “the deftest kind of sociological commentary.” The New Yorker. Review of All-Bright Court, by Connie Porter. 67 (September 9, 1991): 12. Briefly outlines the story, pointing out the parallel between Samuel’s escape from the South and Mikey’s escape from All-Bright Court. Finds a poetic quality in the old colloquialisms and superstitions. Whitehouse, Anne. “Dreamless in Buffalo.” The New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1991, 12. Sees Porter’s “sorrowful and unsparing” account of dreams and defeat as helping explain the rage that exploded after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Comments on Mikey’s inability to see the magic in the world he has rejected. Yardley, Jonathan. “Still Dreaming the American Dream.” Washington Post Book World, August 11, 1991, 3. Argues that Porter’s book has the authority of real knowledge of life in a housing project, but that it also has flaws in structure: Mikey should have taken a central place in the novel much earlier than he does, for example. Sees as Porter’s primary theme as the “strong system of mutual support and love” that enables the residents of All-Bright Court to survive. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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ALL GOD’S CHILDREN NEED TRAVELING SHOES Author: Maya Angelou (Marguerite Annie Johnson, 1928Type of work: Memoir Time of work: Early 1960’s Locale: Ghana First published: 1986

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Principal personages: Maya Angelou, who describes her journey to Africa in search of her self and her roots Guy, Angelou’s son, who is seventeen at the beginning of the book Julian Mayfield, a political activist, writer, intellectual, and American expatriate living in Ghana Ana Livia, Julian Mayfield’s wife, a medical doctor Efua Sutherland, a poet and playwright who is the head of Ghana’s National Theatre Vicki Garvin, a union organizer who leaves America to organize groups in Ghana Alice Windom, an American expatriate seeking work in Africa as a social worker T. D. Kwesi Bafoo, an editor of the Ghanaian Times Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana Kojo, a young boy who lives with Angelou Sheikehali, a Muslim businessman Grace Nuamah, Ghana’s chief traditional dancer Nana Nketsia, the vice chancellor of the University of Ghana Kwesi Brew, Ghana’s minister of protocol Malcolm X, an American political activist William V. S. Tubman, the president of Liberia Form and Content All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes is the fifth of Maya Angelou’s autobiographical works. Her previous four self-portraits—I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), and The Heart of a Woman (1981)—trace Angelou’s life from her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, to her work during the 1960’s as a civil rights worker in the United States and abroad. The fifth self-portrait is both a chronological and a thematic extension of Angelou’s previous books, as it describes her four-year stay in Ghana and her effort to understand herself. While Angelou wears traveling shoes in all of her books, her 1986 memoir particu-

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larly attests why those shoes are necessary apparel for a woman in perpetual search of herself and of a home in which she hopes to find security and meaning. The dedication of the book and its opening epigraph suggest the work’s focus upon this search: Angelou dedicates her book to “all the fallen ones who were passionately and earnestly looking for a home.” She then uses a line from a famous spiritual to underscore the search for a home: “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.” As the book opens, Angelou, at the age of thirty-three, has decided to pursue her quest for roots in Ghana, having recently worked in Cairo as a journalist. She embarks on her journey with excitement and anticipation, seeing it as still another adventure to add to her already adventuresome life of traveling away from and toward new people, experiences, and insights. Joining other African Americans who have emigrated to Africa, Angelou characterizes the expatriates in four groups, all of whom came to Ghana with distinct sets of expectations. The first group of forty families came as teachers and farmers, people who wanted to become one with the land. The second group, sent by the U.S. government, came seeking the opportunity to demonstrate what they saw as their superiority to the Ghanaians. The third group, the smallest, came to create a business community in the city of Accra. The fourth group, of which Angelou counts herself a part, arrived with the hope of finding home, of finding acceptance and adoption by the people of Ghana. Describing themselves as “Revolutionist Returnees,” these people believed that Africa would welcome them and that eventually all African Americans would follow them and find security and solace among a soon-to-be-created family of black men and women. Motivated by this search for utopia, Angelou begins her sojourn in Ghana by seeking employment, and she obtains a job at the University of Ghana as an administrative assistant. What appears to be a good beginning for her—gainful employment and the financial means to pursue her search for acceptance in her new homeland—becomes a disappointment. Her salary is far below that of the British employees, and the job carries with it no house, no tuition for her son Guy, and no moving allowance. Deciding to upgrade her professional position, Angelou applies for a position with the Ghanaian Times, only to be told by its editor, T. D. Kwesi Bafoo, that she will be paid exactly what she is paid at the university. Still not daunted by this lack of opportunity in the country that beckoned her, Angelou goes to the Ghana Broadcasting Office, only to be prevented from entering by a rude receptionist whose manner reminds Angelou of the way in which whites treated African Americans in the United States. Beginning to see that Africa is perhaps not nirvana, Angelou nevertheless continues her quest to become at one with her adopted country. The author has her hair styled in Ghanaian fashion, learns to speak the Fanti language, develops friendships with both Africans and transplanted Americans, and continues to reflect on her ambivalence about her new home. On the one hand, she maintains her belief in this home being large enough and hospitable enough to embrace orphans like herself; on the other hand, she is troubled by a sense that perhaps this country is not her real home.

All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes / angelou

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Her ambivalence is heightened when the political situation in Ghana becomes complicated by an assassination attempt upon President Kwame Nkrumah, a leader honored by his people for his charisma and his ability to call forth a belief in African identity from his followers. The assassination attempt itself terrifies the American expatriates, but what follows is even more horrifying to them. An atmosphere of suspicion envelops the country, and the American exiles come to be viewed as infiltrators. Angelou reflects on her increasing concern that although she may have adopted Ghana, the country does not appear to have adopted her. While still grappling with this concern, Angelou learns that W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African American leader, has died, and she ponders the significance of the death of this “first American Negro intellectual.” His death compels her to think of other notable African Americans, including Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Louis Armstrong, Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson. Memories of and gratitude for those leaders of the country she has left haunt Angelou as she and her fellow expatriates plan a march to coincide with the 1963 March on Washington to be led by Martin Luther King, Jr. The Ghanaian march does not have the impact or significance its participants had hoped it would have, largely because of their growing sense of ambivalence about their place in their adopted homeland. Hearing one of the marchers jeer when a black soldier raises the American flag in front of the American embassy, Angelou notes that the jeering is actually a recognition of knowledge “almost too painful to bear”— knowledge that the Stars and Stripes is the flag of the expatriates—and, more important, their only flag. This painful recognition persists as Angelou spends time with Malcolm X. The volatile activist, who had once been a spokesman for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, has a profound impact upon Angelou. She had met him two years earlier, but she now sees him and hears his words from within her current context, as an orphan looking for a home and looking for reasons to stay in that home. As she observes the various personalities Malcolm X exhibits—from big brother and adviser to spokesman against oppression and for revolution—she reflects on his commitment to changing the status quo in America. When Malcolm X leaves Ghana, Angelou observes that his presence had elevated the expatriates; his departure, however, leaves them what they had been before his arrival: “a little group of Black folks, looking for a home.” As she continues her quest for that home, Angelou dons her traveling shoes again and makes a journey to Germany to perform in a production of Jean Genet’s play Les Nègres: Clownerie (pb. 1958, pr. 1959; The Blacks: A Clown Show, 1960), in a role she had performed some years before. She combines the trip to Germany with a return to Cairo, and the long voyage helps her reflect on the constancy of some of the tensions she had been trying to avoid by coming to Africa, specifically the tension between victims and victimizers. Observing a poignant interchange between a German Jew and a Gentile, she sees the same human complexities she had seen in Arkansas and in Ghana. She realizes that such tensions are not resolved by leaving one’s home and seeking another. She returns briefly to Ghana only to leave this place of tempo-

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rary security and insecurity, consolation and confrontation, pleasure and pain. She leaves, aware that home is not a place, not an external, geographical location, but an internal, psychological state. She leaves as she came: wearing her traveling shoes, like all God’s children. Analysis On January 20, 1993, Maya Angelou became only the second poet to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration (Robert Frost was the first). She read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s swearing-in ceremony; three of the poem’s stanzas suggest some of the themes and meanings of All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes: Lift up your eyes upon The day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream. Women, children, men, Take it into the palms of your hands. Mold it into the shape of your most Private need. Sculpt it into The image of your most public self. Lift up your hearts Each new hour holds new chances For new beginnings. Do not be wedded forever To fear, yoked eternally To brutishness.

These words suggest the impetus for Angelou’s journey to Africa, for her quest to don traveling shoes that will help her search out a place to call home. Believing that she must be an active traveler, a person seizing the day and “new chances for new beginnings,” she boldly sets out for Ghana. She undertakes the journey fearlessly, not “yoked eternally” to any kind of brutishness that might deter her. Every step of the journey reveals this fearlessness. As she begins her sojourn in Ghana, Angelou sees the future as “plump with promise,” despite the fact that she has no job and no house and despite her son Guy’s being injured in an automobile accident on the third day of their stay in Ghana. Specific episodes that would frustrate, if not paralyze, others do not daunt her. She argues with a group of people at the university who make demeaning remarks about African Americans; she works through her son’s rejection of her following an argument they have about his dating an older woman; and she deals with the displacement she feels as she travels from Ghana to Germany and Egypt. In all these experiences, she continues to think and speak boldly, fearlessly, and hopefully.

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In that spirit, home beckons her and emerges as a major theme of Angelou’s memoir and her journey. From the dedication of the book to its last page, in which Angelou states that she “was not sad departing Ghana,” this self-portrait is a song of hope and a hymn of praise. Its hope and praise stem from a sadness that Angelou describes at the end of her work as simultaneously somber and wonderful: I had not consciously come to Ghana to find the roots of my beginnings, but I had continually and accidentally tripped over them or fallen upon them in my everyday life.

Her tripping and falling enlightens Angelou, allowing her to see that her ancestors, though taken by force from Africa, had not completely left that country. Like them, she is experiencing a leave-taking, and like them she will carry Africa with her. Still another connection with her ancestors is Angelou’s commitment to a dream, to the ability to “give birth again/ To the dream,” as she wrote in the poem celebrating Clinton’s inauguration. Though oppressed, victimized, and rejected, Angelou’s ancestors continued to dream of the freedom and respect they deserved as human beings. These dreams are chronicled in the slave narratives that are the forerunners of Angelou’s autobiographical writings, such as Frederick Douglass’s moving account of his escape from slavery and his dedication to the abolitionist cause. Published in 1845, Douglass’s account is a model for those chronicles, like Angelou’s, that emphasize the importance of believing in a dream and working to make that dream become a reality. All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes and Angelou’s other self-portraits pay tribute to the courage and creativity that color her dream for a homeland, for rootedness, and for connections with her past. Angelou began her journey dreaming and looking for something—home—that was a physical, geographical, external place. She concludes her book but continues her voyage by realizing that the security associated with home is internal. All the people she met in Ghana, all the experiences she accrued, and all the trials and tribulations she endured—all of these combine to enlighten her about the decisions she needs to make as she goes on with her life. Like the caged bird of her first autobiography, the author of the fifth self-portrait knows why she sings, why she dreams, and why she travels. She is a survivor, like her ancestors; like those foremothers and forefathers, like all God’s children, she needs traveling shoes. Critical Context Maya Angelou’s poetry and prose typically elicit positive reviews from critics, who see her works as speaking to universal themes. Lynn Z. Bloom, reviewing The Heart of a Woman, observes that Angelou’s autobiographical series reveals the author “in the process of becoming a self-created Everywoman.” The fifth volume in the series, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, is a vivid example of the universality of this Everywoman’s message. While Angelou’s journey is clearly that of a particular African American woman to

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a specific place, it is also that of all people who go somewhere hoping for familiarity and security only to learn that they cannot go home again. Instead, such travelers keep moving on, believing that their journeys and their stories are meaningful. In fact, Angelou’s story has special significance to and reveals a great deal about those whom critic Wanda Coleman calls “both African and American.” Drawing from an autobiographical tradition that began with slave narratives, Angelou relates a story that focuses attention upon the “hyphenated” culture of African Americans. She explores the tension and similarity between a past characterized by slavery and exploitation and a present characterized by oppression and misunderstanding, and she does so with hope, not bitterness. Angelou’s fifth self-portrait, like its predecessors, is a prose poem—not a surprising hybrid for a woman whose poetry is nearly as famous as her narratives. Ghana, the Fanti language of its people, and the people themselves are presented with a lyricism not often found in autobiographies. The clear voice of the poet guides readers through a journey that is Everywoman’s. Just as Angelou’s first memoir looked at various dimensions of victimization—including that of a caged bird or an innocent child as she grows up in racist America—so does her fifth. Both in its examination of an African country that has just won its independence from European colonizers and in its examination of a woman winning her independence from her limiting and limited notion of home, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes is a book about freedom movements and the freedom to move. Bibliography Baker, Houston A., Jr. “Part Five: Into Africa.” The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 1986, 14. Situates Angelou’s autobiography within the American tradition of multiple-volume self-portraits. Notes that such writers as Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Chester Himes have contributed to this kind of serial autobiography by writing about the ways in which spirit and courage can overcome oppression. In her memoirs, Angelou does likewise, and Baker notes that the very titles of her books suggest Angelou’s concern with the dreams of freedom and home. Blundell, Janet Boyarin. Review of All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, by Maya Angelou. Library Journal 111 (March 15, 1986): 64. Examines Angelou’s memoir as a chronicle of her experience in Ghana and also as an exploration of Angelou’s maternal emotions as she watches her son Guy grow to manhood. Notes that Angelou’s self-portrait sheds light on both emerging Africa and the African American community. Coleman, Wanda. Review of All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, by Maya Angelou. The Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 13, 1986, 4. Argues that Angelou’s work is different from celebrity autobiographies, which are typically self-aggrandizing. Instead, Angelou writes carefully and sensitively about herself and the African American community, weaving adages and bits of folk and street wisdom into her self-portrait.

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Neville, Jill. “Bubbling Over.” The Times Literary Supplement, August 28, 1987, 922. Criticizes Angelou’s memoir for its “airy prose” and tendency toward “sentimental black agit-prop.” Neville acknowledges the readability of Angelou’s selfportrait but praises her first two memoirs as her best and views her recent books as less compelling. Sankara, Edgard. “Race, Hybridity, and Multiculturalism in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon and Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes.” In Multiculturalism and Hybridity in African Literatures, edited by Hal Wylie and Bernth Lindfors. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2000. Examines the representation of hybrid identity in Angelou’s work, emphasizing the intersection of Africanness and Americanness. Stuttaford, Genevieve. Review of All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, by Maya Angelou. Publishers Weekly 229 (February 21, 1988): 159. Points to the moving quality of Angelou’s writing insofar as it probes the disillusionment, homesickness, and hurt that Angelou experiences in Ghana. Marjorie Smelstor

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THE AMERICAN EVASION OF PHILOSOPHY A Genealogy of Pragmatism Author: Cornel West (1953) Type of work: Cultural criticism First published: 1989 Form and Content Announcing in his introduction that this book is a political act, Cornel West in The American Evasion of Philosophy seeks in a tradition of American thought a source for effective political, or “prophetic,” action. It is to this tradition that West refers by the phrase “evasion of philosophy,” in which the word “evasion” does not carry its usual negative connotations. Rather, West asserts that when Ralph Waldo Emerson—the great nineteenth century American poet, essayist, and thinker and the founding father of this tradition—turned away from the questions that had been the primary concerns of Western philosophy for centuries, he avoided, or evaded, the blind alley into which philosophy had wandered. Emerson thereby founded the American tradition of philosophy as cultural criticism, emphasizing the application of the critical intelligence to the solution of problems that confront individuals involved in society and culture. West calls this tradition “American pragmatism,” and he articulates his version of the historical development of that tradition. The goal is to define how American pragmatism can inform the thought and action of men and women who, like West, remain committed to the cause of social progress. In addition to turning away from the entanglements of philosophy, Emerson in the middle of the nineteenth century prefigured both what would become the major themes of American pragmatism—power, provocation, and personality—and what would become its crucial motifs—optimism, moralism, and individualism. However, Emerson remained sufficiently bound to the cultural limitations of his era, for example to the “soft racism” that warped the thought even of enlightened white men of Emerson’s generation, to require that his contributions to the tradition be revised and reformed by those who came after. This process of revising and reforming, with the implication that closure is never fully achieved, may, in fact, constitute the tradition itself. The American pragmatic tradition is carried on in the latter part of the nineteenth century by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Peirce, who coined the term “pragmatism,” re-examines the tradition in the light of the emergence, in the course of the nineteenth century, of the scientific method as the primary model of intellectual activity. While acknowledging the power of the scientific method, Peirce asserts that it is not universally applicable. Rather, it is applicable only to the scientific community engaged in rational inquiry. Answering the great questions of religion and ethics, for example, requires a radically different approach, one that acknowledges the claims of dogma, custom, habit, and tradition. If Peirce seems divided within himself

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at this point, the difficulty may be resolved by his pragmatic understanding of meaning as constituted by the practical consequences that might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of an intellectual conception. The emphasis on consequences will remain at the heart of American pragmatism. This emphasis is recognizable, for example, in William James’s frequently quoted formulation: “Truth happens to an idea, it becomes true, is made true by events.” More than Peirce, who developed the applications of pragmatic thought to communities, James focuses on individuals. Both men, like Emerson before them, reject the philosopher’s futile quest for the ultimate foundation of truth. Truth, in James’s thought, no longer rests in splendid isolation but becomes a species of the good. In Emerson, West suggests, we see “Man Thinking”; in Peirce, “Man Inquiring”; in James, “Man Willing.” Peirce and James provide the kind of creative interpretations of Emersonian notions essential to the processes of revising and reforming, but it is in the work of John Dewey in the first half of the twentieth century that American pragmatism comes of age. The great breakthrough achieved by Dewey, who was one of the first to appreciate Emerson’s standing as a philosopher, was to bring larger structures, systems, and institutions to the center of his thought without forfeiting his allegiance to Emersonian concerns with individuality and personality. Through him, American pragmatism became involved in the project of social reform. His links to the urbanized, professional, reformist elements of the middle class assured that he would have a far more immediate impact on society than any of his predecessors had. He championed the critical intelligence as an instrument not for generating metaphysical puzzles but for overcoming obstacles, resolving problems, and projecting realizable possibilities for the betterment of the human condition. More inclined than Peirce to valorize science, he was concerned to extend the experimental method of the natural sciences to the spheres of politics, culture, and economics. Inevitably, Dewey compromised more than once, in both thought and action, in the course of a long and productive life. He was only partly successful in achieving his goals. As America approached the middle of the century and as the middle-class reformers who constituted Dewey’s primary constituency became seduced by competing managerial and Marxist ideologies, it was by no means clear that the legacy to which Dewey had contributed so much could long survive. In fact, the story of American pragmatism at midcentury is essentially one of uncertainty. The experience of economic depression in the 1930’s, of World War II in the 1940’s, and of the Cold War that commenced before the 1940’s were over, had a chastening effect on pragmatic intellectuals. The optimism that had been a crucial motif of the tradition became muted, and midcentury pragmatists such as Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling began to emphasize the acceptance of limits and the cultivation of the tragic view as the beginning, if not the end, of wisdom. Even the radical C. Wright Mills and the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois joined in an attitude of distrust of the poor and working class, thus abandoning a fundamental tenet of the Emersonian notion of creative democracy. Du Bois did,

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however, make major contributions to pragmatic thought in his internationalist sensitivity to the wretched of the earth and in his insistence that American reformist thought must at last confront the issue of race. In the years immediately following the midpoint of the century, pragmatism suffered a serious decline. Although the eminent American philosopher W. V. O. Quine affirmed, within limits, the spirit of American pragmatism, other modes of philosophical inquiry assumed positions of dominance within the academy, and no figure of Dewey’s stature (Dewey himself died in 1952) arose to reassert the pragmatic insights. The last quarter of the twentieth century, however, saw a reawakening of interest in the possibilities of pragmatism. Richard Rorty, who called himself a neopragmatist, played a major role in this renewal. Rorty directed his readers to eschew the quest for certainty and the search for foundations that characterized the philosophy Emerson evaded. The consequences of Rorty’s pragmatism involve a collapse of the distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences, which include the social sciences and the humanities, and a new positioning of philosophy, not as the tribunal of pure reason, but as one voice among others in a grand conversation. The notion of conversation is the key to what finally limits Rorty’s version of pragmatism. His neopragmatism requires no change in cultural and political practices. This observation leads to West’s affirmation of prophetic pragmatism as a deeply American response to the three shaping events of the second half of the twentieth century: the end of the age of Europe; the emergence of the United States as a world power; and the decolonization of the developing world. In what for West remains a Christian perspective, prophetic pragmatism derives from Emerson’s evasion of philosophy a form of cultural criticism that attempts to transform linguistic, social, cultural, and political traditions for the purpose of increasing the scope of individual development and democratic operations. The great example of prophetic pragmatism in its political dimension is the struggle of Martin Luther King, Jr. Analysis The American Evasion of Philosophy is organized chronologically and offers a coherent, if highly selective, historical narrative of the development of American pragmatism from its origins in the first half of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. West’s expositions of the writings of the key figures in this development are, on the whole, clear and reliable. For some readers, in fact, the main value of The American Evasion of Philosophy may be found in treating it as an introduction to some important American thinkers and to the relationships among them. Providing such an introduction is far from West’s primary intention, however, and readers who come to the book with little or no prior knowledge of American philosophy may find it too advanced for their needs. In fact, as many critics have noted, for better or worse, West, who is quite capable of communicating with a general audience both in print and from the platform, seems to be writing in this text for an audience made up primarily of fellow academics. He assumes at least a moderate famil-

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iarity with the subject matter and writes in an academic rather than a popular style. West’s goal is not simply to tell the story of American pragmatism but to discover the possibilities in it for significant action in the contemporary world. The common denominator of American pragmatism, he says, is a future-ordered instrumentalism; that is, for the pragmatist, ideas are instruments for influencing, perhaps even for creating, a more desirable future. A common thread throughout the history of pragmatism is the determination to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action. Pragmatism, then, is not a search for timeless truths; nor is it a search for some sort of ultimate foundation on which individual truths can rest. It thus turns away from— evades—many of the concerns traditionally associated with philosophy, at least since René Descartes in the seventeenth century. If pragmatism is a tradition, it remains an open one. The task for pragmatists will always include the revision and reform of pragmatism as they find it. It is in this spirit that West, a lay preacher in the African American church as well as a philosopher, scholar, and activist, introduces the notion of prophetic pragmatism. Prophetic pragmatism revises and reforms the tradition of American pragmatism, including the neopragmatism of West’s former teacher, Richard Rorty. Informed by West’s profound commitment to Christianity in general, to the Protestant tradition within Christianity in particular, and especially to the African American version of that tradition, prophetic pragmatism reestablishes the connection between pragmatism and social reform. Absorbing the insights of Du Bois and moving beyond the middle-class reform biases of earlier versions of pragmatism, prophetic pragmatism allies itself with the oppositional movements in American society in the continuing struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry. Learning as well from the ordeal of pragmatism at midcentury, prophetic pragmatism acknowledges the tragic truth that evil will never be completely overcome, yet it remains true to the principle of hope and to the belief in the possibility of betterment in self, in society, and in the relationship between them. It may be objected that all this remains very abstract. Some critics, for example, have noted that although West declares with obvious sincerity his concern for the poor, the working class, the undereducated, the children of the inner cities, and the disadvantaged in general, a book such as The American Evasion of Philosophy is hardly likely to reach such groups. Moreover, those who look to West’s book for concrete proposals and programs will be disappointed. All this is true, as far as it goes. West, however, is not as concerned with articulating programs as with finding a way of thinking that is relevant to the real concerns of the time and that is enriched by a philosophical tradition that is both broad and deep. Moreover, West begins to draw the lines between the abstract ideas developed in the book and the concrete realities of the world in later essays, interviews, and lectures, including those gathered in the twovolume collection Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (1993).

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Critical Context Cornel West is regarded by many as the foremost African American intellectual of his generation. Insofar as “intellectual” suggests an ivory-tower remoteness from the concerns of ordinary people, however, it hardly seems the right term to describe West. His status as a lay preacher is merely one indication of the depth of his Christian commitment, and West’s Christianity is at all times deeply involved with the realities of existence. He is the kind of Christian who can build a social outlook on the insights of Karl Marx and who can test those insights against the real experiences of the African American community, which calls forth his deepest loyalty. If an intellectual is someone who can forge vital relationships between the life of the mind and the life of the street, then no one has a clearer claim to the title than does Cornel West. West’s first book was Prophecy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982). This was followed in 1988 by Prophetic Fragments. In these books, West formulated a critique of capitalism on the basis both of Marxism and of the tradition of social protest associated with the African American church. In The American Evasion of Philosophy, West turns his attention to an American tradition that is primarily a product of the white middle class. West has insisted that an African American self-regard cannot be based on either demonizing or deifying white America. His ability to take from a “white” tradition what he needs as a committed African American, together with his willingness to give full credit to all that is positive and creative in that tradition, reflects his own rejection of demonization. His clear-eyed account of all that is limited and compromised within that tradition, from Emerson’s soft racism onward, demonstrates his dismissal of deification. Free of both distortions, he can find the relevance of this “white” tradition to the cause of African American liberation, one of the vital oppositional movements in contemporary America. An important achievement of The American Evasion of Philosophy, then, is that West asserts the “American” side of the formulation “African American” by claiming for himself the tradition of American pragmatism. A more profound achievement, perhaps, is that this assertion is not permitted in the slightest degree to obscure or compromise the author’s “African” identity. As West commences to lead his readers beyond multiculturalism, he works effectively to confirm that the American tradition cannot involve a continued suppression of the African heritage. West has not necessarily spoken the last word on what it is to be an African American. The words he has spoken, however, deserve attention. Bibliography Appiah, K. Anthony. “A Prophetic Pragmatism.” The Nation 250 (April 9, 1990): 496-498. Examines how West bridges cultural theory and the African American community and his attempt to mount a pragmatic cultural critique. Argues that West’s prophetic pragmatism, though drawing on continental influences, remains in the American grain. Boynton, Robert S. “Princeton’s Public Intellectual.” The New York Times Magazine, September 15, 1991, 39. Asserts that West is a synthesizer, a radical traditionalist:

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He embraces the canon, but he also demands its revision; he wants Americans to study their own indigenous philosophical tradition, enriching it with the work of classical European sociologists, rather than to rely on the latest theoretical fashions from Paris. Notes that West’s position may try to accommodate so many disparate voices as to dissipate its authority. Cascardi, Anthony J. Review of The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, by Cornel West. Philosophy and Literature 14, no. 2 (1990): 413415. States that West’s ambition is to reinterpret the pragmatist tradition in order to address the crisis of the American Left. Cowan, Rosemary. Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003. This volume in the Key Contemporary Thinkers series analyzes West’s contribution to various philosophical and cultural traditions and the role of redemptive Christianity in his ethical philosophy. Donovan, Rickard. “Cornel West’s New Pragmatism.” Cross Currents 41 (Spring, 1991): 98-106. Argues that The American Evasion of Philosophy represents West’s attempt to see his religious involvement and political participation in the light of leading American philosophers. Asserts that West wants more social theory in pragmatism. Gavin, William J. Review of The American Evasion of Philosophy, by Cornel West. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1992): 91-94. Observes that West offers a social history of ideas. Sees West’s prophetic pragmatism as more of a “will to believe” in the manner of William James than West realizes, but asserts that West’s perspective does point beyond itself in a prophetic, directional fashion. Jacoby, Russell. “Pragmatists and Politics.” Dissent 37 (Summer, 1990): 403-405. Argues that The American Evasion of Philosophy suffers from overambition: West is often incisive about the thinkers he discusses, but the assortment is too random and the links to pragmatism are too lax. West’s project of reclaiming American pragmatism, Jacoby says, is salutary but incomplete. Johnson, Clarence Sholé. Cornel West and Philosophy: The Quest for Social Justice. New York: Routledge, 2003. Examines the connection between pragmatism as a theory of truth and the ethical drive for social justice in West’s work. Keller, Catherine, and Joseph A. Colombo. “Two North American Political Christianities.” Religious Studies Review 18 (April, 1992): 103-110. Asserts that West’s work embodies the ideal of the organic intellectual, who is linked to prophetic movements and who relates ideas to the everyday life of ordinary people. Observes that West elects a neo-orthodox option that is firmly rooted in the African American church. W. P. Kenney

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ANANCY’S SCORE Author: Andrew Salkey (1928-1995) Type of work: Short stories Type of plot: Fable Time of plot: Creation to the Vietnam era Locale: West Africa and the Caribbean First published: 1973 Principal characters: Anancy, the “spider individual person” who respects no one Anancy’s wife, an astute female creature, more than a match in wits for her trickster mate Brother Tiger, the philosopher/sage in Anancy’s world Brother Dog, a critic, somewhat surly and cynical Brother Snake, a positive figure, the harbinger of change Brother Tacuma, Anancy’s sometime traveling companion, another spider individual Brother Oversea, the self-identified narrator in the short story “Anancy, the Spider Preacher” Sister Mysore Cow, Anancy’s friend, who reserves judgment until she can survey the whole picture The Stories Anancy’s Score is a collection of twenty short stories that feature the adventures of Anancy, a spider person. In the “Author’s Note,” Salkey acknowledges that his Anancy is an amalgamation of the Anansi of West African and Caribbean folklore and his own imagination. True to his folkloric forebears, Anancy, in Salkey’s words, holds no reservations; makes only certain crucial allowances; he knows no boundaries; respects no one, not even himself, at times; and he makes a mockery of everybody’s assumptions and value judgements.

Using the generic conventions of the fable, Salkey reconstructs Anancy’s stories by employing an omniscient, third-person narrator who is identified as Brother Oversea in one tale. The identity of the narrator is unclear in the other stories. The stories are told chronologically, emulating the oral telling and retelling of tales in the folkloric tradition. In the first story, “How Anancy Became a Spider Individual Person,” Anancy’s story becomes a fusion of Caribbean folklore, Judeo-Christian tradition, and postmodern cynicism. Diverging from the pedestrian “In the beginning” motif, the narrator opts to begin this creation myth with a bitter political commentary:

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Once, when neither mushrooms on the ground nor mushrooms up in the air were killing off people, when trees were honestly trees, when things used to happen as if they hadn’t any good reason not to happen . . . all the animals and trees and everything had a magical, straightback dignity of bearing, as if they were special, free creatures and things on the lan’.

Within this land, called “The Beginning,” Brother Anancy and his wife reside harmoniously with all the other creatures. Anancy is content to live idly in The Beginning, spending his days drinking water-coconut and eating bananas, much to the chagrin of his clever, ambitious wife. One day, while Anancy philosophizes with his friends, Brother Dog and Brother Tiger, Anancy’s wife approaches the “serious tree” to talk to the snake. Like her Edenic counterpart, Anancy’s wife succumbs to the snake’s skillful rhetoric. Her rapacious curiosity gets the better of her, and she eats of the delicious red fruit. Unlike the tempting biblical serpent, Brother Snake at first is depicted as a gentleman, not a demon. After all, he is “helping out the first model of a ‘oman in distress.” Anancy, however, views Brother Snake more suspiciously than does his wife, since he recognizes that Brother Snake is really an imperialist who uses political rhetoric to trick the other creatures. In frustration, Anancy’s wife shoves the fruit into Anancy’s mouth. Immediately, anarchy pervades The Beginning. In fear of the now carnivorous animals, Anancy and his wife flee the garden. They implore the snake to save them from their predators. Brother Snake ably complies. He possesses the power of magic as well as the power of persuasion. He transforms Anancy and his wife into a single creature, a spider. The narrator comments that Anancy and his wife actually did become one spider individual person, and the cunning ways Anancy is famous for are the cunning ways of his wife locked way deep down inside him, and the pretty web you see him spinning so is because of the goodness of the poet-person in Anancy own first ol’-time self.

Subsequent tales center on Anancy’s traditional role of the trickster. In “Anancy, the Sweet Love-Powder Merchant,” the arachnid-man sells packets of love powder to the women of Mount Calm, women who are plagued by philandering, drunken husbands. Anancy’s get-rich plans go awry when the astute wife of a medical officer discovers that Anancy’s wonder packets are actually the cause of the vomiting sickness besetting the village. Anancy narrowly escapes the angry townspeople by hopping a train to Kingston, leaving the Mount Calm patriarchy to contemplate the powers of female sexuality and Anancy, the latter a fusion of “spider ways of the big city and white brains.” Ultimately, the trickster figure is transformed into a New World savior. In the last tale, “New Man Anancy,” C. World has been ruined by the white imperialists. The sea polluted, the land worn out, the vegetation blighted, the people exploited, C. World

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has become a dystopia. Anancy is troubled by all he sees. Intuitively, he knows that C. World needs a leader who holds no ideological ties. Anancy reaches an epiphany: C. World is his own world, which he has taken for granted. He regards C. World differently, concentrating on its natural lush vegetation. C. World is inhabited not by the weak, but by the strong; it is a world “where all the power is people, no matter how them poor, maltreat and develop under, people with a heap o’ invention coil up inside them like watch-spring.” The exploiters of C. World are its enemy, and they must be confronted. The story ends with Anancy exhorting the C. World denizens to trade ignorance and nonaction for experience and power. The Characters The characters in Anancy’s Score follow the constraints of the beast fable. Their purpose is to illuminate moral truth. The emphasis of the characterization in the fable, therefore, is on the abstract concepts that the figures represent, not on psychological development. True to generic convention, most of the animals in this modern-day fable are peripheral; that is, they serve only as consultants or sounding boards for the more charismatic Anancy, who, although the central character, is one-dimensional and representational. Salkey’s Anancy is derivative, drawn from the popular Anansi (a spider) of West African and Caribbean folklore. The folkloric Anansi is a trickster figure, basically an outlaw. The Anansi is an outsider in both the natural world and the civilized world. He inhabits, simultaneously, the natural and the human spheres and is bent on mocking the laws of both. The Anansi is set upon wreaking havoc on humanity and nature. In the folklore he does so, temporarily. Although the Anansi stories are retold in a humorous vein, the underlying message they provide is serious. Eventually the Anansi gets his comeuppance in these tales; many times, the consequences are dire. Consequently, in West African and Caribbean folklore, the Anansi’s fate provides a moral lesson. The Anansi stories caution their audience about the dangers of disrupting the community and disregarding its mores. The lesson they teach is a simple one: Responsible members of the community should not and cannot act in the manner of the self-centered, mischievous Anansi. To do so is to risk banishment or even death. Salkey’s Anancy is depicted much in the tradition of the West African Anansi. He, too, is arachnid, large, hairy, and formidable. He is a creature that children fear. In fact, Salkey has drawn on the children’s stories of the Anansi in his own fictional creation. In one story, “Anancy and the Ghost Wrestlers,” Anancy is described in supernatural terms, as a spider who can swim rivers, scale mountains, and win races of endurance. When he walks, he rumbles like an earthquake. His shoulder muscles ripple and bulge. Salkey’s Anancy is a curious mixture of the arachnid and the human, almost a cartoonlike character. All creatures, human and animal, natural and supernatural, fear him, not only for his wrestling prowess but also for his considerable talents as a magician and sorcerer. Endowed by Brother Snake with magical powers, Anancy has the ability to trans-

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form himself into other creatures: a supernatural atomic horse, a mighty preacher, a poet, and a green-coated spider that goes by the name Hope. A few times, he transforms himself for good, particularly in the later stories in the collection, but more often for less than altruistic motives. The settings of the various stories also have an impact on the characterization of the spider person. Anancy is both timeless— the Anancy of the Creation—and of the time—the Anancy of the Vietnam era and of postcolonial Jamaica. Themes and Meanings Central to Anancy’s Score is its theme of oppression, the tension between the colonizer and the colonized. Within the supernatural motif, Anancy becomes a compelling character, deviating from the generic conventions of the beast fable. As wily and ruthless as his West African folkloric ancestors, he reveals an awareness of the plight of the Caribbean people. The Anansi of folklore, in contrast, evinces little or no concern for the community. At first, the twenty stories of Anancy’s Score appear to be loosely connected. The stories move rapidly, with few or no transitions, from the Creation to the political world of the Caribbean to the emancipation of slaves to the Vietnam era. Under further scrutiny, what appears to be haphazard construction is revealed to be a tenuous but present thread of character development. With each story, Anancy is shown to be more than the cool, calculating opportunist of the traditional stories. Rather, he becomes more and more a political citizen of the C. World. Many of the opposing forces Anancy confronts are not created by his antics. They are, instead, the colonizers of the C. World, those who have come to exploit the land and the people of the Caribbean. Eventually, Anancy the trickster transforms himself into his ultimate form: the new man Anancy, who sees himself as the political savior of the Caribbean. He sees his mission as rallying the people to empower themselves to drive out the colonizers. Although on one level Anancy’s Score is a fable with powerful political implications, this novelistic fable is fraught with other tensions, especially gender issues. The Anancy figure is the fusion of the man-poet and his ambitious wife. The feminine becomes the impetus for Anancy’s mischievous exploits. As in the biblical story, the female is depicted as the rebel, the transgressor, and the one who is easily duped by the clever serpent. If Anancy’s wife had not sought out the snake and had not eaten of the delicious red fruit of the serious tree, perhaps the status quo in The Beginning would have been maintained. She is drawn as a woman of ferocious temper and mocking tongue. Anancy, like the other male figures in the stories, is mesmerized by her sexuality. In the story of Anancy and the love-powder, the men of Mount Calm bemoan “pussy power” and its effect on their lives. Thus, the feminine is viewed as a more subversive force. Anancy’s wife and her sister-creatures, both spider and human, are depicted as cunning connivers who spy on and trick their mates. Other creatures represent natural forces. Sister Rain and Brother Sun destroy and rebuild. These characters never speak; their actions on the community are carefully recounted by the narrator. Some characters, such as Brother Tiger and Brother Dog,

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are recurring ones, each representing a particular view. Brother Tiger is a sage figure, whereas Brother Dog is a cynic. Brother Oversea, the narrator, serves in a capacity that rivals Anancy’s in importance. This omniscient narrator frequently offers scathing commentary in his allegorical world, thus placing the fable in a political context. Oversea often comments on the destructive effects of industrialization and unchecked imperialism. Critical Context Salkey, a writer and a journalist, focused on West Indian themes in his novels and poetry, both in his adult fiction and in his children’s books. Anancy’s Score, his fifth published work targeted at an adult audience, represents an ambitious melding of political satire, poetry, and folklore. Some of the Anancy stories were previously published in such diverse venues as literary journals, West German daily newspapers, anthologies of West Indian short stories, and anthologies of African and African American prose. When first published as a collection in 1973, the work was critically acclaimed. Often highly praised by reviewers was Salkey’s skillful recapturing of the lilting rhythms of the Jamaican English dialect, evidencing his keen poetic ear. Although the dialect is at times difficult to comprehend for the uninitiated reader, it is lively and rich, emulating the speech of the Jamaican people. Like most of Salkey’s other work, Anancy’s Score puts forth his wish that the Caribbean people reclaim their cultural and literary identities, both of which he views as being usurped by Western imperialistic powers. In interviews, Salkey asserted that he was committed to understanding and conveying the struggles of the postcolonial world, a world that suffered the aftershocks of oppression and neglect. In the same year that Anancy’s Score was released in its entirety, Salkey published Jamaica, a long poem characterized by idiosyncratic diction that expanded on the theme of colonial oppression and the loss of cultural identity of the Jamaican people. Jamaica was written twenty years before its appearance in print. The gap between creation and publication underscored Salkey’s long commitment to Caribbean identity. The new man Anancy of Anancy’s Score thus serves as another Caribbean cultural advocate, emulating the poetic voice in Jamaica. Anancy’s cry to the people of C. World mirrors Jamaica’s poetic-voice exhortation to reassert the Caribbean in history and in art. Bibliography Abrahams, Roger D. Introduction to African Folktales: Traditional Stories of the Black World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Offers a brief but lucid discussion of the trickster figure in African folklore. States that such tricksters as the Hare, the Jackal, and the Spider are actually creatures that live between culture and nature, obeying the laws of neither. The trickster illustrates how not to act. Berry, Jack. Preface to West African Folktales, collected and translated by Jack Berry, edited by Richard Spears. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Proffers a short discussion of the Anansi as a symbol of physical and moral libera-

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tion. Claims that his family—a wife and an adopted son—merit more critical and anthropological scrutiny than has been afforded them in the past. Courlander, Harold. “Anansi, Trickster Hero of the Akan.” In A Treasury of African Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Myths, Legends, Epics, Tales, Recollections, Wisdom, Sayings, and Humor of Africa. New York: Crown, 1975. Asserts that the Anansi not only is the quintessential trickster in Ashanti and Akan folklore but also is a cultural hero. Although adversarial, he is, at times, a sympathetic and wise character. In the role of the cultural hero, much like the role in which Salkey frequently casts him, the Anansi is responsible for natural and cultural phenomena. Dundes, Alan. “The Making and Breaking of Friendship Frame in African Folk Tales.” In Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, edited by Pierre Maranda and Elli Köngäs Maranda. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Identifies the pattern in African trickster folktales as a progression from an implied contract with family, friends, or both to a violation of this contract, ultimately ending in the contract’s dissolution. Jonas, Joyce. Anancy in the Great House: Ways of Reading West Indian Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Despite the exclusive focus on the Anancy figure in the works of Salkey’s contemporaries, George Lamming and Wilson Harris, Jonas provides a salient analysis of reading Caribbean texts, one that lends itself well to Salkey’s use of the Anancy. Avers that the Anancy, the spider-creator, has become an icon for the Caribbean artist and subsequently voices a dialectical relationship between politics and art. Murray, Patricia. “The Trickster at the Border: Cross-Cultural Dialogues in the Caribbean.” In Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations, edited by Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Examines the trickster figure in postcolonial Caribbean writing and its role in mediating between different cultural values and perspectives. Nazareth, Peter. In the Trickster Tradition: The Novels of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejar and Ishmael Reed. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Press, 1994. Compares Salkey’s Anancy to the trickster figures employed by two of his fellow writers. One of the few book-length works to concentrate on Salkey’s stories. Anita M. Vickers

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ANGELA DAVIS An Autobiography Author: Angela Davis (1944) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1944-1973 Locale: Birmingham, Alabama; New York, New York; California First published: 1974 Principal personages: Angela Davis, an avowed member of the Communist Party and fighter for the rights of African Americans and prisoners George Jackson, an African American prisoner in whose cause Davis becomes deeply involved Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson’s teenage brother, who dies in a shootout with police Fania Davis, Angela’s younger sister David Poindexter, Angela Davis’s companion in her flight from federal authorities Franklin and Kendra Alexander, friends and comrades of Angela Davis in Los Angeles Margaret Burnham, Angela Davis’s childhood friend and one of her attorneys Form and Content Angela Davis is a well-known radical activist who became famous in the early 1970’s. Since her time as a graduate student working with the philosopher Herbert Marcuse at the University of California at San Diego, she has worked for the rights of African Americans, prisoners, and others, eschewing the mainstream of the Civil Rights movement in favor of a radical, no-holds-barred critique of American society and institutions. She is a leading member of the U.S. Communist Party and the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class (1981) and Women, Culture, and Politics (1989). She was fired from her teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) because of her Communist Party membership, an association that, in defiance of consequences, she never denied. Angela Davis: An Autobiography is the story of Davis’s childhood and political education. Originally published in 1974, the year Davis turned thirty (and written when Davis was twenty-eight), the book focuses on her extended incarceration in New York and California prisons awaiting trial on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. The book climaxes with the delivery of the verdict in Davis’s trial, held in San Jose, California. Davis’s notoriety as a fugitive and activist (until she was found in New York and extradited for trial to California, her name was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s

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list of the ten most wanted fugitives) made an autobiography timely and marketable. Though her youth caused her to hesitate to write such a book, she came to see it as a way to publicize the causes she believed in and to emphasize her involvement in a communal fight against oppression and racism. “I was not anxious to write this book,” she asserts in her preface. “Writing an autobiography at my age seemed presumptuous. . . . The one extraordinary event of my life had nothing to do with me as an individual— with a little twist of history, another sister or brother could have easily become the political prisoner whom millions of people from throughout the world rescued from persecution and death.” Having decided to write the book after all, she envisioned it as “a political autobiography that emphasized the people, the events and the forces in my life that propelled me to my present commitment.” In 1988, she reflected that she had “attempted to utilize the autobiographical genre to evaluate my life in accordance with what I considered to be the political significance of my experiences.” Angela Davis: An Autobiography is a self-consciously polemical book, a narrative used as a tool to convey the author’s political beliefs and intended to sway readers to her understanding of the nature of American society. Written in six sections of varying length, the book opens with a dramatic account of Davis’s flight from and capture by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1970. The first section, “Nets,” goes on to recount her weeks in the Women’s House of Detention in New York and her impressions of the conditions there. The second section, “Rocks,” tells of Davis’s childhood in Alabama and her move as a teenager to New York, where she lived with a white family, attended a privately run “progressive” high school in Greenwich Village, and joined Advance, a Marxist-Leninist youth organization with ties to the Communist Party. Part 3, “Waters,” recounts Davis’s intellectual awakening at Massachusetts’s Brandeis University and in Frankfurt, West Germany, where she studied philosophy under the noted scholar Herbert Marcuse. “Flames,” the book’s longest section, details Davis’s growing involvement in the black liberation movement and her membership in the Los Angeles chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), her membership in the Che-Lumumba Club (a local chapter of the Communist Party), and her involvement with the Black Panther Party. “Walls” describes her imprisonment in California after her extradition from New York and the preparations she and her attorneys made for her trial. The book’s final section, “Bridges,” recounts the selection of jurors, the trial, and Davis’s acquittal on all charges. Because the occasion of the book’s composition was Davis’s well-publicized flight from the law and subsequent incarceration and trial, and because she wants to emphasize that her life and exploits are part of a communal struggle, the narrative’s main focus is on her involvement with political groups such as the Che-Lumumba Club and SNCC, and on the struggle of those groups against racial and class oppression in the United States. She accurately calls her book a political autobiography; it also is the intellectual autobiography of a singularly intelligent political thinker and committed social critic and activist. Almost incidentally, readers learn that Davis speaks several languages and has read works of the French existentialists, the German thinker Immanuel Kant, and

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the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Furthermore, Angela Davis is a resonant instance of the African American autobiographical tradition exemplified by texts such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) and Richard Wright’s Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945); it is also an illuminating record of the political turmoil of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Analysis Davis employs her considerable narrative skill and facility with language, the inherent drama of her trial, and the emblematic aspects of her southern upbringing in a credible, highly self-aware autobiographical synthesis. By opening the book with the gripping episode of her flight and capture, she lays claim to readers’ sympathy and sets the stage for the unfolding of the narrative as backdrop to the climactic trial verdict. The outcome of the trial and her interpretation of it are intended not only to demonstrate her actual innocence of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy but also to vindicate her political views. Davis shows the centrality of these views to her identity by narrating their genesis in the experiences of her childhood and adolescence and their application in her activism in California before and during her trial. She relates incidents and feelings from her childhood that place her story within the mainstream of African American experience and literature and set it in a familiar historical context. “From the time we were young,” she writes, “we children would go to the old family farm in Marengo County. . . . A visit to the country was like a journey backward into history; it was a return to our origins.” She writes of her grandmother, the child of slaves, who after death assumed heroic proportions in Davis’s eyes. Davis also tells a fascinating anecdote of a visit she and her sister Fania made to a southern shoe store when they were teenagers. The sisters walked into the store speaking French to each other, pretending to be from Martinique. “At the sight of two young Black women speaking a foreign language, the clerks in the store raced to help us,” she relates. The clerks seated them in the front of the shop (normally reserved for whites only) and fawned over them. Angela and Fania began laughing; the store’s manager, suspecting a trick, asked uneasily, “Is something funny?” “Suddenly I knew English,” recalls Davis, “and told him that he was what was so funny. ‘All Black people have to do is pretend they come from another country, and you treat us like dignitaries.’ My sister and I got up, still laughing, and left the store.” Davis began in early childhood to form the political ideas and principles that would eventually lead to her radical posture toward American society. For example, she remembers that she once stole money from her father to give to her impoverished friends at school. “It seemed to me that if there were hungry children, something was wrong and if I did nothing about it, I would be wrong too.” Moreover, she adds, “My preoccupation with the poverty and wretchedness I saw around me would not have been so deep if I had not been able to contrast it with the relative affluence of the white world.” Throughout the book, Davis uses her command of language not only in the service of a compelling story well told but also to insist on her understanding of the meanings

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of important words. She consistently refers to African Americans (at a time before that term came into use) as “Blacks,” with a capital “B,” while pointedly not capitalizing the word “white.” She interprets the subtext of interracial language; for example, in recalling an exchange between one of her schoolteachers and a schoolboard member, in which the administrator used the teacher’s first name, Davis remembers, “We all knew that when a white person called a Black adult by his or her first name it was a euphemism for ‘Nigger, stay in your place.’” Noting that black children in the segregated schools of the South, unlike their counterparts in the North, learned in school about African American heroes such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, she writes of having been “taught that many of the songs by slaves had a meaning understood only by them.” Davis carries this command of subtexts into the sections dealing with her political activism and trial. She writes that Salinas, California, where she attended court hearings, had “a small-town atmosphere which reminded me of the South.” The town’s courthouse “had a plastic, shiny veneer. Its sparkling marble walls and antiseptically clean floor almost seemed designed to hide the dirty racist business being conducted there. . . . Here as elsewhere Justice was an image—heavy, slick and wholly deceptive.” While Davis was in jail awaiting trial, working with her attorneys on her defense, the authorities, under pressure, allowed her use of an empty cell adjoining her own. Prosecutors in her case referred to her accommodations as a “two-room suite”; Davis rebuts such claims by describing a “two-room suite consisting of a six-by-eight cell and an even smaller padded cell, the toilet hole of which backed up one day and covered my books and the floor with liquid excrement.” An unabashed member of the Communist Party, Davis understands the effect that the word “communist” can have on Americans. “There is something about the word ‘communism’ that, for the unenlightened, evokes not only the enemy, but also something immoral, something dirty.” She relates an encounter that showed her the word’s flip side when she describes meeting a black man who asked her what communism was. “‘There must be something good about it,’ he said, ‘because the man is always trying to convince us that it’s bad.’” Critical Context The timeliness and immediate marketability of Davis’s story led Angela Davis to be written soon after the author’s acquittal and to be published by a major publisher, Random House. (Davis’s editor at Random House was Toni Morrison, who would later earn renown as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Nobel laureate.) The book was reprinted in 1988 by International Publishers, a small, left-wing publishing house based in New York. Angela Davis is not a much-studied text, yet it deserves attention as an articulate, intellectual, and political memoir; an intriguing evocation of African American autobiographical and textual traditions; and a powerful if undeniably radical critique of American society. It is also a valuable historical document. Students of grassroots ac-

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tivism or of American political history at large can use Angela Davis as a touchstone for their research, and might do well to begin by evaluating Davis’s claims. At the time of the book’s publication in 1974, Davis had only recently gained notoriety as a revolutionary, a fugitive, and a purported criminal. The book is thus written from a short time perspective, but with the thoughtfulness and self-awareness of a highly intelligent narrator intent on bringing to bear her understanding of recent important events in which she was intimately involved. Davis intended her autobiography both to illustrate the need for “communal struggle” to alter radically the nature of American society and to inspire others to follow her example of uncompromising opposition to injustice. Bibliography Aptheker, Bettina. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. 2d ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Detailed account of Davis’s trial and its role in her life and in American society. Davis, Angela Y. Women, Culture, and Politics. New York: Random House, 1989. A collection of Davis’s speeches, with titles such as “Let Us All Fight Together: Radical Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women,” “Ethnic Studies: Global Meanings,” and “Children First: The Campaign for a Free South Africa.” Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. New York: Octagon Books, 1977. The standard history of the American communist movement, originally published in 1957. Draper’s book gives important historical background on the rise of the Communist Party in the United States—the party Angela Davis writes about rather uncritically—and its relationship to the Soviet Union. Jackson, George. Soledad Brother. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. The book Davis shared with her fellow inmates at the Women’s House of Detention in New York to encourage their political education. Jackson, who attained national prominence before his controversial death in prison, was a major figure in the development of Davis’s thought. Major, Reginald. Justice in the Round: The Trial of Angela Davis. New York: Third Press, 1973. A detailed account of Davis’s trial. Major argues that Davis’s indictment stemmed from her notoriety as a militant rather than from the strength of the evidence against her. Nadelson, Regina. Who Is Angela Davis? The Biography of a Revolutionary. New York: P. H. Wyden, 1972. A sympathetic biography by a childhood friend of Davis. Widely available, though less than objective. Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Analysis of Davis’s Angela Davis, Assata Shakur’s Assata (1987), and Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power (1992). Discusses the role of autobiographical writing in the context of lives committed to radical activism. Ethan Casey

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ANNIE JOHN Author: Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter Richardson, 1949Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: Mid-l950’s to mid-1960’s Locale: Antigua, West Indies First published: 1985

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Principal characters: Annie John, a smart, sensitive, young black girl Annie’s mother, the center of Annie’s world Annie’s father, a carpenter Gweneth Joseph, Annie’s best friend Ma Chess, Annie’s grandmother, a powerful healer The Red Girl, Annie’s name for a friend on whom she develops a powerful crush The Novel Jamaica Kincaid wrote Annie John shortly after the publication of At the Bottom of the River (1983), a volume of short stories. Though very different in tone and style from her first book, Annie John deals with much of the same material. Where the writing in At the Bottom of the River is ornately textured and impressionistic, however, Annie John adheres much more closely to the conventions of realism. The result is that the two books read as companion volumes. At the Bottom of the River is a highly subjective treatment of the growth of a young girl from Antigua who has to separate herself from a close relationship with her mother, while Annie John is an attempt to present the same material to an audience in a more objective manner—though still in the first person and still with many subjective impressions. Like the earlier work, Annie John is difficult to classify precisely by genre. While it has the unity and structure of a novel, the eight individual chapters are all selfcontained short stories. The point of view remains consistent in each chapter, the chapters taken together tell a consecutive narrative, and, while knowledge of earlier chapters is not essential to an appreciation of later ones, the stories build on one another, allowing readers to find connections and themes between the individual stories. In the first chapter, “Figures at a Distance,” Annie develops a child’s fascination with death. “For a short while during the year I was ten,” the chapter begins, “I thought only people I did not know died.” Her awareness that anyone, even someone she knows, even a child, can die is her first glimmer of her own mortality, and she starts attending funerals of people she does not know simply out of her fascination with death. When Annie’s interest in death leads her to imagine herself dead and to imagine her father, who builds coffins, so overcome with grief that he is unable to

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build one for her, it becomes clear that this interest in death is also the beginning of a separation from her parents. This process of separation has only begun, however, as the chapter’s ending shows: Annie’s mother punishes Annie when, fascinated by the funeral of a girl she knew, Annie forgets to buy fish for dinner. The mother, however, relents on a threat not to kiss Annie goodnight. The identification between mother and daughter has been questioned but not yet seriously threatened. It is in the second chapter, “The Circling Hand,” that Annie first begins to glimpse the truth that she and her mother are separate beings and, worse (for her), that her mother will expect Annie to define herself as separate from her mother. The mother wants Annie to form her own separate identity but also wants to control the terms on which this identity is established. Annie has always worn dresses patterned after her mother’s, but it is now time for Annie to start dressing differently; similarly, her mother shows Annie one way to store linen but then adds, “Of course, in your own house you might choose another way.” In both these cases, the mother is encouraging Annie to establish her identity within a limited sphere of domestic life but not to go beyond it. The title of the chapter comes from an incident in which Annie comes home from church and spies her mother and father making love; the circling hand of the title is her mother’s hand on her father’s back. This scene marks an end to Annie’s feelings that she wants to identify with her mother, and the beginning of a more mutually antagonistic phase of their relationship. The chapters “Gwen” and “The Red Girl” both focus on schoolgirls on whom Annie briefly forms intense crushes. The story behind “Gwen” is more broadly the story of Annie’s entrance into school and adolescence. A composition Annie writes and is asked to read the first day of school makes her instantly popular, and by the end of the day she is best friends with Gweneth Joseph, a classmate. By the end of the story, however, when Annie has begun menstruating, she realizes she no longer feels quite so close to Gwen, and she also acknowledges strong resentments toward her mother. In “The Red Girl,” Annie’s conflict with her mother grows. Her friendship with the Red Girl is more daring than her relationship with Gwen. She and the Red Girl climb a lighthouse together, decide to make the lighthouse their secret hiding place, and meet there every day, until Annie’s mother punishes Annie for playing marbles. Annie consistently lies about playing marbles, and this becomes a wedge between her and her mother, because her mother does not believe her. Eventually, the Red Girl is sent away to finish her schooling elsewhere; a more serious split, however, has developed between Annie and her mother, a split that will grow with the passing of time. This relationship reaches a crisis in the chapter titled “The Long Rain,” when Annie, for no apparent physical reason, gets very weak and has to take to her bed. At the same time, it begins to rain outside, and it rains fairly steadily the entire time Annie is sick. During this time, Annie does not so much hear the words people speak to her as she sees them, and she sometimes sees them fall dead before they reach her. After the medicines of the local doctor and Ma Jolie, a local conjure woman, fail to help Annie, Annie’s maternal grandmother, Ma Chess, recognized as the most powerful conjure woman in the area, arrives unannounced to take charge of Annie. For several months,

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Ma Chess sleeps in Annie’s room and feeds and tends her personally, and for those months, the weather remains damp and rainy. When Annie is finally better, she has grown significantly taller and needs a new school uniform. Symbolically, she has become a new, adult person. The final chapter in the novel, “A Walk to the Jetty,” describes Annie’s last morning in Antigua as she prepares to leave for England, where she plans to study to be a nurse. In a poignantly told account, Annie’s thoughts touch on many of the people and events seen in earlier chapters, including her truncated friendship with the Red Girl and her failed friendship with Gwen (whom she now considers a bit of an embarrassment). Though the story is infused with the pain that such leave-taking often implies, it is clear that Annie has grown in ways that make this separation from her mother necessary. On the deck of the ship, Annie waves farewell until her mother disappears from sight. Although the story is a parting, it is also a gathering together of self for Annie, as she sets out to become more fully the adult person that has been emerging slowly throughout the novel. The Characters Annie is presented as an extraordinarily bright and talented girl, but also as a series of contradictions that make her seem quite typical in many ways. For example, as a young girl, Annie cannot bear to think of her mother disapproving of her; at the same time, however, she has a strong independent streak that leads her to act up when she is sent first to deportment lessons and later to piano lessons, so that she is dismissed from both. Similarly, when Annie’s mother discovers she has been playing marbles, Annie both lies and hides the marbles to protect the secret, even though her secret has been exposed and her mother does not believe her. Annie’s mother is a central character who is viewed differently as Annie grows up. The young Annie worships her mother and wants to be exactly like her. As Annie begins to grow up, her mother appears to Annie to be overbearing, dominant, and a bit contradictory in her assertions that Annie has to become her own person but also has to follow her mother’s rules. Cumulatively, though, a portrait of Annie’s mother emerges as a woman who separated herself from her own mother by adopting specifically Western habits. She wants to inculcate Annie into that culture, although she herself is not completely certain of her place within it. Ma Chess is one of the most engaging figures in the novel, although readers do not see very much of her. Annie’s maternal grandmother, Ma Chess is presented as a powerful conjure woman and healer. Representing a culture that Annie’s mother has specifically rejected, Ma Chess arrives and leaves mysteriously, and she pointedly rejects the idea that the Western style of life Annie’s mother has established is the only valid one. At one point, Ma Chess tells Annie’s father that one does not need a house to live in; a hole in the ground serves just as well. It seems to be from Ma Chess that Annie’s independence of spirit descends, and by extension, the adult narrator’s (and perhaps Jamaica Kincaid’s) ability to use words as a medium for conjuring feelings and healing emotional scars also descends from this ancestor figure.

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The men in the novel are much less clearly developed than the women. Annie’s father is older than her mother and is a carpenter, but he is seen only distantly. Similarly, Annie’s maternal grandfather, Pa Chess, is glimpsed only briefly. Readers learn little about him except the fact that, when his son got ill, he refused to let Ma Chess treat him, instead sending the son to a doctor, and the son eventually died. Of Annie’s two close friends, Gweneth Joseph and the Red Girl, the Red Girl is the stronger figure. Even her name presents her as a mysterious, potentially powerful presence. Gwen, by contrast, proves to be far more conventional than Annie, and though her friendship endures longer, it is not as intense. Themes and Meanings As was the case with At the Bottom of the River, Kincaid’s first book, Annie John is a novel about the pain and necessity of adolescent rebellion for a young girl growing up in the Caribbean. Annie is presented as a strong-willed, independent child who charts a course for growing up that is largely of her own making. A point that the author seems to want to make, however, is that this individuality comes at the cost of considerable emotional distress. Annie’s independence of spirit is exhibited early in the novel. Annie’s attraction to funerals as a young girl, besides marking her as a young girl possessed of a fiercely unique spirit, is already a movement away from her parents, in that it denotes a nascent awareness of her own mortality and the need to be, ultimately, separate. Annie is distressed when she realizes that her mother means for her to begin to assert her own identity. This realization leads Annie to “act up” more, and in ways that her mother frequently cannot abide. To an extent, Annie at first wants to be able to misbehave, but she also wants to receive the maternal approval that she needs. As her mother increasingly withdraws her approval, however, Annie asserts her own personality, though the lack she feels at her mother’s missing support remains painful, and she and her mother become more careful and guarded toward one another. The chapters “The Red Girl,” “Columbus in Chains,” and “Somewhere in Belgium” trace the growing strife and distrust between mother and daughter—as well as Annie’s sagging spirits—but it is in “The Long Rain” that the situation comes to a crisis. “The Long Rain” is powerful in part because it lends itself to two culturally separate but complementary interpretations. In Western psychological terms, Annie is suffering through an acute depression brought on by the worsening strife between her and her mother; looked at from an Afrocentric spiritual perspective, Annie’s sickness can be seen as a dormant period that she has to endure before the final emergence of her adult identity. Further, it is hinted that the identity that emerges is the identity of a conjure woman, like her grandmother; unlike her grandmother, however, Annie’s medium will be words, not roots and herbs. It is the ability to see words that marks the onset of Annie’s sickness, and when she recovers, she finds herself able to speak in words that carry a new authority that demands that people listen. When Annie takes her leave of her mother in the final chapter, it is clear that Annie is no longer a woman her mother understands. She needs to free herself from this too

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close relationship, but the pain still lingers. Further, because the strong love between mother and daughter can be expressed at their parting, it is clear that the pain of their separation will be felt by Annie for a long time. Critical Context Because Annie John was published shortly after Jamaica Kincaid’s well-received first book, and because there are clear echoes of themes and events between the two books, Annie John has frequently been read as a complementary text to the earlier volume. Like At the Bottom of the River, Annie John is clearly a “womanist” text, in that it focuses on the lives and concerns of two women of color, Annie and her mother. Although men enter the world of this mother and daughter, they are secondary characters, and the world that this novel is most interested in exploring is the world of the emotional life of women, a world to which the men in the novel seem almost oblivious. Because it is a story about the development of a young person’s sensibility, Annie John can be loosely categorized as a bildungsroman. Because the novel charts the growth of Annie’s ability to make herself known through words, however, and because of the hints that the sensibility being developed in this young girl is the sensibility of both a conjure woman and a writer, the novel might most specifically be described as a Künstlerroman, a story about the development of an artist. Like At the Bottom of the River, Annie John has been enthusiastically read by critics who have praised its finely detailed capturing of delicate emotions. One such critic has made a telling comparison between Kincaid’s writing and the paintings of the turn-of-the-century French artist Henri Rousseau, noting that the work of both is “seemingly natural, but in reality sophisticated and precise.” Bibliography Austin, Jacqueline. “Up from Eden.” Review of Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid. Voice Literary Supplement, April, 1985, 6-7. An enthusiastic review that also tries to locate Kincaid’s work in the larger tradition of Caribbean writing. Bouson, J. Brooks. Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Study of the representation of motherhood and maternal relationships in Kincaid’s writing. Includes a chapter on Annie John that focuses on the role of the mother in enabling the daughter to become a writer. Cudjoe, Selwyn R., ed. Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux, 1990. Includes an informative interview in which Kincaid discusses her name change, her mother, and Caribbean writing, among other things. Helen Pyne Timothy’s essay provides a helpful reading of rebellion in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John. Dutton, Wendy. “Merge and Separate: Jamaica Kincaid’s Fiction.” World Literature Today 63, no. 3 (Summer, 1989): 406-410. An excellent article, one of the best resources available for someone wishing to compare At the Bottom of the River and

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Annie John as complementary texts that explain and expand upon each other. Edwards, Justin D. Understanding Jamaica Kincaid. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Comprehensive study of Kincaid’s work, devoting a chapter to Annie John and Lucy. Garis, Leslie. “Through West Indian Eyes.” The New York Times Magazine 140 (October 7, 1990): 42-44. A profile of Kincaid that appeared when her third novel, Lucy (1990), was published. Ismond, Patricia. “Jamaica Kincaid: ‘First They Must Be Children.’” World Literature Written in English 28, no. 2 (Autumn, 1988): 336-341. A consideration of Kincaid’s presentation of childhood in Annie John and At the Bottom of the River. Focuses on the Caribbean elements of Kincaid’s writing. Murdoch, H. Adlai. “Severing the (M)Other Connection: The Representation of Cultural Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Callaloo 13, no. 2 (Spring, 1990): 325-340. Psychologically informed reading of the mother/daughter conflict in Kincaid’s writing, focusing on Annie John. Thomas Cassidy

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ANOTHER COUNTRY Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Late 1950’s Locale: New York, New York; southern France First published: 1962 Principal characters: Rufus Scott, a sensitive, African American jazz drummer who finds it impossible to escape the trammels of American racism Leona, a young, white divorcée from Georgia who falls in love with Rufus Ida Scott, Rufus’s younger sister Vivaldo (Danny) Moore, a white writer, Rufus’s best friend Eric Jones, a white, homosexual actor from Alabama Yves, Eric’s lover Clarissa (Cass) Silenski, an upper-class white intellectual Richard Silenski, Cass’s husband, a white teacher who becomes a popular novelist Steve Ellis, an ambitious television producer The Novel Another Country tells the stories of artists, mainly in New York, struggling to love and be loved amid the complexities of racism, sexism, and homophobia. James Baldwin divided the novel into three parts. “Book One: Easy Rider” begins by narrating the last day of Rufus Scott’s life in a November in the late 1950’s, with digressions that show how he has come to the point of suicide. Then it shows his white friends responding to his death. This book ends the following March, when Vivaldo Moore begins an affair with Ida Scott. “Book Two: Any Day Now” opens with Eric Jones and Yves in southern France, and then follows Eric to New York in early summer, where he renews old friendships. During the summer, Cass and Richard Silenski’s marriage comes apart, Cass begins an affair with Eric, and Vivaldo and Ida’s relationship unravels. This book ends with Cass’s confession to Richard, which brings an end to her affair; though very painful for both of them, the episode seems to hold the promise of a renewal of their marriage. “Book Three: Toward Bethlehem” opens with Vivaldo and Eric making love. This event brings the love between these two men into the open and releases them into new understandings of themselves and of the nature of love. Vivaldo confirms that he is not homosexual, but also that he need not be afraid of loving a male friend and expressing this love physically. It was just such a fear that he believes prevented him

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from comforting Rufus at the crucial point in their relationship. After his revelation with Eric, Vivaldo finally is able to overcome his fear of losing Ida and is able to talk frankly with her. She confesses her affair with Steve Ellis, and Vivaldo proves able to forgive and be forgiven, and so to sustain their love. This final part ends with Yves arriving in New York, feeling at first lost in another country, and then comforted and at home when his beloved Eric meets him as promised at the airport. Vivaldo may be seen as the central character, because he has important love relationships with most of the other main characters. On the other hand, Rufus, though he dies early in the novel, also has important love relationships with most of the same characters. Rufus tries to love Leona as a wife, though they do not marry. He tries to love Vivaldo, Cass, Richard, and Eric as friends and to love Ida as his sister. He fails at love. His failure arises directly from his experience with racism, from the self-hatred he cannot escape because it renews itself constantly in his experiences of racial oppression. All of his friends love him, some deeply, but he cannot bring himself to believe in and simply accept their love. Though he tries to love Leona, he cannot help but want to use her to avenge himself on whites. He unconsciously seeks love from whites in order to be able to love himself, but he also rejects the notion that he must depend on white approval. Caught in this contradiction, he destroys Leona and takes his own life. Vivaldo tries to love Rufus, Cass, Richard, and Eric as friends, and Ida as a wife, though they do not marry before the novel ends. He is more successful than Rufus; he manages, despite great difficulty, to sustain his love affair with Ida. His main failure is with Rufus; their friendship succumbs to Vivaldo’s inability to empathize with Rufus. Losing Rufus, however, helps Vivaldo to accept his love for Eric and its physical expression, and this leads fairly directly to his building a stronger relationship with Ida. The Characters Told from a third-person, limited point of view, the novel shifts between internal and external views of the characters and offers internal views of several main characters: Rufus, Vivaldo, Cass, Eric, and Yves. Baldwin’s choice to avoid extended internal views of Richard and Ida may seem puzzling, but in both cases, Baldwin is able to focus attention and sympathy on their opposites, Cass and Vivaldo. Concealing Richard’s and Ida’s thoughts makes it likely that readers will share the mistakes and selfdeceptions of Cass and Vivaldo about their lovers, heightening the effects of their eventual discoveries. Because Cass’s problems parallel Ida’s, and Vivaldo’s parallel Richard’s, readers can appreciate the dramatic irony of Cass and Vivaldo’s limited perspectives. Richard has been hiding his fears about Cass’s withdrawal of respect and affection from him. He knows that she cannot admire his popular detective novel, and he fears that she no longer loves him. Ida has been hiding the mercenary and vengeful motives that led her to have affairs with white men, including Vivaldo and Ellis. Baldwin shows Cass reading Richard’s withdrawal as a turning away from her toward the shal-

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low and false world of a celebrity author. Vivaldo’s motives for ignoring his suspicions about Ida’s infidelity prove very complicated. He says that he fears Ellis will take advantage of her with promises of career advancement. He also fears—rightly— that she will willingly trade sexual favors for advancement when it suits her. Behind these fears is his unresolved guilt. He feels responsible for her brother’s death—and thus that her tormenting of him is only what he deserves—and yet he resents her holding him responsible for Rufus’s choices. While Vivaldo loves Ida and desperately craves assurance of her love, he continues to see her as a stereotypical African American woman, giving in easily to sexual urges and particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation by whites. These various, sometimes conflicting motives torment him almost unbearably. Eric’s sexual affairs with Cass and Vivaldo help them to see themselves and their relationships more clearly. Critics disagree about why Eric, a homosexual expatriate rather like Baldwin himself, should be the one who is uniquely able to help both characters. There seem to be no easy answers, but readers have observed that Eric has the perspective that Cass needs in order to see past the sheltered life she has led. He has suffered deeply, because his search for love has forced him into opposition to social norms and made him the victim of prejudice and exploitation. Cass’s limited perspective has blinded her to the ways she manipulated Richard and, in the deepest sense, failed to love him; knowing Eric opens her perspective. Likewise, Vivaldo’s fear of his own homosexual desires remains unresolved, and this prevents him from identifying with suffering men. After he makes love with Eric, Vivaldo becomes able to accept that he did indeed fail Rufus by not comforting him physically. Moreover, Vivaldo sees that Rufus was trapped in a cycle of retribution from which only love could rescue him. Eric’s ability to be so helpful to his friends probably is not merely the result of his homosexuality but rather a product of his painful struggles to find love as a homosexual in a violently homophobic society. An important strength of Another Country is the complexity of motivation Baldwin allows his characters. Each main character is shown often trying to understand and deal with a multitude of desires, judgments, and values, and attempting to choose a course of action that will lead to communion. Such inward explorations do not make for easy reading, but when they ring true, they illuminate the labyrinths of human intimacy. Themes and Meanings Another Country is mainly about love—what it is, what stands in its way, and how these barriers may be overcome through suffering and empathy. When Vivaldo’s affair with Ida seems doomed, he reflects that love is another country about which he knows nothing. Both love and the lover are alien. After Vivaldo and Ida first make love, the narrator says that Ida’s face will now be more mysterious for him than that of any stranger: “Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself.” Part of the bond between lovers is a desire to know

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the other that can never be satisfied. This desire, therefore, becomes more fundamental than the sexual desire that may have brought them together in the first place. Furthermore, the secrets in the beloved’s face come from oneself; they are invested in the beloved. Fulfillment in love seems to mean a mutual knowing and being known that reveals both self and beloved. As the characters strive for love, they encounter many obstacles, but Baldwin foregrounds race, homosexuality, and gender. American racism is a major barrier to interracial love. The book’s white characters tend to think that when they love an African American, they have escaped or erased their own racism and that their love should undo all the beloved’s suffering from racism. Baldwin, though, shows both lovers in interracial relationships repeatedly falling into traps, especially regarding power and revenge. Neither is easily able to see the other clearly. Baldwin’s males all have experienced homosexual feelings, but their culture exaggerates homophobia, forcing them to repress severely these feelings and the actual homosexuals who come to symbolize such feelings. As a result, male friendships, whether or not they are homosexual, are crippled by a great silence and a resulting distance that disable love and intimacy. Cass, especially, thinks about the problems of gender. She discovers that she has lived on a protected pedestal, with the result that she and Richard both have remained children in their marriage. She has molded herself around him, diminishing her identity and falsely supporting his. These three themes are closely related, in that African Americans, homosexuals, and women share the characteristic of being “invisible” people. They are invisible in the sense that dominant whites, heterosexuals, and males tend not to “see” the members of the dominated groups, but tend rather to project upon them those parts of themselves they wish to repress. Intimacy between members of these opposed groups are always poisoned and potentially doomed by these barriers. By hiding from themselves, the dominant groups avoid the forms of suffering that are fundamental to being human, and so do not learn to empathize with the sufferings of others. Even when love creates the will to know the truth and to empathize, such barriers make truth hard to know and true sympathy hard to attain. Eric becomes a center of healing in part because he has learned to deal with his suffering, to accept it without being overwhelmed and without turning to vengeful retaliation. Cass and Vivaldo find that, with Eric, they are able to face truths that had previously evaded them and to begin to empathize with those they love. Critical Context Another Country was controversial when it appeared in 1962. Though the novel sold well, reviews were mixed. Negative reviews tended to characterize the novel as a personal polemic excusing or even glorifying homosexuality and pushing Baldwin’s supposedly idiosyncratic racial agenda. Mixed reviews tended to praise strong scenes or important ideas but to criticize Baldwin’s art, accusing him of a weak plot, poorly realized characters, or too personal a tone. The most positive reviews tended to argue that the central themes of the novel were universal rather than personal and lo-

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cal. Granville Hicks characterized the novel as “explosive,” but not artless or out of control. Another Country has come to seem less explosive and more perceptive, and Baldwin’s own opinion that it was perhaps his best novel is more clearly justifiable. In 1962, Baldwin’s depiction of the lives of New York artists was distant from the mainstream of U.S. culture, which was beginning to feel the explosive force of a televised Civil Rights movement. Baldwin assumes in his readers a willingness to accept homosexual and interracial love as good because they too are forms of love. One goal of the novel would seem to be to open readers up more fully to the possibilities for loving, and thereby, to humanize them. To present homosexuality and interracial (and extramarital) love affairs without explicit or even implicit moral condemnation seemed so sensational at the time that it was difficult for even the most perceptive readers to appreciate the seriousness of Baldwin’s purposes. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. This collection of critical essays on Baldwin includes two major discussions of Another Country by Charles Newman and Roger Rosenblatt. In his introduction, Bloom sees Baldwin as a prophet whose essays are more important than his fiction. _______. James Baldwin. Updated ed. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. This updated edition of Bloom’s critical anthology lacks the essays by Newman and Rosenblatt, but it includes one by Carolyn Wedin Sylvander on the representation of love and sex in Another Country and Giovanni’s Room (1956). Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking Press, 1991. This biography, by a man who knew Baldwin personally, is especially interesting because it draws on the Federal Bureau of Investigation files kept on Baldwin. Campbell deals frankly with Baldwin’s bisexuality. Included are sixteen pages of photographs. Harris, Trudier. Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. Though Harris’s long chapter on Another Country deals mainly with Ida Scott, it nevertheless offers a full, interesting interpretation of the novel, with good attention to main themes of race, gender, and sexuality. King, Lovalerie, and Lynn Orilla Scott, eds. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Includes two essays comparing Another Country to Morrison’s Jazz (1992). O’Daniel, Therman B. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. Contains essays on Baldwin as novelist, as essayist, as short-story writer, as playwright, and as scenarist, as well as a section on his “raps” and dialogues. Bibliography and extensive secondary bibliography. Relyea, Sarah. Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin. New York: Routledge, 2006. Discusses Baldwin’s role in reimagining the nature of identity, his representation of race and sexuality, and the importance of his status as a cultural outsider.

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Standley, Fred L., and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Divided into sections on fiction, nonfiction, and drama. The introduction surveys Baldwin’s literary reputation and includes a summary of the reception of Another Country. The collection opens with a 1979 interview with Baldwin and includes Granville Hicks’s extensive review of Another Country. Sylvander, Carolyn W. James Baldwin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. This introductory study includes a chronology, a biographical sketch, and chapters on major aspects of Baldwin’s career. Chapter 5 summarizes and evaluates Another Country. Terry Heller

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APPALACHEE RED Author: Raymond Andrews (1934-1991) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1918-1963 Locale: Appalachee, Muskhogean County, Georgia First published: 1978 Principal characters: Appalachee Red, a café and gambling-house owner Baby Sweet Jackson, Red’s live-in lover, called the “Black Peach” Clyde “Boots” White, Appalachee’s police chief and later county sheriff Little Bit Thompson, Appalachee Red’s mother John Morgan, the heir to the wealthy Morgan estate Blue Thompson, the second son of Little Bit Thompson and half brother to Appalachee Red The Novel Appalachee Red, the first part of Raymond Andrews’s Muskhogean Trilogy, traces the development of African American life in the American South from just after World War I until the end of 1963. Although the novel is perhaps best described as tragicomic, it presents readers with many truths of the cultural, social, political, and historial milieus of the South during the first half of the twentieth century. The novel opens in late autumn of 1918, when Big Man Thompson, a twenty-oneyear-old African American man, is arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. This is the first of a number of tragic but realistic injustices experienced by African Americans in the South that the author catalogs. Other such experiences include economic oppression, political manipulation, terrorization of the African American community by law enforcement officials, and forced concubinage of African American women as a rite of southern white manhood. These are accepted codes of conduct in Muskhogean County, Georgia, Andrews’s microcosm of the rural South. Appalachee Red enters town as a mysterious stranger in the fall of 1945 and, with his own brand of manipulation of Appalachee’s African Americans and whites, goes about deliberately and calculatingly claiming the African American community as his own domain. For the next eighteen years, Red is the undisputed and uncontested king of Appalachee, with most of the population fearing his quiet, no-nonsense approach to everything, and just as many envying the number of possessions he amasses, especially Baby Sweet Jackson and Red’s long, black, chauffeur-driven Cadillac limousine.

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Readers soon discover, though the townspeople never do, that Red is no mere stranger who happens to wander into Appalachee. Rather, he is a native son, the offspring of John Morgan, the prototype of the wealthy white southern elite, and Little Bit Thompson, one of the Morgan family’s maids. Red has returned to his native Appalachee following a European tour of duty during World War II to claim his birthright as heir to a portion of the Morgan estate and to seek a measure of revenge on those who have wronged him both directly and indirectly. Red accomplishes this and more. Red drives the police out of the African American community of Appalachee, takes control of the community’s vice, shrewdly manipulates the white community, gives the African American community a degree of pride, and amasses a fortune in the process. As the novel ends, Red leaves Appalachee just as mysteriously as he came, but not before he has given in to the sexual attraction that his white half sister has for him and not before he has killed Boots White, the county sheriff who had pushed Red’s mother into insanity more than twenty-five years earlier. The Characters Appalachee Red is told in the folk tradition of African American storytelling. Thus, there is no central plot that develops from beginning to end but rather a number of episodes that are designed to instruct and entertain. Likewise, there is little character development, and many of the characters are types rather than complex characters in the literary sense of the term. Appalachee Red, for example, is a larger-than-life character. He is a big man, physically, and as powerful and mysterious as he is large in physique. In fact, it may be safe to say that Red is among the most mysterious characters in African American literature, an idea that Andrews capitalizes upon in the narrative. Red is seen primarily through the narrator’s eyes. He speaks very little, a fact that adds considerably to his mystery. In addition, he is described as catlike, again a trait that adds to the power and appeal of the character. Similarly, although there are some facts of Red’s background to which readers are made privy—his real identity as the son of Little Bit Thompson and her white employer, and the fact that he served in World War II in Germany— little is told of what he did during the years leading up to his enlistment in the Army. This lapse of time contributes to the strangeness of Appalachee Red’s sudden appearance in the town of Appalachee. What does become clear upon Red’s equally mysterious departure eighteen years later is that he had revenge in mind all along and that he had gone about exacting that revenge in a quiet, calculated, catlike manner. Because the impact of the story and its numerous characters depend upon the artistry of the storyteller, Andrews takes full advantage of the options that are available to him. He embellishes some episodes, adds humor to others, recounts tragedy in others, and digresses and backtracks; above all, he seems to have fun while he tells the story. That Andrews was able to adapt the power of the oral tradition to the written page is a tribute to his accomplishment as a writer. Most of the novel’s other characters are character types. Clyde “Boots” White appears as the stereotypical redneck southern police chief who exploits vice, lust for

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black women, and fear of the African American community for purposes of control. John Morgan, Sr., appears as the ineffective paragon of the rich white Southerner. Big Man Thompson is portrayed as the quiet, brooding, black brute character, while his wife, Little Bit Thompson, is presented as the long-suffering victim of white sexual and physical brutality. Similarly, Blue Thompson is presented as the young black militant, and Roxanne Morgan is characterized as the white girl infatuated with black men (with Appalachee Red in particular). Each of these characters is presented by a knowledgeable storyteller who not only knows their traits, behavior patterns, and motivations but also knows how to present their overriding problems with a small amount of sympathy and an overwhelming, ribald humor. Their dialect is believable, their actions—while sometimes preposterous—are entirely possible in the context of the story and its setting, and even their names are typical of the time and place. Appalachee Red is a tremendously successful example of storytelling and omniscient narration at its best. Themes and Meanings Appalachee Red achieves two equally important things: First, the novel retells the history of the realities of the American South from an African American perspective; second, the narrator exemplifies the best of the African American storyteller in the oral tradition. This first part of Andrews’s Muskhogean Trilogy firmly establishes both the story and the craft that the author continues in Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee (1980) and Baby Sweet’s (1983). The focus of the novel is on the larger-than-life character known only as “Appalachee Red.” Woven into the story of Red and his exploits, though, are numerous other stories about the South, its people—white and black—its codes of conduct and ethics, and its history. Appalachee Red is born as a result of the tragic but common southern circumstance of forced sexual relations between an African American woman and her white employer. Andrews does not dwell on this occurrence as an individual tragedy of the offspring, however, but portrays its tragic results for his mother, who must separate from her child to save her own marriage and household. Further, Andrews points out the tragedy of such unions for southern white women, who must not only endure the fact of sexual relationships between their male family members and African American women but who must also live with the awareness of the children of such unions. Andrews points out that the white fathers are usually deprived of meaningful relationships with their biracial children; John Morgan is deprived of the exceptional talents of his illegitimate son, as Red proves to be a far more shrewd and successful businessman than either of Morgan’s two legitimate sons. Another tragic reality for southern African Americans that Andrews addresses in Appalachee Red is the exploitation of their labor by white property owners. This is most clearly seen in Andrews’s depiction of a section of Muskhogean County called Hard Labor Hole. “The Hole” is a former swamp that has been purchased by Jake Turner and cleared, filled in, planted, worked, and made profitable by African American convict la-

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bor leased from the state. Andrews points out that there were hardly any differences for African Americans between this twentieth century form of slavery and “the peculiar institution” under which their ancestors had suffered a half-century earlier. Andrews’s focus is not solely on interracial tragedies; he points out problems of intraracial dimensions as well. Tensions between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned African Americans are exemplified through their self-imposed segregation: The darker African Americans live in Dark Town, the lighter ones live in Light Town, and the twain never meet, even though they are located on opposite ends of the same street. Further, the legitimate African American businesses and the county high school for African Americans are all located in Light Town, while the purveyors of vice—liquor houses, gambling houses, and houses of prostitution—are located in Dark Town. The two communities’ churches are indicative of their attitudes toward life and each other: The Baptists, located in Dark Town, are noisy and spontaneous, while the Methodists, located in Light Town, are cold, quiet, and inhibited. Yet another example of intraracial prejudice among the African Americans of Appalachee is the friction between those who live in town and those from “the Hole.” This friction usually escalates into a full-scale war on Saturdays, when the African Americans from the country come to town for their weekly outing. Appalachee Red’s sudden appearance in Appalachee changes much of this situation, as many of his initial actions are designed to wrest control of the African American community from the white power structure and to rescue the community from its own debilitating actions. These things Red accomplishes, turning African American Appalachee into a productive community from which he derives a handsome profit and, as a by-product, much respect, fear, and envy. Red is one of the most powerful and most mysterious characters in African American literature. Equally as important as Andrews’s tale is the manner in which the story is rendered. There is no doubt that the storyteller is the author—no adopted persona here—and that he not only knows the tale thoroughly but also understands its implications, appreciates its worth, and enjoys telling it. Appalachee Red is one of the most comic novels of the twentieth century; indeed, the entire Muskhogean Trilogy gives a new meaning to the postmodern term “black humor.” Andrews has a knack, a true gift, for turning tragedy, violence, and heartbreak in on themselves and rendering them comic without compromising their more serious aspects. One example of this gift involves the pandemonium surrounding the birth of Blue Thompson, who is ripped prematurely from his mother’s womb as she lies on the front lawn of Sam’s Cafe, having been kicked into a nearly comatose state by the police chief. Andrews writes that “Just moments before slipping into a coma, Little Bit took one squinting look at the screaming child through heavily swollen eyelids and smiled happily with her painful, puffy, and bleeding lips before saying weakly, ‘Lawd Gawd, hit’s so black, hit’s blue. . . .’” Certainly the circumstances of Blue’s birth are tragic, yet the storyteller and readers both readily understand the comedy in the naming process. This brilliant combination of tragedy and comedy is vintage Andrews and is characteristic of his work. Finally, Andrews was never afraid to poke fun at sit-

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uations, either personal, societal, or institutional, that were previously off limits to humor, and he developed this humor into one of the most compelling features of his art. Critical Context When Appalachee Red was first published in 1978, it was awarded the James Baldwin Prize by its publisher, Dial Press (which also published Baldwin’s work), for its spirited portrayal of African American experience. Other than that recognition, neither Appalachee Red nor the two other novels in the Muskhogean Trilogy attracted much critical attention. This neglect is in large part a result of the unsettling effect that Andrews’s blend of tragedy and comedy has on sensitive readers and is also a result of Andrews’s tendency to serve as a revisionist historian of African American experience. By the late 1980’s, however, an Andrews revival was initiated with the reissue of Andrews’s Muskhogean Trilogy by the University of Georgia Press. Further evidence that Andrews was beginning to be appreciated came in the publication of two additional books, The Last Radio Baby (1990) and Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire (1991). The 1991 annual conference of the College Language Association, a professional organization of African American scholars in literature and languages, featured a symposium on the works of Andrews with a guest appearance by the author. Appalachee Red was beginning to emerge as one of the finest examples of the modern comic novel, and the trilogy itself was awakening widespread acclaim. Although the death of Raymond Andrews by suicide in November, 1991, was an unexpected tragedy, an expanding readership of and scholarship on his work remain assured. Bibliography Andrews, Raymond. The Last Radio Baby: A Memoir. Atlanta: Peachtree, 1990. Autobiography that focuses on the author’s youth. Blundell, Janet Boyarin. Review of Appalachee Red, by Raymond Andrews. Library Journal, October 1, 1978, p. 2005. A brief early review that praises the novel as “pungent, witty, and powerful.” Contemporary Authors. Vol. 136. Detroit: Gale, 1991. Contains a useful overview of Andrews’s life and career. Highlight is Andrews’s own commentary on his work. Brief bibliography. Includes information on Andrews’s suicide. Harris, Trudier. “This Disease Called Strength: The Masculine Manifestation in Raymond Andrews’s Appalachee Red.” In Contemporary Black Men’s Fiction and Drama, edited by Keith Clark. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Discusses the relationship between race, masculinity, and power in Andrews’s novel. Bibliographic references and index. The New Yorker. Review of Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, by Raymond Andrews. August 11, 1980, 90. Brief, laudatory review of Andrews’s second novel that stresses his abilities as a storyteller who “knows just how far to stretch his audiences’ memory and credulity as he spins and weaves his colorful yarns.” Warren J. Carson

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THE ARTIFICIAL WHITE MAN Essays on Authenticity Author: Stanley Crouch (1945) Type of work: Essays/cultural criticism First published: 2004 Form and Content The Artificial White Man is a collection of essays, written over a period of several years, in which Stanley Crouch explores the portrayal of color, class, and gender in fiction, music, sports, and film. The nine essays of the collection are connected by the theme of “blues,” a word included in the title of each, although Crouch does not define precisely what “blues” means. The book, whose subtitle is Essays on Authenticity, also lacks an explicit definition of the latter term. Instead, Crouch scatters hints as to his concept of authenticity throughout the essays. By reading them, one may gather that authenticity is opposed to making the unreal appear real. It entails rejecting the artificial divisions slipped into social and national life by commercial and political interests. It is the opposite of the shadow world reflected in the media and technology. It is also opposed to seeking “street credentials” and “hoodlum authenticity.” Crouch announces early in the book that he intends to “spank” those who claim to pursue authenticity while promoting different versions of a counterfeit. Indeed, the book “spanks” many and “celebrates” some. In the first essay, “Baby Boy Blues,” Crouch attacks what he calls the “new minstrelsy,” contemporary media images of African American youth that merely rehash the “bullying, hedonistic buffoons” portrayed in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). The purpose of the new minstrelsy is “blaxploitation,” the commercial exploitation of sensationalistic racial stereotypes by the purveyors of popular culture. Crouch stridently condemns much popular culture for reinforcing artificial distinctions that separate people and impeding people’s ability to recognize their common humanity. He also heaps praise on exceptions to this new minstrelsy. The work of film director John Singleton constitutes one such exception. Even though Singleton’s films—Boyz n the Hood (1991), Rosewood (1997), and Baby Boy (2001)—include scenes of violence, casual sex, and drug use and have been criticized as denigrating to African Americans, Crouch interprets them as authentic representations, because they honestly disclose, however unconsciously, the reality of those who struggle to escape a ruinous lifestyle. Crouch devotes an entire essay, “Segregated Fiction Blues,” to critiquing contemporary popular fiction that cravenly avoids the larger, inclusive, and epic themes of life in American society. Exceptions exist, but the author notes that writers who cross the color line, such as William Styron in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), are publicly flogged by the critics who do see beneath the surface. Crouch repeatedly upholds William Faulkner as an exemplary American

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writer of authenticity who crossed the color line in Go Down, Moses (1942). Crouch’s major complaint is that most contemporary fiction writers avoid the grand themes that underlie the epic character of the United States and its history— themes that include the rebelliousness that won Americans freedom from Great Britain, their inherent suspicion of government and authority, their belief in upward mobility, and the freedom they claim to reinvent themselves at every juncture. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000), which are rooted, in Crouch’s judgment, in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, are also cited as examples of authentic fiction. Crouch recognizes Saul Bellow’s Revelstein (2000) as another work of authentic fiction to the extent that it raises the fundamental question of what it means to cross racial and cultural lines and to feel comfortable on the streets while belonging to academia. In an essay titled “Blues for the Artificial White Man” that deals with the literary use of spectator sports—basketball in particular—Crouch criticizes David Shields’s Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999), a subjective account of the 1994-1995 season of the Seattle SuperSonics. Crouch argues that suburban whites watch basketball as an opportunity to satisfy “their favorite dreams,” their sexual fantasies, by reducing African American men to “athletic flesh.” The longest essay in the collection is devoted to the films of Quentin Tarantino that, in the author’s exegesis, call attention to Americans’ obsession with things exotic and their impaired ability to understand anything universal except extreme violence. Tarantino, for Crouch, speaks across race, color, and class lines as he uses characters that are the products of “cultural miscegenation” to confront a pop culture that deals in stereotypes. Crouch concludes the volume with a call for authenticity that entails striving for the kind of integration that rejects bigotry and xenophobia and embraces the entire spectrum of humanity. Analysis The Artificial White Man is a trenchant criticism of the popular culture that exploits identity politics and social divisions for commercial and personal gain and thus undercuts the collective quest for authenticity. Crouch’s favorite authors are those who write in the tradition of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Jorge Borges, who tell epic stories and create universal myths. With characteristic gumption and perspicacity, even while using expressions that some may find offensive, he forces readers to look at the popular culture with a critical eye. Some may find his rejection of rap and hip-hop narrow-minded or his interpretation of jazz as the main metaphor for African American creativity exaggerated. While the book bemoans American culture’s presumed obsession with authenticity, it is anything but a philosophical discourse on authenticity. Rather, Crouch’s essays constitute a literary exploration that critically reflects on the illusions, pretensions, conventions, and divisions created in the name of ethnic and tribal identities. Crouch is not a systematic thinker but an iconoclast.

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Crouch is critical of writers and celebrities, regardless of their race or social position, who use race for commercial gain or to elicit sympathy. For instance, he excoriates Michael Jackson for using race in the service of self-interest. Cultural and political separatists such as Malcolm X and Franz Fanon are also cited as dealers in blaxploitation. Crouch is also contemptuous of those academics who write in the mold of European intellectuals and who do not appreciate the unique cultural mélange that the United States and its long democratic tradition represent. He argues that intellectual support for a universalistic vision can be extracted from American literature itself. He favors a philosophy that recognizes Americans’ historical failures as diseases to be overcome with the medicine of what he calls a “tragic optimism.” Beneath the rough and ready style that occasionally surfaces in Crouch’s writing, one finds an author sincerely advocating openness to a universal humanism that transcends all national, geographical, and ethnic divisions. Critical Context Crouch is a multifaceted and controversial author and cultural critic. He is bestknown as a syndicated columnist for The New York Daily News, a contributing editor to The New Republic, and a jazz critic. He has challenged all orthodoxies both on the Right and on the Left. Because of his penchant for expressing his views forcefully and ruthlessly, he defies ideological classification. Some have called him a neoconservative, because he has questioned the views of many prominent African Americans. Some have called him a sell-out, because he refuses to buy into mainstream African American perspectives on issues of race and ethnicity. He is highly critical of the lifestyle of those with “gold teeth, dropdown pants and tasteless jewelry.” As a jazz critic, he does not care very much for the new forms of jazz music. Crouch is also notorious for his angry outbursts against his critics to the point of physically attacking some of them on a few occasions. Nevertheless, most critics acknowledge him as among the more powerful voices and literary figures to emerge in recent times from the African American community. First-time readers of Crouch may find themselves simultaneously fascinated and irritated by his bluster and bold assertions. His prose has also been criticized for disregarding rules of logic and accepted usages, for mixing metaphors, and for what appears to be hurried writing. Nevertheless, critics as well as admirers would agree that his views of the media and popular culture are courageous, and he represents an independent voice free of programmatically ideological constraints. The Artificial White Man is Crouch’s second major collection of essays, after Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990). His other works include The All-American Skin Game: Or, The Decoy of Race (1995), Always in Pursuit (1998), and the novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing (2000). All of Crouch’s works center around the themes of cultural decadence, racial politics, and the ironies and conflicts that prevail in American life. His prose is inimitable in its style, liveliness, and persuasiveness, and it keeps readers passionately engaged, whether or not they agree with him.

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Bibliography Beck, Stefan. “Authenticity Blues.” The New Criterion 23 (November, 2004): 71-73. Offers the view that Crouch startles readers with his uncommon prose to help them see reality beyond the perspective of group affiliations. Eakin, Emily. “The Artificial White Man: Battling Gangstas and Hussies.” The New York Times, January 16, 2006. While applauding the author’s intellectual concerns, Eakin sharply criticizes his prose for being unclear, insensitive, and imprecise. Margolis, Edward. Review of The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity, by Stanley Crouch. African American Review 40 (2006): 601-603. Provides a balanced and critical assessment of the book’s contribution to cultural criticism. Seymour, Gene. “Crouching Tiger.” The Nation, May 16, 2005, pp. 31-33. Concludes that the book is Crouch’s best so far and that it is very effective in challenging conventional thinking. Walton, Anthony. “Color Blind.” The Washington Post, November 24, 2004. Proposes that, through his essays, Crouch reveals his own autobiography. Mathew J. Kanjirathinkal

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AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER Author: Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter Richardson, 1949Type of work: Short stories Type of plot: Experimental Time of plot: Late twentieth century Locale: Antigua, West Indies First published: 1983

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Principal characters: The Narrator, a young, sensitive, black girl growing up in Antigua The Narrator’s mother, the center of the narrator’s world The Narrator’s father, a distant figure The Red Woman, a possibly imaginary woman The Stories At the Bottom of the River is a series of ten short, impressionistic pieces that might almost be better called “prose pieces” rather than stories. Though the stories develop and have plots, they do not follow most narrative conventions. They do, however, form a tightly connected unit, in that at the center of each tale is the pain of separation of a daughter from her mother. Although At the Bottom of the River resists easy categorization, categories are helpful in understanding it. To an extent, the pieces in this book can be read successfully as poetry in that, as in poetry, the use of realistic detail is suggestive rather than extensive. For the most part, the stories take place within the landscape of the narrator’s mind, and the external “real” world is only an occasional focus. Then, too, the language has the compact beauty and grace of lyric poetry, and the prose is sensitive to the rhythms and sounds of language. As in poetry, readers must be alert to subtle shades of meaning in the language and images of the text. In another sense, however, because the thematic content of the book is so carefully unified, a reader might want to call it a novel. Because the form and appearance on the page is most like that of a collection of short stories, however, and because its novelistic and poetic aspects are aspects of short stories as well, the work is usually classified as a collection of short fiction. The first story in the collection is “Girl,” and most of it is a monologue of instructions from a mother to a daughter, with the daughter’s two attempts to reply indicated by italics; these replies are largely ignored by the mother. Implicitly, the mother’s directions are directions for becoming a young lady and a proper wife, but they are given to a girl who is still too young to appreciate or fully understand them, especially because they contain apparent contradictions. The mother advises her daughter not to appear too sexually provocative, but also tells her how to smile at men so they will not

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ignore her. Similarly, the mother advises the daughter on how to love a man—but then remarks that, if the suggestions do not work, “don’t feel too bad about giving up.” The mother advises her daughter not to sing “benna,” folk songs that draw on African tradition, on Sundays, implying that her Christian heritage must be privileged over her African heritage. On the other hand, the mother also gives her daughter herbal and medicinal advice that derive from African tradition. A grown woman might be able to reconcile such apparent conflict, but the young girl is clearly overwhelmed. Further, there is reason to doubt the mother’s maturity; the advice she gives her daughter includes information on how to spit in the air and how to play marbles. When the daughter tries to protest that she does not do the things her mother thinks she does, it begins to seem likely that the mother is projecting her own conflicts onto her daughter without attempting to understand the girl. Like “Girl,” many of the stories in this collection are remarkable for their ability to suggest feelings and states of mind from childhood. In “Wingless,” the narrator identifies herself with young wingless insects, such as caterpillars that have not become butterflies. The story begins with a school scene of children reading together but then goes into the mind of the young narrator, who is imagining what type of woman she will be. Like most of the stories in this collection, “Wingless” uses an imaginary landscape of memory and desire; the writer is trying to express the desires for womanhood as felt by a child. The red woman, who makes her first appearance in “In the Night,” reappears in this story as a woman whom the narrator follows because she is in love with her. In “Wingless,” it seems clear that the attraction of this woman for the young narrator is that she reminds her both of her mother and of the type of woman the narrator herself would like to be, able, with “a red, red smile,” to kill a man like a fly. The story ends with the narrator voicing contrary desires and dreams of her future self as she falls off to sleep. To the adult reader, it is clear that some of these dreams of the future will conflict with others, but to the child, the state of wanting every possibility is one of perfect comfort and bliss, precisely because the conflicts are not yet serious. As the stories progress, however, the impending crisis of growing up, hinted at in “Wingless,” comes closer. “What I Have Been Doing Lately” is structured as a spiral of recurring events and keeps repeating the story’s opening line. The first time through, the girl’s perception of what begins as an ordinary day is filled with wonder and magic. When the girl sees a hole, she allows herself to fall down it; when falling frightens her, she wills herself to turn back—as if, symbolically, growing up does not have to happen. Midway through, the girl encounters a woman who seems to be her mother, but an unfamiliar version of her mother, who frightens the girl by asking her what she has been doing lately. Again, the narrator goes through the same general sequence of events; this time, though, the world seems not wonderful to her but bitter and ugly. Instead of encountering a hole, she encounters beautiful-looking black people who, on closer inspection, turn out to be made of mud. When she gets trapped in the mud, she is unable to free herself from it. The story ends where it began, in her bed, as if the young girl were about to go through the sequence again—and as if it

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were about to get worse again. This downward-spiralling repetition strongly suggests a child on the edge of severe emotional trouble. The narrator hits her emotional bottom in the story “Blackness.” In many ways, this is a companion piece to “In the Dark,” but in “Blackness,” there is no sense of comfort. “How soft is the blackness as it falls,” the story begins, as if the state of emotional depression the title indicates is at first a comfort. On the next page, however, the narrator says, “in this way I am annihilated. . . . In the blackness, then, I have been erased,” indicating a state of near despair. Midway through the story, a mother’s voice temporarily intrudes on the narrative, looking at the female protagonist and coolly evaluating her and her faults. Whether this is literally the girl’s mother speaking or is rather the girl’s image of how her mother sees her is impossible to determine; what is clear is the separation of the mother from the daughter that is indicated by this passage. The mother sees her daughter as “beyond despair”; the story reveals a girl in the grips of it. The end of the story is ambiguous; at the end, the narrator finds a “silent voice” that helps her “shrug off [her] mantle of despair.” The nature of this silent voice is unclear, but the ending does indicate that she is now able to accept the sense of erasure she felt earlier and is able to move toward personal growth. “My Mother” continues the story of the separation of the girl from her mother through the use of fantastic images of similarity, merging, and separation. The final story, though, “At the Bottom of the River,” brings the narrator to a state in which she can have a sense of her own, unique presence. Included also in this story is a view of the girl’s father, in a four-page passage that takes him through the events of a single day. The father is portrayed as notably outside the sometimes wonderful and sometimes terrifying intimacy that the narrator and her mother share. His days are filled with worldly things, and he persistently defers considering death and the possibility of a world to follow. The narrator, however, is compelled to these questions, and so she asks, “Is life, then, a violent burst of light, like flint struck sharply in the dark?” Her search for a lasting truth takes her to the river’s edge, where, “at the bottom of the river,” she sees a land of absolute truth and reality, the glimpse of which turns her into a red woman of pure spirit, able to enter and flow with the river, or soar above the water and land. Toward the end of the story, she finds herself coming out of a pit, flesh once more, and says her name. Symbolically, this ending represents not only her emergence from the pit of depression but also her acceptance of herself as a separate, individual being with a discrete identity. With the final act of naming herself, she is whole. The Characters The stories chart the relationship between two characters, the narrator and her mother. In the early stories, the mother and daughter do not always recognize themselves as being two wholly separate people. Though the story “Girl” suggests that the narrator feels this closeness to be a bit suffocating, the stories “In the Night” and “Wingless” suggest that the narrator finds the extreme closeness with her mother to be satisfying. In “In the Night,” for example, the young narrator imagines herself

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growing up and marrying a woman who will tell stories every night, stories that always begin “before you were born,” as if the only perfect mate she can imagine for herself is her mother. Similarly, although the central image in “Wingless,” a young insect ready to grow wings, clearly implies that change is inevitable, the girl narrator finds comfort in her ability to imagine different futures that contradict one another, strongly suggesting that the passage out of childhood will be disappointing for her. Themes and Meanings The overriding thematic concern of the stories in At the Bottom of the River is the pain of separation from a mother for a young girl growing up. “Holidays” and “The Letter from Home” both seem to speak of a temporary separation or vacation of the girl from her mother, a separation that proves to be a first attempt at adulthood from which a return to childhood becomes impossible. In “What I Have Been Doing Lately,” the daughter no longer feels herself to be a perfect extension of her mother; rather, the mother now is a demanding presence who makes life hard for the daughter. In “Blackness,” the peace of darkness and nighttime that is evoked so beautifully in “In the Dark” has become predatory and threatens to drag the daughter into an emotional chasm. The mother, looking on, is separate enough from her daughter to not see her as suffering serious problems, but she is also separate enough to see a strength in the daughter of which the daughter may not be aware. The story “My Mother” in some ways encapsulates the main themes of the book, in that the mother and daughter are presented as in constant competition. At the end of the first section of this story, the narrator describes herself and her mother watching each other warily and being careful to flatter one another, because a poisonous lake now exists between them; if they are not careful, they may hurt one another. At one point, the daughter tries to distinguish her own shadow from the darkness of her mother’s room—indicating a feeling of suffocation—and at another point longs for the lost intimacy with her mother. The conflict between these two contrasting feelings, however, is now unreconcilable. Finally, in “At the Bottom of the River,” the daughter achieves a sense of independent self. Ironically, her father, who has been mostly absent during the previous stories, provides a model for this separation. The brief passage focusing on him reveals a man living in separation from the world and the people around him, and even from his own feelings. The daughter does not want to follow his example; rather, she wants to answer the questions he ignores. He feels the approach of death to be a heaviness, so she thinks about death. Her thoughts bring her to the river’s edge, where she encounters, at the bottom of the river, a world of Platonic ideal forms and whole truths. Seeing that there is a transcendental world, she is able to enter it as a spirit and to become a single, individual, unique self. The daughter’s ultimate discovery is that becoming separate does not mean becoming lonely and isolated; one can be an individual and be a part of something larger at the same time. When she speaks her name at the end, it is an act of self-naming by which she tries to begin to position herself in the larger world.

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Critical Context At the Bottom of the River created an immediate sensation when it was published. Kincaid’s work is a unique achievement, and as such it would be a mistake to view the book narrowly within one critical context, yet the traditions upon which the work draws can be detected. In light of Kincaid’s impressionistic style, which stresses feelings and images over meaning and story, a valid comparison can be drawn between the stories in At the Bottom of the River and the soliloquy that ends James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). When the narrator of “At the Bottom of the River” recalls how she would say “yes, yes, yes” to her mother’s beauty, for example, the narrator seems to echo Molly Bloom’s repeated “yes” at the end of Ulysses. A major difference, of course, is that At the Bottom of the River focuses on the development of a young woman’s relationship to her mother, rather than to men, as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy does. The most important context that At the Bottom of the River deserves to be considered within, however, is an African Caribbean one. To be sure, Jamaica Kincaid (a longtime resident of the United States) has been reluctant to label herself a Caribbean writer, claiming that labels are not important. In this case, however, the recognition of the context that helped to produce her work can be informative. The critic Wendy Dutton has called attention to the “conjure woman” elements of Jamaica Kincaid’s writing. Growing from an African tradition, the conjure woman is a figure in African literature and society with knowledge of the spirit world and a spiritually derived knowledge and power over the material world. The references to herbal medicine in “Girl” seem to put the narrator’s mother in this tradition, and the scenes of confrontation in “My Mother” can be read as an account of two conjure women who are respectful of each other’s powers but who find themselves in competition. There are also references to Plato’s allegory of the cave, but even these are given an Afrocentric presentation. In “My Mother,” the girl narrator enters a dark cave with her mother and learns to see in the dark, becoming like one of Plato’s underground inhabitants, who live in a world of appearances rather than reality. In “At the Bottom of the River,” she encounters a Platonic ideal world of true forms, where everything is vivid and original. She herself, at that point, becomes a spirit, transcending the world of ordinary reality. She is very much an elemental spirit, however, learning as a conjure woman, from the earth around her. In this final story, it thus becomes apparent how Kincaid’s narrator is trying to define herself. The Caribbean is an area that has deep roots in both African and European culture, and the narrator in At the Bottom of the River is trying to develop an identity that draws on both cultures. When she names herself at the end—marking an important change of life with an act of self-naming, as is characteristic of some African cultures—she posits a whole, separate identity drawing on these different cultural and deep emotional ties.

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Bibliography Bouson, J. Brooks. Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Study of the representation of motherhood and maternal relationships in Kincaid’s writing. Includes a chapter on “Antigua Crossings” and At the Bottom of the River charting the emergence of Kincaid’s writerly identity. Cudjoe, Selwyn R., ed. Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux, 1990. Includes an informative interview with Kincaid in which the writer discusses her name change, her mother, and Caribbean writing, among other things. An essay by Helen Pyne Timothy examines images of adolescent rebellion in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John (1985). Dutton, Wendy. “Merge and Separate: Jamaica Kincaid’s Fiction.” World Literature Today 63, no. 3 (Summer, 1989): 406-410. Excellent article that depicts At the Bottom of the River and Annie John as complementary texts that explain and expand one another. Focuses largely on the presentation of mother/daughter separation. Edwards, Justin D. Understanding Jamaica Kincaid. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Comprehensive study of Kincaid’s work, devoting a chapter to At the Bottom of the River. Garis, Leslie. “Through West Indian Eyes.” The New York Times Magazine 140 (October 7, 1990): 42-44. A profile of Kincaid that appeared when Kincaid’s third novel, Lucy (1990), was published. Ismond, Patricia. “Jamaica Kincaid: ‘First They Must Be Children.’” World Literature Written in English 28, no. 2 (Autumn, 1988): 336-341. A consideration of Kincaid’s presentation of childhood in Annie John and At the Bottom of the River that focuses on Kincaid as a Caribbean writer. Murdoch, H. Adlai. “Severing the (M)Other Connection: The Representation of Cultural Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Callaloo 13, no. 2 (Spring, 1990): 325-340. A psychologically informed reading of the mother/daughter conflict in Kincaid’s writing. Focuses on Annie John, but because of the intimate relationship between Kincaid’s first two books, these comments illuminate At the Bottom of the River as well. Thomas Cassidy

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS OF WILLIAM WELLS BROWN Author: William Wells Brown (1814-1884) Type of work: Slave narratives Time of work: 1815-1852 Locale: United States and Europe First published: Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave, 1847; The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad, 1855 Principal personages: Narrative of William Wells Brown William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave, the son of his master’s cousin Dr. John Young, a gentleman farmer and physician, William’s first master Elijah P. Lovejoy, the abolitionist printer—and later martyr— for whom William works briefly as a boy Friday James Walker, a slave driver for whom William works for a year Wells Brown, an Ohio Quaker who shelters William during his escape and who gives William his name The American Fugitive in Europe William Wells Brown, a Paris Peace Conference delegate, racial ambassador, and author Victor Hugo, a celebrated French novelist and dramatist Richard Cobden, an English free-trade advocate and social reformer Alexis de Tocqueville, the French minister of foreign affairs Alexander Crummell, an African American Episcopal clergyman who would become celebrated as a Liberian missionary, diplomat, and educator Joseph Jenkins, a putative kidnapped African prince Harriet Martineau, an English historian, biographer, journalist, essayist, feminist, and antislavery advocate William and Ellen Craft, a famous couple who escaped slavery by having the wife dress as a man and pass as the white owner of her husband Form and Content Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave chronicles William Wells Brown’s life as a slave from his birth in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1815 until his escape

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from Missouri to Ohio and freedom in 1834. It concludes with brief comments about Brown’s life in Cleveland and in Buffalo, New York, until 1843, when Brown became a traveling agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. The genesis of Brown’s narrative and the purpose it was meant to serve shed light on both its form and its content. The text proper represented the fleshing out of incidents from Brown’s life in bondage that he had been recounting on the antislavery lecture circuit since 1843. Dramatically witnessing the horrors of slavery—it was published two years after Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) and was more popular than Douglass’s pioneering account—it represented firsthand testimony that the abolitionist movement was eager to exploit. Because the effectiveness of Narrative of William Wells Brown as an antislavery brief turned on the authority of its author, a fugitive slave, Brown’s abolitionist friends packaged the text to enhance his credibility and appeal. Formally, Brown’s autobiography is but one of the constituent elements of the narrative as a rhetorical whole. Readers encounter first an open letter from the author to the Quaker Wells Brown in which this earliest benefactor and “first white friend” is warmly thanked. This letter precedes one from Edmund Quincy, a Boston abolitionist Brown had asked to serve as his editor and public intermediary. There follows a preface by J. C. Hathaway, the president of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, Brown’s first employer. Packaging Brown’s text in this way was meant to confirm the truthfulness of his account and to suggest in advance how to read it. The issues the book raises are clearly spelled out, and readers’ feelings are manipulated without apology. Functioning as Everyman, Edmund Quincy suggests that to read Brown’s narrative was to understand slavery better and to hate it worse. Hathaway comments that the author’s untutored ingenuousness carried the signature of truth. Christians and friends of the Bible could understand slavery only as theft and sin, Hathaway insists, and right-thinking persons should join the crusade to eliminate it. The circumstances surrounding the writing of Narrative of William Wells Brown— the public impact hoped for from a widely circulated insider account—shed light on its content as well. Brown wrote against the background of Richard Hildreth’s The Slave: Or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), a novel by a white historian in the dress of slave autobiography, and Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), a volume of second-hand reportage by a white abolitionist. Needing to inform his northern audiences about the “peculiar institution” as well as to engage their sympathies, Brown describes the multiple faces of slavery in the Mississippi Valley from the time he was first hired out in 1827 until his escape to Cincinnati in 1834. He reports his experience as a tavern keeper’s helper, a steamboat steward, a boy Friday in Elijah P. Lovejoy’s St. Louis printing office, a field hand, a house servant and carriage driver, a physician’s assistant, and—most wrenchingly—as a gang boss for the slave trader James Walker. The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad originated as Three Years in Europe: Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met

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(1852), a series of travel letters that Brown published in London to defray the costs of his trip. The enlarged text, published in Boston in 1855, was recast for American readers. In The American Fugitive in Europe, Brown reports his activities in Paris as an American Peace Society delegate and his activities in Great Britain—following in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond—as an antislavery publicist. Brown functions abroad as a professional man of letters and antislavery lecturer, on the one hand, and as an acknowledged fugitive slave—the perfect case in point—on the other. Strategically exploiting his anomalous identity, drawing pointed lessons from the ease with which he moved among the notables of European society, Brown is a living refutation of presumptions of black incapacity that he challenges simultaneously on the lecture platform. As with Narrative of William Wells Brown, the editorial packaging of the later text is integral to its overall argument. The American Fugitive in Europe opens with the preface to the original English edition. Brown makes ritual apology for the shortcomings of the text, reminding readers that he has been twenty years in bondage and is without formal schooling. Thus, his persona as fugitive slave is thrown into high relief. Brown’s note to the American edition is followed by a “Memoir of the Author,” written by a British journalist, introducing the text proper. Modeled on Brown’s earlier narrative, the “Memoir” tells readers who the fugitive is whose adventures they will share, and it brings the story of his life as an antislavery worker up to date. The external framing of the text is completed by four pages of “Opinions of the British Press.” This follows Brown’s travel account and closes the book. Here the rhetorical point of the volume is made unmistakably. Brown’s “doings and sayings,” the Morning Advertiser confidently predicts, will be “among the means of destruction of the hideous abomination” of slavery. In publishing these travel sketches—closely following the conventions of the form by cataloging the persons and places he sees—William Wells Brown confirms his cultural literacy, demonstrates his formal range as a man of letters, and strikes a blow for freedom. Analysis Narrative of William Wells Brown is best understood as an extended argument against slavery. Following Frederick Douglass, Brown fashions an insider perspective on the “peculiar institution” by helping to establish the formal conventions—the generic themes, the stock human types, and the characteristic incidents—of the slave narrative, its primary literary vehicle. The obscenity of slavery is dramatized in the narrative, for example, in the persons of a New England overseer, a Christian slaveholder, and a predatory slave driver— figures whose twisted identities point up the unnaturalness of a social institution that produces human mutants. Early in chapter 3, Brown introduces the overseer, Friend Haskell, a New England Yankee, and suggests without comment that Northerners in that role were noted for their cruelty. Chapter 4 closes with an eloquently spare ac-

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count of the on-the-ground meaning of religion in the South as but an alternative language of power. In describing the visit of Mr. Sloan, a young Presbyterian minister from the North, Brown notes that Sloan did not teach Brown’s master theology; Brown’s master taught theology to Sloan. Having got his religion homegrown, Brown observes—identifying the practical consequences of slaveholder Christianity—his master proceeded to regiment his slaves more harshly in the name of the Lord. Finally, Brown’s distaste for the slave driver James Walker, who represents the acme of villainy in the narrative, is so profound as to inspire his best writing. Walker forces the chaste quadroon, Cynthia, into his bed; fathers four children by her; then sells children and mother down the river. While driving a coffle of slaves to St. Louis, Walker tears a crying child from a mother who is unable to soothe her. He leaves the child behind to spare himself further annoyance. Brown’s year in Walker’s service, he reports, was the longest he ever lived. The physical violence inherent in the master-slave relation is evident throughout the book. Ten unsettling incidents are witnessed in the brief text, most of them involving attempts to bring male slaves to heel. In the logic of the master-slave relation, the need to break the spirit of the slave was a systemic one. Making discussion of the practice of slave-breaking a convention of the genre becomes a powerful means of illuminating the dark side of the “peculiar institution.” The spiritual violence suffered by slaves is suggested in a telling fashion. The young William is deprived of his given name as a child when his master’s nephew moves into their household. Because the white William preempts their common name, the black William is henceforth known as Sandford. His resentment at being so brusquely expropriated burns throughout his years as a slave. Brown’s perspective on his double predicament as a slave appears later when he says that he was not only hunting for his liberty but also hunting for a name. For this reason, following his escape, his physical liberty must be consolidated and confirmed by an assertion of spiritual autonomy. Thus, the significance of his encounter with the Quaker Wells Brown is that William becomes fully his own man when he chooses a name for himself. He repossesses his given name, William, and takes on the family name of this early benefactor. Asserting a prior right and staking a claim to a future of his own making, Sandford becomes William Wells Brown. That acquiring the name of a free man was a matter of some consequence is seen in the author’s dedication of the book to Wells Brown, his “first white friend.” Overall, the details of Brown’s account are organized around the thematic contrast between slavery and freedom. The social fact that slaves are cultural objects is played off against the fictions with which masters monopolize the status of human subjects. The brutal logic of mastership is dramatized in political and psychological terms. Finally, Narrative of William Wells Brown highlights the contradictions of principle and practice in a society determined to exploit the labor of its black members but to spare its own feelings while doing so. Brown’s references to “slavery, with its democratic whips—its republican chains—its evangelical blood-hounds, and its religious slave-holders” are unique in their energy and pointedness.

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The American Fugitive in Europe, too, is best understood as an extended argument against slavery, and the contrast between an ostensibly liberal Europe and a racist United States provides the thematic scaffolding of the book. On one occasion, Brown wryly suggests how curious it is that monarchical England rather than republican America should be the true home of freedom. On another occasion, he reports that no sooner was he on British soil than he was treated as a man and an equal. This theme is underscored by the manner in which Brown frames his text. The American Fugitive in Europe opens with Brown’s anxiety at leaving his native land— whose evils are at least familiar—for the hazards of foreign travel. It closes five years later with his uneasiness about returning to the United States—where he now feels a stranger—from an England that has made him feel at home. Coming and going, Brown’s ambivalence is eloquent. In developing his argument, Brown effectively exploits encounters with other black persons abroad. On one occasion, he visits Alexander Crummell, later a celebrated educator and missionary in Liberia, then studying at the University of Cambridge. He reports with pride that in an hour’s stroll through London one may meet half a dozen black men attending various colleges of the city. In Scotland, Brown notes with pleasure black and white students seated together at the University of Edinburgh. These brief encounters do significant rhetorical work in two respects. First, Brown represents the presence of black students at institutions of higher learning as evidence of progress in “the cause of the sons of Africa.” Second, he uses them to draw comparative cultural lessons. Taking the moral high ground, Brown presses his critique and turns the knife, stating that “if colored men are not treated as they should be in the educational institutions in America, it is a pleasure to know that all distinction ceases by crossing the broad Atlantic.” Departing from his usual procedure, Brown devotes an entire chapter to Joseph Jenkins, “a good-looking man, neither black nor white.” Brown meets Jenkins in the successive guises of Cheapside bill distributor, Chelsea street sweeper, street musician and vendor of religious tracts, Shakespearean actor, storefront preacher, and occasional professional bandleader. A semicomic figure of uncertain antecedents, the protean Jenkins is a nineteenth century picaro, able to do anything he may have to do. Widely if unconventionally educated—like Benjamin Franklin—and, for all his public disguises, a man of unimpeachable character, Jenkins is the greatest genius, Brown wryly observes, that he has met in Europe. Because Brown spends the better part of The American Fugitive in Europe dropping famous names, readers can be sure the point is seriously intended. William Wells Brown, however, is inevitably a product of the nineteenth century. Though the African American literary tradition he has a hand in creating is culturally subversive from the point of view of race, from other points of view it is at best ambiguously so. Like most of his contemporaries, Brown looks to individual transformations rather than institutional ones when he seeks social remedies. For example, he repeatedly challenges the argument that the poverty and insecurity of the white working class in Europe—and by implication that of the factory worker

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in the northern United States—make wage slavery harsher than the plantation slavery of the American South. This was a staple proslavery argument of the day; Brown’s need to challenge it is understandable. By addressing the question in the terms in which it is framed, however, he mistakes what is really at issue. Brown does not understand that the question of relative deprivation lets Southern lords of the lash and Northern lords of the loom too easily off the hook. The implications of the fact that hierarchies of race and class alike are institutionally reproduced, and might at times be usefully analyzed together, are lost on him. Critical Context The autobiographical writings of William Wells Brown are important from three related points of view. First, the texts are important as biographical landmarks within the corpus of Brown’s work. Narrative of William Wells Brown, in particular, witnesses a double act of self-creation. Brown invents himself as a free man in making the escape the text recounts, and he invents himself as an author in recounting the escape he makes. Taken together, Narrative of William Wells Brown and The American Fugitive in Europe reveal the growth of the author’s distinctive voice and point of view as he fashions differently packaged accounts of successive stages of his life. They shed light on his emergence as an antislavery lecturer and his subsequent development into a polished man of letters. Second, the texts are important for their exemplary status as distinct forms of firstperson nineteenth century prose narratives. From this literary point of view, as the second authentic slave narrative and the first set of travel sketches published by an African American, the texts witness the growing formal repertoire of antebellum black authors. Third and finally, the texts are important as cultural arguments that challenge normative representations of nineteenth century race relations. As such, they suggest the inherently political dimension of minority self-expression. Narrative of William Wells Brown and The American Fugitive in Europe mirror the emergence in the United States of an African American literary tradition—a family of equivocally subversive manners of speaking—whose richness is widely acknowledged. Bibliography Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. A pioneering use of speech-act theory to explore the ways African American autobiographies are meant to affect their readers. Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. The introduction is a particularly useful discussion of how such sources have been and can be exploited as historical evidence. Chaney, Michael A. Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Discusses Brown’s exhi-

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bitionism and representation of self in his autobiographical writings. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. A useful history of the development of the slave-narrative genre. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Foreword to The Works of William Wells Brown: Using His “Strong, Manly Voice,” edited by Paula Garrett and Hollis Robbins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Commentary on Brown’s narratives by a foremost scholar of African American literature and literarary history. Harding, Vincent. There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Passionate yet scholarly exploration of antebellum African American history. Bibliography, notes. Williams, Kenny J. They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 17871930. Nashville, Tenn.: Townsend Press, 1970. Chapter 3 gives a good analysis of the slave-narrative structure. Paul Jefferson

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JUKEBOX Author: Cornelius Eady (1954Type of work: Poetry First published: 1996

)

The Poems Cornelius Eady’s The Autobiography of a Jukebox consists of four parts: “Home Front,” “Rodney King Blues,” “The Bruise of the Lyric,” and “Small Moments.” While the poems could easily be read as autobiographical scenes, they may also be somewhat fictionalized. The poems are written in free verse and produce strongly focused images. They describe women coping with the tensions of economic concerns and emotionally unstable relationships; a cousin who is a “crackhead”; a woman who begs in a dangerous part of town for shopping money; and a father who loves the poet’s sister so much that he must beat her with a belt. This paternal ambivalence echoes when the father also fells a large tree that, the mother says, may have invaded the foundations of their house. The poems offer no answers and no analyses; they draw readers into reflection upon such ambivalence. The rest of the poetry in “Home Front” deals with relationships. The father threatens to leave. The mother and sister leave indeed, and the narrator speculates about feelings that his father does not show when he sees the empty house. Two poems focus on men standing up for themselves. The speaker’s father responds to a racially charged incident, and his grandfather calmly stands on his own land with shotgun in hand while resisting the badgering of officials. Such actions also explain the hardness of the characters. Several poems in “Rodney King Blues” reveal the narrator’s feelings of anger about the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers in 1991 and about the riots that broke out in 1992 after the officers were tried and found not guilty. The poems also deal with people who lost property to the riots, a truck driver who was assaulted by a mob during the riots, double-talk that sought to justify the officer’s actions, and the helpless feeling of being a victim in the inner city. Eady isolates from these events several sharply focused scenes whose verisimilitude pulls readers into the genuine turmoil of life without engaging in tedious moralizing. “The Bruise of the Lyric” introduces pictures of musical artists, each one drawn in words. John Coltrane and Kenny Burrell’s jazz piece “Why Was I Born?” is redrawn in Eady’s words. Percussionist Max Roach is pictured in words. “Miles Davis at Lennies-on-the-Turnpike” contains the memorable words “Death is one hell/ Of a pickpocket.” Eady commemorates Dexter Gordon’s saxophone, Milt Jackson’s vibraphone, Eric Dolphy’s saxophone, and Chuck Berry’s “frenzy of the word go”—in the singer’s “Johnny B. Goode”—as well as his jukebox point of view in “Roll Over Beethoven.” “Small Moments” builds details taken from everyday life into reflections about po-

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etry. One poem focuses on the image of a young white woman in dreadlocks; the next follows the narrator’s evolving hairstyles, from “nappy,” to Afro, to “relaxed,” to “vengeful” dreadlocks, to a barber alienated by the confrontation with “urban steel wool” and “industrial-strength kink.” The other poems in this section reflect upon poetry. Like Eady’s work, Charles Simic’s poems focus on sharp images. In “Cornbread,” the narrator finds cornbread at a poetry reading by Charles Simic, a connection that may be self-reflective. Particularly interesting is Eady’s reference to Walt Whitman, who, Eady says, should have seen some of his posthumous success as a poet. Several poems in this section also reflect on the altered experience of self and others when poets extricate themselves from the American environment and see themselves in the context of Europe. The first poem of “Home Front” focuses on mother and father, a focus that is generalized as the predicament of women seeking security from emotionally unstable men. The man the speaker’s mother turned down “made my father look good,/ That’s how bad it was.” The poem’s characters are forced to choose between bad alternatives. Vacant gaps of emotion are filled with the caulk of religion: “Jesus, the man my daddy once saw/ Lying next to her/ On her old army cot.” Enmity characterizes the relationship between the genders. The mother wins at a lottery; the father and a cousin pick up the winnings; the mother loses the money to the two, and she acquires a pervasive and lasting feeling of having been cheated. In “The Yankee Dollar,” the mother expects to receive royalties from a book she wrote. She distrusts all offers of temporary financial help to keep her afloat until the royalties arrive, even an offer from her son. She distrusts “male money,” because such money represents male control over her. “The House,” a poem that represents the enmity between the sexes from the male perspective, comments: By then he was A pensioner, Who would spend his days Asleep in a Cadillac To escape his wife A woman who would Glower at him . . . Wondering when he Was going to give Her life back

In another strong image, the narrator’s mother falls to her knees at the welfare office because something has gone wrong, a circumstance that the poem’s five- or six-yearold speaker is too young to understand. Patterns repeat themselves for the sister: “Old, and toothless, he’s the man who helps her to pay her bills.” The sister’s only alternative is to go back home to a father whose controlling behavior is equally undesirable. “I Want to Fly Like Superman” is about a little girl who has been told that no one

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wants her, her mother having abandoned her for Florida. The little girl jumps off the garage. She survives the fall to tell how much she would have liked to have bled to death on the pavement. “She will learn that the main rule of this family is: there is no obligation to save a fool.” Eady creates an unbearable tension between the compassion one has for the girl and the hardness of circumstances. “Rodney King Blues” begins with a dramatic monologue by a cab driver, praising the United States. Even Timothy Leary, the cabbie insists, returned after a short while living abroad. He says that beggars are simply lazy people who should be banished from the country, so they will understand how good their life in the United States actually is. The rant of prejudice and misinformation culminates in the lines: “I don’t hold nothin’/ Against no one./ Hey, I picked you up,” alluding to the African American identity of the hearer. “I’ll Fly Away” is a poem included in “Small Moments.” In it, a young African American man in Venice, Italy, loses a coin. A white woman picks it up to hand back to him. The scene paralyzes the young man, as he interprets it through the cognitive dissonance of his memory. He recognizes that what is innocent in Venice is fraught with dangerous meaning back home in the United States. Themes and Meanings Eady’s sharp scenes and images from ordinary life give readers a very clear view of the realities of African American experience. Many poems focus on the ambivalences of family life, as the poet’s affectionate sensitivity wavers and vacillates between sundry attentions. These scenes from everyday life are also generalized and so take on more general meaning for humanity. All the poems of “Home Front” give voice to the human experience of poverty, and the pressures of economic reality on family life are experienced by many people outside the African American community. “Rodney King Blues” and “The Bruise of the Lyric” are most clearly related to African American experience. While “Rodney King Blues” addresses the blatant injustice in the distribution of wealth and resources for African Americans, “The Bruise of the Lyric” celebrates the tremendous contribution of African Americans to cultural experience throughout the world. Eady explores his poetry, his identity, and his metamorphosed sense of self in “Small Moments,” concluding the volume self-consciously by considering the meaning and significance of the poetic art. Critical Context Eady has created for himself a lasting place in African American literature, but his sharp imagery also reaches beyond that literature to the larger literary canon. Already noteworthy, his poetry will become increasingly important as it gains recognition and depth. The poems celebrate African American experience—in the family, in society, in culture, and in poetic practice and identity—thereby broadening the scope and understanding of that experience.

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Bibliography Eady, Cornelius. “Cornelius Eady.” Interview by Patricia Spears Jones. BOMB 79 (Spring, 2002): 48-54. Discusses the relationship between Eady’s poetry and classical Greek theater. _______. “Cornelius Eady: Lyric and Dramatic Imagination.” Interview by Reamy Jansen. The Bloomsbury Review 22, no. 1 (January/February, 2002): 3-11. Includes a useful discussion of Eady’s purpose in the “Small Moments” section of The Autobiography of a Jukebox. Peters, Erskine. “Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water: Its Womanist/Feminist Perspective.” Journal of African American Men 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1996): 1531. Discusses Eady through the lens of African American feminism (a branch of feminism for which Alice Walker coined the phrase “womanist”). Trethewey, Natasha. “A Profile of Cornelius Eady.” Ploughshares 28, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 193-197. Includes a brief biography of Cornelius Eady, as well as a general discussion of his work by Trethewey, a fellow poet. Reinhold Schlieper

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN Author: James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: First half of the twentieth century Locale: Georgia; Connecticut; New York; Paris, France First published: 1912 Principal characters: The Narrator, the nameless, biracial protagonist of the novel The Mother, a beautiful mulatto woman, who is the mistress of a nameless, white, southern gentleman The Millionaire, the wealthy benefactor of the narrator The Novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is narrated by a nameless protagonist who is born shortly after the Civil War in a small town in Georgia, where the novel begins. Very early, however, the boy and his mother are moved to Connecticut and established in a comfortable cottage provided by the boy’s father, who sends monthly checks for their support but who visits only twice during the boy’s childhood. As a boy, the narrator develops an interest in books and music, an interest that is encouraged by his mother. He leads a rather privileged existence for a young African American of this period. In his ninth year, however, he enters public school, and an incident occurs that brings him face to face with the reality that he is black and that this somehow makes him different from his white classmates. Seeking an explanation from his mother, he is merely assured that he is not a “nigger” and that his father is from “the best blood in the south.” This incident is pivotal, because it underlies the ambivalence that the narrator exhibits throughout the novel. Rejected by his white classmates and having no particular feeling of kinship with his black classmates, he turns inward, taking comfort in his world of books and music. He becomes an avid reader—delving into the classics, science, history, and theology—and spends many hours practicing the piano. When his mother dies shortly after his graduation from high school, the narrator begins a quest that takes him to the South, back to the North, then to Europe, and back again to the United States—ever in search of something that continues to elude him. With four hundred dollars in his pockets—money from his mother’s estate and from a concert that he has played—he goes to Atlanta planning to enter Atlanta University, an all-black college. When his money is stolen shortly after he arrives in the city, he takes the advice of a railroad porter and decides to seek work in Jacksonville, Florida. In Jacksonville, he finds work in a cigar factory. When the factory closes down, he does not, like some of the other workers, attempt to find work in the same area.

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Rather, he is “seized with a desire like a fever . . . to see the North again,” despite the fact that he has made friends in Jacksonville and has even become engaged to a local girl. Arriving in New York, he is fascinated by the “lights, the excitement” and immediately embraces the bohemian lifestyle, spending his time in nightclubs and cabarets. Finally, abandoning even the appearance of seeking honest labor, he devotes his energies to gambling and playing piano at a club, learning to play ragtime music and experimenting with ragtime versions of classical works. It is at this club that he meets his millionaire benefactor. The millionaire takes the narrator on a European tour, during which an incident occurs that seems, finally, to give a sense of direction to the narrator’s life. In Berlin, at a party given by the millionaire, one of the guests takes ragtime music and “develops it through every musical form.” The narrator then realizes that while he had been expending his energies turning classical music into ragtime, this man had “taken ragtime and made it classic.” At last, the narrator has found his life’s work: He will compose classical music based upon African American themes, using not only ragtime but also the “old slave songs.” In so doing, he will also be able to realize his boyhood dream of “bringing honor and glory to the Negro race.” Fired by this idea, he reluctantly leaves his millionaire friend in Europe and returns to the United States. After traveling through Boston, Washington, Richmond, and Nashville, he finally settles in Macon, Georgia, determined to begin his research. He has been there only a short time, however, when he witnesses the lynching of an African American man. This incident almost immediately melts his resolve, and he renounces his African American heritage altogether and determines to live the rest of his life as a white man. This, he feels, is his only logical choice, one that will allow him to live his life in dignity. Thus, he moves back to the north, becomes a successful businessman, and marries a white woman, who dies in childbirth with their second child. At the end of the novel, looking back over his life, he ponders whether he has “sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.” The Characters The narrator is the only character that the author fully develops; the other characters seem to exist only to enhance his personality. He is essentially weak, vacillating, and ambivalent. His ambivalence is evident in the contradictions between his principles and his practices. These contradictions are apparent in his attitudes about race, about relationships, both casual and intimate, and about music. For example, during his school days, although he is callously reminded by his white teacher that he is black, and although he is rejected by his white classmates, he admittedly has “strong aversion” to being classed with the black children. Looking in the mirror at the “ivory whiteness” of his skin, he laments the fact that he could possibly be considered a “nigger.” Also, while playing in the club in New York, he is as disturbed at seeing a rich white widow in the presence of a black male companion as any white man of the time would be.

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This ambivalence extends also to the narrator’s personal relationships. He takes pride in the achievements of African Americans, and he expresses great admiration for the photographs of “every coloured man in America who had ‘done anything’” that adorn the walls of the club where he works. He has few black friends, however, and those that he does have, in both the North and South, are of the upper classes. He is revolted by the appearance and actions of all African Americans except those he calls “the advanced element of the coloured race.” From his boyhood, moreover, he has a penchant for fair-skinned women; his first love is a young girl with brown eyes and a “pale face,” and the woman whom he eventually marries is white. Even where his children are concerned, it is his son, “the golden-haired god,” not his darker daughter, who occupies the “inner sanctuary” of his heart. Finally, this ambivalence extends to his music. Because he associates classical music with whites, he considers it superior to ragtime, which he associates with African Americans. Thus, he restricts his playing to the classics or to improvisations on the classics in the ragtime mode. Despite his discourse on ragtime as one of the great accomplishments of the black race, his actions belie his words. To him, ragtime music acquires status as a legitimate art form only when it is played in the classical mode by a German pianist for a group of wealthy whites. The other characters in the novel serve largely to set the personality of the narrator in relief. They provide the necessary background against which the ambiguities of the protagonist may be played out. Except for the millionaire, they are shadow people, with few discernible characteristics. In simply adjusting to any situations from which he does not flee, the ex-coloured man is the perfect accommodationist, and this array of nameless individuals—his schoolmates, his coworkers in Jacksonville, the clientele of the club in New York, even the millionaire benefactor—seem to exist only to people the environment to which he must adjust. Themes and Meanings The major theme that runs throughout The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is that racism in American society has devastating effects on the psyche as well as the behavior of African Americans and does tremendous violence to their heritage. In the beginning of the narrative, for example, the narrator acknowledges that he feels like an “unfound-out criminal” and that he is “seeking relief” from his guilt feelings. At the end of the novel, however, it is revealed that the only “crime” he has committed is the concealment of his black heritage. The irony of this situation is that the narrator’s “passing” does not yield the desired results, for while it brings him some material success, it does not bring him peace of mind. The narrator also experiences the double consciousness most notably explored by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Like many other African Americans, the narrator always operates on two levels of consciousness, a black one and a white one. Unlike most African Americans, however, the narrator is able to move between the black and white worlds at will; thus, he is especially deeply afflicted with this double consciousness. This helps explain the ambiguities in his personality that

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allow him to embrace black culture in principle—paying tribute to its heroes, writers, and artists—while rejecting it in practice. James Weldon Johnson also shows that racism in American culture affects the African American psyche in other profound ways. Through the character of the narrator, he suggests that the stigma attached to being black in American society tends to inure African Americans to basic human feelings. When the narrator witnesses a horrendous lynching of an African American man in the South, for example, his most overwhelming emotion is not pity or sympathy but rather “shame” and “humiliation” for being associated with such a despised race. Finally, Johnson uses the narrator to indict the materialism of American society and the way in which success is measured within that society. As a child, the narrator is given a gold coin by his father, who hangs it around the boy’s neck with a string. Although the narrator wears it throughout his life, he always regrets that his father put a hole in the coin to “attach” it to him. This is an early indication of the way in which the materialism of the society will condition his thinking regarding wealth. As a black man, for example, he gladly accepts what seems at times a master-slave relationship with his rich white benefactor, because, as he says, “he paid me so liberally that I could forget much.” Later, as a “white” man, he admits to being fascinated by “the absorbing game of money-making” to such an extent that he completely abandons his artistic ambitions. Critical Context When The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was published in 1912, it received little critical attention. It was first published anonymously, but it was reissued under Johnson’s name in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. In an introduction to the 1927 edition, Carl Van Vechten, a white critic who often wrote on African American themes, praised the novel as “a composite autobiography of the Negro race in the United States in modern times.” The book purported to be the actual life story of an African American living as a white. The work, however, is not the actual autobiography of James Weldon Johnson, although the narrator’s life parallels his own in several respects, especially in his love for literature and music and his fondness for New York and Paris. Johnson had spent much time in New York, visiting the city as a youth and working as a young man; he had also traveled to Europe as a part of a musical group. To allay any lingering suspicions that the The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man might, in fact, be his life story, Johnson later wrote an actual autobiography, Along This Way (1934). In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Johnson utilizes some of the techniques of the slave narrative, the predecessor of the African American novel and a popular form of nineteenth century literature. Johnson’s use of the first-person narrator, a stock element of the slave narrative, is an innovation in African American fiction. By purporting to record the actual thoughts and feelings of the narrator, the work achieves a greater psychological depth and complexity of character than any African American novel to the time. Though the novel gains in intensity and immediacy from

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the first-person narration, at the same time it loses something in its artistic style. For, just as in the slave narratives, there are in this work long, sometimes tedious digressions that interrupt the flow of the narrative. These digressions, however, contribute to one of the purposes of the novel—that of educating whites about the varied aspects of the African American experience. While in structure The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is indebted to the slave narrative, in theme it utilizes the “tragic mulatto” theme popularized in such nineteenth century works of fiction as William Wells Brown’s Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter, a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). The tragic mulatto theme explores the problems of the near-white African American caught between the white and black worlds and rejected by both. In the hands of James Weldon Johnson, however, this theme is focused and refined. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, then, bridges the gap between nineteenth and twentieth century black fiction; in fact, the book can be said to mark the beginning of modern African American fiction. In the novel, Johnson explores a wider range of sensibilities of a black character—hopes and dreams, frustrations, ambitions, and ideologies—than had theretofore been attempted by an African American writer. Bibliography Alin, Lena. The “New Negro” in the Old World: Culture and Performance in James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2006. Reads The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man as a crucial Harlem Renaissance text and compares its representation of American and European culture to those of two other African American authors. Canady, Nicholas. “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and the Tradition of Black Autobiography.” Obsidian 6 (Spring/Summer, 1980): 76-80. Examination of Johnson’s novel in the context of the autobiographical form. Focuses upon the ways in which Johnson’s handling of that form is unique to African American fiction of the period. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Introduction to The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, by James Weldon Johnson. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Excellent discussion of Johnson’s life and work. Centers on the elements of structure and theme that make The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man a signal accomplishment in African American fiction. O’Sullivan, Maurice J. “Of Souls and Pottage: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.” CLA Journal 23 (September, 1979): 60-70. Examines Johnson’s protagonist from a standpoint different from that of most critics. Contends that the book’s narrator is “richly complex,” not merely weak and vacillating, and that it is in the character’s ambivalence that this complexity is centered. Price, Kenneth M., and Lawrence J. Oliver, eds. Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Collection of writings on Johnson, from contemporary reactions to late twentieth century reassessments. Rosenblatt, Roger. “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.” In Black Fiction.

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Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Argues that Johnson’s protagonist is yet another example of the “vanishing hero” in black fiction. Suggests that in trying to beat the system by accommodating to it, Johnson’s narrator disappears into that system, losing all sense of himself in the process. Ross, Joseph T. “Audience and Irony in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.” CLA Journal 118 (December, 1974): 198-210. Asserts that the ambivalence of Johnson’s protagonist is not so much a natural weakness of character but rather a studied attempt by the author to dramatize the effects of betrayal by a white upperclass value system from which the protagonist cannot escape. Stepto, Robert. “Lost in a Guest: James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an ExColoured Man.” In From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. A thorough examination of Johnson’s novel within the context of other literary forms of the period, specifically the autobiography and the slave narrative. Concludes that although Johnson utilized many of the techniques of these forms, he produced something new and different. Gladys J. Washington

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHESTER HIMES Author: Chester Himes (1909-1984) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1909-1976 Locale: United States and Europe First published: Volume 1: The Quality of Hurt, 1972; Volume 2: My Life of Absurdity, 1976 Principal personages: Chester Himes, a noted African American writer of detective novels Estelle Charlotte Bomar Himes, Chester’s mother, a strong-willed person who has a close but exceptionally tempestuous relationship with her son Jean Johnson Himes, Chester’s first wife, an African American woman who lives with him while he is gaining a literary reputation in America Richard Wright, a famous African American novelist who gives Himes assistance Marlene Behrens, a white German woman who is Himes’s companion in France Lesley Packard Himes, a white woman whom Himes marries in 1965 Form and Content Chester Himes’s autobiographies are at once a record of his life as a black, radical, expatriate writer and a social document disclosing the sufferings of African Americans throughout most of the twentieth century. His life story is central to a study of African American literature, because it explores the pain inflicted upon Himes, pain he was able to convert into powerful literature; because it dramatizes the problems an African American artist, especially a political radical such as Himes, must face in the white publishing world; and because it exposes the intraracial conflicts of other important African American writers of the period, specifically between Richard Wright (Himes’s sometimes reluctant mentor) and James Baldwin. A writer who was initially spurned by both white and black American readers, Himes throughout his life craved recognition and respect for his innovative literature, and these two volumes should help secure his position in American literary history. His first volume, The Quality of Hurt, begins with Himes’s credo, which unifies both volumes: “Human beings—all human beings, of whatever race or nationality or religious belief or ideology—will do anything and everything.” His conviction of the enormous potentiality of human beings for evil, however, comes directly from his

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chaotic and violent youth. Born on July 29, 1909, to a middle-class black family in Jefferson, Missouri, Himes had to deal immediately with the marital strife of his parents, a direct consequence, he presumed, of racial injustice in America. His darkskinned father was a professor of mechanical arts at various southern “Negro A & M Colleges”; his light-skinned mother felt strong antipathy to prominently African features, especially her husband’s. Himes, light-skinned himself, felt emotionally close to his mother, and he felt increasingly contemptuous of his father’s servility before whites. His mother took the opposite approach toward racism; once, when traveling, she drew a gun on whites who threatened her. When the couple finally divorces in Chester’s adulthood, he is somewhat relieved. A crucial event in Himes’s youth changes his life forever. Chester and his older brother, Joseph, Jr., are planning to enter a science contest, and their entry is to be a “torpedo” composed of chemicals and ground glass. As punishment for earlier misbehavior, however, Mrs. Himes forbids Chester to participate, though his help is essential for the success of the experiment. Joseph, alone on the stage, attempts to complete the experiment himself, but it explodes prematurely, sending ground glass particles into his eyes. Horrified, the Himes family rushes Joseph to a white hospital, where he is refused medical treatment; when he finally receives treatment, he has lost his vision forever. Although Joseph, Jr., accepts his personal loss courageously, eventually earning a Ph.D. and becoming a renowned sociologist, Chester discovers in Joseph’s tragedy the themes that will later shape his literature: the abject humiliation of African Americans in the face of racism, and the inner rage that is its concealed effect; the futility—even absurdity—of harsh punishment, which will inevitably have unintended consequences for both the victim and the accuser; and the chaotic, accidental, unpredictable nature of existence. Himes’s experience throughout his adolescence confirms his sense of life’s absurdity. His early life is a series of contradictions and inexplicable accidents. Although he is shown to be brilliant by standardized testing, his high school career is marked by academic failure; he manages to graduate only because of a teacher’s grading error. He gets a job in a hotel, then accidentally falls several floors down a broken elevator shaft; severely injured, he unknowingly signs away his legal rights because of the hotel’s chicanery and his father’s eagerness to placate white authority figures. He enters Ohio State University, but he is so disgusted with Jim Crow policies in this supposedly liberal institution that he cannot concentrate and is expelled. Event after event brings home to readers the absurdity and sense of contradiction that mark Himes’s life. In 1928, when Himes is nineteen, his life takes another definitive transformation. Himes is arrested for armed burglary, and he receives the maximum sentence of twenty to twenty-five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Writing about the judge, Himes says, “[he] had hurt me as much as I could ever be hurt if I lived a hundred thousand years; he had hurt me in a way I would never get over.” Himes serves seven and a half years of his sentence; his description of prison life—and his short stories based on his experience—are harrowing visions of the life of the black underclass

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during the Depression: their brutal and terrible lives, tortured by racial oppression and the chaos of their emotions. His fellow inmates are also capable of heroism and nobility, which they demonstrate in the horrifying Easter Monday fire in 1930, in which more than 330 people die. His prison life in large part leads to his conviction that “people were capable of anything,” both demonic crime and heroism. His prison life leads him to his vocation as a writer. At first to pass the time but later as a commentator on African American life, Himes begins to write short stories, which he publishes in a variety of black journals. In 1934, he publishes his account of the 1930 fire as a short story in Esquire; following his parole, he begins to write for various journals and magazines as a profession. Himes works on a history of Cleveland, Ohio, for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, and he works on a novel about prison life. His strong opinions on racial injustice are, however, too controversial to win general acceptance, and he struggles financially with his young wife, Jean. The pain and difficulties of these years, however, yield fruit: the novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). This success brings unexpected consequences. The wellreceived novel wins a disingenuous acceptance from whites that Himes disrespects and exploits; his many affairs with white women then lead to Jean’s suicide attempt. Once again, Himes confronts the absurdly contradictory nature of his life as an African American writer—racial pain produces work about racial tolerance, while artistic success leads to personal despair, frustration, loss, and rage. The bitter denunciation by critics of his next novel, Lonely Crusade (1947), combined with the deterioration of his marriage, constant racist harassment, and publication frustrations, all finally lead to Himes’s expatriation to France in 1953. His departure brings him into close contact with Richard Wright, the great African American novelist whose novel Native Son (1940) prepared the way for Himes’s brutally honest work. In Europe, Himes also meets other important black writers of the period, including James Baldwin, whose relationship with Wright was deeply conflicted. In a central moment in The Quality of Hurt, Himes relates an argument between the two writers in which Baldwin finally retorts to Wright, “The sons must slay their fathers”— meaning, presumably, that the younger Baldwin’s Oedipal destiny was to write in opposition to Wright, his literary forebear. Such a comment might well apply to Himes also: Perhaps unconsciously, he was to “slay” not only his own biological father (whose obsequiousness before white authority Chester despised) but his own literary father, Wright himself. With his radicalism, he lays to rest his father’s legacy of accommodation; in his writing, he subverts many of Wright’s essential themes. In many ways, The Quality of Hurt, in its contemptuous rejection of Wright’s political vision and in its insistence upon Himes’s own sexuality, can be interpreted as an implicit criticism of Wright’s own politicized (and seemingly asexual) autobiography, Black Boy (1945). Himes’s sexual life inevitably leads him into conflicts, not only with Wright and other blacks, who refuse to accept Himes’s lovers, but with racists in Europe, who dis-

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approve of his living with white women. Himes’s own choices in women also prove problematic. Vandi Haygood, for example, is addicted to drugs and alcohol, and she and Himes have a mutually abusive relationship. The two finally split up, and Haygood eventually dies young, perhaps of an overdose of barbiturates. He meets another lover, Alva Trent van Olden Barneveldt, on a ship passage across the Atlantic. Although they collaborate on a novel, when it is rejected by publishers, she suffers a deep depression that makes life difficult for Himes; her departure for America is a relief for him. Perhaps the most significant of Himes’s white lovers is Marlene Behrens, a German actress whose story constitutes the first sections of Himes’s second volume, My Life of Absurdity. Behrens and Himes’s relationship evolves slowly into a mutually destructive affair; he acts as a rescuer, helping her through her many neurotic periods, but Behrens plays the role of victim adroitly. Inevitably, Himes attempts to force the relationship’s end, but her attempted suicide forestalls his effort to extricate himself. Inexplicably, he offers to marry her instead. The affair finally ends when Behrens introduces him to her racist father (Himes is once again antagonistic to father figures), who strongly resists the engagement, then relents on the condition that Himes agrees not to marry for a year. Himes, when confronted with an ostensibly cooperative father, refuses to be manipulated into marriage and leaves. The Behrens affair seems to solidify in Himes’s imagination the trap posed not only by the white world but also by one’s own passion. If human beings “will do anything and everything” because the world is essentially out of control, he too is implicated: Against the best advice of his friends, and his own vague intuition, he had involved himself in a relationship that could have been fatal to his artistic career, if not his very existence. Unconscious of why he needed Behrens, he writes, “All of reality was absurd, contradictory, violent and hurting.” Perhaps at least one reason he uses Behrens is that she, unlike the world, is available for him to control; she typifies all that is supposedly desirable in the Western world (she is a blond and attractive young woman). In 1955, Himes accidentally meets the French publisher Marcel Duhamel, and once again his life takes a dramatic, unexpected turn. Duhamel asks Himes if he would write detective novels (which Duhamel was publishing), and Himes, needing the money, reluctantly agrees, though he does not respect the detective genre. Suddenly, Himes discovers his genuine literary mode, as he shapes the genre of the detective story to reflect his own radicalism and sense of absurdity: “My mind had rejected all reality as I had known it and I had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence was funny.” Himes’s imagination seems to coalesce within the detective form, and as he composes his second detective novel, he writes: “As before, I entered the world which I created. I believed in it. It moved me and troubled me. But I could control it, which I have never been able to do to the world in which I really live.” The strange, bizarre, absurdist world of his detective fiction becomes the vehicle for Himes’s meditation on the absurd struggle of race in America. Himes is aware of the ironic discrepancy between what he initially seeks when he writes the novels—quick cash—and what the novels bring him. Usually despised as

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“lowbrow” literature, the detective series, beginning with A Rage in Harlem (1957) and ending with Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), earns Himes fame, international recognition, and substantial affluence. Finally, he is involved in the Hollywood production of two of his works. My Life of Absurdity ends with the incongruous image of Chester Himes, political radical, the aging patriarch of black American writers, buying a house and touring Europe with his wife Lesley in a new Jaguar. Analysis Himes’s epigraph for The Quality of Hurt is taken from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597, pb. 1600): “The quality of mercy is not strain’d,/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath.” Himes’s ironic substitution of “hurt” for “mercy” in his title hints at the organizing principle of his autobiography: In a world where justice is not “enthroned in the hearts of kings,” Himes experiences no mercy, only pain—regularly and unremittingly. The autobiography is intended, then, as a catalog of the psychic, physical, spiritual, and racial suffering that the African American must necessarily endure. The central meaning of the narrative is how Himes deals with the cumulative force of hurt, how he makes sense of it, and how he uses it to provide a shaping philosophy for his career. Certainly, his childhood experiences are central in determining his life of rebellion against authority figures. His mother’s punishment of him for minor misbehavior causes in part his brother Joe’s tragic accident; his father’s servility before whites costs Himes his right to sue the hotel for negligence after his accident; finally, a foolishly bungled burglary puts him in prison as a teenager. The common theme in these incidents seems to be the futility of imposing control on experience by manipulating others. A strict mother, a meek father, a law-and-order judge—all these characters attempt to make sense of experience by controlling Chester; the ironic result is that they cause harm to both him and themselves. As a rebel, Himes rages against those who attempt to make sense of life by arbitrarily restricting his freedom, especially white people who assume that they are somehow guardians of the culture. If the world were absurd, if events were indeed beyond human control, control and punishment would only lead to greater pain and needless suffering, especially for African Americans in a country where racism is institutionalized. Himes’s sense of rebellion extends to his artistic life as well. The autobiography shows his ambivalent relationship with Richard Wright, for example, whom he admires and respects, but who perhaps expects a greater commitment than Himes can emotionally extend. His relationship with his publishers is also extraordinarily abrasive; he alternately feels exploited and neglected, leading him to change publishers almost compulsively. The issue here is not the truth of his accusations or the justification of his resentment, but the fact that he feels abuse so acutely and acts precipitously, sometimes against his own interests. His detective novels, for which he is most remembered, can be read as an assault upon the detective novel itself, since he changes almost beyond recognition the formal attributes of the genre.

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His tumultuous relationship with women, a subject presented in intimate detail, reveals Himes’s own will to control and dominate. Perhaps his typical attraction to neurotic, weak women is in some sense an unconscious rebellion against his mother—a strong, domineering woman who sought to mold him. In any event, much of the unhappiness of his personal life derives from women who allow themselves to be abused and controlled, but who exact their revenge by clinging to him unmercifully. Of course, having white lovers is yet another form of rebellion against social codes against miscegenation, both in America and in Europe. The autobiographies make clear that Himes discovered final order in his art. A world he could enter into and imaginatively control, Himes’s literature paradoxically celebrates absurdity—the acceptance that the world is out of control. His autobiography emphasizes that only through laughter can the pain of humanity’s absurd condition be endured: “It was funny really. If I could just get the handle to joke. And I had got the handle, by some miracle.” Critical Context Chester Himes’s two volumes take their place beside other great autobiographical narratives of African Americans: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Malcolm X. The differences between Himes and all these other writers make him essential reading, however, not only because the volumes help to elucidate his own strange, innovative fiction but also because he presents America after World War I from the perspective of political radicalism. Himes’s autobiography—in its assault on whites, its insistence on sexuality, and its uninhibited rage against authority—is unique in American literature. Even Malcolm X, whom Himes knew and liked, cannot equal his ferocious energy. Bibliography Hairston, Loyle. “Chester Himes: ‘Alien’ in Exile.” Freedomways 17, no. 1 (1977): 14-18. Focusing on Himes’s second volume, Hairston argues that Himes was a misanthrope who was personally offended by America’s failure to accept him. His hurt led him to alienate himself from other blacks in Europe and America. Lundquist, James. Chester Himes. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976. Examines the narrative of Himes’s work and gives a detailed plot synopsis of each text. Margolies, Edward. Which Way Did He Go? The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross Macdonald. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. An excellent study that places Himes in the line of major writers of detective fiction. Milliken, Stephen F. “The Summing Up.” In Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. In a full-length study of Himes’s work, Milliken argues that the two volumes should be classified not as autobiography but as a series of character portraits, unified by a theme of knowing the reality of pain. Milliken places Himes’s autobiographical volumes in the context of his fiction.

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Sallis, James. Chester Himes: A Life. New York: Walker, 2001. Extensive biography of Himes written by a fellow crime-fiction author whose work was heavily influenced by that of his subject. Silet, Charles L. P., ed. The Critical Response to Chester Himes. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Collection of scholarly essays on Himes’s life and work. Walters, Wendy W. At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Includes a chapter analyzing the importance of Himes’s expatriate experience to his detective fiction. Gary Storhoff

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X Author: Malcolm X (Malcolm Little, 1925-1965), as told to Alex Haley (1921-1992) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1925-1965 Locale: United States and the Middle East First published: 1965 Principal personages: Malcolm X, a fiery, eloquent, charismatic religious leader Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam Form and Content The Autobiography of Malcolm X is an interesting and exciting book. Although it is based on fact, it reads like a novel. It tells the story of a young African American who inherits the gifts of courage and self-reliance from his father and mother and rises to international prominence despite overwhelming odds. As a child, Malcolm often went hungry. His father, an itinerant preacher, was constantly moving because of threats from white bigots who resented his espousal of the back-to-Africa program of Marcus Garvey. Malcolm’s worldview was forever affected by his memories of latenight raids by the Ku Klux Klan and his father’s murder by members of another white supremacist organization called the Black Legion. His widowed mother eventually suffered a nervous breakdown under the strain of trying to rear eight children on welfare, and she had to be institutionalized. Malcolm became a virtual orphan and a ward of the state. Along with his remarkable strength of character, the young African American child was exceptionally intelligent and got outstanding grades in the nearly all-white schools he attended. His academic success motivated him to achieve financial success, but he soon realized that most doors were shut to African Americans at that time. Eventually, he drifted into a life of crime. His book is full of interesting, often shocking, anecdotes, and many of these have to do with his adventures as a con artist, pimp, gigolo, drug peddler, rapist, burglar, and armed robber. In 1946, he was sentenced to ten years in Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts for a series of burglaries. Malcolm’s autobiography reads like an exciting novel comparable to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) or Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), with one important difference. Malcolm writes about his early years from a mature perspective. He constantly interrupts his narrative to interject observations about how his life experiences mirrored the experiences of countless African Americans of his time. He stresses the fact that the majority of African Americans had consciously or unconsciously adopted white values and were hoping somehow to achieve the impossible feat of becoming white.

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Malcolm was attracted to white women and describes many of his affairs with them. Telling about these affairs in retrospect, he philosophizes that his attraction was only another symptom of African Americans’ adoption of white values and their own feelings of inferiority that are a natural consequence. One of the most striking anecdotes in the novel describes the time when Malcolm was “conking” his hair—that is, using a mixture of lye, eggs, and potatoes to make his hair straight—and found that the water had been shut off. The lye was burning his scalp; in desperation he stuck his head into the toilet to wash it out. To him, this incident symbolized the humiliating position of the African American who had accepted the belief that white features were desirable while African features such as kinky hair were ugly and shameful. Malcolm used the penitentiary’s extensive library for self-education and found that he had voracious interests in languages, philosophy, politics, religion, and other subjects. While in prison, he became acquainted with the tenets of the Black Muslim’s Lost-Found Nation of Islam, a religion that proclaimed the superiority of the black race and stigmatized the white race as devils. He corresponded with the Black Muslims’ founder, Elijah Muhammad, and went to serve under him in Chicago after he was released from prison in 1952. His relationship with Elijah Muhammad was the most important of his entire life. Perhaps the older man became a substitute for the father Malcolm had lost in childhood. As Malcolm X, Malcolm Little became Elijah Muhammad’s most loyal and most successful disciple, preaching from Harlem Mosque Number Seven as well as on street corners and anywhere he could gather an audience. He discovered that he possessed the rare gift of spellbinding oratory, attributable to his intelligence, his extensive self-education, his strong motivation for self-fulfillment, and his deep belief in the teachings of his mentor. He quickly rose from assistant minister to minister to national minister in the Black Muslim organization. Malcolm had such a bad reputation in prison that fellow inmates referred to him as “Satan.” His conversion to the Black Muslim faith, however, transformed his character. He gave up smoking, drinking, drugs, profanity, and sexual promiscuity. He gave up zoot suits, conked hair, and all the other flashy affectations he now considered clownish. His cropped hair and conservative business suits reflected his moral transformation. Malcolm was Elijah Muhammad’s diligent disciple for more than ten years. Another major turning point in his life arrived when he became aware that his master was not the saintly character Malcolm had taken him to be. Malcolm discovered that Elijah Muhammad was not only interested in personal enrichment but also sexually promiscuous and had seduced several of his former secretaries, who had borne him illegitimate children. Although disillusioned with his mentor, Malcolm remained a devout Muslim. He went to Mecca in search of further spiritual enlightenment and experienced a powerful religious conversion. He renamed himself el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. After this experience, he considered himself at least equal to Elijah Muhammad in religious

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enlightenment and founded his own Muslim organization, which he called the Organization of Afro-American Unity. After Malcolm broke with the Black Muslim sect, he was harassed and threatened by its members, who presumably were working under orders from Elijah Muhammad. In speeches and interviews, Malcolm frequently predicted that he would be assassinated. His house was firebombed, and he had to send his wife and four daughters out of town for their own safety. His remarkable courage and dedication to his cause were evident in his behavior during this critical period. He refused to hide from his invisible enemies, making repeated public appearances in Harlem and elsewhere to proclaim his crusade for the spiritual and political unification of black people all around the world. He openly attacked Elijah Muhammad for “religious fakery” and “immorality.” The most striking things about Malcolm X’s autobiography are his candor, his motivation, and his anger. Few characters in novels have undergone such transformations as this man did in real life. Reader see Malcolm change from an ignorant child into a sophisticated urbanite, then into a vicious criminal, then into an embittered convict, and finally into a highly devout, ascetic religious leader who is ready to sacrifice his life for the good of others. The one thing that remained consistent throughout his adult life was his anger at the way white society had cheated him by shutting its doors to opportunity and forcing him into a life of crime and degradation. He believed that his life story was the story of his race. The Autobiography of Malcolm X ends with Malcolm living as a hunted man, having been repeatedly threatened by the followers of his former idol. In 1965, the year his autobiography was published, Malcolm died in a blaze of shotgun pellets and pistol bullets while addressing an audience in Harlem. Three followers of Elijah Muhammad eventually were convicted of the crime; however, countless conflicting rumors circulated concerning who might have been the masterminds behind the plot. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X became a martyr to the cause he believed in. Perhaps only King can be compared to Malcolm X for courage and dedication to the cause of ending racial bigotry in the United States. Analysis Malcolm X’s main theme was that racism was an inescapable fact of American life. He pointed out that white European immigrants had no trouble becoming integrated into the American population upon arrival, but African Americans were still treated like outsiders even after their ancestors had lived in the country for hundreds of years. He regarded white men as inherently evil and wanted African Americans to give up hopes of becoming integrated into the American mainstream. Instead, he believed that African Americans should establish their own autonomous enclaves and possibly their own independent nation on the North American continent. Malcolm X fervently wanted separation from white society and white culture. He advised African Americans to refuse to participate in what he called “white man’s wars,” such as the wars in Korea and Vietnam. He believed that African American sympathies should be with nonwhite nations that were resisting white imperialism.

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The Christian religion based on humility and brotherly love had been a source of survival for African Americans during slavery and after emancipation. Malcolm X called on African Americans to repudiate Christianity as a “slave religion” foisted on subject peoples to keep them subservient. This aspect of his teaching was in diametrical opposition to that of many black Christian ministers throughout the land, including Martin Luther King, Jr., who preached patience, tolerance, understanding, and passive rather than active resistance. In one of his speeches, Malcolm told his audience: You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself. This is what the white man knows. So they make you and me hate our African identity. . . . We hated our heads, we hated the shape of our nose, we wanted one of those long dove-like noses, you know; we hated the color of our skin, hated the blood of Africa that was in our veins. And in hating our features and our skin and our blood, we had to end up hating ourselves.

His message seemed calculated to put white Americans on the defensive, which was exactly what it did. Some white Americans began to feel guilty about feelings of superiority and hostility they had always taken for granted. They began trying to justify themselves and found that their position was not only unjustifiable but also ridiculous. They had to acknowledge the truth reiterated by Malcolm X, that African Americans were not lazy and shiftless but the victims of blatant discrimination. In some of his speeches, Malcolm expressed his anger with even greater bitterness and made it clear that he advocated nothing less than interracial warfare. At the time of his death, he seemed to be groping his way toward a vision of African Americans as leaders of a worldwide revolution based on Marxist-Leninist principles. Many believed that he was being used by Soviet-directed Communists as a tool to undermine American prestige and morale, and it has often been suggested that he was assassinated for that reason. Critical Context The Autobiography of Malcolm X is generally acknowledged to be one of the most important books ever written by an African American. Few other books—including Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—have had comparable impacts on the general reading public. Malcolm X’s book naturally aroused hostility among white reviewers because of Malcolm’s inflammatory accusations against the white race as a whole. His attitude was widely regarded as reverse racism: If whites are wrong for indiscriminately hating African Americans, some asked, how can African Americans be right for indiscriminately hating whites? Many commentators, both black and white, thought that Malcolm’s militancy would produce a counterreaction. The term “white backlash” was frequently used in print and over the airwaves. Martin Luther King, Jr., was disturbed by Malcolm’s uncompromising position, although publicly he tried to maintain cordial relations between the Muslim and Christian members of the Civil Rights movement.

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published at the height of the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union had recently been at the brink of mutual nuclear annihilation in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many critics thought that Malcolm X was undermining his own country in the eyes of the world and thereby helping to influence some developing nations to align themselves with the Soviet Union in the global ideological struggle. It has been suggested that his assassination was encouraged if not actually arranged by American intelligence agencies because the African American Muslim movement under his leadership was assuming international importance. The Autobiography of Malcolm X has been published in many editions and continues to stir powerful emotions among African Americans, who recognize the painful truths it exposes. Although African Americans have made significant advances in all areas since Malcolm X’s assassination, most thinking people acknowledge that segregation and economic injustice are still painful facts of American life. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, many African Americans converted to the Islamic religion and changed their names to signify their new allegiance. Two prominent examples are heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and basketball player Lew Alcindor, who changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. That wave of African American Islamic religious fervor seems to have subsided, along with many other extremist movements that characterized the turbulent 1960’s. The basic principles enunciated by Malcolm X, however, have become deeply ingrained in African American consciousness. As reviewer I. F. Stone put it, “No man has better expressed his people’s trapped anguish. . . . This book will have a permanent place in the literature of the AfroAmerican struggle.” Truman Nelson, writing in The Nation, said, “A great book. Its dead level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose will make it stand as a monument to the most painful truth.” Spike Lee’s lengthy, faithful film adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, released in 1992 as Malcolm X, revived interest in the book for a whole new generation. Malcolm X T-shirts and other memorabilia became fashionable. Malcolm X has become an American icon, and his book, because of its emotional impact and powerful dramatic format, has become an acknowledged American literary classic. Bibliography Bassey, Magnus O. Malcolm X and African American Self-Consciousness. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Detailed study of Malcolm X’s effects upon racial identity and self-understanding in the United States. Bloom, Harold, ed. Alex Haley and Malcolm X’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” New York: Chelsea House, 1996. Compilation of essays by leading scholars analyzing Malcolm’s autobiography. Gallen, David, ed. Malcolm X: As They Knew Him. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. Collection of memoirs and interviews describing the life and times of Malcolm X from personal observations and recollections. Contains a good chronological chart of important events in Malcolm X’s life and in the sentencing of his three assassins.

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Karim, Benjamin, with Peter Skutches and David Gallen. Remembering Malcolm. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. The story of Malcolm X as told by his assistant minister, focusing on the religious aspects of Malcolm’s career as a Black Muslim leader and the inner politics of the Black Muslim organization. Malcolm X. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. Edited and with prefatory notes by George Breitman. New York: Merit, 1965. A collection of eloquent speeches mostly made during the last eight months of Malcolm X’s life, while he was earnestly seeking new directions for himself and his movement. Perry, Bruce. Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1991. A full-length scholarly biography of Malcolm X. Especially valuable because it contains 126 pages of detailed endnotes referring to newspaper articles, published interviews, books, speeches, and legal documents. Stone, I. F. “The Pilgrimage of Malcolm X.” The New York Review of Books 5 (November 11, 1965): 3-5. Review essay of The Autobiography of Malcolm X by a prominent American political writer. Contains a good summary of the book with penetrating commentary on the racial situation in the United States at the time of its publication. Terrill, Robert E. Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004. Academic study of Malcolm X’s life and work that focuses on his rhetorical style and its relationship to the prophetic tradition. Wood, Joe, ed. Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Interesting collection of essays about Malcolm X by a number of freelance writers and academicians, including playwright Amiri Baraka and revolutionary political science professor Angela Davis. Bill Delaney

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN Author: Ernest J. Gaines (1933Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1864-1963 Locale: Rural Louisiana First published: 1971

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Principal characters: Miss Jane Pittman, a former slave who looks back on her long life from the perspective of the civil rights era Big Laura, a slave woman who leads other slaves toward Ohio after the end of the Civil War Ned Douglass, the son of Big Laura Albert Cluveau, a Cajun well known as a murderer for hire Joe Pittman, Jane’s common-law husband Robert Samson, the owner of the plantation where Jane goes to live after the murder of Ned “Tee Bob” Samson, Robert Samson’s son Jimmy Aaron, a young civil rights worker The Editor, a nameless schoolteacher who interviews Jane Pittman The Novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is the life story of Jane Pittman as purportedly told to an unnamed schoolteacher, who edits the interviews into a continuous narrative of life among slaves and other Louisiana African Americans from 1864 to 1963, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. This editor is a fictional personage whose interests in Jane become a motive for learning about life among poor African Americans in the South. Through the device of the schoolteacher learning about Jane and other African Americans, the book represents the individual trials, hopes, and aspirations of Southern African Americans they battle for dignity and self-esteem long after they were supposed to have been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The editor negotiates interview opportunities with sixty-year-old Mary Hodges, who looks after Jane. Jane herself is more than one hundred years old (she does not know exactly how old she is, but she thinks that she was ten when she took the name of Jane in 1864). Jane does not seem able to keep her memories straight, so the editor asks neighbors for help in assembling her jumbled memories into a coherent narrative. Jane’s style of speaking is abrupt and halting, sometimes repetitious and discontinuous.

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Jane’s story is divided into four parts. The first, “The War Years,” covers the period near the end of the Civil War, when Jane tries to leave Louisiana for Ohio. The second section, “Reconstruction,” describes the years when Jane lives with Joe Pittman near the Texas border. The third section, “The Plantation,” covers Jane’s life in the twentieth century on Robert Samson’s plantation, to which she moves after the death of Albert Cluveau and where she observed the trials of Samson’s sons, Tee Bob and Timmy. The fourth and final section, “The Quarters,” brings Jane’s story to its conclusion with the murder of Jimmy Aaron, who tries to lead the local black population in a civil rights demonstration. Jane and her friends are doubtful that Jimmy can do any good, believing instead that he will do great harm to all of them if he persists in challenging the white powers. When Jimmy persists and is murdered, Jane becomes one of the many who defy their white bosses and take Jimmy’s place. Although Jane knows that she will probably be forced to leave her home on the Samson plantation if she participates in the civil rights demonstration, she decides to walk defiantly past Robert Samson and go to Bayonne to join the “movement.” Her last words are, “Me and Robert looked at each other there a long time, then I went by him.” The Characters Jane Brown is the name taken by a ten-year-old slave girl, Ticey, when a white Union soldier tells her she should not let herself be abused by her white slavemasters. After the soldier leaves, Ticey/Jane tries to assert her independence, and she is beaten for it. This beating destroys her ability to conceive children, and so her only motherhood is caring for Big Laura’s child, Ned, after Big Laura is killed while helping other slaves escape to the North. Jane learns early to repress the instinct for rebellion that she felt when she was Ticey. When Jane decides to live with the horse-breaker Joe Pittman, she takes his name as well, but she never marries and remains “Miss” for all her life. Miss Jane Pittman is presented by the editor as a character speaking in her own voice. Because of her great age and infirmity, as well as her unpolished language, Jane’s narrative seems unlikely. The rationale for its style is that the editor is an educated schoolteacher who has smoothed out the illiteracies and oral characteristics of the original recitation. Nevertheless, some of her speaking voice is suggested by such expressions as “It might ‘a’ been July, I’m not too sure, but it was July or August. Burning up.” Although Jane tells her own story in her own words, edited as they are, her character is expressed more fully by the relationships she forms with the people in her life. Apart from Big Laura, there are men whose significance for Jane is slow to dawn in her moral development. After the first outburst of defiance that she shows as ten-yearold Ticey, Jane Pittman survives because she succeeds in repressing her passions and maintaining some distance from those who cannot do the same. The men of her life, from Ned to Jimmy, seek to implicate her in their courage and rebellion, but she resists until the very end. Even her life of intimacy with Joe Pittman is sustained with

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caution and care. She does not see clearly that her care, in the form of a consultation with a voodoo woman, leads directly to the death she tries to prevent for Joe. The characters of Jane’s narrative are presented through her words, through her eyes, and through her moral imagination. Recalling Ned Douglass, Jane struggles to understand why he risked his life for his right to teach. Jane understands the motives of the sinister Albert Cluveau better than those of her beloved Ned. Albert has a physical and familiar presence, although he becomes a sign of evil in Jane’s dreams. Cluveau is a cold and calculating person, all the more frightening because he seems so common. When Cluveau dies insane, Jane does not think it extraordinary that her wishes might have caused his suffering. Jane Pittman is a naïve observer of her own life, which is punctuated by the martyrdoms of one woman and three men. When Jimmy Aaron’s body is returned to Samson’s plantation after he tries to exercise his civil rights in Bayonne, Jane reaches into her spiritual resources and finds the child Ticey again, as she walks past Samson to take her place in the cause of righteousness. She boards a bus for the town, where she means to drink from a “whites only” water fountain. For one so wise, Jane seems remarkably insensitive to the power of her men’s moral courage, although she can appreciate the vitality of their presence. There is aesthetic pleasure in recognizing that Jane’s naïveté may be the product of the editor’s own moral innocence. The character of Jane Pittman is left incomplete and mysterious, because the schoolteacher has smoothed out the bumps and filled in the gaps of her living autobiography. To see into her essential being would be difficult enough for anyone listening to her living voice. It is more difficult still for a reader dependent upon a text edited by a teacher who is making a lesson of Jane’s life for his schoolchildren. Themes and Meanings When Jane Pittman recounts a sermon delivered by Ned Douglass, she constructs a powerful piece of rhetoric echoing Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. It is remarkable that she can recall in such detail the words of Ned from so long ago; she claims she does not remember all that he said, but what she remembers she attributes to Ned’s faith: “I can remember it because Ned believed in it so much.” She has a prodigious memory or a persuasive imagination. In either case, she is a compelling storyteller. The theme of Ned’s sermon is what it is to be American, to take possession of America, to be possessed by it, and to nourish one’s identity with attachments to the earth. Freedom carries with it a responsibility to labor and to love the land and its people. One of Jane’s earliest lessons is that any place can be all places; at ten, frustrated that her days of traveling to Ohio have still not taken her out of Louisiana, she exclaims, “Luzana must be the whole wide world.” Her hope for finding a place of freedom is dashed by a hunter she and Ned meet during their early travels. Freedom, the hunter tells her, “ain’t coming to meet you. And it might not be there when you get there, either.” She must find freedom in herself before she can find it anywhere else, and that understanding does not come until the end of her long life. Indeed, it may not come until she tells her story to the editor.

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In the novel, freedom is bounded by natural processes and expressed through natural forces. Human blood drenches the earth as if to keep life going. From Jane’s bloody beating when she is ten to the murder of Jimmy Aaron when she is 110, Jane’s history is a story of the earth absorbing the blood of martyrs. When Ned is murdered, his blood drips along the dirt road as his body is carried home; Jane swears that his blood could be seen for years afterward, even after the road was covered with gravel. Blood-soaked earth produces great oak trees, which express the virtues of endurance, stolidity, and fortitude. Jane talks to trees, and she understands that such behavior may appear crazy to others. She insists, however, that it is a sign of her respect for nobility; she thereby has a connection with the soil of her bloody history, just as the great trees have with the earth from which they spring. Indeed, Ned’s sermon includes an image of trees falling back into the earth as a symbol for the earthly origins of human beings. Another powerful symbol used in the novel is the river. Jane tries to cross it to reach Ohio; Ned teaches beside it; and Jane dreams of her spiritual crossing of it when she “travels” to salvation. This flowing river washes away guilt and restores life; first, though, the fear of death has to be conquered. Thus the figure of the black stallion, unbroken by Joe Pittman, ridden by the evil Cluveau, has to be confronted and purged by a renewed Jane Pittman in her dreams. When Jimmy Aaron is killed because he protests the arrest of a black woman in Bayonne, it is deeply ironic that her arrest is for drinking from the “whites only” fountain in the Bayonne court-house. Drops of water forming the morning dew cleanse the air for Jane on the morning that she chooses to be free and to go to Bayonne herself. Critical Context Ernest Gaines won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship to attend a Stanford University writing program in 1958 and 1959. He received the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award in 1959, and he published two short-story collections between 1968 and 1971, the year The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman appeared. Many critics have praised the novel, and much has been written about it. The story is best known as a 1974 television film that starred Cicely Tyson in the role of Jane Pittman. The film won nine Emmy Awards, including awards for Tyson’s acting, John Korty’s direction, and Tracy Keenan Wynn’s screenplay. This powerful novel did not arise without roots. Gaines had studied the fiction of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and those writers acted as tutors for Gaines’s style, which lets the story tell itself and inhabit a local landscape of imagination. While Faulkner’s works seem most influential on Gaines, from love for a place in the South to preoccupations with memory and time, Faulkner’s vision was still a product of a white experience and was, from Gaines’s perspective, thus limited in what it could communicate of black life in America. It is reasonable to compare Faulkner’s character of Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury (1929) with Jane Pittman, because both are black women of the old South and both are powerful figures of virtue amid vicious brutality. Faulkner, however, does not allow his readers to identify with

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Dilsey, who remains at a distance from the novel’s imaginative center; Gaines’s character, by contrast, is at the center of his story and his imagination. More illuminating for appreciation of Gaines’s achievement is a comparison of his work with its predecessors in African American literature. Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) tells the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman of the South who, like Jane Pittman, acquires authority as a storyteller. By way of Frederick Douglass, Gaines takes on the challenge of answering Ralph Ellison’s vision of the black protagonist as an “invisible man.” Ned Douglass takes his name from his great forebear and insists that white society see him in all of his authority; he refuses to take the accommodationist route of Booker T. Washington and disappear into the roles allowed by white power. Gaines refers to such figures from African American cultural history to enrich his novel’s themes of political power and individual integrity. He brings the story of Jane’s life from the time of Frederick Douglass to the time of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, with whom Jane Pittman can be compared when she takes her place in the Civil Rights movement at the end of the novel. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. “The Contemporary Afro-American Novel, Two: Modernism and Postmodernism.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Examines Gaines’s fiction as an example of Afro-American postmodernism, which differs from white postmodernism by exploring the power in folk tradition rather than rejecting fictional tradition. Byerman, Keith E. “Negotiations: James Alan McPherson and Ernest Gaines.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Reviews Gaines’s fictional productivity and compares his use of folk tradition with the urban tales of James McPherson. Finds in Gaines’s stories possibilities for black resistance to white oppression. Callahan, John F. “A Moveable Form: The Loose End Blues of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” In In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Focuses on the novel’s use of the teacher as an oral historian editing his material. Callahan analyzes the art of the novel with reference to historiography and folk autobiography. Carmean, Karen. Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Critical overview of Gaines’s work and its importance to African American and southern literary history. Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Focuses on Gaines’s achievement in capturing the oral traditions and the linguistic cadences of African American culture. Argues that the varied voices of his characters combine to generate the unique voice of the author himself. Gaines, Ernest. Interview by John O’Brien. In Interviews with Black Writers. New

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York: Liveright, 1973. An important text for appreciating Gaines’s sense of himself as an artist as well as a son of the South who re-creates his past through his artistry. Hogue, W. Lawrence. “History, the Black Nationalist Discourse, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” In Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986. Examines the novel as a product of the Black Nationalist movement of the 1960’s. Sees Gaines as celebrating black history and correcting literary caricatures of African Americans by such white writers as Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Wertheim, Albert. “Journey to Freedom: Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971).” In The Afro-American Novel Since 1960, edited by Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1982. Analysis of the novel’s theme of finding freedom. Contains a detailed review of the book’s narrative structure. Richard D. McGhee

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY DEAD BROTHER Author: Walter Dean Myers (1937), illustrations by Christopher Myers (1974) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: Early twenty-first century Locale: Harlem, New York First published: 2005 Principal characters: Jesse, a promising fifteen-year-old African American visual artist, who is sad that he and his oldest friend Rise have grown apart Rise, Jesse’s former best friend, whose decisions to deal drugs, wear flashy jewelry, and drop out of high school drive him away from Jesse C. J., Jesse’s current best friend, a budding jazz musician who plays the organ in Jesse’s church Sidney Rock, an African American police officer who grew up in Harlem and acts as a surrogate father to the boys in the neighborhood Montgomery, also known as Little Man, a fourteen-year-old African American boy whom neither Jesse nor Rise trusts and whom C. J. fears Mason, a nineteen-year-old African American man currently in jail The Novel The title of Autobiography of My Dead Brother refers to Rise, a young African American whose life is chronicled by his oldest friend, Jesse, through pictures and comic strips. Jesse and Rise are not literally brothers, but they grew up together. Rise’s grandmother babysat Jesse while Jesse’s parents were working. Neither child had siblings, and they became best friends. After watching an old movie about Native Americans on television, they cut themselves to exchange blood and became “blood brothers.” The opening episode of the novel is a funeral for a fourteen-year-old African American, a friend of both Jesse and Rise. They attend the funeral, while their friend C. J. plays the organ. The deceased had been killed in a drive-by shooting, and the police do not have any suspects. The next night Jesse, Rise, and C. J. attend a meeting of the Counts, a social club for teenage boys that meets at a local armory. They are not a gang, although one of the

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oldest members, Mason, has been trying to convince them to become one. Mason has recently been arrested and has asked the Counts to talk to the main witness against him in the hope of intimidating him into not testifying. Several of the members, including Rise, are in favor of the action and several, including C. J., are against it, so they table their decision. Jesse does not express an opinion. Another item of business for the Counts is the admission of a new member, Montgomery, nicknamed Little Man, but they again table their decision until the next meeting. There is something about Little Man that bothers them. This scene introduces two significant elements of the novel: the pressures on the Counts to become a gang and Little Man, who reappears several times in the book and represents a random element that affects the other characters’ lives. Later that night, Jesse goes to Rise’s house. They are listening to music when Sidney Rock, a police officer who grew up in their neighborhood, arrives to warn them against taking any action toward the witness in Mason’s case. A few days later, Sidney invites Jesse and Rise to visit the prison at Riker’s Island, New York, but he actually takes them to a halfway house to meet Mason. Mason does not really want to talk to them, but eventually Rise and Mason get into an argument over the leadership of the Counts. No resolution is reached. Jesse, C. J., and some others decide to start a Cuban band. C. J. plays keyboard, Jesse plays the conga drum, and the others sing and play guitars. The band, called the Caballeros, later plays at a party for about twenty-five twelve-year-olds. The hosting parents are rich African Americans, but most of the guests are white. The band is a success, mostly because of C. J., and everyone can see that he has a future in music. Rise becomes a drug dealer and is given a territory within Harlem. Although he never recruits Jesse and C. J. into his life of crime, he does use them to establish an alibi when his associates kill some young rivals. After the police hold him for a week as a suspect in that murder, he decides to leave New York for Florida. The Characters All three of the central characters contain autobiographical elements, but Rise is the one who the most resembles Walter Dean Myers as a teen. Rise has been skipping school, much as Myers did during his junior and senior years in high school. Myers never dealt drugs, but he had a close friend who made deliveries for a drug dealer. After a gang marked Myers for death and the police sought him in connection with an assault, Myers left Harlem for the relative safety of the U.S. Army when he was seventeen. Rise is also seventeen, but his plan for survival is to leave Harlem to live with relatives in Florida. Jesse and C. J. resemble Myers in that they are passionate about their arts. Myers was a writer from a young age, and he started composing poetry when he was in the fifth grade. Jesse always carries his sketchbook with him and draws pictures of Rise from memory. He has also created a comic strip featuring the characters Spodi Roti and Wise. C. J. wants to become a jazz musician, although his mother would prefer that he specialize in church music and become a minister.

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Themes and Meanings Autobiography of My Dead Brother can be grouped with Myers’s other realist young-adult novels, which are set in Harlem, where Myers grew up. They include It Ain’t All for Nothin’ (1978), Crystal (1987), Motown and Didi: A Love Story (1984), Monster (1999), and Scorpions (1988). Growing up is hard anyplace, but in contemporary Harlem just living long enough to grow up is a challenge. While Myers is normally optimistic, Autobiography of My Dead Brother is preoccupied with untimely death, especially that of teenage African American males. Not only does the book begin and end with the funerals of such boys, but it also depicts two drive-by shootings that result in the death of yet another African American teenager. Much of the novel’s violence is related to either gang activity or drug dealing. Several shootings occur in the course of the story, and at least one is the result of a gang trying to establish its territory for dealing drugs. Neither idea is new for Myers. Gangs play an important role in Scorpions, and a drug dealer is a major character in Motown and Didi. Critical Context Autobiography of My Dead Brother was critically acclaimed when it was first published. It was nominated for a National Book Award in the Young People’s Literature category and was listed by the American Library Association as one of the Best Books for Young Adults in 2006. The only controversy among the reviewers concerned whether it ranked among Myers’s best work. Bibliography Bishop, Rudine Sims. Presenting Walter Dean Myers. Boston: Twayne, 1991. First book-length treatment of Myers’s life and work; argues that he is one of the most important young adult fiction authors of his time. Provides detailed analysis of his work up to 1990. Burshtein, Karen. Walter Dean Myers. New York: Rosen, 2003. Study of Myers’s life and work; aimed at young adult readers with emphasis on how events in the author’s life generated ideas for his books. Jordan, Denise M. Walter Dean Myers: Writer for Real Teens. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1999. Biography of Myers and a critical study of his work. Written for young adult readers and meant to inspire young African Americans. McElmeel, Sharon L. “A Profile: Walter Dean Myers.” Book Report 20, no. 2 (September/October, 2001): 42-45. Biographical essay that provides insight into Myers’s writing and life experience. Myers, Walter Dean. Bad Boy: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Myers’s autobiography concentrating on his childhood and teenage years. _______. “An Interview with Walter Dean Myers.” Interview by Olumbunmi Ishola. World Literature Today 81, no. 3 (May/June, 2007): 63-65. Emphasizes Myers’s views on music; provides insight into his representation of C. J.’s musical ambitions.

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Odean, Kathleen. “Football, Fire, and Fear: High School Boys.” Teacher Librarian 33, no. 4 (April, 2006): 23. This review of several young adult novels featuring teenage boys, including Autobiography of My Dead Brother, points out how Christopher Myers’s illustrations complement the story. Patrick-Wexler, Diane. Walter Dean Myers. Austin, Tex.: Raintree-Steck Vaughn, 1996. Biography aimed at preteen readers that emphasizes Myers’s early life. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Walter Dean Myers: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Organized alphabetically by topic, this analysis of Myers’s work includes a map of Harlem, a time line, and a genealogy of Myers’s main characters. Thomas R. Feller

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER Author: Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter Richardson, 1949Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Feminist Time of plot: Early twentieth century Locale: Dominica First published: 1996

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Principal characters: Xuela Claudette Richardson, the novel’s narrator Ma Eunice, who raises Xuela as a young child Jacques and Lise LaBatte, a couple with whom Xuela boards as a teen Roland, a stevedore with whom Xuela falls in love Phillip Bailey, the European man whom Xuela marries Alfred Richardson, Xuela’s father, who is a wealthy, corrupt policeman The narrator’s unnamed stepmother and sister The Novel The Autobiography of My Mother offers a first-person, retrospective account of Xuela Richardson’s struggle, over the course of her life, to reconcile with the early loss of her mother. As a Dominican girl in the early twentieth century, Xuela must also learn to cultivate her own positive sense of self in an environment that is hostile to her because of her race and gender. The novel begins with Xuela’s birth and her mother’s consequent death and describes her early life in the home of a paid caretaker, Ma Eunice, her experiences at school, her sexual maturation, the establishment of her independent adult life, and, finally, her marriage to a man she does not love. Ma Eunice is the first person with whom Xuela comes into conflict. This conflict is the result of Xuela’s intuitive rejection of Ma Eunice as someone who is not equipped to provide the nurturing that she requires. As a laundress struggling to raise her children alone, Ma Eunice occupies a social position that the young Xuela instinctively resists. When Xuela reaches school age, her father, Alfred, removes her from Ma Eunice’s home and sends her to school, an unusual opportunity for a girl in that day and age. Xuela, however, also has a difficult time in school, suffering verbal attacks from her teacher. The episode in the school constitutes an important part of the novel’s critique of colonialism’s legacy: The teacher is hostile toward Xuela because the teacher has internalized a belief that colonized peoples are culturally and intellectually inferior to their colonizers. Xuela demonstrates intellectual aptitude, making her teacher suspicious. Indeed, the teacher believes that Xuela’s ability must be the result of some kind of possession.

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Xuela refuses to learn inferiority from either Ma Eunice or her teacher. She rejects the colonial assessment of non-Europeans and seeks solace in her mother, of whom she dreams frequently. Her mother’s descent from Carib Indians represents to Xuela a potential alternative source of identity. When her father learns of her difficulties, he takes her home to live with him and the wife he has recently married. In Alfred’s home, Xuela has an even more difficult time as, in addition to subjecting Xuela to verbal attacks, her stepmother attacks her physically. In this section of the novel, the hostility that Xuela encounters derives primarily from her position as a female. Much of the section focuses on her struggle for sexual autonomy in a context in which women are often victims of their sexuality and are economically dependent on the men in their lives. Her stepmother’s attack on Xuela stems from her perception of Xuela as a competitor with her biological children for economic privilege within the family. As a result of an effort to resolve this conflict, when Xuela reaches fifteen years of age, she is sent to live with one of her father’s acquaintances and his wife, Jacques and Lise LaBatte. At the LaBattes’ home, Xuela becomes aware of the dependent nature of malefemale relationships through her observation of the LaBattes’ marriage. Though Mrs. LaBatte enjoys economic security and social sanction, she appears to have little sense of personal fulfillment. Mr. LaBatte, on the other hand, finds satisfaction in the ownership of things, including women. Not surprisingly, a sexual relationship between Xuela and Mr. LaBatte develops, and eventually Xuela becomes pregnant. She does not want to find herself in the same position as Mrs. LaBatte, so, after terminating the pregnancy, she flees their home. On her own, Xuela finds employment picking up rocks with a road-building crew, and for the first time begins to attempt to forge an independent life. Eventually, Xuela becomes a doctor’s assistant in Roseau, a town a bit larger than her father’s village of Massacre. It seems, briefly, that Xuela will achieve the emotional and sexual connection that she has been seeking through a relationship with a stevedore named Roland. Her attraction to him rests largely on what she believes is their equal social status. Roland, however, has internalized a sense of male superiority and eventually grows frustrated by her refusal to be impregnated by him, an act that he understands as an assertion of power. Her failed relationship with Roland is the last straw, and Xuela seems to resign herself to the idea that she will never find the kind of equitable relationship that she is looking for. This resignation results in her marriage to Phillip. The marriage confers upon Xuela the wealth, privilege, social esteem, and cultural assurance that she lacks, but to gain these benefits, she must marry a man she does not love. The Characters Xuela, as the novel’s primary narrative voice and interpretive filter, restricts readers’ access to the subjectivity of other characters. Her tendency to contradict herself and her obvious victimization raise questions about the veracity of her narration. These questions represent Kincaid’s concern with the lack of fixity and “truth” in the

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postcolonial context. In this regard, Xuela’s characterization contributes to the development of the theme of postcolonial identity. Though her mother appears only as a partial vision in Xuela’s dreams, that presence provides an important counterbalance to Xuela’s father and that which he represents. Xuela perceives her mother’s Carib cultural heritage as a source of alternative identification and connection, whereas her father’s African and European heritage is closely associated with a hostile, patriarchal social order. Alfred functions as an agent of Xuela’s alienation, especially in terms of her experience as a woman. He is associated with patriarchal authority through his occupation as a policeman and through his acceptance of a system of colonial hierarchy and corruption. Much attention is paid to his uniform as well as the fact that his wealth derives from extortion and exploitation of the poorer inhabitants of Dominica. The other women in the text function primarily as types that help readers understand the social positions available to women in colonial cultures. Ma Eunice, for instance, symbolizes the costs that can be associated with female sexual autonomy in her struggle to raise several children as a laundress. Providing a sharp contrast to Ma Eunice is Mrs. LaBatte, whose gray appearance, lack of vitality, and physical barrenness reveal the self-alienation that can be associated with the more socially acceptable route of marriage. Themes and Meanings There is little in the way of traditional plot in The Autobiography of My Mother, and it is questionable whether the novel’s major problem, Xuela’s inability to connect with others, has been resolved by the end. Instead of plot, Kincaid utilizes genre, metaphor, and characterization to convey the novel’s concern with the inescapability of the colonial past and the oppressive nature of female social roles. In presenting a novel as an autobiography and the self as other, the novel’s title centralizes concepts such as interconnection, multiple perspectives, and porous boundaries—all of which are closely associated with the experiences of postcolonial peoples. Further, Xuela’s experience can easily be understood as a metaphor for the subjectivity of colonized people as a group, since they too have historically been separated from intact sources of cultural nurturing. Finally, Xuela’s continual conflicts with potential mother figures in the novel helps convey the author’s rejection of women who accept social limitations on sexual, financial, or social autonomy. Critical Context Both feminist academics and the non-academic literary establishment have embraced Jamaica Kincaid’s work. The Autobiography of My Mother, her fourth novel, has been the subject of many scholarly articles, which see it as an important engagement with the intersection of the personal and the historical. Similarly, the novel was received by the popular press as a welcome expansion of the mother-daughter theme in the author’s work. Where her earlier works had been focused intensely on the relationship between two individuals, The Autobiography of My Mother was seen as en-

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gaging in a broader social construction of the relationship. Although some critics were given pause by the book’s rather hopeless ending, the novel is generally regarded as especially successful in its use of the lyrical prose style that has become Kincaid’s hallmark. Bibliography Alexander, Simone A. James. “I Am Me, I Am You: The Intricate Mother-Daughter Dyadic Relationship.” In Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Extended analyses of the motherdaughter relationships in Kincaid’s Annie John (1985) and The Autobiography of My Mother. Brancato, Sabrina. Mother and Motherland in Jamaica Kincaid. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 2005. Offers an explanation of two functions of the images of motherhood that are deployed throughout Kincaid’s works. Davies, Carol Boyce, and Elaine Savory Fido, eds. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990. The editors provide an overview of the history, themes, and writers central to Caribbean women’s literature. Edwards, Justin D. Understanding Jamaica Kincaid. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Presents a biographical sketch of Kincaid’s life and clearly and lucidly discusses each of her works of fiction and nonfiction. Kincaid, Jamaica. “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview.” Interview by Selwyn Cudjoe. Callaloo 39 (Spring, 1989). Kincaid explains how she incorporates her personal experience into her work. Beauty Bragg

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF W. E. B. DU BOIS A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century Author: W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1868-1958 Locale: United States and Europe First published: In Russian as Vospominaniia, 1962; English translation, 1968 Principal personage: W. E. B. Du Bois, a prominent black activist, writer, educator, and early advocate of pan-Africanism Form and Content The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois traces the ninety-year journey of a historian, sociologist, poet, editor, lecturer, organizer, essayist, propagandist, civil rights activist, humanitarian, statesman, and advocate for peace. The book chronicles this life from Du Bois’s humble beginnings in Great Barrington, a small New England town, to halls of government, palaces of royalty, and international forums. Du Bois plotted a course few would even dare to dream, much less live. His impact can be seen from America to Africa and Asia. Through it all, amid praise and damnation, pride and humiliation, hope and despair, Du Bois remained singularly directed toward confronting and defeating the “color line.” This autobiography provides a rare glimpse into the life and times of Du Bois; only through this vehicle can one begin to understand what can only be termed an American paradox. It was neither vanity nor apology that led Du Bois to write his autobiography. The intent was an honest attempt to record and critically assess his life. Although he acknowledged that “the final answer to these questions, time and posterity must make,” he nevertheless felt it his duty “to contribute whatever enlightenment” he could. “This book then is the Soliloquy of an old man on what he dreams his life has been as he sees it slowly drifting away: and what he would like others to believe.” Much of the text in this “soliloquy” appears in earlier versions. Specifically, most of part 2 comes from Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940) and part 3 from his In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday (1952), while an earlier version of the book’s “postlude” first appeared in The National Guardian. The later work, however, expands upon these earlier versions and collects in one place a personal testimonial of an American hero. Du Bois actually wrote three autobiographies. The first, written when the author was fifty, was Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920). Although autobiographical in nature, the book is succinctly summarized by its most famous passage:

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“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” In his seventieth year, Du Bois wrote his second autobiography, Dusk of Dawn. Using his own life as a case study, Du Bois analyzes the “race-problem.” Du Bois relates his birth and development, triumphs and failures, and hopes and despairs in his quest for racial justice, equality, and freedom. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois thus represents a third autobiography, compiled by Du Bois when he was ninety years old. The book, divided into three parts, begins at the end—that is, chronologically speaking, the first part is actually the conclusion. The chapters that make up this section are best described as propaganda pamphlets and bits of speeches in support of communism. Reading these, one finds repeated condemnations of capitalism in general and of the United States in particular. Alternatively, Du Bois could find nothing but praise for socialism and for China and the Soviet Union. Analysis Considering this first section of The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, a question emerges. How did Du Bois, who spent most of his life working within and believing in the basic principles of freedom and justice of the American system, become so vehemently opposed to that same system at the end of his life? The answer comes in part 2. As he explains in part 2, Du Bois grew up believing that racial discrimination and prejudice could be overcome by ability and hard work. He spent the first quarter of his life achieving academic excellence at Fisk University, Harvard University, and the University of Berlin. Toward these ends, Du Bois notes: “In the days of my formal education, my interest became concentrated upon the race struggle. My attention from the first was focused on democracy and democratic development, and upon the problem of the admission of my people into the freedom of democracy.” Upon completing his studies, Du Bois, determined to make a difference, sought to apply his newfound knowledge to understanding and eradicating the color line. His first attempt to share this knowledge and vision was as an assistant professor of Latin and history at Wilberforce University in Ohio. At Wilberforce, Du Bois completed his first book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896). In it, Du Bois gives an impassioned description of how the United States, ignoring moral and political resistance, could participate in the sale and importation of slaves. Du Bois’s next book, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), was one of the first community studies done by a sociologist in the United States. Conducting original research, Du Bois documented the interaction between race and class. This study demonstrated the link between a racially oppressive system and many of the social ills associated with ghetto communities. The interaction between class and race would become a central theme interwoven throughout the count-

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less books, articles, essays, and lectures that would occupy Du Bois’s lifetime. From this period and for the next two decades, Du Bois led the charge against America’s racial caste system. Simultaneously, he insisted upon the rebirth of racial pride. Du Bois called for the creation of a “new Negro,” one who through training and excellence would silence racist critics. Du Bois challenged African Americans not to be complacent but to be unceasing in their complaint. One of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was able to infuse these thoughts into a broad institutional base for action as the editor of the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. As editor of The Crisis, Du Bois for more than two decades launched a forceful attack against many of the most blatant aspects of racism. Under Du Bois, The Crisis also became the vehicle by which a whole generation of American black writers launched their careers. Such writers as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countée Cullen, Anne Spencer, Abram Harris, and Jessie Fauset saw their first works published in The Crisis. It was through this journal that Du Bois began directing his attention to worldwide issues, especially as they related to Africa. Beginning in the 1920’s, Du Bois was instrumental in organizing pan-African conferences throughout the world. The principal concern of these conferences was to draw attention to the plight of Africa and Africans. Du Bois hoped that American black intellectuals would serve as a vanguard to uplift blacks not only in America but also in Africa. In this connection, Du Bois began considering the works of Karl Marx. Although Du Bois initially rejected the Soviet solution for African Americans, he did see in the writings of Marx some reason for hope. What amazed and uplifted me in 1926, was to see a nation stoutly facing a problem which most other modern nations did not dare even to admit was real: the abolition of poverty. . . . It might fail, I knew, but the effort in itself was social progress and neither foolishness nor crime.

Thus inspired, he began to advocate the development of a “talented tenth.” This idea first surfaced in his 1903 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois hoped that the formation of this group of intellectuals would eventually lead to the abolition of poverty among African Americans. These ideas became central to much of Du Bois’s writings and would become the basis of major controversies. With each new work and each new observation, Du Bois became increasingly disenchanted with America and his hope for his people. Several efforts among black and white intellectuals were made to censure Du Bois. Unwilling to accept censure, Du Bois concentrated his efforts more and more on the international arena. This change in orientation was more a process than a single action. Du Bois, after living through two world wars, after becoming frustrated at seeing the race problem continue unabated, came to realize that these problems were interrelated. He noted his “growing conviction that the first step toward settling the

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world’s problems was Peace on Earth.” As Du Bois turned his eye to the international setting, he was once again perplexed with the problems of race. In England, Du Bois would observe that although order, beauty, and industrial wealth flowed, the nation was morally corrupt. England had “built its prosperity on cheap labor, which the colored peoples of the world were forced to do, and on lands and materials which had been seized without just compensation by the British throughout the world.” In France, he noted, “There was death in her eyes, in her speech, in her gestures. The gates of my most loved of public parks, the Luxembourg Gardens, were guarded by police armed with machine guns. I saw Algerian boys searched on the public streets. Fear, hate and despair rode the streets of Paris.” In sum, Du Bois viewed Western Europeans as clinging to the “desperately held belief . . . that their culture and comfort depend absolutely on cheap labor, seized land and materials belonging to defenseless peoples. . . .” As an organizer of several pan-African conferences, Du Bois became known to a worldwide group of peace activists and scholars. Through these contacts, Du Bois was invited to participate in international peace conferences; this work led to Du Bois’s being indicted by the U.S. government. Although Du Bois was ultimately found innocent, the experience would be a sore point for the rest of his life. Du Bois, no stranger to controversy, found himself fighting on two fronts simultaneously. On one hand, Du Bois was relentless in his attack upon racial caste; on the other, Du Bois fought what he perceived as complacency, assimilationist ideas, and hesitancy on the part of prominent African Americans. Civil rights leaders and organizations, even the NAACP, took pains during the Joseph McCarthy era to distance themselves from Du Bois. As a consequence, Du Bois, at mid-century, found himself being attacked by white academicians and policy makers and shunned by black intellectuals and civil rights leaders. Du Bois expressed pessimism at the series of NAACP-instigated Supreme Court rulings easing conditions of racial caste in housing, schooling, and employment. Although surprised at the victories, Du Bois attributed them to world pressure inspired by the Soviet Union and aimed at the United States. Moreover, he believed that the South would delay legal enforcement of such rulings almost indefinitely. Frustrated with the domestic situation, Du Bois devoted the rest of his life to trying to change the condition of people of color around the world. Toward these ends, Du Bois, now in his eighties, became a self-appointed ambassador for peace. In this role, he visited and lectured in such places as England, China, the Soviet Union, Holland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. His message, untempered by age, was essentially the same as it had been in his youth: that the dignity of all humans—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—should not be abridged as a consequence of race, class, or gender. Du Bois observed that America for more than two hundred years had denied a fourth of its citizens these basic rights.

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Critical Context It is virtually impossible to pick up a text dealing with sociology, race and race relations, anthropology, stratification, or American or African history and not come across the name and ideas of Du Bois. His observations, analysis, and insight remain just as robust, just as provocative, and just as fresh as when they were first conceived. How is one to judge this autobiography? Certainly, standard literary criteria would be insufficient. This is more than literature, more than a personal testimony; it is the testimonial of a movement, a process. As such, this testimony may be compared to those of Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. As with their testimonies, one notes that humans die but that ideas endure. Some critics of The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois have questioned whether or not it appropriately reflects Du Bois’s intellect. These critics, noting that the book was published posthumously, observe that Du Bois was unable to edit the final manuscript; thus, it is unknown if the end product is how Du Bois would have wanted it. Whether the book is flawed or not, reading Du Bois’s autobiography is like having a conversation with an old friend, mentor, and teacher. Sometimes the thoughts come out crude and rough, other times they are polished and finished. These thoughts, whether in condemnation or praise, whether reflecting joy or pain, wisdom or folly, nevertheless are full of hope for a future free of racial bigotry and oppression. Bibliography DeMarco, Joseph P. The Social Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983. Incisive exploration of Du Bois’s philosophy. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings. Edited by Nathan Huggins. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1986. Provides one of the most complete compilations of Du Bois’s writings, including his first book and essays and speeches that cover the period from 1890 to 1958. _______. W. E. B. Du Bois: On Sociology and the Black Community. Edited by Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Discusses the sociological contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois. The introduction provides a summary of his life and times. The remainder of the text consists of essays and excerpts from works dealing with sociology, the black community, black families, black culture, and race relations. Essien-Udom, E. U. Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America. New York: Dell Books, 1964. Identifies Du Bois as one of the major black intellectuals responsible for initiating pan-Africanism, a movement seeking the political unification of Africa led by African Americans. Argues that Du Bois differed from others of the period in that he called for full political participation and racial unity to respond to racism. Gillman, Susan, and Alys Eve Weinbaum, eds. Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

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Compiles scholarly works discussing the gendering of race and the racing of gender in Du Bois, as well as his influence on African American sexuality generally. Keller, Mary, and Chester J. Fontenot, Jr., eds. Re-cognizing W. E. B. Du Bois in the Twenty-first Century: Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2007. Collection of essays reevaluating Du Bois’s influence upon social, political, and religious thought. Rampersad, Arnold. Introduction to The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, by W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Commentary on Du Bois’s biography by a renowned biographer and literary critic, reviewing its importance from the point of view of the early twenty-first century. Turner, Jonathan H., Royce Singleton, Jr., and David Musick. Oppression: A Sociohistory of Black-White Relations in America. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984. Classifies Du Bois, along with Frederick Douglass, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr., as a “protest integrationist.” Argues that these individuals attempted to work within the political system in order to change it. In this regard, Du Bois was the intellectual heir to Frederick Douglass, becoming the recognized leader of the Civil Rights movement and expanding the movement into the international arena. Further, Du Bois carried this torch from the turn of the century, passing it on to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the mid-1950’s. Rodney D. Coates

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BABEL-17 Author: Samuel R. Delany (1942Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Science fiction Time of plot: The distant future Locale: Earth and outer space First published: 1966

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Principal characters: Rydra Wong, the protagonist, a twenty-six-year-old telepath and an intergalactically famous poet General Forester, the military man who convinces Rydra Wong to help the Alliance win the war against the Invaders Dr. Markus T’mwarba, Rydra Wong’s psychoanalyst Danil D. Appleby, the customs officer who helps Rydra assemble the crew of her interstellar ship Rimbaud Brass, a surgically altered, half-animal and half-human pilot of the Rimbaud Calli, one of three navigators on the Rimbaud Ron, another navigator Mollya Twa, the third navigator Slug, the overseer of the Rimbaud’s crew Eye, Ear, and Nose, incorporeal servants who can spy invisibly or function in an environment where a living crew cannot Baron Felix Ver Dorco, a former cannibal who becomes an armaments expert for the Alliance Jebel, the renegade captain of a scavenger ship Nyles Ver Dorco, also known as the Butcher, a mercenary and the son of Baron Ver Dorco The Novel Babel-17 is the story of the poet Rydra Wong and her successful attempt to decode Babel-17, the secret language used by the Invaders in their continuing aggression against the Earth-based Alliance. Though divided into five parts, the novel consists primarily of three episodes that take place in increasingly remote sections of Alliance territory. The first episode begins in a conventional Earth setting but quickly “defamiliarizes” readers with the description of the working-class Transport quarters and the ultimate dead end of the Discorporate sector. The second episode concerns events that take place at the Alliance war yards at Armsedge, including the assassination of leading armaments developer Baron Felix Ver Dorco. The last episode of the novel concerns the events taking place during and immediately following the arrival

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of a ship carrying Rydra and a crew in the no-man’s-land of the Specelli Snap, a frontier in the war against the Invaders. In each of these settings, readers are introduced to a new variation of the linguistic adventure that Rydra undertakes at the beginning of the novel. Soon after Rydra accepts the mission offered to her by General Forester, she begins to assemble her crew from the unconventional Transport and Discorporate sectors, the former peopled by working-class characters who have a taste for cosmetic surgery, wrestling, and alcohol. Upon leaving Earth, however, she begins to experience spells of dizziness, and her ship, the Rimbaud, falls prey to acts of sabotage—both of which developments she believes to be connected to her quest to decipher Babel-17. After arriving at the Alliance War Yards at Armsedge, Rydra is greeted by Baron Felix Ver Dorco, a former cannibal who specializes in unique and sophisticated methods of killing, including biological and genetic warfare. All of his expertise, however, cannot stop an assassination attempt on his own life that occurs during a dinner held in honor of Rydra’s visit. Immediately following Ver Dorco’s death, the crew flees Armsedge, only to discover that their ship is placed on a course that none of the members can remember having plotted. Rydra and her crew next awaken in the frontier of the Specelli Snap, a no-man’sland in the frontier between the Alliance and the Invaders. Here the crew is simultaneously rescued and captured by Jebel, a self-employed mercenary who preys on ships from both sides of the conflict, though he specializes in cannibalizing the ships of the Invaders. His best fighter is an unusual individual, known simply as “The Butcher,” who has a complete lack of identity and does not understand the meaning of the first-person pronoun. In a subsequent fight with the Invaders, Rydra, along with the Butcher, helps to thwart a major invasion. Afterward they are discovered in a catatonic state by the Alliance. During an intensive cross-examination by General Forester and Dr. T’mwarba, the truth of Babel-17 is revealed: It is a schizophrenic language that inhabits a person and controls the actions of the host without his or her knowledge. Both Rydra and the Butcher have been “infected” with the language, but Rydra has been able to mitigate, if not control, its effects. The novel concludes with Rydra’s invention of Babel-18, a language that will counter the effects of Babel-17 and give the advantage to the Alliance. The Characters Rydra Wong is a strong heroine who does not conform to the macho image prevalent in the science fiction of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Instead, she is a sympathetic, individualistic, and even romantic figure who single-handedly solves the puzzle of Babel-17. Wong is born with a talent for languages, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. An embargo-related plague causes her to become autistic; only extended treatment with Dr. T’mwarba enables her to recover and, eventually, become the poet who functions as “the voice of her generation,” a title she despises. Rydra enjoys the numerous chances, sometimes dangerous, to put her talents to extraliterary use, including the

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opportunity to decipher Babel-17. As the novel progresses and Rydra’s mission leads her into contact with unfamiliar settings, some of her character traits are revealed through interaction with other unusual characters. The first of Rydra’s extraordinary traits is her telepathic ability, displayed in an encounter with General Forester that opens the novel. She surprises Forester with her ability to anticipate his comments in the conversation. Later that evening, during a discussion of the interview with Rydra’s mentor and former psychoanalyst, Dr. T’mwarba, the secret of Rydra’s poetic talent is revealed: She monitors the thoughts of those around her and then expresses their unformed thoughts in poetic form. Likewise, Rydra’s interaction with the crew of the starship Rimbaud helps to show the dimensions of possible character interchange. The pilot, a surgically altered figure named Brass, immediately becomes attuned to Rydra’s personality. Such rapport between members of different classes—Customs and Transport—is uncommon, until Rydra reveals that she is not a member of any class, despite her current Customs status. Even more unusual is her relationship with the navigation “triple,” whose strange characteristics are partly a result of their sexual, as well as professional, relationship. Rydra reveals to Ron, a member of the triple, that she was once a navigator and part of a legendary triple. The last two relationships Rydra experiences are with two renegades who seemingly side with the Alliance. The first character, Jebel, is a mercenary who poaches on all sides of the conflict. He rescues Rydra and her ship and spares them because he is an admirer of her poetic talents. The second character, upon Rydra’s preliminary encounters with him, proves not to be a character in the traditional literary sense. “The Butcher,” a former criminal, is the perfect warrior because he has no sense of self and does not understand the concept of “I.” After extensive conversations with the Butcher, Rydra is able to diagnose the source of his problem: His conscious self has been overridden by a foreign thought pattern. During the ensuing battle between Alliance and Invading forces, Rydra determines that the Butcher is in fact under the control of Babel-17, and that the language is being used by the enemy to turn Alliance members into counteragents. Rydra herself experiences these symptoms after she begins to translate, and increasingly to think, in the economical but subversive language. With the help of Dr. T’mwarba, she is eventually able to bring the Butcher’s true character back to the surface. Once in control of his own self, the Butcher remembers that he is actually Nyles Ver Dorco, an Alliance agent and the son of Baron Ver Dorco. With this revelation and with Rydra’s help, Nyles Ver Dorco turns against the Invaders who had erased his character. Themes and Meanings The primary subject of Babel-17 is the role of communication in human society. Included in Delany’s discussion of communication, in addition to the obvious discussion of language, is the encoding of human behavior in the realms of sexual and classrelated behavior. In each of these situations, the correct decoding of the environment determines the success of the character’s enterprise.

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The first of these encoded situations concerns the nature of sexuality. General Forester is immediately attracted to Rydra upon meeting her. The general, however, strictly follows the rules of military etiquette and does not mention this attraction to Rydra. Rydra, who is telepathic, senses the general’s thoughts and later tells Dr. T’mwarba that she would have welcomed, or at least appreciated, the advance. The general, unable to decode the situation properly, remains on the outside of communication, as he does throughout the novel. The second encounter over sexuality involves the unique customs of Transportclass navigators, who situate themselves in sexual “triples” to aid in the completion of their duties. The two navigators chosen by Rydra for the mission, Calli and Ron, have lost the first (female) member of the trio. Rydra convinces them to choose a new first from among the reanimated navigators at the morgue. When Ron continues to feel resentment about the treatment of the navigators by the Customs class, Rydra reveals to him that she was once the sole female member of a legendary triple involved in the war against the Invaders, and if she had it to do over again, she would be tripled with one woman and one man. The discussion of tripling between Ron and Rydra also reveals another of the encoded contexts in the novel, the conflict between the two classes in the Alliance, the Customs and Transport classes. Danil P. Appleby, a customs officer, accompanies Rydra on her trip to the Transport district. At first he is appalled by the class difference, including the Transport practice of “cosmetisurgery” and the custom of disrobing when one enters a bar. Gradually, however, as Appleby becomes more accustomed to the context, he begins to enjoy such Transport customs as wrestling matches between ship’s pilots. Eventually, however, his lack of decoding skills makes him a victim much the same as General Forester. Left alone in the Discorporate Sector while Rydra looks for additional crew members, Appleby is robbed by a discorporated prostitute, or succubus, proving, to one Transport worker’s delight, that you can take the money with you when you go. The most important example of decoding is the deciphering of Babel-17. Originally, the Alliance looks at Babel-17 as a code and not as a complete language. Rydra, with her natural linguistic abilities, soon recognizes that the transcriptions given to her are in fact a dialogue between the speakers of the precise and mathematical language. Her ultimate determination that Babel-17 is a parasitic language that inhabits the speaker, much as the succubus inhabited Appleby, allows the Alliance to gain an advantage in the decades-long conflict. Her encoding of a new language, Babel-18, assures the Alliance of victory. After her successful semiotic venture, she sends a simple message to the Invaders, stating that they will be defeated in sixteen months. Critical Context Samuel Delany has himself explained the context in which the novel was written in several interviews and in his memoirs, the most complete of these being The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965

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(1988). Though Babel-17 was published in 1966, Delany’s memoirs cover the period during which the novel was written and reveal the two episodes that led to its composition: the language that he and his then-wife, poet Marilyn Hacker, invented, the source of Babel-17; and the sexual “triple” which he and Marilyn entered into in the East Village of New York City. Delany’s social and sexual preoccupations became the source for many of the novel’s ideas and plot devices. The literary influences on the novel range from the science fiction of Theodore Sturgeon, to the poetry of prodigies such as the French writer Arthur Rimbaud, to the circle of science-fiction writers in New York, and the circle of writers in San Francisco who came to be associated with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. These various and wideranging influences contribute to the richness of allusion and detail that are typical of Delany’s work. As Delany describes it, the novel was born during a period of psychological and social discovery in his life, during a time when he was experiencing what it was like to be black, a writer, and gay. As he notes in retrospect, he came to these realizations in the early 1960’s, when none of those words had the significance that they gained by the end of that decade. Bibliography Bartter, Martha A. “The (Science-Fiction) Reader and the Quantum Paradigm: Problems in Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.” Science Fiction Studies 17 (November, 1990): 325-340. Argues that Delany’s well-known interest in contemporary literary theory extends also to an interest in contemporary scientific theories. The essay primarily concerns itself with Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) but discusses other novels and presents information concerning Delany’s wide interest in science. DeGraw, Sharon. The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2007. Discusses Delany’s representation of race and compares his work to that of Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Samuel Schuyler. Delany, Samuel R. “An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.” Interview by Robert F. Reid-Pharr. Callaloo 14 (Spring, 1991): 524-534. Delany provides extended answers to all Reid-Pharr’s questions, which place particular emphasis on the author’s political and theoretical positions. _______. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965. New York: Arbor House, 1988. Extensive and revealing memoir of Delany’s life from his graduation from high school in the Bronx to his subsequent move to the East Village in Manhattan. Emphasizes Delany’s contemplations about what it was like to be black, a writer, and gay before those terms gained their current significance. _______. “On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.” Interview by Robert M. Philmus. Science Fiction Studies 17 (November, 1990): 295324. Extended, informal interview that grew from Delany’s participation in a class at Concordia University.Concerns Delany’s views on utopian and antiutopian science fiction. Delany also discusses in detail his interest in the linguistic study of

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signs and in the theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as his views on the influential cyberpunk movement in science fiction. Malmgren, Carl. “The Languages of Science Fiction: Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17.” In Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany, edited by James Sallis. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Discusses the concept of “linguistic otherness” as a way into Babel-17, which Malmgren describes as alternative society science fiction. Stone-Blackburn, Susan. “Adult Telepathy: Babel-17 and The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation 30 (Fall, 1989): 243-253. Compares the telepathic characters in Babel-17 and Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). StoneBlackburn argues that the climax of both novels concerns a telepathic union between characters. Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Book-length study of Delany’s science fiction and its unique contributions to the representation of racial and sexual identity in literature. Jeff Cupp

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BABY OF THE FAMILY Author: Tina McElroy Ansa (1949) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: 1950’s-1960’s Locale: Mulberry, Georgia (a fictional town based on Macon, Georgia) First published: 1989 Principal characters: Lena McPherson, a young girl struggling to balance the psychic and material gifts with which she has been endowed Nellie McPherson, Lena’s mother, who is a significant presence in the family business although her primary work is in the home Jonah McPherson, Lena’s father, a successful entrepreneur who is both feared and respected in the local community Grandmama (Lizzie McPherson), Lena’s paternal grandmother, who along with Nellie is the mainstay of Lena’s domestic life Nurse Bloom, the nurse/midwife who delivers Lena and attempts to educate Nellie on the management of Lena’s gift Rachel, the ghost of an enslaved woman whom Lena encounters on a trip to the beach The Novel Baby of the Family traces Lena McPherson’s development from birth to young womanhood as she copes with the supernatural experiences that are the result of her having been born with a caul (a fetal membrane) covering her head. In the African American folk tradition, the caul is associated with special powers of vision such as foresight and the ability to see spirits, and Lena’s powers are seen as a “gift.” Lena experiences some aspects of her special status as a burden rather than a gift, however, and throughout the novel she struggles to balance her position as the coddled youngest child and only daughter of a well-to-do African American family with her gift’s darker aspects, which allow her contact with the spirit world that she doesn’t always understand. Lena’s struggle is made more difficult by the fact that her mother, by embracing the “modern” and rejecting the folkways of the rural community, has deprived Lena of useful folk knowledge and protection. Though Lena feels a distinct sense of alienation because of her extraordinary sensitivities, she nonetheless remains closely connected to the community from which she springs, and she has several significant friendships that help move her toward full self-awareness and self-acceptance. First among these significant friendships is her relationship with a neighborhood girl, Sarah. Sarah serves largely as a traditional

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literary foil; she is the opposite of Lena in almost every way. Though Sarah is poor, neglected, and prematurely burdened with care and responsibility, the two girls share a sense of adventure and a love of imaginative activity. Through her observations of and interactions with Sarah, Lena becomes more aware of her own economic privilege. Lena also learns more about herself when she encounters the ghost Rachel during a family vacation at the beach. Lena’s encounter with Rachel gives her access to the subjective aspects of slavery that are not presented in the historical accounts that she has received in school. Through hearing Rachel’s analysis of how slavery cut people off from their creative capacity and therefore their humanity, Lena becomes aware of herself as a historical subject. She is presented with a historical context by which she can understand her own claims to freedom. Lena’s journey to self-awareness and self-acceptance is not completed in these early childhood encounters. Her teenage years will present more tumultuous events for her to navigate: She is ostracized by her classmates after she gets one of them into trouble by revealing her as the source of a rumor about the nuns’ sexual activities; she proves susceptible to sleepwalking; and she must work through the death of her grandmother. All these events represent obstacles that Lena must overcome, and the first two traumatize her because they are associated with the inexplicable. When Lena tells the girls’ secret to the Sister, she speaks words that she does not intend to say in a voice that is not her own. Lena is particularly frightened by her sleepwalking episodes, because they are actions of which she is unconscious. Sleepwalking therefore contributes to Lena’s confusion about her own ability to distinguish the real and unreal, leading her to doubt her sanity. Her grandmother’s death also contributes, initially, to her sense of self-doubt, because she feels that she should have been able to foresee it and prevent it. Ultimately, though, an encounter with the ghost of her grandmother helps reframe Lena’s abilities in more positive terms. Though Lena’s doubts are not fully dispelled, the novel ends positively in that Lena has been instructed to contact Nurse Bloom for information about her endowments. The novel’s final image is of Lena squarely assessing herself in a mirror. The Characters Lena is marked by feelings of ambivalence regarding her special status. On one hand, she accepts with easy grace her place at the center of her community and the affection and trust that are showered upon her by it. Lena is particularly easy in her relationships with adults, such as Frank Peterson, a handyman who helps maintain the McPherson home, and Gloria, a barmaid in her father’s juke joint. These characters could easily be dismissed as a drunk or a “loose woman” (and they sometimes are), but Lena is able to see past the superficial and gains their trust, their affection, and a great deal of information about human frailty and resilience as a result. On the other hand, the very root of Lena’s sympathetic relations with these marginalized people, the heightened perception that allows her to see on multiple planes, is an

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aspect of her identity that at times leads her to question her own sanity. The generosity of spirit and confident assurance that Lena exhibits are further cultivated in her home life. The domestic space is shared equally by Lena’s mother Nellie and her grandmother, who together constitute a dualistic image of domesticity. Nellie’s association with the modern is symbolized primarily through her rejection of Nurse Bloom’s folk wisdom. Miss Lizzie’s association with tradition is primarily expressed through her storytelling (which focuses on ghosts) and her belief in folk cures. Within the novel, however, aspects of each woman’s character are valued. In fact, the way that Lena relates to them suggests that a synthesis of the two attitudes will be the most functional approach for Lena in her own development. The characterization of Lena’s father Jonah is filtered through the “bad man” tradition of African American music and literature. His success is idealized, because it is achieved on his own terms rather than those that are deemed socially acceptable: He is a gambler, and his business is a combination juke joint and liquor store. As a consequence of his self-made status, he attains mythic proportions in the minds of Lena and other members of the community as someone not to be “messed with.” Jonah’s characterization exposes the central contradiction of the “bad man” figure in that he is revered by the community in spite of the fact that his primary commitment is to himself. In Jonah’s case, this contradiction is revealed through his womanizing, his tendency to violence in dealing with others, and his domineering attitude within his family. Themes and Meanings In Baby of the Family, Tina McElroy Ansa’s primary thematic concerns are the relationship between cultural and historical memory and the specific experiences of African American women. In her attention to the details of this particular geographic and temporal location and her valorization of folk culture, Ansa contributes to the richness of African American literature and storytelling and advocates for a central place for women in the culture. Lena’s gift, which she cannot fully understand, and the alienation that results from it are easily understood as metonymies for misrecognized African American identities. African Americans as a group are the recipients of the gift of a rich cultural legacy, the value of which is not always recognized. As a result, the unique perspectives of African American culture can be seen as burdens that sometimes lead to the same type of alienation that Lena experiences. Critical Contexts Though Baby of the Family has been subject to a least one scathing review, critics generally have praised Ansa’s rich rendering of southern culture and her attention to women’s specific experience within that culture. While her novel, Ugly Ways, was the first of her works to garner scholarly attention, a body of criticism on Baby of the Family has begun to emerge.

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Bibliography Billingslea-Brown, Alma Jean. “Folk Magic, Women, and Identity.” In Crossing Borders Through African American Women’s Fiction and Art. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Discusses the presentation of folk belief as a source of power for women in the visual art and literature of contemporary African American women. Magee, Rosemary M. “From Grandmother to Mother to Me: Birth Narratives and Tradition in the Fiction of Southern Women.” In Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Provides a brief discussion of the transfer of memory, identity, and psychological wholeness from generation to generation in literature by contemporary southern women writers. Okonkwo, Christopher. “Of Caul and Response: Baby of the Family, Ansa’s Neglected Metafiction of the Veil of Blackness.” CLA Journal 49, no. 2 (December, 2005): 144-167. Argues that Ansa renders Lena’s experience as a metonymy of contemporary African American racial experience and an extension of traditional literary themes by comparing her use of the caul or veil with those of W. E. B. Du Bois and Arna Bontemps. Town, Caren. “‘A Whole World of Possibilities Spinning Around Her’: Female Adolescence in the Contemporary Southern Fiction of Josephine Humphreys, Jill McCorckle, and Tina Ansa.” Southern Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Winter, 2004): 89-108. Argues that these contemporary representations of southern adolescence extend and revise the traditional rebellious southern heroine, offering more optimistic outcomes for them than earlier writers were able to offer. Warren, Nagueyalti. “Resistant Mothers in Alice Walker’s Meridian and Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways.” In Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Useful discussion of obstacles, including motherhood, to female self-realization. Beauty Bragg

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BAILEY’S CAFÉ Author: Gloria Naylor (1950) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Summer, 1948, to summer, 1949 Locale: A street the location of which shifts with each character First published: 1992 Principal characters: Bailey, the owner of Bailey’s Café, an African American veteran of World War II whose two great loves are baseball and his wife, Nadine Nadine (Deenie), Bailey’s wife, a tall, beautiful African American woman Sadie, an aging wino and prostitute Eve, the owner of the boardinghouse-bordello near Bailey’s Café Sweet Esther, a resident of Eve’s house who is known as a woman who hates men Mary (Peaches), another of Eve’s boarders, whose internal conflicts made her so desperate that she slashed her own face Jesse Bell, one of Eve’s boarders, who was rejected and humiliated by the snobbish family into which she married Mariam, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl from Ethiopia Stanley Beckwourth Booker T. Washington Carver Maple (Ms. Maple), Eve’s housekeeper and bouncer The Novel Bailey’s Café is the story of a magical place and of the lost souls who have there found, if not redemption, at least a safe haven. As the chapter and section titles suggest, Naylor structures her novel in the form of a jazz performance. The book begins with “Maestro, If You Please,” in which Bailey, as the bandleader, introduces himself; this is followed by “The Vamp,” Bailey’s introduction to his café. The main part of the book is entitled “The Jam,” and Bailey’s Café ends with a short, upbeat chapter appropriately called “The Wrap.” The novel begins with a first-person narrative by the man whom everyone calls Bailey, after the name of his place of business. Even though Bailey never does mention his real name, he does not omit anything else from his life story. He describes his childhood as the child of African Americans who were the servants of wealthy African Americans, his successful courtship of the beautiful Nadine, his failure in several jobs, and his participation in World War II. What brought Bailey to despair, ironically, was the event that assured him of surviving that war: the bombing of Hiroshima

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and Nagasaki. Devastated by guilt, Bailey ended up on the wharf in San Francisco, then inexplicably found himself working in a rundown café with Nadine beside him. As Bailey hastens to point out, his café does not have a geographical location. It moves about, appearing wherever and whenever someone is “hanging on to the edge” and needs a place “to take a breather for a while.” In his second chapter, “The Vamp,” Bailey introduces two “one-note players” who are not ready to look beneath the surfaces of their lives. Thus Sister Carrie, a religious fanatic, pretends to be highly moral, and Sugar Man, a pimp, pretends to be a benefactor of women; actually, both are interested only in controlling others. Although these are only “minor voices,” in Bailey’s words, they illustrate the fact that the truth lies not in protestations but in what “happens under the surface.” In the long section that follows, “The Jam,” the characters do bare their souls; they “play it all out.” In each of the section’s seven chapters, a character relives a life so full of suffering and defeat that it has ended at Bailey’s Café. The first three stories, those of Sadie, Eve, and Sweet Esther, all describe the betrayal of a girl child by a person from whom she should have expected protection. Sadie’s mother contemptuously uses her child first as a servant and then as a profitable prostitute; Eve’s godfather makes her a scapegoat for his own obsession with sex; and Sweet Esther’s brother sells her to a man he knows will brutalize and corrupt her. Then there are Peaches and Jesse Bell, who knew only kindness when they were children but who came to disaster in the adult world. Perhaps because her father almost worshiped her, Peaches became a woman who demanded sexual homage from every man she met. Jesse Bell’s problem was different. Her husband’s upper-class family resented and humiliated her, until at last she rebelled, disgraced herself, and destroyed her marriage. The other two characters in this section, Mariam and Stanley, are both victims of prejudice that has become institutionalized. Mariam, a fourteen-year-old from Ethiopia, has been destroyed by a male-dominated society’s preoccupation with female chastity. Circumcised to destroy her pleasure in sex, then sewed up to ensure her virginity, Mariam could not possibly have been impregnated by a man. Discovering that she is indeed pregnant, however, the people of her village have expelled her, intending her to die. To them, such actions are justified by social custom and religious law. Stanley, too, is a victim of social prejudice, his aspirations blocked by a whitedominated society’s insistence on black subjugation. Despite his achievements in college, despite his brilliance in his field, Stanley has been denied the kind of job he deserves. Because of his race, Stanley meets only rejection, which is equally humiliating, whether he is turned down outright or hypocritically offered a dead-end slot in a company that needs a token black. Though a brilliant businessman, Stanley lives at Eve’s, where he serves as the housekeeper and bouncer; there, he wears dresses and is known as Ms. Maple. Naylor’s jazz concert has a harmonious ending when all the characters come together for the birth and the ritual circumcision of Mariam’s baby boy. Afterward,

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however, the mother and child are parted. Since Mariam is to be a permanent resident of Eve’s, the baby will be taken to an orphan home, perhaps in time to be adopted. It is a sad ending—but then, as Bailey comments, life has more questions than answers. The Characters Although Bailey is not the only narrator in Bailey’s Café, his voice dominates the action of the novel; he is truly the “maestro” of the concert. He is also the loquacious man at the counter, observing others and, like them, trying to understand the meaning of life. Obviously, he has always been that kind of person. Even as a child, he was trying to guess how others felt—for example, the Van Morrisons, for whom his parents worked. As Bailey tells the story of his life, he will stop periodically to act out little interchanges between his parents, conversations with Nadine, even the chants of the men at boot camp. Beneath this outgoing personality, however, is a tormented person who is consumed by guilt because he benefited from the dropping of the atomic bomb. This other persona, denoted by italics, speaks in a poetic, if often profane, style, abandoning Bailey’s usual wisecracking mode. Interestingly, when Naylor reaches deep into the thoughts of Sister Carrie and Sugar Man in the second chapter of the book, she again uses italics to mark the movement from what they say or think on a superficial level to what they deeply feel. All the characters in “The Jam” except Sadie and Mariam are revealed in a fairly straightforward fashion. First, Bailey introduces them, and then they tell their stories to whomever is listening, perhaps to a reader who has by now been transported to the café. Each voice is unique. Ms. Maple’s complex, carefully constructed sentences are as different from the colloquial comments of Jesse Bell as those are from the childlike, fragmented speech of Sweet Esther, who relives her loss of faith and innocence at the age of twelve. Although for some reason Naylor chooses to tell Sadie’s story in the third person, there is really no difference between it and the first-person narratives. Naylor traces Sadie’s mental patterns so accurately that she comes to life on the page. In contrast, almost all of Mariam’s story is told by other people. She is introduced, surprisingly, by the usually silent Nadine. Naylor then records the thoughts of Mariam’s mother, beginning with her disappointment about the birth of a girl and ending with Mariam’s expulsion and her own walk into a ritual death. Perhaps to enhance the virgin-mother symbolism, Naylor keeps Mariam herself at a distance, penetrating her mind for only a few sentences and thus effectively denying her a voice. For this reason, of Naylor’s major characters, only Mariam is not fully developed. Themes and Meanings Although Bailey’s Café begins in a realistic manner, it soon takes on the qualities of Magical Realism. For example, the café is not really a café. In critical terms, it is the governing metaphor of the novel; in metaphysical terms, it represents a state of the human soul. As Bailey says, it is a place people go when they are “hanging on to the edge.” Therefore, the café appears only to people who are desperate, who have endured so much pain that they think they cannot go on living.

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The two other buildings on Naylor’s magical street also have symbolic significance. People who have reached the end of their own resources can raise money by selling their possessions at Gabe’s pawnshop or by selling their bodies at Eve’s bordello. There is a difference, however, between these two places. All that Gabe, the buyer of material goods, seems able to do is guide people like Mariam to the café. On the other hand, Eve snatches her residents from death and gives them the chance to feel cherished, not used, by being paid only in flowers. Sometimes, too, Eve intervenes to save them from themselves, as she does with Jesse Bell, and as she plans to do with Peaches. As Bailey says, however, some of those who come to the edge of life proceed to the end of life. These are the people who enter the front door and proceed right out the back, presumably into annihilation. Their only answer to pain is extinction, and Bailey’s Café does not prevent them from making that choice. If the darkness behind the café symbolizes death, it can also stimulate people to new efforts. When she is forcing Jesse to will herself into withdrawal, Eve opens the back door of the café and shows her first the void, which terrifies her, then her bedroom in her childhood home, and finally the kind of bathroom she has always dreamed about. When Jesse asks where she is, Eve replies, “Hell.” Given the gap between Jesse’s past innocence and lost hopes for the future, on one hand, and the reality of her present addiction, on the other, Eve’s answer is appropriate. Nevertheless, when Jesse clings to the door to keep from disappearing into the void, she is deciding against death, and when she moves into those rooms of her memories and her dreams, she is committing herself to life. The magical framework that Naylor has constructed offers some reason for hope. Although the world that her characters remember was filled with cruelty and intolerance, it was also filled with beauty and love. Sadie’s pretty, clean house, the New Orleans gardens where Eve learned to love flowers, the sweet potato pies that Jesse Bell used to inspire her husband—all of these are as much part of the characters’ lives as are the scars on their bodies and on their souls. Nevertheless, Naylor refuses to pretend that life is easy, even for a miraculously conceived baby. After his birth in a magic-filled room, after a naming ceremony that makes him both black and Jewish, Mariam’s little boy is taken from his mother and sent to an uncertain future. Bailey apologizes because he cannot provide a happier ending; however, the novel ends with a simple affirmation. “Life will go on,” Bailey says. In the context of the heartrending stories told by Naylor’s characters, this simple statement is a tribute to the human spirit. Critical Context The Women of Brewster Place (1982), which won the National Book Award, established Naylor as a gifted writer, worthy of comparison with Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. The next two novels she published, however, met with mixed reviews. While her exploration of the black middle class in Linden Hills (1985) was praised for its originality, some critics thought that the novel was flawed by Naylor’s obvious preoc-

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cupation with symbolism and her scrupulous adherence to the pattern of the Inferno section of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). Similarly, reviewers admired Mama Day (1988) for its synthesis of social satire and the oral tradition, but many believed that Naylor had overloaded her story with plot and symbolism, again attempting more than she was able to manage. Although an ornate and symbolic plot structure is also basic to Bailey’s Café, most critics have agreed that in this novel Naylor has successfully integrated form and content. Both the ingenious concert framework and the richly symbolic setting have been judged to be successful; far from getting in the way of her characters, the devices enable them to reveal themselves in all of their complexity. Most reviewers thus consider Bailey’s Café to be both a showcase for the author’s powers of invention and a triumph of Magical Realism. Moreover, in the conclusion of the novel, many critics have observed a change in tone from Naylor’s earlier works, which offered little hope to African Americans (who were seen as victims of the white establishment) and even less to black women (who were shown bound by sexism as well as by racism). In Bailey’s Café, in contrast, Naylor uses the sufferings of her characters as a basis for an affirmation of life and the possibility of spiritual transcendence. Bibliography Byerman, Keith. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Includes a chapter comparing the representations of desire in Bailey’s Café and Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992). Jones, Marie F. Review of Bailey’s Café, by Gloria Naylor. Library Journal 117 (September 1, 1992): 215. Succinct, useful review. Jones argues that the characters and their sufferings determine the direction of the novel. Calls the characterizations in Bailey’s Café Naylor’s most interesting since The Women of Brewster Place. Kaveney, Roz. “At the Magic Diner.” Review of Bailey’s Café, by Gloria Naylor. Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 1992, 20. An unfavorable review. Kaveney praises the book’s subject matter but argues that Bailey’s Café fails because of its structure. Kaveney calls the novel “a poor book from an admirable writer.” Naylor, Gloria. “Gloria Naylor.” Interview by Mickey Pearlman. In A Voice of One’s Own: Conversations with America’s Writing Women, by Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Superb interview by a major scholar. Pearlman enters the writer’s home, discusses some interesting biographical matters, and elicits significant opinions, particularly about women’s perceptions of space, memory, and identity. _______. Introduction to “Moon: Indigo, from Bailey’s Café.” Southern Review 28 (Summer, 1992): 502-503. Naylor looks back on her first four novels as a “quartet” conceived while she was writing The Women of Brewster Place. In each, the “content carved its own landscape” and determined its form. Bailey’s Café, “which addresses our perceptions of female sexuality,” demanded a jazz framework, with a blues base, which could show the “sadness embodied in any might-have-been.”

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Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison. “A Conversation.” Southern Review 21 (Summer, 1985): 567-593. Lengthy interview of Morrison conducted as a conversation between the two writers, who find common ground both as women and as members of the community of black women writers. A useful introduction to Naylor’s works. Stave, Shirley A., ed. Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Includes a chapter by Carol Bender and Roseanne Hoefel on the importance of empathy in Bailey’s Café. Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Bailey’s Café, by Gloria Naylor. Publishers Weekly 239 (June 15, 1992): 83. Favorable review, praising Naylor’s realistic picture of African American life in mid-century. Steinberg asserts that the novel’s Ms. Maple segment recalls the best fiction of Ralph Ellison. Wakefield, Dan. “Nobody Comes in Here with a Simple Story.” Review of Bailey’s Café, by Gloria Naylor. The New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1992, 11. Admires Naylor’s “virtuoso orchestration of survival, suffering, courage and humor.” Notes that the redemptive ending is not the “unearned kind” Bailey would shun, but one that both the characters and their creator have indeed earned. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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BANANA BOTTOM Author: Claude McKay (1889-1948) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Early 1900’s Locale: The town of Jubilee and the village of Banana Bottom, Jamaica First published: 1933 Principal characters: Tabitha (Bita) Plant, the protagonist, a twenty-two-year-old black girl who has been educated abroad Jordan Plant, Bita’s father, a prosperous landowner Malcolm Craig, a white Calvinist minister in Jubilee Priscilla Craig, Malcolm’s wife, also a minister Squire Gensir, a British aristocrat Herald Newton Day, a self-important seminarian Hopping Dick Delgado, a fast-talking dandy Jubban, Jordan Plant’s trusted foreman and Bita’s devoted protector The Novel Banana Bottom is the story of a young Jamaican woman’s discovery of her country, her people, and herself. The novel begins with the return to Jamaica of twentytwo-year-old Tabitha “Bita” Plant, who has been abroad for seven years. After a flashback in which he explains the reasons for her absence, McKay tells the story of Bita’s life from her homecoming to her marriage, concluding with a brief epilogue that shows her as a contented wife and mother. The tone of the book is detached, the pace leisurely. Like a loquacious village storyteller, McKay moves from episode to episode as if there were no direction to his narrative. When, at the end of Banana Bottom, Bita freely chooses a husband and a way of life, each of the earlier encounters takes on a new significance. It is then clear that every character, every incident, and every discussion in the novel has in some way affected Bita’s development. Although as the first native black girl to receive an English education, Bita Plant returns home a celebrity, she had very nearly been ruined in her childhood, when she had sexual intercourse with a half-crazy musical genius. Although he was charged with rape and sent away, Bita’s reputation was tarnished. Fortunately, her father, the prosperous farmer Jordan Plant, could turn to the white missionaries Malcolm and Priscilla Craig, who took Bita to their home in Jubilee. Later, the Craigs decided to use her as an experiment, to show how an English education could transform a native girl. What they did not expect was that Bita would return to Jamaica with a mind of her own.

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Bita’s vacillations between doing what is expected of her and making her own choices can be charted through her movements between her home in Jubilee, where the Craigs expect her to act in accordance with the rules of their strict denomination, and her home in Banana Bottom, where she has more latitude. After her return to Jamaica, Bita at first moves back in with the Craigs and, just as easily, accepts the plans they have made for her, even agreeing to marry another of their projects, the ministry student Herald Newton Day. Although she enjoys the activities at the mission, however, Bita soon becomes fascinated with her own culture, as represented by the effervescent horse-dealer and gambler Hopping Dick Delgado. Although she does not at the time realize it, when she sneaks away from the mission to go with him to functions of which the Craigs disapprove, Bita is beginning the process of rejecting Jubilee in favor of Banana Bottom and the culture of her own people. Additionally, the more Bita sees of her self-centered, self-important fiancé, the less she wants to spend her life with him. When her stepmother Naomi Plant (Anty Nommy) becomes ill, Bita is shocked to find herself secretly delighted, because in leaving the mission, she will be escaping from Herald. At Banana Bottom, Bita is free of the restraints that she always feels in Jubilee. She has long conversations with the freethinker Squire Gensir, a white British aristocrat, who places great value on native folklore and customs. She also comes to appreciate the power of Obi, the African god of evil, who may very well be responsible for Herald’s disgrace: Herald sexually abuses a nanny goat, an episode that ends his career in the church as well as any expectation that he will marry Bita. When Bita returns to Jubilee, however, it becomes clear that Bita’s unhappiness at the mission was not merely the result of Herald’s proximity but instead reflected her growing rebellion against the Craigs’ view of life. Simply because she feels so imprisoned, Bita declares her intention of marrying Hopping Dick. Desperate, the Craigs send for Anty Nommy, who first disposes of Bita’s suitor by appearing to expect an immediate wedding and then takes Bita home with her. It is obvious to everyone that Bita will never again be able to live at Jubilee. At Banana Bottom, Bita can at last decide her own destiny. Freed from the Craigs’ expectations, she comes to recognize the worth of her uncle’s trusted foreman, Jubban, who, though uneducated, is wise, courageous, and good. At a suitable time after the tragic deaths of Jordan Plant and both of the Craigs, Bita and Jubban are married in a double wedding, along with Hopping Dick, who has been captured by Bita’s friend Yoni Legge. At the end of the novel, Bita has inherited Squire Gensir’s property and, with Jubban and an increasing family, is enjoying the simple life of a wellto-do peasant. The Characters Since Banana Bottom is the story of Bita Plant’s self-discovery, it is not surprising that she is the only character who can be seen to develop in the course of the novel. Certainly, when Bita comes home to Jamaica, she is already more complex than the Craigs believe her to be. She loves and respects her adoptive parents, and initially she

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seems willing to fulfill their ambitions for her, especially since her parents are in agreement about her future. Bita, however, is still the same girl who for so long had run wild at Banana Bottom, and she is also the girl who threw herself into the arms of Crazy Bow because she was so overwhelmed by his music. She is also still a Jamaican. If she is exposed to her heritage, she will respond to it, and ironically, by encouraging intellectual curiosity, her European education has merely made her exposure a certainty. McKay does not, however, present his heroine as a person at the mercy of her emotions. Every time Bita sees something new, she first observes, then decides whether or not to participate. Her detachment is impressive. The moment she comes back to consciousness after fainting in religious ecstasy at a revival meeting, Bita begins to analyze her own reactions. Her development, then, is not merely accidental. Throughout the novel, Bita is busy making the most of every experience, watching herself and others in order to discover her true nature and to make herself into the person she wants to be. The other characters, though not as dynamic as Bita, are still fairly complex. Moreover, although McKay’s lengthy descriptions and explanations prevent the others from being stereotypes or caricatures, each is primarily important as an influence on Bita. For example, both of the Craigs are complex characters, with the inconsistencies and irrationalities common to all human beings. Malcolm Craig is a kindly man who combines a lifelong dedication to the cause of black freedom with a sincere belief in a religious faith that would deny the black heritage. Priscilla Craig, too, can be compassionate and loving; unfortunately, she is so concerned with the opinions of others, which she rightly realizes can affect the mission, that she seems incapable of spontaneity or even of admitting that she has marital relations with her husband. Nevertheless, although McKay makes the Craigs understandable and even sympathetic characters, he also uses them to represent the system that Bita must reject if she is to develop. Similarly, Belle Black, Yoni Legge, Hopping Dick, and the disreputable Tack Tally are complex characters. The daughter of a happily unmarried couple, Belle has a fine voice but unimpressive moral standards. Yoni, the pretty young sewing-mistress, enjoys her status in the community but periodically succumbs to her passions. Despite his strutting, Hopping Dick is easily cowed when he is threatened with marriage to Bita, and he is just as easily persuaded to marry Yoni, the mother of his baby. Tack Tally, the leader of the rum-shop loudmouths, is also weaker than he pretends to be. When he cannot find the witch doctor to remove a curse that he believes has been placed upon him, he commits suicide. While these complicated individuals are interesting in their own right, again their primary importance is the fact that they represent one of Bita’s options: the spontaneous world that the Craigs deny, a world of dancing, drinking, and fornication, a world in which the African gods still hold sway. There are several minor characters in Banana Bottom who reflect McKay at his comic best, such as the gossipy Sister Phibby Patroll and the insufferable Herald Newton Day, whose downfall is hilarious, even though McKay makes no preparation

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whatsoever for it. Among all of his characters, major and minor, only one fails to come to life. In Squire Gensir, McKay was describing his own mentor and patron, the English student of Jamaican dialect Walter Jekyll. Unfortunately, Gensir lectures; he does not live. Thus even though he is important to Bita’s development, as in real life Jekyll was important to McKay, the Squire remains a hazy figure, a voice from the author’s past, rather than a creation for his novel. Themes and Meanings Banana Bottom is based on a less simplistic view of the black experience than some critics have assumed. A close look at the novel shows how far McKay’s underlying meaning is from the easy dichotomy between a white society of repression, which is evil, and a black culture of expression, which is good, with all the characters lined up on one side or the other. One of McKay’s major themes has little to do with that kind of dichotomy. His Jamaica is almost entirely black, and the social hierarchy that he finds so stultifying is maintained by blacks, not by whites. The reason that the highly educated, intelligent, charming Bita can aspire no higher than her seminarian is that, in the view of her own society, no one so dark in skin color can marry a professional man or a government official. Granted, the Jamaican system is based on the old white colonial belief in black inferiority; however, it is not whites who enforce this social stratification. By showing how this system traps people of unquestionable ability at an arbitrary level in society, McKay is arguing for a change of mind within the black community itself. An even more important theme of Banana Bottom is the issue of what lifestyle is most fulfilling for a black person, specifically for an intelligent, well-educated individual such as Bita. Again, it has been easy for critics to see the prudish and repressed Priscilla Craig as the representative of white society and Herald Newton Day as an example of a black man destroyed when he attempts, like his white sponsor, to repress his black sexual vitality. McKay, however, does not make arbitrary classifications of either his whites or his blacks. In Malcolm Craig’s dedication to black freedom and autonomy and in Squire Gensir’s passion for black culture, McKay shows that some whites are capable not only of kindness but also of selflessness. Similarly, he uses two of Bita’s suitors to show that black people are not necessarily noble. Certainly both Hopping Dick Delgado and Tack Tally are unworthy of McKay’s heroine. It is not true, as several writers have suggested, that the reason she does not marry Hopping Dick Delgado is that he is not the marrying kind. In the first place, Bita admits to herself that she has decided to be in love with Hopping Dick only because Priscilla Craig has opposed her seeing him. Nor is Hopping Dick a confirmed bachelor. At the end of the novel, he does get married; in fact, he marries Bita’s best friend, Yoni Legge, in the same ceremony at which Bita is united with Jubban. If McKay had really wanted to immerse Bita in the kind of purposeless, irresponsible life that he had seemed to glorify in his two earlier novels, he would likely have had her become involved not with Hopping Dick, who can obviously be placed on the

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road to bourgeois respectability, but with the drunken braggart Tack Tally. It is not Bita’s repressive education but her common sense that causes her to find Tack’s pretenses of love so ridiculous. Finally, however, Tack is a tragic, not comic, figure, used to show that if the Craigs’ brand of Christian fundamentalism can be destructive, so can the fear of Obi and the dependence on witch doctors. It is his adherence to another set of false values that brings Tack to suicide. Unlike both Herald and Tack, the man whom Bita chooses is a truly free one who finds the meaning of life not in the supernatural but in nature itself, in his wife, in his family, in his own sexual vitality, and in the land to which he is devoting his life. Instead of denying Bita the expression of her own identity, Jubban encourages her even in those interests that are not his own. The life that Bita and Jubban build together, then, is not a rejection of one culture or another but a fusion of the best of two worlds. In his Edenic conclusion, McKay states the theme of Banana Bottom, as Bita muses about her union with Jubban and with Jamaica: “Her music, her reading, her thinking were the flowers of her intelligence and he the root in the earth upon which she was grafted, both nourished by the same soil.” Critical Context In the 1920’s, Claude McKay was considered one of the titans of the Harlem Renaissance. In his introduction to McKay’s Harlem Shadows (1922), Max Eastman rather surprisingly called the volume “the first significant” poetic work by a black. Five years later, even though black critics including W. E. B. Du Bois were offended by its depiction of African Americans, McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) was immensely popular. White critics, at least, praised it for its realism. McKay’s second novel, Banjo (1929), which described the adventures of a group of black seamen beached by choice in Marseilles, was financially successful, although still annoying to many black critics. By 1933, when McKay’s last novel, Banana Bottom, was published, the Great Depression had hit. Through no fault of the writer or the work itself, the book was a financial failure. Although McKay eventually found funding to bring out his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), Banana Bottom was the last of his creative works. Ironically, many critics now believe that it is also his best. It is true that those who continue to interpret McKay’s novels as unthinking glorifications of primitivism tend either to focus on his poetry or to dismiss him altogether as a writer whose significance is purely historical. Recent studies, such as those by Wayne F. Cooper and Tyrone Tillery, have revealed subtleties in McKay’s fiction that had been overlooked. It is now increasingly thought that Claude McKay’s fiction may well surpass his poetry and that Banana Bottom, the finest of his three novels, is alone worthy to ensure his high standing among African American writers. Bibliography Cobham, Rhonda. “Jekyll and Claude: The Erotics of Patronage in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom.” In Queer Diasporas, edited by Cindy Patton and Benigno

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Sánchez-Eppler. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Reads Banana Bottom from the point of view of queer literary theory, emphasizing the role of whiteness in his novel and the use of the patronage relationship as a coded representation of homosexuality. Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Major biography, primarily intended to show that although McKay was an important figure among Harlem Renaissance writers, he was in no way typical of the group but disagreed with them in important ways. A sound and illuminating work. _______. Introduction to The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948, edited by Wayne F. Cooper. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. Excellent summary of McKay’s life and his literary development. Considers Banana Bottom the high point of McKay’s novels. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Sees McKay’s primary theme, “the superiority of the primitive black to the middle-class Negro and to the white,” as untenable. Argues that despite McKay’s obvious talent, little of his work will last. In addition to lacking a sound intellectual basis, Davis claims, McKay’s fiction is poorly constructed. Frederick, Rhonda D. “‘With Him Watch Chain/ A Knock Him Belly’: Migration, Masculinity, and the Colón Man in Banana Bottom, “Window,” and Tropic Death.” In “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. Study of the representation of foreign laborers imported to construct the Panama Canal in literary and historical texts. Reads Banana Bottom’s representation of the Colón Man and places it in the context of Caribbean literary traditions. Giles, James B. Claude McKay. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Intended to correct earlier assessments of McKay as an uncompromising revolutionary and an obdurate primitivist. Giles also insists that McKay’s place as a major figure in African American literature rests on his novels, rather than his poetry. McLeod, A. L., ed. Claude McKay: Centennial Studies. New Delhi, India: Sterling, 1992. Collection of essays presented at a 1990 international conference held in Mysore, India, on “Claude McKay, the Harlem Renaissance, and Caribbean Literature.” Of particular interest to readers of Banana Bottom are McLeod’s “An Ideal Woman: Claude McKay’s Composite Image” and Emmanuel S. Nelson’s “Community and Individual Identity in the Novels of Claude McKay.” Rahming, Melvin B. The Evolution of the West Indian’s Image in the Afro-American Novel. Millwood, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1986. In an attempt to explain the hostility often seen between two groups with a common African heritage, Rahming looks at the ways in which West Indians are shown by African American writers, in contrast to the self-images presented in novels by West Indians themselves. Includes a perceptive discussion of Banana Bottom. Ramesh, Kotti Sree, and Kandula Nirupa Rani. Claude McKay: The Literary Identity

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from Jamaica to Harlem and Beyond. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Includes a chapter reading Banana Bottom as a kind of literary homecoming for the expatriate McKay. Stoff, Michael B. “Claude McKay and the Cult of Primitivism.” In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Asserts that McKay’s novels reflect his commitment to primitivism. The theme of Banana Bottom, Stoff argues, is the conflict between the repressive “civilized Christ-God” and the real ruler of Jamaica, the “African Obeah-God of freedom and primeval sensuality.” Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Critical biography that emphasizes the political environment in which McKay lived and wrote. Sees him as typifying “the larger problems of identity, vocation, and politics” faced by black artists of his era. Includes an extensive bibliography. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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THE BATTLE OF JERICHO Author: Sharon M. Draper (1948) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Early twenty-first century Locale: Cincinnati, Ohio First published: 2003 Principal characters: Jericho Prescott, a trumpet player who is invited to pledge the Warriors of Distinction, an exclusive high school club Joshua Prescott, Jericho’s cousin and best friend, who also pledges the Warriors of Distinction Dana Wolfe, the only female pledge, who snuck into the Warriors of Distinction to prove that girls should be allowed to participate Arielle Gresham, Jericho’s new girlfriend, who loves the idea that he will be a Warrior of Distinction Rick Sharp, a fellow student and the pledge master of the Warriors of Distinction Eddie Mahoney, a senior Warrior of Distinction, who has it in for Dana during pledge week Mr. Boston, Jericho’s math teacher, who encourages him to report the club’s hazing practices Kofi Freeman, Jericho’s friend and fellow pledge Cedric Prescott, Jericho’s father, a police officer who never pledged the Warriors of Distinction in high school Brock Prescott, Joshua’s father and a former Warrior of Distinction Mr. Tambori, Jericho’s music teacher The Novel When Jericho Prescott and his friends are invited to join a prestigious school club, they are thrilled and honored, but what should be harmless fun quickly turns sinister. Jericho, Joshua, and Kofi are among fifteen high school boys invited to join an exclusive club called the Warriors of Distinction. The boys are eager to get involved, because club membership comes with popularity and privileges. First, the boys are asked to help with a holiday toy drive for children. The drive goes well, but shortly afterward, they each receive an ominous phone call inviting them to meet the Warriors at a warehouse at midnight. Jericho decides to sneak out of the house to participate. From that point on, Jericho

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finds himself in morally ambiguous territory. He wants to be a Warrior, but he feels that some of the group’s activities are questionable. The pledges gather at midnight to take an oath of secrecy. One girl, Dana, secretly infiltrates the group, causing an uproar. The Warriors decide to let her continue pledging, because she has already witnessed too many of the club’s inner secrets, but the elder Warriors warn her that the road will not be easy. Eddie makes it his mission to humiliate Dana, hoping she will quit. Pledge week begins. The pledges are made to wear matching shirts, run in circles, steal, and perform degrading tasks, such as eating earthworms and climbing into a filthy Dumpster. They are called “pledge slime,” beaten, threatened, and made to suck the toes of the older Warriors. They are expected to give up all other activities and be loyal to the club. Jericho, an accomplished trumpet player, even forsakes an opportunity to perform for a Juilliard professor in order to be with the Warriors. On the last night of pledge week, the Warriors give the pledges alcohol. They lead them upstairs to make the “Leap of Faith,” jumping out a second-story window onto a pallet of mattresses and mud on the ground. The alcohol dulls their inhibitions, so despite being frightened, all the pledges jump. Joshua is the last to leap. He falls headfirst, striking his head on a rock at the edge of the soft landing spot. An ambulance comes, but it is too late. Joshua dies. The students, parents, and community are shocked to learn what the Warriors of Distinction asked their pledges to do. They are just as appalled that the pledges agreed to go through with all the hazing activities and to keep their vow of secrecy. The Characters Characters in The Battle of Jericho run the gamut from kind and well-intentioned to deliberately cruel and dangerous. The challenge for the central character, Jericho, is to determine the boundary between those two extremes. Jericho and his peers believe the Warriors of Distinction is a club that focuses on service projects and brotherhood. As they begin the pledge process, however, the seemingly good-natured fun of pledge week quickly enters a morally gray area. Jericho, Josh, Kofi, and Dana must ask themselves how badly they want to be part of the group—and whether the cost of membership is worth paying. Readers experience Jericho’s struggle with these questions. As the severity of the pledge week exercises increases, Jericho’s anxiety increases, but he silently goes along with everything he is asked to do. Through Jericho, the story explores the difficulty of trusting one’s personal judgment in the face of perceived power. The Warriors are merely other schoolkids, yet Jericho cannot bring himself to challenge them. He feels nervous, ashamed, and guilty over not stopping Eddie’s abuse of Dana, not standing up for himself when he is being degraded, wanting to join a group that would not consider including his disabled friend, and so on. His struggles with these feelings, however, do not prevent him from following the Warriors’ instructions. He fears losing his girlfriend and becoming an outcast if he walks away from the Warriors. Through peer pressure, Jericho is driven to feel that membership in the club is the

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most important single thing he will ever have the chance to gain—and that to lose it would destroy his life. To the extent that the story has a villain, it is Eddie. Eddie has it in for Dana, and he exercises power over her in ways that are deliberately harsh and often sexist. He is motivated by deep anger and a difficult home life, but his actions are never significantly challenged by the other, more conscientious Warriors or by any of the pledges. Jericho feels helpless to stop Eddie’s abuse, not recognizing his own power in the situation. Adults play diverse roles in the novel as well. Brock is a proud alumnus of the Warriors, and he encourages the children to join, as do the club’s faculty advisors. Cedric and Mr. Tambori are more neutral observers, though both encourage Jericho to value his future over membership in the club. They try to talk him into attending the trumpet competition where he would perform for a Juilliard professor. Mr. Boston challenges the premise that the Warriors’ behavior is appropriate. Jericho hears the math teacher’s opinions, but he does not absorb them until it is too late. Mr. Boston’s comments heighten dramatic tension by educating readers about the danger of hazing. Themes and Meanings The central issues explored in The Battle of Jericho relate to peer pressure, exclusivity, and social acceptance. The quest to feel accepted by one’s peers is a central aspect of high school life, and Jericho is confronted with the fine line between positive, character-building challenges and dangerous, degrading hazing activities. Following Jericho through the pledge experience, readers can see the points along the way where he crosses that line. Different readers may see the line appear at different places in the story: when he sneaks out without permission, when he steals, or when he participates in the first pledge stunt or the last one. The story challenges its readers to judge these events for themselves and to consider how far they might go in their own lives in order to fit in. The novel’s characters recognize but fail to heed the warning signs of hazing, because they are convinced that no price is too high to pay for the benefits of membership. The book’s conclusion demonstrates that they are wrong. The book’s impact is stronger for the way it allows the worst-case scenario to play out. It may be read as a cautionary tale, but on a deeper level it is as much about the struggle as it is about the end result of making the wrong choices. When people blur moral lines that bring minor consequences, the novel suggests, they will more readily blur lines that bring major ones. Critical Context Sharon M. Draper has said that the idea for The Battle of Jericho came from a young reader she met who asked her to write about the challenges of peer pressure. The author took that seed of an idea and solicited feedback from other students, who agreed that many teens will go to extreme lengths to fit in. Thus, The Battle of Jericho emerged as a book that speaks to real issues dealt with by real students in schools across the United States. The novel was critically acclaimed by School Library Jour-

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nal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. The Battle of Jericho also received a 2004 Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. Bibliography Bishop, Rudine Simms. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. History and analysis of the evolution of African American writing for children and young adults; covers developments from the oral culture of slave narratives through contemporary African American writers for young audiences, including Draper. Draper, Sharon M. November Blues. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. The companion novel to The Battle of Jericho; in the wake of the pledge stunt tragedy, Jericho, November, and their friends and family struggle to deal with Joshua’s death. Ralston, Jennifer. “Anger Management and Violence in Society.” School Library Journal, October 1, 2003. Discusses prevalence of anger issues and violence among youth and suggests that books touching on these topics can help young people deal with them; discusses The Battle of Jericho as one example. Kekla Magoon

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BEETLECREEK Author: William Demby (1922) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: The Depression era Locale: The fictional neighborhood of Beetlecreek, West Virginia First published: 1950 Principal characters: Bill Trapp, an old white man who lives near the largely black community of Beetlecreek Johnny Johnson, an African American teenager who befriends Trapp David Diggs, Johnny’s uncle Mary Diggs, David’s wife Edith Johnson, an old friend who entices David into an affair The Novel Beetlecreek is divided into four sections, all told by an omniscient third-person narrator whose focus shifts from one main character to another. The short first section opens with Bill Trapp, the old white man, scaring four black teenaged boys out of his apple tree. Actually, he means to welcome them more than frighten them, for he has lived a lonely life since coming to Beetlecreek, a white man on the margin of a black neighborhood with no ties to anyone of either race. Johnny does not get out of the apple tree in time to run, and he accepts Bill’s unexpected invitation to sit and drink a glass of the old man’s homemade cider. When David Diggs, Johnny’s uncle, comes looking for the boy, he joins in their conviviality, and the result is that David invites Bill to join him and Johnny that night at Telrico’s, the local tavern. For Bill, the boozy evening at Telrico’s is a breakthrough to the human companionship he has had to do without for most of his life. His joy is painful, because it clearly presages disappointment to come. Indeed, when David and Johnny leave Bill following their beer-drinking fellowship, David warns Johnny, “Don’t bother saying anything to your Aunt Mary about Bill Trapp being there tonight.” Whereas the novel does not stress racial discrimination, David’s caution to Johnny betrays his uneasiness about his own hospitality at the same time that his kindness to a lonely old man reveals that he is above racial barriers to human kindness. Meanwhile, Mary Diggs is daydreaming about the Missionary Guild’s soon-to-bestaged Fall Festival and the acclaim she hopes it will bring “Mary’s Bestest Gingercake.” The topic obsesses her. Part 2 develops the important theme of Johnny’s loss of innocence at the hands of Baby Boy and his boys’ gang of “Nightriders,” who take Johnny to their shack, introduce him to pornography, and shock him by wringing the neck of a bird that flies into

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the rundown little building. One whole chapter tells the story of Bill Trapp’s childhood as an orphan, his closeness to his sister, Hilda, and his desolate years following a traveling carnival around West Virginia before he bought the little farm in Beetlecreek. When Bill gives some pumpkins to two small black girls, he conceives the idea of holding a picnic for local children, black and white, a kind instinct that will cost him much pain. Part 3, the third and longest section, brings these characters together and features the affair between David Diggs and Edith Johnson, who has come home for her mother’s funeral. Indifferent to the proprieties of her situation, Edith takes command of David at Telrico’s and determinedly revives his old infatuation for her from his college days. While their little drama is moving ahead inevitably, Bill holds his picnic, only to be victimized by a vicious little white girl called Pokay. This child’s wickedness consists of looking at Bill’s innocuous anatomy textbook and then stirring up a story that makes the innocent hermit out to be a pervert—a slander that soon spreads through both the white community and the black. Part 3 ends with Mary preparing intensively for the festival, the community gossiping about Bill Trapp, and Johnny feeling confused about many things that are oppressing him. Part 4 treats the climactic events on the night of the Fall Festival. Johnny is summoned by the Nightriders for his initiation into the gang and charged with a terrible assignment: to burn down Bill Trapp’s shanty. Johnny musters the will to carry out this act, and as he is fleeing the blazing building he meets Bill. Johnny’s immediate reaction is to swing his gasoline can at the old man, knocking him limp on the ground. While Johnny is letting himself be corrupted by the gang, Mary is achieving even greater success than she had dared to pray for; meanwhile, David and Edith are meeting at the bus station to leave together for Detroit. With these developments, Beetlecreek ends abruptly, leaving readers to fill in for themselves the fates of its various human schemers. The Characters Bill Trapp is a man devastated by loneliness. Every night when the sun sets he drinks himself to sleep, sometimes dreaming of Harry Simsoe’s Continental Show, the carnival with which he traveled as a laborer for many years. He and his sister, Hilda, were adopted as orphans by a Mrs. Haines; as a child, he always thought of himself as ugly. When Mrs. Haines died, Bill and Hilda had to fend for themselves with what jobs they could find, Hilda as a maid and Bill as a garage helper and later a carnival hand. Bill’s only friend with the circus had been a drunken Italian performer who was devoted to an ancient hound dog. Bill and the Italian even ordered a set of books, one of which contains the anatomy text with which the girl Pokay later incriminates Bill. When the Italian dies, Bill retires in the town where he finds himself—Ridgeville— and buys the little patch of farmland near Beetlecreek. He has been there ten years when the story begins. When Johnny Johnson comes to live with the Diggses, he is an innocent youth with no ill will toward anyone. At the fateful moment he discovers Johnny in the apple tree, Bill ends his self-imposed alienation from other humans by welcoming Johnny, and it

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appears that the black adolescent and the old white man may establish a friendship satisfying to both. Johnny’s corruption by Baby Boy and his delinquent Nightriders is swift, however, and Johnny’s torching of Bill’s home is a shocking close to their story. Johnny’s introduction to evil becomes simultaneously his initiation rite and his damnation. David Diggs has the potential for tragedy. He is presented as a young man intent on making his way by hard work and good behavior, only to find himself trapped by his own weakness: His girlfriend is pregnant, and he marries her as his honor demands. His plight is described succinctly: “Marrying the girl was like jumping over a bridge to end a terrible nightmare.” Sadly, the child is born dead. David Diggs is basically good, but he is weak. Mary Diggs is one-dimensional. She comes to life only in her longing for social prestige attained through the Missionary Guild, where she aspires to the same role that she sees her white employer, Mrs. Pinkerton, enjoying in her society. Her vision, though, does not seem to go beyond “Mary’s Bestest Gingercake.” Edith Johnson, the archetypal temptress, evinces no feeling for anyone. Her world is bounded by her own vanity, expressed mainly in the one role in which she has always starred: inciting the admiration and sexual interest of men. She is a cold person despite the sexual heat she generates, and woe to the men, such as David, who are drawn into her circle of attraction. Themes and Meanings Demby’s narrative method in Beetlecreek is simple: He constructs a series of short chapters composed largely of dialogue. The result is a readable story that eschews any modernist techniques and relies on conventional character development and plot complication. Beetle images occur several times, reinforcing the novel’s title, but symbolism plays no significant role in the working out of things. At one point, Johnny’s state of mind is described thus: And Black Enameled Death that he had seen represented everything of Beetlecreek and was like the restlessness and dissatisfaction of the birds, only inside him, swarming and swooping inside him, filling him with vague fear and shame, preparing him for something, telling him, warning him, separating him from things that were happening around him apart from him, pulling him along toward things he could not see or know.

The menace that Johnny senses here foreshadows the moral collapse that overtakes him finally. Bill Trapp is a marginal man, living on the fringe of life for all of his lonely years. His childhood was marginal, with its only solace his love for his sister, Hilda. His wandering carnival years were empty except for his brief friendship with the Italian performer. After leaving the carnival, he has settled in a boundary area between the black community of Beetlecreek and the white business district of Ridgeville, a social limbo made worse by his extraordinary shyness. His comparative poverty estranges

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him from white society, and his color makes problematic any friendship with the African Americans he lives among. Racial animosities, though, do not intrude in Beetlecreek. Bill feels no prejudice against African Americans. He is, if anything, drawn to his Beetlecreek neighbors by a sense of their shared exclusion from the larger world dominated by powerful whites. Even though Johnny commits a terrible sin against Bill, he does not act out of racial hatred. Johnny is victimized mostly by his own innocence and his human need to belong somewhere, a need that he holds in common with Bill. Ironically, it is a need that eventually destroys both of them. If there is a villain in Beetlecreek, it is the white girl Pokay, who poisons Bill’s image among both African Americans and whites by spreading the false story that he is a sexual pervert. That this act of meanness should ensue from the kind efforts of a lonely man hoping to create a bond with the children—both black and white—who come around his place is particularly painful. If meant as a comment on the wickedness lurking in human nature, it is depressingly effective. The cruelty of the Nightriders is more understandable, if not any more forgivable, as a kind of juvenile viciousness that everyone recognizes, but Pokay’s malice has a motivelessness about it that hints at something darker in human nature. Many readers will be frustrated by the ending of Beetlecreek, which leads up to the climactic events of the evening of the Fall Festival but offers no hint of a denouement. What happens to Bill after Johnny knocks him flat with the gasoline can? Does he live? What happens to Johnny? Is redemption open to him? What will become of David and Edith after they arrive in Detroit on their bus? Will David return shamefaced to Beetlecreek after his fling? How will Mary react to her husband’s betrayal? The omniscient narrator takes the story to its climax and then abandons it, rejecting any gradual working out of the crises precipitated by the characters’ reckless actions. Beetlecreek has a beginning and a middle, but no traditional end. Readers are left to invent their own closures; in that respect, Beetlecreek is fashionable beyond its 1950 date of publication. Critical Context Beetlecreek has often been out of print, and William Demby is practically unknown. It was published before many important advances in civil rights for African Americans and before the barriers came down to admit the coarsest realism in speech. For these reasons, the book might strike modern readers as quaint. The black and white communities in Beetlecreek coexist in a peaceful symbiosis that does not reflect any of the injustices that were common at the time; in this respect, the dramatization of life in Beetlecreek is perhaps unrealistic. At the same time, however, there emerges a picture of a black community that is settled and self-sustaining, with ordinary people going about their business in a culture untroubled by drugs and violence. The tableaux of life in the local barbershop, for example, are pure Norman Rockwell in their comforting normality, and the excitement stirred up by the Fall Festival evokes a Middle American ritual

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familiar to people of many other racial, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. Demby does not try to represent the speech of any of his characters by dialect spellings, mispronunciations, or any other idiosyncrasies. The effect is in keeping with the general movement of the novel’s tendency to minimize racial differences rather than stress them in the name of cultural uniqueness. Beetlecreek may seem dated to modern readers, but it pleads for a vision of racial harmony and is certainly wise and up-todate in doing so. Bibliography Bayliss, John F. “Beetlecreek: Existentialist or Human Document?” Negro Digest 19 (November, 1969): 70-74. Bayliss disputes Robert Bone’s argument for a dominating theme of existentialist choice as central to Beetlecreek. For Bayliss, the novel dramatizes human dilemmas that can be easily understood without resort to the grim visions of modern philosophies of despair. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Bone discusses Beetlecreek in a chapter on “The Contemporary Negro Novel,” finding in it a parable on existential freedom. David Diggs is caught between Bill Trapp and Edith, and chooses the course that leads away from the good. Similarly, Johnny is destroyed by the forces that draw him into the gang. Christensen, Peter G. “William Demby.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Provides a critical biography of Demby, as well as a bibliography of works by and about him. Fabre, Geneviève, and Klaus Benesch, eds. African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds: Consciousness and Imagination. New York: Rodopi, 2004. Includes an essay by Benesch on Demby and African American modernism. Hall, James C. Afterword to Beetlecreek, by William Demby. Jackson, Miss.: Banner Books, 1998. Reevaluation of and commentary upon Beetlecreek by a Demby scholar at the University of Alabama. Margolies, Edward. Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro Authors. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968. Stresses Demby’s realistic style and the existential themes of Beetlecreek, which are especially suitable in a treatment of black life in America. Margolies observes of the persecution of Bill Trapp: “Thus Negro life in all its deathly aspects is the mirror image of white society.” Marowski, Daniel G., and Roger Matuz, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 53. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. The entry on Demby includes a good biographical sketch and excellent excerpts from the sparse commentary on his novels. O’Brien, John. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. Interesting comments by Demby on the genesis of Beetlecreek: He recalls that he had fallen in love with a woman in Salzburg, Austria; when she went out with someone else, he got angry and wrote the novel’s closing scene. Frank Day

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BELOVED Author: Toni Morrison (1931Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1850-1874 Locale: Kentucky and Ohio First published: 1987

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Principal characters: Sethe, an escaped slave Beloved, the physical manifestation of the murdered daughter of Sethe Paul D, a former slave and an old friend of Sethe, who becomes her lover Denver, the last child born to Sethe The Novel Beloved moves back and forth through time, telling in flashbacks the story of the characters’ past as slaves. Throughout the narrative, readers learn the background of the characters and the pertinent incidents of their slavery. Beloved is killed by her mother, who will not allow her daughter to be returned to slavery. As the ghost of a woman of twenty, the age the baby would have been if it had survived, Beloved haunts the Ohio house where Sethe and her youngest daughter, Denver, live; Beloved is the past brought to life in the present. Before the spirit of Beloved is manifested in flesh, she is seen as a “baby ghost” who haunts her family and her house. Sethe once belonged to Mr. Garner, a humane master who treats his slaves well. Mr. Garner purchases Sethe at the age of thirteen to replace the recently freed Baby Suggs. Sethe marries Halle Suggs, Baby Suggs’s son, who fathers every one of her four children; such monogamy was the exception rather than the rule in slavery. With the death of Mr. Garner, and the coming of his brother, “schoolteacher,” and his nephews, Sethe and the other slaves experience the full degradation and inhumanity of slavery. Schoolteacher beats the male slaves and deprives them of their guns. He treats his brother’s slaves as property, keeping a record of their behavior as part of his scientific experimentation with them. Schoolteacher measures their heads and numbers their teeth. When Sethe learns that schoolteacher’s intentions may also include the eventual selling of her children, she resolves to escape North to freedom. Sethe and Halle make plans to take the Underground Railroad to Ohio to join Baby Suggs. Sethe succeeds in getting her children on the Underground Railroad, but before she can join them, she is violated by schoolteacher’s nephews, who brutally beat her while she is pregnant with her fourth child. Pregnant, barefoot, and mutilated, Sethe escapes to Ohio to join her mother-in-law and her already crawling baby girl,

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Beloved. She arrives in Cincinnati with Denver, her fourth child, who was born en route. Halle, her husband, fails to escape and is driven crazy from having witnessed the crime against Sethe, which he could not prevent. Because schoolteacher values Sethe for her childbearing capabilities, he decides to capture her and return her and her four children to slavery. Sethe is nursed back to health by her mother-in-law before schoolteacher finds her. Sethe, rather than allow her children to be returned to slavery, kills Beloved and attempts to kill her other children as well. After the killing of Beloved and the appearance of the baby ghost, Baby Suggs takes to her bed to die, and Sethe’s sons, Buglar and Howard, leave the house, driven away by the ghost. Eight years later, Paul D, another former slave from the Garner plantation, arrives at Sethe’s house seeking Sethe and Baby Suggs. He drives out the spirit of the baby ghost, striking it with a table and ordering it to get out. The baby ghost returns later as a twenty-year-old spirit that succeeds in taking over Sethe’s mind, body, and heart. Beloved follows Sethe everywhere, questions her, and feeds on her until Sethe deteriorates physically and mentally. Meanwhile, Beloved grows fat and appears in this guise to the women of the community, who come to drive her out. When Denver finds Sethe is no longer able to provide for the family, she ventures out of the house to find food. Denver has once attended a school taught by Lady Jones, and she knows only two places to go, her mother’s former place of work and the house of the lady who once taught her. Lady Jones offers Denver food and relays the plight of Denver’s family to the neighbors, who join in leaving food where Denver can find it. Denver, by returning the bowls and plates to their respective owners, is able gradually to rejoin the community and find a job to provide for her family. The community of women, led by Ella, who had helped Sethe when she first came to Ohio, is incensed upon learning of the intrusion of the ghost into the lives of Sethe and Denver and its debilitating effect on the family. The women converge upon Sethe’s house, singing songs and bringing all the magic and charms they know of in order to rid the house of the vengeful spirit. When Denver’s employer approaches the house to pick up Denver for work, Sethe relives the visit of schoolteacher, and she picks up an ice pick with murderous intentions. Beloved thus vanishes. Paul D, who had previously been seduced by Beloved and who had left after hearing about Sethe’s murder of the baby girl, returns to the house and finds that Sethe has taken to the “keeping room” and given up on life. As the novel ends, he attempts to infuse a will to live into Sethe by endeavoring to make her realize her own self-worth. The Characters The novel takes its name from the character Beloved, a ghost. Beloved was killed by her mother, Sethe, as a baby to keep her from being returned to slavery by her owner, schoolteacher, who has come to Ohio to reclaim his slave property. As a result, the opening lines of the novel state that the house where Sethe, her mother-inlaw, Baby Suggs, and her daughter, Denver, live is spiteful and full of a baby’s

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venom. The frightful atmosphere caused by the antics of the baby ghost causes Beloved’s brothers, Howard and Buglar, to run away by the time they are thirteen. Subsequently, Beloved walks out of the water a fully dressed woman of twenty, the age the murdered baby would have been if she had lived. The author reveals the character of Beloved through the thoughts, emotions, and reactions of Sethe, Denver, and Paul D (Beloved’s uncle and Sethe’s lover). Sethe is at first flattered by Beloved’s quiet devotion and adoration, which pleases her. Denver is devoted to the care and protection of her ghostly sister, but Paul D is suspicious of Beloved. He notices that she is “shining” and questions her closely concerning her origins. Sethe notices that Beloved vexes Paul D, and he is eventually run out of the house and seduced by Beloved. Moreover, Denver notices “how greedy” Beloved is to hear Sethe talk, and that the questions Beloved asks—such as “where are your diamonds?”—are perplexing since she did not understand how Beloved could know of such things. As a result of her murder, Beloved has a need for retribution, which she seeks by literally using up her mother with her constant and insistent demands for time and nurturing. Beloved’s murder is the cause of Sethe’s constant state of guilt and Denver’s alienation from the community. The efforts of Sethe to provide unity and support for herself and her daughters after Beloved’s return are dramatically revealed in the iceskating scene. Beloved, Denver, and Sethe skate on a frozen pond holding hands and bracing one another. The three cannot stay upright for long, however, and the author states that “nobody saw them falling.” Sethe’s inability to hold out physically or mentally against Beloved’s need for vengeance and constant attention eventually leaves her jobless and confined to the house. Beloved takes the best of everything. Denver is forced out into the community to provide for the family; moreover, the community is forced to come to the family’s home to rid it of the invasion of the ghost. A replay of the scene that caused her murder causes Beloved to disappear, and Sethe takes to Baby Suggs’s dying bed with “no plans at all.” Ironically, Sethe’s wasting away is paralleled by Denver’s emergence, thus allowing the rounding out of Denver’s personality. As a result of Beloved’s disruption of the household, Denver becomes acquainted with her community, and that community gives Denver the help and support that she and her family need to survive. Denver’s shyness is overcome, and she finds a job to provide for her family; however, this job brings her white employer to her home, an episode that in turn causes the flight of Beloved and allows Denver’s emergence into full maturity. Denver’s thoughts are revealed through a stream-of-consciousness technique, and she is the first to recognize that Beloved is “the white dress that had knelt with her mother in the keeping room, the true-to-life presence of the baby that had kept her company for most of her life.” In fact, Denver begins to come alive in the novel when Beloved enters the household, for her mind begins to work fervently trying to understand the acts and desires of the spiritual presence that has entered her life. Morrison, therefore, uses a variety of literary techniques to develop well-rounded principal characters in Beloved. The use of flashbacks, which reveal the background

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of each primary character as well as the perceptions of the minor characters, allows the author to delineate character in an effective and artful manner. Themes and Meanings The characterization of the female fugitive, Sethe, and her murdered daughter, Beloved, is without precedent in fiction. The novel is an accurate portrayal of the black slave woman’s experience. Married by age fourteen, Sethe is pregnant with her fourth child by nineteen. Although Mr. Garner prides himself on the treatment of his male slaves, he nevertheless has the slavemaster’s agenda of using slave women for the purpose of childbearing. Schoolteacher also values Sethe for her childbearing capabilities and the money she represents. Moreover, the novel is important for its demonstration of the concern that slave mothers had for the welfare of their children. Sethe determines to kill all of her children rather than allow them to be returned to a life of slavery. Thus Sethe struggles to reach Ohio, and her children, at any costs. In fact, she repeats often that she has to get her milk to her “crawling already” baby girl, Beloved. The novel also probes the bond between the nursing mother and her infant. Sethe remembers that slavery has denied her a relationship with her own mother and determines to have a nurturing relationship with her own children. Beloved’s personality, therefore, originates from a lack of bonding with her mother and from a sense of spite, as well as from a need for retribution for her brutal murder at her mother’s hand. Although Beloved is a ghost, it is significant that she acts like a child who has experienced a loss in the infant stage of development; she is psychologically damaged and has enormous anxieties. Thus, Beloved constantly demonstrates a need to be near Sethe at all times and never gets enough of anything, especially her mother. Because of Sethe’s sense of guilt, Beloved is able to demand the best of everything and to make her mother try to meet all of her demands, no matter how ridiculous. When Sethe complains, it does no good. The genesis of the plot of Beloved came when Morrison worked as an editor. While on a project, the author came across the story of a slave woman, Margaret Garner, who killed one child and tried to kill three others to keep them from being returned to slavery; the story was the basis for Beloved. The novel treats the theme of the mother as nurturer and protector through the characters of Sethe and Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs protects and takes care of Sethe after her escape, and when she can no longer do so, she decides to die. Sethe sees her children as her property, as lives that she has made. An alternate example is provided by Baby Suggs, who was forced to part with all of her children but her last son, Halle. Sethe determines to put her children where they cannot be hurt by the system of slavery. The novel is, moreover, an attempt to understand the forces, historical and personal, that would cause Sethe to murder her daughter rather than allow her to experience the horrors of slavery. The horror of the slave past is shown as a haunting, evidenced by the appearance of the baby ghost and the manifestation of the fully grown Beloved. From the opening of the novel, the means of bringing the past into the

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lives of Sethe, Denver, Baby Suggs, Paul D, and the community is the use of the supernatural. Beloved represents the troubled past that haunts the lives of all African Americans. This troubling past is represented by the word “rememory,” which is used throughout the novel. The characters are constantly in a struggle to “beat back the past,” which intrudes into their lives and causes a haunting pain that is physically represented by the appearance of Beloved. Morrison unceasingly places before her readers the environment that created Sethe—economic slavery. This is the source and the context of Sethe’s madness and the impetus for her behavior. Paul D is able to understand and verbalize Sethe’s dilemma by concluding that it was dangerous for a slave woman to love anything, especially her children. Paul D thus points out the tension created by the system of slavery and the instinct of the slave woman to protect and nurture her children. Slavery claimed ownership of all of its property and ignored the slave mother’s right to determine the future of, to mold the character of, and to physically nurture her own children. Sethe instinctively sought to hold on to and love her own children, thus creating the central conflict in the novel. Critical Context It has been noted that Beloved, Morrison’s fifth novel, is more explicit than most early slave narratives, which could not fully reveal the horror of the slave experience either because the authors dared not offend their white abolitionist audiences or could not bear to dwell on the horrors of slavery. Reviewers have also often remarked on the author’s emotional distance from her characters and her ability to relate grotesque stories without extreme emotionalism. Beloved won Morrison a 1988 Pulitzer Prize, though the novel was at the center of controversy when it did not receive two other major literary awards. In 1993, any earlier critical slights of Morrison’s work were redressed by her receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Includes sections on the “story behind the story,” the novel’s characters, and the general critical reaction to its publication, as well as more focused scholarly essays analyzing themes and issues in Beloved. Bowers, Susan. “Beloved and the New Apocalypse.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring, 1990): 59-77. Discusses the novel in the tradition of African American apocalyptic writing. Concludes that the book maps a new direction for the African American apocalyptic tradition that is more instructive and powerful than the versions used by writers of the 1960’s. Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Puts forth the argument that African American folklore is the basis for most African American literature and that Morrison transforms historical folk materials in her novels, creating what Harris terms “literary folklore,” allowing no dichotomy between form and substance. The study exam-

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ines The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved based on this theory. Holloway, Karla F. “Beloved: A Spiritual.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (Summer, 1990): 516525. An analysis of the literary and linguistic devices that facilitate the revision of the historical and cultural texts of black women’s experiences. Also treats the mythological basis of the novel. McDowell, Margaret. “The Black Woman as Artist and Critic: Four Versions.” The Kentucky Review 7 (Spring, 1987): 19-41. Discusses the significance of the work of Morrison and other African American women writers because of the broadness of their inquiry and the intensity of their commitment to issues related to art, race, and gender. Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Focuses on the analysis of the entire body of Morrison’s work, giving a thorough character and thematic analysis of the author’s novels through Beloved. Simpson, Ritashona. Black Looks and Black Acts: The Language of Toni Morrison in “The Bluest Eye” and “Beloved.” New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Focuses on Morrison’s successful struggle to represent African American lanuage and linguistic traditions without relying on nonstandard grammar or syntax. The author, Simpson argues, chooses language that “acts black” over language that “looks black.” Spaulding, A. Timothy. “Ghosts, Haunted Houses, and the Legacy of Slavery: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Gothic Impulse.” In Re-forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Discusses Beloved in the context of a broader movement toward representing the history of slavery in the United States through the lens of the supernatural and the subversion of realist narrative conventions. Weinstein, Philip M. What Else but Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Extended discussion of the representation of race’s effects on loving relationships—from parent-child to romantic—by two of the United States’ greatest authors. Includes a chapter juxtaposing Beloved with Light in August (1932). Betty Taylor-Thompson

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BETSEY BROWN Author: Ntozake Shange (Paulette Williams, 1948Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: 1959 Locale: St. Louis, Missouri First published: 1985

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Principal characters: Betsey Brown, the thirteen-year-old, African American, upper-middle-class daughter of Jane and Greer Brown Jane Brown, Betsey’s mother Greer Brown, Betsey’s father Vida Murray, Betsey’s maternal grandmother The Novel Betsey Brown explores the interior workings of an upper-middle-class African American family in 1959 St. Louis. The family’s dynamic structure is juxtaposed against a changing social climate, particularly desegregation of the schools, and the changing and growth of Betsey. Betsey and her siblings are reared in a household of privilege. Shange pays especial attention to the rendering of upper-middle-class African American family life as she presents the unfolding of the title character. The novel, as a bildungsroman, traces Betsey’s progressive awareness of herself and her community as she interacts with characters who offer other attitudes than her parents and her grandmother do or who support some of the basic assumptions by which she has been reared. Several of Betsey’s friends present her with other ways of seeing the world. Her classmates at the black school, Liliana and Mavis, introduce her to sexual vocabulary and innuendo that give concrete expression to some of Betsey’s feelings. Betsey and three of her friends, including a poor white, Susan Linda, talk about their bodies’ physical changes. With Eugene, a high school basketball player, Betsey experiences the joys and frustrations of young romantic love: the pleasures of kissing, holding hands, and feeling special. Through the three housekeepers who, at different times, try to sustain order in the Brown household, Betsey is introduced to lower-class African Americans, those who do not speak “correct” English, who do not own their homes, and who may not have the nicest clothes to wear. Betsey’s knowledge of the black lower class has been limited to stories she hears, and she does not think that she has daily interactions with them. One day in school, Betsey brags to her friends, Veejay and Charlotte Ann, how she made it so difficult for the Browns’ housekeeper Bernice that Bernice was fired. Veejay tells Betsey that her own mother is a housekeeper, that she thinks Betsey’s behavior was intolerable, and that she does not want to be Betsey’s friend anymore. Betsey learns from her mistreatment of

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Bernice and vows to “do her best not to hurt or embarrass another Negro as long as she lived.” She gives the housekeepers who come after Bernice a fair chance, develops great friendships with Regina and Carrie, and learns much about black people, black culture, and the complexities of being human. When she must attend the predominantly white public school, Betsey also learns. Her biggest lesson is that most of the white children and teachers refuse to see her. Her difficulties in adjusting to her new school, coupled with her parents’ marital troubles and the fact that Eugene does not seem to be paying enough attention to her, convince Betsey that she must run away to a place (the beauty shop in the black neighborhood) where she will be understood. When she returns, after a day, and sees just how much she was missed by every member of her family, Betsey realizes that even if she is not always understood, she is absolutely loved. Betsey’s enlarging sense of what a family is helps to explain why she is so eager to help the new housekeeper who comes when her mother leaves. She wants her mother’s house to run smoothly so as to be a refuge when Jane returns. From these experiences, Betsey grows toward maturity. The Characters Betsey Brown, as the oldest child, feels a sense of responsibility to her younger siblings, and yet she is desperately seeking to find her place in the changing world of her family and St. Louis of 1959. Shange unfolds Betsey’s character through a series of major and minor crises that Betsey must confront. Her parents’ troubled marriage is one event that takes its toll on Betsey, even more so when her mother, Jane, actually leaves the family. In her mother’s absence, Betsey exhibits a variety of behaviors that demonstrate her coping. She is at first rebellious, especially when her father employs a series of housekeepers. Betsey does not like most of the housekeepers and finds ways to make them quit or get fired. Beyond her rebellion, she feels the changing family circumstances are preventing her from doing the things she most likes. Because she does not want an outsider to take her mother’s place, she tries to take on more of those responsibilities herself, and she is often frustrated not only in her attempts to do so but also by the time and effort it takes from her other normal adolescent pursuits. For example, she is intelligent, makes good grades in school, and loves to recite African American poetry, and she has several secretive and private places in and around her family’s home where she likes to go to fantasize about romance and adventure. Her mother’s continued absence and Betsey’s feeling that no one understands her is punctuated in her character development as a series of mood swings that increasingly become more pronounced. Betsey’s final way to cope with her problems is to run away. It is when she runs away to a poorer section of the black community, where she sees firsthand what real struggle is about, that she begins to reassess her situation at home and finds the balance that marks her growing up. In a family of spunky people, Betsey has the most spirit. She has a sharp tongue and

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a quick wit. From the beginning of the novel to the end, Betsey is presented as someone who will triumph. She survives in a healthy way when faced with her parents’ troubled marriage; she deals effectively with school desegregation, and she adjusts, even as she notes the adjustments are not always better, to her new school and blatant racism. Her spirit is never defeated. Jane Brown, Betsey’s mother, on the surface appears less spirited than her oldest daughter. She appears entirely conventional. She has married a doctor, works as a social worker at a public hospital that caters to African Americans, likes to pamper her body with perfumes and lotions, does not like her husband’s commitment to racial activism, and seems a traditional wife and mother. Shange, however, uses Jane’s thoughts to convey another more rebellious and spirited side. Going against the value system of her family, which has a long history of “marrying light,” Jane marries a dark-complexioned man. She defies conventional expectations of her class in another way too, for she has a career as a social worker. More important, she assists people whom even members of the black community think are outcasts. Jane’s mother, Vida, does not like either of these two choices, but Jane is comfortable with her decisions. Moreover, Jane is not a static character content with the status quo of her life. She wants more. She wants a life separate from her husband and her children so that she can be herself, with little judgment from others and little interference. She is not presented as selfish in these desires, for even when she temporarily leaves her family, she always thinks about them and she always knows that she will return to them. Jane is a woman who wants to have it all: family, career, and self. Jane’s husband, Greer, one of the most original and positive black male characters in African American literature, is committed to family and to community. He teaches his children to value themselves and to value their African American culture, and he does this during a time in American history when many African Americans did not promote racial and cultural health. Every morning, he quizzes his children on African American history and culture, but he does not do this in a way that is painful or boring. The children look forward to this precious time with their father and their culture. If anything negative can be said about his character, it is that he must learn to balance his commitments to family and to the black community, in which, as a doctor, he tends the sick and injured. He is essentially a workaholic. After Jane leaves, he learns that he must find more space in his life for his wife. Themes and Meanings Vida, Jane, and Betsey are complicated characters who through their stories capture significant parts of black women’s history in America. Vida complains about many aspects of her life with Jane, Greer, and her grandchildren. Many of Vida’s values are old-fashioned, but they are values that should be treasured for their historical significance. Vida spends a great amount of time in reverie, sitting on the porch, in her room, or in the garden. Like Betsey, she is affected by the changes that are occurring in America. She does not know quite what to make of desegregation, for she grew up

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in a world where the social demarcation between African Americans and whites was always clear. In her world, some black people valued themselves only in comparison to white people—the more white, the better. Regardless of Vida’s occasional escapes into self-hatred, Shange always insists that Vida does what most black people have always done—they look out for other African Americans. Though the advice and complaining that Vida offers might be outdated, her love for her family is not. Indeed, Vida has experienced many dramatic changes in her life—growing up under the Jim Crow society of North Carolina, having many children and rearing them successfully, enduring the death of her beloved Frank, having to move into her daughter’s home and not be the mistress of her own house, having to deal with the fact that her daughter Jane married “down,” and having to deal with desegregation. Vida is never defeated, shouts her opinions, and, as her name suggests, sees the implications of a changing America on black people: cultural confusion. Jane absorbs many of Vida’s values, but she is willing to take some risks that her mother was unwilling to take. As an independent woman, she chooses to marry a dark-skinned man, which goes against the teachings of her mother and that part of her family background; however, she takes no risk when it comes to the possibility of abandoning her class. She marries a dark man, but she marries a physician. She leads much of her life as if she were a white middle-class woman. When her husband’s deep devotion to black people requires her to accept her race openly, some of her mother’s teachings of self-hatred surface. Jane has been taught by Vida to reject authentic black culture, especially that which emanates from the black masses. She does not always like the soul music that Greer plays, the African and African American history quizzes he gives to the children, his attention to the black community, and his complete acceptance of those African Americans who are not of his class. Jane struggles to understand her husband’s allegiance to race and to figure out her own. If she can settle these social-racial-cultural issues, she feels, then her marriage will be all right, for she and Greer have a wonderful physical relationship and communicate adequately with each other; they need only a bit more romance in their busy lives. From Vida and Jane, Betsey learns a number of important approaches to living her own life. From Vida, who constantly talks about her dead Frank, Betsey learns what committed love between a man and a woman is all about. Vida often gets on Betsey’s nerves, but Betsey understands that her grandmother’s ability to express herself is what she, Betsey, has all along been wanting to do. Her oral presentation for her English class is a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar; the poem’s key line is “Speak up, Ike, an ’spress yo’se’f.” Betsey’s character is largely focused on her struggles to express herself. She has several secret places on the Brown property where she can go to think her deep thoughts, listen privately to other people talking, and gain some perspective on events surrounding her life. Like Vida and Jane, Betsey is outspoken and speaks her mind even if it gets her into trouble. One way to see her growth is to pay attention to her decision late in the novel not to tell her family that she understands why their housekeeper Carrie is arrested. Here, not expressing oneself is important. The narrator records that “Betsey never mentioned her feelings to her mama cause then Jane

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would just remind her that she always picked the most niggerish people in the world to make her friends. . . . Betsey couldn’t understand how anybody didn’t know Carrie wouldn’t . . . have cut nobody, not less they hurt her a whole lot.” Betsey’s understanding of Carrie’s life differs from her earlier misunderstanding of Bernice. She has become a selfless young adult. The individual’s relationship to family and to community is one theme Shange explores in Betsey Brown. In showing Betsey’s growing up within the affluent Brown family, Shange gives expression to a number of intraracial as well as interracial issues that affect black people. Differences in class and the historical antecedents for such differences say much about the attitudes that Vida and Jane announce in the Brown household. The announcement of such racist and classist values, however, does not mean that these values will dominate or that the people who announce them are bad. Betsey comes to take them for what they are, values tied to her maternal history and precious for that reason, but not values to be used in 1959 St. Louis. Betsey also learns to accept the larger black community in ways that go beyond her appreciation of black history and culture that she has read or heard. Her interactions with the black housekeepers, with Mrs. Maureen, the beautician, and with others help her to understand that these people are her family too. This connection means that the racism she experiences at school is tempered and is not going to destroy her, for she tells Carrie that her white teacher, who knows nothing about Paul Laurence Dunbar, is “dumb.” Critical Context Betsey Brown has a prominent place in Ntozake Shange’s canon of plays, poems, and other novels. In this novel, she carries forward a number of issues and themes that appear in earlier works. For example, her attention to the black woman’s story was first announced in the critically acclaimed for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1976). In that book, Shange focused on adult women and their problems with African American men, with their roles as mothers, and with racism, sexism, and discrimination. In Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), three sisters and their relationships with one another and with their maternal history is explored. Betsey Brown revisits these works, as Shange looks closely at the development of a middle-class African American girl and some of the forces and conditions that make her transition to adulthood potentially difficult. Betsey Brown joins several works in the black women’s literary tradition that give expression to the growing up of black girls: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953), Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1974), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) and The Color Purple (1982), and Joyce Carol Thomas’s Marked by Fire (1982), to mention a few. Betsey Brown explores authentically the life of an upper-middle-class African American girl and her family.

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Bibliography Martin, Reginald. Ntozake Shange’s First Novel: In the Beginning Was the Word. Fredericksburg, Va.: Mary Washington College, 1984. Discusses Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo and introduces Shange’s use of active voice, inverted word order, and metaphorical language as a way of showing stylistic techniques she uses in her first novel. Ryan, Judylyn S. Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Includes a chapter comparing Shange’s use of spirituality to that of Zora Neale Hurston and Ama Ata Aidoo. Schindehette, Susan. Review of Betsey Brown, by Ntozake Shange. Saturday Review 11 (May, 1985): 74. Finds much to praise in the novel—the characters, the dialogue, the rendering of context—but sees the novel as a failure, suggesting it is not a novel but a play. Splawn, Jane P. “Rites of Passage in the Writing of Ntozake Shange: The Poetry, Drama, and Novels.” Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (September, 1989): 687A. Looks at the transitions that Shange’s characters experience on their way to adulthood or some other version of self. Argues that these rites of passage are tied to black cultural traditions. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Contains a penetrating analysis of Shange’s development as a writer. Whitson, Kathy J. Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Reads Shange from the point of view of her feminism as well as her race. Places her alongside feminist writers of all races and nationalities. Willard, Nancy. Review of Betsey Brown, by Ntozake Shange. The New York Times Book Review, May 12, 1985, 12. Argues that Betsey Brown is more straightforward than Shange’s first novel. Suggests that Shange’s artistic strengths are in her ability to delineate character and place. Considers the exploration of the black upper class as palatable for black and white readers. Charles P. Toombs

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THE BIG SEA and I WONDER AS I WANDER Author: Langston Hughes (1902-1967) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1902-1938 Locale: United States; Mexico; Africa; France; Haiti; Soviet Union; Spain First published: The Big Sea: An Autobiography, 1940; I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, 1956 Principal personages: Langston Hughes, an acclaimed poet, novelist, and short-story writer Mary Sampson Langston, Hughes’s maternal grandmother, with whom he lived until he was twelve years old James Nathaniel Hughes, Langston’s father, who abandoned his family to live in Mexico Carrie Langston Hughes, Langston’s mother, who often left him Betsey Brown while she looked for work Vachel Lindsay, a noted poet who “discovered” Hughes Carl Van Vechten, a critic and novelist who submitted Hughes’s first book of poems for publication The Anonymous Patron, a wealthy New York woman who supported Hughes Noel Sullivan, another wealthy patron Form and Content Langston Hughes began his writing career in Lincoln, Illinois, when, as the poet of his eighth grade class, he delivered a sixteen-stanza poem for a graduation exercise in 1916. He was elected class poet, he writes in The Big Sea, because no one in his class looked like a poet, or had ever written a poem; his white classmates, knowing that poetry had to have rhythm, elected him, since they believed that all African Americans had rhythm. Thus Hughes began a writing career that continued for nearly half a century. The two autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, cover roughly the first thirty-five years of his life, from his birth in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902 to his return to America after he had served as a war correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American. He prefaces The Big Sea with a description of his departure from New York at the age of twenty-one on board a freighter bound for Africa. The first part of The Big Sea, “Twenty-One,” then relates the events of his life from his birth to his departure from New York Harbor. The second part, “Big Sea,” follows him to Africa and recounts his adventures in Europe. Finally, “Black Renaissance” covers the years from 1925 to 1930. I Wonder as I Wander begins where The Big Sea left off in 1930 and details

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Hughes’s experiences in Haiti, Russia, California, Mexico, and Spain as he searches for a way “to turn poetry into bread.” The Big Sea begins with Hughes throwing all of the books that he had read while studying at Columbia University into the sea. He wrote that although throwing his books into the sea may have been a little melodramatic, he felt as though he had thrown “a million bricks” out of his heart. Hughes was twenty-one years old and going to sea for the first time, and the tossing of the books was symbolic of his break with his past: He felt he had rid himself of the memory of his father, the stupidities of color prejudice, the fear of not finding a job, and the feeling of always being controlled by someone other than himself. He wrote that he felt like a man, and that henceforth nothing would happen to him that he did not want to happen. He recounts how his father, James Hughes, had left Langston and his mother for Mexico, where he could practice law and escape the prejudice and poverty he so hated. As a result, Langston’s mother, Carrie Hughes, seemed continually to be on the move, going from job to job, searching for better employment. Consequently, until he was twelve, Hughes was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston. Hughes was graduated from grammar school in Lincoln, Illinois, and from Central High School in Cleveland, where the family had relocated. Hughes discovered that he hated his father when he spent the summer of 1919 with him in Mexico, but he returned to discuss his future with his father in 1921. That same summer, he made his publishing debut in The Crisis with his meditative poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Although his father wanted him to attend European universities to become an engineer, Langston persuaded him to finance an education at Columbia. After a year, he quit and broke with his father completely. The second section, “The Big Sea,” chronicles the years 1923 and 1924. Hughes continued writing while working on ships traveling to Africa and to Holland; he spent time working in nightclubs in France and combing beaches in Italy. When he returned home, he worked in the Wardman Park Hotel; there, in December of 1925, he slipped three of his poems on the table of the poet Vachel Lindsay, who announced the next day the discovery of a “bus boy poet.” This was an important break for Hughes, since it gave his work considerable publicity. He won first prize in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity magazine with his poem “The Weary Blues.” “Harlem Renaissance,” the last section of the book, covers the years from 1925 to 1930. Four important events occurred in Hughes’s life during this period. First, although he lived in Washington, D.C., Hughes went often to New York, where the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing and where he met many black writers who were to become important literary figures, including Jean Toomer, Countée Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, and Wallace Thurman. Second, he met Carl Van Vechten at the awards party for winning the Opportunity poetry prize, and Vechten offered to submit Hughes’s poetry to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Shortly thereafter followed a letter from Blanche Knopf saying the poems were to be accepted for publication. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926.

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Hughes won a scholarship to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1929. During his final years at Lincoln, he was introduced to an elderly lady in New York who became his patron and who assured him of an income and a place to work. The result was that Hughes was able to complete his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. In December of 1930, however, he became alienated from his patron, and their relationship dissolved. Hughes, however, became more determined than ever to make his living from writing. He closes The Big Sea this way: “Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I’m still pulling.” I Wonder as I Wander picks up where The Big Sea leaves off. Increasingly, Hughes had become disenchanted with the hypocrisy of his being chauffeured about New York while he saw his fellow African Americans sleeping in subways and going hungry. The stock market had crashed; the Depression was beginning; Harlem and black culture were no longer in vogue. Hughes asked to withdraw from the patronage extended him. As he tells it, his problems were two: He was “ill in my soul,” and he needed to discover how to make a living from writing. He had given his mother one hundred dollars of the four-hundred-dollar Harmon prize; with the remaining three hundred, he and a friend traveled first to Cuba and then to Haiti to escape the damp and dreary Cleveland winter. After several months, he returned to New York, where in 1931, with a grant from the Rosenwald Fund, he set out to tour the South reading his poetry. While he was in Arkansas, some friends, learning that he was going to California, offered to introduce him to Noel Sullivan, who would later become a patron. Hughes was in San Francisco when he learned of an opportunity to go to Russia to work on a film. Of the four hundred pages of I Wonder as I Wander, roughly half are devoted to Hughes’s journeys and adventures in Russia: the ponderous and unbelievably slow workings of the political system; the improbable and naïve plot of Black and White, the film on which he was to work (eventually the production was canceled); shortages of food; the primitive and unsanitary living conditions of Soviet Central Asia; the absence of prejudice and discrimination wherever he went; the bizarre lovemaking rituals of Tatar women; and his love affair with Natasha, the wife of a Soviet bureaucrat. In the spring of 1933, he boarded the Trans-Siberian express for Vladivistok. Hughes had it in mind to see China before going home via Hawaii. Because Japan had just invaded China, however, he found traveling difficult. From Vladivistok he sailed to Korea, then to Japan. He visited Shanghai, where he met Madame Sun Yat-sen, the wife of the founder of the Chinese Republic and the sister-in-law of Chiang Kaishek, and he was able to see a small part of the interior of China. En route home, his ship stopped at Tokyo again, and he went ashore to stay a few days in the city’s Imperial Hotel. The Japanese police interrogated him about his meeting with Madame Sun Yat-sen and presumably thought him to be carrying messages from China to Japan. He was declared persona non grata in Japan—an event that caused a stir in the newspapers—but he was released to return home.

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Noel Sullivan’s cream-colored limousine picked Hughes up at the dock in San Francisco in the summer of 1933. Over lunch, Hughes told Sullivan of his adventures. He had become interested in writing short stories while reading the works of D. H. Lawrence, and Sullivan generously offered Hughes his cottage in Carmel, California, for a year rent-free. In 1934 and 1935, he lived and wrote in Carmel, in Mexico, and in Oberlin, Ohio, where his mother had taken ill with cancer. His play Mulatto, which had gone unproduced for five years, began a successful Broadway run. In 1937, Hughes went to Madrid, where he was the war correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American. The closing scene of I Wonder as I Wander is vivid and memorable. As the bells of Paris toll in 1938, Langston Hughes sits in a small café; he is on his way home and worried about his mother, who is terminally ill. In the first hours of the New Year, he muses on the fate of civilization; he does not think his world would end, but he is not sure. Analysis Two themes dominate The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander: Hughes’s personal odyssey and evolution as a black writer and his personal investigation into the color line around the world. As Hughes writes in The Big Sea, it was the works of Guy de Maupassant that first convinced him to become a writer; he was reading de Maupassant in French when “all of a sudden one night the beauty and the meaning of the words . . . came to me. I think it was de Maupassant who made me really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far-away lands would read them—even after I was dead.” Hughes was always very clear about his function as a writer. “I try,” he wrote, “to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America.” Hughes’s development as a writer exemplifies the second major theme in his autobiographies: bigotry and prejudice. As he wrote in the closing pages of The Big Sea, when the stock market crashed, the lush days of the Harlem Renaissance crashed as well. Black actors went hungry; magazines politely turned down articles and stories on black themes. White writers who had written novels nowhere near as good as his were employed in Manhattan or were on their way to Hollywood. While he was in Haiti, he began to figure out how he could earn a living from the kind of writing he wanted to do, even in the face of prejudice. He became a student of race relations and the color line all over the world. He was puzzled by the fact that by stepping across an invisible line from El Paso, Texas, into Juarez, Mexico, a black person could buy beer in any bar, sit anywhere in a theater, or eat in any restaurant, and he found it curious that a white American who would not drink beside a black man in Texas would do so in Mexico. Hughes found that he was welcome, even celebrated, as he was in the Soviet Union, everywhere in the world— except in his own country. Hughes had dreamed of becoming a writer, and after his tour in Spain, he was able

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to say that his dream was beginning to come true. He noted, moreover, that his interests had broadened “from Harlem and the American Negro to include an interest in all the colored peoples of the world—in fact, in all the people of the world, as I related to them and they to me.” Critical Context In August of 1940, The Saturday Review of Literature characterized The Big Sea as “a most valuable contribution to the struggle of the Negro for life and justice and freedom and intellectual liberty in America.” This critical statement summarizes the importance and value of Hughes’s two autobiographies. Although the autobiographies document Hughes’s own struggle against bigotry, prejudice, racial hatred, and intellectual racism, they also document the same struggle for all people of color in the United States. Moreover, because of Hughes’s interest in people of color all over the world, and because of his wide travels, the autobiographies provide important insights into global attitudes toward people of differing color and race. In addition, Langston Hughes was an important member of the group of “New Negro” writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The Big Sea, in particular, is an important document of the literary history of the United States, and sheds much light on the lives and struggles of those writers. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes. New ed. New York: Blooms Literary Criticism, 2008. Collection of essays on Hughes’s life and work by notable scholars in the field. Emanuel, James A. Langston Hughes. New York: Twayne, 1967. Among the best introductory studies of Hughes. Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. This reconsideration of the entire body of Hughes’s work begins with a rereading of the author’s autobiographies and uses them as a key to reinterpreting the rest of his writing. O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. Langston Hughes, Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation. New York: William Morrow, 1971. Contains a brief biography, an excellent bibliography, and twelve critical essays covering the various genres of Hughes’s work. Scott, Jonathan. Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Insists on the importance of the author’s visceral socialist imagination in shaping the course of his work. Dean Davies

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BIRD AT MY WINDOW Author: Rosa Guy (1928) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Naturalism Time of plot: 1920’s-1950’s Locale: Harlem, New York; Paris, France First published: 1966 Principal characters: Wade Williams, the protagonist, a virile, attractive, light-skinned African American male “Big Willie” Williams, Wade’s father, a physically powerful, half-white man Evelyn Williams, the family matriarch Faith, Wade’s sister Willie Earl, the eldest of the three Williams siblings Uncle Dan, Big Willie’s brother Professor Jones, a one-person crusade for justice and equality Clovis Rockford, Jr., Wade’s friend and intellectual confidant Gay Sommers, a lab technician who becomes involved with Wade Gladys, an “exquisitely ugly” woman The Novel Divided into fifteen chapters, Bird at My Window has a plot that readers unwrap like the leafy layers of an artichoke, revealing, at last, the heart and soul of the main character, Wade Williams. As the novel begins, Wade wakes up in a straitjacket in the prison ward of a New York City hospital. The straitjacket is, in some ways, a metaphor for his predicament in life; it foreshadows the evolving restrictions of both heredity and environment that Wade confronts as the novel unfolds. At first completely disoriented, Wade soon learns that he has nearly killed his beloved sister Faith. She, however, refuses to press charges, blaming herself for intervening in a scuffle between Wade and their brother, Willie Earl; she also declines to tell Wade the cause of the fight. Accordingly, Wade’s first thought upon release is to find Willie Earl and to force him to set the record straight for their mother, who has rejected Wade as “just mean clear through.” For Wade, Mumma’s one-room kitchenette is the still point in a too rapidly spinning world, and he savors the time he spends there each day before returning to his own apartment. Wade desperately wants to win back Mumma and regain his place in the family circle. The principal plot line involves Wade’s quest for answers from Willie Earl and ac-

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ceptance from Mumma. At times, however, the forward momentum of the main narrative is interrupted by Wade’s memories, dreams, and even hallucinations involving the past. Three such flashbacks are of pivotal importance. The first concerns Wade’s schooling. Born into a family that undervalues formal education, Wade has no one to appreciate his potential until the arrival of the neighborhood activist Professor Jones, who examines Wade’s school records and discovers that the boy is a genius. During this same period, Wade also begins his friendship with Rocky, a bright, sensitive, and articulate boy his own age. Almost singlehandedly, Professor Jones mounts a campaign to enroll five gifted African American boys in an all-white Bronx high school. The effort fails because of white mob pressure, and eleven-year-old Wade is jailed for assaulting a belligerent white woman in the crowd of protesters. When his parents decide to send him to Boston to live with cousins and attend school in that city, Rocky invites Wade to accompany him. The Williams family is asked to provide only train fare. Mumma refuses to listen to this request, blaming Wade’s jail sentence on all this “stupid” talk about school. Her tirade shatters Wade’s prior supposition that his family had been proud of him for his intelligence and academic achievement. Wade realizes now that his mother is incapable of understanding his educational goals, and Rocky and he have no other choice but to bid each other a tearful farewell. The second important recollection also involves the impetus toward self-actualization. After Professor Jones procures him a trainee position with the city health department, Wade meets Gay Sommers, and their relationship develops until her announcement of her pregnancy. Initially euphoric, Wade slowly succumbs to the fear that Gay will take him away from his family and neighborhood. He tells her that marriage is not his “line.” Gay seems to have expected that response, and when he cannot shatter her apparent imperturbability, Wade avoids contact with her. It is only after Gay calls in sick that Wade realizes that she has had an abortion. Mumma subsequently blames Wade for what has happened. The third major memory involves the war years and Wade’s service in France, where he meets the prostitute Michele and considers making a life somewhere other than his racist homeland. At one point, however, the young couple is accosted by a group of white officers in a café. A “big, red-faced” captain calls Wade an “African monkey,” and soon both Wade and he act on the shared “madness” of their reciprocal racial hatred. Wade leads the captain into the Bois de Boulogne, where he beats the officer to death and then buries his body. Wade laughs at what he has done and feels, for a time, “unshackled.” When he returns to Harlem to retrieve the money he asked his mother to save for him to finance his new life with Michele in France, however, Wade is told that Mumma has spent everything on her own medical care. Thus ends a three-part pattern of broken dreams. After this last memory, Wade returns to the realities of the narrative present and the gritty world of Harlem. While observing the body of a young man dead from a drug

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overdose, Wade starts to put his own predicament in perspective. To him, the dead junkie becomes the “guardian of some terrible truth.” This boy and Wade both have mothers who “sealed you into this crap, set your limits to make sure that you didn’t go beyond it, rubbed your nose in it all your lives and when you became a solid part of it they got scared, put you out.” Lightning flashes in the sky and in Wade’s mind, and he suddenly remembers why he attacked Willie Earl; it was the revelation of Willie Earl’s bankbook and the realization that his elder brother had been sitting on thousands of dollars all the years the Williams family went hungry. More important, because Mumma had spent his Army money while Willie Earl’s savings had gone untouched, Wade lost his chance with Michele. Wade runs home now, breaks down the door, and curses his mother. Originally intending just to shock Mumma into some state of self-awareness, Wade resolves, on the spur of the moment, to kill her, Willie Earl, and then himself. Faith, however, returns home, asserting that Mumma alone is not to blame for their lives, that they have been shaped by forces larger than themselves. Nevertheless, Wade impulsively lunges as Mumma runs for the door and accidentally stabs Faith in the chest as she interposes her body between them. It can be assumed that he next kills Mumma and then blacks out. In the last scene, Wade wakes up on a concrete island in the middle of Lenox Avenue; he has blood on his clothes and hands. The Characters Although it is told from the limited-third-person point of view, the narrative is not Wade’s alone. In some ways, the novel provides a group portrait. It chronicles the shaping of a family by forces both within and without. Everything begins with the parents. The child of a white father and a black mother, Big Willie faces the general dilemma of all those individuals of mixed blood—a basic sense of displacement. His role as outcast manifests itself in mindless sexual activity and violence, behavior toward which Wade is also predisposed. Big Willie spits in the eye of Miss Suzie, a white woman who fancied him; Wade spits in the face of a bigoted white mother outside the Bronx high school to which he hoped to gain admission. Big Willie kills other black men in brawls and gambling disputes; Wade also becomes inured to killing. The most significant inheritance from father to son, however, is Big Willie’s contention that his family is “the barrier between him and his self-respect”; because of them, he fled the South rather than face the “crackers” who wanted his blood. For Wade, family responsibility, however misplaced and misinterpreted, stands as a bar to his own fulfillment as a person. Wade also learns from his mother, whose life is dominated by fear and the establishment of self-imposed geographical and psychological boundaries. After the family’s hasty departure from the South and especially following the death of Big Willie, Mumma tells her children not to venture out of the neighborhood and into areas of the city where white people live; Harlem becomes a ghetto determined as much by personal restrictions as by external forces.

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Mumma blames her husband and his devilish ways for the fact “that she had to be crucified in the bowels of a city like New York with three children as her cross.” Christianity is her talisman, and she is quick to turn a blind eye to any of her family’s transgressions done for the sake of subsistence if she can, at the same time, preserve her own sense of being a “decent God-fearing” woman. As long as Willie Earl cites a source other than shoplifting for the money he brings home, for example, Mumma is more than willing to accept his ill-gotten funds. The Williams children bear the stamp of their parents. Willie Earl learns to play his “man-of-the-house part” by telling Mumma what she wants to hear. His inherent dishonesty is a response to her own. Faith is also a product of conditioning. At the time of her death, she is a thirty-nineyear-old virgin who hates to have anyone touch her. This is attributable partially to her mother’s beating her after she is caught in childhood sexual experimentation with Wade and partially to her having almost been raped by two men in the bathroom shared by families in the building. It is Faith who tells Wade that “without us there would be no you.” He is the one who suffers most from blood inheritance and behavioral conditioning. The abandonment of his educational goals, his externally mandated separation from Rocky and Michele, and his self-defeating renunciation of Gay establish a pattern that “strangely enough, he was used to.” Wade comes to expect nothing better than suffering; he argues that “life is made long before a cat reaches thirty-eight. After that, it’s just a question of living it out.” Harlem itself is a vibrant presence in the novel: the teeming streets, the crowded apartments, the “busy nothingness” of the people. The Williams family is caught up in the ghetto’s “hot arms” and held captive, their dreams turned to ash. The dehumanizing impact of this environment is exacerbated by restrictions imposed by the people themselves. Their own fears and hopelessness make them look down instead of up. Wade knew the dreary streets of Harlem well, but he had never “really seen a star” until he was in France during the war. Despite role models like the indefatigable Professor Jones and his own sister Faith, who tries to inspire him even at the novel’s end with the story of a friend’s father who returns to college after the age of forty, Wade has lost the will to dream. Themes and Meanings The novel’s title holds a major key to its meaning. First, the novel abounds in bird references. As Wade regains consciousness in the hospital, for example, he spies a bird on the windowsill in his room. As it flies off, Wade’s frustration at his own confinement increases, and he beats his hands together. As the novel progresses, the protagonist realizes again and again that he has “no wings” or that his wings are “clipped.” To some extent, Harlem is his cage, but it is a prison to which he has grown accustomed. Shut out of his mother’s apartment because of his attack on Faith, for example, Wade cannot accept his lot as an “outdoor child.” Given the opportunity for a new life

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with Gay Sommers, Wade returns to his neighborhood like one of the homing pigeons he refuses to acknowledge as members of the bird species. After identifying a blue jay in Mount Morris Park, Rocky challenges the questionable “freedom” of birds by insisting that they really have no free will but are “guided completely by instinct.” Wade himself feels most birdlike, in this sense, when he acts from instinct, such as when he kills the Army captain and when he attacks Mumma. “It is doing what you have to do and feeling free with the world around and in you,” says Wade. Faith’s reply is that such behavior is more reminiscent of beasts than birds. The second half of the novel’s title involves windows, portals of both ingress and egress. Windows can symbolize opportunities, such as the three major chances Wade has for a fresh start. Windows can also be vehicles of communication. In this regard, the novel’s many eye references come into play. Through the eyes, one can “read” the soul. Mumma has “fire-and-brimstone” eyes, Gay has “warm, laughing” eyes, and the prison psychiatrist has “see-right-through-you” eyes. Early in life, Wade learns to control his own naturally “round brown” eyes in such a way that he can transmit the “messages he wanted.” Occasionally, others try to read his face for some sense of “that other him curled up behind his eyes.” Just as they can open up worlds to the viewer, eyes can also shut the world out. Gay learns this lesson in her relationship with Wade; for her, his windows remain dark. “Most people live through their eyes,” she says, “you live behind yours.” The image of the thoroughfare is also important in the novel. The heart of the family’s Harlem neighborhood is Lenox Avenue, with its “hot slabs of concrete.” In his mind’s eye, Wade envisions, at one point, a “sunlit road” that will lead him out of his problems if he can only walk right down the middle and avoid being “tangled up like hell, with people and things.” Wade, however, cannot keep his road clear; his past always catches up to him, and memories strangle him “like vines, a thicket entwining, cutting off the light of the road,” until he is enveloped by shadows. Critical Context Rosa Guy’s novel fits into a tradition of naturalistic works that can be traced at least to Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) by American novelist and poet Stephen Crane. Like the Johnson family in Crane’s book, the Williamses are both victims and victimizers; trapped in an urban ghetto, they cope not by facing their dilemma squarely and honestly but by living according to value systems that either ignore or intensify their problems. Like Mrs. Johnson’s self-righteous response to the suicide of her prostitute daughter Maggie, for example, Mumma wraps a cloak of false Christianity about her to hide her basic self-interest. In works of naturalism, all characters are essentially puppets prompted by internal and external manipulation. Thus, what engages readers’ attention is often not so much the characters themselves as these behavioral factors. Perhaps the parts of Bird at My

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Window where the characters seem most like flesh and blood are those that describe Wade’s adolescence. Critics have long asserted that Rosa Guy’s depiction of the traumas of African American youth is her greatest strength. In this regard, Wade’s memories of his shared hopes with Rocky are among the most evocative sections in the book; they compare favorably to moments in the author’s celebrated Jackson-Cathy trilogy, which includes The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978). It is also logical to draw comparisons between Bird at My Window and Rosa Guy’s second adult novel, A Measure of Time (1983). Both are big, sprawling books that cover decades of American life through the eyes of a central character. Unlike Wade Williams, Dorine Davis, the heroine of A Measure of Time, is a doer and a shaper of her own fortunes, and as such, she offers, despite her criminal activity, inspiration to those who feel that the individual self does matter. Bibliography Adell, Sandra. Foreword to Bird at My Window, by Rosa Guy. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2001. Reevaluation of Guy’s novel by a professor of international black literature. Hass, Victor. “A Case of Quiet Desperation.” Review of Bird at My Window, by Rosa Guy. Books Today 3 (February 20, 1966): 6. Sees Guy as having brought Henry David Thoreau’s classic phrase “quiet desperation” to life in the form of Wade Williams, an antihero “as real as a toothache.” Hass argues that Wade is taught to kill in the war and is never deprogrammed after his discharge. Johnson, Brooks. Review of Bird at My Window, by Rosa Guy. Negro Digest 15 (March, 1966): 53, 91. In trying to capture the essence of life in Harlem, Johnson says, Rosa Guy is working in the tradition of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Claude Brown. Kirkus Reviews. Review of Bird at My Window, by Rosa Guy. 33 (November 1, 1965): 1131. Argues that in her inconsistent but robust first novel, Rosa Guy examines how a mother’s “fear of freedom” can destroy her son. Norris, Jerrie. Presenting Rosa Guy. Boston: Twayne, 1988. This brief monograph is one of the only book-length studies of the author and her work. S. Thomas Mack

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BLACK BETTY Author: Walter Mosley (1952Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Detective Time of plot: 1961 Locale: Greater Los Angeles First published: 1994

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Principal characters: Elizabeth “Black Betty” Eady, who disappears in Los Angeles Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a part-time private investigator who is paid to find Betty and who becomes the target of the police and of others trying to kill him Jesus and Feather, Easy’s two adopted children, who are fifteen and seven years old, respectively Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, Easy’s friend, who has just finished a prison sentence for manslaughter and who is looking for the person who turned him in five years ago Odell Jones and Martin Smith, two other African American friends of Easy Sarah Cain, the wealthy white woman for whom Betty worked Marlon Eady, Betty’s disturbed half-brother Terry and Gwendolyn, Betty’s twin children by Albert Cain, the father of Sarah Cain Saul Lynx, a private investigator who pays Easy to find Betty The Novel Walter Mosley’s detective novel Black Betty is set in 1961, and it begins when Easy Rawlins is offered four hundred dollars by white private investigator Saul Lynx to locate “Black Betty.” As Lynx says, Easy knows how to find people in Los Angeles’s African American community. Easy takes the job, because he is chronically short of money, but he is soon sucked into a whirlpool of violence. Easy knew Betty when he lived in Houston as a child, but she has been working in Los Angeles as a domestic servant for a rich white family named Cain for twenty-five years. Betty’s disappearance corresponded with the death of Albert Cain, the family’s patriarch, and Easy searches from Watts to the desert, from Baldwin Hills to Beverly Hills, following various clues in his attempts to locate her. Along the way, Easy comes upon several corpses, and he is stabbed and knocked out by assailants. He is arrested and beaten by the police and, after his release, finds himself the target of murderers: He must send his two children to a friend’s house for protection and go into hiding himself. Further complicating the plot, Easy’s friend Mouse has just been released from

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prison, and he is attempting to discover who informed on him to the police. Easy attempts to keep Mouse from killing the informant in revenge for his five-year prison term. A third plotline involves a real estate broker named Clovis who has tricked Easy and his partner Mofass out of the money they hoped to make from a landdevelopment deal. In the end, Easy locates Betty, only to have to tell her that her brother Marlon is dead and that her son and daughter—the products of her rape by Albert Cain—have also been murdered. Cain had been killed by his daughter Sarah’s ex-husband, Ronald Hawkes. Prior to his death, in a fit of remorse over his rape of Betty, Cain had willed everything to her. Members of the Cain family began murdering people in the wake of Albert’s death in order to secure the family fortune for themselves. The novel is wrapped up with a rough kind of criminal justice, and even the corrupt white police captain who targeted Easy is sent to prison. The Characters The players in this murder story are three-dimensional and painfully realistic. Easy Rawlins is a complex man, equally capable of love and rage, bothered by violent dreams (although he never kills anyone himself in this novel). He tries to live by his own code of ethics, to share with those less fortunate than himself, and to find justice in an unjust world. The novel is set during the early 1960’s, at a time when racial tensions in Los Angeles are high. African Americans hardly trust whites, and with good reason, for most of the acts of violence in the novel are committed by the dominant group against the subordinate one. The other African American characters are also complex. Easy’s friend Mouse is a violent killer bent on revenge, and only Easy saves him from himself. Odell Jones helps Easy grudgingly, because there is past bad blood between them; his third old friend Martin Smith is slowly dying of cancer. Betty is a victim as well, raped by Cain, her weak half-brother Marlon sucked into the Cains’ criminal world. The white characters are consistently evil and arrogant, and Easy’s lack of trust in them is well founded. The prime exception is Saul Lynx, a white man who is saved in the end by Easy and who becomes his friend. The Cains are more typical of Mosley’s representation of white characters: A white family haunted by their violent past, they would probably get away with murder were it not for Easy. Mosley’s characters may be black or white, but their characterizations are usually shades of gray. Easy Rawlins’s first-person narration conveys their complexity at the same time that it reveals his own pained and troubled mind. Themes and Meanings Black Betty, like Walter Mosley’s other Easy Rawlins novels, is a hard-boiled detective mystery. Rawlins traverses a grittily realist Los Angeles, one replete with seamy characters, police brutality, and racial tensions. The novel also resembles the others in Mosley’s series in that it is as much historical as detective fiction: It takes place in a very specific 1961, one in which both President John F. Kennedy (elected just the year before) and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., are important

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figures. Easy Rawlins comments on the social, political, and racial landscape wherever he goes in Los Angeles. He has a kind of social mobility that allows him to move easily between the white and the African American worlds, even changing his voice when he talks to white patrons. Easy’s passage between these two worlds is part of the deeper meaning of the novel; as he says, he identifies with both the slave Jim and the title character of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Mosley depicts a city where both truth and freedom are conditioned by shifting racial lines. Easy’s alliances across these lines—with Saul Lynx, for example, or with the Japanese American librarian Miss Eto—underscore the city’s racial geography, but references to Kennedy and King portend a better time in America. As critics have noted, finally, a large part of the meaning of the novel circles around Easy’s attempt to establish his own identity in this violent world. Critical Context Mosley has often been compared to the hard-boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler; Mosley sets his novel just a few decades after Chandler’s private investigator Philip Marlowe walked what Chandler called Los Angeles’s “mean streets.” Like Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), Black Betty revolves around a wealthy but corrupt white family. The novel also resembles the 1974 film Chinatown in that a rich family’s sexual secrets hide at the heart of the story. The difference is that Easy’s world is mainly African American, and he spends as much time solving crimes in Watts and Compton as he does in Beverly Hills and Oxnard. In a sense, Mosley is closer to the African American writer Chester Himes, whose novels (such as If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945, or Cotton Comes to Harlem, 1964) include some of the same urban racial tensions that Mosley portrays. Critics have complained that Mosley has incorporated a genre—the Los Angeles detective story—that is inherently conservative. Mosley has actually used that genre for his own literary and political purposes, however, to point out the true racial feeling of the city, to underscore its violence, but to counter it with the strong sense of family and community to be found in this African American world. Like the plays of August Wilson, Walter Mosley’s novels give a fresh and challenging look at black America. Bibliography Berger, Roger A. “‘The Black Dick’: Race, Sexuality, and Discourse in the L.A. Novels of Walter Mosley.” African American Review 31, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 281-295. Argues that Mosley’s novels reinforce the conservative values of most American detective fiction, rather than subverting those values. Coale, Samuel. “Race, Region, and Rites in Mosley’s Mysteries.” In The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Compares Mosley to fellow mystery writers Tony Hillerman, James Lee Burke, and Carolyn Heilbrun; sees them as pursuing social and cultural differences in his mysteries, differences that do not

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usually figure in the detective genre. Includes a 1999 interview with Mosley. English, Daylanne K. “The Modern in the Postmodern: Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, and the Politics of Contemporary African-American Detective Fiction.” American Literary History 18, no. 4 (2006): 772-796. Reads Mosley’s fiction as doubly historical in that Black Betty, published two years after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, is set four years before the Watts riots of 1965. Goeller, Alison D. “The Mystery of Identity: The Private Eye (I) in the Detective Fiction of Walter Mosley and Tony Hillerman.” In Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction, edited by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Claims that, like Hillerman’s detective Jim Chee, Easy Rawlins may find the biggest mystery of all to be his personal identity. Muller, Gilbert H. “Double Agent: The Los Angeles Crime Cycle of Walter Mosley.” In Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, edited by David Fine. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Includes a good discussion of Mosley’s early Easy Rawlins novels—including Black Betty—their connection to Los Angeles, and their parallels to the work of Chester Himes. David Peck

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BLACK BOY and AMERICAN HUNGER Author: Richard Wright (1908-1960) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1908-1943 Locale: United States First published: Black Boy, 1945; American Hunger, 1977 Principal personages: Richard Wright, who overcomes his impoverished background to pursue a career in writing Ella Wright, Wright’s mother, a strict disciplinarian and a stroke victim Nathan Wright, Wright’s father, who deserts the family when Richard is still a young boy Granny Wilson, Wright’s grandmother, who condemns Wright for his lack of religious faith Form and Content Black Boy traces the young Richard Wright’s troubled journey through the violence, ignorance, and poverty of the Jim Crow South. Originally intended as a much longer work, the autobiography focuses primarily on the racist attitudes Wright encountered as he moved from rural Mississippi and Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee. It also highlights the turmoil he suffered growing up in a supposedly cruel and often overbearing family environment. The book ends in 1925 with the nineteen-year-old Wright, having begun his literary apprenticeship, determined to become a writer and escape the nightmarish turbulence of the oppressive South. The posthumously published American Hunger takes up where the earlier autobiography left off. It chronicles not only Wright’s disillusionment with the Communist Party, which he joined near the end of 1933, but also the difficulties he experienced as a poor African American living in the urban North. “What had I got out of living in America?” Wright asks at the end of the book. “I paced the floor, knowing that all I possessed were words and a dim knowledge that my country had shown me no examples of how to live a human life.” Wright vows to “hurl words” at his country in order to make it a safer and more promising place for all Americans. In the early 1940’s, Wright considered himself a militant novelist; he thought his own biography would be of little interest to the American public. Writing disturbing, violent fiction such as the acclaimed novel Native Son (1940), which put to rest the myth that American racism confined itself only to the Deep South, provided him the voice he needed to help resist American injustice. Only after he traveled to Fisk University in Nashville in 1943 to speak to a group of sociology students did Wright realize the potential of his own life story. The mixed group of white and African Ameri-

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can admirers responded enthusiastically as he recalled what it was like growing up during the early decades of the twentieth century. That night, Wright decided to abandon fiction temporarily and to string together his own thoughts and memories into a candid, personal narrative. Wright wrote his complete autobiography, which he originally entitled American Hunger, in less than eight months, relying partly on a sketch he had written about himself in 1937 called “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” Eventually included in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), his first collection of short stories, this early autobiographical piece recounts, in nine segments, the violence and resistance Wright had experienced in Jackson, Mississippi, and West Helena, Arkansas, where he spent most of his childhood, and in Memphis, where he spent his later adolescence and plotted his eventual journey north. The author’s expanded autobiography expounds on these episodes and more, including Wright’s flight from the South and his future assimilation into a Chicago slum. It also recalls his days as a young militant and the difficulties he encountered trying to make his living as a writer under the aegis of the Communist Party. Edward Aswell, Wright’s editor at Harper & Brothers, praised the manuscript and agreed to publish it the following year. He suggested to Wright, however, that only the “Southern” section of the text be released. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which had agreed to feature the autobiography, objected to Wright’s criticism of the Communist Party and threatened to withdraw its support without specific revisions. Somewhat reluctantly, Wright accepted Aswell’s advice. Further delays postponed the publication until the following spring, when it appeared under the new title Black Boy: A Recollection of Childhood and Youth. Over the next several months, Wright’s recollections of his Chicago days were published separately as articles in various literary journals. They appeared collectively as American Hunger in 1977, seventeen years after the author’s death. Black Boy is divided chronologically into fourteen chapters. It begins with two episodes that introduce most of the important people in Wright’s youth, including his parents and his Grandmother Wilson. On the opening page of the book, Wright recalls an accidental fire he set in his grandparents’ rural home and how he was beaten so severely afterward by his parents that he lost consciousness. The “fog of fear” that enveloped Wright following the beating stands as a fitting metaphor for the agonizing and painful relationship that he claims he experienced with his family while living in the South. The second episode is set in Memphis and involves Wright’s gruesome killing of the family kitten. Wright had been playing with the noisy animal with his younger brother when their father, who had been trying to sleep, ordered his sons to “Kill that damn thing!” Wright knew that his father had only meant to quiet the pet, but his hatred for his father encouraged Wright to accept the statement literally. After he hanged the kitten, Wright realized that he had triumphed over his father. He was elated because he had finally discovered a way of throwing his criticism of his father into his father’s face. “I had made him feel that, if he whipped me for killing the kit-

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ten, I would never give serious weight to his words again,” Wright explains. “I had made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me.” Wright recalls several other disturbing incidents in his troubled home: the day his father, who had deserted the family, humiliated his mother at a court hearing; his mother’s debilitating strokes, which left her paralyzed for months at a time; and the constant shufflings back and forth between distant relatives. He also details the numerous battles he had with Granny, his strict Seventh-day Adventist maternal grandmother, who repeatedly warned young Richard that he “would burn forever in the lake of fire” unless he converted and renounced his sinful ways. The family quarreled incessantly, and Wright often compared his living situation to that of a common criminal. “Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife,” Wright proclaims. He characterizes religion as “the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God.” Black Boy is equally remembered for its depiction of Wright’s numerous encounters with racism and for the courage and dignity he tried to maintain while living in the oppressive South. In one gripping scene, Wright recalls how his Uncle Hoskins, who owned a thriving liquor business, was killed by a gang of jealous whites who coveted a share of his liquor profits. In order to avoid further danger, Wright’s family was forced to flee in the middle of the night. No matter where he lived in the South, Wright witnessed insult and false accusation, police brutality, rape, castration, and lynching— all at the hands of racist whites. Educated in the ethics of Jim Crow, he soon learned how to pitch his voice “to a low plane, trying to rob it of any suggestion of overtone or aggressiveness,” so that local whites would tolerate him. Even in the more cosmopolitan Memphis, Wright experienced racial prejudice and quickly learned the numerous subjects that southern whites refused to discuss with African Americans. Despite its bigotry, however, the city environment did offer Wright new options, including the chance to discover the world of literature. In one of the book’s most memorable passages, Wright describes how, as an adolescent, he would forge notes in order to check out books from the city library. Each time he wanted new literature, he would hand the white librarian a sheet of paper that read, “Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by. . . .” Wright believed that the librarian would never suspect him of writing such a note if he actually referred to himself as a “nigger.” The trick worked. Wright read voraciously, and books by H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis taught him new ways of looking at the world. Convinced that his southern heritage would continue to terrorize him, Wright left Memphis for Chicago on December 27, 1927. He was nineteen years old. American Hunger, a much shorter work of five chapters, begins with Wright’s arrival in “the flat black stretches” of Chicago. Initially, the northern city offered Wright little relief. As had been the case in Memphis, he had difficulty finding decent employment and had to take odd jobs washing dishes and delivering goods. By the following summer, he had acquired part-time work at a city post office; because of severe malnourishment, however, he failed his physical exam, and once again he had to

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seek menial employment to survive. Wright also experienced an unhealthy family environment. Shortly after his move north, he was forced to share a windowless, oneroom apartment with his mother and younger brother. The “emotional atmosphere in the cramped quarters became tense, ugly, petty, bickering,” Wright remembers in American Hunger. The brutal hardships of the urban surroundings left him bewildered and lonely, as if he “had fled one insecurity and . . . embraced another.” Wright comments extensively on his interactions with the Communist Party, which offered him a needed escape from some of his personal misery. As he recalls in the autobiography, he was invited one evening by a friend to attend his first John Reed Club meeting. At first he was skeptical, convinced that Communists cared little about minority rights and solicited African American membership merely to push a political agenda. When he finally accepted his friend’s offer, he decided to attend “in the capacity of an amused spectator.” After several meetings, however, Wright’s opinions started to change. He was impressed by “the scope and seriousness” of the club’s activities and quickly moved from the rank and file to group leadership. The club initiated Wright into the modern world and provided him sustainable relationships with both men and women for years to come. Many of these relationships were literary, and Wright soon discovered that club members and other leftists associated with the Communist Party provided him the encouragement he needed to pursue his writing career. Wright helped form literary support groups and engaged in political debate about the future of America’s oppressed. Just as relationships with his family suffered in the face of poverty, however, so too did his association with Communists deteriorate. Although they recruited him for public appearances, many Communists, especially African American Communists, suspected Wright’s motives and often challenged him to debate. Wherever he turned, Wright was subjected to deceit and harassment. He was soon branded an “intellectual” and accused of plotting to undermine the Communist Party. Convinced that the artist and the committed activist stood at “opposite poles,” Wright severed his ties with the Communist Party in 1944. Wright details other episodes that affected him while he was living in Chicago, including a rare humorous moment when he and his fellow workers disrupted a downtown medical research institute. Wright remembers how two older attendants got into a fistfight and accidentally knocked over the steel tiers containing scores of animals used in scientific experiments. The frightened workers quickly straightened the tiers, but they were left with the unwanted task of placing the cancerous rats, diabetic dogs, and other infected animals into their respective cages. Luckily, Wright and his cohorts were never discovered. In fact, as Wright ironically points out, they were left to marvel at how the fate of the research institute rested in “ignorant, black hands.” Analysis Writing Black Boy and American Hunger provided Wright not only with a forum to denounce the racial atrocities he had witnessed but also with an opportunity to purge what he considered the cultural and psychological pretenses that alienated him during

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his childhood and most of his young adult life. In Black Boy, Wright recalls how he used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair.

Wright uses both autobiographies to elaborate on these unflattering remarks, to probe his inner thoughts in relation to what he loosely viewed as the collective African American psyche. In Black Boy, he concentrates mainly on his immediate family to show how only after he took a violent stand against their conventional ways did he gain his independence and win respect. He targets African American Communists in American Hunger, arguing that they lacked the strength to develop their own political platform and that they remained blind and uninformed because party leaders had convinced them that the most pressing social and political problems had been solved. As Michel Fabre, one of Wright’s biographers, points out, both autobiographies function therapeutically, as “an inner adventure, akin to psychoanalysis,” by which Wright “could come to reevaluate his personality and his career at the very moment when his break with communism was causing him to question himself and seek in himself a new direction.” Of course, Wright also knew that the bleak state of black America resulted from hundreds of years of oppression. Like other committed intellectuals, he recognized that African Americans had been denied entrance into the dominant American culture, that they “had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it.” Because Wright had overcome his barefoot beginnings and discovered his gift of writing, he felt compelled to speak for an entire people who he believed shared a common experience. “I wanted to give, lend my tongue to the voiceless Negro boys,” Wright commented on the writing of Black Boy, adding, I wrote the book to tell a series of incidents strung through my childhood, but the main desire was to render a judgment on my environment. . . . That judgment was this: the environment the South creates is too small to nourish human beings, especially Negro human beings.

In one telling passage, Wright even forgives his father when the two are reunited years after his father’s desertion; Wright realizes that his father had not been given “a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition” because the elder Wright, like so many other African Americans, had been a helpless victim of southern oppression. In American Hunger, Wright levels the same charges against the North, where racial hatred stifled social mobility and subjected African Americans to an inferior posi-

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tion. Wright quickly realized that the more tolerant North also had its drawbacks, that if he chose “not to submit,” he would inevitably embrace the more subtle horror of stress, anxiety, and permanent restlessness. Having lived in the North for more than fifteen years, Wright could sympathize with disgruntled African Americans who returned to their impoverished southern roots. The “white tormentors” might continue their oppressive behavior, Wright argued, but at least in the South African Americans knew who they faced and what they had to overcome in order to achieve social equality. Critical Context Black Boy and American Hunger take their place within a long list of autobiographies rooted in the African American slave narrative. Like this early literary form, both books indict a racist system based on ignorance, fear, and hate. At the same time, each text exaggerates its claims. Wright’s recollections of his unhappy childhood, for example, are emotionally charged and often distort the facts. He projects his bitterness toward his family onto all African Americans, leading at times to faulty generalizations and illogical conclusions. The value of each autobiography, however, rests on its artistic merit. Both works are continuous with Wright’s famous fiction and focus on narrative voice, imagery, and dialogue as much as on social commentary. As in his early fiction, Wright is committed to detail. Relying on the journalistic skills he developed a decade earlier, he examines both rural and urban America, analyzing myriad aspects of African American society. He cleverly manipulates scenes; interpolates description, imagery, exposition, and theme; intersperses dialogue and annotation; carefully selects and controls syntax; and varies tone. Indeed, Wright’s autobiographical writings contain some of his most eloquent prose. Wright was relatively young—in his mid-thirties—when he attempted to write his autobiography. Though he died in Paris at the age of only fifty-two, he still had some twenty years in which to reexamine the events that had affected him so profoundly during his youth. He also had plenty of time to experiment as a writer and to grow intellectually, which he did after befriending French existentialists and African expatriates while living in France. Despite what both texts might have been had Wright postponed their writing, Black Boy and, to a lesser extent, American Hunger stand as American classics. They provide not only a critical look at American life during the early twentieth century but also a vivid account of one individual’s determination to secure a permanent place in American letters. Bibliography Andrews, William L., and Douglas Taylor, eds. Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” (“American Hunger”): A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Compilation of responses to Black Boy that includes contemporary criticism by such writers as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, as well as later academic evaluations. Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright’s “Black Boy.” New York: Chelsea House, 2006.

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Collects essays on Wright’s autobiography by leading scholars. Includes thematic studies, as well as comparisons of Wright’s work to that of Maya Angelou and to the African American autobiographical tradition generally. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated by Isabel Barzun. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Generally considered the definitive biography of Wright. Details the period in which Wright wrote the autobiographies. Also offers an in-depth critical evaluation of each text. Gibson, Donald B. “Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the Trauma of Autobiographical Rebirth.” Calloloo 9 (Summer, 1986): 492-498. Offers a short but informative analysis of Black Boy, arguing that the first chapter, in which Wright distances himself from his environment, sets up an outline for the rest of the text. Mechling, Jay. “The Failure of Folklore in Richard Wright’s Black Boy.” Journal of American Folklore 104 (Summer, 1991): 275-294. Points out several passages in Black Boy that highlight Wright’s use of songs, riddles, and stories, but generally argues that Wright’s text fails as authentic folklore. Stepto, Robert. “Literacy and Ascent: Black Boy.” In Richard Wright, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Shows how Black Boy “revoices” Wright’s own Native Son and borrows from various tropes in African American narrative literature. Wright, Richard. Later Works. Vol. 2 in Works. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. Includes an informative section of notes by Rampersad pertaining to Black Boy and American Hunger. Rampersad argues that the Library of America edition is the “complete text” that Wright presented to his publishers. Points out how the Book-of-the-Month Club influenced Wright’s editor and persuaded him to convince Wright to publish his autobiography in two volumes. Bruce Dick

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BLACK ICE Author: Lorene Cary (1956) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: Early 1970’s and 1989 Locale: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Concord, New Hampshire First published: 1991 Principal personages: Lorene Cary, the protagonist, an adolescent schoolgirl boarder at St. Paul’s School Mr. Price, one of the teachers and counsellors at St. Paul’s School Ricky Lockhart, Lorene’s first serious boyfriend, who is a student at a school like St. Paul’s Mr. Hawley, the rector of St. Paul’s school, a major influence on the course of Lorene’s education Carol Hamilton Cary, Lorene’s mother John W. Cary, Lorene’s father Form and Content African American literature has a strong tradition of autobiography that has been sustained by such artistic forms as slave narratives and the blues as well as by more Eurocentric examples of the genre. Within that tradition, women’s accounts of their own history are of particular significance and constitute a crucial expression of the African American experience. Their significance derives from the historical status of women, generally considered, and from the relation of this marginalized status to that of women who were already members of a marginalized social group. The emphases, tempo, and content of African American women’s autobiography provide a comprehensive perspective from which typical African American experiences can be reappraised. Black Ice participates fully in, and tacitly articulates a sophisticated awareness of, the role of women’s autobiography in African American cultural selfconsciousness, particularly since, as a narrative of education, one of its inevitable themes is the growth and development of a consciousness. The work opens with a sequence of glimpses from graduation day at St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire, and closes with the recollection of further moments from that graduation weekend. The author is present in her capacity as a member of the school’s board of governors, a status that is implicitly contrasted with Lorene Cary’s initial affiliation with St. Paul’s. It was at this school that she spent two decisive years as an adolescent scholarship girl from Yeadon, a black area in West Philadelphia. In Yeadon, she had attended public school, worked at the lunch counter of the local Woolworth’s, and had comparatively little experience of the social world

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or cultural mission of powerful white institutions, or even of the kinds of Philadelphia suburbs in which St. Paul’s genteel though perceptive recruiters lived. Cary’s two years at the elite, Episcopalian, newly coeducational St. Paul’s is what makes up the bulk of Black Ice. The contrast between the author’s teenage and adult selves becomes a means whereby readers can appreciate the cultural issues and the human drama of the story of the author’s actual schooling. By opening her narrative with a depiction of the school’s class of 1989 as it assembles to receive its diplomas, Cary suggests that Black Ice in part concerns moments of transition and the various ways in which such moments are ritualistically defined as commonplaces of experience and development. Her own transition from family, culture, and urban context is initially made without any such institutional ratification; this is one reason why it is important to record it. The unlikely relationship between the person and the school is presented not so much as the story of an exceptional individual as an exceptional story, since from the standpoints of race, class, and gender it recounts a sequence of circumstances that are the exception rather than the rule. The author’s experience of transition is not merely one of uprooting and relocation, though inevitably such components form a central part of the whole cultural enterprise and contribute to its essentially problematic character. In addition, there are the numerous adjustments that ensue once Lorene is installed in St. Paul’s. Some of these are endemic to the increasing socialization and self-reliance that an adolescent has to undergo. These rites of passage are aggravated by the additional cultural adjustments Lorene has to make. In addition, such adjustments are made with a consciousness of the culture from which they are adjustments. The result is an experience of dissonance that, though never overwhelming, frequently makes Lorene painfully aware of the various contending powers contributing to her evolving sense of selfhood. Particularly noteworthy in this respect are episodes in which gender and class outweigh the relevance of race. The episodes in question concern Lorene’s relations with some of the African American male students at St. Paul’s whose experience of transition is even more conflicted than her own. The overall effect of this very human element of the story, one that receives at least as much attention as the description of Lorene’s various academic struggles, is to make of the author a character who ultimately does become, however unintentionally, coextensive with the exceptional character of her story. With regard to class, an embarrassing date with Booker, a coworker from the diner in which Lorene has a summer job, is an unnerving reminder of the distance she has traveled in terms of social expectations. Questions of class raise issues of power and authority, also, and receive an unexpectedly illuminating treatment in the context of Lorene’s religious conflicts, which are brought about by the difference in emphasis between St. Paul’s church and the church she attended with her parents in Philadelphia. As the completion of her St. Paul’s experience draws near, Lorene becomes subject to distressing doubts about the degree to which she has abandoned her people, both in a cultural and in a class sense. The forceful rendering of these doubts dramatizes the trial of consciousness to which Lorene’s education has subjected her. Her

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survival of this trial, in connection to which the text of Black Ice stands as an unimpeachable expert witness, is also exceptional. Honesty about the shock value of the author’s own complex transitions is one of the outstanding aspects of Black Ice. This honesty is most readily perceptible when she is describing the tortuous growth of her younger self. It is a quality that also enables the author to pay tribute to the context in which that growth took place. While fundamentally an autobiography, the work also becomes the journal of a place and of an ethos that are depicted as being culturally responsive—and responsible enough to come to terms with what its influx of difference, embodied by young Lorene, might have to offer. Analysis One of the recurring means by which the author dramatizes the fundamental nature of her experience of transition and development is in terms of trust. In a manner that expresses the difficult dichotomies that arise out of the invitation to be assimilated into an America that she had never adequately known, and which she regarded skeptically, the issue of trust is represented in two distinct ways. One of these articulates the challenge being confronted in terms of “a leap of faith.” This term, associated primarily with the theologian Paul Tillich, is used in Black Ice as a cultural or intellectual nmemonic, a means by which young Lorene keeps bearing in mind the need to shed some of the inhibitions and reservations that her presence at St. Paul’s inevitably generates. To invest herself without qualification in the institutional and educational world of the school, to accept that this model of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant power will work to her benefit, seems to demand a disposition as mysteriously liberated as the phrase “a leap of faith” projects. In order to convey her difficulty, the author draws on part of her own cultural tradition, a West Indian folktale told by her grandfather. The story deals with a child who is encouraged by her father to jump, and eventually does jump only to find that her father does not break her fall as promised. By means of this experience, the father intends to foster a disposition of mistrust and selfprotection in his daughter. Despite the genuine appeal of the Paul Tillich phrase, and despite the academic and other significant endorsements that Lorene finds attached to it, she also discovers the need to counterbalance it through an idiom and example that speaks more explicitly to her relationship with her context. The power of the different verbal structures, and the author’s keen sensitivity to the authority of language to encode commands and prescriptions, warnings and invitations, and to recognize the cultural force of these encodings surreptitiously pervades her sense of her education as, fundamentally, a language system. The ability of what might be termed the author’s native language to be heard by the more rarified orthodoxy of institutional language remains somewhat in doubt, as is suggested by a seemingly urgent reminder of her own language’s importance at the end of Black Ice. This reminder is significant because the author understands language to be a repository of culture and that it is as necessary to keep faith with the culture of the folktale as it is to take the leap of faith toward the culture of less informal modes of address. To see each of these two modes

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of articulation as the guarantor and authenticator of the other is the dream of which Lorene’s educational opportunity at St. Paul’s is the inspiration. Making that dream a reality requires measures of courage, stubbornness, and goodwill for which the arduous, intense, and finally rewarding career of the adolescent Lorene provides a yardstick. The autobiography’s unusual title speaks to the theme of possibility also, as well as to the elusiveness of fully realizing it. While it is tempting to underline the color coding in Black Ice, the exclusive emphasis in the text is on the natural phenomenon of black ice. One of the key moments in the development of Lorene’s awareness is a reflective interlude by a lake on the school grounds. Oppressed by the demands and expectations being placed upon her, and believing that perfection is the only way in which to respond to them, she seeks a contemplative moment. The natural equivalent of what she desires to realize in herself is the climatic phenomenon of black ice. This is ice of extraordinary translucency, firmness, and purity, tantamount to a force that grips and holds nature in a mold. By doing so, however, it performs an act of preservation. Although the author does not tease out the various implications of this complex image for her understanding of her St. Paul’s sojourn, readers are provided with numerous clues regarding the title’s possible meanings. In particular, the emphasis on the natural is significant. For although there are a number of pages devoted to such issues as the challenges of calculus, examinations, and broader intellectual concerns, these merely provide a venue for the humanistic core of the story that Black Ice tells. Lorene studies a variety of subjects at St. Paul’s, but she also learns a number of other lessons. Her academic work is not glossed over, and the author went on to have a successful university career that, in turn, led to entry into the professional middle class. Her schoolwork, however, remains as an anteroom to the true venue in which her drama of transition takes place. The emphasis throughout is on the person, rather than on the student—and this is an emphasis that the school itself insists on, an emphasis that is one of the main rationales for its being a boarding school or, as its executives see it, a prototype of communal potential. The overall effect is to educate Lorene in an ethos, one which designates her a child of promise, a worthy object of liberal benevolence and high-mindedness, an emblem of historic opportunity. The opportunity in question is a contemporary replaying of a familiar American myth of unity, possibility, and assimilation, a myth the potency of which is enhanced by the realistic detailing of what participating in it costs. Black Ice provides such details. Critical Context If, from the point of view of the author’s experience, Black Ice is less about the humanities than it is about humanity, this is not to suggest that the story it tells has no bearing on the humanities. The educational setting makes it inevitable that questions concerning curricular content, cultural emphasis, and the like arise, particularly in view of the author’s sensitivity to the authority of certain cultural idioms. While it would be misleading to consider Black Ice as a contribution to contemporary public

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debate on such subjects as multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, the cultural challenge that Lorene faces speaks to the relevance of such a debate—particularly since so many of the contributors to the debate are members of the author’s generation and maintain positions that derive from variations of her cultural and institutional experiences. Such a context for Black Ice draws attention to a more fundamental basis for the work’s noteworthiness. The author’s generation emerged into adulthood in the immediate wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s as the direct inheritors of that movement’s moral authority and of the legislative response that the assertion of that authority prompted. As such, they were available to areas of American experience in larger numbers than had historically been the case hitherto, available in particular to the American experience in its mainstream, institutional manifestations. In the light of such developments, reflected in society at large by the increased size of the African American middle class, Lorene Cary’s story may be seen as not merely an account of a personal odyssey through a certain phase of her development but also as an exemplary enactment of choices with which some members of the post-civil rights generation of African Americans were confronted. Black Ice is not the major imaginative statement that some African American women writers have made. Because the book focuses more on matter than on method, moreover, Cary’s work may seem inadequately aware of the illustrious tradition of African American autobiography to which it contributes. In certain fundamental respects, however, Black Ice provides readers with critical instruction regarding the social relevance and human exigency of the strains and tensions latent in the cultural classification “African American.” Bibliography Alabi, Adetayo. Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Important overview of the African American autobiography as a genre. Discusses both the features held in common and the significant diversity among black autobiographical writings. Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Provides a sense of the tradition to which Black Ice contributes and of that tradition’s cultural and literary importance. Cary, Lorene. “As Plain as Black and White.” Newsweek 119 (June 29, 1992): 53. Essay on different verbal and tonal emphases in white and African American speech. Provides additional perspective on the linguistic subtext of Black Ice. _______. “Why It’s Not Just Paranoia: An American History of ‘Plans’ for Blacks.” Newsweek 119 (April 6, 1992): 23. Essay on the historical roots of contemporary attitudes toward African Americans, with particular emphasis on the group’s mortality rates and similar areas of neglect. Supplements the conscience-forming experiences detailed in Black Ice. Golden, Marita, and E. Lynn Harris, eds. Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing. New York: Harlem Moon, 2002. Introductory notes from the editors com-

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ment upon the work compiled in this anthology, which includes an excerpt from Cary’s Pride (1998). Lopate, Philip. “An Epistle from St. Paul’s.” The New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1991, 7. Lengthy review of Black Ice, outlining its sociological interest, the quality of its writing, and its moral integrity. Trescott, Jacqueline. “To Be Young, Gifted, Black . . . and Preppie: Author Lorene Cary’s Recollections of Life at a Posh Boarding School.” The Washington Post, April 25, 1991, p. Cl. Extended profile of Cary. Contains some relevant statements regarding her own view of the achievement of Black Ice. Yardley, Jonathan. “Old School Ties and Knots.” The Washington Post Book World, March 31, 1992, 3. Review stressing the complexity of the feelings that permeate and authenticate Black Ice. George O’Brien

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BLACK MACHO AND THE MYTH OF THE SUPERWOMAN Author: Michele Wallace (1952) Type of work: Autobiography/cultural criticism Time of work: Late 1960’s-1978 Locale: United States First published: 1979 Principal personages: Michele Wallace, an African American female adolescent Faith Ringgold, Michele’s mother and an African American feminist artist Form and Content Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman consists of two essays on the title topics, a bibliography, and an index. Michele Wallace attacks the male supremacist bias of 1960’s and 1970’s African American politics. She shows how the Black Power movement that attempted to empower African Americans only empowered African American men. Women remained marginalized, unable to develop a political strategy to take control of their own lives. Wallace argues that African Americans had been systematically deprived of their own African culture. While slavery and segregation were enormously damaging, African Americans were also hurt by integration and assimilation that denied them the knowledge of their history of struggle and the memory of their own cultural practices. In the process of assimilation, integration, and accommodation, African Americans took on white cultural attitudes and values in regard to sexuality and gender. As a result, African American men became sexist and misogynistic and African American women became self-hating. In hating African American women, African American men hated themselves. They had accepted the dominant culture’s negative stereotypes about the African race. The roots of African American self-hatred are found in the United States’ history of lynching African American men who purportedly pursued white women. The idea developed that an African American man’s access to white women was a prerequisite of his freedom. This notion shaped the minds of both those white women who came to the South as part of the Civil Rights movement and the African American men who met them there. Since many such men had come to think of themselves in largely physical terms, the inaccessibility of white women represented a severe limitation to their manhood. Liberal white women did not want to oppress African American men by rejecting their sexual advances, while African American men gained no status by romantically pursuing African American women. Thus, Wallace argues, African American men began celebrating masculinity at the expense of their race. When Shirley Chisholm, an African American female legislator

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from New York, ran for president in 1972, African American political forces—all male—did not support her. They actively opposed her nomination, attempting to humiliate her as a political being as well as a sexual being. The man on the street seemed either outraged that Chisholm was running or simply indifferent to her campaign. As a result, Wallace was baffled to hear African American men argue that African American women should ignore feminism and focus on African American interests. African American men obviously identified as men before they identified as African American: They had demonstrated by their attitudes toward Chisholm that they wanted African American men to be privileged ahead of African American women. The Black Power movement pursued African American male superiority instead of African American superiority. Black power advocates celebrated a type of African American manhood, or “black macho,” that combined the ghetto cunning and unrestrained sexuality of African American survival with the unchecked authority, control, and wealth of white power. African American men who stressed a traditionally patriarchal responsibility to their women, children, and community were seen as feminized. Instead, an African American man’s sexuality and the physical fact of his penis were the major evidence of his manhood and the purpose of it. Black macho permitted its adherents to embrace only the most primitive notion of women—as possessions and spoils of war—leaving African American women as devalued symbols of defeat. As Wallace explains it, the myth of the superwoman holds that African American women have inordinate strength, with an associated ability to tolerate an unusual amount of misery and heavy, distasteful work. According to this myth, the African American woman does not have the same fears, weaknesses, and insecurities as other women, but views herself as stronger emotionally than most men. In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” more commonly known as the Moynihan Report. The report blamed African American women for being strong and therefore imposing an intolerable burden on African American men that destroyed African American families. While African American men attacked Moynihan for taking the responsibility for racism off the shoulders of whites, they also agreed that African American women had substantial advantages over African American men educationally, financially, and in employment. This attitude led to scapegoating of African American women. Rather than carve out a place for African American men in the white-dominated economy, African Americans sought to reduce the accomplishments of African American women. Successful African American women were made to feel guilty for being successful. Analysis At the time that Wallace wrote her book, the significance of African American women as a distinct category was routinely erased by the way in which the leaders of many women’s movements and African American movements chose to set their goals and recollect their histories. In 1978, practically no one discussed racial oppression

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and women’s oppression at the same time. In subsequent years, multicultural feminist inquiry would make such dualism less of a problem in the academy, but not among the general public. Wallace, a professor of English at the City University of New York, grew up in New York City as the daughter of African American feminist artist Faith Ringgold. She attributed becoming a feminist in the 1970’s to her mother’s influence. However, Wallace also had a number of personal experiences with discrimination. She withdrew from historically African American Howard University at the end of her freshman year in 1970 after finding the misogynistic atmosphere at the school to be intolerable. While studying at the City College of New York, she studied under African American feminist writers Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Wallace helped found the National Black Feminist Organization in the 1970’s. Critical Context When Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman appeared in print, Wallace was twenty-six years old and unprepared for the resulting onslaught of criticism. While some members of the African American community supported her work, many others were openly hostile. Wallace was accused of causing a division in the African American community that would aid whites, of being a dupe of white feminists who only wanted to exploit her, and of weakening the African American community. The sharp criticism gave Wallace a nervous breakdown. In subsequent years, Wallace’s work became recognized as pathbreaking and enormously significant. Feminist scholars built on her discussion of African American sexual politics, though there remained comparatively few works on African American feminism. However, Wallace’s hope that African American women would design their own liberation has not been fully realized, nor has the dream of cohesive African American political action. Bibliography Byrd, Rudolph P., and Beverly Guy-Sheftell, eds. Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Explores the place of African American men in African American feminist criticism, as well as the patriarchy’s exploitation of African American women. Carson, Clayborne, Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner, and Gary B. Nash. The Struggle for Freedom: A History of African Americans. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. One of the best general histories of African Americans. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Essentially the successor book to Wallace’s work, Collins’s text explores how images of black sexuality have been used to oppress African Americans. _______. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. One of the best histories of modern black feminism.

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Estes, Steve. I Am A Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Examines male attitudes toward the Civil Rights movement and the Moynihan Report. Robnett, Belinda. How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. A history of the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of African American women. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000. One of the best histories of the women’s movement. Caryn E. Neumann

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BLACK MEN Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? Author: Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee, 1942Type of work: Essays First published: 1990

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Form and Content As he approached his fiftieth year, Haki R. Madhubuti drew on his experiences as an engaged artist, a practicing poet, a social activist, and an African American to gather into the form of a book a series of interlinked essays directly addressed to the most serious problems afflicting the African American community. Writing partly in response and as a complement to the strong voices of such African American women essayists as June Jordan, Bell Hooks, and Maya Angelou, among others, partly as a speaker for a social group underrepresented and often “voiceless,” and partly as a concerned citizen confronting a national crisis, Madhubuti combined in his essays the powerful language of a poet and the perceptions of an intellectual activist in a campaign for social justice and communal pride. In Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? Afrikan American Families in Transition: Essays in Discovery, Solution, and Hope, Madhubuti cast himself in one of the most ancient and most important roles for a poet, that of cultural storehouse of his people. As he put it, “I’m a poet in the Afrikan griot tradition, a keeper of the culture’s secrets, history, short and tall tales, a rememberer.” His essays are a teaching text, a source of wisdom, insight, and inspiration built on the considered experience of the author. The structure of the book is developed through the construction of a foundation of knowledge that is based on the study of a wide variety of writers covering an international perspective; Madhubuti concentrates this material into an individual voice. To avoid the dangerously narrow viewpoint of an exclusively personal essayist, Madhubuti permits his own singular being to emerge gradually through his language and ideas, with a minimum of specific biographic detail. The only essay that offers information about Madhubuti’s life is entitled “Never Without a Book”; the piece is designed to show how important books have been for him and, by extension, to support his essential argument that the book is the most powerful weapon that a people might utilize in a struggle to preserve its cultural heritage. He recalls that from the age of thirteen, when his mother introduced him to Richard Wright’s Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), “seldom has there been a day that I’ve been without a book.” He comments that for a poor boy living in Detroit on “unforgiving urban streets,” books “represented revelation and intellectual liberation,” the twin centers of soul and mind. Like many other street kids, he notes, he quickly learned the dubious but necessary skills of “how to pray, rap and lie to white people.” Books offered other possibilities, widening the scope of experience beyond the world he had previously known, and he was struck by the capacity of language to free a person “from the

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awesome weight of race, gender, class and poverty in America.” He knew how black men fought in the streets; now he was becoming aware of how they were being “annihilated intellectually” by the misuse of language and cultural knowledge as “weapons of power and destruction.” Madhubuti lists the books and authors that were most important to his awakening, and he notes that for him, as for many other intellectually adventurous boys, the public library became a “second home.” Because he knows both realms—the limiting, numbing world of the street and its temptations, and the infinitely more challenging and rewarding world of the imagination, with the satisfactions it ultimately offers—Madhubuti is prepared to address the problems of what drives people from a place in a family and community to the desperate, temporary gratifications of destructive street life. While the title of the book suggests that its focus is on African American men, the direction of the essays is toward the reconstitution of the African American family. Madhubuti arranges the essays using two patterns of rhythmic organization that are grounded in African American traditions: the concept of a theme and variations that is at the heart of jazz improvisation, and the vocal dialogue of call-and-response popular in black church congregations for centuries. There is an echo of the book’s title query about black men—“Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?” (the theme)—in the subtitle “Essays in Discovery, Solution, and Hope” (the variation), as well as a further tonal extension in the book’s dedications and acknowledgments. This is a part of an aural texture that is also evident in the frequent use of lists (akin to extended variations on a theme) and in the location of poems throughout the text to emphasize or reinforce a particularly important point, a device something like the powerful melody (the theme) recurring after sections of development. The idea of call-and-response is related to the speech-oriented aspect of the essay form, and Madhubuti uses it in anticipation of reactions and questions that might be raised at crucial places in his argument and as a way to state a problem (the call) and then to address the issue (the response). The overall organization of the book is essentially threefold, paralleling the title and the subtitle. In regard to each significant element in the societal disintegration he identifies, Madhubuti probes for its causes, describes its most damaging effects, and searches for some possibilities of remedy. The cause/effect/search-for-solution form, however, is more a general progression, with frequent returns and reiterations, than a specific sequence. At the pivotal point of the book, the title essay focuses attention on black men as a symbol of the cumulative effects of racist policies, which have resulted in the loss of African American traditions, the erosion of familial relationships, and the black community’s spiral into decline and despair. Individual essays outline the problems in devastating detail; Madhubuti then discusses specific programs, approaches, and philosophical anchors for setting positions of strength against discouragement. Moreover—throughout the book, but especially in the concluding chapters—Madhubuti offers examples of individuals and organizations demonstrating the principles he proposes. The impression that this format is designed to convey is one of resilience, determination, and, ultimately, hope. His mood is somber in the face of the facts he confronts, but the last essay concludes with the word “love,” and

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the final page contains the poem entitled “Yes” that is an affirmation of the beauty of true human civilization. Analysis “The pain is in the eyes,” Madhubuti writes, of young black men who are “lost and abandoned . . . sons of Afrika, once strong and full of the hope America lied about . . . now knee-less, voice-broken, homeless, forgotten. . . .” Writing with a bitter candor, Madhubuti concentrates his anger into the forcefully rational tones of a classical rhetorician as he begins his consideration of black manhood with a historical evaluation. Using considerable statistical evidence, informed opinion, serious scholarship, and incisive observation, Madhubuti draws a grim picture of a bleak reality that is familiar but nevertheless disturbing. This is the foundation for the critique that follows—an indictment of both the white policy of “terrorization” and cultural destruction and an unsparing, rigorous examination of the failures within the African American community that have prevented any real attempt at amelioration. “I am among these men,” Madhubuti declares, and it is his pain and love for his own community that compels his honest and unsettling evaluation. He is insistent that “poverty is slavery” and that chattel slavery has been transformed into the enslavement of economic helplessness. Because he is convinced that, though there are “some white men of good will,” the majority of white people will not undertake “life-giving and life-saving corrections,” Madhubuti contends that any solution to these problems must come from the African American community. Since American history is a record of white supremacist policies pursued from a Eurocentric standpoint, he argues, African Americans must be responsible for their own survival. As a first step, Madhubuti feels it necessary to dispel the nonsense espoused by people such as the tycoon Donald Trump, whom Madhubuti quotes as having claimed, “If I were starting out today, I would love to be a well-educated Black because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.” Madhubuti also criticizes the defensive delusions and hypocrisies of the so-called leaders of the African American world. Madhubuti believes that various black celebrities, hustlers, church figures, and other prominent people have encouraged a mind-set that is selfish, sexist, and dependent—a “Negro’s philosophy of life.” It is the deadly conjunction of a racist attack on black people and a cult of personality fostered by hustlers ready to sell out their heritage, Madhubuti argues, that has turned black men into “beggars, thieves, or ultra-dependents on a system that considers them less than human.” For Madhubuti, the loss of manhood is literally a loss of self, and the goal of his book is to redefine “Black Manhood.” Madhubuti recognizes that, deprived of money and power, black men have been tempted by what he calls “unlimited negative options” that are “incorrectly defined as freedoms”; at the crux of his definition, however, is a reconsideration of the potential for black men to achieve a measure of power and control without reliance on the white world. To begin, Madhubuti recalls the “Afrikan” society (which he spells with a “k” to signify a “redefined and potentially different Afrika”), which might serve as a guide

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in terms of cooperation and support among members of a family and a community. One of the most striking features of his concept of manhood is his respect for and admiration of women as partners, and he sees no contradiction between a man’s fulfillment of his function as a “warrior” and his fulfillment of his responsibilities as a father and husband. The title chapter is echoed and extended in the chapters “Before Sorry: Listening to and Feeling the Flow of Black Women” and “What’s a Daddy? Fathering and Marriage.” The defining characteristics of manhood, Madhubuti writes, include such qualities as cultural and moral integrity, competence, psychological security and stability as a Black man, sensitivity to the needs of one’s people, a strong work ethic, a culturally-based mindset, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge (truth), a winner’s attitude toward life, an insatiable love for Black people (especially the children), revolutionary unpredictability, and an unstoppable willingness to struggle against any odds for the liberation of Black people.

A true man, Madhubuti writes, can deal with enemies and can help to make a home into a refuge, a source of strength for the most basic component of a solid social system, the immediate family. Madhubuti continually refers to an African model in the essay “Twelve Secrets of Life” and uses it as an idealized vision of a workable society. The culmination of this consideration of partnership is the poem “A Bonding,” an epithalamium celebrating the kind of relationship that Madhubuti is encouraging. Throughout the central section of the book, Madhubuti’s tone gradually shifts from that of an objective, although righteously angry, lecturer to the more personal, softer mood of someone in conversation. As he concludes the book with several examples of “positive male reality models,” including Malcolm X (“Our Shining Black Prince”), Hoyt Fuller (“the fired-up conscious individual”), and Bobby Wright (“the constant swimmer, the energized professional”), he moves toward an almost prophetic eloquence, celebrating with poetic power the lives of three men who exemplify the qualities he has been espousing. The sense of personal involvement, of a man speaking from the heart, is appropriate for the author, who has previously written, “My fight is to be an inspired example of a caring, healthy, intelligent and hard-working brother.” Critical Context Haki R. Madhubuti is a “race man” (to use Langston Hughes’s or Sterling Brown’s term) but not a racist. He is acutely aware of the assault on black cultural values and the destructive impact of national policies on African American life in the United States, but while he is determined to restore and maintain those aspects of the African American tradition and heritage that he considers vital for survival, he has not condemned other racial groups, and his anger is directed at the racist policies of white Americans, not at any other race. His sensible, fair-minded essay “Blacks and Jews:

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The Continuing Question” is critical of both groups, and he does not avoid admiring comments about the behavior and practices of Jews in America, which he feels might be useful as an example for others. Madhubuti was born Don L. Lee in a Detroit ghetto and reared by a single mother who was murdered when he was fifteen. He saw young illiterate, directionless black men on the streets, and he regards his discovery of literature as the source of his strength in escaping from a similar destiny. Through the continuous development of his artistic capabilities, he has become Haki R. Madhubuti (the name is drawn from Swahili words meaning “just” and “precise; accurate, dependable”). His philosophy, as expressed in his essays, is meant not only for the black community but also as a critique of American society in the last decade of the twentieth century. He describes his audience as all “serious men and women,” and while his ideas are built on the experiences of the African American world, they are applicable to and designed for the human race. The damage done to the black community, he argues, has harmed the entire nation, and Madhubuti’s personal credo, “To be progressively consistent in my politics and profoundly kind in my manners,” has nothing to do with race or gender. Nevertheless, Gwendolyn Brooks has accurately described him as one of the first “blackeners” of English; his use of the black idiom in poetry in the 1960’s made him relevant then, just as his evolving critique of the entire black community from his Afrocentric perspective has kept him relevant into the 1990’s. The essays, poems, and other writings collected in Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? are a part of his continuing contribution to the cultural heritage he values. Bibliography Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. An appropriate complement to Madhubuti’s social commentary from a “committedly feminist, hopefully leftist, and unabashedly racialist perspective.” Includes a highly individual response to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy. _______. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Essays described as “direct, sometimes angry, and always probing” that connect African American experiences and traditions with evolving conditions in the postmodern era. Jennings, Regina. Malcolm X and the Poetics of Haki Madhubuti. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Major work evaluating the aesthetics informing Madhubuti’s poetry and arguing that Malcolm X acted as the poet’s “literary muse.” Madhubuti, Haki R. Don’t Cry, Scream. Chicago: Third World Press, 1969. The first major collection of Madhubuti’s poetry, published by the press he established to give black writers access to adequate publishing and distribution systems. Other important collections include Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions: Poetry and Essays of Black Renewal, 1973-1983 (1984), which offers essays and poetic commentary on political and social issues, and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors (1987), which contains “cutting verse” on various manifestations of American culture.

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_______. YellowBlack: The First Twenty-one Years of a Poet’s Life: A Memoir. Chicago: Third World Press, 2005. Autobiography covering the formative years of Madhubuti’s life and his first forays into poetry. Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. 1979. Reprint. New York: Verso, 1990. The first section presents a feminist critique of the Black Power movement that argues that, as a result of white racism, “there is a profound distrust, if not hatred, between black men and women.” Both a parallel to and another angle on the issues Madhubuti addresses. _______. Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory. New York: Verso, 1990. A collection of essays and articles on black artists, including Spike Lee, Michael Jackson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ishmael Reed. Leon Lewis

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THE BLACK MUSLIMS IN AMERICA Author: C. Eric Lincoln (1924-2000) Type of work: History First published: 1961; revised 1973, 1994 Form and Content C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America was the first serious historical account of the Nation of Islam (NoI, sometimes known as Black Muslims), an organization that combines portions of the Islamic religion with Black Nationalism—an ideology that advocates separation from white society. Lincoln begins his historical account with a summary of two of the group’s precursors, Marcus Garvey, the most famous Black Nationalist of the early twentieth century, and Noble Drew, who endorsed the ideology within the context of an unorthodox Islamic sect. He then discusses Wallace D. Fard, a former leader of Drew’s movement who in 1930 founded the Allah Temple of Islam (ATI). While the ATI retained several Islamic symbols and teachings, Fard added new elements, including the doctrines that African Africans were the original people and that whites were devils created by an evil black scientist named Dr. Yakub. Lincoln believes that Garvey and Drew “capitalized on the lower-class black man’s despair and reservations about the white man.” Fard, he says, added a spiritual dimension to Black Nationalism, developing “black consciousness into a confession of faith.” One of Fard’s devoted disciples, Elijah Pool, who later changed his name to Elijah Muhammad, introduced the doctrine that Fard was actually Allah (or God). Although this doctrine was contrary to traditional Islamic teachings, Fard apparently endorsed it. In 1934, when Fard was forced to leave Detroit because of a ritualistic murder committed by a follower, he changed the group’s name to the Nation of Islam. By this time, the organization had grown to include about ten thousand members. Fard mysteriously disappeared, allowing Elijah Muhammad to assume leadership of the NoI. Calling himself Allah’s Messenger, Elijah Muhammad emphasized black solidarity, racial dignity, racial separation, hard work, self-defense, strict morality, and strong family values, centered around a patriarchal family structure. Although not an eloquent speaker, he spoke with great conviction, and his message resonated with many people, especially those who were poor and oppressed. In 1942, he was imprisoned for refusing to register for the draft. Elijah Muhammad’s incarceration rallied his followers and brought additional publicity for the NoI. In 1947, an angry young African American man named Malcolm Little, while in prison for burglary, became a zealous NoI convert and changed his name to Malcolm X. Following his parole in 1952, Malcolm devoted his great energy and charismatic personality to recruiting new members and building temples. A militant Black Nationalist, he rejected nonviolence and urged African Americans to defend themselves “by

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any means necessary.” The second edition of Lincoln’s book details Malcolm’s life after leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, when he became disillusioned with Elijah Muhammad’s moral behavior and racial theories. In response to his open criticism of Elijah Muhammad, NoI leaders proclaimed Malcolm worthy of death, and extremist members of the group assassinated him in 1965. The third edition of Lincoln’s book continues the NoI’s history beyond 1975, the year in which Elijah Muhammad died and was succeeded by his son, Warith Deen Muhammed. An orthodox and moderate Sunni Muslim, the new leader rejected his father’s racist doctrines and other non-Sunni teachings, thereby fundamentally changing the nature of the organization. Minister Louis Farrakhan and his followers were displeased with these changes, and in 1978 Farrakhan resurrected the NoI according to most of the early teachings of Elijah Muhammad. According to Lincoln, the two organizations should be looked upon as separate religious denominations. Analysis As an African American who experienced racial discrimination in his youth in Alabama during the Jim Crow era, Lincoln has no trouble understanding the Black Muslims’ anger and resentment toward white Americans. He observes that members of the organization have been “drawn together and held together by hatred,” encouraged in their hatred by centuries of white racism. In addition, it is significant that the Black Muslims’ principal source of recruitment has been the inner city, with its “dirty streets and crowded tenements where life is cheap and hope is minimal.” Summarizing the group’s characteristics in the early years, Lincoln writes that the members were generally drawn from the lower socioeconomic classes and were predominantly male, that they tended to be young and “functionally illiterate,” and that a significant percentage had recently migrated to the North from the South, an experience that had heightened their realization of racial subordination. Lincoln, a liberal minister in the Methodist Church, is firmly committed to the “American creed,” which he defines as a set of beliefs and values that “affirms the basic dignity of every individual and the existence of certain invaluable rights without reference to race, creed, or color.” Having worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., Lincoln naturally regrets that the NoI repudiates this creed, and he writes that the goal of separate nationhood based upon “black supremacy” is “obviously unrealistic.” Lincoln recognizes, nevertheless, that the NoI provides its members with spiritual solace and a foundation for moral living. He also observes that those members have consistently earned a reputation for honesty, individual responsibility, hard work, and conservative family values. He admires the organization’s promotion of racial pride and solidarity as means of promoting economic and social development. Although some of the group’s most militant members have been involved in violence, such as a bloody shootout with the police in Louisiana in 1972, Lincoln emphasizes that the NoI has consistently taught its members that they should only use violence when necessary for self-defense.

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Lincoln greatly minimizes the role of religious teachings in attracting and keeping NoI members. Rather than being based on otherworldly religion, he believes, the group’s success has primarily been due to its political and social messages. When Muslims persuade persons to leave black Christian churches, they emphasize secular goals and even express contempt for the Christian notion of rewards in an afterlife. In interpreting the NoI as primarily a Black Nationalist movement, Lincoln argues that all such movements share three characteristics in common: demand for strict separation of the black and white races, disparagement of whites and their culture, and glorification of African civilization. Critical Context After holding professorships at several universities, Lincoln taught religion and sociology at Duke University for many years. He became widely recognized as one of the nation’s premier authorities in the sociology and history of African American religion. During his long career, he published more than twenty additional books, all of which became well respected. The Black Muslims in America, a revision of his Ph.D. dissertation, continues to be his most popular and well-known work. The book tells a fascinating story, and it is based on an impressive amount of research that draws on documentary sources and oral interviews. Because of its historical framework and emphasis on social characteristics, the book can best be classified as a work of historical sociology. In contrast to many sociological studies, however, it is written in an accessible style, without technical jargon. Lincoln’s was first scholarly account of the NoI, and it helped make the group a legitimate object of scholarly study. It also helped give prominence to Malcolm X, who became Lincoln’s personal friend. Additional books continue to be written about the history of the organization, but Lincoln’s remains among the most compelling for a general readership. Bibliography Curtis, Edward E., IV. “Islamizing the Black Body: Ritual and Power in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam.” Religion and American Culture 12 (Summer, 2002): 167-196. Excellent article that takes issue with Lincoln’s characterization of the early Black Muslims as primarily political and not profoundly religious. Lincoln, C. Eric. “The Universal Black Experience: An Interview with C. Eric Lincoln.” Interview by Yvonne Ochillo. The Journal of Negro History 75 (Summer/ Autumn, 1990): 112-119. Lincoln discusses his views on religion, civil rights, and sociology. _______, et al. “Black Scholars Recall Racism from their Undergraduate Years.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 14 (Winter, 1996): 101-103. Interesting memoirs by C. Eric Lincoln, John Hope Franklin, and others, illustrating how perceptions of racial prejudice influenced their thinking. Quarles, Benjamin. Review of The Black Muslims in America, by C. Eric Lincoln. The Journal of Negro History 46 (April, 1961): 198-199. Important contemporary assessment of Lincoln’s history of the Nation of Islam.

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Trulear, Harold. “Sociology of Afro-American Religion: An Appraisal of C. Eric Lincoln’s Contribution.” Journal of Religious Thought 42 (Fall/Winter, 1985-1986): 44-56. Valuable for persons interested in the academic fields of sociology, ethnic studies, and the sociology of religion. Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African-American Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Excellent book investigating the connection between African Americans and Islam from the colonial period through the end of the twentieth century. Adds context to Lincoln’s pioneering study. Thomas Tandy Lewis

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BLACK NO MORE Author: George S. Schuyler (1895-1977) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Satire; science fiction Time of plot: Mid-1930’s Locale: United States First published: 1931 Principle characters: Max Disher, an African American veteran who becomes the white Matthew Fisher Bunny Brown, Max’s friend and fellow veteran Helen Givens, Max’s white love interest Dr. Junius Crookman, a scientist who invents a device that turns black people into white people Santorp Licorice, a Black Nationalist modeled after Marcus Garvey Henry Givens, Helen’s father, who is a racist minister and politician The Novel In George S. Schuyler’s Black No More, Max Disher and his friend, Bunny Brown, are African American World War I veterans out at a Harlem nightclub, when two high-class white couples enter the club. Max is immediately transfixed by one of the women, Helen Givens. He asks her to dance but is shocked when she tells him she does not dance with “niggers.” The next morning, Bunny tells him that the local newspaper is featuring a story about a black scientist, Dr. Junius Crookman, who has found a way to turn black people white. Max gets the treatment, sells his story to a newspaper for traveling money, changes his name to Matthew Fisher, and returns to his hometown, Atlanta, Georgia. In Atlanta, “Matthew Fisher” attends a meeting of the Knights of Nordica, an organization of white laborers led by the Reverend Henry Givens. Passing himself off as an anthropologist, Matthew works his way into the organization. Meanwhile, Crookman’s invention, Black-No-More, has become so successful that it not only threatens the livelihoods of white racists and the black businesses of Harlem but also affects the National Social Equality League and black cultural nationalist Santorp Licorice. Santorp forms a temporary alliance with the Knights of Nordica. Matthew works for the Knights as a publicist, hires his old friend Bunny to spy on Santorp (who is on the Nordica payroll), and marries Helen Givens. Matthew and Bunny are then hired by a South Carolina plant manager to help his company avert a workers’ strike. Matthew gives a speech to the workers supporting their labor initia-

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tives and then hires operatives to spread rumors that Swanson, the labor leader, is really African American. When Helen becomes pregnant and insists on having the baby at home, Matthew’s worst fear, that the baby will be black, drives him to extreme measures. He hires Bunny to burn down the Givens house, forcing Helen to go to the hospital. There, Santorp induces a miscarriage. Meanwhile, public anger at Crookman and his BlackNo-More formula is threatening the Republican administration in which Senator Givens—who has traded in his pulpit for a political career—is a major player. Givens approaches his son-in-law for help, and Matthew dutifully develops a plan to appease white public anger: Givens will denounce Crookman, call upon the Republican administration to close all of Crookman’s laboratories, and insist on deportation of all the “new whites.” At the same time, Matthew plants a story in The Warning, a Knights of Nordica publication, claiming that the Republicans are in league with the Pope, Catholics, and Jews. Meanwhile, a Dr. Samuel Buggerie, at the behest of Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, is conducting a large-scale study of the genealogy of Americans to separate Nordics from non-Nordics. Matthew convinces the Democrats to nominate the Knights of Nordica’s Henry Givens as their presidential candidate and the Anglo-Saxon Association’s Arthur Snobbcraft as his running mate. The Republicans form an alliance with Dr. Buggerie and Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, who uncover some damaging genealogical evidence: The vast majority of the white population has mixed blood going back at least five generations. Helen becomes pregnant again and expects to give birth before the elections. Matthew knows he cannot “arrange” another miscarriage, so he begins making plans to leave the country. Helen’s baby turns out to be mulatto, but she assumes this to be the result of the Givens bloodline and begs Matthew’s forgiveness. Bunny bursts in with a newspaper: The Democrats’ bloodlines have been exposed as being mixed. Matthew tells Helen the truth. She does not care, however, and they fly off to Mexico, where they learn the white populace has turned against the Democrats. Snobbcraft and Buggerie flee on a private plane, but it does not have enough gas to reach Mexico. The pilot puts them down in Mississippi. Thinking it is better to be black than white in the state, they blacken their faces with shoe polish. However, they wind up in Happy Hills, Mississippi, where a church minister, Alex McPhule, asks God to send him “a nigger to lynch” as a sign. Snobbcraft and Buggerie are castrated, lynched, and burned at the stake. The novel concludes with Crookman’s discovery that “new” whites are actually “whiter” than “natural” whites, which leads to a new type of racism against the former who, being “too” white, are seen as savages. Since being “too” white becomes a sign of inferiority, “real” whites begin using skin products that will turn them slightly darker. The Characters Given Schuyler’s cynical representation of human nature in Black No More, it is not surprising that the characters Schuyler himself appears to favor are those con men

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and hucksters who, unlike almost everyone else, know exactly who they are. Max Disher never forgets that being Matthew Fisher is, like all his exploits, a scam. The same can be said for the unregenerate racist Henry Givens, who at least believes what he says, and cosmetologist Madam Sisseretta Blandish, who is never tempted to turn white herself. Because this is satire, all the other characters are essentially stock figures. It is interesting, though, that the black ones are caricatures of specific real people (for example, Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard represents W. E. B. Du Bois and Santorp Licorice represents Marcus Garvey), while the white ones are often composites of various demagogues, politicians, and race theorists of the time—or, like Helen Givens, serve as allegories of mythological figures (Helen of Troy). Themes and Meanings Black No More is a lacerating satire of the mores of race and ethnicity in the United States in the first third of the twentieth century. Indeed, Schuyler’s mocking epigraph sets the tone for the entire novel: Dedicated to all Caucasians . . . who can trace their ancestry back ten generations and confidently assert there are no Black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches on their family tree

Though the epigraph focuses on white obsession with bloodline “purity,” Schuyler exploits the color-obsession of African Americans as well, noting that insofar as “whiteness” is the standard, all races and ethnicities, including non-Anglo-Saxon whites, aspire to “whiteness” on some level. Thus, “whiteness” stands not for race but for a whole set of beliefs, behaviors, and modes of access to political and economic power. More important, Schuyler demonstrates how this obsession with skin color blinds every American to scientific “truth,” which is not based on appearances alone, and to class conflict, which drives and accounts for economic and political power in the United States. Thus, for Schuyler, poor whites, Jews, and Catholics act against their own interests, because they remain mesmerized by the chimera of race. The crowning irony is that everything represented in the novel as the pinnacle of whiteness turns out to be corrupt, immoral, and violent. Critical Context Schuyler composed Black No More when he was still a socialist, though evidence of the conservatism he would fully embrace in the early 1960’s is already evident in the cynicism permeating the narrative and, especially, in the role that science plays in the novel. The novel was written during an age of rising eminence for the scientific method, objectivity, and statistical knowledge, which would come to displace religion and revelation as the sphere of “truth.” However, Black No More turns on a distinction that Schuyler draws between science per se and scientists. For Schuyler, the

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American obsession with wealth and power trumps all endeavors, including the scientific one. If he wanted evidence of the corruptibility of scientists, Schuyler could find ample proof in the rise and popularity of eugenics in the early twentieth century. For Schuyler, eugenics is a perfect example of scientific methodology and rigor yoked to questionable sociological ends: For example, Margaret Gander, the founder of Planned Parenthood, originally dedicated herself to “cleansing” the Anglo-Saxon race by discouraging miscegenation not only between African Americans and Caucasians but also between Caucasians and Asians, Jews, Catholics, and Eastern Europeans, among others. In the novel, Dr. Crookman and Dr. Buggerie function as the scientists who are driven by both a thirst for knowledge and a thirst for money and power. Schuyler sees both socialism and eugenics as predicated on a belief in the improvement of human welfare. His point is that, while both may be theoretically possible, human nature, in its ugliest forms, always bends the search for truth to the search for power. Bibliography Ferguson, Jeffrey B. The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. First full biography of Schuyler; covers his life and career, concluding that Schuyler was a paradox. Guesser, John C. “Review: George Schuyler, Samuel L. Brooks, and Max Disher.” African American Review 27, no. 4 (Winter, 1993): 679-686. Ostensibly a review of the posthumous publication of Schuyler’s dystopian science fiction novel, Black Empire, but Guesser widens his discussion to critique Schuyler’s critical reception, arguing that Schuyler was a complicated man and writer. Haslam, Jason. “‘The Open Sesame of a Pork-Colored Skin’: Whiteness and Privilege in Black No More.” American Literature, Spring, 2002, 15-30. Haslam analyzes Black No More from a “white studies” perspective, demonstrating how the racial and class dynamics of the work reinforce one another, even when “pure” racial or economic concerns dominate character motivation and the plot. Kuenz, Jane. “American Racial Discourse, 1900-1930: Schuyler’s Black No More.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 30, no. 2 (Winter, 1997): 170-192. Reviews the cultural context in which Black No More was written, demonstrating that Schuyler was consciously reacting to the rise of an American obsession with race purity on both sides of the color line and that he consequently set out to attack both black and white promulgators of racial ideology. Rayson, Ann. “George Schuyler: Paradox Among ‘Assimilationist’ Writers.” Black American Literature Forum 12, no. 3 (Autumn, 1978): 102-106. Focusing largely on Schuyler’s 1966 autobiography, Black and Conservative, Rayson argues that the text does not fit the prototypical African American autobiography, even as other aspects of his career as a journalist and writer, as well as his personal life, do fit, however awkwardly, the model of the assimilated writer. Tyrone Williams

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BLACK THUNDER Author: Arna Bontemps (1902-1973) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1800 Locale: Richmond, Virginia, and environs First published: 1936 Principal characters: Gabriel Prosser, a young black slave who organizes a slave revolt Pharaoh, a light-skinned slave who warns the white community of Richmond of the impending revolt Mingo, a free black who joins the rebellion Old Ben Woodfolk, a domestic slave who unveils many of the details of Gabriel’s plans Ditcher, a loyal friend of Gabriel and a fellow leader of the revolt M. Creuzot, a white Frenchman widely suspected to have planned Gabriel’s rebellion Alexander Biddenhurst, a Philadelphian with ties to the Underground Railroad Juba, Gabriel’s girlfriend, a strong-spirited woman who joins the slave rebellion General John, a slave in the rebellion who is crafty and good at planning The Novel Black Thunder, Arna Bontemps’s second novel, tells the fictionalized story of a historical slave revolt that occurred near Richmond, Virginia. The revolt is led by a twenty-four-year-old slave named Gabriel, who is sometimes assigned the surname of his owner and referred to as Gabriel Prosser. Inspired by Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave revolt in Haiti, Gabriel develops a simple plan that falls apart as the result of bad weather and betrayal. The novel begins by telling of the murder of a slave known as Old Bundy, whom Thomas Prosser, in possession of a newly inherited estate, tramples to death with his horse. The senseless brutality of Bundy’s murder incites many local slaves to join Gabriel’s efforts to organize a revolt. One of these recruits is Ben, an older house servant who might otherwise not be attracted to a violent revolt. Bontemps tells his story from multiple points of view, so that in the beginning, readers share with many of the characters the expectation that something is about to happen. By presenting the discussions between many people, including the slave-

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holders as well as those who, such as M. Creuzot, oppose slavery, Bontemps puts Gabriel’s attempt at revolution into the larger historical perspective of the international debate over personal liberty and the rights of man during a period when the French Revolution had made many wealthy landowners and aristocrats fearful of social uprisings. Gabriel’s basic plan is simple. An army of slaves will mass in the woods, sneak into Richmond to arm themselves with weapons from the arsenal there, and take control of the city. On the crucial night, however, an unexpected tempest—the worst in recent memory—intervenes and floods the rivers, preventing the slave army from crossing a river. The storm forces Gabriel to delay his plans. A second attempt at revolt is betrayed by Pharaoh, and Gabriel’s forces quickly disperse. Ben Woodfolk drives the final nail in the rebellion’s coffin when he tells his owner, Mosely Sheppard, the details of Gabriel’s plan. Many of the rebellious slaves go back to their plantations and try to carry on with their lives; some of them are captured; and some of them, like Ditcher, surrender voluntarily. Gabriel himself, however, remains at large long after most of his cohorts have given up. The chapters focusing on Gabriel’s attempts to keep first his hopes for a mass rebellion, later his hopes for some kind of rebellion, and eventually his hopeless oneman guerrilla campaign alive are the most psychologically compelling chapters of the novel. When it is clear that his army has dissipated, he nevertheless hopes that if he and a few trusted lieutenants can band together, they can terrorize the town, keep the spirit of the rebellion alive, and possibly still win eventually. When even those hopes have faded, he still determines to keep his one-man rebellion alive, hiding out first in the woods, which the white population is still afraid of entering, and later hiding out in the city while bands of men search the woods for him. Convinced that even a general without an army still must serve his cause, he remains on the loose as a terrorist for some time, even after he has been identified as the leader of the movement and is a wanted man. Meanwhile, others who served with him—and some who did not—are captured, abused, and in some cases executed, as the landowners in Richmond try to unravel the nonexistent “Jacobin” plot that they believe is at the bottom of the conspiracy. Eventually, Gabriel tries to escape, but he is caught when he surrenders himself to prevent the punishment of a man who had helped him. When he is interrogated, his questioners continue to demand evidence of the Jacobin plot; they are unwilling to accept that a young slave with no formal education could have gathered the information necessary to formulate a plan so simple and nearly effective. Gabriel and some of his top lieutenants, including Ditcher and General John, are hanged together; Ben Woodfolk, who is in the crowd that has gathered to watch Gabriel die, turns away, but he continues to see Gabriel’s form. Later the same day, Ben sees a slave auction and realizes that the slave who is being auctioned is Juba, Gabriel’s girlfriend. Again, Ben turns away. As the day develops, the storm begins again; the weather both reflects the storm that ended Gabriel’s hopes for rebellion and metaphorically portends the eventual, inevitable onset of more “black thunder.”

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The Characters In his 1974 work From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900-1960, Arthur Davis makes the claim that Gabriel is so compellingly drawn that readers tend to overlook the book’s minor characters. Many readers may indeed find that to be true. Gabriel certainly is the most fully and compellingly drawn character. Nevertheless, critic Sandra Carlton-Alexander has argued convincingly that “short but rounded characterization was imperative given the demands of the unusual narrative technique” of Black Thunder, in which multiple points of view are used to tell the story. Although Bontemps employs numerous characters, his characterizations are both clear and, when they have to be, succinct. For example, Pharaoh, the first slave to inform on Gabriel, is presented as jealous and untrustworthy. It is also clear that Gabriel sees him as such and so avoids giving Pharaoh any real responsibility in the rebellion. By contrast, the people whom Gabriel does invest with some authority are shown to be trustworthy, useful men. Mingo, besides having the relative mobility freedom allows him, brings a priceless ability to the rebellion through his ability to read, which allows him to keep lists and records. General John is presented as being a crafty strategist, although he gets caught after the rebellion while trying to escape to Philadelphia to find Alexander Biddenhurst. Of Gabriel’s close friends, however, Ditcher is presented most clearly. Similar to Gabriel in many ways, he is large, strong, and a man of leadership ability, having served in the position—unusual for a slave—of being a black overseer on a plantation. He clearly does not have the drive and inspiration to organize such a rebellion or to keep fighting after the war is lost. Of the characters who betray the revolution, Old Ben is the most fully and engagingly drawn. Though he would be an easy character to stereotype, this older domestic slave who, out of loyalty to his master, betrays Gabriel after the second attempt at rebellion fails is portrayed with understanding. Ben’s relationship to Mosely Sheppard, his owner, is presented so that readers can see that there is a mutual trust and respect between the two men. Ben does not delude himself about his personal importance to Sheppard, but though Ben detests slavery and craves freedom, it goes strongly against his nature to violate whatever trust Sheppard has placed in him. Vivid though the secondary characters often are—including Juba, Gabriel’s girlfriend, who retains something of her rebellious spirit even when Old Ben sees her being auctioned at the end—it is undeniably Gabriel who holds the center of readers’ attention. Although the novel makes it clear that Gabriel is a charismatic young man, Bontemps is careful not to make his protagonist too extraordinary. Though Gabriel’s plan is considered by many of the characters to have had a good chance of success, its potential lies not in its complexity but in its simplicity. Relying greatly on the power of surprise, Gabriel thinks that it will be possible to subdue the white men in the city swiftly. When the plan fails and Gabriel is left alone, he is shown as a man struggling with doubts, hopes, courage, and fears. It is crucial, for Bontemps’s purposes, that Gabriel be seen as a courageous, exceptional man—but also a real man, not a perfect one. What Bontemps pictures in Gabriel is a lone man standing up for himself and his people in the face of overwhelming,

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even hopeless odds. To an extent, Gabriel’s courage was intended to inspire those fighting the civil rights battles yet to be fought. Themes and Meanings Bontemps begins the introduction to the 1968 edition of Black Thunder by stating, “Time is not a river. Time is a pendulum.” Bontemps was implying that he saw slave uprisings such as the one described in Black Thunder as harbingers of the protests and uprisings of the civil rights era. That is, when Bontemps wrote Black Thunder in the 1930’s, he was looking backward to slave rebellions as a way of predicting the rebellion that he believed was surely in America’s future. Because Bontemps’s historical novel was thus also about the struggle for equal rights that still lay ahead, and because Bontemps knew that not all the battles yet to be fought would be won, it was important to him to picture an African American from history who faced a more impossible struggle and faced the outcome with courage. Thus, Gabriel emerges not as a saint, nor as a man with a special pipeline to the truth, but as a gifted man who is in most ways an ordinary one, trying to win his freedom by any means necessary. Gabriel and the other characters in the novel are created so as to be readily understandable to a twentieth century reader. While Bontemps does not use self-conscious anachronism—as Charles Johnson, for example, would many years later in his novel Middle Passage (1990)—the characters are presented in such a way as to be clear and recognizable to an audience of Bontemps’s own time. Furthermore, Bontemps has also made no attempts to hide parallels between the events of his novel and the events of his times. Thus, when Gabriel’s plan is revealed, the white men of Richmond look for a “Jacobin” influence, unable to accept that an unlettered slave would have been able to create such a plan himself—just as in Bontemps’s own time, outside “communist agitators” were often blamed for stirring up civil protests among African Americans and other Americans during the Depression. Bontemps’s implied response to such accusations is that outside agitation is not needed; the hunger for freedom and respect lives in all human beings. The book’s title has both descriptive and prophetic meanings. On the most literal level, the title refers to the nighttime storm that takes up a central portion of the novel and prevents Gabriel’s rebellion from succeeding. On a more figurative level, the title is meant to imply the sound of African drums, which Gabriel at one point imagines using to scare the people of Richmond. More generally, though, “black thunder” is meant to imply both the rebellion that Gabriel organizes and the rebellions that Bontemps foresees still in the future. Critical Context Although Black Thunder was well received when it first came out, it never, as Bontemps notes in his 1968 introduction, earned him more than the advance he had received upon first publication, and the book was allowed to go out of print. The publication of the 1968 edition temporarily rekindled critical interest in the novel, but again, such interest seemed to wane shortly thereafter. In the late 1980’s and early

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1990’s, in the wake of the success of a number of historically based novels of slave life (including Alex Haley’s 1976 Roots: The Saga of an American Family and Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved), interest in the novel was rekindled once again. At no point, however, has Black Thunder been completely ignored, and it has in fact long been considered Bontemps’s best novel. Richard Wright praised the novel when it first appeared, and it has often been cited as an influence on Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), in part because both novels frankly explore the topic of black rage. Haley’s Roots is often cited as having revived interest in the telling of stories of slavery in novel form. Black Thunder anticipated this movement by about forty years. If the book was not as widely read at the time of its publication as it deserved to be, that may be because the Depression-era audience was not ready for the work’s often bitter message. Black Thunder, however, is a powerful novel about the courage and cost—and inevitability—of the fight against racism. Bibliography Bishop, Rudine Sims. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Discusses Bontemps’s seminal role in the history of African American children’s literature and his influence on his contemporaries. Bontemps, Arna. Introduction to Black Thunder. Beacon Press: Boston, 1968. In the introduction to this reprinted edition, Bontemps tried to place Black Thunder not only in the context of his own life but also in the context of the years of the Civil Rights movement, up to and including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. An unusually frank and enlightening author’s introduction. Carlton-Alexander, Sandra. “Arna Bontemps: The Novelist Revisited.” CLA Journal 34 (March, 1991): 317-330. Attempts to refocus critical attention on Black Thunder. Carlton-Alexander particularly examines some of the negative comments that have been made about the novel. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. This survey of African American fiction includes a chapter on Bontemps. Particularly focuses on recurring themes in Bontemps’s collection of poetry, Personals (1963), and his novels, Black Thunder, God Sends Sunday (1931), and Drums at Dusk (1939). Davis considers Black Thunder to have been Bontemps’s outstanding work. Flamming, Douglas. “A Westerner in Search of ‘Negro-ness’: Region and Race in the Writing of Arna Bontemps.” In Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, edited by Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Discusses the relationship between racial and regional marking in Bontemps’s ficton. Jones, Kirkland C. Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. The first full-length biography of Arna Bontemps. An excellent source for information not only about the

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man himself but also the background of his works, including Black Thunder. Includes a bibliographic essay that serves as a handy guide to primary and secondary material about Bontemps. Sundquist, Eric J. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Originally presented as a series of lectures, the three chapters in this book are more informally and more accessibly written than much modern literary criticism. The chapter on Black Thunder specifically focuses on Bontemps’s use of folk culture and sources in his novel. Weil, Dorothy. “Folklore Motifs in Arna Bontemps’ Black Thunder.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 35 (March, 1971): 1-14. Examination of how Bontemps’s use of folklore helps to deepen readers’ understanding of characters and events in Black Thunder. Wright, Richard. “A Tale of Courage.” Review of Black Thunder, by Arna Bontemps. Partisan Review and Anvil 3 (February, 1936): 31. Very favorable review of Black Thunder. Wright argues that Bontemps’s novel marked a turning point in the African American novel. Of equal interest to those interested in either Bontemps or Wright. Thomas Cassidy

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THE BLACKER THE BERRY A Novel of Negro Life Author: Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Satire; realism Time of plot: 1920’s, during the Harlem Renaissance Locale: Boise, Idaho; Los Angeles, California; Harlem, New York First published: 1929 Principal characters: Emma Lou Morgan, the protagonist, a young African American woman Jane Lightfoot Morgan, Emma Lou’s light-skinned mother Hazel Mason, a wealthy, good-hearted Texas college friend of Emma Lou John, a dark-skinned, uneducated porter from Georgia Alva, a part-Filipino mulatto Geraldine, Alva’s favorite girlfriend Gwendolyn Johnson, a light-skinned friend of Emma Lou The Novel The Blacker the Berry is divided into five sections. Although they vary to some degree in length and differ greatly as to the length of time that is covered, each of these sections ends with a decision or a revelation on the part of the protagonist, Emma Lou Morgan. In the first section of The Blacker the Berry, entitled “Emma Lou,” the protagonist, eighteen-year-old Emma Lou Morgan, is shown at her high school graduation in Boise, Idaho, the only black face in a sea of white ones. Aware not only of her difference from her classmates but also, more painfully, of the degree to which she is an outsider in her light-skinned family, Emma Lou is almost too embarrassed to walk up and receive her diploma. Her mother, Jane Lightfoot Morgan, has always let Emma Lou know that because of her black skin, flat nose, and thick lips, she is the family disgrace. Only Emma Lou’s uncle, Joe Lightfoot, holds out some hope for the girl; he assures her that color prejudice is found only in provincial towns like Boise. At the University of Southern California, he promises, Emma Lou will be accepted. Unfortunately, Uncle Joe is wrong. During her first weeks in Los Angeles, Emma Lou discovers that because of her color, she is excluded not only from the sorority that has been organized by African American girls but also from even the most casual social contacts. The only men who will take her out are the uneducated ones whom another outcast manages to find. Back home for the summer, Emma Lou begins to see Weldon Taylor, who intro-

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duces her to the pleasures of sex, and for the first time in her life, she feels that someone really cares about her. When Weldon has to leave town in order to earn enough money to return to medical school, however, Emma Lou wrongly assumes that she has once again been rejected because of her skin color. After two more miserable years in Los Angeles, Emma Lou comes to the conclusion that only in a larger black community will she find the acceptance she craves. She decides to take any job that will take her to Harlem. The rest of the novel is set in New York. In “Harlem,” Thurman follows Emma Lou through just one day to suggest how disillusioning her experiences there will be. After she has been in New York for five weeks, Emma Lou has blithely quit her job as an actress’s maid and broken off with her dark-skinned lover, John. When she begins going from one employment agency to another in search of work, however, Emma Lou finds that even stenographic jobs are closed to a woman of her appearance. Nor are her social prospects much better than her prospects of employment. At the end of this discouraging day, hearing men on the street joke that they do not “haul no coal,” Emma Lou realizes that as far as color prejudice is concerned, Harlem is no different from Boise or Los Angeles. In the third section of The Blacker the Berry, “Alva,” Thurman introduces the man who will seem to offer love to Emma Lou, only to betray her. Alva is a small, Asianlooking, part-Filipino mulatto who works as a presser in a costume house—at least when the weather is not too hot and he is not exhausted from the previous night’s party. At a cabaret, this paragon asks Emma Lou to dance, and she falls head over heels in love with him. The next time she sees him, Emma Lou virtually throws herself at him, even though Alva has obviously forgotten her. Naturally, he adds her to his stable of women who provide him with sex, companionship, and money. Only Emma Lou misreads Alva; she is sure that she has found true love. In “Rent Party,” Thurman finds occasions to make some statements of his own about color prejudice, first, in a discussion among a group of intellectuals, who are going slumming at a lower-class “rent party,” and later through Emma Lou’s own comments about a vaudeville performance at the Lafayette Theater, in which people with black skin are repeatedly the butt of jokes. After Emma Lou is evicted from her room, Alva refuses to let her move in with him, and, saying that he is tired of hearing about her problems, he walks out. At that point, even Emma Lou begins to suspect that Alva is not as devoted as she had believed. Ironically, Alva is forced to take in Geraldine, the light-skinned mistress he exhibits in public, because she is going to have his baby. “Pyrrhic Victory” takes Emma Lou through a period of self-abasement to a new resolution. With the encouragement of her friend Gwendolyn Johnson, Emma Lou has sought a new life for herself, and she has even found a boyfriend, Benson Brown. Hearing where Alva is, however, she forgets all of her good resolutions, and she moves in with him, nurses him through the illness brought on by his alcoholism, cares for the deformed and retarded baby whom Geraldine has abandoned, and, of course, works to support all three. Finally, however, Emma Lou begins to think things

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through. Remembering the advice of her friend Campbell Kitchen, she determines to break off with Alva and find her own identity. When she goes home to find Alva drunkenly making love to a young boy, Emma Lou does not delay. In an instant, she loses her feeling for Alva. Ignoring the screams of the baby, she packs her things and walks out. The Characters The Blacker the Berry is essentially the story of one character, Emma Lou Morgan, who is a victim both of color prejudice and of her own foolishness and self-delusion. All the other characters in the novel are secondary to Emma Lou and are important only in relation to her and to the theme of the novel. Certainly, it is not Emma Lou’s fault that she was born black into a family that considers itself a “blue vein circle” and that aims to grow whiter with each generation. It is not surprising that, having been scorned throughout her childhood, she has a negative self-image and therefore is more vulnerable than someone who feels secure. Although she is the victim of prejudice, Emma Lou is herself a snob. At college, she tries to distance herself from the ebullient Hazel Mason because she thinks that Hazel’s bright clothes, loud voice, and defiant use of black English mark her as an inferior. Later, in Harlem, Emma Lou exhibits her own color prejudice when she drops the dark-skinned but decent John in order to throw herself at the parasitic Alva and the unintelligent Benson Brown, whose only real attraction is the color of their skin. Emma Lou’s snobbery is only part of a larger problem, her habit of living in worlds she has invented rather than in the real world. This is illustrated by her experience with Weldon Taylor. First, she imagines that she is about to marry him; then, with just as little basis in reality, she builds up another scenario, in which Weldon has left town because he objects to her skin color. With Alva, Emma Lou again refuses to face reality. Even though she knows better, she pretends to herself that Alva is faithful to her, and she even sees his admission of bigamy as a proof of his superiority to other men. Throughout the novel, Thurman maintains a stance of authorial detachment toward Emma Lou and his other characters, merely reporting their thoughts, their conversations, and their actions without making overt judgments. This results in some of Thurman’s most effective satire. For example, he can sum up a whole type with what seems to be a mere statement of fact. The men who gathered around Hazel, he says, “worked only when they had to, and played the pool rooms and the housemaids as long as they proved profitable.” Similarly, Thurman does not label Alva and Geraldine as vicious characters; he merely explains logically why they do not kill their baby. Neither is brave enough to do the deed alone, he says, and the two do not trust each other enough to collaborate in murder. Most of the characters in The Blacker the Berry are treated briefly, their attitudes summarized in a few well-chosen words. Other than Emma Lou, no one except Alva is dealt with at length, and even his role in the novel is secondary to that of the central figure. Thurman reports what Alva is thinking in order to emphasize Emma Lou’s capacity for self-delusion. When Emma Lou approaches Alva in the Renaissance Ca-

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sino, for example, he is confused but “game” enough to speak to her “sincerely.” To Alva, sincerity is merely a manner. Emma Lou, however, chooses to believe that Alva is indeed sincere, not because she is really in love with him, but because she needs him as a character in her own imagined world. Themes and Meanings One of the subjects of The Blacker the Berry is color prejudice among black people. Thurman attacks this kind of discrimination in several ways. As a satirist, he shows the folly of basing any estimate of worth on appearance. Thus Emma Lou’s grandmother, Maria Lightfoot, is proud of her “blue vein circle,” so named because one must have a skin light enough so that one’s veins are visible in order to belong. The fact that this aristocratic group is located in a place as small as Boise, Idaho, makes her pretensions even more patently ridiculous. It is particularly illogical for African Americans to assign social status on the basis of how un-African one looks, since by doing so they are denying their own heritage and accepting white values. When Maria calls Emma Lou’s father and Emma Lou “niggers” or “niggerish,” she is echoing the words of white racists. Similarly, when the comedians at the Lafayette Theater show a thick-lipped, coal-black Topsy as someone whom no one would want, they are underlining the assumption that ugliness is colored black. In “Rent Party,” a group of intellectuals discuss the racist basis for color prejudice; however, they ignore the most eloquent argument against it, the suffering of the girl who is sitting mute beside them. In the person of Emma Lou, The Blacker the Berry shows how color prejudice harms individuals. On the basis of her color, Emma Lou is made to feel unattractive and unlovable, both as a child and as a young woman at college. In New York, because of her appearance, she is refused employment. In order to prove that she is desirable to men, Emma Lou sacrifices herself for a worthless man to whom she is attracted only because her society has convinced her that light skin is equivalent to real worth. Moreover, as her grandmother cruelly but accurately tells Emma Lou, her gender makes her situation even worse. In choosing their wives, the best-educated, most successful African American men will choose the lightest-skinned women, and Emma Lou will have to take what she can get. In his characterization of Emma Lou, however, Thurman has broadened his theme. While he has no sympathy with color prejudice or with the gender discrimination associated with it, he obviously sees both of these evils as problems of perception. If Emma Lou suffers from the faulty perceptions of others, she also is the victim of her own unwillingness to see the world as it is, not as she would like it to be. Therefore, while the author cannot realistically promise an immediate cure for the evils he describes, he can have his protagonist move toward a different view of herself. Throughout the novel, Thurman utilizes various characters as the voices of reason. For example, both Joe Lightfoot and Hazel Mason try to show Emma Lou that no one’s worth depends on color. Later, a kindly woman at an employment agency and the white writer Campbell Kitchen both encourage Emma Lou to become economi-

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cally independent by going into teaching. What is at issue, of course, is the fact that Emma Lou sees herself only through the eyes of others. When she does get a teaching job, when she walks out on Alva, she is abandoning her fantasies in order to concentrate on a real self, which she now perceives as being of real value. Critical Context Although in the 1920’s Wallace Thurman was considered the central figure in Harlem’s black bohemia, his works are marred by an evident inability to accept himself, his race, and the intellectual circle of which he was a part. While Thurman’s contemporaries found much to praise in his first novel, The Blacker the Berry, which they saw as an effective attack on intraracial prejudice, some felt that because the author had projected his own self-hatred onto his protagonist, he had failed to bring her to life. Others believed that the story was exaggerated; moreover, some African American critics resented any work that presented African Americans in a less than favorable light. According to critic Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, Thurman himself was not pleased with his novel, feeling that in order to make his point he had produced propaganda, not art. It is generally agreed that the bitter autobiographical novel that followed, Infants of the Spring (1932), is an artistic failure. While from a historical standpoint the work is interesting, with its acidic descriptions of such major Harlem Renaissance writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Countée Cullen, it lacks the narrative structure of The Blacker the Berry. Instead, it is little more than a prolonged discussion, a book-length version of the kind of argument among intellectuals that for a time halts the action in “The Rent Party.” Thurman’s only other novel, a collaborative effort called The Interne (1932), is negligible. Despite the author’s reservations about The Blacker the Berry, later critics have tended to find the novel more complex and more profound than either Thurman or his contemporaries thought it to be. Pointing out how effectively the author dealt with the issues of gender and of identity, critics now see The Blacker the Berry as one of the Harlem Renaissance’s more interesting novels. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Argues that because his heroine’s life so closely parallels his own, Thurman fails to maintain the distance that would have made his novel more effective. Like Thurman himself, Bell writes, Emma Lou “lacked the will and community support to explore the cultural alternatives of her shame.” Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. Suggests that in the character of Emma Lou, Thurman is working out his own conflicting feelings about his race and his identity. While in this novel he seems to have reached some resolution, in Infants of the Spring he reverts to bitter uncertainty. David, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960. Wash-

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ington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Describes The Blacker the Berry as a “really moving book” despite its “sledgehammer” approach to a complex issue. Praises Thurman for daring to use a dark-skinned girl as his protagonist. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. Includes an excellent analysis of The Blacker the Berry emphasizing the problem of black identity, which is in part a result of the “aspirations of the black middle class.” The theatrical productions mentioned in the novel symbolize the confusion of roles in real life. Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Portrait of Wallace Thurman.” In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Relates The Blacker the Berry to Thurman’s own uncertainties about the function of the black artist. Believing that one should concentrate on universals, not on “propaganda” about specific issues, Thurman was not happy with the novel. Hunger, Margaret L. Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone. New York: Routledge, 2005. Includes a chapter on The Blacker the Berry and discourses of ethnic legitimacy. Thomson, Maxine D., and Verna Keith. “The Blacker the Berry: Gender, Skin Tone, Self-Esteem, and Self-Efficacy.” In Race, Work, and Family in the Lives of African Americans, edited by Marlese Durr and Shirley A. Hill. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Discusses the effects of racial and gendered codes upon characters’ feelings of self-worth in Thurman’s novel. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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“BLUE MERIDIAN” Author: Jean Toomer (1894-1967) Type of work: Poetry First published: 1936; expanded edition, 1980 Form and Content Jean Toomer’s “Blue Meridian” is a poem of prophetic implications, arguing that in America there is the possibility for a new world vision wherein all barriers between people will be overcome. Toomer’s visionary, polemical poem focuses on those dimensions of conventional Western, particularly American, society that have sought to exclude others with whom one does not desire to identify and shows the possibilities inherent in the American people for overcoming these barriers and becoming one with the “Universal Self,” the spirit behind all existence. The poem was originally written in the 1920’s and was completed by 1931. An early portion of the poem, “Brown River Smile,” was published in 1932. Not until 1936 was Toomer, who is best known for the original book Cane (1923), an anthology of poems, short stories, and drama centered on African Americans, able to find a publisher for “Blue Meridian.” Even then, only a portion of the lengthy poem was published. The poem was Toomer’s last significant publication during his lifetime, and though admired by a select few, it did not earn him critical attention. Since the late 1960’s, there has been a resurgence of interest in all of Jean Toomer’s work. In 1969, Cane was reissued; this led to a renewed interest in Toomer that has continued, and in 1980, a volume containing the full text of “Blue Meridian” was published. Written in a free-verse style reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” “Blue Meridian” combines the ideas of Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, coming to a conclusion based on Gurdjieff’s philosophy of unitism. There are also echoes of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, but the dominant influence on Toomer’s poem and life during the time of the poem’s composition was Gurdjieff. At the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, which he founded in Fontainebleau, France, in the early 1920’s, Gurdjieff taught that the universe had a definite order and that the goal of life was to recognize the common source of all being, the godhead, through a conscious spiritual yearning toward the oneness of all creatures and a search for internal harmony. This higher level of consciousness would be achieved through physical and psychological means. People should avoid overemphasizing the differences between themselves and those whom they consider the “other” and recognize a commonness of humanity and spirit. In Toomer’s poem, Gurdjieff’s philosophy is evident in the poet’s emphasis on the search for internal harmony and in his insistence on altering one’s perceptions to such a degree that differences between people become diminished and the oneness of all begins to be acknowledged.

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The poem consists of more than eight hundred lines. The poem’s lyrical movement makes it difficult to interpret chronologically, but sections of the poem that are in italics are, according to some critics, the key to understanding the poem. In fact, one might even suggest that the sections in italics may be read as a separate poem. Certainly, the most important aspects of these sections are their movement from the black, to the white, to the blue meridian—representing an alteration in perception from the conventional categories of black and white to the symbol of the unity of all peoples and ideals in the middle ground, or meridian. Critic Jean Wagner refers to the “blue meridian” as the “synthesis of the Black and White Meridians.” At the opening of the poem, Toomer introduces readers to the theme of America’s potentiality. The America he envisions would be capable of oneness with the godhead if all Americans, members of a special race of people, willingly committed themselves to being “spiritualized.” Immediately thereafter, he juxtaposes the two-line opening with lines in italics on the “black meridian,” the symbol of racial difference and oppression and of an extreme worldview that America must learn to overcome in order to reach the ultimate goal of oneness, which is symbolized later in the poem as the “blue meridian.” He urges readers to seek their spiritual side and to destroy all barriers separating human beings from each other and from God. Like Whitman, Toomer uses “I” to represent the Universal Self, who is one with God. Circular images abound to represent the unity of all being. If humans—particularly Toomer’s ideal race of Americans—were willing to “Let the Big Light in,” the union of themselves with God and the spirit would be possible. Rooted in Eastern religion and philosophy, these ideas are derived from both Gurdjieff and Whitman. Toomer soon introduces readers to another significant symbol, the Mississippi River. He sees the Mississippi as the equivalent in the West to the Eastern and Indian Ganges, which is considered a sacred river. He suggests that if Americans would commit themselves to becoming one with the universe and God, the Mississippi would be lifted to “become/ in the spirit of America, a sacred river.” At this point, the Mississippi has the potential of being a sacred river; when he returns to it much later in the poem, it is referred to as a sacred river because, in his vision, Americans relinquish all the false barriers and weaknesses of the races of which it is composed. In the next section, Toomer, like Whitman, lists the varieties of Americans and suggests that they make up a complete whole—a oneness. More particularly, he declares that, whether one is of the East or the West, the human being is spiritually united to all through “an essence identical in all.” Moreover, the old gods have died and a new god of spirit and oneness must be found through such recognition of unity; again, the assumption in the last section of the poem is that this new unity will be realized. Toomer then moves on to characterize the types of peoples who originally inhabited America. He begins with the Europeans, who, as a result of the rising industrialization of America, were overcome and “baptized in finance”—that is, materialism. People became nothing more than commodities “sold by national organizations of undertakers.” The African race, to which Toomer next turns, was forced to leave their homeland of “shining ground” and to possess “the watermelon”—a symbol of the vic-

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timization and oppression of African Americans. Also making up the American nation is the “great red race,” who, destined to be united with a new race Toomer labels “American,” also waited for “a new people,/ For the joining of men to men/ And man to God.” The Native American’s gods came down and sank into the earth, and they “fertilize the seven regions of America.” As the poem progresses, Toomer suggests that these false barriers between people will be torn down when Americans begin to see themselves as the new race of people they are. The land of America itself, a New World, is then described as “a vacuum compelled by nature to be filled” with a new race of people representing “all peoples of the earth.” Nevertheless, though there was this potential in America from the beginning, “The alien and the belonging,/ All belonging now” had “not yet [been] made one and aged.” The next section, which is repeated with slight variations several times throughout the poem, is in the form of a prayer asking for inspiration in the souls and minds of the American people: O thou, Radiant Incorporeal, The I of earth and of mankind, hurl Down these seaboards, across this continent, The thousand-rayed discus of thy mind, And blend our bodies to one flesh, And blend this body to mankind.

Here the speaker asks the divine to fill the souls of all with the yearning to become one, and in the next stanza, Toomer characterizes the East Coast as masculine and the West Coast as feminine (a pattern that he reverses later in the poem to emphasize his idea of the circular nature of all), with the middle symbolizing the child, a reconciling force. There must be the desire for a reconciliation for humans to be able to achieve the proper level of consciousness. The next several stanzas, which are interrupted briefly with a juxtaposition of lines in italics concerned with the “golden grain,” concentrate on the vision of a New America in the process of becoming what it has the potential of becoming. Only if each new American is committed to spirituality will America reach its spiritual capabilities. However, there are barriers: the past, which is connected to hell and blinds the human race to its potentiality, the distrust of the divine, the loss of spiritual awareness, the disillusionment of the years following World War I, the nature of the American people themselves (symbolized by the eagle, which represents the divine life force as well as the potential for destruction), the tendency to use violence and weaponry (even among the intelligentsia), and the inherited shackles of tradition and society (Toomer calls modern society “a prison system of all wardens”). If the new race called Americans cannot move ahead, Toomer suggests, it is due to humans’ tendency to hold themselves back. Nevertheless, since “it [the racket of human society] begins with us,/ So we must end it.”

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At this point, the poet calls humans to action and to liberation from all those barriers that separate them from one another other and from the divine. More “simple things” must be embraced; masks and barriers must be discarded. The goal of life is to grow spiritually: We who would transform ex-I to I And move from outlaw to I AM, May know by sacred testimony— There is a right turn, A struggle through purgatories of many names, A rising to one’s real being Wherein one finds oneself linked with The real beings of other men, and in God. . . .

In this section, Toomer also introduces in italics the white meridian, which, unlike the black meridian with which the poem opens, is “waking on an inland lake,” suggesting the gradual coming of the blue meridian, the word “waking” implying that the new vision is through the course of time gradually going to be made possible. After a three-line commentary on the white meridian, Toomer returns to the barriers interfering with spiritual growth. Control itself is a form of imprisonment; some examples of control mentioned are fear, prejudice, murder, and tradition. The modern world is a “wreckage” of “homesick ghosts” that must be overcome through a rejection of the old perceptions and the past. Rather than live, humans, who have become dehumanized in the machinery of modern society, are in despair; yet they must discover the goal of living, of opening themselves up to a spiritual vision of life. Those things by which humans allow themselves to be imprisoned symbolize to Toomer the “shrinkage” of human potential. The human race is made to “flow and expand,” not to shrink and limit. Toomer then catalogs, in one of the poem’s most important passages, the varieties of imprisonment in human society: race, ethnicity, nation, region, sex, class, occupation, religion, and others, stating his theme rather obviously in discussing the realization of “pure consciousness of being.” Drawing readers’ attention to the natural world as a reflection of the divine, Toomer describes the beauty of nature as “a sacred factory” and suggests the pathways to the “sun,” or human potential and the divine. Speaking for himself, yet using the universal “I,” the poet points out that even though he lived for and was approved of by society, he was caught in a trap until he found the source of all being, which is symbolized by the river. His spiritual awareness was brought about partly due to the influence of a woman (critics have commented that this is probably an autobiographical reference to Toomer’s brief infatuation with the wife of Waldo Frank). Though he and the woman “parted,” their relationship brought him to a new awareness of being and a dissatisfaction with “the world I wound around me.” While he listens to the recordings of others on a phonograph, he now hears himself—again suggesting the oneness of all being. He has begun to recognize the con-

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stant flow of being, of human existence, and he has come to envision the sun as a sacrament, for it symbolizes spirit and God. As he looks at the possibilities for America, he recognizes the circular nature of the universe as he looks out from some of the highest buildings in New York City. He sees the wheels of the steam engine as representing the fundamental unity of all things and the continuous journey of being. The poem shifts, after a juxtaposition suggesting that there is the potential in Americans to become “matter superbly human,” to a present recognition of America’s potential. Toomer, while earlier in the poem suggesting that America has not become what it is capable of becoming, now imagines that it has. As a result, he repeats a number of lines used earlier in the poem and modifies certain lines to suggest this altered vision of America. The old gods he has mentioned earlier now have become the “new God we have,” that is, “the god who is, the God we seek.” The dead spirits of the Europeans who peopled America are reborn through a revival of the spirit of the individual. Americans are a living, breathing race capable of the highest potentials to which humanity can reach: “Americans, to suffer, and rejoice, create,/ To live in body and all births.” Contributing also to Toomer’s vision of the New America are the Africans, who “immortalize a hiding water boy” (or the common person), and the poet himself, who, like Whitman’s poet, shows the equality and oneness of all and is a man “at large among men.” Native Americans, whose gods earlier were described as sinking into the earth to fertilize, now have gods who “Sank into the sacred earth/ To resurrect”— another symbol of rebirth. The next section explains more clearly the poet’s use of the black and white meridians. Toomer equates black and white, two extremes, with yes and no, two other extremes, as a way to suggest the dangers of extremity that have led to barriers between people and the divine. For the survival of the human and divine spirit, Americans pave the way by giving up the narrow perceptions of everything as being either black or white: Black is black, white is white, East is east, west is west, Is truth for the mind of contrasts; But here the high way of the third, The man of blue or purple, Beyond the little tags and small marks, Foretold by ancient seers who knew, Not the place, not the name, not the time, But the aim of life in men, The resultant of yes and no Struggling for birth through ages.

Yes and no become one in Toomer’s world of unity, and America is the culmination of centuries of convergence toward union with the divine.

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Returning to the Mississippi River, a symbol of American unity, Toomer now deems it a “sacred river.” The circular image of the river and the flowing of the river have been used throughout to represent the oneness of all with the Universal Self. While earlier the West Coast had represented the feminine and the East Coast the masculine, Toomer now reverses these to reemphasize his belief in the fundamental unity of all—and the androgynous nature of all being. Repeating himself, he declares that “life is given to have/ Realized in our consciousness . . . This real,” what he terms the “resplendent source” of all being. America’s natural beauty symbolizes the majestic oneness of all existence. As the poem closes, Toomer again uses italics, this time to reflect on the “blue meridian,” his symbol for the fundamental recognition of the convergence and oneness of all. Left and right are united; light is awakened upon the earth. Blue Meridian, the symbol of the human being who has reached the awareness of the highest potential, “dances the dance of the Blue Meridian/ And dervishes with the seven regions/ of America, and all the world.” Toomer ends by reemphasizing the need for humans— particularly Americans—to try to bring themselves to an awareness of their highest potential (and consciousness) and “the operations of the cosmos”: Beyond plants are animals, Beyond animals is man, Beyond man is God. The Big Light, Let the Big Light in!

Analysis While not structured chronologically or in linear fashion, the poem does show the extent to which Toomer was aligned with the conventions of modernism such as stream of consciousness, imagism, and free verse. The poem’s structure, as well as some of its fundamental ideas, may be compared to the spontaneous style and original content of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” In many ways, “Blue Meridian” resembles a collage of images and ideas, juxtaposing these without a seemingly logical progression or transition. Toomer particularly uses juxtaposition to introduce some of the key movements in the poem—from the old modes of thinking and perception about reality to the new. The most obvious use of juxtaposition occurs when Toomer uses sections in italics, which show a progression from the narrow black meridian to the other extreme, white meridian, and which end with the blue meridian, a symbol for the balance and unity of the peoples and ideas of the earth. By far the most frequently used poetic devices in the poem are metaphor and personification. There are a number of symbols employed in the poem as well: the Mississippi River, the sun, the eagle, the star, and the wheel, for example. Toomer’s style, while superficially complex, does not include many traditional poetic devices, and the ones he does use are not excessively complex. One could in fact clearly

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understand the poem without an exhaustive study of the devices within it. The most essential metaphor is the use of the first-person “I,” which represents at times a universalizing of the poet himself but more often than not represents the Universal Self, or God. Since Toomer’s view of the divine does not include a personal God like the God of much of the traditional Western world, the “I” represents a personalization of the divine. All human beings—and all existence itself—are in some sense symbolized by the Universal Self, the Universal I. The natural images of the poem are often described in human terms; thus, Toomer personifies all living things. Examples include the Mississippi River’s “smile” and the sun’s “face.” Metaphors are fairly easy to discern; the phonograph represents the journey of all being through life, the water represents the flowing of all time, the river represents the continuous process of becoming, the sun represents the Universal Self, the wheel (and the spiral, which may come from Yeats’s system of mythology) represents the cycles of life and the journey of life itself, the cross represents the burdens and streams of existence, and the eagle symbolizes the divine life force as well as destructive capabilities. Critical Context Like Whitman, Toomer saw America as a symbol of human potential. America, as a symbol of freedom from conventional Western restraint and limitations, offers the hope of salvation for the human race. The poem reflects the quest or yearning toward the ideals Toomer espouses of unity, oneness, and deemphasis on the barriers between people. Throughout, Toomer emphasizes imprisonment, confinement, and enslavement and tries to call readers to action to loose the shackles of conventional society and tradition. One of the most important sections of the poem is placed just past the halfway point. Having established the numerous barriers that prevent growth of spirit and humanity, Toomer states: Unlock the races, Open this pod by outgrowing it, Free men from this prison and this shrinkage, Not from the reality itself But from our prejudices and preferences And the enslaving behavior caused by them, Eliminate these I am, we are, simply of the human race.

Several stanzas later, Toomer’s point becomes clearer: Uncase, unpod whatever blocks, until, Having realized pure consciousness of being, Knowing that we are beings Co-existing with others in an inhabited universe,

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We will be free to use rightly with reason Our own and other human functions— Free men, whole men, men connected With one another and with Deity.

These lines summarize the poem’s major thesis: The false barriers of conventional society have done nothing more than imprison and enslave the human family; moreover, these barriers, whether they be of race, nation, region, sex, class, or creed, have brought about a gradual deterioration of human spirit and potential that, in turn, prevent connection with and consciousness of the spiritual dimensions of life. As Jean Wagner, one of the best critics of Toomer’s poem, has written, “The fundamental thesis of ‘Blue Meridian’ is the need for a regenerated America, to be achieved through the regeneration of each individual and each community composing it, of an America once more united around the spiritual dream of its founders.” Bibliography Egar, Emmanuel E. The Poetics of Rage: Wole Soyinka, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005. Study of the political aesthetics of Toomer and two other major black poets. Fabre, Geneviève, and Michel Feith, eds. Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Anthology of scholarly articles on the relationship between Toomer and other Harlem Renaissance writers. Ford, Karen Jackson. Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Reads Toomer’s works as exemplary of African American modernism. Kerman, Cynthia Earl, and Richard Eldridge. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. First full-length biographical study of Toomer. Kerman and Eldridge emphasize the personal, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of Toomer’s quest for a mystical experience with God and demonstrate what seems to have been Toomer’s failure to achieve the oneness he so desperately desired. Includes a bibliography of primary and secondary material. McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 18941936. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Effective critical study that includes analyses of Cane and “Blue Meridian.” Focusing on the relationship between Toomer’s works and events of his life, McKay emphasizes that Toomer failed to live up to his potential as a writer because he became involved in religious and philosophical issues. Includes an index and a primary and secondary bibliography. O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. Excellent, lengthy collection of critical essays on the works of Toomer. While focused primarily on Cane, the collection includes discussions of Toomer’s relationship with Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, and

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Hart Crane and sections on Toomer as poet and playwright. The section on poetry, while brief, will assist readers in understanding “Blue Meridian.” Bibliography. Toomer, Jean. The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980. Organized by genre, this collection contains many previously unpublished and uncollected works of Toomer, including the complete text of “Blue Meridian,” autobiographical writings, plays, and fiction. Turner’s useful introduction contains general background material on Toomer’s life and philosophy. Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Primarily biographical, this early introduction to the life and works of Toomer is a useful overview of Toomer’s life and the main issues in Cane. Turner emphasizes the quest for a unified self in the life of Toomer and suggests that Toomer’s commitment to his search for an identity apart from the one assigned to him by his culture and his philosophical and religious views limited his success as a writer. Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Translated by Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Wagner’s excellent study devotes an entire chapter to Toomer’s life and work, emphasizing the poetry of Toomer in Cane and “Blue Meridian” and the desperate search for unity throughout Toomer’s life. Includes a short bibliography of secondary material. D. Dean Shackelford

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BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Protest drama Time of plot: 1950’s Locale: Southern United States First produced: 1964, at the ANTA-Washington Square Theatre, New York, New York First published: 1964 Principal characters: Richard Henry, the protagonist, a young black man who has returned to the South from the North Lyle Britten, a white store owner who epitomizes the destructive racist thinking of the South Meridian Henry, Richard’s father, the acknowledged leader of the local black community Parnell James, the rich white editor of the local newspaper Juanita, Richard’s childhood friend, who becomes his sweetheart Papa D, an old black man who owns a juke joint The Play Blues for Mister Charlie is based on the case of Emmett Till, a young black man who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The murderer was subsequently acquitted. The play is cyclical in its structure, opening and ending with the killing of Richard while occasionally utilizing a series of flashbacks to establish the reasons for Richard’s death. This structure allows for a focus on issues such as race, sex, and Christianity. With Richard’s murder established at the very beginning, the action switches to show Richard’s father, Meridian, and a group of black students demonstrating in protest of the murder. Parnell James, the editor of the local newspaper, interrupts with the news that a warrant has been issued for Lyle Britten’s arrest. Caught between his desire for justice and his friendship for Lyle, Parnell runs off to alert Lyle of the impending arrest. With Parnell’s assurance that he will “never turn against” his friend, Lyle is confident that he will not be convicted. After all, Lyle says, Richard was “a northern nigger” who “went north and got ruined” and came back to the South “to make trouble.” Lyle’s stereotypical racist interpretation of Richard’s behavior is underlined in the first of a series of flashbacks in the play. Richard appears talking to his father and his grandmother soon after he has returned from New York. Richard is bitter with hatred for whites; he has no tolerance for Christianity, and he is impatient with the power-

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lessness that his father exhibits. What is more, he has a gun. Richard next appears at Papa D’s juke joint, where Richard publicly boasts about his sexual conquests of white women. Here, for the first time, Richard and Lyle meet each other in a clearly foreboding context. With the action moving back and forth between the black community’s response to Richard’s death and the victim’s activities just before his death, Baldwin brings father and son together in a scene that focuses on a reconciliation between both men. This rapprochement is possible because Richard has shown greater appreciation and understanding of his father’s position, and his father has moved closer to his son’s attitude. It is not surprising that, in the subsequent meeting with the liberal Parnell, Meridian feels compelled to question Parnell’s Christianity and to reproach him for his betrayal of their friendship. Meridian concludes that Parnell is “just another white man” who should not be trusted. When Parnell moves back among his own people, he attempts to correct the conventional views held about African Americans by southern whites. The white community is not impressed, as is evident in their reaction to the murder. As though to provide further motivation for Lyle’s crime, Baldwin introduces another flashback scene in which Richard taunts both Lyle and his wife. Richard knocks down Lyle, embarrassing him in the presence of his wife. Shifting back to the trial of Lyle for murder affords the author the opportunity to examine southern justice. Witnesses are called, and they all testify as to what they know about the murder. Lyle’s wife, however, lies; only the testimony of Parnell can discredit what she says. He refuses to contradict her, and Lyle is subsequently acquitted—as he had believed he would be all along. Lyle’s acquittal clears the way for his dramatic confession to Meridian that he did in fact kill Richard. The confession is shown in a flashback; thus, the play comes full circle to the action of the beginning. Lyle’s admission that he is not sorry prompts Meridian to announce that “it all began with the Bible and the gun. Maybe it will end with the Bible and the gun.” Meridian’s decision to hide Richard’s gun under the Bible in his pulpit lends credibility to his pronouncement. The play concludes with Parnell’s plea to be allowed to join the black marchers. Juanita’s decision to accept Parnell indicates that all is not lost: There is room for white liberals in the struggle for civil rights, and there is the possibility of reconciliation between the races. Themes and Meanings In the play’s preface, Baldwin announces that the play takes place in “Plaguetown, U.S.A.,” and that the “plague is race, the plague is our concept of Christianity: and this raging plague has the power to destroy every human relationship.” As a play of ideas, Blues for Mister Charlie affords Baldwin the opportunity to explore several of the issues connected with race and Christianity through the use of dialogue and setting.

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Baldwin uses stage structure as a comment on the situation between the races. He devises a set in which an aisle is placed between what he terms “Whitetown” and “Blacktown”; the division immediately sets the tone for the play. At times, the two sections function as the church, at other times as the courthouse. These two divisions not only support the themes of the play but also suggest the idea of two seemingly irreconcilable opposites. With these several divisions as background for the play, Baldwin makes a statement about the nature of a society that permits a white man to murder a black man and not be punished for it. This speaks to the question of who has power and who does not. Richard recognizes this; on his return to the South, he tells his grandmother that “it’s because my Daddy’s got no power that my Mama’s dead.” According to Richard, this lack of power allows whites to “rape and kill our women and we can’t do nothing.” When Richard challenges Lyle’s power and, by extension, that of the white community, he is killed. Power is not the only factor operative in the relationship between the races. The sexual factor—or, rather, the sexual basis of racism—is in fact the most explosive element, according to Baldwin. He depicts a white community that is obsessed with the sexuality of black people. Baldwin focuses on the white community’s sexual fears and guilt and shows how these can lead to misunderstandings and conflict. When a group of white people gather in Lyle’s kitchen, their conversation inevitably turns to the sexual threat that they think that black men represent. They are terrified by the thought of “a nigger without no clothes on,” and they think that sex is the only thing that interests black people. The white men terrify their women with exaggerated stories of the black man’s sexuality. Baldwin intimates that sex is used as a substitute for and as an indicator of power. It also becomes a means of exercising power, but the power it represents is a counterfeit, used to disguise the weakness and the insecurities of those who seek to subjugate and oppress. Richard’s sexual relationships with white women in New York and his subsequent boasts about manipulating them are substitutes for real power and only help to accentuate his powerlessness. Correspondingly, Richard’s sexual taunting of Lyle about his wife—“you let me into that tired white chick’s drawers, she’ll see who’s the master”—is seen as a challenge to the power of white men for which Richard must die. Woven in between the discussion of sex and racism is the other “plague” that Baldwin’s experience in the church, particularly as a preacher, gives him the authority to criticize—“the concept of Christianity.” Nearly every black character in the play is made to question Christianity, particularly when it does not respond to the injustices meted out to black people. Baldwin himself is primarily concerned with the responsibility of the black church to its people. For him, the church must be held accountable; thus, when Meridian does nothing in response to Richard’s murder, Lorenzo, a black student, rails at not only Meridian but also “that damn white God.” Lorenzo later suggests that the only useful

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function that the black people’s Bibles can perform is to act as “breast-plates.” In fact, the young people in the play are highly critical of Christianity, as Baldwin himself had grown to be. Baldwin seems to believe that religion is at times a hindrance that demobilizes black people and so prevents them from freely addressing the problem of racism. Even Meridian, the black minister, performs a searching self-analysis and comes away with the discovery that, before Christ, “black people weren’t raised to turn the other cheek.” Realizing how ineffective Christianity has been in the protection of his family, Meridian suggests that the real reason for his adherence to Christianity may be to acquire a sense of dignity and to become “a man in the eyes of God,” since, he says, he “wasn’t a man in men’s eyes.” In other words, Christianity is a subterfuge intended to give a sense of belonging. If Christianity is to become accountable and more relevant to the lives of black people, it must oppose injustice vigorously. The church must stand up to the racist system that is epitomized by legal institutions. It is for this reason that Baldwin employs the stage technique of having the church directly across the street from the courthouse. It is for this reason, too, that Baldwin has Meridian undergo a militant change. Living up to his responsibility, Meridian stands up to the state and its twisted justice system. He accuses the state of being unchristian and of destroying his son “because of your guns, your hoses, your dogs, your judges, your law-makers, your folly, your pride, your cruelty, your cowardice, your money, your chain-gangs, and your churches!” Acting as a chorus, the black people show their approval for Meridian’s new and uncompromising stand. Meridian’s Christianity then undergoes a practical change. The previously cowed minister emerges as a militant Christian, prepared to balance the Bible with the gun and to use both to secure freedom. He announces that he has placed the gun under the Bible in his pulpit, “like the pilgrims of old.” This is the type of Christianity that made sense to Baldwin in the early 1960’s. Critical Context According to Baldwin, the subject matter for the play was first suggested to him by novelist and filmmaker Elia Kazan at the end of 1958. The decision to complete the play was made only after Medgar Evers, a prominent civil rights activist and one of Baldwin’s friends, had been killed in June, 1963. Baldwin saw the murders of Evers and Emmett Till as signs of “terrible darkness,” and he stated that Blues for Mister Charlie was “one man’s attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light.” The reality of which the author speaks is oppressive racism, and until Blues for Mister Charlie, no playwright had confronted racism in America in this manner. Before the play was performed, some readers (primarily white friends and acquaintances of Baldwin) believed that the work was too radical, too extreme. Its unconventional structure bothered some as well. Precisely these two elements—radical content and unconventional form—in Blues for Mister Charlie helped usher in the Black Nationalist theater, anticipating the work of such writers as Amiri Baraka, Ron Milner,

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Woodie King, and Ed Bullins. At the time, Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) thought that Blues for Mister Charlie “marked the point at which White America gave up on Baldwin.” The reception of Blues for Mister Charlie, however, was generally good. Baldwin’s biographer William Weatherby has noted that Kenneth Tynan, the British drama critic who also wrote for The New Yorker, spoke of the play as having created shock waves that were felt across the Atlantic. Critic Howard Taubman of The New York Times, whose reviews could make or break plays, praised the play for bringing “eloquence and conviction to one of the momentous themes of our era.” Even though Taubman criticized Blues for Mister Charlie’s loose structure and use of clichés, his review was enthusiastic enough to ensure a run. Other critics also focused on what they saw as the play’s problematic structure while praising its energy, passion, relevance, and authenticity. Time magazine, however, reported that Blues for Mister Charlie was “a hard play for a white man to take.” In time, the audience became predominantly black, and the Broadway production was forced to close at the end of the summer after incurring several months of losses. The play fared much worse when it was taken to England. Baldwin answered many of his critics by declaring that the play was not about civil rights but rather about “a state of mind and the relationship of people to each other, helplessly corrupted and destroyed by this insanity you call color.” Produced as the play was in the midst of the civil rights struggle, it is little wonder that many saw the work simply as an antiwhite protest. When next Baldwin turned his gaze upon Broadway, it would be in 1965 with the revival of his 1954 work Amen Corner, a less controversial production that marked the end of his experimentation with the theater. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006. Part of the Bloom’s Biocritiques series, this collection comprises four extended biographical essays on the author’s accomplishments. Bloom also edited a 2007 volume with the same title featuring critical essays on specific Baldwin works and genres. Hernton, Calvin C. “A Fiery Baptism.” In James Baldwin. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Comments on the negative reaction of whites and the positive reaction of African Americans to the performance of the play. Argues that Blues for Mister Charlie forces whites to face themselves squarely and to confront their fears and guilt. Asserts that the play severed “the romantic involvement between James Baldwin and white America.” Jones, Mary E. James Baldwin. Atlanta, Ga.: Atlanta University, 1971. Short literary biography with an extensive and valuable bibliography of works by and on Baldwin. The bibliography includes several pieces of criticism and interpretation of Blues for Mister Charlie. Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1994. This major biography of Baldwin devotes an entire chapter to Blues for Mister Charlie. Margolies, Edward. “The Negro Church: James Baldwin and the Christian Vision.”

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In Native Sons. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968. Argues that the spirit of evangelism from the black church is everywhere in Baldwin’s works. Margolies sees Blues for Mister Charlie as a play in which Baldwin’s “apocalypse” is translated “into concrete social terms.” Meserve, Walter. “James Baldwin’s ‘Agony Way.’” In The Black American Writer. Vol. 2. Compiled by C. W. E. Bigsby. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1969. Argues that Baldwin is not a very accomplished dramatist, but that he does have a message that he manages to convey effectively. Notes that there is not much action and that the play’s emphasis is on rhetoric and dialogue. Sharma, Asha. James Baldwin: Protest and Beyond. New Delhi, India: Rajat, 2005. Extended study of the role of protest in Baldwin’s work and the role of his work in African American protest fiction. Sternlicht, Sanford. A Reader’s Guide to Modern American Drama. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Overview of the history of modern drama in the United States, including a section on Baldwin placing his work in the context of theatrical history. Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989. The standard biography of Baldwin, examining his life from his boyhood to his death. Delves into his early sexual ambivalence. Traces his career as an artist with an examination of the circumstances surrounding all of his publications, detailing both his successes and his disappointments. Roosevelt J. Williams

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THE BLUEST EYE Author: Toni Morrison (1931Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: 1941 Locale: Lorain, Ohio First published: 1970

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Principal characters: Claudia MacTeer, the nine-year-old protagonist and narrator, a strong but naïve child Pecola Breedlove, an abused child brought up to accept white standards of beauty and success Mrs. MacTeer, the stern but loving mother of the MacTeer family Pauline (Polly) Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, a maid and frustrated artist, who abuses her children Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s abusive father Geraldine, the mother of Pecola’s hateful classmate Junior Soaphead Church, a strange, meticulous old man who is sexually attracted to young girls The Novel The Bluest Eye opens and closes with Claudia MacTeer’s reflection on the meaning and significance of a little girl’s suffering and her community’s responsibility and obligation to her. Using marigold seeds as a metaphor for the affection that might have allowed her abused friend Pecola Breedlove to thrive, Claudia realizes that the failure of her seeds to sprout demonstrates that the soil of her community “is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear.” While Claudia MacTeer withstands that world’s harshness through the strength and love of her family, a fragile child such as Pecola has no chance. Dark-skinned Claudia values herself more than the world does. Although kindly relatives and parents present her with fine white baby dolls for her to love and mother, she sees them only as something unlike herself, something to dismember, “to see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.” Frighteningly, such destructiveness carries over to Claudia’s perception of real little white girls such as film star Shirley Temple; Claudia also resents her light-skinned African American classmate Maureen Peal, who possesses not only matching skirts and kneesocks, muffs to warm her hands, and beautiful, long, “good” hair, but also something that draws the attention of teachers and prevents the playground harassment of boys. In spite of all, Claudia remarks, “Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We

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felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.” That “Thing,” as Claudia calls it, that makes Shirley and Maureen and white baby dolls desirable and darker-skinned children not, the thing to which Claudia cannot assign a name, is racism. Pecola, on the other hand, bears her “ugliness” like a cross. Recalling Pecola’s birth, her mother Polly thinks, “I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.” Polly Breedlove prefers her white employer’s little girl, with her perfect curls and pretty dresses, to her own daughter. Never having felt loved and valued, Pecola wonders: “How do grown-ups act when they love each other?” Her only clues are the choking sounds that emerge from her parents’ bed when they make love. When Maureen taunts Pecola, Claudia notes that her friend “seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing.” Junior, another hateful child, invites Pecola into his house after noting that “nobody ever played with her. Probably, he thought, because she was ugly.” Such treatment makes her ripe for Junior’s abuse; he throws his family’s cat against the wall and blames the incident on Pecola, which leads Junior’s mother to shout at the hapless girl, “You nasty little black bitch. Get out of my house.” Pecola cannot bear that much pain and rejection. Soaphead Church, seizing the occasion to use Pecola to poison his landlady’s offensive, mangy dog, wishes he could really perform the miracles he promises, especially for this “little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” Instead, her vulnerability allows Soaphead to indulge in his perverted sexual fantasies and gives Cholly the opportunity to rape his own daughter. Pecola becomes pregnant as a result, but the baby dies. Living alone with her mother on the edge of town, Pecola sinks into madness following the death of her baby. Claudia and her older sister Frieda feel sorry for Pecola and for her baby, because no one else in the community seems to care. Claudia remarks that “I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.” Frieda and Claudia resolve to give the money they had saved to buy a bicycle to the baby, but it does not survive. Pecola reminds the community of its failure, the emblem of “all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to all of us.” Claudia realizes, however, that the blame for Pecola’s suffering cannot be limited to a few black people in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941. “It was the fault of the earth, the land, and town,” she says. Pecola’s pain is rooted in white America’s racism, and in African American self-hatred. The Characters The naïvete with which Claudia experiences the world allows readers a rare glimpse into the mind of a young African American girl coming of age. Much surprises her. When Pecola comes to stay with the MacTeers temporarily because Cholly has set his family’s house on fire, Claudia cannot believe that a father could be so irre-

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sponsible as to put his own family outdoors: “Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. . . . There is a difference between being put out and being put out-doors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go.” During her stay, Pecola begins to menstruate. Claudia believes that such bleeding must be fatal, until her hardly more informed sister explains that it simply means that Pecola is now able to have babies. That night, Claudia feels that “lying next to a real person who was really ministratin’ was somehow sacred.” She is surprised again when an adult friend of the family inappropriately touches Frieda, and she concludes that her sister must now be “ruined,” the word applied to the three neighborhood prostitutes. The girls naturally reason that Frieda will either be fat like the one or thin like the other and can be cured only by whiskey. Claudia also comes to realize how important color is in the larger world—through white baby dolls, Shirley Temple, and Maureen Peal, through Mrs. Breedlove’s greater concern for a white girl than for her own child Pecola when a hot blueberry cobbler falls to the floor, splattering both. Only the perfect child is comforted; Pecola is scolded and sent away. Claudia reaches great maturity for the age of nine when she realizes that no one cares about Pecola or her baby, and that no one cares for dark-skinned children in general. Claudia’s strength is contrasted to Pecola’s weakness. Pecola has been given none of the tools with which to fight the sense of worthlessness from which she suffers daily. No loving parents, no close playmates, not even a house to call her own—only a storefront with sheets strung across the large interior to separate one person from another. Ignored by shopkeepers, scorned by classmates and teachers, used by Soaphead Church, Pecola wants only to vanish. She cannot fight her circumstances; she only wants to escape them. The narratives of Pauline and Cholly Breedlove help readers at least to understand their characters, even if it is difficult to empathize with them. Pauline is shown first as a young woman craving acceptance and love from her family and, when that is not possible, from Cholly. In the integrated North, acceptance comes only through resemblance to white people. When her rotten tooth undermines her attempt to fashion herself to white standards of beauty, and when her children look nothing like Hollywood’s lovable white children, Pauline succumbs to her own self-hatred and “ugliness,” which expresses itself in self-righteous judgment of her husband and rejection of her children. Cholly’s rape of his own daughter cannot be excused, but Morrison’s presentation helps readers understand him. A violent, drunken, and abusive man, Cholly has little chance to succeed, given the events of his childhood. Rejected by both parents, orphaned by the death of his loving Aunt Jimmy, and humiliated by white men during his first sexual experience, Cholly displaces his anger and humiliation upon all African American women, including his wife and daughter. With no father figure to emulate, Cholly mistakes sex for love. Making “love” to Pauline eventually comes to mean his noise, her silence, and mutual anger. When he sees Pecola washing dishes in the kitchen and scratching the back of her leg with her foot, a gesture that reminds him of the young Pauline, Cholly feels sorry for his daughter and rapes her, showing her affection in the only way he knows—through sex.

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The wholly unsympathetic behaviors of Geraldine and of Soaphead Church are painted against a backdrop of the past, also creating understanding, if not sympathy. Both are light-skinned people, a fact that allows them to dissociate themselves from their African roots, their sexuality, and their true natures. What results is an unfeeling woman who wishes sexual organs were located somewhere more convenient (such as the palm of the hand) so that bodies would not have to touch during intercourse, and a latent homosexual whose hygienic meticulousness leads him to pedophilia. Themes and Meanings Toni Morrison has stated, “I was interested in reading a kind of book that I had never read before. I didn’t know if such a book existed, but I had just never read it in 1964 when I started writing The Bluest Eye.” Elsewhere, she has observed, “I thought in The Bluest Eye, that I was writing about beauty, miracles, and self-images, about the way in which people can hurt each other, about whether or not one is beautiful.” In this novel, Morrison writes of the forces that thwart a black female child’s coming of age in America while at the same time she suggests the qualities that permit the strong to survive. White standards of beauty destroy first Pauline Breedlove and then her daughter, cause even a strong child such as Claudia to question her own worth, and result in Geraldine’s denial of her own sensuality and passion. While Claudia will survive such influences (which are counteracted by the loving strength of her family), others, such as Mrs. Breedlove, Geraldine, and Soaphead Church, are perverted by such pressures, and some, like Pecola, succumb to mad fantasies. Morrison shows how the pressures created by white-defined values as reflected in American popular culture and in America as a whole pervert the relationships within African American families as well as among individuals in the black community. In a 1978 interview, Morrison explained that Cholly “might love [Pecola] in the worst of all possible ways because he can’t do this and he can’t do that. He can’t do it normally, healthily, and so on. So it might end up in [the rape].” Geraldine shows more affection for her cat than for her son, and no one loves Pecola’s black baby. The three neighborhood prostitutes use sex to profit from and to humiliate men. Soaphead Church, after being rejected by his wife years before, desires people’s things more than relationships with actual adults. Because he sees children, especially girls, as clean, manipulable, and safe, they are the only ones with whom he will relate. The division of the novel into sections that reflect the seasons—from autumn to the following summer—suggests maturation as another important theme. Claudia’s maturation process contrasts with Pecola’s. Claudia’s ninth year provides her with knowledge of the larger world that includes isolation, rejection, pain, and guilt. Her experiences bring her to an acceptance of responsibility, not only for herself but for others in her community as well. This same year in Pecola’s life, though, only pushes her to the margins of society and sanity. Her journey takes her ever inward, since too much pain lies in the external world for one eleven-year-old girl to bear. Morrison has stated that “all of the books I have written deal with characters placed

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deliberately under enormous duress in order to see of what they are made.” The stuff of Claudia’s character endures; Pecola’s is destroyed. Critical Context The Bluest Eye fits into a tradition of African American female coming-of-age novels, though Morrison was unaware of any such books at the time of her novel’s composition. Like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), this novel provides readers with a clear picture of a black girl’s maturation from innocence to experience. When The Bluest Eye was published in 1970, The New York Times’ influential critic Haskel Frankel declared it a success, and the novel has continued to win critical respect since its publication. By now a standard text in use at many high schools and universities, The Bluest Eye provides readers an uncompromising examination of race, color, gender, and sexuality in American culture. Bibliography Awkward, Michael. “Roadblocks and Relatives: Critical Revision in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, compiled by Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Claims that the novel is in part an intertextual rereading of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), “giving authentication and voice to specific types of black and feminine experiences.” Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” Updated ed. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007. Collection of important and influential readings of Morrison’s novel by leading scholars and critics. Bibliographic references and index. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Contains three essays examining several of Morrison’s works, including The Bluest Eye. Klotman, Phyllis R. “Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye.” Black American Literature Forum 13 (Winter, 1979): 123-125. Demonstrates how the Dick-and-Jane primer passages interspersed through the book and the references to Shirley Temple serve as counterpoints to the realities of black experience. Mayberry, Susan Neal. Can’t I Love What I Criticize? The Masculine and Morrison. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Includes a chapter on the construction of the white gaze and the representation of African American masculinity in The Bluest Eye. Miner, Madonne M. “Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Margorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Sees parallels between the ancient myths of Philomela and Persephone and Morrison’s exploration of rape, madness, and silence.

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Rosenberg, Ruth. “Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye.” Black American Literature Forum 21 (Winter, 1987): 435-445. Maintains that Morrison’s novel is unusual because it brings to the foreground experience—being young, black, and female—that had always been in American society’s background. Tally, Justine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collection of essays on Morrison’s work, including a chapter on The Bluest Eye and Sula, as well as more general discussions of Morrison as author, teacher, and critic. Willis, Susan. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison.” Black American Literature Forum 16 (Spring, 1982): 34-42. Argues that the novel is a metaphor for the historical changes prompted by African American migration to the North in the 1940’s. Laura Weiss Zlogar

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THE BONDWOMAN’S NARRATIVE Author: Hannah Crafts (fl. mid-nineteenth century) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: Mid-nineteenth century Locale: North Carolina First published: 2002 (written c. 1855) Principal characters: Hannah Crafts, a runaway slave The Mistress, Hannah’s unnamed mistress, who, although a slave, attempts to pass for white Mr. Trappe, an evil lawyer, who knows the Mistress’s secret and attempts to blackmail her and sell her into slavery Mrs. Wheeler, a vain, upper-class woman and the wife of a minor government official, who buys Hannah and orders her to work as a field hand and to marry another slave Aunt Hetty, a kind, old, white woman who teaches the child Hannah to read and write and later helps her escape to the North The Novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative, a nineteenth century novel by Hannah Crafts, is believed to be at least partly autobiographical, and its narrator shares the name of the author. It is impossible, however, to determine how much of the text is a factual account of the Crafts’s life and how much is fiction based on the author’s general experience. In the novel, Hannah—a young slave girl on a North Carolina plantation—demonstrates an unusual desire to learn to read. A kind old couple that lives nearby breaks the law by teaching her. They also convert her to Christianity. However, the couple’s actions are discovered, and they are sent to jail. The deeply saddened Hannah, however, grows up working as a trusted house slave. At her master’s large wedding, Hannah notices Mr. Trappe, a stern-looking older man dressed in black, following the bride, who is Hannah’s new mistress. Soon after the wedding, Mr. Trappe is ensconced in a room of his own at the plantation: The mysterious lawyer rarely lets the young bride out of his sight. Hannah’s new mistress is miserable, and Hannah comes to believe that Mr. Trappe holds an enormous secret over her head. As time goes on, Hannah and the Mistress become devoted to each other. The Mistress becomes ill and rarely leaves the house. Then, Hannah discovers her secret: Her mistress is biracial. Under North Carolina law, she is a slave. Unless the Mistress obeys him, Mr. Trappe has threatened to tell the bride’s husband her secret.

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Hannah tells the Mistress that she must flee and promises to go with her. They plan to escape at night, run to the river, and take a boat to safety in the North. However, they get lost in the woods and walk in circles for hours. The following day, they continue wandering and come across a hospitable home in which to spend the night. When they discover that Mr. Trappe is trailing them, they take off again into the woods, where they find an unoccupied shack. For months, they remain hidden, forced to eat whatever they can scrounge. Hannah’s mistress begins to go insane. In the springtime, hunters discover them and take them off to jail. Horace, one of the hunters, tells Hannah that her master committed suicide after Mr. Trappe informed him of his wife’s secret. In prison, the two women encounter Mrs. Wright, who has been imprisoned for attempting to help a slave girl escape. Mrs. Wright has become deranged, and she believes that she is living in a palace and that Hannah and the Mistress are her guests. Similarly, Hannah’s mistress continues her own descent into madness. Slowly, both women become friendly with the guards and are moved to a house where their life is better; it hardly seems like a prison. However, Mr. Trappe shows up, and the women find themselves back in his power. The Mistress can no longer stand the stress; she has a stroke and dies. After Trappe’s latest victim dies, he is forced to sell Hannah. However, the slave dealer is killed and Hannah is severely injured in an accident involving a horse and cart. The kind Mrs. Henry cares for Hannah, who, in time, comes to love her. However, Hannah is eventually sold to a Mrs. Wheeler from Washington, D.C. Mrs. Wheeler makes Hannah’s life a nightmare. She sends her to purchase a special face powder that, through a strange chemical reaction, makes her face turn black. The outraged Mrs. Wheeler orders Hannah to work in the fields, to live in a slave cabin, and to marry a rough field hand. Hannah cannot endure this punishment, so she decides to flee to the North. During her flight, she is rescued by Mrs. Hetty, the same woman who taught Hannah to read as a child. Eventually, Hannah escapes to the North, where, happily, she manages to find her long-lost mother. The Characters Scholars maintain that the narrator of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Hannah, is based on the book’s author, Hannah Crafts. The book’s manuscript was discovered and published more than a century after it was written, however, and little is known of the author’s actual life. It is therefore difficult to categorize the work definitively as either a novel or an autobiography, although generically and stylistically it resembles a nineteenth century novel. Hannah is a complex character who deeply loves her mistress. However, the character Hannah has received literary rebuke for her subservience toward any white person who is kind to her. She works without complaint as a house slave, and she rebels only when Mrs. Wheeler orders her to demean herself by working in the fields and marrying a field hand. The Mistress is motivated largely by weakness. Although Hannah is able to endure

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slavery and find some joy in simple things, the Mistress simply cannot live such a life. After her ill-planned escape with Hannah, she descends into madness. When she is recaptured and faced with the prospect of becoming a slave, she dies. Hannah, on the other hand, bides her time and eventually escapes to freedom. Mr. Trappe strongly resembles Mr. Tulkinghorn, a manipulative character from Charles Dickens’s contemporary novel Bleak House (1852-1853). He wears black throughout the book and lurks in the shadows, ready to pounce when least expected. As his name indicates, Mr. Trappe “traps” people and feeds on them like a bird of prey. Themes and Meanings The slave narrative has become a crucial genre within African American literary studies. Invariably, its central theme is escape from bondage to freedom. At the beginning of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the child Hannah never complains, but she is unhappy with her lot in life. She desires the freedom to be able to read and grasps it when she can. When the opportunity arises for her to escape, it seems as if she desires to reach the North even more than does her mistress. Unlike her physically and emotionally weak mistress, Hannah possesses the wherewithal and the determination to continue, but she remains with her mistress, who sinks ever deeper into insanity. She adapts to new masters and new surroundings, bides her time, and, when life becomes intolerable, she finally finds a way to escape. Loyalty is another theme throughout the novel. Unlike her white masters, Hannah is loyal to a fault. She hardly criticizes her taskmasters, and she risks her life to run away with her mistress. Indeed, she even offers to become the slave of Mrs. Henry, the woman who nursed her back to health. She obeys the intolerable Mrs. Wheeler’s every whim—all out of loyalty. Critical Context The Bondwoman’s Narrative was discovered by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., after he acquired the manuscript through an auction. It is believed to be the earliest novel written by an African American woman. As such, the work is of immense historical significance, quite apart from its literary value. Victorian in style, some scholars argue that the novel is indeed an autobiographical account of Hannah Crafts, a slave who passed for white after escaping from North Carolina to freedom in the North. Before its publication in 2002, Professor Gates went to great lengths to authenticate the manuscript and to determine that it was written in the mid-1850’s. The 2002 edition includes an detailed scholarly introduction by Gates, in which he details his discovery of the novel and the subsequent steps he took to authenticate it, including commissioning a scientific investigation of the manuscript’s ink, binding, and paper. The edition concludes with several appendixes that provide evidence to back up Gates’s evaluation.

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Bibliography Ballinger, Gill, Tom Lustig, and Dale Townshend. “Missing Intertexts: Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and African American Literary History.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 2 (Summer, 2005): 207-37. Fisch, Audrey, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Records the experience and history of slavery in the United States while comprehensively examining the slave narrative’s relation to abolitionism, Anglo-American literary traditions such as autobiography and sentimental literature, and the larger African American literary tradition. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Hollis Robbins, eds. In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Written by authorities on African American history and literature, this collection of scholarly articles analyzes Craft’s novel. M. Casey Diana

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BREATH, EYES, MEMORY Author: Edwidge Danticat (1969) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Feminist; bildungsroman Time of plot: 1970’s-1980’s Locale: Haiti; Brooklyn, New York First published: 1994 Principal characters: Sophie Caco, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, who, at the age of twelve, leaves Haiti and her beloved aunt to live with her troubled mother in Brooklyn Tante Atie, Sophie’s lonely and wise surrogate mother whose illiteracy cost her the love of the man she desired Martine Caco, Sophie’s mother, who fled to New York after her brutal rape by a member of the Tonton Macoutes, Haiti’s infamous secret police Joseph Woods, the African American jazz musician and neighbor with whom Sophie elopes in defiance of her mother Marc Chevalier, a successful Haitian lawyer and Martine’s lover The Novel Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory begins as Sophie Caco discovers she must leave the aunt she loves to live with a mother she barely recalls. The opening chapters establish the richness of Sophie’s life in Haiti, the powerful fragrances of the foods she eats and the flowers that surround her. Tante Atie knows the right herbs to treat almost any illness and the right stories to comfort a frightened child. Sophie’s journey to the airport introduces a different Haiti, one marked by political turmoil and violence. Moreover, although almost everyone congratulates Sophie on her good fortune, the New York she first encounters with its trash-filled streets and barred windows is far from an embodiment of the American Dream. Her mother’s car has torn seats and a broken windshield, and Martine herself looks tired and overworked. Part 2 of the novel leaps forward six years. Sophie and her mother have moved to a more middle-class neighborhood now that Martine has a better job. Sophie has started college and falls in love with the man next door. This section of the novel focuses on Sophie’s developing relationship with Joseph and on her mother’s insistence on policing her virginity. In defiance of the Haitian practice of “testing,” Sophie mutilates herself to ensure that she fails. She is evicted from her house as a result. Part 3 finds Sophie and her daughter Brigitte in Haiti, having run away from her husband to try to heal herself. Martine follows them there. Much has changed. Tante

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Atie has learned to read thanks to her friend Louise, and the family now owns the land on which they live thanks to money sent by Martine. However, the Tonton Macoutes still terrorize the population. As the four generations of women interact with one another, Sophie struggles to reconcile the love and admiration she feels for these women with the psychological toll their oppressive ideas about female bodies and obligations have had on her psyche. Part 4 begins with a third plane ride, as mother and daughter return to New York together. Martine unexpectedly finds herself pregnant. Though Marc pleads with her to have the baby and marry him, she refuses. Overcome by fresh nightmares of her rape, the shame she endured in carrying Sophie to term, and her own profound sense of failure as a woman and mother, she is driven to suicide. It will be left to Sophie to exorcise her mother’s demons as well as her own with the help of American-style group therapy, Santeria, and a final trip home to bury her mother and visit the site where the rape occurred. The Characters Sophie, her mother Martine, and Tante Atie are the three women at the core of the novel. All three suffer from their condition as women. Atie is rejected by the man she loves, a man whose marital happiness she is condemned to observe from close range, and she then must give up the niece she has raised since birth. Later in the novel, her friend Louise, who had introduced her to an intimacy and understanding she had never before experienced, abandons her. Tante Atie bitterly explains to Sophie the plight of the Haitian woman expected to dedicate each of her ten fingers to the needs of others. Martine never recovers from the brutality of the rape that forced her into exile and resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. In New York, she feels isolated by her menial work and dark skin, and her womanhood is further undermined by the loss of her breasts to cancer. Despite her considerable successes, including a better job and the love of a good man, she cannot keep her nightmares at bay, nor can she learn to believe in herself. These two women offer Sophie very different versions of her birth. Martine notes that Sophie’s face is the same as the rapist’s, a constant reminder of the violence of her conception. Tante Atie speaks of a child “born out of the petal of roses, water from the stream, and a chunk of the sky.” Sophie must learn to embrace the love and rich heritage represented by her aunt’s words and to liberate her mind and body from the legacy of violence and self-hatred that has destroyed her mother. It is this journey that the novel follows and that Sophie narrates. Despite the novel’s feminism and its powerful critique of patriarchal ideas and practices, its two major male figures are kind and loving men. Marc tries to help Martine in any way he can. He sobs when she dies and ultimately travels back to Haiti with Sophie to bury her. Joseph waits patiently for Sophie to heal and return to him. Though neither is fully developed as a character, they provide positive counterpoints to the Tonton Macoutes.

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Themes and Meanings Many of Breath, Eyes, Memory’s most important themes are tied to Haitian folklore and legend. The novel celebrates the strength of Haiti’s women and condemns the violence of its history. “Caco” is the much-revered name of the fighters who bravely resisted the island’s American occupation. The novel’s women are repeatedly associated with a Haitian creation myth in which trouble is granted only to those strong enough to carry the sky on their heads. Erzulie, the goddess worshipped by Haitian women, is an ambiguous figure, both Christian and pagan, both virgin and temptress, and thus may represent the mixed and ultimately destructive messages women receive. The text’s most frequently referenced Haitian myth is that of the Marassas, twins assumed to have special powers and associated with the theme of doubling. As Martine tests Sophie’s virginity, she tells her that the Marassas were inseparable lovers closer to each other than to their shadows; she wishes for an equally close relationship between herself and Sophie. The very distrust and violation represented by the testing itself prevents mother and daughter from enjoying such closeness, however. Tante Atie and Louise come close to a Marassas ideal, but the relationship is shortlived. For Danticat, the Marassas myth may be less about finding one’s soulmate and more about reconciling the warring selves within one individual. In addition to its cultural richness, the novel is filled with vivid imagery and metaphor, most obviously the use of color. The opening sections are bathed in yellow. Sophie loves yellow flowers and especially daffodils, flowers that, like Sophie and her mother, must learn to live in an alien environment. When Sophie and her mother move to their new neighborhood, they decorate everything in red. Sophie buries her mother in an inappropriate, crimson suit, choosing to remember her as the “hotblooded Erzulie” and the magnificent scarlet bird also named “Caco.” Critical Context Almost all reviews praised the lyricism of Breath, Eyes, Memory and commented on Danticat’s enormous promise as a young writer. Several highlighted the novel’s important contribution to knowledge about Haiti and its people. Others placed it in the context of feminist writing, because it focuses on the need for women to reclaim ownership of their own bodies. Bibliography Casey, Ethan. “Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Callaloo 18, no. 2 (Spring, 1995): 524ff. Sees the novel as an important literary introduction to Haitian culture at a time when Haiti’s political turmoil was in the news. Notes that the coded reference to politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s party, Lavalas, is a subtle statement of Danticat’s hopes for a post-Duvalier Haiti. Corelli, Marie. “Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 10, no. 1 (Fall, 1994): 36ff. Argues that the novel serves two important purposes: It is a celebration of a Haitian culture likely to disappear in the not-too-distant future,

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and it is a plea for mothers to welcome their daughters into the world the same way they welcome their sons, to stop the cycle of abuse that they perpetuate because of their own suffering at the hands of their own mothers. Francis, Donette A. “‘Silences Too Horrific to Disturb’: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 75ff. Provides the history of the women’s movement in Haiti, which is seen as closely tied to the U.S. occupation and Duvalier regimes. To make her case for the relationship between scenes of sexual violence and the postcolonial state, Francis closely examines five key moments of abuse, beginning with the rape of Martine in a cane field. Loichot, Valerie. “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History.” Meridians 5, no. 1 (2004): 92-116. Sees food as the central link between the individual and community, claiming that Martine’s loss of Haitian recipes, like Sophie’s bulimia, results from her cultural isolation. Places Danticat in the company of other feminist writers who use food as a metaphor for the female body and who equate literacy and writing with female power. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!” Macomère 3 (2000): 123-140. Explains many of the novel’s allusions to Haitian myths and the meaning of names used for characters and places. Translates key Creole words, identifies important Haitian proverbs, and offers an analysis of dreams and omens. Jane Missner Barstow

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BRIGHT SHADOW Author: Joyce Carol Thomas (1938) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: Summer, 1971, through Easter, 1972 Locale: Ponca City, Oklahoma First published: 1983 Principal characters: Abyssinia (Abby) Jackson, a twenty-year-old black student at Langston University Carl Lee Jefferson, Abby’s boyfriend, a tall, handsome track star Strong Jackson, Abby’s strict father Patience Jackson, Abby’s mother Serena Jordan, Abby’s aunt Rufus Jordan, a minister who marries Aunt Serena The Novel Bright Shadow is a love story. It continues the life of Abyssinia Jackson where it left off at the end of Joyce Carol Thomas’s first novel, Marked by Fire (1982). Abyssinia is attracted to Carl Lee Jefferson, a fellow student at Langston University. Her father, Strong, does not like the boy because of his family. Carl Lee is the son of the town drunkard. Abby’s mother, Patience, has a sister, Serena, who lives next door to the Jacksons. She is sixty years old and has just married a former minister named Rufus Jordan. This minister, who recently moved to Ponca City, Oklahoma, from Houston, Texas, has an evil look in his eyes. His demeanor and booming voice frighten Abby. Against her father’s wishes, Abby invites Carl Lee to her house for a visit. Strong tells Carl Lee the story of Abby’s birth. This narration fills in background material from the previous novel, Marked by Fire. It explains the close relationship that Abby has with her Aunt Serena. Strong alludes to another unusual birth, that of Carl Lee, the winter before Abby’s, but drops the subject when Patience gives him a warning look. A few days later, Abby has a bad dream about Aunt Serena. It leaves her with a feeling of dread. That Saturday, when Carl comes over to help her rake leaves, they visit with her aunt over the fence that separates their two properties. Abby is given a bouquet of blue iris from Serena’s garden. After Carl leaves, Abby tries to find out what her aunt thinks about this new beau. Aunt Serena says that he is a fine boy and that she likes him. Every day for a week, Carl Lee and Abby observe Serena and her new husband as they go to a nearby cornfield. When they get there, the Reverend Jordan preaches a sermon with only the cornstalks, a scarecrow, and Aunt Serena to hear him. When the

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moon is at its fullest, the couple walks to the cornfield at night instead of during the day. The next morning, Abby learns that her aunt has been murdered. She is horrified, moreover, to discover that she has made crackling bread out of strips of Aunt Serena’s skin. Abby is anguished by the death and takes long walks in the country to take her mind off it. On one of these excursions, she finds a cat under a bush. She realizes it is not an ordinary cat because the bush is covered with starflowers and song sparrows. Carl Lee sustains Abby through the terrible grief that afflicts her, and their love deepens. Strong and Patience begin to change their minds about the young man. Their new attitude of acceptance stems from the support he gives Abby. Slowly, Carl Lee begins to trust Abby enough to confide in her, and she learns that he also has troubles. His father abuses him. When his father tries to force him to eat a rat, Carl Lee leaves home. Abby misses him greatly. While Carl Lee is away, Abby has a nightmare about Aunt Serena. It affects her so much that she begins tearing up flowers that have bloomed in her garden on the first day of March. She plants weeds instead. Patience and Strong are worried about her. They try to talk to her about Serena, and they tell her that she must cry and get the pent-up grief out of her system. She does cry, but the pain is still there. Soon, it becomes known that Carl Lee’s father is very sick. His diseased liver is making him mortally ill. People no longer see him around town, and no one knows his whereabouts. Carl Lee comes back to look for his father and asks for Abby’s assistance. Together, they search the woods and at last are led to his grave by a Cherokee Indian woman who turns out to be Carl Lee’s mother. When Abby returns home, her parents tell her the story about Carl Lee’s birth: His mother was thrown out of her home forever because she had gone into the woods according to Indian custom to have her baby. Carl Lee’s father could not accept his wife’s Indian ways and took the baby away from her. On Easter morning, flowers spring into bloom among Abby’s weeds. Carl, a Methodist, decides to go to the Pentecostal church with Abby. As the organ plays, they sing a duet, and grief is conquered for both of them. The Characters A third-person narrative with a limited omniscient point of view, Bright Shadow’s characters are known through the protagonist, Abby Jackson. She is a dynamic heroine, just as she was in Marked by Fire, but this time her changes occur as she tries to overcome an emotional trauma caused by her aunt’s bizarre murder. All the characters are described with the lavish use of adjectives by the author. Abby has dusky-lashed, cocoa-colored eyes set in a pecan-brown face. There is a birthmark on her cheek. She is independent, tenderhearted, and a good student. Her voice is a sweet soprano, and her face mirrors intense grief over the loss of her aunt. Her forebodings come to her in dreams. Abby’s view of Carl Lee, the boy she loves, dwells on his features, such as eyes that are shiny and liquid like still water. She thinks of his hair like blackberries and his

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skin as like that of a ripe plum. He has a strong baritone voice, and “strong” is a word Abby uses often in thoughts of him. She seems to be connecting him with her father, Strong, who sees the boy in a totally different way. To Strong Jackson, Carl is a “skillet headed ape.” Abby’s father, Strong, is stern. He has broad shoulders and thick, black hair salted with sprigs of white, and he often bellows. He can draw blueprints and build furniture. His wife, Patience, is plump and caramel-colored, with snow-white hair that falls in braids to her shoulders. She sews quilts with a missionary named Ruby Thompson, a flat character who serves primarily as someone to participate in dialogue that furthers the story. She is the spokeswoman for the neighbors when they confront Abby about her weed garden. Aunt Serena is a plump woman with butter-colored skin. Her front teeth glitter, and her voice ranges from a sound like crystal to that of a trumpet. Alert eyes, a songbird singing voice, and a wonderful laugh complete the portrait. This sixty-year-old woman dips snuff with a hackberry limb from which she has teased out a natural brush with her fingers. She is very religious and has just married a preacher, the Reverend Rufus Jordan, who comes from a big city where he was the pastor of a big church. Jordan is overweight, squinty-eyed, and squat. He talks in honeyed words that carry a hint of menace, and his laughter is forced and unnatural. He has high shoulders, and his head is too far forward on his rigid neck. His bass voice and his mean eyes frighten Abby. Actually, she probably senses that he is crazy. The parents of Carl Lee are minor characters. His father, an alcoholic, has liver disease. During the novel, he disappears and is found dead. Carl Lee’s mother is an American Indian. Of Cherokee descent, she is variously described as a “bright shadow,” a bird of light movement, and a statue of proud grace. She has black hair that hangs like silken ropes down her back. A band of beads lies across her brow and a multicolored blanket drapes her body. At the end of the story, Abby borrows a bright shadow of a voice from her dead Aunt Serena. It is one of the miracles of spring. Themes and Meanings Like African American writers such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Hamilton, Joyce Carol Thomas tries to re-create African American experience through character and setting. The main character of Bright Shadow is Abyssinia, who is also the heroine of Marked by Fire. On the first page of this sequel, she is described with words that connote heat. Words boil from her scorched voice. She glows. She feels marinated. These words are simply transition devices to take her from the previous novel into this one, because fire is not featured at all in Bright Shadow. As in the preceding novel, characters have names that define them in some way. Abyssinia is a biblical term for Ethiopia and is sometimes used as an adjective to mean “African” or “black.” Her parents are patient and strong as their names suggest, and Aunt Serena is serene. The first name of Rufus Jordan, Aunt Serena’s crazy husband, means “red”—the color of blood.

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Although significant names and description are used to depict character, Thomas’s primary technique is revelation of character through dialogue. Conversations among characters display their personalities as if they were on stage. For example, readers find out about Abby’s secret quilting stitch that defies unraveling, Rufus Jordan’s braggadocio, and Aunt Serena’s ability to see visions as these persons engage in discourse with other characters. Abyssinia, like many heroines of African American fiction, is both spiritual and mystical, but she has a practical side as well. She can cook good meals, grow flowers, and collect herbs. She is industrious. She is emotional, but she is also smart and well organized. Her love for Carl Lee grows as the novel progresses. She helps him find the courage to break away from an intolerable situation and to go out on his own. Although he is a well-developed character, readers are unlikely to sympathize with him as much as with the heroine. Character development and dialogue are both expertly handled. The story, which endows everyday events with the magic of fairy tale, could be classified as a love story, but it is also about overcoming grief. The style is simple and direct. Bright Shadow can be compared with a blues song. Life’s problems and joys are treated dramatically in both, and lyrical style, vivid imagery, and strong emotion are common to both. Some critics have mentioned overwriting as a fault of the novel, but if the book is viewed as a spontaneous presentation in the manner of a blues song, such flaws are to be expected. Grandiose fantasy mixed with ordinary events is another characteristic of the blues. A description of icicles in the book is reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s work. His influence is also evident when brightness and shadow appear in juxtaposition, and again in a scene where the main character tears up flowers. In more than one place, this supposedly realistic novel takes on an aura of fantasy not usually found in works of realism for young people. Magical events concerning flowers are recounted as if they really occurred. Irises bloom in Aunt Serena’s garden while the fallen leaves of autumn are on the ground. In African folklore, flowers blooming out of season portend danger; this strange event thus foreshadows Serena’s murder. The following March, snapdragons and roses burst into blossom. In Oklahoma, these flowers would not appear until May at the earliest. The author may have intended this blooming of unseasonable flowers to be another ill omen, because the death of Carl Lee’s father is imminent. Abby destroys all the flowers in favor of weeds. Wrapped up in her grief, she nourishes ugliness over beauty and refuses to let brightness illuminate the darkness of her soul. On Easter morning, in the midst of Abby’s weeds, a cat creates instantaneous blooms with its paws. In folklore, cats are often the incarnation of human beings, and this cat may be the spirit of Aunt Serena. The animal first appears to Abby in the company of song sparrows; Aunt Serena could sing like a bird. On another occasion, when Abby is stroking the cat, she falls asleep and has a terrible nightmare about Aunt Serena. The cat, by creating flowers, encourages Abby to try to heal her psy-

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chological wounds, as Aunt Serena would certainly have tried to do if she could. When the cat causes a plum tree to blossom, the act is highly significant, because plums are the fruit most often used to describe black skin. These flowers are symbols of the resilience of the black spirit, which, when powered by the heat and fire of love, can blossom anywhere and at any time. The flower allegory is not totally successful, because it is not clear. It is not merely hyperbole when Abyssinia goes to church on Easter with “one of almost every wild flower that bloomed in Oklahoma” in her hair. She has heard a whisper saying, “believe in flowers,” and, magically, hundreds of them from all seasons adorn her. They make a statement to all who see them that her spirit is whole again. Crackling bread from human skin and a rat served up for dinner are two revolting aspects of the story that might be classified as macabre. Thomas has said that she likes to combine magic and the macabre with reality. To do so takes great skill or the result can be less than satisfying. Thomas is trying to convey the idea that African Americans turn the harsh ugliness of life into beauty through fantasy and song. Another theme of the novel seems somewhat fantastic. It does not ring quite true that Carl Lee could grow up and never know that he had a living mother, even though she left breast milk in bottles on the porch for him when he was a baby and visited him regularly in his room after dark. It stretches readers’ credulity but is not inconsistent with a blues dilemma. Ambivalence and paradox, love and hate: These are the form and substance of the blues. Strengths of the work are its vivid, memorable images, its well-drawn characters, and its poetic language. It is a window into the black psyche, where love of, respect for, and tolerance of people glimmer brightly through life’s somber shadows. The book’s message is that emotional healing occurs from within a person through strength of character. The author has done a good job of capturing the powerful rhythms of African American church music. She ends the book with a typical example. The chorus of a song sung by Abby and Carl is repeated several times with the change of only a word or two, until it rises into a crescendo of passion. This is characteristic of the call and response of a blues song, designed to create rhythmic tension. In this novel, rhythm is sometimes more important than meaning. Critical Context Joyce Carol Thomas is an accomplished storyteller who creates believable people for whom readers have sympathy. She shows African Americans to be physically attractive, sensitive, caring individuals who are eminently worthy of full membership in the great human family. This sequel to the acclaimed Marked by Fire was itself honored by the annual Coretta Scott King Award for outstandingly inspirational contributions to black literature for children. The story is continued in the novel An Act of God (1985), in which Abyssinia attends medical school, and Water Girl (1986). A story about Carl Lee’s childhood is told in The Golden Pasture (1986).

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Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Complete history of the African American novel and its practitioners. Argues that 1983—the year of Bright Shadow’s publication—was a crucial transition year for the form. Caywood, Carolyn. Review of Bright Shadow, by Joyce Carol Thomas. School Library Journal 30, no. 5 (January, 1984): 89-90. Mixed review that calls the book’s melodrama contrived but that praises Thomas’s “sensuously descriptive passages celebrating the physical beauty of the black characters.” Davis, Thulani. Review of Bright Shadow, by Joyce Carol Thomas. Essence 14, no. 12 (April, 1984): 50. Warm review by a respected dramatist and novelist. Earhart, Amy E. “Joyce Carol Thomas.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Critical biographical essay on Thomas, accompanied by a bibliography of works by and about her. Rollock, Barbara. Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Garland, 1988. Useful factual summary of Thomas’s career that discusses her editorship of the black women’s newsletter Ambrosia and her lecturing in Africa, Haiti, and the United States. Thomas, Joyce Carol. Marked by Fire. New York: Avon Books, 1982. Thomas’s acclaimed first novel about Abby Jackson and her family, for which the author won an American Book Award. Valkeakari, Tuire. Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952-1998. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Study of Christian imagery and rhetoric in African American novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Useful for placing Thomas’s use of church music in context. Yalom, Marilyn, ed. Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1983. Notes that women are central to Thomas’s fiction and that her characters are drawn from people she has known in real life. Josephine Raburn

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A BRIGHTER SUN Author: Samuel Selvon (1923-1994) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: World War II Locale: Barataria, a village east of Port of Spain, Trinidad First published: 1952 Principal characters: Tiger, the protagonist, the sixteen-year-old son of Indian Hindu cane field laborers Urmilla, Tiger’s teenaged wife Joe Martin, a former “sweetman” in Port of Spain Rita, Joe’s common-law wife Sookdeo, an old Indian who lives “on rum and memories” Boysie, a vendor of manure The Novel Because A Brighter Sun opens with a catalog of events, both local and international (and repeats this device subsequently), it might be approached as a quasihistorical narrative; however, this technique places the characters, their actions, and aspirations in social perspective, counterpointing major and minor happenings and emphasizing the concerns of the ordinary struggling individual. World events are distant; local and personal concerns dominate the characters’ lives. The arrangement of the novel into twelve chapters suggests the form of the epic, with its hero battling against great odds, and the title (like that of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises) intimates the possibility of amelioration, of the dawn of a new era, of the potential for achievement. The novel is clearly a bildungsroman, a story of the maturation of a youthful hero who sets goals for himself and overcomes disappointments and setbacks; furthermore, it is in the tradition of the social realist novel that depicts a section of working-class life in detail and with sympathy. Tiger, though disappointed in life, nevertheless adopts a mature philosophy: He rejects a return to his family’s village and life on the sugarcane estate or a departure from Trinidad for either America or India in favor of making a life for his family in Barataria’s multiethnic community. That is, he rejects a return to the past and accepts a modern social attitude. Rather than being merely the record of the first five years of Tiger’s married life, the novel is a study of changing mores in Trinidad (and hence the West Indies), with Tiger as a metonymic character, one who represents the larger community. The plot is chronological, though only half the novel concerns Tiger himself: The rest consists of episodes from others’ lives that provide Tiger with material for his growth.

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The marriage of Tiger and Urmilla (he did not even know the name of his arrangedmarriage bride before the wedding) was for the Chaguanas district “the biggest thing to happen, bigger than the war,” for Tiger, a nonreligious Hindu, had accepted his ethnic imperatives to maintain the cohesiveness of the Indian community. Immediately, however, the new couple moves to Barataria, which both physically and symbolically represents a break with tradition, for it is a newly constructed, distant, mixed community. Tiger’s father, Baboolal, provides Tiger’s new mud hut and land—but no furnishings. Tiger, though still boyish, thinks that marriage has made him a man; nevertheless, he smokes, drinks, and abuses his wife in the belief that these are necessary indications of masculinity. When Chandra, their daughter, needs a bonnet, Tiger goes to Port of Spain with Boysie to buy one. Here, Tiger is introduced to racial discrimination when a creole clerk serves a white customer first, though Tiger was the first to arrive. In the quiet of the botanical gardens, he muses on the necessity of education and the effect of wealth. He decides to work for the Americans building a road through the development and plans to save to build a house comparable to his neighbor Joe Martin’s—with sewer, power, and floor. When he learns that Urmilla is pregnant again, he suspects infidelity and mentions this to Rita, who throws him out of her house. Because he can read a little and is complaisant—even fawning at times—Tiger receives preferments on the surveying and construction crews. He expands his vocabulary, seeing language as a means to status and power, and he invites his American bosses to dinner, for which Rita provides the necessary utensils and furniture—even stringing an electric light from her house (to Joe’s chagrin). The dinner is a pathetic example of inept cultural communication, a semiotic disaster. When Urmilla is ill, Tiger seeks a doctor in the wet night. An Indian doctor and a black doctor refuse to attend her, though a white physician does and charges a mere token. The next day, Tiger confronts the Indian doctor: “All you don’t have pity, all you don’t know what it is to suffer.” He is disillusioned by status-seeking nonwhites: Their lack of identification with their own folk he considers “the hurtful part.” Later, when Urmilla is ready to deliver, the local midwife is away; Rita (who has helped other women) acts as midwife. The baby, a boy, is stillborn. With growing maturity, Tiger philosophizes, “A man should be glad for what he have.” When the road is completed, Tiger is unemployed, but he uses his savings to build his house while Urmilla recuperates at her parents’ home. Again he contemplates life and reaches mature conclusions such as “you just have to go on from where you stops” and “always the sun shines.” With the completion of his house, he has completed his maturation from boy to man; he has rejected the old ways in favor of the new, and he has rejected expatriation in favor of working for the betterment of Trinidad and himself—perhaps as a politician devoted to the education of his countrymen. The Characters Although there are numerous characters in A Brighter Sun, the novel is essentially focused on Tiger. Even Urmilla is not foregrounded. She is (like Joe, Rita, Sookdeo,

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and Boysie) a foil to Tiger, though she is also the means of depicting the role of Hindu women in Indian social life. Joe is a nonphilosophical, pragmatic person, friendly yet distant; Rita is self-assured, congenial, and unpretentious—a fine example of a true neighbor. Tall Boy and Otto (Chinese shopkeepers) are introduced, it seems, merely to represent one of the minuscule racial and ethnic groups in the Caribbean. Tall Boy is the astute entrepreneur, the family man; Otto is the older, opium-addicted stereotype. They offer a Chinese analogue to the Indian communities in Chaguanas and Barataria. Tiger is not given a family name (a not uncommon practice in Indian villages), and thus he can be accepted as a representative individual, rather like one called “Yank” or “Aussie.” He represents that large section of the population of Trinidad, Fiji, and Guyana who are descendants of the indentured plantation workers who were imported at the end of slavery to work on the large estates and who were long denied education, opportunity, and political representation. Accordingly, we can understand Tiger’s intense interest in language and education, in owning land and a house, and in entering politics. He has set his sights high and looks to the future with “a brighter sun” than that of the past. Symbolically, Tiger’s personal war against the old order (and against being regarded as a child) coincides with World War II, which cemented the superpower status of the Soviet Union and United States while setting into motion a number of revolutions in colonized lands in Central and Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In the botanical gardens, Tiger contemplates the harmonious mixture of vegetation and what he calls “the big thought”: Why should he have to restrict his friends to members of the Indian community? His mind engages also other mature matters. Thinking about Sookdeo, he wonders, “What he come on earth for?” Tiger concludes that you “don’t start over things in life” but push on regardless of disappointments and failures. That is, only a few years after Tiger has turned sixteen, his mind has already become adult; he has developed from a physical creature to a thoughtful—if not yet wholly intellectual—one contemplating matters that impinge on himself, his family, his community, his nation, and humankind. Selvon has moved from observing children “walking in that sweet wonder of childhood” to observing Tiger walking in serious contemplation of life. Joe, who is seen only occasionally and whom readers learn relatively little about, is an interesting character and an easy foil to Tiger, not only because he is static rather than dynamic but also because he is accepting, rather than questioning, by disposition. His transformation from “sweetman” (one who lives off the earnings of a woman companion) to provider has already occurred, and he has accepted the responsibility to rear Rita’s sister’s son as his own, showing his generosity and acceptance of the extended family. He has not bothered with a formal marriage, however. He sees Rita as property, he puts great value on ownership of a house and its modern appurtenances, and he is not generous beyond the extended family. He has few verbalized goals, perhaps because he believes that he has gained all that is achievable. For him there appears to be no idea of things becoming brighter; after all, “Joe might easily not have

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been born,” his aunt, Ma Lambie, says, alluding to his prostitute mother’s plan for an abortion. He has survived. Rita, confident, ebullient, courageous, is a perfect foil to Joe, and she is a model neighbor. She seldom thinks deep thoughts, but she acts with kindness and spontaneity, out of generous, commendable motivations. Urmilla is a mere cipher: She is reticent, withdrawn to the point of obsequiousness, and unquestioning in her obedience to customs and to her husband. She is stereotypical and static, even pathetic. Many readers feel deeply for her (especially when she is kicked and abused), yet she is uncomplaining about not having a floor, a bed, or working kitchen equipment. Her single goal seems to be to please her domineering husband. The many minor characters are presented in vivid and memorable detail through vignettes, cameo appearances, anecdotes, and occasional allusions or rumors. They serve an important role as models to be imitated or avoided, as foils, and as part of the mosaic that is Trinidadian society. Themes and Meanings The title, A Brighter Sun, implies a comparative, and that is surely the new day, the new Trinidad that Tiger foresees. The dominant theme, therefore, is change. Tiger changes from boy to man; the countryside changes from a collection of market gardens to a suburban satellite town; the muddy track becomes the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway; Tiger and Urmilla’s mud shack becomes a furnished brick house; the newlyweds become parents; a backward colony is on the cusp of becoming an independent nation. Whereas in the early chapters Tiger and Urmilla are concerned with raising rice and other crops, later they are purchasing large fowls, rum, cigarettes, and household furnishings and borrowing knives, forks, and other symbols of Westernization. Throughout the novel, there are references to rain, sunshine, and mangoes, all common enough in the Caribbean. These are major symbols in the story. It rains when things are not going well, such as when Urmilla is ill and when she is delivering her stillborn son—and when Tiger is working in his garden immediately beforehand. It is mango season when Urmilla discovers her pregnancies; Sookdeo buries his money box under the roots of a mango tree in his backyard, regarding it as a good omen, and when the tree is bulldozed, he dies. The sun is always a positive image and a symbol of prosperity, continuity, fecundity, and goodness. It brings Tiger out of his states of depression, and when he says that “always the sun shines” in Trinidad, it seems that Selvon is asserting the positive about his country. Tiger’s constant ambition to build a house like Joe’s is noteworthy, as is his purchase of bricks, one at a time. It should perhaps be noted that in this respect, Selvon predates V. S. Naipaul’s famous A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) by a decade. In both novels, the house is the great goal and achievement, and both espouse the same sentiment, which Selvon phrases as “Trinidadians does only talk, dey don’t do nutting.” The Indians do. In his use of dialect, Selvon is masterful. Though there may be some quibble about

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the accuracy of the reported speech of Otto and Tall Boy, the Chinese store-owners, there can be none about the verisimilitude of both the Creoles and the Indians; however, Selvon’s ear for the occasional white person’s English may be inaccurate. Notwithstanding any minor deficiencies and inconsistencies, dialect is of significance, and Selvon pioneered its use in West Indian prose fiction in A Brighter Sun. The rather utilitarian, pedestrian prose of the opening pages of those chapters that provide situational and chronological context is in contrast to the evocative power of many of the descriptive passages. Selvon’s metaphors are very effective (“bees in the hive of his brain,” for example), but his similes reveal the touch of the poet: “teeth like brown, ugly stubs set in chocolate blancmange” or “emotions . . . like ropes across the breasts,” for example. Critical Context Although Selvon attracted critical attention incommensurate with his contribution to West Indian prose fiction and poetry, his work is gaining in stature, especially among those who are specialists in Commonwealth literature. Part of the explanation for this early oversight must be that Selvon was beginning to write when there was still a critical disposition against Commonwealth writers, and British and American writing was the focus of attention; further, Selvon’s style—one that clearly reflects his own personality—is gentle, unprepossessing, and engaging rather than dramatic, convoluted, or opaque, which was in vogue in certain critical circles in the 1960’s. A Brighter Sun, however, has now gone through reprintings and has gained in readership and renown. Selvon has since been the focus of much informed criticism, and his special strengths are being acknowledged. His work has been praised because it depicts so vividly the sociology of Trinidad at a time of critical change in the years between colonial dependency and national independence, when West Indians were adapting to the dictates of life in the metropolitan culture rather than the peripheral one. He depicted the lives and struggles, the aspirations and failures of this large expatriate group with particularly poignant—if at times comic—sympathy. He showed the effects of voluntary as well as involuntary ghettoization based on race and ethnicity and also showed the residual commitment to beauty and idealism of the expatriate islanders in the face of adversity and bias. (In his later novels about Caribbean life, the optimism was somewhat muted.) In Turn Again Tiger (1958), a sequel to A Brighter Sun, Tiger and Urmilla return to the sugarcane district and rent out their new Barataria house only to encounter several disappointments and disillusionments. From this harrowing experience, Tiger emerges undefeated and confirmed in his philosophy: “We finish one job, and we got to get ready to start another.” This is the basic message of A Brighter Sun, and it doubtless represented Selvon’s own outlook.

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Bibliography Barratt, Harold. “Dialect, Maturity, and the Land in Sam Selvon’s A Brighter Sun: A Reply.” English Studies in Canada 7, no. 3 (Fall, 1981): 329-337. Takes issue with both Birbalsingh and MacDonald (below). First, Barratt demonstrates that Tiger’s developing consciousness is the paramount element of the novel and that the novel is more than “a mere photographic representation of quaint, exotic local customs”; second, he argues that Tiger’s focus is not on dialect and language but on education, and that he does not want to escape from the land. Birbalsingh, Frank. “Samuel Selvon and the West Indian Literary Renaissance.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 8, no. 3 (1977): 5-22. Proposes that the narrative technique in A Brighter Sun is freely associative, loosely interweaving episodes in Tiger’s life with occasional insights into politics and sociology, and that the dominant tone is comic and farcical rather than pathetic. Cartey, Wilfred. “The Rituals of the Folk: The Crossing of Rhythms.” In Whispers from the Caribbean: I Going Away, I Going Home. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Argues that A Brighter Sun depicts rigid ethnic and racial attitudes in the older folk but a movement toward a merging of races in the younger ones. There is harmony between Tiger and the earth, the elements, that is really symbiotic. Forbes, Curdella. From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, and the Cultural Performance of Gender. Mona, Jamaica: UWIPress, 2005. Includes a chapter comparing Selvon’s representations of masculinity and homecoming in A Brighter Sun and Turn Again Tiger. Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Asserts that education and the mastery of the colonial language are viewed as the source of knowledge that will permit Tiger to transcend the “cane culture” of his family, and that the building of the new highway symbolizes the coming displacement and modernization of the Trinidad countryside. MacDonald, Bruce F. “Language and Consciousness in Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun.” English Studies in Canada 5, no. 2 (Summer, 1979): 202-215. Argues that the novel is structured with an eye to the potential of dialect and language as determinants of social class and as indicators of personality. Selvon’s treatment of Tiger is seen as much gentler, less caustic than V. S. Naipaul’s treatment of similar upwardly mobile and aspiring characters. Nasta, Susheila, ed. Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988. A helpful compendium of statements by Selvon, articles on Caribbean literature, and critical assessments of Selvon’s major works. A bibliographic section lists all the author’s works in addition to reviews and critical articles. Zehnder, Martin, ed. Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon. Leeds, West Yorkshire, England: Peepal Tree, 2003. Collection of essays by noted scholars on Selvon’s life and work. A. L. McLeod

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BRONX MASQUERADE Author: Nikki Grimes (1950Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Experimental Time of plot: 2002 Locale: Bronx, New York First published: 2002

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Principal characters: Tyrone Bittings, a high school student who has a low opinion of school and wants to be a musician Raul Ramirez, a student who loves to paint and hopes to be the next Diego Rivera Diondra Jordan, a student who is tall but does not want to be a basketball player and who has a talent for drawing portraits Lupe Algarin, a student who wants to love and to be loved but is struggling to love herself Janelle Battle, a student who knows she is much more than meets the eye The Novel In Nikki Grimes’s Bronx Masquerade, Mr. Ward’s English class has been studying the Harlem Renaissance. He has assigned an essay, but an essay seems to be an inappropriate assignment to at least one of his students: Wesley “Bad Boy” Boone. Wesley would rather write a poem, thinking it would be more in keeping with the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Mr. Ward allows Wesley to write a poem and even to read it aloud in class. He must still write the essay, however. Wesley’s poem starts a trend, and soon his “homey” Tyrone brings in a poem of his own to read. Before long, other students in class want to read their poems, and Open Mike Friday is born. The eighteen voices representing the students in Mr. Ward’s English class are quite diverse, including young men and women who are black, white, and Latino. They range from the quintessentially “cool” to the naturally “nerdy.” On the surface, the students seem very different; each wears a mask in order to portray the person they want the world to see. Beneath their masks, they share common feelings: fear, insecurity, the need for love, a lack of identity, and a struggle for recognition. The students’ poems gradually pierce their masks, exposing their deeper identities to their classmates. The hotshot basketball player, seemingly confident and in control, is revealed as a secret bookworm who loves to learn. The meek, needy, overweight girl becomes a loving, giving, caring young woman her classmates had never before noticed. Poetry has a transforming effect, and it becomes a positive force that reaches be-

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yond the school and into the students’ extracurricular lives to affect their families and their community. Grimes’s novel alternates between poems written by the students and short character sketches of each student. In addition, Tyrone injects his own comments after every poem, reacting on behalf of the class. The Characters Bronx Masquerade features the literary equivalent of an ensemble cast. The novel is filled with the voices of these young adults. By contrast, the voice of Mr. Ward, their teacher, is never heard directly. The students speak, first in prose then in verse. Writing in The Horn Book Magazine, reviewer Susan P. Bloom said, “Grimes asks a lot of poetry in this short, fast-paced novel: within a year these eighteen kids have allowed poetry to turn them into a family and to turn them around.” Grimes, who was born in Harlem and has lived in nearly every borough in New York City, presents eighteen young men and women, each with a unique voice and a special circumstance. With the exception of Tyrone Bittings, the students get about equal billing. Tyrone is essentially the emcee of the novel, the man who comes on stage between the acts to crack wise and give the next act time to set up. Depending on one’s frame of mind and personal experience, one might find a particular student’s story more compelling than the others or more relevant to one’s own life. However, each young character is sufficiently drawn by Grimes to convey his or her story. One student, Diondra Jordan, is tall and lanky. Her father looks at her and sees the son he never had, the basketball player he has always dreamed of, but his daughter is awkward and inept at sports. With a charcoal pencil, however, she can capture a person’s essence and allow a viewer to see her subject’s soul through carefully rendered eyes. As the novel begins, she has no idea of the depth of her talent. She only knows that she loves to draw. It is another student in the class, Raul Ramirez, confident and determined, who is the class artist. He uses Mr. Ward’s desk as a miniature studio before each class. Only when Raul sees one of Diondra’s drawings does she realize that she has a gift: Raul chases after Diondra down the hallway just so he can get a better look at her drawing and tell her he only wishes he had her skill. Only then does Diondra begin to believe in herself. This type of discovery transforms to some degree every student in Mr. Ward’s class. The vehicle for each transformation is poetry. Themes and Meanings Bronx Masquerade is targeted at young adults, who often hide the vulnerabilities they share beneath artificial masks that make them seem to have little in common. The novel’s characters, perhaps not yet jaded enough wholly to buy into their parents’ fears and prejudices, remain young enough that the art of poetry can slice through their facades to reveal their souls. They express in rhythm and rhyme the extent to which their hearts all beat to the same time. This is the message at the novel’s core. It is a book for optimists, for dreamers and poets. Its purpose is to inspire.

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The students in Mr. Ward’s class discover that it is too easy to judge by appearances. The labels they use to classify and sort their friends, family, enemies, and neighbors are terribly inadequate to capture the complexity of their fellow human beings. The novel’s eighteen characters are all different in appearance. Outwardly, they present a fiction that comforts and reassures others. Inwardly, however, they strive to break free from their self-imposed masks and reveal the beauty hidden beneath. Grimes chooses to convey this message through poetry, because it allows her to use lyrical devices rather than standard narration or description to convey information about her characters. In the journal Language Arts, Grimes told an interviewer, I am really uncomfortable with this label “verse novel” because that’s not what I do. I much prefer that my work be called a “novel in poetry” because there are too many socalled verse novels you get fifty pages into without finding a single metaphor. What they’re actually writing is broken prose. They think as long as it doesn’t go all the way across the page, it’s poetry.

Critical Context Grimes has written over fifty books and won many awards, including the Coretta Scott King Award for Bronx Masquerade. Encouraged to write by her father and her older sister, Grimes was influenced in high school by the poetry of Kahlil Gibran and Langston Hughes. As she became a writer, she traveled with Nikki Giovanni and was mentored by James Baldwin. Her initial passion was to write novels for adults, but her first idea for a children’s book led to another and another. Bronx Masquerade represents an experimental style, alternating poetry and prose. Within the set milieu of a high school English class and working with a finite number of students, Grimes is able to endow each student with a personality, talents, fears, and dreams. The plot is advanced not by description so much as by monologue expressed as verse. Bibliography Bloom, Susan P. Review of Bronx Masquerade, by Nikki Grimes. Horn Book Magazine 78, no. 2 (March/April, 2002): 213. Claims that the novel succeeds despite its somewhat excessive optimism, because its compelling characterization breeds sympathy in readers. Evarts, Lynn. Review of Bronx Masquerade, by Nikki Grimes. School Library Journal 48, no. 1 (January, 2002): 132. Compares Grimes’s style to that of Mel Glenn, but emphasizes the originality of her decision to combine both poetry and prose narrative in the same text. Grimes, Nikki. “An Interview with Poet Nikki Grimes.” Interview by Sylvia M. Vardell and Peggy Oxley. Language Arts 84, no. 3 (January 1, 2007): 281. In this interview Grimes emphasizes the extent to which poetry is incorporated into children’s everyday lives, in the form of nursery rhymes, schoolyard chants, and so on.

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She says that poetry in children’s literature therefore begins with a strong foundation on which to build. Roback, Diane. Review of Bronx Masquerade, by Nikki Grimes. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 51 (December 17, 2001): 92. Notes that each character is strong enough to hold his or her own as a protagonist, but that the ensemble format prevents them from receiving as much time as they deserve. Wysocki, Barbara. Review of Bronx Masquerade, by Nikki Grimes. School Library Journal 52, no. 11 (November, 2006): 66-67. In this review of the audiobook version of Grimes’s novel, Wysocki asserts that the book may encourage teens both to become poets and to communicate honestly with one another. Randy L. Abbott

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BRONZEVILLE BOYS AND GIRLS Author: Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) Type of work: Poetry First published: 1956 The Poems Gwendolyn Brooks’s Bronzeville Boys and Girls, a collection of thirty-four poems, portrays the lives of children living on the South Side of Chicago. While this area called Bronzeville has been known as an economically challenged and violenceplagued section of town, it was home to Brooks for her entire life, and she portrays its vibrancy with the assistance of illustrator Faith Ringgold, whose bold use of color captures the dynamic nature of the community and of the children who inhabit it. While Brooks’s first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), centered on the adults of the community, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, by concentrating on its youth, offers hope not only to children who live in communities such as Bronzeville but also to all children who are trying to figure out who they are and where they belong in the world. The title of each poem in Brooks’s collection contains the name of one or two children. Some titles describe the children’s conditions or situations, as in “Cynthia in the Snow,” “John, Who Is Poor,” or “Robert Who Is Often a Stranger to Himself.” Most of the titles, however, consist solely of children’s names, a convention that serves not only to emphasize their subjects’ identities as individuals but also to help readers identify with those subjects. In “Mexie and Bridie,” for example, two girls have a tea party much as any other two children might, with “Pink cakes, and nuts and bon-bons on/ A tiny, shiny tray.” They enjoy the weather and watch the ants and birds. With Mexie in her white dress and Bridie in her brown one, they stand out against the blue sky and green grass, considering themselves proper ladies. The title character of “Val,” on the other hand, is not quite so proper. He does not enjoy the sound of grownups laughing at parties and does not mind when his father chases him away. After all, he says, he would rather be in the basement, outside, or on his bicycle. “Timmy and Tawanda” describes two kids who think it is “a marvelous thing and all/ When aunts and uncles come to call,” because the children are “almost quite forgot” and “are free to plan and plot.” Whether trying to fit with established conventions or rebelling against them, the children in these three poems test social boundaries. In some of the book’s other poems, Brooks portrays children doing things that set them apart from their peers. The subject of “Narcissa,” for instance, does not play jacks or ball with the other girls. In fact, she does not play “Anything at all.” Instead, she sits in her backyard, dreaming that she is “an ancient queen,” “a singing wind,” or a nightingale. All the while, she is “sitting still, as still, as still/ As anyone ever sat!” Here, Brooks shows how imagination can be as active as recreation. “Keziah” and

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“Charles” also portray children who go to secret places, Keziah “when the wind is rough” or his mother is scolding his big brother, and Charles at “Sick-times,” when he goes inside himself, then looks outside himself “At people passing by.” In these poems, Brooks portrays the need for children to have a psychological retreat. That place of solace could also be helpful to John of “John, Who is Poor.” He “lives so lone and alone,” because his mother works all day and his father is “dead and done.” The poem’s narrative voice entreats the other children to be good to him and “not ask when his hunger will end” or “when it began.” A similar disappointment pervades “Otto,” which portrays a child who is not deprived of a father but does not receive the Christmas presents he wanted. He is careful, though, not to let his father know, for “It’s hard enough for him to bear.” What is hard for the father to bear is not stated explicitly. Perhaps it is the lack of money needed to buy the desired presents, the hard work that it takes to make what little money he has, or the absence of a wife and mother. In any case, Brooks depicts the sensitivity of a child to his father’s feelings. Brooks also portrays appreciation for parents in poems such as “Andre,” “Eunice in the Evening,” and “The Admiration of Willie.” Andre dreams that he has to choose a mother and father and is confused by all of the possibilities. Just before he awakens, though, he knows what parents he would take: “the ones I always had!” Eunice is grateful to see everyone in the dining room, with “Daddy on the long settee—/ A child in every chair” and “Mama pouring cocoa.” Similarly, Willie appreciates the wisdom of “Grown folks” and all of the things that they can do, such as tying ties, baking cakes, and finding balls, not to mention “kissing children into bed/ After their prayers are said.” “The Admiration of Willie” ends Bronzeville Boys and Girls on a comforting note. Themes and Meanings Despite the qualities that they ostensibly share with nursery rhymes in their use of exact rhyme and regular meter, the poems of Bronzeville Boys and Girls demonstrate Brooks’s mastery of traditional poetic form, particularly the sonnet. In “Mexie and Bridie,” for instance, Brooks creates a lighthearted rhythm by rhyming the second and fourth lines of each quatrain and employing meters varying from iambic tetrameter to pentameter. The variation in metric length keeps the poem from being singsong and predictable, but the regular rhyme and consistent metrical pattern enable it to hold children’s interest. Some other poems in the collection contain rhyming couplets, and some are only one stanza, but all show Brooks’s ability to adapt and modify the form of a poem to suit its subject and tone. These poems also evince a preoccupation with individuality and community, portraying children whose concerns—such as being afraid of storms, being good in church, or mourning a dead goldfish—could be the concerns of any child. Some poems portray the disappointment that can come from realizing that one does not have material things that other children have, but they also convey the message that people should not be judged by their appearances. The children commenting on Eldora in

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“Eldora, Who Is Rich,” for instance, are surprised to hear her yell, “Please play with me!” and to see her smile “Like any other little child.” Still other poems express a desire to be somewhere else. For instance, in “Rudolph,” Rudolph “Is Tired of the City,” and he wants to “tend the cows and chickens” and “do the other chores” so that he can be “A-SPREADING out of doors.” Meanwhile, “Paulette” deals with a girl who feels the need to run, despite her mother’s admonitions that she is eight and “ready/ To be a lady.” Poems such as “Cynthia in the Snow,” “Lyle,” and “Tommy” show an appreciation for nature that could develop in the city or country, where, for example, a child such as Cynthia can appreciate the “SUSHES” and “hushes” of the snow, as well as its “flitter-twitters,” and still end with the feeling that snow is “So beautiful it hurts.” A tree, on the other hand, has a comforting permanence for Lyle. Despite the fact that he has moved seven times, he knows that the tree “won’t pack his bag and go” but will “stay and stay,” just as Tommy can put a seed into the ground and watch it grow. In fact, the plainspoken poems of Bronzeville Boys and Girls are metaphors for the growth of a child despite the often harsh elements of inner-city life. Critical Context Like poets of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Brooks presented a vision of a community that could prosper and celebrate its culture despite hardship. Unlike the romantic, sometimes exoticized portrayal of African Americans that became the trademark of Harlem Renaissance poets, however, Brooks portrayed regular people who happened to face unique challenges and develop unique perspectives based on where and how they lived. Although some reviewers have described Bronzeville Boys and Girls as a children’s book, meant to appeal to children of all backgrounds, it is clearly social commentary in its presentation of a particular community and a cross section of the children who live there. While their parents and other adults are in the background, it is clear that the children are affected by their economic challenges and the other hardships of growing up. In contrast to the retreat represented by Chicago’s white suburbs, Bronzeville in the mid-1950’s was exposed to the realities of crime and poverty. A decade before the Civil Rights movement, Brooks portrayed the tension lying beneath the surface while also showing children how they could transport themselves to other places through imagination, as well as appreciate the community in which they lived. Bibliography Alexander, Elizabeth. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Library of America, 2005. Selection of poems that are considered some of Brooks’s most important; the introduction provides biographical information about Brooks and critical insight into her work. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Interview by Joan Kufrin. In Uncommon Women. Piscataway, N.Y.: New Century, 1981. Engaging interview with Brooks in which she discusses

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her origins and career as a poet as well as her desire to encourage others, particularly young people, to write poetry. Flynn, Richard. “‘The Kindergarten of New Consciousness’: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood.” African American Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 483. Describes the lack of sentimentality in Bronzeville Boys and Girls compared to other mid-1950’s portrayals of childhood. Hill, Christine M. Gwendolyn Brooks: “Poetry Is Life Distilled.” Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 2005. Photo-illustrated biography of the poet; includes a chronology of her life and bibliography of her work. Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Illini Books ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Varied selection of critical essays on Brooks’s poetry and fiction, including an essay titled “Paradise Regained: The Children of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Bronzeville.” Holly L. Norton

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BROTHERS AND KEEPERS Author: John Edgar Wideman (1941) Type of work: Autobiography/biography Time of work: 1960-1982 Locale: Laramie, Wyoming; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Detroit, Michigan; Western State Penitentiary, Pennsylvania First published: 1984 Principal personages: John Edgar Wideman, a celebrated author, university professor, Rhodes scholar, and former basketball star Robert (Robby) Wideman, John’s brother, a convict serving a life sentence for armed robbery and murder Edgar Wideman, the hard-working father of John and Robby Bette Wideman (née French), John and Robby’s loving, supportive mother Garth, Robby’s teenage friend Michael (Mike) Dukes and Cecil Rice, Robby’s accomplices in a holdup that results in murder Stavros, a used-car salesman and petty thief Form and Content In an author’s note, John Edgar Wideman states that Brothers and Keepers is “an attempt to capture a process that began in earnest about four years ago: my brother and I talking about our lives.” The author’s desire to understand the remarkable divergence in the arcs of those lives lies at the heart of the book. While the two brothers grew up in the same household just ten years apart, John became a star athlete, university professor, and celebrated author, while Robby was sentenced to life in prison for armed robbery and murder without possibility of probation or parole. As Wideman writes, “The world had seized on the difference, allowed me room to thrive, while he’d been forced into a cage. Why did it work out that way? What was the nature of the difference? Why did it haunt me?” Based upon his interviews with Robby in prison, Brothers and Keepers is, according to Wideman, a “mix of memory, imagination, feeling and fact.” The narrative alternates between John’s formal literary voice and Robby’s street vernacular. The book is divided into three main sections, “Visits,” “Our Time,” and “Doing Time”; a postscript contains Robby’s graduation speech from a prison educational program in engineering technology. Wideman states early on that “you never know exactly when something begins,” and, accordingly, the events of the book do not follow chronological order. Brothers

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and Keepers begins on February 10, 1976, as the fugitive Robby, an accomplice to a murder committed during a holdup, enjoys a daylong respite with his brother, who is a professor at the state university in Laramie, Wyoming. Robby is arrested in Colorado the following day. The narrative then shifts into the past to consider the lives of the brothers’ grandparents, who lived in Pittsburgh at the turn of the century. The author then recalls his own encounters with racism at the University of Pennsylvania some fifty years later. “To maintain any semblance of dignity and confidence,” he writes, “I had to learn to construct a shell around myself.” The upkeep of that shell exacted a high price, however, as Wideman states that “the brighter, harder, more convincing and impenetrable the shell became, the more I lost touch with the inner sanctuary where I was supposed to be hiding.” The “Visits” section closes in 1981 with a description of the penitentiary where Robby is held and an analysis of the effect of the physical layout on prisoners’ psyches. In relating his tale of the fatal robbery, Robby says, “It all started with Gar dying.” The “Our Time” section begins with the story of Garth’s death, the cause of which the author attributes to negligent care for an internal disease—in his view, the episode is a microcosm of the poor health care afforded to African Americans in general. His friend’s death leaves Robby outraged and ever more rebellious. As his narrative continues, readers learn of his descent into heroin addiction, a dependency so powerful that he eventually resorts to stealing his brother’s new television for drug money. Feeling shut out from conventional avenues of success as a youth, Robby says that he sought the illicit “glamour” and “rep” of the streets. The youngest of five children, he also felt intimidated by the achievements of his siblings: “Figured out school and sports wasn’t the way. I got to thinking my brothers and sisters was squares. Loved you all but wasn’t no room left for me. Had to figure out a new territory. I had to be a rebel.” In one dramatic illustration of that rebelliousness, Robby threatens to kill his father with a pair of scissors during an argument over the use of the family’s telephone. In the summer of 1968, Robby’s defiant nature leads him to become one of the principal organizers of a citywide high school strike. The strikers’ demands include increased recognition of African American history and culture in the curriculum and African American representation in the administration; after the attempts at reform fail, however, Robby is marked as a troublemaker. Although he eventually finds a job working with handicapped children that is spiritually if not financially rewarding, Robby conspires to buy and distribute a cache of heroin, a venture that leads, indirectly, to the fateful robbery and murder. In hope of escaping the poverty of the ghetto, Robby and his associates pool their savings and purchase two thousand dollars worth of the drug in Detroit for distribution in Homewood. By a twist of fate, however, they are forced to hide the heroin for a week, during which time it spoils and becomes worthless. In an attempt to raise more money for another drug buy, Robby, Mike, and Cecil begin working a con game involving the supposed sale of stolen televisions. It is in the midst of such a scam on November 15,

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1975, that Mike shoots and kills a used-car salesman named Stavros. Wanted by the police, the three men flee Pittsburgh the next day. The opening pages of “Doing Time” tell of the trio’s first days on the run. Although they initially plan to go to Los Angeles, Cecil soon returns to Pittsburgh to face criminal charges, and Robby and Mike never make it to the West Coast. After parting in Chicago, the latter two are reunited in Utah in late December, two months before they are captured in a car with stolen license plates in Colorado. Robby and Mike are then extradited to Pittsburgh, where they are convicted in separate trials and receive the maximum sentence of life in prison for their crimes. Jumping forward some six years, Wideman next describes his visits with Robby in the penitentiary in 1982. The author’s most pointed criticism of the American prison system occurs in this section. Wideman argues that prisons degrade, brutalize, and dehumanize inmates, virtually precluding any chance of their rehabilitation. He writes, “Inside the walls nothing is certain, nothing can be taken for granted except the arbitrary exercise of absolute power. . . . And the prison rules are designed to keep you ignorant, keep you guessing, insure your vulnerability.” To which Robby adds, “This is the place of knowledge. By the time a dude gets out of here, most likely he’s a stone criminal. . . . What I’m saying is a dude comes out of the joint worser off than he was when he came in. And it’s spozed to be that way, far as I can tell. They saves you a place in the chow line cause they know you’re coming back.” The remainder of the book includes John’s ruminations on the relative success of the narrative (he worries especially that he is exploiting Robby by publishing a book about him), examples of Robby’s poetry, and the text of his graduation speech, in which he argues for the continuation of prison educational programs. The concluding section at once acknowledges Robby’s inner strength and humanity and the futility of his situation. As his older brother writes, “The character traits that landed Robby in prison are the same ones that have allowed him to survive with dignity. . . . And though these same qualities helped get him in trouble and could derail him again, I’m happy they are still there. I rejoice with him.” Analysis Addressing his brother, John Edgar Wideman states, “The usual notion of time, of one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to isolate the shape of your life from the rest of us, when I try to retrace your steps and discover precisely where and when you started to go bad.” While the older Wideman may not be able to pinpoint the beginning of Robby’s demise, Brothers and Keepers does illuminate the underlying causes, personal and social, that led to his incarceration. Above all else, the book illustrates that the reasons for the vast difference in the fates of the two brothers are anything but simple. Wideman never excuses his brother of personal responsibility for his actions, but he nevertheless emphasizes the key role played by historical and social factors far beyond his brother’s control. Prison serves as a metaphor in Brothers and Keepers for the conditions under

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which inhabitants of the African American ghetto live. According to his brother, the course of Robby’s life was largely predetermined by societal forces that subverted his opportunity for success. Wideman writes that “Robby’s chance for a normal life was as illusory as most citizens’ chances to be elected to office or run a corporation.” Time spent in the prison system further corrupts the individual, he argues, as inmates receive an education in crime rather than the skills necessary to become productive members of society. Throughout Brothers and Keepers, Wideman, like the author and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois before him, portrays the struggles of African Americans who feel divided by ties to their ancestral heritage and the exigencies of living in a dominant white society. John’s own experience as a son of the African American neighborhood of Homewood who goes on to gain acceptance in the predominantly white world of academia serves as a prime illustration of such difficulties. The cost of assimilation was rejection of his heritage. As Wideman writes, “I was running away from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness.” Brothers and Keepers is, in large part, Wideman’s attempt to reclaim that heritage, to acknowledge his connection to Homewood and to his brother. He honors that commitment in the form of the book, too, as he gives voice to Robby, recounting his dialogue in his own vernacular; the result is a kind of play on Standard English, akin to a good jazz solo in its improvisational and musical qualities. In an essay entitled “The Black Writer and the Magic of the Word,” Wideman states, “My goal has always been to write as well as anybody has ever written, but I am sure now that for a long time I didn’t know what really counted as legitimate subject matter, legitimate language, for such an enterprise.” He turns to his familial and racial heritage for that subject matter and language in Brothers and Keepers. The work is infused with an affection and respect for African American artistic and cultural forms, particularly popular music and storytelling, both written and oral. Wideman stresses the importance of stories and storytelling to understanding one’s self and one’s history throughout his work. In Brothers and Keepers, he puts that belief into practice, examining his own past and that of his kin and recording his story, and their stories, for generations to follow. Critical Context The subject of a segment on the popular television program 60 Minutes, Brothers and Keepers was controversial for its criticisms of the national prison system, of racism, and of urban decay. In light of the continuing struggle for equal rights for people of color, the book has retained its relevance to issues of racism and penal reform. A National Book Award nominee, Brothers and Keepers has been praised both for its analysis of social forces that oppress African Americans and for its sensitive probing of the relationship of two brothers. Wideman has also drawn acclaim for his skillful use of African American street argot and for his interweaving of autobiography and biography. Like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845), Brothers and Keepers is an African American captivity narrative; it is

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also an example of the broader corpus of American prison literature, ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” to The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison (1968). Wideman’s book is also situated within the rich tradition of African American autobiography that extends from early slave narratives to twentieth century works such as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) and Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power (1992). In his first novel, A Glance Away (1967), and especially in the “Homewood Trilogy” (a series of novels consisting of 1981’s Hiding Place and Damballah and 1983’s Sent for You Yesterday) Wideman began to explore his central themes of the nature of time, familial history, and African American culture as exemplified by the people and places of the Homewood section of Pittsburgh where he grew up. Brothers and Keepers addresses these same subjects in the form of nonfiction. Wideman’s honesty and passion lend the work emotional power, while his technical skills and successful narrative experimentation make for a formal tour de force. Many critics agree that Wideman, whose work has been compared to that of William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, has developed a unique voice in American literature through his mixture of African American street dialect and traditional literary language. While Wideman’s fiction has received considerable critical praise (Sent for You Yesterday, for example, won the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), Brothers and Keepers brought him unprecedented popular recognition. In Brothers and Keepers, he writes of the subtle and overt forms of racism that African Americans face daily and asks that his readers consider their complicity in the fates of the disenfranchised such as Robby Wideman. Of his youth, Robby observes, “We wasn’t that bad off, but compared to what them little white kids had I always felt like I didn’t have nothing. . . . Couldn’t have what the white kids in Shadyside had, and I wasn’t allowed to look around the corner for something else.” Like Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), he is representative of those African Americans who have been taught to desire that which they are denied. Robby feels confined even as a child, not unlike the inmates of Western State Penitentiary with whom he will later serve his life sentence. Bibliography Bidinger, Elizabeth. The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography: Representation of Family by Four American Authors. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Discusses representations of class and domesticity in Brothers and Keepers and compares the book to novels by Russell Baker, Agate Nesaule, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Bonetti, Kay. “An Interview with John Edgar Wideman.” Missouri Review 9, no. 2 (1986): 75-103. Extensive interview in which Wideman discusses his work, childhood, education, literary influences, African American vernacular, African American literature, and American culture in general. Brown, Chip. “Blood Circle.” Esquire, August, 1989, 122-132. Biographical profile of the author focusing on his reaction to a murder committed by his sixteen-year-

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old-son Jacob in 1986. Discusses Jacob’s case in relation to Robby’s and explores its effects on Wideman. Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. The first book-length study of Wideman’s work. Analyzes Wideman’s major fiction, from A Glance Away through the novel Reuben (1987), from the perspectives of modernism and postmodernism. Makes several references to the relationship between the author’s fictional characters and those in Brothers and Keepers. Includes a 1988 interview with Wideman. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. Review of Brothers and Keepers, by John Edgar Wideman. The New York Times, October 29, 1984, p. C21. Negative review that criticizes Brothers and Keepers as being “angry and ideological” with a weak ending. Concludes that Wideman’s portrait of Robby and charges of racism are a “cop out.” Refers to the author as a “guilty liberal” who has not fully acknowledged the role of his own success in Robby’s demise. The sole point of praise is for Wideman’s skill at storytelling. Reed, Ishmael. “Of One Blood, Two Men.” The New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1984, pp. 1, 32. Lauds Wideman for his use of diverse linguistic styles and his critique of the American prison system. Compares Brothers and Keepers favorably to Claude Brown’s autobiography Manchild in the Promised Land (1965) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Reed argues that the strength of the book lies in its “intimate portrayal of the lives and divergent paths taken by two brothers,” thus raising it above a mere sociological tract. Rosen, Judith. “John Edgar Wideman.” Publishers Weekly 236 (November 17, 1989): 37-38. Interview conducted shortly before the publication of Wideman’s shortstory collection Fever. Details his method of composition and his beginnings as a professional writer. Wideman also discusses the interconnections between racial prejudice and language. TuSmith, Bonnie, and Keith E. Byerman, eds. Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Collection of essays on a wide range of issues in Wideman’s work, including a piece on self-knowledge in Brothers and Keepers by Eugene Philip Page. Yardley, Jonathan. “The Prisoner Within.” The Washington Post Book World 14 (October 21, 1984): 3. Review praising Wideman for his ability to evoke sympathy for his brother while never excusing his criminal actions. Claims that Brothers and Keepers is “guaranteed to shock and sadden.” Mark J. Madigan

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BROTHERS AND SISTERS Author: Bebe Moore Campbell (1950-2006) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: 1992 Locale: Los Angeles, California First published: 1994 Principal characters: Esther Jackson, an upwardly mobile, highly educated, African American bank manager Mallory Post, a white loan officer involved in an affair with a married man Humphrey Boone, an African American bank manager who strives to overcome his ghetto origins LaKeesha Jones, a young, single, African American mother whose child was fathered by a gang member Preston Sinclair, the president of the bank, who attempts to address racial discrimination The Novel In April, 1992, Rodney King, an African American, was arrested by Los Angeles police after a high-speed automobile chase. His severe beating at the hands of four policemen, captured on videotape by an amateur photographer, outraged the African American community. When the policemen were exonerated by an all-white jury, Los Angeles erupted in a series of civil disturbances during which fifty-three people were killed and over one billion dollars in property was destroyed. Bebe Moore Campbell’s novel Brothers and Sisters is set in the aftermath of these historical events. The novel is a frank exploration of the complexities of race, gender, and social class, represented through the viewpoints of a large cast of characters. Esther Jackson and Mallory Post are professional employees of the downtown regional headquarters of the fictional Angel City National Bank. Esther, on the surface self-possessed and under control, seethes with inner rage at her treatment as a token African American woman. Mallory seeks Esther’s friendship but is puzzled by her seemingly incomprehensible anger. Esther, in turn, is blind to Mallory’s well-intentioned, if naïve, attitude. Each woman tries to understand the other, as they struggle with ethical issues raised by their jobs and the gender discrimination suffered by women of both races. Mallory, blond and elegant, is a highly paid commercial loan officer. Esther, whose striking good looks attract much attention, is manager of the tellers. She applies for a higher-paying position as a loan officer, a job for which she is qualified, but is denied promotion by the white manager. The issues of race, class, and gender that dominate

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the story are precipitated when Kirk Madison, a white man who is the temporary manager, is replaced by Humphrey Boone, an African American man who has been brought in from the inner-city branch by bank president Preston Sinclair. Into this explosive situation comes LaKeesha Jones, a single mother and the sole support of a chaotic household that includes her grandmother, her alcoholic mother, and two sisters on welfare with illegitimate children. Esther faces the tough decision of whether to hire as the new teller a qualified white man or to give LaKeesha, her African American “sister,” the opportunity to make a better life for herself. Esther hires LaKeesha, risking a potential threat to her own career. Esther’s life is further complicated by her desire to find a wealthy African American husband, but she is attracted to Tyrone Carter, a mail messenger, her social inferior. Preston Sinclair, whose college-age son has been injured in an automobile accident, grooms Humphrey Boone as his replacement. Boone, despite his professional veneer, masks his ghetto origins and his family’s unreasonable demands for money. Invited to Sinclair’s home, he befriends Sinclair’s son and is seduced by the wealth and privilege of the country-club lifestyle. Juggling this large cast of characters and a complex plot, Campbell creates suspense by revealing the characters’ thoughts to readers, who are given information unknown to the characters. Esther discovers that someone has been embezzling from dormant accounts but, fearing that LaKeesha may be responsible, does not immediately report the crime. A further complication is the mutual attraction between Mallory and Humphrey, whose ego is tempted by the fantasy of the trophy white woman. Humphrey acts precipitously when Mallory ends the relationship. Accused of sexual harassment, he is fired and replaced by Kirk Madison, who readers know is on the brink of a financial and mental breakdown. LaKeesha is blamed for the embezzlement, and both she and Esther, as her sponsor, are fired. Esther, encouraged by the integrity and clear-sightedness of Tyrone, makes the decision that brings about justice. She and LaKeesha, who knows that Madison is the embezzler, summon the courage to take their evidence to Sinclair, fearing that as African American women they will not be believed. Sinclair, however, does believe them and restores both women to their positions. Madison is arrested and sent to jail. Mallory extricates herself from her love affair and disavows her accusation of Boone. Boone becomes the chief executive of an inner-city bank, where he can support the aspirations of African Americans who have been refused loans by the white establishment. The Characters In exploring the fraught issues of race, gender, and social class, the author propels her main characters from their initial weaknesses to more mature actions that promise a hopeful future. Esther Jackson, abandoning her search for a wealthy African American man, realizes that Tyrone Carter, with his kindness and integrity, is worthy of her attention. Mallory Post develops the self-respect to reject her abusive lover. She and Esther are open to the possibility of a genuine, if precarious, friendship. Humphrey

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Boone decides that he does not belong in the world of the white male establishment and dedicates himself to helping African Americans achieve their financial goals. LaKeesha is poised to overcome her attraction to her criminal lover and, because she is a competent worker, will succeed in making a home for her family. Preston Sinclair acknowledges the bank’s record of discrimination and brings about a just solution. Themes and Meanings Campbell’s portrayal of the inner lives of her characters attempts to convince both African American and white readers that there is hope for racial harmony and understanding. In revealing the secrets of class and color prejudice within the African American community, she opens up a world generally unknown to white readers. She brings to the fore the emotional conflicts faced by African Americans, who must balance their own hopes for personal success against the urgent needs of their African American “brothers and sisters” of the title. Campbell is unsparing in her portrayal of the welfare mentality and the painful demands made on strong African American men and women by their less successful relatives. Although she portrays her white characters with some insight, her African American characters, plagued by their own anger and insecurities, seem more likely to evoke empathy in readers. Ultimately, the author believes that trust and friendship between the races is possible if each is open to compromise and the willingness to abandon society’s false standards. However, this ideal is a work in progress, and its realization will require heroic compassion and the resolve to understand others who are different. In one interview, Campbell cited her belief that her fiction has a message. As human beings, she implied, we are all responsible for one another, regardless of race, income, or social class. Critical Context The novel was an immediate popular success, becoming a best seller shortly after its publication. It was soon reprinted in paperback. Readers, however, have been more enthusiastic about Campbell’s work than have critics. Some fault the author for her two-dimensional characterizations, which sacrifice complexity in the service of plot and themes. However, reassessments of Campbell’s work after her untimely death at the age of fifty-six evaluated her as a compelling storyteller who reached both African American and white readers with her insights into racism and gender conflicts. As one writer in The Washington Post said, “Her writing is clean and clear; her emotions run hot, but her most important characteristic is uncompromising intelligence with a perfectionist’s eye for detail.” Bibliography Brown, Deneen L. “A Book that Binds: Novel Project Fosters Racial Understanding.” The Washington Post, November 13, 1997, p. A.01. Discusses Mary Brown, an African American English professor at Prince Georges Community College who has generated a successful series of interracial seminars in the community, using Brothers and Sisters as a springboard for discussion.

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Chambers, Veronica. “Which Counts More, Gender or Race?” The New York Times Magazine, December 25, 1994, p. 16-19. In this author interview, Campbell says that she wants to explore interracial friendships in her fiction and that African American women are more oppressed by color than by gender. Fox, Margalit. “Bebe Moore Campbell, Novelist of Black Lives, Dies at 56.” The New York Times, November 28, 2006. Summary of Campbell’s writing career that notes that, although critics found her characters to be two-dimensional, she was successful in reaching both African American and white readers. Gleick, Elizabeth. Review of Brothers and Sisters, by Bebe Moore Campbell. The New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1994, p. 18. Argues that Campbell’s attempt to reveal the complexities of racial issues achieves mixed success and lacks subtlety. Lamb, Yvonne Shinhoster. “Bebe Moore Campbell: Writer Explored Race, Mental Health Themes.” The Washington Post, November 28, 2006, p. BO6. Credits Campbell with “keen insight into the human condition.” Winter, Karl J. “Brothers and Sisters.” African American Review 31, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 369-371. Aruges that Campbell attempts to avoid clichés in Brothers and Sisters, but creates shallow characters who are not always convincing and depends upon stereotypes of physical appearance. Marjorie Podolsky

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BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES Author: Paule Marshall (Valenza Pauline Burke, 1929Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: World War II Locale: Brooklyn, New York First published: 1959

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Principal characters: Selina Boyce, a young African American girl growing up among Barbadian immigrants in a section of Brooklyn Deighton Boyce, Selina’s father Silla Boyce, Selina’s mother Suggie, a tenant in the Boyce’s boardinghouse Miss Thompson, a hairdresser and an acquaintance of the Boyces Clive Springer, Selina’s first lover The Novel Brown Girl, Brownstones examines the personal and social development of a young girl, Selina Boyce, born to first-generation Barbadian immigrants to New York. Her first impressions of the world include the heavy, oppressive brownstone dwellings of her neighborhood, a later symbol of all she wishes to escape. She grows up in an atmosphere of familial and social tension: World War II hovers vaguely over her childhood, but more immediate concerns are the battles within her own household. Selina’s father, Deighton Boyce, is an unskilled and uneducated factory worker. His only asset is his buoyant and free-spirited personality, which carries him through various disappointments. When the accounting course he takes through the mail does not land him a job with a white accounting agency, he turns his back on the business world, dismissing it as hopelessly racist. He picks up a trumpet and is determined, for a time, to become a great jazz musician. Through all of his dreams and illusions, Selina is by his side, believing in him and protecting him from the cold blast of his wife’s derision. Silla Boyce wants only enough money to put a down payment on a house. She works at a factory to accomplish this end and deeply resents her husband’s unwillingness to surrender his dreams and embrace hers. When Deighton learns that he has inherited a piece of land in Barbados, he begins to spin fantastic dreams about moving his family back to their homeland to live like proper landowners. The land represents to Deighton everything his black skin color has denied him: social status, communal respect, and a life of ease. Silla, however, has no intention of giving up her dream of a home and place in America, and she entertains no romantic illusions about life back in their homeland. In fact, as she explains to

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Selina, she remembers her life there as filled with torturous labor and unbearable isolation. To expect things to be any different because of a small plot of land is, to Silla, just another of her husband’s illusions. When Silla succeeds in a scheme to sell the land for money to buy a house, the tenuous thread between the husband and wife breaks. Deighton feigns forgiveness and cons Silla into giving him the money to deposit in the bank, and instead he spends it all on a shopping spree for the family, returning home with every penny spent. From that moment, a cold silence pervades the Boyce home. Silla is determined to work for the money she lost; Deighton is determined to give her no support. When Deighton crushes his arm in a factory accident, he gives up all hope and resigns himself to the ascetic religious cult of Father Peace, who requires of his followers a total denial of earthly attachments, including marriage and family, and an immersion in a closed community of the faithful. Deighton leaves his family to work in this commune. Silla is so angered by his abandonment that she reports her husband’s illegal immigrant status to authorities, and he is deported. Soon after, the family learns that he fell or jumped overboard and drowned just as his ship reached the shores of Barbados. Having been robbed of her only source of light and love by a mother who cannot understand her, Selina embarks on a painful process of self-discovery. She derives insight and strength from the eccentric role models of the bohemian Suggie, who instructs her in the power of passion, and the hairdresser Miss Thompson, whose strength and autonomy impress upon Selina the need for self-assurance and endurance. She meets Clive Springer, a war-beaten artist. He becomes her lover and educates her in the ways of the world, helping her to see her need to fight the “invisibility” caused by racism and antifeminism, both of which the growing Selina has begun to encounter. Selina plans to join a group of Barbados immigrants who meet to plan their assimilation into American society. Though she does not share their objectives, which she identifies as those of her mother, she hopes to win a monetary award and use it to escape with Clive. Ultimately, however, she is unable to overcome her feelings of hypocrisy and accept the award. She also realizes that Clive must be left behind in her search for self. The novel closes with Selina’s realization that she shares more of her mother’s strong and determined qualities than her father’s weaknesses, and a new mutual respect is achieved between mother and daughter. The strength her mother has bequeathed to Selina enables her to turn her back on all that is familiar and reach out for her roots to find a sense of who she is. The Characters In Brown Girl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall brings together in a New York community a group of first-generation Barbadian immigrants who find their intrinsic spiritual values to be in conflict with the more transient material values of U.S. society. Many find themselves embracing the materialism of U.S. society in order to succeed; others, in trying to hang on to their cultural values, find themselves essentially ostracized from the community. While the novel traces Selina Boyce’s development from childhood to young

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womanhood, at its center is Silla Boyce, Selina’s strong-willed, self-assured mother. Silla is determined to do whatever is necessary to succeed in “this white man’s world.” She is a strong, hardworking, tough-minded, business-oriented woman; to her, as to most of the Barbadians, success means owning commercial property. She works long hours in a factory job and even sacrifices her marriage to this ideal. Without his consent, Silla sells her husband’s property in Barbados in order to obtain the money to purchase the brownstone in which she and her family reside. She is ruthless in her pursuit of money and power. Both in physical stature and in personality, Silla Boyce is an overpowering figure, as Marshall’s description of her suggests. She is a “bold, angular, powerful” woman, and her family and friends are overawed by her. She so completely dominates her older daughter, Ina, and her husband, Deighton, that Ina withdraws into the church and then into a dull, safe marriage, and Deighton retreats into a cult and ultimately commits suicide. Even Selina, the stronger of the daughters, finds that her resolve withers when she confronts this powerful presence. Watching her mother at work in the factory, Selina observes that the force of the great machines is equally matched by “the mother’s own formidable force.” Not only is Silla a powerful woman, but she is also a skillful manipulator of language—a trait that reveals her Barbadian heritage as much as it symbolizes her strength. Talking was frequently the only way in which Barbadian women—many of whom were uneducated—could express their artistic nature. Silla is of this breed of woman, and she practices her art as she gossips with her friends around her kitchen table, as she chastises or cajoles her family, and as she operates within the business world and with the members of the Association of Barbadian Homeowners. Deighton Boyce, on the other hand, is one of those Barbadians who has tried to cling to the old ways and resist the materialism of U.S. society. Carefree and easygoing, he takes life at a leisurely pace and is content to lie in his parlor reading the paper or playing his trumpet. He is not driven, as are many of his fellow Barbadians; when chided for not making a greater effort to purchase one of the old brownstones, Deighton retorts that he will not invest his money in “old houses white folk don’t want.” Rather, he holds on to his dream of returning to Barbados and using his inheritance to build a grand house on the island. The son of a doting mother, Deighton has never developed a sense of responsibility. Thus, he is content to leave the running of the Boyce household and the disciplining of the children to Silla. Deighton is also unfocused; thus, he is unable to complete a project, quickly abandoning one for another at the least provocation. This attitude is viewed by the Barbadian community, including his wife, as a weakness for which he is essentially ostracized. In the face of this ostracism, he seeks refuge in a cult; later, having been deported to Barbados on a ship, he jumps overboard and commits suicide. Selina, the younger daughter, acts somewhat as a reporter; all the incidents in the novel are filtered through her consciousness. She exhibits characteristics of both her mother and father. Like Silla, she is strong-willed and resolute, and these traits often

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put her in conflict with her mother. Even in their confrontations, however, Selina’s admiration is apparent; she seems to recognize herself mirrored in Silla. Selina’s strength, unlike Silla’s, is employed in aiding the weak—Miss Mary, the aged invalid; Suggie, the prostitute; and Miss Thompson, the hairdresser. Each of these women is flawed in some way, and, though much older than Selina, they seem to draw upon her strength. Even Selina’s father seems to look to Selina as a source of strength, often seeming to be more the child than the parent. Like her father, Selina exhibits a romantic, artistic quality. This quality is evident not only in her sensitivity to people but also in her musings about the old brownstone, which she imagines to have a personality of its own, and in her interest in the arts. Although during much of the novel, Selina is closer to her father, it is apparent that she is a composite of both her parents—a fact that she acknowledges in a final confrontation with Silla when she says, “They used to call me Deighton Boyce’s Selina, but they were wrong. I am truly your child.” Clive, Selina’s first love, is, like Deighton, a dreamer. An artist and musician, he is a World War II veteran who has been disillusioned by the prejudices and injustices of U.S. society. Thus, he is content to paint his pictures and while away his time lying around the apartment, for which his mother assumes responsibility. He is completely devoid of ambition, and, like Deighton, he is essentially ostracized by the Barbadian community. In a moment of reflection, Selina, who is first drawn to Clive because of his sensitivity and his artistic qualities, admits that she “possessed a hard center he would never have.” The other characters in the novel are the friends and associates of the Boyce family, and they flesh out this Barbadian community. Most are business-oriented people who have embraced the materialism of white American society, adhering to the dictum pronounced by Silla in her speech to the Association of Barbadian Homeowners: “People got a right to claw their way to the top and those on top got a right to scuffle to stay there.” For this, however, some pay a terrible price. Themes and Meanings Several themes are at work in Brown Girl, Brownstones. The strongest, perhaps, is the theme of personal and social alienation. From the start of the novel, Selina is aware of an environment that does not welcome her. The brownstone buildings themselves seem to warn her of pending entrapment, a pervasive, heavy darkness that will always surround her, like the darkness of her skin. The people she meets remind her of those who found themselves hopelessly mired in this darkness: Suggie, with her meaningless sexual encounters, perpetrated only for the momentary illusion of power and life force they provide, and Miss Thompson, with her painful reminder of the violence of the world toward the weak, the black, the female. Initially, Selina hopes to escape their fate through her father’s dreams, believing in them because she must. The intense hatred she feels toward her mother for the destruction of these dreams is the hatred a prisoner feels for the jailer who throws away the key. Selina sees her mother as someone who, like the brownstone buildings, exists

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merely to imprison her. When her father dies as a result of Silla’s scheming, and Suggie is evicted, Selina is certain of her mother’s objective: She wants Selina to become what she is, an object of cold, autonomous strength, without need of anyone. What Selina fails to understand until the end of the novel is that her mother has prisons of her own, and these prisons have made her strong. The truth is that Silla is neither cold nor autonomous: She very much needs her husband’s strength and love. Her passion for him is what leads her to surrender the money she has stolen from him. Her need to believe in his love for her provides him with the means of hurting her. It is only Deighton’s final and total abandonment of Silla that makes her renounce him. Until Selina herself falls in love and understands what it means to be emotionally dependent, she cannot understand her mother’s prison and need to own something no one can steal from her—a home. Selina’s sense of alienation extends beyond her familial relationships. As she begins to venture outside the brownstone world, she meets people who see her blackness as a kind of invisibility, and she fears this lack of identity more than anything. Though she forms friendships with white people, she always feels a need to overcome their initial dismissal of her as a void of blackness. As Clive explains to her, “I’m afraid we have to disappoint them by confronting them always with the full and awesome weight of our humanity, until they begin to see us and not some unreal image they’ve super-imposed.” Selina senses that her whole life will be a struggle to prove her humanity. If this is so, how can she get beyond that to achieve other things—education, marriage, politics, dancing, love? The alienation in the novel gives birth to the logical consequence of the power of dreams and aspirations. Deighton uses his dreams of success in the white man’s business world as a means of coping with the alienation he feels as an “invisible” black man. Silla lives for her dream of a house to bridge the gap between her feelings of repulsion toward her past and her present feelings of an outsider in a world that is at best ambivalent toward her presence. Selina dreams of a sense of wholeness, a truce between and among her warring worlds—the Nazis and the Allies, the Suggies and the Sillas, the mothers and the fathers. She also seeks internal unity, and this dream seems focused on a need to find a place to call her own, not like her mother’s “place,” but a place of origin. In this quest, she is a combination of both her parents’ dreams: her mother’s dream of possessing something of her own and her father’s dream of finding his own social and emotional place in the world. When Selina embarks on her journey to the Caribbean at the end of the novel, she is committing herself to a quest for self, with the ultimate objective of presenting to the world that denied the individuality of both of her parents a person of definitive blackness, a whole being, one that cannot be dismissed as invisible. Critical Context When Brown Girl, Brownstones was first published in 1959, it received excellent reviews in most of the journals and newspapers that noticed it. The novel, however, like Marshall’s second work, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), re-

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ceived little attention in scholastic and academic circles until the 1980’s, when it was viewed as one of the first African American novels to explore a black woman’s coming-of-age. With the publication of her third novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Marshall established herself as a respected voice for human rights and personal dignity for all races. Brown Girl, Brownstones remains her most popular novel, valued for its sophisticated characterization, colorful use of an urban setting, and attention to West Indies dialect and culture. Bibliography Brown, Lloyd W. “The Rhythms of Power in Paule Marshall’s Fiction.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 7 (1974): 159-167. Examines the use of rhythm and sound in Marshall’s novels and short stories, especially Brown Girl, Brownstones and “To Daduh, In Memoriam.” Brown contends that Marshall uses a repetitive, rhythmic symbolism to support themes of self-reflection and life versus death. He also examines the way in which the power of the machine, another strong theme in Marshall’s fiction, is portrayed through rhythmic symbols, pitting the machine against the life force to create a jarring “sound” full of tension and conflict. Cobb, Michael L. “‘She Was Something Vulgar in a Holy Place’: The Resanguination of the Word in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones.” In Racial Blasphemies: Religious Irreverence and Race in American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2005. Chapter on the ideological function of blasphemy in Brown Girl, Brownstones; compares the work to novels by James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner. Collier, Eugenia. “The Closing of the Circle: Movement from Division to Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Contends that Marshall’s body of work reveals a progression of characterization from divided individuals to whole individuals integrated within a community. Collier sees in Brown Girl, Brownstones an illustration of a lost, fragmented protagonist—Selina—who finds herself within the world community. Collier illustrates her thesis with references to all Marshall’s novels and several short stories. Jackson, Blyden. The Waiting Years: Essays on American Negro Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Includes Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People in a discussion of African American novels that might be labeled “militant” for their intolerance of the white world. Jackson, Tommie Lee. “The Success Phobia of Deighton Boyce in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones.” In An Invincible Summer: Female Diasporan Authors. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2001. Looks at Marshall as a diasporic writer in examining her representation of success and ambition. Kapai, Leela. “Dominant Themes and Techniques in Paule Marshall’s Fiction.” CLA Journal 16 (September, 1972): 49-59. Examines the major themes at work in Marshall’s novels, including racial tension, psychological struggles for identity, and

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the African American cultural tradition. Kapai traces these themes through an examination of character in each of Marshall’s novels, concluding that one of Marshall’s primary voices is the one that calls readers to their past in order to enlighten their present selves. Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. An anthology of essays that emphasizes the power of the written word in giving voice to the “magic” and reality of black women’s lives. Marshall’s work is a frequent subject in this collection. In Barbara Christian’s “Trajectories of Self-Definition,” Brown Girl, Brownstones is discussed as a major literary touchstone in African American fiction by women, focusing as it does on a mother-daughter relationship. In “Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations on the New World,” Hortense Spillers discusses Marshall’s novel in the context of her career, viewing it as an expansion of the themes initiated in Brown Girl, Brownstones. Whitlow, Roger. Black American Literature: A Critical History. Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1974. Traces Marshall’s life and career, evaluating her work in a personal and social context. Whitlow considers Brown Girl, Brownstones a major novel of urban realism. He emphasizes Marshall’s use of the urban setting of Brooklyn as a symbol of various thematic concerns. Penelope A. LeFew

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BRUTAL IMAGINATION Author: Cornelius Eady (1954Type of work: Poetry First published: 2001

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The Poems Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination consists of five sections; the first four are numbered, and the last section bears the title “The Running Man Poems.” Section 1 dealts with Susan Smith and Charles Stuart, two murderers who blamed their crimes on nonexistent black assailants. Eady suggests that the police and the public, who believed their stories, are the ones with “brutal imaginations.” Susan Smith drowned her two boys by keeping them in the backseat of a car that she pushed into John D. Long Lake, near Union, South Carolina. In Boston, Charles Stuart killed his pregnant wife for insurance money. The speaker of “How I Got Born” is the fictional young African American man whom Susan Smith invented and accused of her crime. He says, “Susan Smith willed me alive/ At the moment/ Her babies sank into the lake.” Together, the young man and the children “roll sleepless through the dark streets, but inside/ the cab is lit with brutal imagination.” Other poems imagine this fictional young African American assumes a life in the popular awareness that goes beyond Smith’s fiction. In “Sightings,” a man sees the speaker pumping gas with the children in the backseat. Someone from North Carolina sees him “move like an angel/ In my dusky skin/ And knit hat.” Another witness sees the car on a highway, with the well-behaved children in the back. A motel’s night clerk hears the car’s tires as it pulls up to the motel. All of these sightings are part of a brutal imagination. In “Where Am I?” Eady describes attempts to find an African American driver with two white children in his backseat. In “The Law,” the speaker describes driving as an African American: I’m black, which means I mustn’t slow down. I float in forces I can’t always control.

The poems emphasize the racial dimension of the imagination’s brutality: How long do you think the cops would listen Had Susan not sworn I was black, I was a bad dream.

Even when the car is found in the lake, the invented culprit continues in the sheriff’s mind and in the public’s mind, fed by the posters that a police artist has drawn.

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Scenes, images, existential dilemmas, and matter-of-fact prejudice are all crisply and clearly drawn in this first set of brutal imaginations. Section 2 consists of five poems that deal more broadly with the brutal imagination of American culture. “Uncle Tom in Heaven” laments: I with another black man pour from a White woman’s head. I fear He’ll live the way I did, a brute, A flimsy ghost of an idea. Both Of us groomed to go only so far.

Uncle Ben “was pulled together/ To give, to cook/ But never to eat.” “Aunt Jemima’s Do-Rag” refers to the original Aunt Jemima, a round-faced woman with a headscarf, based on the image of a real African American woman named Nancy Green of whom almost nothing is known. The poem highlights the cognitive dissonance between corporate icons and fully dimensioned human beings. While the first is a literary character and the other two are marketing devices, Uncle Tom, Uncle Ben, and Aunt Jemima are all icons of the white culture’s brutal imagination. They serve a purely and unrealistically servile role. Eady similarly addresses such cultural caricatures as Buckwheat—a member of the Little Rascals who, as an adult, becomes an alienated outsider—and Stepin Fetchit, a character played by Lincoln Perry. Eady highlights the complexity of Perry’s own life, which exists in tension with the caricature he helped perpetuate. In section 3, Eady returns to Susan Smith, a culprit whose reality is the sand and silt under her fingernails. The collective suspicions she has created weave the web of the brutal imagination. “Interrogation” points to the nonsensical nature of such suspicions in the highly implausible image of a black man driving an old Mazda through a southern town with two white kids in the car. The image is an absurdity; to the brutal imagination of prejudice, however, it is not. Several poems focus on the intricate entanglement of the personas of the invented and the inventor: “Susan steps to the mike./ How do we feel?/ There’s a crack in our voice.” The invention is part of Susan’s schizoid persona; she becomes a “we.” “I am in the back of her mind,/ Not even a notion,” reflects the invented African American murderer about Susan Smith in the first poem of section 4. This and the remaining nine poems in the section juxtapose quotes from Smith’s confession with an attempt by Smith’s persona to make sense of the media and cultural phenomenon she created. In the end, the invented African American persona says, “She only has me,/ After she removes our hands/ From our ears.” This last section of the collection comprises poems that became the libretto for the jazz opera Running Man (1999), on which Eady collaborated with composer Diedre Murray. The poems constitute a narrative in the form of dramatic monologues. Each title indicates the speaker of the monologue. Only one poem varies from that format by juxtaposing comments from townspeople with those of the primary speaker.

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The titular Running Man is first represented from the point of view of his younger sister, Miss Look, who sees him as a great entrepreneur who can do the white man’s arithmetic to make silver dollars. The older sister’s monologue gives readers a glimpse of Harlem, where the sisters live sometime between the 1930’s and the 1950’s, having left their home state of Virginia. Their apartment building has only one phone; tap signals on radiator pipes serve as an intercom. It is through this makeshift intercom that the sisters learn of their brother’s death in a shooting in Virginia. They take the train to settle his affairs, and they are subjected to the empty consolation of a neighbor’s invocation of “Jesus” and allusion to the Lord’s work serving as a backdrop to all. These references contrast ironically with one sister’s simple wish to hear her brother’s voice again. The train ride occasions a visit to the past to learn more about the Running Man, his ambience, and his family. His father’s dramatic monologue indicates what the father has become as a consequence of his military obligation. Once “a sweet man,” in the words of his wife, he has been changed by barracks unfit for rats and a white officer who urinated on African American soldiers as they dug latrines. The father’s poem is entitled “Piss”; it culminates in the lines: Before the war, I used to think A black man With enough Smarts And backbone Could win a place In this world. No more.

Unlike his father, the Running Man’s mother still retains her optimism. She plans to seek advancement for her son by way of education, which will provide “Armor for his beauty.” “Failure,” spoken by the Running Man, gives a haunting account of the mother-son relationship. Mother points out a hawk in the sky, as it embeds its talons in a sparrow; she predicts that her son will be like “that” some day. She sees the hawk; the son sees the sparrow. Then, “I felt her hand fall lightly/ On my shoulder.” A soft talon of the mother-hawk forces the son-sparrow to let his mother live vicariously. Other characters are represented through the eyes of the Running Man. While the Running Man takes great interest in reading, he recognizes that interest as his unique feature. He is defined by the ambience of a town that “not even a bible can cure.” He recognizes that he is expected to turn into a criminal, pulling a trigger before he will behave obsequiously to any boss. As a ghost in the dream of his sister, the Running

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Man reflects about his hometown on the Chesapeake: Old Nancock, Virginia. There, the whites permitted only “A post office/ A general store./ A church/ A cemetery,” from which old slaves still rise. The poem ends with the observation that the wrists of the slaves’ descendents are still as shackled as the wrists of the slaves themselves. “And what’s become/ Of the keys?” Another poem explains the relationship between the town, the Running Man, and the family. The slave cemetery is the favorite place of the Running Man and his younger sister, because there “Africa lies under our feet.” The punishing father emerges in the poem “Sex.” Having been treated to women’s makeup by one of the sisters as he sleeps, the young Tommy has revealed homosexual yearnings: . . . My father takes me, To the bathroom, he removes my pants, He takes a toothbrush and this pain he gives Is approved by Jesus. I bleed. It hurts to sh*t.

“Revenge” gives an account of the speaker’s first heterosexual experience with a woman, whom he clearly uses without any love. The theme of using others continues: The Running Man is stronger, faster, and smarter than others; he therefore feels entitled to use them. “Replaced” is a soliloquy by the father that gives an account of the father’s losing the Oedipal conflict. The son rules the house, because the mother “longed for company/ That was well-read and could hum symphonies.” The Running Man describes his first murder, killing his wife because she knew too much about him. The townspeople know that the woman is gone. He persuades them to believe that she has left him for another man, but “mud/ And pine needles/ On the soles of/ My boots” would give him away if anyone looked. No one sees this evidence: “I can lie./ They can kiss my ass.” The Running Man’s closing soliloquy tells poignantly what he is: God made me pretty. God made me smart. God made me black. Which only proves God’s infinite sense of humor.

Themes and Meanings The overarching theme of Eady’s collection is the brutality of a white imagination that dominates American culture and limits the options of African Americans. This imagination sees African Americans as criminals and caricatures, rather than as people. It prevents real African Americans from being seen clearly, and it falsifies their identities in ways that detrimentally shape their lives and experiences.

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Critical Context Eady has become a critically acclaimed poet, and Brutal Imagination has garnered favorable attention. In this and other work, the poet evinces an astute awareness of how cultural images can define people and how popular anecdotes can shed light on the sources and effects of prejudice. Eady’s crisply drawn and well-focused images are worthy of a reader’s attention, but an extensive corpus of critical works about Eady’s poetry has yet to appear. Bibliography Eady, Cornelius. “Cornelius Eady.” Interview by Patricia Spears Jones. BOMB 79 (Spring, 2002): 48-54. Discusses the relationship between Eady’s poetry and classical Greek theater. Includes a detailed discussion of Brutal Imagination. _______. “Did Your Mama Hear Those Poems?” In Ask Me Now: Conversations on Jazz and Literature, edited by Sascha Feinstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Interview in which Eady discusses the relationship between jazz and poetry; part of a collection of interviews with musicians and writers on the mutual influence of literature and jazz upon each other. Peters, Erskine. “Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water: Its Womanist/ Feminist Perspective.” Journal of African American Men 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1996): 15-31. Touches on themes of family relationships in Eady’s work that are important for understanding the “Running Man” poems. Poetry Society of America. “For Want of Nail: Neglected American Poets.” Newsletter of the Poetry Society of America, Autumn, 1994, 44. Includes a short statement of praise for Eady’s poetry. Trethewey, Natasha. “A Profile of Cornelius Eady.” Ploughshares 28, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 193-197. Brief biography of Cornelius Eady and summary of his work by another significant African American poet. Reinhold Schlieper

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BUCKING THE SARGE Author: Christopher Paul Curtis (1953) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman; social realism Time of plot: Early twenty-first century Locale: Flint, Michigan First published: 2004 Principal characters: Luther T. Farrell, a precocious fifteen-year-old living in a housing project in Flint, Michigan Sarge, Luther’s mother, a tough-minded entrepreneur, landlord, and loan shark Sparky, Luther’s closest and only friend Chester X. Stockard, one of Sarge’s residents, a retired railroad porter who becomes Luther’s surrogate father The Novel At the age of fifteen, Luther T. Farrell helps his mother, known as Sarge, run a real estate empire in the ghetto of Flint, Michigan. His father is dead, and Luther has been raised by his mother, who left teaching to take a lucrative job on the Buick assembly line in Flint. She has since branched out into shady business operations, which she is grooming her only son to run. Luther has heard stories concerning his mother: The rental properties and group homes she owns barely meet city codes; she uses the residents in her homes to gouge the Social Security system; most disturbing, she runs a loan shark operation and even uses an intimidating second-in-command, Darnell Dixon, as muscle. Luther, meanwhile, has his own ambitions: He wants to study philosophy at Harvard University. In return for the hours of work Luther has put in, Sarge has been putting aside an education fund, now worth more than ninety thousand dollars. That money is Luther’s ticket out of Flint. His only friend, the goofy Sparky, lacking such resources, schemes to get out of Flint by suing someone rich. Luther discovers a stash of pills in the mattress of one of his mother’s tenants. He suspects the tenant, Chester X. Stockard, is hoarding the pills to use to commit suicide. The encounter, though, leads the two to become friends. Chester tells Luther bluntly that his mother is using him and will never let him go. Chester advises Luther to move with him to Florida. Luther refuses, but his situation changes when his science fair project wins a gold medal (it is his third gold medal, an unprecedented feat in his school’s history). Luther’s science project concerns the dangers of lead paint and the corrupt landlords in Flint who continue to use it. The project’s findings outrage Flint’s mayor,

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who attends the award ceremony and promises a swift crackdown. It has not occurred to Luther, however, that his mother will be a prime target of this crackdown. After the assembly, she quietly tells Luther that when she returns from a weekend trip to Washington he must be out of the house. Luther decides that before he leaves he will take with him the college fund that is rightfully his. He goes to the bank but finds only nine hundred dollars in the account. Ever cool, Luther cleans out his mother’s safety deposit box, finding more than fifty thousand dollars in it. He then uses his power of attorney to sell the group home’s van, which, in addition to the money from the deposit box, gives him roughly the amount his mother owed him. In his mother’s safety deposit box, Luther also finds evidence that Sarge had bribed the judge of last year’s science fair, so he visits the girl who came in second in that fair and gives her his medal. He sets about tying up other loose ends as well: He gives new clothes to his mother’s tenants and fifteen thousand dollars to a classmate whose family Sarge had evicted. He promises Sparky that he will send for him in three months. He transfers ownership of Darnell’s expensive car to himself. Then, Luther and Chester take the car and head to Florida. The Characters Bucking the Sarge is an ensemble novel; Christopher Paul Curtis grew up in Flint and creates believable secondary characters, anxious and desperate, who are trapped in an economically distressed city. The novel, though, centers on the tension between Sarge and Luther, who is its first-person narrator. Luther must reject his corrupt mother to stand up for himself. This situation represents a break from Curtis’s earlier novels, which had endorsed the value of a supportive family. Sarge—her name suggests her preference to be feared rather than loved—attempts to impart to her son the toxic philosophy that money is everything. Her abandoned teaching career, the long dull hours at the car assembly plant, and her assorted illegal schemes have created the security she sees as an end that justifies the means. Her exploitation of the African American community in the Flint ghetto never concerns her. Only gradually do Luther and the novel’s readers fathom Sarge’s shocking willingness to exploit her own gifted son. Not surprising, Sarge ends the novel unredeemed. As a role model for an African American urban adolescent, Luther challenges stereotypes: He avoids drugs; he loves school; he is celibate (his wallet contains an ancient condom that he has had for so long he has given it a name); and he avoids confrontations. His science fair project reveals a compassion for those in Flint’s forgotten neighborhoods, the very people his mother exploits. If Luther is precocious, however, he is only book smart—his wisdom is shaped by the neat logic of science and garnered from the cable television he watches as he supervises the group home. He only pretends to be an adult—he has a fake driver’s license and an impressive array of credit cards. Only after he understands the paradox of his parasitic mother does he achieve adulthood. Before he leaves Flint, Luther—who has studied karma—

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balances the wrongs to which he has been a party through his association with his mother. His moral identity secure, he heads to Florida a man. Themes and Meanings Curtis’s earlier characters were young African Americans who confronted questions of identity within the racially charged environment of the Civil Rights era. In present-day Flint, Luther Farrell confronts a more personal kind of oppression and a more insidious system of degradation: his own mother. In this respect, Bucking the Sarge works less as a social indictment of white oppression and more as a traditional bildungsroman. The victims are black, but so is the victimizer—Sarge herself. The novel is a call for compassion, as Luther is repeatedly moved by the desperation of his neighbors. More to the point, the novel, like many of the most enduring works of young adult fiction, celebrates the dreams of a gifted teenager. Luther’s aspirations (parodied by his friend Sparky) soar beyond the limits of his surroundings. Curtis himself was a product of Flint who worked for years at a car assembly plant while he dreamed of being a writer. The novel also argues a moral dimension to character. Luther fashions a private moral code against a larger universe of corruption. Indeed, like the resourceful child heroes of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain (both influences that Curtis acknowledges), Luther demonstrates an innate moral sensibility that will not tolerate an unrighted wrong, as well as a knack for self-preservation and a supreme commitment to personal freedom. That exhilarating combination gives the narrative its optimistic— even inspirational—feel. Critical Context Although Bucking the Sarge is most reliably approached as a coming-of-age narrative, the novel also critiques the capitalist embrace of materialism as an agent of corruption, an evil that abides no racial distinctions. Money drives Sarge and justifies her amorality. Indifferent to the consequences of the economic catastrophe that has gutted Flint, Sarge looks out only for herself. Drawing on the harsh criticism of capitalism found in both Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut, Bucking the Sarge is a strident reminder of the corrosive influence of wealth. Curtis is not naïve—after all, he abandoned his education to work more than thirteen years at a mind-numbingly dull but lucrative assembly-line job and, when he returned to school, was forced to pay for his education with menial jobs. He understands the importance of money. Indeed, Luther heads off to Florida with more than fifty thousand dollars to ensure his dreams. That contradictory sensibility—asserting that money is both the cause of evil and the stuff of hope—makes Bucking the Sarge a far more complicated read than much young adult fiction. Bibliography “Christopher Paul Curtis.” Contemporary Authors Series: New Revised Series. Vol. 119. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 2003. Analyzes Curtis’s early life and his first two

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works. Cites as themes the importance of self-respect, the need to accept life as it is, and the validation the self receives from a loving family. Positions Curtis as one of the few writers specifically interested in African American young adult fiction and the importance of offering that audience a literature of hope. Curtis, Christopher Paul. “Christopher Paul Curtis Goes to Powell’s.” Interview by Dave Weich. http://www.powells.com/authors/curtis.html. Extensive interview that reviews Curtis’s place in young adult fiction (specifically his thematic interest in identity and family) and his literary influences. Emphasizes that his works are not exhaustively defined by an African American sensibility. Gaines, Ann G. Christopher Paul Curtis. Hockessin, Del.: Mitchell Lane, 2001. Brief biography geared toward a young adult audience that stresses Curtis’s decision to leave work on the assembly line to pursue writing. In the hands of one of the most prolific writers of young adult nonfiction, Curtis’s biography becomes an inspirational tale about believing in dreams. Lamb, Wendy. “Christopher Paul Curtis.” The Horn Book Magazine, July/August, 2000. Offers a helpful overview of Curtis’s life, particularly the long road to his first publication, which was not released until he was forty. Traces the themes of childhood and maturation and Curtis’s juxtaposition of comedy with social realism. Tarbox, Gwen. “Christopher Paul Curtis.” In St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers. 2d ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1999. Focuses on Curtis’s first novel and its interest in the Civil Rights era. Stresses his willingness to introduce mature themes such as racism, violence, and political hypocrisy and to confront cultural problems in young adult fiction. Cites Curtis’s street-smart realism, his believable characters, and his humor. Joseph Dewey

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CAMBRIDGE Author: Caryl Phillips (1958) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: Early nineteenth century Locale: West Indies and England First published: 1991 Principal characters: Cambridge, a black man educated in England who is sold into slavery in the West Indies Emily Cartwright, an English spinster who visits her father’s West Indian estate Arnold Brown, the overseer of the Cartwright estate Stella, Emily’s faithful black servant The Novel Cambridge, Caryl Phillips’s fifth novel, is a complex feat of historical imagining. Cambridge attempts to reconstruct the spirit of the age in which it is set. This ambitious, and largely successful, attempt conditions the work’s language and form. The book is written in a style that reflects not only the literary fashion of the novel’s time period but also the habits of mind of the time. The absence of, among other salient details, the name of the Caribbean island on which the greater portion of the book’s action takes place also emphasizes the novel’s focus on the palpable, but largely uncataloged, human experiences to which the colonization of the New World gave rise. While Cambridge continually draws attention to the resources of language and literary form, revealing them to possess greater power than the characters’ subjective implementation of them can control, the novel also uses these resources to meet some of the requirements of orthodox historical fiction. The fact that three of its four parts take the form of various kinds of nonfictional documentation is not a mere novelty but rather an economical means for the author to establish the novel’s fictional world. A case in point is the longest of these three narratives, that of Emily Cartwright, which opens the novel and which reproduces the form of the ethnographic journal. Emily’s travel narrative serves a dual purpose. First, it introduces readers to the outlook and mentality of one of the chief characters, thereby establishing one of the novel’s fundamental emphases, which is less on material reality than on perceptions of reality. Second, Emily’s journal is a vivid pastiche of the ethnographic, sociological, and botanical catalogs that typically make up narratives of travel to exotic places. Thus, while the attention that Emily pays to her surroundings is continually filtered through her awareness of her own foreign and superfluous presence, a strong sense of

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the superficial features of her world also emerges. Picturesque vistas abound, as does a great deal of other heterogeneous and semidigested information, from the making of sugar from sugarcane to the ritual practice of obeah. The author is careful not to provide Emily with the analytical ability necessary to form a fully synthesized view of the way of life upon which her father’s fortune and her own well-being depend. Phillips is equally careful to reveal that Emily is by no means morally insensitive to what is being effectively perpetrated in her name. The result of such strategies is that Emily is implicated in the plantation world long before the plot reveals to her that this is the case. The other narratives in Cambridge confirm, from different perspectives, the unavoidable and profound degree of implication that slave shares with master and master with slave. The slowly developing plot concerning the relationship between Arnold Brown and Cambridge, and its inevitably violent outcome for both the antagonists, shows how all-consuming the moral entanglements of slavery are. The narratives that constitute the aftermath of the violent confrontation between overseer and underdog, for all their brevity, supplement the comprehensive sense of interdependence, entrapment, and incomprehensibility that convincingly demonstrates the institutional, and consequently depersonalizing, character of slavery. For all concerned, this condition of depersonalization becomes a life sentence that none of the characters successfully escapes. The stories of Cambridge and Emily Cartwright can be seen to be intricate counterparts. For all their superficial differences of race, gender, and class, and even despite their eventual fates, the novel makes a strong case for the moral congruity of their stories. Their stories are not the narratives that they compose in their own voices. At that level, the degree of interaction between the two is limited and indecisive. When the manner in which both their narratives conclude is considered, however, the resemblance between them emerges, though even here it is not quite in terms of a shared physical reality that the similarity is encoded but in terms of how comprehensively victimization pervades slavery. Emily, despite seeming to be far removed from and culturally immunized against exploitation and confinement, proves just as susceptible to these features of the moral landscape as Cambridge is, thereby calling into question the reliability of the various structures that appear to differentiate them. The Characters The prominence given to Emily Cartwright, whose story opens and closes the novel, should not draw attention away from the character for whom Cambridge is named. Cambridge earns his central status in the novel by virtue of having experienced what Emily can hardly conceive. His comparatively brief testimony, which is offered to readers after, and possibly as an antidote to, his trial for the murder of Brown, recounts in pitiable terms a saga of deprivation and manipulation that is more compelling for its cultural and psychological effects than for its physical details. Cambridge’s testament acts as a legend of the various effects that slavery has upon the spirit. It is these that the novel memorializes in its title.

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The crucial feature of Cambridge’s experience is that he is unable to consider himself a slave. Many of his experiences after his initial enslavement contribute to this inability. The story of his acculturation in England, and his complete identification with Christianity, the principal means of such an adaptation, may perhaps be considered a satire on the hypocrisy of articulating a doctrine of charity in an age when economic welfare depended on kidnapping and exploitation. On the other hand, the legitimacy of Cambridge’s voice in his own story depends on an appreciation of his desire for faith and for the ratification of identity that espousing the faith of his masters provided. The subsequent revelation of the vulnerability of rectitude, and of the frailty of an assumed identity, contributes significantly to the sealing of Cambridge’s fate. A comparable combination of vulnerability and properness undoes Emily Cartwright. Her inability to identify completely with either the world of the slaves or the world of their owners, and her inconsistent though quite understandable alienation from both, result in her eventually becoming merely an embodiment of her own powerlessness. The moral agnosticism of Emily’s detachment from the world around her is the counterpart of Cambridge’s immersion in that world. The weakness of her position appears very readily between the lines of her journal, so that when Brown’s exploitation of her sexuality takes place, it seems more a confirmation of her status than an offense against her person. Such a conclusion is suggested by the fact that Emily unthinkingly lends herself to Brown’s experience, just as she has lent herself to various other scenarios that others, all of them men, have proposed to her. Her visit to the West Indies was her father’s suggestion, and there are other indications of Emily’s vulnerability to the ways of patriarchy, even as her journal notes her awareness of those imposing and oppressive ways. The ease with which she seems to be led by the social and cultural norms gives rise to an uneasiness of equal and opposite force once the leading has taken place. The conflict arising from the irreconcilability between what Emily affirms and what she experiences is what makes her vulnerable and, at the end of the novel, leaves her a victim, her life as a potential moral agent terminated as conclusively as Cambridge’s. In contrast to the central twosome, Cambridge and Emily, and providing a perspective on them are a pair of characters who are embedded in the slave world, rather than existing in critical relationship to it. These two characters are Arnold Brown, the plantation overseer, and Stella, a slave and Emily’s devoted servant. As opposed to the individually contradictory and mutually complementary status that Cambridge and Emily share, making the world with which they are associated a challenging, complex, and dangerous place, Brown and Stella perceive their status and their roles in a very literal manner. This manner provides them with a rooted and self-justified presence that provides the slave world with a patina of stability and normality, a world in which hierarchies are uncontroversially and unproblematically observed and enforced and in which there is none of Cambridge’s implicit provocation and none of Emily’s latent questioning. Stella’s fidelity to Emily, the expression of which effectively means that the slave is nothing in herself and only of value by virtue of the services she performs for her

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mistress, is one version of the institution’s success. On the other hand, Brown’s ability as an overseer, his rigid sense of system, and his faceless and enigmatic malevolence, which emerge as tantamount to complete amorality, are an equally consummate expression of the institution’s effects. In order to live up to the institution’s demands, Brown has no alternative but to deny Cambridge his sense of his own identity. Similarly, Stella clearly has no alternative but to give continually of herself. These two characters define the moral territory to which Emily and Cambridge are confined. Themes and Meanings Much of the economical effect of Cambridge is obtained through Caryl Phillips’s sense of language. This sense not only provides the novel with a certain amount of period flavor but also underlines the importance of point of view in the transmission of experience. Like most individuals, Cambridge and Emily are limited by their points of view. The reality that they perceive is not necessarily the reality that they would be best served by perceiving. It is by means of this dichotomy that they so persuasively inhabit their given realities. What is before their very eyes is so exigent and demanding that the possibility of evaluating it in the light of a more objective perspective is not available to them. Because of this, the foreignness of their presences in their respective worlds is rendered. The emphasis throughout is on the characters’ experience and on the degree of innocence that is necessary in order to undergo experience. The trust that Cambridge, in particular, places in the various Anglophone worlds to which he finds himself transported is especially ironic, since it receives endorsement and encouragement from the Christians he encounters. His acquisition of English is consistent with his identification with the Christian message, a message that enables him to accept his travail as the expression of a greater power. In learning to speak his masters’ language, he impresses his instructors and gains their favor and support, and he believes that, as a result, he is equipped to live in the world as they do. This belief is naïve because of its consequences rather than because of any inherent deficiency in the belief itself. Cambridge’s intellectual capacities and social aptitudes not only qualify him for membership in white English society but also belie the physical resemblance he is subliminally imagined by Emily to bear to Caliban, a character in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623). It is this belief that brings such tragedy to Cambridge, leading indirectly to the death by neglect of his English wife and child. It encourages him to return to Africa to set up a missionary school, a voyage that culminates in his second enslavement and his transportation to the West Indies. His continuing fidelity to his faith in the West Indies brings about the complicated situation involving Brown, with calamitous consequences for both men. It is toward the larger implications of the institution of slavery that Cambridge continually tends. Its tone, style, and accounts of the material and cultural contexts in which it is set are all calculated to create what might be termed a moral epistemology

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of slavery. The novel’s sense of this project is subtly articulated by two related means. The first of these is the conscious artifice of its various narrators’ styles. The sublimating and evasive tendencies of these styles express a conception of decorum that is a clearly inadequate response to the material world for which it seeks to account. In addition, the object of the language is expository rather than dramatic. One of the effects of such an approach is to detach events from the full weight of their consequences, so that both of the central characters may be seen attempting to justify their actions. Ultimately, both Cambridge and Emily are overwhelmed by the social institutions of their time. With their fate as a lens, Cambridge provides an acute insight into the eloquently powerless condition of characters in the grip of circumstance. Critical Context The 1992 award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the poet Derek Walcott and the mid-1980’s resurgence of interest in the critical and theoretical writings of C. L. R. James has given greater visibility to West Indian literature. Part of this effect is to draw attention to the important developments that have been made in West Indian fiction beginning in the 1960’s by such writers as Wilson Harris, Roy Heath, George Lamming, and V. S. Naipaul. These novelists not only reveal various aspects of the richly complex culture and history of the extensive colony formerly known as the British West Indies but also have brought home to white audiences some of the colonizers’ legacy. It is in the context of this development that Cambridge must be evaluated. The comparatively small island population in the United States has not given rise to a distinctive Caribbean literary subset within African American culture. In England, however, Caribbean literature is of obvious importance, a fact stressed in the novel by Emily’s problematic embodiment of the values of the mother country. Caryl Phillips is one of the generation of black writers who, although reared and educated in England, retain a strong sense of attachment to the history and culture of their birthplace. The retelling of stories of empire from the standpoint of the colonized is an obvious act of cultural reclamation with various long-term repercussions, among which is the potential for a reevaluation of the purpose and prospects of the novel in England. Together with its considerable artistic merit, Cambridge is a particularly illuminating contribution to the kinds of intellectual and cultural reorientations that are central to contemporary literary debate. Bibliography Eckstein, Lars. Re-membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. New York: Rodopi, 2006. Analyzes Cambridge’s use of slave narratives, travelogues, and other historical texts to intervene in the collective memory of of transatlantic slave trade. Juxtaposes the novel with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999). Jaffrey, Zia. “Colonial Fiction.” Review of Cambridge, by Caryl Phillips. The Nation 254, no. 11 (March 23, 1992): 385-387. Lengthy, appreciative review of Cam-

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bridge, identifying its aesthetic attainments and its relation to both postcolonial literature and the realities of industrial capitalism. Ledent, Bénédicte. Caryl Phillips. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Important postcolonial study of Phillips that emphasizes the extent to which his fiction redefines both Caribbeanness and Britishness. Pinckney, Darryl. Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2002. Study of Phillips, J. A. Rogers, and Vincent O. Carter by the author of High Cotton (1992). Emphasizes the importance of Phillips’s trip to America in shaping his life and fiction. Thomas, Helen. Caryl Phillips. Tavistock, Devon, England: Northcote House, 2006. This monograph—an entry in the Writers and Their Work series—reads Phillips’s work as an attempt to decolonize the interior by responding to the lasting traumatic effects of racial and economic exploitation by British colonialism. Walters, Wendy W. At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Study of the black literary diaspora that includes a chapter on Phillips’s representation of memory. George O’Brien

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THE CANCER JOURNALS Author: Audre Lorde (1934-1992) Type of work: Memoir Time of work: 1977-1979 Locale: United States First published: 1980 Principal personages: Audre Lorde, an African American feminist and poet, who battles breast cancer Frances, Audre’s lesbian lover, who comforts Audre after her mastectomy Form and Content Audre Lorde, in her poetry, her fiction, and her nonfiction, always assumes the role of outsider. She speaks for those who are marginalized for a number of reasons. She speaks for African Americans, for women, for lesbians, and for cancer patients. This volume documents her discovery that she has breast cancer; her reactions; the medical procedures performed on her, including a mastectomy; her subsequent emotional coming-to-terms; and her courageous speaking out about a disease so dreadful that it is considered bad form even to mention it. The central issue addressed in this volume is how people deal with cancer. Lorde has always been a fighter, both in her personal life and in her writings. Her poetry resounds with the songs of warrior women, and Lorde herself is one of them, waging war against the illness within her body as well as the sickness in her society. This book and her other works are not merely against the problems in current world society. This book is also profoundly pro-women. Its truths are painful, both physically and spiritually, but Lorde sees a necessity of telling them, as part of the continuum of her life’s work of reclaiming both the earth and power for women. The introduction includes some entries from her 1979 journal. In these entries, readers find neither a woman made saintly by suffering nor a woman hardened by pain. Instead, Lorde admits that, in the eighteen months since her surgery, cancer and its implications were never far from her mind. She also speaks of hope and despair, of her sorrow when another black young person was needlessly shot, and of the difficulty of trying to make her voice as a cancer patient heard. She admits to difficulties of leading such a life, made self-conscious by illness. She also addresses the problems of her physical loss. Her succor is that she knows that, by being honest with herself and by writing honestly about her pain and suffering, she can be of help to other women. The volume is divided into three sections. The first section, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” was originally a talk given at the Modern Lan-

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guage Association meetings in 1977. In this talk, which holds up remarkably well on the written page, Lorde examines the difficulty of speaking out about a subject so very personal. She weighs the stress of risking misunderstanding or even ridicule against the comfort of silence. During a three-week period during which she waited to find out whether the lumps in her breast were cancerous, she came to some courageous conclusions about the transformation of silence into language and action. She found in her psychic self-examination that her only regrets about her past life had to do with those occasions when she did not speak out. Furthermore, she knows that her silences have not protected her. She finds that when she has made an attempt to speak hard truths, she has found power within herself, and that in making contact with other women, she has been able to bridge their differences. Most important, these contacts with others gave her the strength necessary for her self-examination and for the hard road she inevitably had to choose. Moreover, with the prospect of cancer before her, it was obvious that the possibility of final silence was something she had to consider. Because silence had done her and other women no good, she decided to speak out, even though she as yet did not have the words. During this time of self-searching and soul-searching, she admits, she was often afraid. In the speech, she says frankly to her audience that they can hear the fear in her voice. She insists, however, that silence does not alleviate the fears or diminish the powers of society, which she contends tries to crush black women and most other women. She reminds herself that “if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.” The second section of the book, “Breast Cancer: A Black Lesbian Feminist Experience,” begins with journal entries about the pain from her breast surgery. It details her terrible chills in the recovery room. It also flashes back to the difficult decisions she had made previously and her feelings about them. Sometimes, she says, she was almost overwhelmed by pain and fury. She had considered various alternatives to surgery but had finally discarded them. Among her fears is that she is not really in control, that it is too late to stop the spread of cancer. Through hesitation, fear, and pain, however, Lorde is able to call up and record in her journal a note about the Amazons of Dahomey. These were African warrior women who, according to myth, had their right breasts amputated to give themselves more room to hold and draw their bows. This reference to warrior women is significant because Lorde has a long battle ahead of her. She is extraordinarily frank about the specific events of her days in the hospital after the surgery. The second day, she experienced a kind of euphoria. The third day was also good, because her family and friends flooded her with love and concern. The pain also returned that day, making her brain feel “like grey mush.” Just as she began to emerge from physical and emotional shock, she found that feeling was returning to her chest area, and that feeling was pain. She began to heal in a number of ways, and she attributes this to the love of women: her lesbian lover Frances, her other female

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lovers and friends, acquaintances, and even women whom she does not know who have shown concern for her. Like other cancer patients, she is visited by a woman from Reach for Recovery, a breast cancer support group. Although the woman is kind and helpful, Lorde feels the distance between them and cannot tell the dyed-blond lady that she, Lorde, is a lesbian and that she is not concerned about loving men but about loving women. Moreover, the bra that the lady brings her, with a puff of lambswool to stuff in the empty right pocket, is pink. Lorde is offended by both the color and the obvious subterfuge. Finally at home, she cannot stop weeping. Frances finds some other lesbian women who have undergone mastectomies; they come over and offer their support. L’il Sister, a relative of one of her in-laws, visits and talks about her mastectomy ten years previously. Lorde believes that L’il Sister has never been able to speak about it before. There are setbacks. When Lorde goes to the surgeon’s office, she is not wearing a prosthesis, having decided against using one. A nurse takes her aside and scolds her, saying that she is bad for morale in the office. Lorde is shocked. She knows that many of the women in the office have also had mastectomies. If they knew who they were, they could begin to share experiences and strengths. As it is, they are all, except Lorde, in disguise. The cosmetic attempts to appear natural, Lorde believes, weaken women who are cancer’s victims by hiding them from one another. They further weaken women by hiding them and their plight from society. If women could honestly appear as mutilated, they would support one another and perhaps shock society into further measures. The third section of the volume, “Breast Cancer: Power Versus Prosthesis,” presents Lorde’s view of what should be done by women who have had breasts removed. She is careful to state that her method is right for her but that she respects other women’s choices. She believes that mastectomy victims should make no attempt to conceal their condition. A prosthesis, Lorde claims, encourages women to dwell in the past rather than facing the exigencies of the present. It also encourages women to concentrate on their appearance rather than on deeper and more serious questions. Lorde believes that the emphasis on outward appearance discourages the examined life. Analysis Lorde is adamant that women need to consider carefully their own lives and to evaluate them. Although this examination may be painful, it is necessary for the journey into a deeper self. It is in the deeper self that power lies, and if one never experiences the examination, the door to that more important self is never opened. Lorde is concerned that society sees women as mere ornaments and that many women accept that role, not reaching down into themselves to find their own strengths and talents. She would make women with breast cancer into warriors. She asserts that she has been to war and is still engaged in the fighting. Because of the severity of cancer, and because its incidence seems to be increasing, she says that women cannot afford de-

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ception or look the other way. They cannot opt out of the battle. She was far ahead of her time in 1978 when she wrote about her grave reservations about silicone implants. She has been proven correct on this count. She brings up a little-considered problem of these implants: that money and research were devoted to developing them and to improving them rather than to understanding and treating cancer. Lorde uses several interesting techniques in this volume. She did not write it in strict chronological fashion. Instead, she used a kind of layering, so that readers uncover Lorde’s physical and spiritual condition as the story unfolds. This technique seems right for this story. It gives it some of the elements of a novel, making the stark facts easier to assimilate and adding reader interest, as readers wonder what will be uncovered next. This method also seems right for the author. It is a completely honest depiction of the discoveries the writer makes about herself. She does not know or understand all of her feelings at once. At the beginning of the book, there are many aspects of a lifethreatening condition that turn out to be different from what Lorde thought. For example, she says that in her early days of recovery at home she “pretty much functioned automatically, except to cry.” From time to time she would ask herself how she could “preserve my new status as temporary upon this earth.” Then she would remember that “we have always been temporary, and that I had just never really underlined it before, or acted out of it so completely before. And then I would feel a little foolish and needlessly melodramatic, but only a little.” This uncovering bit by bit is also useful in preparing the way for Lorde’s most important message. She insists that women must empower themselves, that they must not be ornaments or bystanders. She points out that a serious challenge of this type can strengthen the women who come to terms with its real meaning. The real meaning for Lorde is that this firsthand struggle with death makes her more powerful, rather than less, because, “after all, what could we possibly be afraid of after having admitted to ourselves that we had dealt face to face with death and not embraced it?” Once a woman accepts the fact of her eventual death, Lorde says, she has new and increased power. After that encounter, there is no one on earth who can ever have power over her again. The most important characteristics of this volume’s style are its clarity and the way in which that clarity comes about. Lorde effectively avoids medical jargon, sentimental language, and easy, pat answers. The section of the book in which she assesses her recovery is an excellent example of this. She attributes her recovery to women. She likens their support to “a ring of warm bubbles keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea,” the sea of love. She is careful to differentiate this kind of caring from what she calls false spirituality. What she experienced is the real power of healing love. After several paragraphs explaining this background, she brings readers to a one-sentence paragraph: “Perhaps I can say this all more simply; I say the love of women healed me.” This is a good example of the way Lorde lets readers work with her to sort out the truth from the less important, all of it as clear as the tropical sea of love on which Lorde finds herself floating.

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Because Lorde is a poet, she brings her powers of condensation to bear on this subject as well. The book could have been much longer and more detailed, as is Barbara Creaturo’s Courage: The Testimony of a Cancer Patient (1991), which gives Creaturo’s story of struggle against ovarian cancer in 275 pages, compared to Lorde’s 77. Creaturo’s book is also moving and informative, but the spareness and clarity of Lorde’s book make it read more like a short poetic novel or a long narrative poem. The subject matter, which both women writers treat with respect for its threat and its power, makes both of these books especially poignant. Both women struggle with the ultimate opponent. Readers know that in both cases the writers will ultimately lose, as all human beings lose to death, but the immense courage with which they confront the worst adversary of all is inspiring. Both women hope that their stories will benefit others, but Lorde is more explicit and more militant in this commitment. Lorde consciously searches for a way to use her experience to benefit all women. She knows that when she begins to work, not only for her own health but also for the well-being of others, her experience, no matter how difficult, will turn her from powerless to powerful. She eschews the nominative of “victim” and proposes to turn that word inside out. She is determined to wrest from her experience that which is useful and workable, for herself and for many others. The logic she uses in coming to this conclusion is superb. She notes that a number of victims are blamed by society, that the rape victim is suspected of luring her attacker and that battered wives are often told that they should not anger their husbands. She compares the mastectomy victim to these, insisting that a mastectomy is not a sign of guilt that must be disguised in some way so that the woman can regain acceptance from society. Instead, the warrior woman trumpets: “Pretense has never brought lasting change or progress.” Lorde suggests that if women were to refuse reconstructive surgery and prosthesis, their ability to recognize and support one another would be vastly enhanced. She also believes that the impact of so many women visibly mutilated would bring about enough indignation in society to increase the kinds of research needed to discover the causes and the cures of cancer. Although she is careful to write that the choice to refuse reconstructive surgery and prosthesis is one that every mastectomy patient must make for herself and that she understands women who choose each way, she advocates refusal extremely effectively. Critical Context As she had hoped, her courage and the power she struggled for have inspired a number of other women. One in Three: Women with Cancer Confront an Epidemic (1991) is a collection of personal stories told by women who have had cancer. It is amazing how many of these women have found Lorde’s book and pay it homage. Sandra Steingraber’s “We All Live Downwind” documents whom she has responded to and uses Lorde’s ideas, especially Lorde’s concept that cancer is a political issue. This theme is also taken up in Sharon Batt’s essay, “Smile, You’ve Got Breast Cancer.” Batts writes about the difference in militancy between breast cancer patients and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) patients. Sandy Polishuk states in her

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essay that the first thing she did when she discovered she had breast cancer was to buy Lorde’s book. She reports the relief she found in agreeing with Lorde on the question of prostheses. The last essay in the volume, by Audre Lorde, is a selection from A Burst of Light (1988). The women who write in this volume are a small number of those who have received both comfort and direction from Lorde’s honesty and courage. Women with cancer are often immobilized by their own terror and, even worse, have no means to find one another. Lorde’s pioneering work, by revealing her innermost feelings about the disease and through her insistence that cancer must be battled in the same way as are racism, heterosexism, and apartheid, has inspired any number of women and given them the power to use their resources for their own health and for one another. The medical profession and the federal government, which regulate the kinds of drugs available to patients, have been remarkably slow to change. Even physician education programs that can publicize new drugs or combinations of drugs have been woefully inadequate, as Dr. Ezra M. Greenspan, chairman and medical director of the Chemotherapy Foundation, documents in an afterword to Creaturo’s book. The Cancer Journals attacks this inertia at the same time that it admonishes women to fight for their own health. Lorde had found the enemy. It was not the cancer itself but rather the society that did not spend its resources effectively to prevent or combat it. Norman Cousins, in several books, advocated laughter and attitude as weapons against disease. His books made him a celebrity even in medical fields, and he was invited to lecture at several medical schools. No one invited Lorde to become a medical school lecturer. Is this because she was a woman? Or black? Or lesbian? Or is it that society considers breast cancer, which primarily affects women, a lower priority than other health issues? Lorde’s book should have shaken the medical establishment when it was first published. Lorde probably was not surprised that it did not. It did, however, start a slow revolution that is gathering strength. The clear, clean prose in this volume becomes better known every day. That is a tribute to a woman who turned adversity into what will eventually become triumph. The Cancer Journals benefits not only those readers who admire her style but also millions of women who have to deal with breast cancer. Bibliography Alexander, Elizabeth. “‘Coming Out Blackened and Whole’: Fragmentation and Regeneration in Audre Lorde’s Zami and The Cancer Journals.” In Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, edited by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Comparative study of physical and psychological pain and healing in two of Lorde’s autobiographical works. Brooks, Jerome. “In the Name of the Father: The Poetry of Audre Lorde.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Brooks stresses Lorde’s courageous description of her emotions during and after the operation. Finds the subtitle of

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one chapter, referring to black lesbianism, irrelevant. Many feminist critics would disagree. Herndl, Diane Price. “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years After Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. Looks at the legacy of Lorde’s work for feminist representations of unwell female bodies and the state of feminist disability studies in the early twenty-first century. McHenry, Susan. Review of The Cancer Journals, by Audre Lorde. Ms. 9 (April, 1981): 42. Brief summary accompanied by McHenry’s evaluation that the book is akin to Lorde’s poetry, because it expresses “raw emotion with precision and clarity.” Also notes that the book is a powerful example of self-healing useful to anyone working through a crisis. Perreualt, Jeanne. “‘That the Pain Not Be Wasted’: Audre Lorde and the Written Self.” Auto/Biography Studies 4 (Fall, 1988): 1-16. This essay’s complex first half summarizes deconstructionist literary theory. The second half demonstrates Audre Lorde’s use of the changed physical self in her work. Pinney, Nikky. “Vital Signs, Well Water: On Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals.” Social Policy 20 (Winter, 1990): 66-68. Relates a personal response to Lorde’s book, emphasizing Lorde’s insistence on an open response and the necessity of talking about an issue of such importance to women. Affirms Lorde’s questions about the causes of increased incidence of cancers as “mainly exposures to chemical or physical agents in the environment.” Small Press Review. Review of The Cancer Journals, by Audre Lorde. 13 (March, 1981): 8. Emphasizes Lorde’s courage, passion, enormous poetic gift and craft, and feminist commitment. Ann Struthers

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CANE Author: Jean Toomer (1894-1967) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: Early 1920’s Locale: Rural Georgia; Chicago; Washington, D.C. First published: 1923 Principal characters: Fernie May Rosen, the beautiful, unhappy daughter of a black mother and a white Jewish father Tom Burwell, a black field hand competing with a white man for a woman named Louisa Paul Johnson, a southern black man who is light enough to pass as white Ralph Kabnis, a northern black teacher of southern descent The Novel Cane is a slim miscellany composed of fifteen poems, six brief prose vignettes, seven stories, and a play—all about black life in the 1920’s. The book is divided into three parts, the first and last of which are set in rural Georgia; the narratives of the second section take place in Chicago and in Washington, D.C. Women, particularly in the first part, are depicted as sex objects who, though victimized by men, manage not only to endure but also to prevail, often exercising spiritual and emotional control over the very men who seduce them. The six prose units of the first part, only three of which are fully developed stories, take place in a segregated South of sugarcane and cotton fields in which women dominate men. The opening sketch is about Karintha, a nubile beauty who excites young and old males. After having an illegitimate child, she throws the newborn into a sawdust pile at the local mill and sets it ablaze. She then becomes a prostitute. The next vignette tells of Becky, a white woman who violates the social codes by having two illegitimate black sons. Never seen, she lives a reclusive life in a one-room cabin and is sustained by secret gifts of food that African Americans and whites bring. Since she is unseen, people can publicly deny her existence, but the sense of communal guilt and responsibility continues until the cabin burns down one day; Becky is presumably consumed by the fire. Raw sexuality also is the focus of “Carma,” a two-page sketch about a strong woman whose unfaithfulness to her husband while he is in a chain gang leads to tragedy when he is released. In “Fern,” Toomer brings together his emerging themes of sexuality, miscegenation, and universal guilt by having the sensitive male narrator (who also tells the other tales and is Toomer’s alter ego) relate the story of Fernie May Rosen, the illegitimate daughter of a black woman and a white Jewish

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man (thus twice a social outsider). She has a languid beauty and indifferent sexuality; her “body was tortured with something it could not let out,” and her transient lovers “vow to themselves that some day they would do some fine thing for her.” The religious alienation suggested in “Fern” is central to the next story, “Esther,” which also is about isolation and frustrated sexuality. At age nine, introverted Esther becomes infatuated with King Barlo, an itinerant preacher and charlatan. When he returns to town fourteen years later, she flees her parents’ home at midnight to search for him and finds him drunk in a boardinghouse room with a woman who teases Esther for having a light complexion. Esther retreats, bereft of a dream that had sustained her for so long. “Blood-Burning Moon,” the last and most fully developed story of the first part, is about Louisa and her two lovers, a white man for whose family she works and Tom Burwell, a black laborer in the cane fields. A confrontation between the suitors leads Burwell to cut his white rival’s throat; in retaliation, a mob of whites takes Burwell to an antebellum cotton factory, where he is tied to a stake and set afire. Thus, the first section of Cane ends as it began, with the immolation of a black person. Whereas the initial section portrays rural African Americans in a society mired in the past, the second part, located in the urban North, shows them confronting the present and looking ahead to the future. “Seventh Street” and “Rhobert,” the opening vignettes—impressionistic, even symbolic—introduce a primary theme of white society bearing down, confining, and stifling African Americans. “Avey,” the third piece, which is longer and more fully developed, is set in Washington, D.C., and recalls the stories of the first section; though Avey becomes a prostitute, she also has been graduated from school and has been a teacher. The narrator, however, fails in his attempt to rekindle a boyhood passion for her, because she is remote and indifferent to emotional relationships. “Theater” also deals with unrequited love. Its main characters are Dorris, a dancer, and John, a theater manager’s brother. Because of class differences symbolized by John’s fairer skin, nothing comes of the pair’s dreams of having an affair. Similarly, in “Box Seat,” Dan and Muriel finally go their separate ways because—by society’s standards—she is too good for him. In “Bona and Paul,” the last story in the second section, two Southerners meet in a Chicago physical education school. Since Paul, light enough to pass as white, denies his racial identity, whereas Bona is attracted to him because of it, she eventually leaves him. In all these stories and sketches, male-female relationships are frustrated and tensions aggravated by race. “Kabnis,” the single work that makes up the third part of Cane, is in the form of an impressionistic play or closet drama in which Toomer dramatizes the collision of past and present. Ralph Kabnis has returned to rural Georgia from New York, his mission being to teach and to implore, for he has an artist’s zeal to improve the lives of his people. By and large, though, they are not interested, having come to terms with the conditions under which they live. Kabnis, therefore, is a potential troublemaker who could upset the delicate social balance with which they are comfortable. Kabnis is changed by the experience, so that by the story’s end he has become no more than a childlike scarecrow. In the last lines of “Kabnis” (and Cane), the sun is rising, and

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Toomer’s focus is on Carrie, a vital young woman, and Father John, an ancient man, who presumably represent between them the past, present, and future of their race. The Characters Fernie May Rosen, the central character of “Fern,” is beautiful but unhappy. She is the illegitimate daughter of a black woman and a white Jewish man, and she is thus doubly a social outsider. She spends most of her days listlessly sitting on the porch of her rural Georgia home, the languid object of many men’s desires. Her remoteness and sexual indifference lead her many lovers to abandon her, but they remain forever under her spell and bring her gifts as signs of their adoration. In “Blood-Burning Moon,” Tom Burwell is portrayed as a gentle introvert. When he is frustrated by his inability to express his feelings for Louisa, however, he flies into a rage, leading to the story’s tragic conclusion. In “Bona and Paul,” the central figure is Paul Johnson, a black man who is lightskinned enough to pass as white. Paul’s uncertainty about his racial status makes him aloof and inaccessible. Although his white girlfriend Bona is attracted to him because of his blackness, his ambivalence and his denial of a part of his heritage cause her to leave him. Ralph Kabnis, the central character of the book’s final section, is a northern black teacher of southern descent who comes to rural Georgia in search of his roots. He has difficulty adapting to his new environment, however; sensitive and neurotic, he cannot accept what he sees as the submissiveness of the South’s black population. When he is confronted by the apparent indifference of his fellow African Americans to their situation, the results are catastrophic for him. He loses his teaching job and begins working as an apprentice in a wagon shop, but his spiritual and emotional decline continues. By the end of the work, he is a childlike, dependent failure. Themes and Meanings Recognized widely as one of the major literary works of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s, Cane emerged from Jean Toomer’s experience as the temporary head of a Georgia industrial and agricultural school for African Americans. Toomer called sadness the dominant emotion in the volume, saying it “derived from a sense of fading.” Cane as a whole is an exercise in self-discovery, with its sensitive, self-effacing narrator, actually the author himself, revealing and exploring his own racial identity. Indeed, Toomer himself was so light-skinned that he lived for many years as a white man and throughout his life challenged the norms of racial labeling. Cane’s form has been as problematic for critics as its substance. Some see it as merely a gathering of fugitives—stories, poems, and a play previously published separately in different magazines—unified only by their common themes, settings, and binding. Others have called it either an experimental novel or a work that denies the possibility of standard categorization. Critical uncertainty and controversy notwithstanding, the form of Cane is not unique, for it is similar to James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), two other thematically

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related story collections that develop unified and coherent visions of societies. It also echoes Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology (1915), which probes the psyches and secrets of small-town residents. Toomer surely was familiar with the Joyce and Masters books, and he knew Anderson personally. Both Cane and Winesburg, Ohio have similar narrators, men who serve as mediators between author and reader; both are collections of prose cameos, and each has a group of characters that become “grotesques,” in Toomer’s case because of the lingering social and psychological effects of slavery. Toomer’s inclusion of poems within and between his stories is a distinguishing feature. Mainly folk songs or ballads, the poems provide substantive reinforcement to the action and themes of the prose pieces and enhance the pervasive mood of wistful and mournful pastoralism. By recalling a tradition of American black music, particularly spirituals from the antebellum slavery period, they also add historical dimensions to Toomer’s fiction and serve as transitional thematic devices to link the prose pieces. Finally, the poems heighten the impressionistic quality of the book; though Toomer writes about actual social problems and believable people, he is not primarily a realist or a naturalist. For example, the lynching of Tom Burwell in “Blood-Burning Moon” (the title is from a folk song) is presented not only in believable, realistic detail but also in a deliberately ritualistic manner that incorporates myth and symbol. The conflict in “Blood-Burning Moon” brings to the fore a central theme of the book: Toomer’s belief that there was a southern conspiracy to ignore the reality of miscegenation. In other words, the bigotry in rural Georgia created barriers to normal interpersonal relationships, exaggerated the tensions present, and ultimately led to debilitating sexual repression. Toomer portrays African Americans, however, as having a firmer cultural foundation than whites, in large measure because they work in the fields and thus are closer to nature. In “Fern,” the narrator says, “When one is on the soil of one’s ancestors, most anything can come to one.” Still another motif that is important throughout the book is the economic situation—symbolized in large part by the sugarcane of the title—in which the two races are interdependent at the same time that they are competing. In “Blood-Burning Moon,” for example, the cane (whose smell pervades the town) is both symbol and reality as the means of livelihood for African Americans and whites, just as the decaying cotton factory where Burwell is killed stands as stark evidence of the fading of an old economic order. Cane has meaning and significance beyond Toomer’s concerns with racial identity and conflict. Most of the book’s men and women, even those who love and are loved, are strangers to those with whom they live. The narrator of “Fern” says: “Men saw Fern’s eyes and fooled themselves. Her eyes said one thing but people read another. They began to leave her, baffled and ashamed . . . for men are apt to idolize or fear that which they do not understand.” In “Esther,” King Barlo is “slow at understanding.” In “Kabnis,” the old man who lives beneath Halsey’s shop is “a mute John the Baptist of a new religion, or a tongue-tied shadow of an old.” In sum, Cane is about people— black and white—who cannot communicate, even with their own kind.

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Critical Context Cane was published to favorable reviews in 1923, but only about five hundred copies were sold that year, and not until 1927 was a small second printing made. The novel soon went out of print and was largely forgotten. Not until the 1960’s did Cane again attract attention. A hardcover reprint was issued in 1967 (the year Toomer died), and a paperback edition came out two years later; others have followed. Since the 1960’s, Cane has been the subject of continuing critical commentary and has come to be accepted as a major product of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s. In the immediate aftermath of Cane’s publication, Toomer was welcomed into New York City’s avant-garde white literary circles, but within a year or so he departed the literary scene. After Cane, he published only four short stories and Essentials (1931), a book of definitions and aphorisms. Because of his experiments with language, technique, and form, Toomer can be linked with such contemporary white writers as Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. As such, he stands apart from his fellow black authors of the time, who in their work did not move far beyond standard realism. Toomer’s subject matter also distinguishes him from his peers; in Cane, he writes about aspects of black life that had not previously been examined in fiction. Though some critics have credited Toomer with inspiring a generation of black writers, such an influence is open to doubt. Because Cane was not popular when published and then went out of print for decades, it is more likely that other black writers simply were influenced by the same leading white figures to whom Toomer was drawn. Whatever the extent of Toomer’s influence upon his black contemporaries or later generations of black writers, in Cane he created a singular and memorable masterpiece of twentieth century American fiction. Bibliography Bone, Robert. Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Critical survey (1885-1935) that stresses the debts of black writers to an oral tradition that Bone calls a “blues aesthetic.” The chapter on Toomer reviews his entire career, including the important influences of Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank, and includes detailed analyses of three stories from Cane: “Fern,” “Theater,” and “Bona and Paul.” _______. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Pioneering study of black writing from 1853 to the works of James Baldwin. Bone’s chapter on the Harlem School remains valuable, particularly for his discussion of Toomer and Cane. Cager, Chezia Thompson. Teaching Jean Toomer’s 1923 “Cane.” New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Guide to using sociological, historical, and biographical context to teach and understand Cane. Durham, Frank, ed. The Merrill Studies in “Cane.” Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1971. Includes critical studies of Cane from 1923 to 1969. Of special interest is Waldo Frank’s foreword to the first (1923) edition of the novel. Many

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other useful studies are included by such people as Robert Bone, Arna Bontemps, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Of questionable purpose is Durham’s grouping of the selections by each author’s race, especially since his racial classifications are not always correct. Grant, Nathan. Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Compares Cane to work by Zora Neale Hurston; discusses the differences in the representation of manhood and masculinity between the two authors. McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 18941936. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. A comprehensive and lucidly written study, with the author benefiting from her access to the collection of Toomer manuscripts and correspondence at Fisk University. The interpretation of Toomer’s imagery, structure, and themes is convincing, and McKay makes the interesting suggestion of a link between Cane and James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922). Toomer, Jean. Cane: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Edited by a leading scholar in the field of black literature and a major force in advancing the reputation of Jean Toomer. In addition to reprinting the text of Cane, this excellent book includes early assessments of the novel, correspondence about his work between Toomer and others, and a balanced selection of critical studies from 1958 to 1984. Whalan, Mark. Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. Comparative study of Cane and Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Includes chapters on Cane’s representation of the body, the importance of its status as southern literature, and the relationship between its structure and its intended audience. Gerald Strauss

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CAPTAIN BLACKMAN Author: John A. Williams (1925Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1770’s-1970’s Locale: Vietnam First published: 1972

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Principal characters: Abraham Blackman, an Army captain who teaches a course in African American military history to fellow soldiers in Vietnam Major Ishmael Whittman, who battles Blackman on both realistic and allegorical levels Mimosa Rogers, Blackman’s female counterpart and love interest Lieutenant Luther Woodcock, a light-skinned African American soldier in Blackman’s outfit Robert Doctorow, a New York Jew whom Blackman educates about racism Peter Salem, Prince Estabrook, and Cuff Whittemore, Blackman’s historical and fictional compatriots in the Revolutionary War dream The Novel Captain Blackman centers on the experiences of the African American soldier throughout history. Abraham Blackman is a symbol for all African Americans who had served their country. Although it opens on the battlefield of Vietnam, the novel quickly becomes an epic. Blackman has chosen to act as a decoy to draw enemy fire in an effort to save the other members of his squad. Hit by multiple rounds of mortar fire, Blackman soon slips into unconsciousness. In this state, he enters a complex series of dreams. The first places him in the Revolutionary War alongside such historical figures as Crispus Attucks, Peter Salem, and Prince Estabrook. Although the battles Blackman finds himself engaged in last for days in his dream, in reality they are only minutes long. The actual time span of the novel is a few days, even though the dream sequences cover almost two hundred years of American military history. There are no abrupt transitions between real time and dream time. A military historian, Blackman dreams of the wars he covers in his black military history seminar. The last thought that had entered his head before he was wounded was what he had told his company in class the previous day, that he wanted no heroes in his squad, that what they were doing as soldiers was no different from what Crispus Attucks, Peter

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Salem, and others had done. Thus it was natural that Blackman’s dreams would be set in a historical context. Williams adeptly intersperses Blackman’s dreams within the reality of his situation in Vietnam. The novel therefore provides a damning chronicle of the treatment of the African American soldier, as exemplified by Blackman. A man larger than life throughout all of his dreams (he endures terrible mutilation from enemy fire that would have killed an ordinary man), Blackman begins his surrealistic military career as a private. Ironically, after two hundred years of heroic service he is rewarded only with a captaincy. The dreams therefore symbolize the injustice done to the African American by the military. The dreams, in quick succession, outline some of the worst abuses of power in military history. Through the eyes of Blackman’s dream self, readers are exposed to the atrocities of all the wars. In the Revolutionary War, the African Americans were expected to go into battle without muskets. Whites feared that if African Americans were armed, they might turn on their superior officers. During the Civil War, Blackman witnesses the slaughter of black prisoners. During the Plains Wars, Native Americans retaliate with their own atrocities against the atrocities heaped upon them by the predominantly white army. When the Native Americans ask Blackman how African Americans who have been oppressed by whites can in clear conscience serve for them, Blackman has no answer. In 1906, he watches as 166 African Americans are dishonorably discharged on trumped-up charges in Brownsville, Texas. Worst of all, he loses in his effort to rewrite history in World War II. Despite his objections, the Army stands by and allows the people of Tombolo to be massacred. In the final chapter, the black revolution has happened much in the manner Blackman had suspected it would happen. White officers, particularly those who think like Blackman’s nemesis Major Ishmael Whittman, are undone by their foolish trust in race. Thousands of light-skinned African Americans, Blackman’s protégé Lieutenant Luther Woodcock among them, have infiltrated the upper echelons of the military. Once in positions of power, these revolutionaries instigate a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The novel ends with the whites unable to comprehend how African Americans were capable of such treachery, treachery that evinced skill and intelligence. The Characters Captain Abraham Blackman is, simultaneously, a complex yet allegorical figure. He serves as narrator, protagonist, commentator, observer, and teacher throughout the novel. As he marches from battle to battle, Blackman wrestles with the problems of race relations throughout the ages. He is a man who confronts his fears and anger much as he confronts his duties: head-on. He is tormented through two hundred years of dreams by his antagonist, Major Whittman. He recognizes in the lighthaired, light-eyed Whittman the racist and imperialist military mind-set. In two time periods (the War of 1812 and the Plains Wars), Blackman must serve under light-haired men of the same ilk as Whittman: Andrew Jackson and General George

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Custer, both of whose inhumanity to the indigenous peoples was legendary. Like the biblical Abraham, Blackman becomes the leader of an oppressed people, thus becoming the new Abraham. Through Blackman’s teaching, young African Americans such as Luther Woodcock will subvert the Whittmans, and Jews such as Robert Doctorow will aid the black revolutionary movement. The younger soldiers who have learned from Blackman are not the passive victims of the past, as the apocalyptic ending bears out. On the other hand, Blackman’s nemesis, the narrow-minded, petty Major Whittman, is purely allegorical. He is not Walt Whitman, who as a poet sought to encompass all humanity, but instead the opposite of what the poet represented. Ishmael Whittman is primarily a man consumed by hate, devoid of any humanity. His frosty appearance mirrors the iciness of his soul. Other characters in Blackman’s Vietnam experience appear sporadically in his dreams. Only Whittman appears in every era, in every battle. He first appears in the American Revolution as an aide to General Washington. By the time Whittman appears in the Korean War dream, Blackman is able to beat him in a fight. In reality, Whittman takes great delight in Blackman’s extensive injuries, hoping that he will die. Blackman has the last word, since he, the new Abraham, has marshaled his people to revolt. Eventually, Whittman is annihilated, undermined by his own racial prejudice. The most intriguing character in the novel is Mimosa Rogers, a prototypical African American woman. As her name suggests—the mimosa plant folds its leaves for protection when it is touched—Mimosa is a touch-me-not, a woman who throughout the centuries has ably defended herself. She, like Blackman, is larger than life, described in Amazonian terms. With each successive dream, she becomes larger and stronger. In the first dream in which she appears, the Civil War sequence, Mimosa is a slave girl who has been raped by white men. Blackman ultimately avenges her by raping a white woman while her bound husband is forced to watch. In reality, she works in the foreign office in Saigon, dispelling the notion that African American women were only capable of being domestics. She is Blackman’s partner, exhorting him to live after he is injured and to fight racism. Themes and Meanings Captain Blackman is, arguably, the most complex of Williams’s novels. The interweaving of dreams and reality and of history and future creates a surrealistic world that reaches mythic proportions. By using war as his backdrop, Williams explores not only the writing and rewriting of history but also the human condition. The use of allegorical figures further develops the themes of racial injustice and rampant inhumanity. The conflicts through history of the “black man” (Blackman) and “white man” (Whittman) are fought in each era. Successively, the African American characters become more powerful, enabling them to battle the racism of the white imperialists. United, the new Abraham and his touch-me-not consort engineer the black revolution. The novel, however, is more than a work of fiction. Williams provides six histori-

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cal glosses on the six title pages that separate the major parts of the novel. These glosses are actual historical documents that center on the plight of the African American soldier. Part 1 opens with a quotation from a forgotten African American soldier imploring that he not be discarded without notice. Part 2 begins with a quotation from W. E. B. Du Bois commenting on the role of the African American soldier in the emancipation process. The quotation by Captain Arthur Little of the 369th Infantry Regiment in part 3 outlines the patience and fortitude black soldiers exhibited after being ridiculed by their own army and then loaned out to the French army as a means of solving a political problem. Part 4 underscores the integration of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. An ominous anonymous statement opens part 5. Its accusing tone raises the issue of unspeakable evil and military coverup. Part 6 offers two statements, one made at the House Committee on Appropriations Hearings in 1954, the other from a book about Vietnam published in 1968. These last two underscore the two major issues of the novel: unchecked imperialism in the Far East and racial injustice in the United States. Within each part, italicized sections called cadences constantly disrupt the novel, as Blackman’s dreams disrupt the linear flow of reality. The cadences are actually vignettes that underscore the evils of policy making, predicting its lethal consequences. The cadences are works of fiction interspersed within the narrative, serving to magnify the grotesque and the apocalyptic visions. To support these visions, Williams offers “Drumtaps,” testimonies of men who have fought in wars. The words of the famous and infamous are sometimes juxtaposed with the words of obscure soldiers. Often two “Drumtaps” will offer conflicting viewpoints, the resolution demystifying the accepted historical accounts. By casting this rewriting of history in a fictional work, Williams provides a powerful message: that the major wars in which the United States engaged could not have been won without the service of African American soldiers. It is no accident that Abraham Blackman is a teacher when off-duty. The text itself, as it rewrites history, teaches. As he moves from war to war, from continent to continent, from era to era, Blackman observes, comments, and teaches the history of the African American soldier, a figure that has been erased from the traditional writing of history. Critical Context Captain Blackman is unique because it proffers a study of the African American military experience within a fictional narrative. Williams uses war as the means to explore the human experience much as canonical writers such as Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos had done before him. As many critics have noted, Captain Blackman transcends the war experience motif of these writers through Williams’s innovative use of structure, diverse narrative technique, and subject matter. At the time it was published, the novel was heralded for its inclusive treatment of war and racism. Often cited for praise is Williams’s employment of diverse syntactical possibilities to develop his thesis. Stylistically, the novel interweaves journalistic prose with surrealistic structure.

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As a writer, Williams views his role as a disseminator of historical accounts. In an article in the New York Herald in 1964, he asserted that American writers were just beginning to correct the errors of history as it is taught and understood. Such miswriting is evidence of the manipulation of the predominant class. Williams charges the novelist not to dismiss the African American contribution to history but to use it to rewrite history. Captain Blackman is such a rewriting. Bibliography Bruck, Peter. “Protest, Universality, Blackness: Patterns of Argumentation in the Criticism of the Contemporary Afro-American Novel.” In The Afro-American Novel Since 1960, edited by Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer. Amsterdam: Grüner, 1982. Discusses how postwar African American literature and criticism are codified by the aesthetic standards established by Black Nationalists during the 1920’s. Mentions how such writers as Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke saw a distinct correlation between literary and political thought. Provides a context for the literary aesthetic and politics of Williams’s writings. Bryant, Jerry H. Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Includes a chapter on the relationship between realism and violence in Williams’s novels. Cash, Earl A. John A. Williams: The Evolution of a Black Writer. New York: Third Press, 1975. The first book-length study of Williams’s work, both nonfiction and fiction. Provides cogent discussion of the double literary standard historically applied to African American work and sets out to explode such standards. Sees Captain Blackman as making two major points: that African Americans will continue to be trapped by history until they recognize that they can learn from it and that the cyclical pattern of history will eventually prompt whites to reckon with African Americans. The appendix contains two interviews of Williams by Cash. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. Investigates Williams’s fiction linearly, as a progression from protest to assertion. Cites Captain Blackman as an outstanding example of Williams’s keen historical analysis. “John A. Williams.” In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith. Vol. 2. 2d ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. Useful summary of the author’s life and work. Muller, Gilbert H. John A. Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A full-length study of Williams’s work to 1982. Offers a careful analysis of nine of Williams’s novels. Sees an evolution in Williams’s work, culminating in a tentative spirit of affirmation in the later works. Asserts that Captain Blackman is the most technically complex of the nine novels discussed. Nadel, Alan. “My Country Too: Time, Place, and Afro-American Identity in the Work of John Williams.” Obsidian II: Black Literature Review 2, no. 3 (1987): 2541. Examines the sense of repetition and dislocation in Captain Blackman. Discusses Williams’s use of modernist narrative conventions to reflect the historical,

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geographical, and psychological displacement of the African American experience. Views Blackman as the quintessential African American soldier, who is continuously sacrificed in American history or erased from its pages. Pate, Alexs. Introduction to Captain Blackman, by John A. Williams. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 2000. Reevaluation of the novel’s importance by the author of Amistad (1997) and Losing Absalom (2002). Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973. Provides a clear and concise survey of Williams’s novels from the 1960’s, claiming that Williams has moved on to militant social protest in his fiction. Williams, John A. “Son in the Afternoon.” In This Is My Best: Great Writers Share Their Favorite Work, edited by Retha Powers and Kathy Kiernan. San Francisco, Calif.: Chronicle Books, 2005. This short story, which is Williams’s best according to his own judgment, is preceded by an introduction by the author in which he explains why he chose it. Provides invaluable insight into the writer’s self-evaluation and his understanding of his own aesthetic goals and accomplishments. Anita M. Vickers

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CAPTIVITY Author: Toi Derricotte (1941Type of work: Poetry First published: 1989

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The Poems Toi Derricotte’s third published poetry collection, Captivity, is divided into four sections: “Blackbottom,” “Red Angel,” “The Testimony of Sister Maureen,” and “The Terrible Bright Air.” The first section’s opening poem, “The Minks,” describes the animals her uncle raised for sale in five hundred cages in the backyard of the house she lived in on Norwood Steet as a child. Derricotte describes in painstaking detail the effects of such captivity on essentially wild animals: Sometimes, they paced compulsively; sometimes, the mothers snapped the necks of their kits; often, they hid in their wooden houses. In the fall, the minks were slaughtered for their skins, which returned to the yard pinned by their mouths to metal hangers. In front of company, Derricotte’s uncle would take out the skins and blow on them, parting the hairs to show their bright “underlife.” The poet uses this image to end the poem in a lovely simile comparing the “underlife” to people’s souls, shining and manifesting their inner life. Written in forty lines of uneven length with no stanza separations and no rhymes, the poem reads like a story, yet, because of its brevity, personification of the animals, and striking similes, it retains the condensation and impact of fine poetry. The second poem, “Blackbottom,” is the poem for which the section is named. Black Bottom is an old African American neighborhood close to Detroit that developed during the 1920’s through the 1940’s. Although Black Bottom is usually described as a crime- and poverty-ridden area, it was also a vibrant center of racial and cultural identity, well known to Derricotte, who grew up in Detroit and graduated from Wayne State University. The poem describes a middle-class African American family who left the area for a nice suburb, Conant Gardens, in northeast Detroit. They return to Black Bottom’s streets to immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, and smells of their old neighborhood, knowing that on Monday they will be safe at their jobs and schools back in their new, middle-class home. The old neighborhood excites them and makes them proud. They realize they have lost something, for hearing the music of the streets makes them realize: We had lost our voice in the suburbs, in Conant Gardens, where each brick house delineated a fence of silence, we had lost the right to sing in the streets and damn creation.

The remainder of the first section’s poems deal with Derricotte’s youth. They include poems for her mother and father, a poem about the house on Norwood Street, fires in

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childhood, her high school, and the concluding poem of “Blackbottom,” “The Struggle,” a meditation on her confusion about the racial aspirations of her family. The poems in the second section, “Red Angel,” deal with a later period of Derricotte’s life. They cover adult topics such as making love, marriage, friendship, and the problems that occur in adult life. The last three poems in the section include one about Derricotte’s mother and two about her father. The poems are still composed of varied-length lines with no apparent form, except for “Squeaky Bed,” which is divided into three stanzas, and “Touching/Not Touching: My Mother,” which is divided into two sections rather than stanzas. “The Testimony of Sister Maureen,” the third section of the book, is based on the story of a teaching nun with the Sisters of St. Joseph who was tried in court for manslaughter in the death of her newborn son in 1976. She was found not guilty. The poem, narrated in the first person, is surreal, beginning in the clerestory of the nun’s convent, where she is advised by another woman to confess the identity of her lover. In the second part of the poem, the nun describes the changes she undergoes, her skin growing black and the miracle of God burning in her bones. More formal elements shape this poem: The stanzas are divided into seven sections, the narrator uses italics to comment on key scenes, and the spacing of words on the page becomes more varied and innovative as the poem reaches its final epiphany. The fourth and final section of Captivity contains poems about children, school, Allan Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, black female corpses, and, finally, a stunning poem titled “A Note on My Son’s Face,” which turns into a meditation on skin color. The poems make more explicit use of formal elements in this last section, as in “For the Dishwasher at Boothman’s,” which is divided into three- and four-line stanzas and concluded with two couplets for emphasis. The poems about Ginsberg and Whitman use long lines in the style of the poets themselves, and “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses” is divided into nine four-line stanzas. Themes and Meanings Derricotte blends her own experience with her imagination as impetus for many of the poems in Captivity. She often writes about the African American female experience, and the poems expand in a reader’s thoughts to touch on the common experience of subjugation. In the opening poem, “The Minks,” there is a strict line drawn between the minks and the humans, when the writer’s uncle says of the animals, “They’re wild . . . Never trust them.” The animals are subjugated for their coats, but their wildness and strangeness are not to be trusted; they are somewhat like Derricotte herself, whose poems were considered morbid when she was a teenager, a rebuff that led her to hide her early work. It seems the wild impulses must be carefully controlled for civilized life to take place, yet Derricotte’s poetic eye can find the “character and beauty” of these animals. As a member of a middle-class, African American family growing up in the 1950’s, Derricotte felt enormous family pressure to conform to the majority society and to disprove stereotypes. This attitude informs the poem “The Weakness,” a description

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of shopping with her grandmother at the upscale department store Saks in 1945. When the child becomes too exhausted to continue shopping, her grandmother, white and sweating, drags the child along upright through the store, afraid the clerks would notice the African American child making a scene. Other poems struggle with themes of identity: “Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing” describes Derricotte’s mother donning her best clothes to go out, overcoming her role as “the slave of the house” to simply turn into a woman. In “The Struggle,” Derricotte questions the aspirations of her family, suggesting that their lives somehow seemed an attempt to be the same as white people, a theme first suggested by the fear and disdain the family in “Blackbottom” feels when they visit their old neighborhood. “High School” describes some other girls in the poet’s Catholic school, all different than she is and “ignorant/ as God of our suffering.” In the final section, the poem “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses” turns to the issue of justice and Derricotte’s own identification with the dead women. Derricotte wonders if the crimes would be more thoroughly investigated if the victims were white and pretends that she is not like the victims. While part of her wants “to pull/ the earth on top of me,” the power to write about her thoughts turns her to the light, and to life. Critical Context Derricotte’s book was well received by the critical community. It received a Pushcart Prize, as well as an award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and it helped the poet secure her second fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The work confirmed Derricotte’s ability to engage in considerations of race that are both nuanced and striking. The concluding poem in Captivity, “A Note on My Son’s Face,” is a meditation on the different shades of color her son and her grandson are and her own ambivalence over her son’s dark color. The grandson is apparently lighter and welcomed as such, but the poet feels like begging the darker children who have come before for forgiveness. This is not a simple poem; Derricotte describes a picture of a lynching seen in a book and how the fear of having black skin is reinforced by such pictures. Many of her themes come together in this poem: color, identity, victimization, and shame. The last two lines of the poem are chilling: “The worst is true./ everything you did not want to know.” They are an appropriate ending for a book called Captivity, a collection of poems that explore so many subtle implications of that word. Bibliography Davidson, Phebe. Conversations with the World: American Women Poets and Their Work. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England: Trilogy Books, 1998. Treats five American women poets in depth, including Toi Derricotte. Includes wide-ranging interviews with each poet about their life, work, and aspirations. Derricotte, Toi. The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Starting as journal entries when the author moved into an all-white

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neighborhood in the late 1970’s, this autobiography turns into an examination of what it means to be a light-skinned black woman in a racially divided society. Also works out coming to terms with her own attitudes toward color. Gilbert, Derrick, ed. Catch the Fire!!! A Cross-Generational Anthology of AfricanAmerican Poetry. Knoxville, Tenn.: Riverhead Trade, 1998. A celebration of contemporary African American poetry, this book introduces a whole new generation and places Toi Derricotte in the context of the fellow poets of her own generation. Hernton, Calvin C. “Black Women Poets: The Oral Tradition.” In The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life. New York: Anchor, 1990. Feminist analysis of the triple burdens of sex, racism, and capitalism used to exploit African American women poets. Rowell, Charles H. “Beyond Our Lives: An Interview with Toi Derricotte.” Callaloo 14, no. 3 (Summer, 1991): 654-664. Useful interview with the poet discussing Captivity and other works. Sheila Golburgh Johnson

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CATHERINE CARMIER Author: Ernest J. Gaines (1933) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Early 1960’s Locale: Southern Louisiana First published: 1964 Principal characters: Jackson Bradley, a searcher who returns to Louisiana after completing his college education in California Catherine Carmier, a young woman divided between her need to fulfill herself as an individual and her powerful attachment to her family Lillian Carmier, Catherine’s sister Raoul Carmier, a hard, determined man whose extremely light skin has created in him a sense of distance from his darkerskinned neighbors Charlotte, Jackson’s aunt, whose emotional investment in him blinds her to his needs Della, Raoul’s wife Madame Bayonne, Jackson’s former schoolteacher The Novel In Catherine Carmier, the arrival in a small rural community in southern Louisiana of two outsiders—two natives who have been away—threatens the tentative equilibrium that has been established within the community. Whether that equilibrium can ever be reestablished, and whether it should be, are questions that the novel explores. Jackson Bradley has come home after being graduated from college in California. His aunt, Charlotte, believes he has come home to stay, that he will settle down to teaching in the community, and that he will probably marry Mary Louise, whose love for him has never faltered during his absence. Although he is not sure where he does belong, Jackson realizes that this backwater community can no longer satisfy his needs. As far as he is concerned, he has returned for a visit of only a few weeks. Lillian Carmier arrives on the same day as Jackson. She is welcomed by her sister, Catherine. When Catherine and Jackson encounter each other, it is clear to Lillian that there is something between these two. The Carmiers’ skin is so light that they could easily pass for white, and Lillian, who has been reared by relatives of her father in New Orleans and who therefore has no strong ties either to the community or to her parents, has decided to do just that, a long way from Louisiana. Catherine has no such intention, and she tries to encourage a

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greater closeness between Lillian and Della, their mother. Their father Raoul’s insistence that they have nothing to do with dark-skinned men, however, has left Catherine in a position of emotional isolation. Her father cannot so easily dictate Catherine’s feelings. In fact, she has had a son, but Raoul drove the dark-skinned father away before he could marry her. She has also loved Jackson, whose skin color makes him just as unacceptable. Now Jackson’s return threatens whatever peace Catherine has been able to find. Among those with whom Jackson renews acquaintance, he finds understanding especially from his former teacher, Madame Bayonne. She lends him a sympathetic, but not uncritical, ear as he tries to work through the emotional confusions arising from his sense that he must carry on his spiritual quest, from his reluctance to inflict pain on Charlotte, and from his renewed feelings for Catherine. With the support of Lillian, who, for reasons she never examines, wants Catherine to make some sort of break from the family, Jackson and Catherine become lovers. As soon as their relationship has been consummated, however, Catherine resolves to send Jackson away. She cannot bring herself to betray her father, whom she loves, she realizes, more powerfully than she could ever love any other man. Jackson tries, with limited success, to convince himself that he wants nothing further to do with Catherine. He is still dealing with those feelings when he tells Charlotte of his intention to leave. At first Charlotte is unable to accept what he tells her, and her collapse makes him the target of the community’s anger. Her minister, though, helps her to recognize the difference between loving and possessing. She realizes that her Christian faith compels her to let Jackson go. Ironically, Jackson, who has left the church, does not understand Charlotte’s change of heart. When Lillian and Catherine decide to attend a dance in nearby Bayonne, Lillian makes sure that Jackson will be there as well. Raoul, who has escorted his daughters to Bayonne, is told by two black men that Catherine is fooling around up at the dance; Raoul does not know that the informers are carrying out the orders of Cajuns who covet Raoul’s land. After Raoul has torn Catherine away from Jackson, Jackson pursues them back to the Carmier house. The two men finally and inevitably confront each other. Jackson is the victor in the bruising fight that ensues, but his victory seems empty when Catherine says she must look after her beaten father. However, she says she will come to Jackson if he will be patient. Della, Raoul’s wife, tells Jackson to wait; he is the hero now, and Catherine will be his. Della has been emotionally estranged from her husband ever since the birth of her son Mark, whose dark skin revealed that Raoul was not his father. It is at last, Della feels, her moment; Raoul can now be truly hers. As the novel ends, Jackson stands outside the Carmier house, waiting for Catherine to come back outside. Yet, in the novel’s closing words, “she never did.” The Characters Although not the title character, Jackson Bradley seems to be the protagonist of Catherine Carmier. He is certainly the most powerful active force in the novel,

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the character whose desires and actions disturb the static community in which the novel is set. Jackson is defined in part by the desires of other characters as those desires intersect with his. Charlotte’s desire, for example, is that Jackson will settle down and teach school. For Charlotte, Jackson represents the future—but the future, for Charlotte, means essentially a continuation of what has been. Because Charlotte is a sympathetic character, she can suggest the value of what Jackson is rejecting. For a seeker such as Jackson, however, Charlotte’s dream would be a surrender. Mary Louise’s desire is that Jackson will return her unselfish love (she clearly distinguishes between love and possession), but to Jackson, that too would mean surrendering the freedom his nature demands. Jackson also feels alienated from his old friend Brother, in part because Brother seems, to Jackson, to be disturbingly free of desire. In cutting himself off from his past, however, Jackson has not succeeded in liberating himself; he suffers from a sense of aimless drift. Madame Bayonne does not play an active role in the novel. Strictly speaking, she makes nothing happen. Her function is to allow Jackson to articulate his feelings, and she acts as a kind of ironic chorus, commenting on the people, places, and events of the novel. She may also suggest, by her intellectual range and depth, that life in a rural community such as this one need not be quite so stultifying as Jackson supposes. The threat Jackson represents to the stability of the community is intensified by the reawakening of his feelings for Catherine. Catherine is divided and indecisive. Lillian, who in many ways parallels Jackson, represents a threat from within the family to Catherine’s serenity. She cannot commit herself to Jackson, knowing that that would mean a final break with her father. The exact nature of Catherine’s love for her father is itself uncertain, but the fact that she seems to regard Jackson and her father as rivals suggests that that love may have in it more of the erotic than Catherine herself consciously realizes. Raoul himself is a formidable figure. He probably killed Mark, Della’s son and the physical proof of her extramarital affair with a dark-skinned man. However, Della, who has long suppressed her spontaneous, outgoing nature for Raoul’s sake, wants above all to be acknowledged by him as his wife. The defeat Raoul suffers at the hands of Jackson is more the result of age than of any lack of resolve. However, the determination that becomes questionable as it warps his daughter’s life is also the quality that makes him the one man to hold out against the encroachment of the Cajuns, who have swallowed up almost all of what used to be black people’s land. Even Raoul’s final defeat is not without ambiguity. At the end of the novel, Catherine is with him. Jackson waits outside. Themes and Meanings Because certain of the themes of Catherine Carmier are familiar, perhaps overly familiar, elements of African American fiction, there is some danger that these themes will draw excessive attention to themselves, producing a distorted impression of the novel as a whole. The situation of the light-skinned African American was a

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staple of fiction of an earlier era; the temptation to “pass” often arose as a motif within this frame of reference. The tensions created by color prejudice within the African American community, too, are not new matters of concern. Certainly, these themes do in part inform Ernest J. Gaines’s first novel; however, they enter into highly complex relationships with other thematic elements. The result is a novel that, although not entirely free of the problems that first novels often manifest, moves far beyond a generalized meditation on the significance of color to become an urgent and at times impressive exploration of psychological and ethical conflicts. Their light skin distinguishes the Carmiers from their neighbors. Because of Raoul’s intransigence, it isolates them from others, and this isolation generates a morbid intensity of relationship within the family. The relationship of Raoul and his daughter may be described as emotionally incestuous, even if not physically so. Thus Catherine, a grown woman and herself the mother of a son, questions whether she can ever love another man as much as she loves her father. It does not seem to occur to her that in a healthy relationship, a daughter’s love for her father differs in kind, not in degree, from a woman’s love for a man. The emotional fervor with which Raoul maintains the barriers between Catherine and men of her age is also obviously beyond what even so intense a color prejudice as his would require. As Della sees, when Raoul fights Jackson, he is fighting his rival for the woman he loves. Della’s hope is that Jackson’s victory in the physical fight will prove an emotional victory as well: that Jackson will now be able to claim Catherine, leaving Raoul to Della. Della, then, has known for years that her daughter is her rival for the man they both love. Is Della’s hope realized? The ending of the novel is ambiguous. Jackson waits for Catherine to come to him. “But she never did,” the novel states. Is this merely the colloquial “never,” or is it to be taken as final, as indicating that Catherine will never be able to leave her father’s house? In any event, Gaines explores the morbid consequences of a family’s turning in upon itself. Jackson’s situation is thus left unresolved. He is, at the novel’s denouement, at a standstill. What of his resolution to continue his search? Has that been defeated by his entanglement in the Carmiers’ emotional wars? When the novel introduces Jackson, he is a man in motion. At the end, his condition is one of stasis and uncertainty. The novel acquires further direction from thematic concerns that will prove constant in Gaines’s work. The varieties of love, both sexual and nonsexual, play an important organizing role in Gaines’s work. In this novel, Gaines works changes on the relationship of love and possession. Mary Louise’s love does not entail the need to possess. This is her strength—yet, insofar as it tends toward passivity, it is also a weakness. Charlotte, supported by her religious faith, can only with difficulty purge her love for Jackson of its possessive elements. For Raoul, love is possession; the loved one is to be denied any independent existence, any freedom to choose a life of her own. The relationship of Jackson and Catherine is articulated in terms of these tensions. How much that is possessive is there in Jackson’s love for Catherine? To what extent is love, for Catherine, a matter of being possessed?

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All of Gaines’s important and memorable characters, moreover, confront the difficulty of striking the proper balance between continuity and change. Lillian is on the verge of denying her family and racial history. Charlotte tries to hold on to an old dream. Jackson thinks he can walk away from his past, but he feels himself drifting rather than moving purposefully in a chosen direction. Catherine cannot imagine escaping from her past. The ambiguities of the novel’s resolution underline the complexity and power with which Gaines invests these issues. The past, Gaines seems to say, must be acknowledged as the foundation on which to build toward the future. Tragedy can arise from the valorization of either past or future at the expense of the other. To an extent, Charlotte is able to let go, but it remains very much in doubt whether she has the strength to move on. Della, at the end of the novel, seems ready to accept the worst of the past, even the knowledge that Raoul killed her son, as a condition of moving into the future. The novel’s resolution, however, leaves doubt as to whether that hope can be fulfilled. Critical Context For an African American of Ernest J. Gaines’s generation, the story of Jackson Bradley could carry considerable symbolic weight. For Gaines himself, the story has even more personal associations. Born in southern Louisiana, Gaines moved at fifteen to California. He was graduated in 1957 from San Francisco State College and did advanced work at Stanford University. Like Jackson, then, Gaines had traveled far from his roots. The question of one’s connection to one’s roots might be said to inform much, if not most, of Gaines’s fiction. The question of his connection to his roots troubles the mind of Jackson Bradley. The question of connection to roots was not a simple one for educated young black men in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Although Lillian’s desire to pass for white is an extreme, Jackson’s hope of finding himself at the end of a search that will take him far from his starting point might symbolize a similar uncertainty about identity. Jackson’s roots in southern Louisiana allow Gaines to explore the rural area that also provides the setting of his later novels The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983). Gaines recognized early that his genius was for subjects and themes derived from rural life. His artistry in depicting that life constitutes one basis for his claim to special attention among African American novelists. While looking closely at his place of origin, Gaines has also listened carefully. One of his more impressive achievements, critics agree, has been to capture, with special vividness and commendable attention to variety, the quality of black speech as it can be heard in southern Louisiana. Gaines has maintained the vital link between formal art and the oral folk tradition in African American literature. In Catherine Carmier, the composite—and by no means uniform—voice of the community engages in a richly expressive counterpoint with the more cultivated and genteel accents of Jackson and Catherine, and of the narrative voice. Finally, Gaines’s novels manifest a fascination with the psychologically complex

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individual, black or white, rather than with the sociologically or ideologically representative type. Although dealing with the theme of color prejudice within the African American community, Catherine Carmier is more concerned to explore the psychology of the characters than to use them to make didactic points. The refusal to reduce people to tokens, to reduce literature to propaganda, is a value for which Gaines stands most emphatically within the African American tradition. Bibliography Babb, Valerie Melissa. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Asserts that Gaines’s writing transcends African American experience and voices the concerns of humanity. Catherine Carmier is a pastoral, but one in decline. Bell, Bernard W. “Ernest Gaines.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bell claims that Catherine Carmier is informed by the sense of nihilism of the nineteenth century Russian author Ivan Turgenev and by the sense of southern history of the twentieth century American author William Faulkner. Bryant, Jerry H. “Ernest J. Gaines: Change, Growth, and History.” The Southern Review 10 (1974): 851-864. Bryant states that Gaines combines moral commitment and aesthetic distance. Catherine Carmier depicts the triumph of inertia. Byerman, Keith E. “Negotiations: The Quest for a Middle Way in the Fiction of James Alan McPherson and Ernest Gaines.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Examines how Jackson and Catherine must escape the confinements of the old world, but in the name of the values of that world. Carmean, Karen. Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Critical overview of Gaines’s work and its importance to African American and southern literary history. Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Focuses on Gaines’s achievement in capturing the oral traditions and the linguistic cadences of African American culture. Argues that the varied voices of his characters combine to generate the unique voice of the author himself. Hicks, Jack. “To Make These Bones Live: History and Community in Ernest Gaines’s Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum 11 (1977): 9-19. Notes that Catherine Carmier is informed by a view of personal and racial history as a prison from which the principal characters can never fully escape. Stoelting, Winifred L. “Human Dignity and Pride in the Novels of Ernest Gaines.” CLA Journal 14 (March, 1971): 340-358. Stoelting claims that Gaines is concerned with how his characters handle decisions, rather than with the rightness of their choices. W. P. Kenney

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CEREMONIES IN DARK OLD MEN Author: Lonne Elder III (1931-1996) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Early spring of an unspecified year, probably in the 1960’s Locale: 126th Street, Harlem, New York First produced: 1965, at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York; 1969, in revised form, at St. Mark’s Playhouse, New York, New York First published: 1969 Principal characters: Russell B. Parker, a widower who runs a barbershop that has no customers; he lives upstairs with his daughter and two sons William Jenkins, Parker’s friend and checkers opponent Theopolis “Theo” Parker, Russell’s older son, who teams up with Blue Haven to set up a bootlegging business Bobby Parker, Russell’s younger son, an expert burglar and shoplifter Adele Eloise Parker, Russell’s hard-working daughter, who supports the entire family with her office job Blue Haven, a tough man of the streets who knows how to exploit weaker men The Play Ceremonies in Dark Old Men is set in Harlem, in a run-down barbershop on 126th Street. The play is divided into two acts of about equal length. The staging is very simple and naturalistic. The barbershop owned by Russell Parker is dominated by a barber’s throne, which Parker appropriates whenever he is in the room. Elsewhere around the shop are a wall mirror, several projecting shelves, a clothes rack, a card table, and six chairs. Off to the right is a back room with an old refrigerator, a desk, and a bed. A short flight of stairs on the far right leads up to living quarters, and a door signals a set of stairs coming up from a small basement. There are no symbolic or expressionistic effects and no dramatic physical activity, except the checkers games that Parker and Jenkins play and a mildly suggestive sexual scene between Parker and his girlfriend. The language is frequently obscene. The play opens with Jenkins entering for a game of checkers with Parker, a ritual that they engage in frequently. Parker has yet to win a game. Their dialogue is easy and natural, the companionable chatting of two men who are perfectly at ease with themselves and with each other in the barbershop setting. A comic note is struck when Parker sees his daughter, Adele, coming home from work. He makes Jenkins hide under the bed in the back room. This subterfuge is necessary because Adele is constantly

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after Parker and his two sons to stir themselves and find jobs. Parker knows that if he is caught playing checkers, he will get a scolding. Since the death of Parker’s wife, Doris, Adele has been the breadwinner, supporting her idle father and the two layabout boys, Theo and Bobby. Supporting three ablebodied men—assuming her mother’s role—has begun to grate on Adele’s nerves. At one point she angrily bursts out, “But then I found myself doing the same things she had done, taking care of three men, trying to shield them from the danger beyond that door, but who the hell ever told every black woman she was some kind of goddamn savior!” Adele walks in and immediately begins grilling Parker about his attempts to find a job that morning, attempts that he has not made. While they bicker, Theo and Bobby come in. Adele promptly begins to taunt them about their idleness. Finally, Adele tells the three of them that they have six days to find work. If they have not, she is going to change the locks on the door so that they can enter only with her permission. Adele is adamant about her proposed new rule: “I am not going to let the three of you drive me into the grave the way you did Mama.” After a heated confrontation with the three men, Adele storms upstairs. As soon as she leaves, Jenkins comes out from under the bed. Parker had completely forgotten him, and Jenkins is angry. Not knowing that he was in the room, Adele had snapped to Parker that “most of your time is spent playing checkers with that damn Mr. Jenkins.” The man’s feelings are hurt enough that he will not stay for any more checkers games. Jenkins comes across as a decent enough man, and Adele’s contempt for him appears to be based on nothing more substantial than the opportunity for wasting time that he offers to Parker. That is certainly a minor fault, since Parker would not be doing anything but loafing in his shop anyway. Theo has never displayed any perseverance. His father grumbles at him for having gone from one thing to another, most recently an effort at becoming a painter, an effort that has produced only “two ghastly, inept paintings.” After Jenkins leaves, Theo introduces a new project to his father. Theo brings Parker a brown paper bag containing a bottle of corn whiskey, from which Parker takes several large, approving swigs. Thus is born the Parker family’s latest money-making scheme. To overcome his father’s doubts about his plan to make corn whiskey, Theo gets his father drunk and urges him to reminisce about courting his wife and doing dance routines. The first scene ends with Adele coming in to announce supper in the middle of Parker’s execution of some fancy dance steps. Scene 2, set six days later—the deadline for the men to find jobs—opens with Theo telling Bobby to steal a typewriter, the kind of assignment at which Bobby has a reputation for excelling. Theo treats Bobby as not quite an equal, not even as a younger brother, but as a slow younger brother. Bobby sulks about this but does Theo’s bidding. Theo wants the typewriter to encourage Parker to write his memoirs. Parker comes in at this point, claiming to be worn out from job hunting. He goes upstairs to placate Adele. Blue Haven’s entrance is dramatic. He is dressed entirely in blue and wears sunglasses. He carries a gold-topped cane and a large salesman’s sample case. Blue is something of the Fagin of Harlem, the boss of a “piano brigade,” a gang of thieves

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and store burglars. Blue identifies himself as the “Prime Minister of the Harlem DeColonization Association,” a fantasy of his devoted to the disestablishment of “Mr. You-Know-Who.” Blue’s plan for Parker and his sons is that they run, out of their basement, a bootlegging operation featuring Theo’s corn whiskey. He also envisions various entrepreneurial diversifications such as numbers games and dartboards embellished with some of the most hated white faces. The corn whiskey is named “Black Lightning.” Blue is a figure of deliberate but almost comic menace who provokes Parker’s question, “What kind of boy are you that you went through so much pain to dream up this cockeyed, ridiculous plan of yours?” Blue’s answer is moving, and it makes clear that behind the Amos-’n’-Andy antics of Parker and Jenkins there is a real issue in a real world of suffering and degradation. Blue explains that he was born nearby and that before he was ten years old he felt that he had been living for a hundred years. He says, “I got so old and tired I didn’t know how to cry.” He is now making money, so he does not “have to worry about some bastard landlord or those credit crooks on 125th Street.” Blue’s hunger for justice and some room in the world for himself comes through poignantly. Parker, heretofore skeptical, is won over to the grand project to market Black Lightning. Act 1 ends with a dramatic shouting match in which Adele’s strong protests against Theo’s bootlegging project are overridden by Parker, who asserts his patriarchal role by approving the illegal scheme. Act 2, set two months later, plays out the bootlegging story. The enterprise has been a great success. Theo works hard over the brewing process in the basement, succeeding for the first time in his life. Bobby is apparently deeply involved in Blue Haven’s burglary undertakings, and several nearby stores have closed their doors because of losses from theft. Parker, who has brought Jenkins in for a slice of the investment, is busy with new clothes, a young girlfriend, and a losing struggle to recapture his salad days. Adele has a boyfriend who demands much of her time. Things unravel. The barbershop is getting a bad reputation because the whole neighborhood knows what is going on there. Jenkins bursts in to collect his profits and declares that he no longer wants to be part of the enterprise. Theo becomes disgruntled over what he thinks is a lack of help with the production process. When Parker brings his girlfriend home, she turns out to be a spy for one of Blue’s enemies. She is interested only in what she can learn from Parker about what they are doing and where the pilfered loot is being kept. His avowals of love and proposals of marriage are embarrassing in the light of her frank contempt for him. Adele comes home. She has been beaten by her lover, who discovered her with one of his friends. Finally, with everyone disillusioned in their bright hopes for new lives with Black Lightning, the fatal blow comes in the form of news that Bobby has been shot to death by a security guard. Themes and Meanings Ceremonies in Dark Old Men portrays the disintegration of a family after the death of the mother. Parker is a decent man. His stories of a happy marriage with Doris are believable. His memories of his vaudeville successes are perhaps less believable but

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still plausible. The family’s story seems to be an old one, of a strong mother who keeps the family together when the father feels defeated by a racist society. After Doris’s death, Adele believes that it is her inherited role to take care of the men. They let her do it. Parker sees his shop as a haven from the streets outside, where he knows he will meet with failure. In the comfortable ceremonies of their checkers games, Jenkins and he enjoy the solace of friendship in a difficult world. For Blue Haven, life on the streets has been an ordeal that he has faced the only way he knows how, even to the extent of killing a man over a woman. Whatever sort of villain Blue Haven may appear to be to the world beyond his streets, he lives by his lights. He has a son by the woman who is his companion, and with this woman he has a sex life that at least temporarily obscures for both of them the misery of their cramped existence. When she begs Blue to marry her, he breaks out in a sweat, realizing what threats are entailed in a life of responsibility and entanglement. He nevertheless agrees: “But I have been kind! I have kissed babies for the simple reason they were babies! I’m going to get married to some bitch and that gets me shaking all over!” Blue Haven is probably Elder’s greatest challenge in this play. Elder succeeds brilliantly in creating a convincing human being who has coped with long odds from the day he was found lying in a pool of blood at birth. Perhaps the most pathetic character is Bobby. As the second son, young when his mother died, he can only follow the verbal Theo, who constantly puts him down. Finding his niche in the world is hard for Bobby, so he pursues the only trade he is good at—stealing—and dies on the job. As a story of family breakdown under the stress of poverty, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men is a considerable success. Its convincing characters have imperfections that do not diminish sympathy for their joint plight. It provides an honest vision of both Harlem and human nature. The play ends with a long monologue by Parker, who has just won his first game of checkers against Jenkins. His speech is a proclamation of his love for his dead wife and his children, a confession that he can no longer play the “dumb clown” for white condescension and an admission that he has been a deluded fool in chasing a young girl. Tomorrow, he says, they will begin again. As he speaks, however, he is unaware that Bobby is dead. Parker speaks the last three words of the play, words that echo with great power: “Say, where’s Bobby?” Critical Context Lonne Elder III was born in Americus, Georgia, in 1931. His family soon moved to New Jersey, where he grew up. In the mid-l950’s, Elder joined the Harlem Writers Guild. He identifies Douglas Turner Ward of that group as a major influence on his career as a playwright. Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was first performed at Wagner College on Staten Island in 1965. A Stanley Drama Award and a John Hay Whitney Fellowship enabled Elder to study filmmaking at the Yale School of Drama from 1965 to 1967. Other fellowships followed. The revised version of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was first performed professionally in 1969, by the Negro Ensemble Company.

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Although there were dissenting voices, most critics gave high praise to Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. The play was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, and it won the Outer Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Vernon Rice Award, the Stella Holt Memorial Playwrights Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award. Most viewers thought that Elder avoided the stereotypes and preoccupations present in the works of other African American dramatists of the 1960’s. The play does not focus, for example, on black-white confrontations and the social evils of racism. Clearly, all of the Parker family members have been scarred deeply by these evils, but family relationships and universal human aspirations make the Parkers something much more than victims of injustice and make the play something much more than a tract against oppression. Bibliography Cherry, Wilsonia E. D. “Lonne Elder III.” In Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Vol. 38 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. One of the longest sketches of Elder’s life and his career as a dramatist. The commentary on Ceremonies in Dark Old Men stresses the play’s depiction of the resilience of the American black family. Fontenot, Chester. “Mythic Patterns in River Niger and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.” MELUS 7 (Spring, 1980): 41-49. An excellent piece of formal analysis that does much to reveal the structure of the play. Gant, Liz. “An Interview with Lon Elder.” Black World 22 (April, 1973): 38-48. One of the most extensive of the interviews Elder has given. Very informative. Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Comprehensive overview of African American dramatic production; places Elder both within the context of the 1960’s and within the broader context of American and African American theater as a whole. Jeffers, Lance. “Bullins, Baraka, and Elder: The Dawn of Grandeur in Black Drama.” CLA Journal 16 (September, 1972): 32-48. Fine appreciation of three African American writers who rose to prominence in the 1960’s. King, Woodie, Jr. The Impact of Race: Theatre and Culture. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2003. Takes a cultural-studies approach to African American theater studies, tracing the functioning of race within African American drama and the function of that drama within American and global culture. Turner, Darwin T. “Lonne Elder III.” In Contemporary Dramatists, edited by James Vinson. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. This early recognition of Elder contains one of the most sensitive readings of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. Frank Day

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THE CHANEYSVILLE INCIDENT Author: David Bradley (1950) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Late 1970’s, 1930-1965, and precolonial days to the twentieth century Locale: Pennsylvania First published: 1981 Principal characters: John Washington, a studious, intensely dedicated historical scholar Moses Washington, John’s father Judith Powell, a psychiatrist and John’s only friend Peter John “Old Jack” Crawley, a surrogate father to John Yvette Franklin Stanton Washington, Moses Washington’s wife Bill Washington, John’s brother C. K. Washington, Moses Washington’s grandfather The Novel In The Chaneysville Incident, David Bradley employs a dual narrative that simultaneously follows John Washington for ten days in March, 1979, when he returns to the hill country of his origin to care for and then bury “Old Jack” Crawley, and the course of John’s thoughts as he reconsiders the facts of his family’s history while he tries to solve the mystery of the “Chaneysville Incident,” which contains the key to his father’s existence. As the narrative begins, John appears to be in an admirable position as a respected young historian employed by a major university in Philadelphia, but he is troubled by a kind of rage that he has learned to control by suppressing his emotions so totally that he has shut even those closest to him out of a significant portion of his life. He has been living with Judith Powell, a white psychiatrist, whose love for him has kept them together even though he has held her at a distance. They are kept from being closer by John’s suspicions about all white people, his distrust of women, and his unusual rearing by his father and his father’s closest friends, Old Jack and Joshua “Snakebelly” White. When John is summoned by a message that Old Jack is near death, the claim of love and kinship that carries him back to the country of his youth is combined with a growing sense of urgency to reconcile his defensive posture with Judith’s demand for his trust by probing to the core of his family’s mystery. John’s memory is engaged by his recollections of his life on “The Hill,” the old black neighborhood where he lived in the unusual house his father, Moses Washington, built. John recalls the stories Old Jack told him about his father and about the adventures of Moses and his running mates in the days when they faced active hostility from the white community. Gradually, as John ranges over his early life, his discov-

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ery of his mind as an active instrument—even a weapon—is presented as the crucial event in his development. He realizes that he has emulated his male mentors by conceiving strategies for defiance and survival that emphasize mental combat more than physical prowess; he also realizes that he has echoed his mother’s adjustments to social rejection and bigotry by projecting an icy disdain toward every incident of racial prejudice. When John visits the most powerful man in the region, the legendary Judge Scott—who, surprisingly, was a secret friend of his father—he learns that the linkage of the black and white communities is more complicated than he had thought. When the judge discloses the terms of Moses’ will, which requires John to probe to the heart of the family mystery, John is struck by how much he still does not know about his father’s extraordinary abilities and tenacity. Judith’s determination to understand why John has been withholding some essential element of himself also encourages him to accept the challenge of his father’s bequest. Finally, his desire to know proves greater than his fear of what he might find out. Consequently, he prepares himself for the final stage of his quest, a voyage into the past. John seeks to penetrate the veil of confusion separating him from a full understanding of the actions of both his great-grandfather C. K. Washington, who led slaves to freedom in the 1850’s, and Moses Washington, who committed suicide. At the same time, John is also moving into the deeper recesses of his subconscious, seeking an understanding of his soul in order to overcome the anger that has been the foundation of his defenses. The voyage is conducted both on the backcountry hills where his ancestors lived and also through layers of historical documents that John has gathered, organized, and puzzled over. An indication of his determination to overcome his biases is his decision to invite Judith to join him, and, as she becomes an active partner in his search, their relationship moves toward the true sharing she seeks. The final section of the novel draws the various elements of the narrative together, as a storm that has been gathering strength sweeps in full fury across the landscape. Struggling against the forces of nature but drawing strength from their ability to survive in the harsh conditions, John and Judith follow the trail of the data John has gathered in his historical research. They find the actual grave sites of C. K. Washington and several slaves he had helped to escape who had killed themselves rather than return to slavery. This is also the place where Moses Washington chose to end his life in homage to his ancestor, who had accepted death as the only freedom available to him in the middle of the nineteenth century. The separate narrative tracks coalesce as John tells Judith the story of C. K. Washington and Harriet Brewer merging in purpose as cohering elements in a kind of mythic entity, the story which John relates paralleling the relationship he and Judith are stretching toward. Judith may not be able to understand fully the belief that John maintains in the “spirit that leaves the body that bound it to the ground”—an African and African American conception of continuing existence beyond death. John, though, wants her to understand why he lives as he does and why he hopes that he has validated his training as a historian by going beyond facts to attain an understanding that depends on an active imagination and an openness to all the implications of an elusive truth.

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The Characters Like the narrative course of the novel, which takes John Washington back to the place where his father worked through his life’s purpose and back through time in an examination of history and heritage, the method of characterization Bradley employs is also devised as part of a multiple perspective. John Washington is presented as the narrative consciousness of the novel, and all the other characters are essentially seen from his point of view—that is, from the outside. John, however, is extremely perceptive, and he has been educated as a historian who must exercise the discipline that insists on more than an emotional or instinctive response. Consequently, he is intelligently sympathetic and convincing in his accounts of the other characters and is a reliable narrator. When necessary, Bradley will also use an omniscient point of view, particularly when recounting John’s dialogue with Judith, a technique that indicates that she is an independent figure. This is appropriate, since she presents John with the challenge that is one of the propelling aspects of the narrative. Bradley has made Moses Washington an exceptionally capable man, and it is John’s awed assessment of his father that ratifies readers’ reactions to Moses’ exploits. John’s historical foundation gives him a standard against which to measure Moses’ accomplishments. Along with C. K. Washington, Moses combines the mind of a precise thinker with the athletic ability of a decathlon champion—a formidable fusion of capabilities that are exhibited in the long narrative sections in which Moses and C. K. are shown in a kind of combat against various adversaries. These “stories” are told by John with a practiced authorial style, mingling observation, description, analysis, and some dialogue to reveal character. The other characters are inevitably reduced in comparison with the men in the Washington family, but both Judith and John’s mother Yvette are convincing in the consistency of their actions. Bradley admires logical extrapolation, and once he has established the psychological foundation for the women’s characters, the motivations for their actions are clear. While John is coldly harsh in his initial responses to both women, Bradley has already established that he is somewhat blinded by anger, so that readers can see the qualities that John eventually comes to appreciate. This is part of a pattern in which John’s somewhat distant, inner-directed view is balanced by his sense of fairness, by his fascination with almost everything, and by his rather dry sense of humor. Thus John’s initial contempt for Judge Scott and his son Randall does not prevent him from seeing them eventually as human beings rather than as white stereotypes. In addition, the depth of Judith Powell’s character, while only suggested by her appearances within the boundaries of John Washington’s life, is indicative of a wider range of control, since she is not—unlike any of the other characters—a feature in the story John tells. Instead she is, like the novel’s readers, a listener and observer, although also a kind of participant. Themes and Meanings The Chaneysville Incident is an attempt by David Bradley to claim as an area of vital importance the lost histories of the black people whose story is an integral part of

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the cultural continuity of the United States. Much of the long African American struggle for equality has been recorded and recounted primarily in songs, tales, and fugitive journals, the only means available for people denied the opportunity for formal education. Bradley demonstrates and celebrates the vitality of this method of cultural preservation and transmission by capturing the enduring power of the storyteller as a crucial figure in the African American community. He also examines the ways in which such works might serve as models for writers who seek to create an imaginative account of events that pursues historical truth through the fusion of fiction and actual history. As Bradley observes, “the truth of the matter is that I don’t even know anymore” how to separate the two realms. At the center of The Chaneysville Incident are three men in the Washington family, high points of a Homeric lineage running through an epic of black experience. The quest that John Washington undertakes is designed to help him to locate himself in terms of the accomplishments of his illustrious ancestors, to learn and understand their roles (and his) in a chain of historical continuity, and to set the direction of his life so that he can follow their examples. Like that of the traditional epic hero, John Washington’s struggle—especially as it recapitulates and expresses the lives of C. K. and Moses Washington—is the epitome of an effort to define, preserve, and extol the values and virtues of a culture, and his problems as an individual reflect the obstacles that a people must confront. In particular, John has been formed in part by his reactions to the policies of what the essayist and poet Haki R. Madhubuti has called the “racial terrorism” directed against African Americans. John’s understandable response is the formation of a protective shield of anger and a fortress of intellectual intensity guarding against an openly emotional response that might make him vulnerable. This strategy has permitted him to achieve a sort of worldly success, but it has also left him with a deep psychic void. The chill inside him, which corresponds to the late-winter storm that surrounds the literal search for C. K. Washington’s burial place, is a version of the wrath that led his father to choose death as a way of joining C. K. in a spiritual alliance. John is trying to find another way, more appropriate for another era—a new time when racial enmity might not be total or inevitable, even if it is pervasive. For all of his capability, Moses has overlooked (or refused to see) the gesture of humanity made by the white man who buried C. K. and the escaping slaves with reverence and care. When John’s historical exploration culminates in this revelation, he is finally prepared to acknowledge the possibility of a common vision connecting races; when he realizes that Judith understands and appreciates qualities in himself that he has not dared to accept, he begins to see that love might possibly transcend all boundaries. That he is willing to risk the demolition of his carefully constructed world shows that he realizes that he will be forever incomplete without a commitment to another person—even a white person, who can never fully understand the African and African American vision of existence. From this perspective, access to the “truth” often entails the ultimate sacrifice—death.

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Critical Context The Chaneysville Incident, which David Bradley notes in his acknowledgments was “ten years in the making,” received the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award as the finest novel of 1981. The initial response of most reviewers was unusually enthusiastic, and the novel has been discussed in many serious scholarly studies of African American fiction. The book has been criticized for its portrayal of women and especially for Old Jack’s apparent misogyny, but Old Jack is hardly a spokesman for the author, and the point of the novel is John Washington’s attempt to go beyond the protective stance of his mentors. In a sense, Bradley’s work is a kind of complement to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), which focuses on the experiences of African American women. Bradley has stated that “I certainly wouldn’t want white people judging black people by my behavior, or my writing.” Nevertheless, the African and African American elements that inform the mythic nature of John Washington’s quest—especially the idea of death as a passage, a type of shape-changing—distinguish Bradley’s work and make it central to black experience. Bibliography Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Reconstructing American Literary History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Includes an essay by Robert B. Stepto, “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives,” that emphasizes the importance of storytelling and the oral tradition with which Bradley works. Byerman, Keith. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Study of the representation of history in African American fiction. Includes a chapter on history as reinvention and the intersection of familial and public memory in The Chaneysville Incident. Callahan, John F. “Who We For? The Extended Call of African-American Fiction.” In In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Examines concepts of storytelling, the uses of history, and the central characters of The Chaneysville Incident. Campbell, Jane. “Ancestral Quests.” In Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. Compares Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and The Chaneysville Incident in terms of both books’ examination of the relationship between North American and West African culture. Concentrates on religion, the supernatural, and family histories. Cooke, Michael G. “After Intimacy: The Search for New Meaning in Recent Black Fiction.” In Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. Covers the specific use of symbolism in The Chaneysville Incident. Leak, Jeffrey B. Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Each chapter compares a specific inter-

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section of racial and gender myths in two novels. The final chapter discusses the “myth of cultural depravation” in The Chaneysville Incident and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977). Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. An examination of novels, including Chaneysville Incident, set in modern times that attempt to deal with the “family secret”—slave owner as ancestor. Leon Lewis

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THE CHINABERRY TREE A Novel of American Life Author: Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: 1930-1931 Locale: Red Brook, New Jersey First published: 1931 Principal characters: Laurentine Strange, a beautiful, middle-class black woman of twenty-four, who has quietly and stubbornly refused to live fully Melissa Paul, Laurentine’s sixteen-year-old cousin, who comes to live with the Stranges Sarah Strange (Aunt Sal), Laurentine’s mother and Melissa’s aunt Stephen Denleigh, Laurentine’s suitor, a forty-year-old doctor Asshur Lane, Melissa’s first suitor, a moral, strong, steady, outgoing, and pleasant young man Malory Forten, Melissa’s second suitor, who is handsome, intelligent, moody, withdrawn, pretentious, and snobbish Millie Ismay, Laurentine’s friend and confidante The Novel The Chinaberry Tree tells the story of Laurentine Strange and her cousin Melissa Paul while at the same time telling the story of a part of African American life largely unknown to the general public—the life of the black upper and middle classes. In the novel’s progression, the author unfolds Laurentine’s and Melissa’s struggles for happiness while at the same time recording the everyday happenings that make up black Red Brook society. The novel begins with a portrait of Laurentine that shows how she has had to make a number of compromises concerning self-expression and happiness. Laurentine must make these compromises because of how Red Brook society has judged her, her mother Sarah, and Sarah’s sister Judy. The older Strange women have done the unthinkable and unconventional: Sarah has had an affair with the white and married Colonel Halloway, and Laurentine is a reminder to the community of this indiscretion. Moreover, Judy has had an affair with the married and respected black community member Sylvester Forten. Judy’s affair has essentially driven Forten’s wife crazy, and most members of Red Brook’s black society blame the Strange women. As a child, Laurentine is tolerated by the community, but by the time she is eight

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years old and Judy has had her affair with Sylvester Forten, the community will no longer have anything to do with the Stranges. Fortunately, Sarah and Laurentine have been well provided for by Colonel Halloway, who has bought them a big house and left them some money. This self-sufficiency means the Strange women do not need to depend on the community. Yet other, nonmaterial, problems affect Laurentine. Throughout high school, she is not invited to parties and dances and does not have a steady beau. She walls herself into her home and has only the Chinaberry tree outside her window to anchor her dreams of romance. Other than daydreaming, Laurentine devotes most of her time to her dressmaking business. Melissa’s entrance into the Strange household has a few pleasant and immediate consequences for the Strange women. First, Melissa does not know anything about her own parentage, so she thinks her mother was respectably married; she knows only that her father died shortly after she was born. She knows the history associated with Laurentine, but it is not her history, so she plunges forward into society, never thinking that Red Brook society might be judging her. Perhaps because she is sixteen, the black community temporarily tolerates her. Besides, Melissa is vivacious, witty, pretty, and conventional. The girls and boys of Red Brook’s black society like her. She is invited to parties and dances, and her friends come to the Strange home. For a while, the Strange home is as both Laurentine and Sarah would have it, filled with company, gaiety, and laughter. During this time, when Melissa is popular, Laurentine is glad that her cousin has come to live with them. For a time, Laurentine is able to live a part of her own neglected life through Melissa. The town, however, only apparently accepts Melissa. When a rumor (spread by Harry Robbins, a boy whom Melissa rebukes) suggests that Melissa is too flirtatious, the adults remember and talk about Judy Strange’s visit to Red Brook sixteen years earlier. Before long, Melissa finds that her reception within “society” has waned. Melissa notes the change, but she attributes it to her cousin and aunt. Laurentine’s response to Melissa’s decline in social fortune becomes one of spite and insensitivity. She thinks that Melissa must have done something wrong, for Phil Hackett, who was just about to ask Laurentine to marry him, suddenly decides not to, at about the same time that the gossip concerning Melissa starts. Actually, Phil Hackett rejects Laurentine not because of Melissa but because of Laurentine’s own parental background. He wants a career in politics and feels that Laurentine would be a hindrance. Laurentine’s once-positive feelings toward Melissa become spiteful and vindictive. Because she thinks Melissa has made her family the pariah of the community again, she will have nothing to do with Melissa. She forbids Melissa to have male friends at the house. Even later, when Laurentine’s social fortunes rise after Millie Ismay takes her under her wing and Laurentine meets and falls in love with Dr. Stephen Denleigh, she is still hostile to Melissa. Melissa’s response to this hostility, once her boyfriend Asshur Lane goes south to attend agricultural college and she meets Malory Forten, is to become secretive. She keeps information from Laurentine and Sarah. Melissa meets Malory in secluded places, but before long, members of the community notice, and a

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new and more earnest sort of gossip takes hold. Had Melissa been allowed to invite Malory to the Strange home, Sarah, if not Laurentine, would have known that Melissa was dating him. Malory is the son of Sylvester Forten, and the community tries its best, without ever actually confronting Melissa or Malory, to keep the two young people apart. The final chapters of the novel reveal the family secret to Melissa and Malory, and, at the same time, loose plot ends are connected. Laurentine returns to her initial sisterly relationship with Melissa. Melissa realizes that she has all along been in love with the stable Asshur, who reenters the narrative, when he returns from the South, as Melissa’s knight in shining armor. Laurentine and Stephen make plans to marry. Malory falls in love with Gertrude Brown, who is prepared to accommodate his moodiness. The community prepares to accept the Strange women and to let their pasts remain in the past. The Characters The characters in The Chinaberry Tree defy a number of traditions established for black characters in American literature, for most of them belong to the black upper and middle classes. Jesse Redmon Fauset had to make her characters believable as representations of upper-class black people while at the same time making sure their individuality grew out of the specific contexts of the story. Laurentine Strange is, on one hand, the stock “tragic mulatta” character. Her father is white, her mother one step from being a slave (Sarah Strange was a maid in the Halloway home), and Laurentine suffers in consequence. For most of her life, Laurentine steadfastly refuses to give into the demands of the black community. While Laurentine does not overtly challenge or confront members of the black community who judge her, she does get on with the part of her life that requires no social acceptance. The most significant area of her life that blossoms is her creativity, as expressed not only in her dress designing but also in the management of her business. In addition to her creativity and management skills, Laurentine battles the black community in another way. She attends the black church and holds her head up high when she goes, even though she is aware of the gossip about her and her mother. This is not to say that Laurentine is happy with her role as outcast. She merely refuses to bow to community judgment. This, however, is not all in keeping with her personality. Laurentine has a side that needs expression in conventional ways. She muses over the fact that most of her teen years were wasted. She knows she has much to offer to the society that rejects her, and she is often angry and frustrated about it. Outwardly, she leads an exemplary life. Not an iota of scandal can be associated with her until the gossip with Melissa begins, and this is partly why Laurentine reacts so severely toward her cousin. The effort it takes to keep her image clean before the community’s eyes means Laurentine is largely a split character. The part of her that is desire, that craves romance, is repressed, finding expression in daydreams, dressmaking, and a barely concealed rage.

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When her friendship with Millie Ismay and her romance with Stephen begin, Laurentine is poised to find a meeting place for her two parts. With these friends, she has access to some of the socializing that she has longed for, has romance and its expression of desire, and still holds her head proudly in the face of those community members who would judge her. Melissa is similarly portrayed, in that she, too, has an outside self and an inside one. One big difference between the two cousins is that Melissa, on the outside, seems the more daring, as can be seen in the risks she takes to date Malory and her initial rejection of the conventional and stable Asshur. On the inside, Melissa is all too conventional. She daydreams about being married. When suspicion mounts concerning her behavior, her external response is to ignore it, but inside she feels deeply troubled because she is so conventional. The other characters speak and act according to their class. The only real surprises are the Ismays, the Browns, and Stephen Denleigh, who are more progressive than their class counterparts. The black working-class or lower-class characters are almost types. There is a certain amount of individuality given, but they behave stereotypically. For example, Mr. Steade, the Strange’s gardener, gossips, begs for food, has a daughter who is loud and vulgar, and is generally something of a buffoon. Themes and Meanings In the foreword to The Chinaberry Tree, Fauset writes, “In the story of Aunt Sal, Laurentine, Melissa and the Chinaberry Tree I have depicted something of the homelife of the colored American who is not being pressed too hard by the Furies of Prejudice, Ignorance, and Economic Injustice. . . . He is not rich but he moves in a society which has its spheres and alignments as definitely as any society the world over.” Her novel in its overall architecture renders African American middle- and upper-class life. This focus provides the novel’s strength and its limitations. Issues that plagued the majority of African Americans during the early twentieth century are not addressed in The Chinaberry Tree. Characters rarely encounter racism. When overt racial discrimination occurs, as it does when Laurentine and Stephen visit New York and are ill-treated at a restaurant, the narrator makes it clear that neither of the characters has had any real previous encounters with discrimination. Both Laurentine and Stephen quickly forget about the incident and, other than giving vent to a temporary expression of hurt and anger, do not make any real protest. This example of racism occurs outside Red Brook, which helps to underscore Fauset’s presentation of Red Brook itself as free of prejudice. The rendering of middle- and upper-class black society is one of the novel’s major achievements. The novel demonstrates that a significant black middle class exists and that it has its values and unique codes of behavior. The novel’s major meanings relate both to the central characters’ dilemmas and to the community itself. The lonely Laurentine, who has desired both romance and community acceptance, discovers it is possible to have both in Red Brook. Once she is “properly attached” to Stephen Denleigh, the community is able to forgive her,

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and she, no longer the pariah, can forgive it. In this sense, the novel emphasizes an important idea in African American literature and experience: the notion of the communal self or kinship, the idea that African Americans look out for one another’s best interests. Laurentine and Melissa lose something in this acceptance and forgiveness. Each loses a bit of the independence that had so marked their earlier portrayals in the novel. Laurentine, who will marry Stephen, is content with the idea of being a traditional wife and eventual mother. Her skills as a business manager will now be refocused on the homefront. Melissa has inwardly desired such domesticity, yet, in light of the daring parts of her character, it seems unfortunate that she will become a quiet housewife, even if it is to the decent and stable Asshur Lane. In suggesting the peace and stability that is a part of the Red Brook community, Fauset indicates that some of her novel’s more daring issues—sex and love outside marriage, adultery, and miscegenation—can be controlled and made acceptable through the conventions of marriage and middle-class conduct. Critical Context Initial critical reaction to The Chinaberry Tree was generally favorable. Most reviewers praised the novel for its depiction of African American life in a manner not previously realized in the American novel. Most thought the novel created a realistic portrait of the black middle class and presented everyday details from black middleclass life that usually went unrecognized. The initial responses to the characters and their conflicts, however, were mixed. Critic Rudolph Fisher argued that the restaurant scene, in which Laurentine and Stephen experience open and hostile racial discrimination, was ineffective. Others thought Fauset’s use of the potential for incest in the Melissa and Malory plotline melodramatic. Still others argued that many of the book’s characters were lightly drawn and verged on being stereotypes. Until the mid-1970’s, Fauset’s works were known and discussed primarily for their renderings of the black middle class. With the increasing prominence of black women writers beginning in the mid-1970’s, however, critics and scholars began to pay more attention to the works of Fauset and of her contemporary Nella Larsen. This criticism emphasized Fauset’s attention to the creation of black women characters and the problems they faced in a time of unyielding racial and sexual discrimination, and she has come to be viewed not only as a skillful novelist but also as a pioneer. Bibliography Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Argues that black women novelists have used their works to address major political and social issues and, in the process, redefined the black woman. Views Fauset as somewhat conventional and argues that The Chinaberry Tree is often chaotic. Christian, Barbara T. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. A seminal discussion of

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black women’s fictional narrative. Considers the obstacles black women writers face as well as the particular themes and issues they address. Fauset is considered a key player of the Harlem Renaissance movement and a major black woman writer, even though some of her themes are not as aesthetically challenging as those of her contemporary Nella Larsen. Harker, Jaime. America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Focuses on the importance of reading Fauset as a middlebrow author and discusses the interrelationship of progressivism and sentimentalism in her work. McDowell, Deborah E. “The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Argues that there is more to Fauset’s works than is apparent from their preoccupation with traditional romance and their conventional endings. Ransom, Portia Boulware. Black Love and the Harlem Renaissance—The Novels of Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston: An Essay in African American Literary Criticism. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Discusses Fauset’s representation of intimacy and the function of love in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance generally. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933. New York: Meridian, 1988. Presents a comprehensive discussion of Fauset’s life and an overview of her literary works. Tomlinson, Susan. “An Unwonted Coquetry: The Commercial Seductions of Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree.” In Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920’s, edited by Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Discusses the representation of consumption, gender, and middle-class consumer culture in The Chinaberry Tree. Washington, Mary Helen. “‘The Darkened Eye Restored’: Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Shows how black women writers often respond to one another in their works. Charles P. Toombs

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A CHOCOLATE SOLDIER Author: Cyrus Colter (1910-2002) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1920’s-1980’s Locale: In and around Gladstone College in Valhalla, Tennessee First published: 1988 Principal characters: Meshach Coriolanus Barry, a lonely, obsessive, fifty-five-year-old, black pastor Carol Barry, Meshach’s daughter, a serious young woman in her late twenties whose relationship with her father has been strained since her teenage years Rollo Ezekiel “Cager” Lee, the rebellious, doomed hero of Meshach’s narrative Mary Eliza Fitzhugh Dabney, the elderly matriarch of an old Virginia plantation family Haley Tulah Barnes, a compassionate black professor of history at Gladstone College Flo, a beautiful and dignified single mother in her late twenties or early thirties who falls in love with Cager The Novel A Chocolate Soldier is a story within a story that reveals the obsession and loneliness of Meshach Barry’s life. He narrates the history of his hero, a classmate at Gladstone College thirty-five years earlier. The novel is a nonlinear direct address narrative, flashing from the present, in which Meshach attempts to make emotional contact with his estranged daughter Carol through the act of sharing his story, to the past, in which closely alternating segments in the lives of Meshach and Cager establish the contrast between them. The tragedy of the novel is that Carol is unable to understand that her father needs to retell this story in order to come to terms with the meaning of his life. To Carol, Meshach’s interest in Cager’s life is nothing but a useless compulsion. Because Carol, Meshach’s only human connection, refuses to listen to her father’s story, he is forced to turn and speak directly to the audience. Meshach and Cager, both from rural southern families, meet at Gladstone College, an all-black school in Valhalla, Tennessee, in the midst of World War II. Meshach has been forced by his mother to study to be a preacher. Cager is determined to escape the fate of his sharecropper father by becoming a militant black leader. Eventually Cager’s belief that education is useless without force to support it leads him to neglect his studies in favor of training the small, all-black militia he has

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mustered among the townspeople. Cager is a visionary leader, but before long the other members of the group come to believe that their effort is useless, and they leave him. Disheartened by this failure and hurt by his girlfriend Flo’s brutal honesty concerning the misshapenness of his sexual organ, Cager is on his way to flunking out of school when Haley Barnes, a history professor, intervenes. Barnes, concerned that Cager is on his way to ruin, convinces the boy to take some time off from school and get a job to allow himself time to think about his future. It is Barnes who uses his connection with Mary Dabney to get Cager a job as a house servant in the Dabney mansion. Although Cager finds Mrs. Dabney’s white supremacist attitude maddening, he decides to stay on in her employ until he has studied all the volumes in her library of military books. He sneaks the books to his room to read at night. He discovers an inflammatory black newspaper, The Chicago Hawk, that another servant’s relatives smuggled south. He is amazed by the apparent solidarity and aggression of Chicago African Americans, and he determines to go there as soon as he is done with Mrs. Dabney’s library. It is while reading through a historical volume in the Dabney household that Cager learns about Ofield Smalls, a nineteenth century slave who led a rebellion against his kind white masters. In a dramatic scene approaching the climax of the novel, Cager is struck by an epiphany while he stands over a bridge above the river Darling. Realizing that Smalls was denouncing oppression hidden in charity, Cager is seized by a feeling that he is fated to carry out a rebellion similar to Smalls’s. Driven by a messianic vision, Cager dresses himself in the uniform of his defunct black militia and stabs Mrs. Dabney to death with the bayonet of her heirloom confederate Enfield musket, just as she is on the eve of donating an enormous amount of money to Gladstone College. As Meshach narrates this story, constantly emphasizing Cager’s saintly intensity and his will to sacrifice his own good for his ideals, it becomes clearer that Meshach, having spent time in prison and several spells in a mental hospital as well as having sexually violated his daughter, is trying desperately to create some order in his own life by relating himself to Cager. The novel ends as Meshach, in an epilogue, tells of Cager’s death as the victim of a mob lynching and Flo’s death from tuberculosis. There is no definite action left for the narrator to take once his tale is told. The novel’s ending suggests that Meshach has achieved some sort of catharsis from reorganizing his memories. The Characters Meshach Barry is a complex character who acknowledges to his audience that he is perhaps not the most reliable of narrators. By describing his feelings of guilt toward his daughter and by referring to himself as a hypocrite, a preacher who loves to stand in the pulpit and give sermons but who does not actually believe in God, Meshach makes it clear that he is not to be considered a noble or even a likable character. By establishing his own actions as negative, Meshach focuses positive attention on Cager, whom he calls the hero of his story. By introducing himself as an unreliable, biased

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storyteller, Meshach suggests that everything in his narrative, including Cager’s goodness, is questionable. Cager Lee’s faith in African Americans’ need and ability to control their own destiny, coupled with his single-minded determination to help his people regardless of the cost to himself, clearly establishes him as a foil for the ambivalent Meshach. Cager is a martyred saint, a visionary secular prophet who believes that the ends justify the means. Cager’s intense conviction in the necessity of black self-determination is offset, however, by his naïveté. He is unable to distinguish between the militant rhetoric of The Chicago Hawk and factual reporting, and he is crushed when Haley Barnes informs him that Chicago is no mecca for African Americans. Although his determination is admirable, Cager’s childish simplicity, as pointed out by Barnes, makes him another questionable character. After Cager goes to work for Mrs. Dabney, several people, including Mrs. Dabney’s daughter Gussie, remark how the old woman has grown strangely attached to the boy in some mysterious way. Gussie remarks that it is as if Cager has cast some sort of spell over the old woman. Portrayed early in the novel as a crotchety, ironfisted matriarch used to having the last word in every matter, Mrs. Dabney evolves into a more compassionate woman who begins to question whether the racist beliefs she has lived by are really ordained by God, as she has been taught. Her sympathy for Cager grows as the novel progresses, ending, ironically, only when she realizes that Cager is about to kill her. Haley Barnes, noting the change that has come over Mrs. Dabney, provoking her to donate money for a new liberal arts building on the Gladstone campus, is satisfied that he has helped Cager out of his academic predicament. When Cager comes to see Haley about his plan to move to Chicago, Barnes is angered by his student’s naïveté. The compassionate Barnes truly cares about Cager and worries that the boy will spend his life dreaming up fruitless schemes for black militant action. Begging Cager to abandon his inflammatory newspaper and devote himself to learning the history of his people, Barnes acts as a father figure for Cager, trying to steer him on what he perceives as the best path. When Cager kills Mrs. Dabney and is lynched, it is Haley Barnes who feels responsible for bringing the two together. The ruin of Cager’s life, added to the burden of losing his sister in a violent way, reduces Barnes to a somber shadow of a man who lives the rest of his life in a well of guilt. The peripheral characters in the town of Valhalla are also profoundly affected by the novel’s dramatic climax. Cyrus Colter presents a vivid picture of the various inhabitants of Valhalla who knew Cager and whose lives were irrevocably altered by the events surrounding his death. There are no minor characters in Valhalla. Colter illustrates each person, from restaurant keeper Shorty George to the lecherous traveling preacher Bearcat Walker, in great detail. It is clear the entire community can never be the same after Cager kills Mrs. Dabney and is later dragged from the courthouse and set on fire.

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Themes and Meanings The theme of faith is central to Colter’s novel. It is faith, or the lack thereof, that defines each of the characters. Meshach considers himself to be a hypocrite because he feels faithless, even though he has been a very successful preacher. His success raises the question of his congregation’s faith. Colter suggests that those who are misled by a man consciously masquerading as a messenger of God may themselves be less faithful than they seem. Cager, the hero, is mythologized precisely because, in contrast to the narrator, he has an abundance of faith. In fact, Cager has so much faith in his ability to change the world for the better that he borders on being gullible. He is ready to believe that Chicago is a city of militant African Americans after reading one propagandistic newspaper. He believes that Shorty George and the other black townspeople are capable of mustering a large army, although everyone else in the town ridicules the ragtag band of men. When he thinks he has finally figured out why Ofield Smalls rebelled against his generous white masters, Cager is filled with faith that his gesture of rebellion can take on the same importance and meaning. Flo’s love for Cager is based largely on her faith in Cager’s single-minded dedication to improving the lot of his people. When comparing Meshach to Cager, Flo points out that Cager is trustworthy, because he is true to his real identity, while Meshach is a charlatan who only pretends to have a developed spiritual life. Cager is a secular saint, in Flo’s view, while Meshach is merely a big talker. The purpose of Flo’s love for and faith in Cager is called into question, however, since it is Flo who wounds Cager by making him physically self-conscious about his handicap, and since her affection for Cager does not in any way change his sad fate. Faith fails Carol, who is the audience for large parts of her father’s story. Because of the incestuous physical relationship that Meshach hints occurred between them long ago, Carol is unable to trust her father on any level. Although she loves him and is at times very moved by his desire to share the story of Cager’s life with her, she has no faith in her father’s view of history as something that can be understood by talking. She and her father have never discussed the events that occurred between them long ago; Carol tells her father that she wants to forget their past. Carol does not see her father’s storytelling as a therapeutic activity that can change his relationship to the past. Instead, it is merely an example of his obsessive and self-indulgent desire for attention. By presenting the story through a narrator of questionable objectivity, Colter directs the question of faith outward toward readers, who are asked to trust in a story that may or may not be true. Meshach’s retelling of history seems to suggest that even the most reliable narrator cannot be trusted to provide objective witness, since the “truth” of any situation can only be perceived subjectively. Thus, Colter suggests not only that Meshach’s narrative demands skepticism but also that any narrative is, by nature, somewhat unreliable.

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Critical Context In his review of A Chocolate Soldier, writer Brooke K. Horvath notes Colter’s borrowing of a historical conflict. Black educator Booker T. Washington wanted black people to have equal economic opportunities but separate social structures, while activist W. E. B. Du Bois believed that equal economic opportunity alone was not enough. Although Horvath praises the novel’s theme, he is skeptical about its effectiveness, noting that one of the problems of a first-person narration is that awkwardness results when the speaker recounts episodes about which he or she could not know. Poet and editor Reginald Gibbons points out that in A Chocolate Soldier, Colter’s fifth work of fiction, the author’s conscious use of an open-ended form is a stylistically sophisticated way of addressing the lack of resolution in the lives of believable characters faced with difficult choices. Gibbons praises Colter’s development of characters, noting Cager as a particularly effective portrait of an individual torn in two directions by his single-minded determination at war with his ethical sensibilities. Furthermore, Gibbons notes the mythological dimension of the novel. Recognizing that the characters are often intended to seem overly dramatic and, in Meshach’s case, omniscient, Gibbons praises the high tragedy of Colter’s plot. A Chocolate Soldier was also favorably received by Fred Shafer. In an interview with Colter, Shafer suggested that he could detect stylistic influences from Irish author James Joyce in the novel’s characters, who, like Joyce’s creations, are multidimensional, almost mythic individuals who face the circumstances they encounter not with simplistic clarity but with a rich complexity true to real life. Bibliography Colter, Cyrus. Interviews by Gilton Cross et al. “Fought for It and Paid Taxes, Too: Four Interviews with Cyrus Colter.” Callaloo 14 (Fall, 1991): 855-897. Four writers interview Colter on a range of topics, from his political and personal relationship with his work to the influences that have shaped his writing. Colter, a lawyer for most of his life, lists Jean-Paul Sartre, Herman Melville, James Joyce, and William Shakespeare among the literary figures who made impressions on his way of addressing literature. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Collected in Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1965. Du Bois’s famous ideas on the education that African Americans needed to succeed. Written largely as a rebuttal to the program proposed by Booker T. Washington. Gibbons, Reginald. “Colter’s Novelistic Contradictions.” Callaloo 14 (Fall, 1991): 898-905. Survey of Colter’s four previous works of fiction as well as A Chocolate Soldier. Gibbons traces the growing trend toward open-endedness in Colter’s short stories and novels, with a special emphasis on Colter’s use of characterization throughout his literary career. Graham, Maryemma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Collection of essays that together provide a comprehensive overview of the history of the African American novel;

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places Colter’s work in the context of thematic and formal developments of the late 1980’s. Horvath, Brooke K. Review of A Chocolate Soldier, by Cyrus Colter. Review of Contemporary Fiction 10 (Spring, 1990): 325. Notes the many subthemes that run through Colter’s text, including the idea of the pervasiveness of pseudo-scientific social Darwinist beliefs and the interplay between self-determination and literacy. Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture. New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970. Examines issues of twentieth century African American culture, ranging from the aims of black education to the role of blues and jazz in American society to the politics and myths of the African American middle class. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Collected in Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1965. The famous autobiography of the founder of the Tuskegee Institute whose ideal of autonomy through technical vocation influenced generations of African Americans. V. Penelope Pelizzon

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THE CHOSEN PLACE, THE TIMELESS PEOPLE Author: Paule Marshall (Valenza Pauline Burke, 1929Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1960’s Locale: A mythical island in the Caribbean First published: 1969

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Principal characters: Saul Amron, a veteran anthropologist and expert field-worker in developing nations Harriet Amron, Saul’s wife, the heiress to a family fortune founded on the slave trade and the exploitation of the Bourne Island people Merle Kinbona, a descendant of a white plantation owner, who has an affair with Saul Allen Fuso, Saul’s assistant, a statistician whose guilt-ridden memories about the death of his friend Jerry Kislak render him incapable of action or love Vereson (Vere) Walkes, a young Bournehills man Lyle Hutson, a Bourne Islander whose local academic success wins him an education at Oxford, the London School of Economics, and the Inns of Court Leesy, Vere’s grandaunt Ferguson, a reciter of Cuffee Ned stories and an opponent of the closing of the sugarcane plant Stinger, a hard-working Bournehills resident whose work makes Saul understand the plight of the “little fellas” Delbert, a store proprietor who resembles a tribal chieftain The Novel Marshall’s novel is divided into four books: “Heirs and Descendants,” “Bournehills,” “Carnival,” and “Whitsun.” The first two books serve as exposition. In them, she delineates her characters. The second two books link the subsequent actions of those characters to major rituals on Bourne Island. In effect, Marshall demonstrates how her characters’ histories determine the events and outcome of the novel. By the end of the novel, she has illustrated her prefatory words, taken from the Tiv of West Africa: “Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies.” Readers discover the effects of colonialism on the Bourne Islanders as well as on other exploited people of the world. In “Heirs and Descendants,” Marshall introduces the major characters, outlines

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their histories, and explores their aims. Saul, Harriet, Allen, and Vere travel by plane to Bourne Island. Vere entertains motor racing ambitions; Allen, who is returning to Bourne Island, seeks a refuge from the world; Harriet needs to “wield some small power”; and Saul wants to atone for his first wife’s death and past field-trip failures. As their plane nears the island, Merle is traveling to meet them by car. With her education and travel, she has ties to their world, yet she has her roots in Bournehills. Just as Harriet epitomizes the colonial spirit in her family history, with a will to control, Leesy represents the colonized, who look to the past and the future. Leesy’s photograph of the queen ties her to the colonial past, while one of Pearl Bailey relates her to the future. The groups meet at the home of Lyle Hutson, who, like Merle, has lived in both worlds but who, unlike her, has chosen the world of the exploiters. In “Bournehills,” Marshall continues the exposition. Saul learns about Cuffee Ned’s successful rebellion against Percy Byram, then discovers how George Clough, editor of the local paper, has twisted Saul’s development project for the Center for Applied Research, raising unrealistically high expectations. Saul tours Bournehills, observing how Stinger and his family work, asking Delbert about past development failures, and talking with Merle. Harriet, who is a “spectator,” tires of that role and intervenes with Stinger’s family, despite Saul’s warning. Despite his own efforts, Saul also has trouble deciphering the Bournehills culture. Merle admits that “you come close to being what we call in Bournehills real people.” By the end of this section, Merle sees that she and Saul are similar: “It’s that, like me, you’ve been through a lot, and you’re only now coming to yourself.” In “Carnival,” Vere and Harriet share the focus. The carnival in New Bristol is, for Harriet, a “challenge,” a test of whether she can belong or must remain an outsider. As the torrent of Bournehills revelers floods through town on the way to the bay, Harriet loses control and discovers that she is swept up in the celebration. Frightened and desperate, she finally escapes with the help of Lyle Hutson and his wife, Enid. She retreats from Carnival and is essentially isolated and alone at the end of the book. Vere, on the other hand, overcomes his obstacles. He beats the woman who betrayed him, finds Allen, and celebrates his freedom from his obsession by making love to another woman. Allen cannot make love to the woman he is with, but he does masturbate and climax just as Vere reaches orgasm. At the end of the book, as at the end of the second book, Saul and Merle are together, exchanging stories. In “Whitsun,” the mood switches quickly from optimism and promise to death and despair and then to ultimate affirmation. The cassia are in bloom, as is Vere, who is buoyed with the news of the prospect of the Spiretown motor race. He wins, but he dies when his car crashes. The recently organized village council then has to confront the closing of the sugarcane factory. Workers transport the cane to another factory in a rebellion reminiscent of Cuffee Ned. As Saul’s work progresses, Harriet becomes more withdrawn; when she learns of Saul’s relationship with Merle, she unsuccessfully attempts to buy Merle off. Although she succeeds in having Saul reassigned to Philadelphia, he tells her that their marriage is over. Despondent, she commits suicide by drowning. Despite her death, the novel ends with affirmation. Saul and Merle have

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worked through some of their problems, and Merle resolves to go to Africa to find her daughter and then to return to effect change in Bournehills. The Characters As Marshall has stated, many of the characters in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People serve as individuals and as symbols. Harriet represents the controlling WASP; Merle, the voice of Bournehills; and Lyle, the liberal who sells out. Marshall also tends to present her characters as opposites: She uses a “them and us” approach that furthers her political message. The Bournehills people are separated from the New Bristol people in geography (“the ridge divided Bourne Island into two unequal parts”), in color (black and “red”), and in attitude (the Bournehills people refuse to change their Carnival performance and cling to the past). There are even divisions among the people of New Bristol, where the elite from the Crown Beach Colony exploit the less fortunate. The characters are also pitted against one another economically. The exploitative white colonial class is represented by Sir John Stokes, “dressed as if for a safari,” who callously observes at the cane factory, “It’s always a bit of a shock, don’t you know, to realize that the thing that sweetens your tea comes from all this muck.” The “little fellas,” Ferguson and Stinger, are in direct opposition to the wealthy. Between these groups is Lyle Hutson, whose house, a bizarre clash of traditional and modern taste, reflects his divided nature. He is committed to money, not to people. His womanizing also reflects his desire to exploit without responsibility. Erskine Vaughan, a Bournehills man who works as a kind of deputy for Stokes, is a kind of lesser Lyle Hutson in that both have sold out their people. Like Lyle in background, overseas education, and—at one time—politics, Merle is also torn between the progressive New Bristolers and the traditional Bournehills folk. Merle chooses the latter. When Lyle outlines the development scheme, which ignores the agricultural interests of Bournehills while it stresses tourism and business concessions, Merle states her opposition. Unlike Lyle, she cannot be bought. It is her rejection of Harriet’s bribe that forces her to find her daughter and change life at Bournehills. Unlike Harriet, Saul is an outsider who wants to be admitted inside; he is almost successful. As a Jew, the prototypical outsider, Saul feels a kinship with Merle. Like her, he seems obsessed with memories, one of his mother and the historical repression of the Jews and one of his father, who seeks to atone for his sins. Saul comes to see that if he is ever to know the island, he must “embrace” Merle, for she, the “perfect cultural broker,” serves as a conduit to understanding Bournehills. Themes and Meanings In the novel, Bourne Island is a mythical place, one Marshall creates to illustrate the plight of postcolonial people. Located at “the eastern boundary of the entire continent, to serve as its bourn,” Bourne Island looks west to Africa and the slaves who perished en route to the New World. Marshall’s account of the Cuffee Ned legend,

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which lives on, suggests a place where time stands still, where past, present, and future merge. Saul believes that the island is a place that “he has unwittingly returned to,” and Merle observes that “yesterday comes like today to us.” Cyclical patterns, such as the periodic cleansings of the sea, predominate in the novel. Events occur and then are reenacted, overtly as in the annual Cuffee Ned pageant, and implicitly, as Harriet returns to the site where her ancestors exploited the Bourne Island people. In fact, the Center for Applied Research project is in danger of becoming another example of white exploitation, perhaps not so different from the scheme Lyle and his friends propose. As is often the case with island literature, the small island world becomes a microcosm of the larger world; the fate of Bournehills becomes the fate of exploited people everywhere. There are two classes of people, the colonizers and the colonized, who, as Merle suggests, “colonize our minds, too.” Percy Bartram, Sir John Stokes, and Harriet are alike in some ways. They want to control, they assume parental authority, and they are racists. Part of Harriet’s response is a reaction to her husband sleeping with a black woman. Her racism is apparent when she loses control at Carnival. Marshall writes of Harriet’s futile attempt to divert the crowd to Queen Street, with its colonial overtones. The novel contains many historical events associated with colonialism and describes Lyle’s neocolonialist plot in some detail. There are also “trivial” indications of how pervasive colonialism has proved to be. The woman whom Vere beats accepts her punishment until it is extended to the destruction of her valuable white doll, a symbol of Western influence. The Opel that Vere drives to his death is the product of the same Western technology that killed Leesy’s husband in one of the cane machines. The Crown Beach homosexuals who use the island’s boys are also part of the exploitation. The people are timeless and the place is “chosen,” perhaps an oblique reference to God’s chosen people, the Jews. Saul’s status as a Jew, as an outsider, and as a victim is similar to the status of Marshall’s “chosen people,” uprooted and exploited but also resilient and persevering. They will not create a new format for Carnival; they will reenact the victorious uprising every year. At the end of the novel it is clear that the unity the Bournehills people achieve to transport their cane is a significant step, but it is the colonial/capitalistic system that must be altered, as Merle intends to do. Critical Context The Chosen Place, the Timeless People has much in common with Marshall’s earlier novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), and her book of short stories, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). All three works concern protagonists discovering their identity, the importance of heritage and tradition, and the interdependence of people who learn to share instead of remaining isolated individuals. The first novel concerns a young girl growing up; the short stories focus on old men who refuse to share; The Chosen Place, the Timeless People concerns a middle-aged woman and man who choose to share their memories and lives, thereby freeing themselves of past sins.

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Harriet and Allen are unable to share and to participate in life; they remain spectators. Allen is unable even to talk about his repressed homosexual feelings for Vere. He certainly does not act on them. Marshall’s novel has proved to be influential in a number of ways. Her strong women characters, those she thought had been neglected in literature, have been emulated by many African American women writers. In lending an air of myth and legend to her fictitious world, she prepared the way for writers such as Gloria Naylor, whose Mama Day (1989) also takes place on a fictitious island, this one off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Both islands are “ruled” by strong women who are intent on reenacting legend, making it ever new. What distinguishes Marshall’s novel from Naylor’s is the political message of The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. Colonialism and racism are the villains in Marshall’s novel, and her book is unabashedly political in nature. When people like Lyle Hutson sell out their people, research agencies come and go, and industrial magnates close down factories, half-way measures such as transporting cane to another factory are insufficient. Lyle knew this but forgot; Merle has not forgotten. It is this strong political indictment of the system that accounts for much of the novel’s appeal. Bibliography Brathwaite, Edward. “Rehabilitations.” The Critical Quarterly 13 (September, 1971): 173-183. Places Marshall’s work in the literary context of West Indian literature, identifies two main stories (one about Merle, one about Saul and Harriet), and comments on the effects of colonialism, especially on people such as Lyle, who is analyzed in depth. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 18921976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. Regards Bournehills as a character in the novel, examines the characters in terms of their response to the island, comments on the four-part structure of the novel, and dissects the politics of colonialism. Essential for an understanding of the novel. Kapai, Leela. “Dominant Themes and Technique in Paule Marshall’s Fiction.” CLA Journal 16 (1972): 49-59. Identifies four themes—identity, race, tradition, and sharing—in Marshall’s fiction and traces their development. Contains excellent analysis of Allen’s character. Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Includes a chapter analyzing The Chosen Place, the Timeless People from the point of view of Marxist cultural studies as intervening in the discourse of late capitalism. Lynch, Joy M. “Beyond Recognition: Heritage and Identity in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People.” In Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S., edited by Martin Japtok. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003. Examination of the roles of inheritance and postcoloniality on the representation of identity in Marshall’s novel. McCluskey, John, Jr. “And Called Every Generation Blessed: Theme, Setting, and

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Ritual in the Works of Paule Marshall.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1983. Links the novel with a shorter piece, “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” (1967) and sees Marshall developing themes from her earlier work. Marshall, Paule. “‘Re-creating Ourselves All Over the World’: Interview with Paule Marshall.” Interview by Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie and Carole Boyce Davies. Matatu 3, no. 6 (1989): 25-38. Marshall describes her novel as “strongly political,” states that Harriet and Merle are symbolic characters, and characterizes Lyle Hutson as a socialist who sells out. Nazareth, Peter. “Paule Marshall’s Timeless People.” New Letters 40 (1973): 113131. Explores Marshall’s indictment of an exploitative hierarchy. Condemns Lyle Hutson as a potential Cuffee Ned radical who sells out to further his own career. Sees the novel as Marshall’s answer to the question, “What has gone wrong with the Third World and why?” Skerrett, Joseph T., Jr. “Paule Marshall and the Crisis of Middle Years: The Chosen Place, the Timeless People.” Callaloo 6 (1983): 68-73. Uses Erik Erikson’s developmental theory to analyze Merle as a mature woman experiencing “the crisis of generativity,” which she meets by rejecting Harriet’s attempt to buy her off. Starke, Catherine Juanita. Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters, Archetypes, and Individuals. New York: Basic Books, 1971. Provides analysis of Merle’s need for a protective facade, identifies the causes of her shame, asserts that she depends on a lover for her identity, and asserts that her coming to terms with herself resembles the self-cleansing of the sea of Bournemouth. Stoelting, Winifred L. “Time Past and Time Present: The Search for Viable Links in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People by Paule Marshall.” CLA Journal 16 (1972): 60-71. Sees the novel as developing a “human, historical, and cultural continuum,” regards the Cuffee Ned masque as a surreal attempt to re-create the past and determine the future, and sees in the flowering cassia tree the hope of rebirth in the future. Talmor, Sascha. “Merle of Bournehills.” Durham University Journal 80 (December, 1987): 125-128. Sees the novel as depicting universal people and places, considers the island to be a character in its own right, and treats Merle as an archetype, “a life-focus, an earth-mother who is the island.” Thomas L. Erskine

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CLIFFORD’S BLUES Author: John A. Williams (1925) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism; social criticism; social realism Time of plot: 1933-1945 and 1986 Locale: Dachau concentration camp, Dachau, Germany First published: 1998 Principal characters: Clifford Pepperidge, a gay African American jazz pianist who is imprisoned in Dachau for a dozen years, working directly for an SS officer as a servant and sometime bandleader Dieter Lange, a gay SS officer at Dachau in charge of the canteen, who was a hustler and pimp in Berlin Annaliese Lange, Dieter’s wife, who is complicit in his black market activities but initially unaware of his sexual orientation Gerald “Bounce” Sanderson, an American college coach who is given the Pepperidge diary by a German man in Flensburg in 1986 Eric Ulrich, an SS officer and jazz trumpeter who forfeits his life after masterminding a failed attempt to smuggle Pepperidge to Switzerland The Novel Clifford’s Blues is narrated through the fictionalized diary of an African American jazz pianist who survives more than a decade in the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau. The novel begins with a 1986 letter from Gerald Sanderson to Jayson Jones. Sanderson asks Jones to read Clifford Pepperidge’s diary and to determine whether it might be published. The bulk of the novel consists of the diary itself, and the book concludes with a return letter from Jones to Sanderson. Jones is impressed with the achievement of Clifford’s diary and is committed to seeking its publication. He realizes, however, that because stories of black people in Nazi concentration camps are little known, it is ironically unlikely that sufficient demand will exist for it to be published. Clifford’s diary itself—supposedly written over the course of twelve years on tissue paper, glazed paper, children’s writing tablets, wrapping paper, and the end pages of books in pencil, ink, and crayon—creates a compelling fictional world. It expresses the perspective of an African American houseboy witnessing the rise and fall of the Dachau concentration camp. Pepperidge’s background as the piano player in Sam Wooding’s jazz band provides a context and a vocabulary for his narration. Familiar with the jazz clubs of western and northern Europe, Pepperidge makes the mistake of

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engaging in a homosexual dalliance in Berlin with Malcolm, a low-level American diplomat who double-crosses Pepperidge to get himself out of Nazi Germany. Pepperidge is sent to Dachau for “criminally indecent activities.” Pepperidge’s first diary entry is dated May 28, 1933, only two months after the concentration camp was opened. It is fitting that Dachau is the setting for Pepperidge’s diary, since Dachau was the first concentration camp and served as a model for those that followed. Indeed, Schutzstaffel (SS) officer Dieter Lange, who only recently had been a pimp, hustler, and profiteer in Berlin, is often described as traveling during Pepperidge’s narrative, ostensibly setting up canteens at the new camps. Lange is an opportunistic manipulator, and he recognizes Pepperidge from the gay and jazz clubs of Berlin. He procures for Pepperidge a green rather than a pink triangle, designating him as a habitual criminal rather than a homosexual. He then arranges for Pepperidge to become his calfactor (houseboy). As the Dachau complex is built and expanded, Pepperidge—who keeps the accounting books for his boss in the canteen—provides a unique perspective on the developing Nazi incarceration machine. As major historic events occur, including the opening of the Buchenwald concentration camp (1937), the invasion of Poland (1939), and the second major assassination attempt on Hitler (1944), there are resultant shudders in the supply and logistics systems of Dachau that trigger further indecencies, torture, and wanton, brutal deaths. As it becomes clear in the last year of the war that the Nazi cause is doomed, food supplies become insufficient and wanton killings accelerate. At the same time, some mid-level officers begin to ingratiate themselves to prisoners in the apparent expectation of leniency or clemency in any war crimes trials that may take place after the liberation of the camp. The diary ends on April 28, 1945, with a weak Cliff taking sulfa to combat syphilis from a rape by Lange, as Anna suffers from typhus. They do not know whether they will even be able to walk to wherever they will be ordered to go. The text closes with Cliff’s postwar destiny unknown. The Characters The central dynamic of the characters in the novel is the strange ménage à trois that develops between Clifford Pepperidge, Dieter Lange, and Annaliese Lange. Though Cliff and Dieter are both gay, Cliff submits to sexual relations with Anna and her friend Ursula as a survival tactic. Dieter has married farmgirl Anna simply because homosexuality is forbidden in Nazi Germany, especially after the passage of the Nuremberg laws (1935), which require that all SS officers have four children, whether with their wives or with other, racially appropriate females. Their sham marriage requires Anna even to fake a pregnancy, “lose” the baby, then locate a corrupt doctor who will provide the documentation necessary to waive the SS child requirement for her husband. Although Clifford is technically a servant and prisoner, he understands that he is in a privileged position that allows him to survive for twelve years and to outlast the Dachau camp. In addition, he provides insights and counsel to Dieter and Anna, from

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his suggestion to find a crooked doctor to avoid the four-child requirement to his authoritative comment to Dieter that he should not beat his wife on Christmas Day. Themes and Meanings From the opening entries in Clifford Pepperidge’s diary, the narrator makes comparisons between the Nazi treatment of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals and the American legacy of slavery and persistent racial prejudice. Pepperidge is reflective and detailed in his ability to understand radical differences, as well as troubling similarities, between Nazi extermination policies and American traditions of racial prejudice. Pepperidge, with unofficial but relatively accurate information channels as a prisoner and as a houseboy for an SS officer, provides eloquent commentary on many national and international events of note during the twelve years covered by the novel. He discusses the proliferation of concentration camps, changes in the contemporary jazz world and the Swing movement, the Max Schmeling-Joe Louis heavyweight boxing prize fights (1936, 1938), and Jesse Owens’s gold medal achievements at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Pepperidge notes with irony that Hitler’s superman theories of a master race have been undermined by the achievements of two of the diarist’s fellow African Americans, Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. The quality and depth of the novel lie in part in the fact that all its characters are complex, with variegated characteristics. Even a seemingly supercilious Nazi like jazz trumpeter Eric Ulrich can turn out to be a member of the underground who sacrifices his own life and that of his lover, Maria, in a failed attempt to smuggle Pepperidge safely to Switzerland. Therefore, one of the essential meanings of the novel is that people are individuals, and they are capable of extraordinary feats of physical and emotional endurance in order to do what they consider to be the right thing. Critical Context Clifford’s Blues is often compared to John A. Williams’s breakthrough novel, The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), even though it was published more than three decades later. Both novels treat, in radically different ways and decades apart, the plight of the black male artist alone in western Europe—a composite culture that is both enchanted by and fearful of the black male artiste identity. Critics often use their reviews of the novel to note that it was indeed not only six million Jews but also three million people with other ethnic, racial, and sexual identities—gay people, gypsies, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others—who suffered death and torture at the hands of the Nazis in and near their concentration camps. Williams’s use of the epistolary form has also been favorably compared to Alice Walker’s narrative technique in The Color Purple (1982), which helped reveal the possibilities of telling a story through diary entries or letters.

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Bibliography Andrews, William L., et al., eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Brief biographies of four hundred African American writers, including Williams. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Emily Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Brief entries on 611 African American authors over four centuries, including a good review piece on Williams. Graham, Maryemma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Provides social and intellectual context for 150 years of novel writing in North America, from the slave narrative to the postcolonial novel. Harkins, Pamela, et al. African American Writers. Boston: Nextext/McDougal Littell, 2001. Brief, discursive survey of contemporary African American literature that includes insightful commentary on Williams’s achievement as a novelist. Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Describes the interaction of culture, politics, and science that attempted to legitimize Nazi racial theories. Williams, John A. “The Dubious Ecstasy of Exile.” In Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the ’90’s, edited by Elizabeth Nunez and Brenda M. Greene. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Essay by the author of Clifford’s Blues, discussing the relationship between exile and African American writing of the 1990’s. Richard Sax

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CLOTEL Or, The President’s Daughter, A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States Author: William Wells Brown (1814-1884) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical melodrama Time of plot: 1817-1842 Locale: Richmond, Virginia; New Orleans, Louisiana; Natchez, Mississippi; Vicksburg, Mississippi; Dunkirk, France First published: 1853 Principal characters: Clotel, an attractive biracial woman, who is sixteen years of age at the opening of the novel Currer, a forty-year-old mulatto woman, who is Clotel’s mother Althesa, the youngest biracial daughter of Currer Horatio Green, the white Virginian who purchases Clotel as his concubine The Reverend John Peck, the Methodist parson of Natchez, Mississippi, who purchases Currer Georgiana Peck, the daughter of Reverend Peck Mary, Clotel’s daughter George Green, a “passing” mulatto, who is the servant of Horatio Green The Novel Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter, A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is principally about the fate of an African American female slave, Clotel, who is described by William Wells Brown as the daughter of Thomas Jefferson. In her earlier years, Clotel’s mother, Currer, was a servant of Jefferson before his departure to Washington “to fill a government appointment,” at which time Currer was passed on to another master. In the context of the novel, Currer’s daughters are the offspring of Thomas Jefferson. As a quadroon, Clotel is much sought by the white males of Richmond, who viewed quadroon and mulatto females as a select choice for concubinage. Brown’s book, however, does not begin with the story of Currer and her children, but rather with the “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown,” a biographical sketch of Brown’s own experiences of bondage and his eventual escape to the North. The novel itself begins with the dilemma faced by Currer, who along with her daughters is sold on the auction block in Richmond after the death of her master. Clotel is bought by Horatio Green; Currer and her younger daughter, Althesa, are pur-

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chased by a slave trader who transports them south. Currer is sold in Natchez, Mississippi, to the Reverend John Peck. Althesa continues to New Orleans, where she is auctioned and purchased by James Crawford as a house servant. The separation of Currer and her daughters provides the basis for the development of the three primary story lines, Clotel’s, Currer’s, and Althesa’s. Clotel’s story involves her life as a concubine of Horatio Green in Richmond, where she has been provided with a house and eventually gives birth to a daughter, Mary. Clotel’s relationship with Horatio Green is characterized by the language of the sentimental novel, which includes descriptions of overpowering emotional attachment, especially of Clotel for Horatio. Brown introduces the second story line when he traces the experiences of Currer in Natchez. Currer spends her remaining years as a servant of Reverend Peck, dying in Natchez without ever reuniting with her daughters. An extended section portrays Reverend Peck, who is used by Brown to present the religious issues surrounding slavery, the contradictions between Christian beliefs and bondage. The scenes at the Peck farm are used to develop the differing attitudes of Peck and his daughter, Georgiana, toward the institution of slavery. Clotel’s life is radically changed when Horatio Green marries Gertrude, a white woman who insists on the sale of Clotel because she views Clotel as a rival. Clotel is sold to a slave trader and eventually is purchased by James French to labor as a servant for his wife in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Clotel’s daughter, Mary, remains in the Green household and is treated unkindly as a servant. Clotel resists her bondage in Vicksburg and plots to escape, cleverly disguising herself as an ailing white male traveling with a servant, a fellow slave, William, who has decided to assist Clotel in her escape. Clotel’s escape is portrayed in detail as she travels by boat from Vicksburg to Louisville, Cincinnati, and then overland by stagecoach to Richmond. Although she arrives safely in Richmond, she is hunted by slave catchers and imprisoned in Washington, D.C. She escapes, but, pursued and facing capture on the Long Bridge, Clotel commits suicide by leaping into the Potomac River, within sight of the Capitol and the “President’s house.” The third story line, the fate of Althesa, involves her purchase by Henry Morton, who marries her and fathers their two children, Ellen and Jane. Both Althesa and Morton perish in a yellow fever epidemic, leaving Ellen and Jane as property to be dispensed with by Morton’s brother. Both daughters are subjected to the auction block and the possible trials of forced concubinage. Jane dies of a broken heart after the death of her lover, and Ellen commits suicide, fearing a life of sexual abuse from her master. The story of Clotel’s daughter, Mary, is told in the closing episodes of the novel. Mary is eventually sold because she assists a fellow slave, George, in escaping. She is purchased in New Orleans but is rescued by a Frenchman, Devenant, who assists her in escaping to Europe and marries her. George and Mary meet accidentally in Dunkirk, France, after the death of Devenant. The novel closes with the marriage of George and Mary.

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The Characters Brown’s characters show the dynamics of antebellum Southern society. He portrays African American women of biracial ancestry, the Southern slave-owning class, Northern white liberals, and the community of black bond servants. Clotel’s characterization reflects the numerous conditions of bondage for biracial females in the nineteenth century. Her portrayal is used to suggest the ironies and contradictions of American democracy, in that she is presented as the daughter of Thomas Jefferson. Sixteen years old at the opening of the novel, Clotel is described by Brown as an attractive “quadroon” much sought after at “Negro balls” by white male gentry. The tragic course of her life begins with the breakup of her family, dramatizing the dehumanization of chattel slavery and the auction block. Clotel is also portrayed in a love relationship with Horatio Green, who purchases her as his concubine. Green’s rejection of Clotel in order to marry a white woman produces a deep emotional reaction in Clotel. A concern for familial connections is a major part of Clotel’s characterization. Her longing to be reunited with her daughter Mary motivates Clotel’s escape, which ends in Clotel’s suicide when she is tracked down by slave catchers. Currer, Clotel’s mother, also reflects a concern for family stability. Forty years of age when the novel begins, she is described by Brown as a mother whose principal concern is the advancement of her daughters. Currer realizes that advancement is based on physical appearance. Currer symbolizes the vicissitudes of bondage for aging African American mothers; she never loses sight of her mission to free her daughters and reunite her family. Currer’s younger daughter, Althesa, who is fourteen when the novel opens, ends up in New Orleans, where she is sold in the slave market. Althesa is purchased by a Northerner, Henry Morton, who marries her after being captivated by her “fair” beauty. Brown uses Althesa to show the tenuous nature of mixed marriages during slavery, for, after the death of Morton and Althesa, the couple’s daughters, Ellen and Jane, become “property” destined for tragic outcomes. Mary, Clotel’s daughter, is used to show the cruelty of the white mistress Gertrude, who resents both Clotel and Mary. Mary’s unshakable love for George, a fellow servant, reveals the curious workings of destiny as well as allegiances among bond servants. After assisting George in his escape from prison, Mary is sold to a slave trader in New Orleans, who in turn sells her to a Mobile resident. She is assisted in her escape by a Frenchman, Devenant, with whom she flees to Europe. They reside in Europe at the close of the novel, when Mary is reunited with George, whom she marries after the death of Devenant. Brown’s portrayal of white male and female characters shows the variety of relationships between masters, mistresses, and bond servants. Horatio Green lacks the courage to choose Clotel above Gertrude. Green’s rejection of Gertrude and his condoning of the treatment of Mary show his moral weakness. Another of the white male characters, Reverend John Peck, to whom Currer is bound, is used by Brown to dramatize the contradictions between Christian beliefs and slavery. Conversations be-

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tween Peck and his daughter Georgiana, who sees the pernicious nature of slavery, are used to present liberal antislavery views. These ideas inform the behavior of Miles Carlton, who marries Georgiana. Georgiana manumits her African bond servants on her deathbed. Brown also portrays the slave community, but at times in a somewhat humorous fashion, as in the characterization of Sam, a servant of Peck. Sam’s brief role shows the pretensions of some Africans and their adaptation to slave status. Sam is described in a humorous manner in terms of his grooming habits and his use of language. In contrast, George, a fair-complexioned “passing” mulatto and servant of Horatio Green, is used to show solidarity within the slave community. George and Mary become romantically attached, and Mary assists him in his escape. George eventually finds his way to Canada and concerns himself with purchasing Mary’s freedom. Unable to secure her freedom, he migrates to Europe, where, ironically, he meets Mary. The marriage of Mary and George symbolizes the strength of African American love relationships despite the rigors of bondage. The theme of allegiances between bond servants is also revealed in Brown’s portrayal of William, a slave of Cooper in Vicksburg. Green assists Clotel in her escape by posing as her servant. He separates from Clotel in Cincinnati and travels to freedom in Canada. Themes and Meanings Through the use of the conventions of melodrama and slave narrative, Brown presents the characters of Currer, Clotel, and Althesa as bound by the restrictions of slavery, particularly its effects on family relationships and the bond between mother and child. Currer is portrayed as a mother whose main objective is the safety of her children. Both Clotel and Althesa are drawn as tragic mulattoes, both of whom are depicted in love relationships with white males. Clotel’s attachment to Horatio is emphasized by her depression following his marriage to a white woman. Clotel is a mirror of her mother’s commitment to the maternal connection; Clotel is also motivated by the need to reunite with her own daughter. Althesa is characterized as a concubine legitimized to a degree by marriage. Like her sister, Althesa also bears children as a result of her relationship with a white male. Ironically, her status in marriage does not provide free status for her daughters, because Althesa’s freedom had not been purchased prior to her marriage. Both Althesa and Clotel serve as representations of the tragic mulatto. Clotel is rejected and separated from her daughter; Althesa experiences married life and a more enduring connection to her daughters, Ellen and Jane. Ellen and Jane, who are presented as the granddaughters of Thomas Jefferson, show the continued exploitation of the mulatto female and the fear of sexual exploitation through concubinage. Brown also develops certain white characters, representatives of the slaveholding class. In particular, the relationship between Reverend Peck and Georgiana, his daughter, is used to express differing views of slavery. The proslavery arguments of Peck are in direct contrast to the abolitionist views of his daughter. Peck becomes

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symbolic of the hypocrisy of slaveholding Christians. The portrayal of Horatio Green, Clotel’s lover, suggests the tenuousness of interracial relationships involving mulatto females and white males. The portrayal of Gertrude, Horatio’s white wife, also suggests the jealousy and resentment of white mistresses toward African American females who were potential rivals. Brown also presents a number of African American male characters within the slave system. Sam, the bond servant of Peck, is used to explore the adaptations to bondage by black males and is given a somewhat humorous portrayal. William collaborates with Clotel in Vicksburg, assisting her in her escape. George Green also escapes from bondage with the assistance of Althesa. The portrayal of William and George reveals the support of fellow slaves and the ever-present goal to flee slavery. Stylistically, Brown’s novel combines the elements of the slave narrative with elements of melodrama and the sentimental romance. The work also reflects historical occurrences and personages, although some of the historical details have been questioned in terms of their logical continuity within the plot structure. Divided into twenty-nine chapters, most of which open with a poetic verse, the novel’s main purpose is to present a platform for the presentation of ideas of social protest. Brown develops his principal heroine as a victim of the system of slavery, which tore apart families and caused anguish for those who grieved as a result of separation. Brown manages a number of important themes: the horrors of slavery, the contradictions between the democratic ideal and Christianity, and the dilemmas of the tragic mulatto. The philosophical contradictions of American democracy are often portrayed through narrative statements that suggest the irony of depicting the daughters or granddaughters of Thomas Jefferson on the auction block or working as maidservants. Jefferson serves as a symbol of the American democratic ideal. In a number of sections, Brown emphasizes the genealogical linkage between Jefferson and the daughters and granddaughters of Currer. In chapter 1, the narrator states, “Thus closed a Negro sale, at which two daughters of Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the presidents of the great republic, were disposed to the highest bidder.” The dehumanizing effect of slavery is depicted in scenes involving the slave auctions of Richmond and New Orleans; the Africans are treated as chattel, as property to be bought and sold. The auction block becomes a repeated motif that is clearly part of the subversive intentions of an antislavery work, showing the system of slavery as reprehensible, especially in its treatment of women. The exploitation of the female slave is also a central theme of the novel. The description of “Negro balls” in the opening of the work is evidence of the sexual exploitation of quadroon and mulatto women, who are described as being reared for the purpose of concubinage. Brown probes the complexity of female biracial status. In addition, the tragic end of Currer’s life after her years of faithful service is used to exemplify the end of a female slave who has been separated irrevocably from her children. Brown also gives close attention to the issue of Christianity and slavery, using

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the white woman Georgiana as the mark of Christian conscience and abolitionism. Conversely, Gertrude is symbolic of the jealousy and resentment of white mistresses. By exploring the conditions of slaves in Natchez, Brown also depicts the “slave community.” The closing sections of the work follow the course of the sentimental novel, showing the various escapes and the romantic union of Mary and George, the mulatto survivors, in Europe. In staging the escapes of both Clotel and Mary, Brown used devices of disguise and deception, playing on the “passing” appearance of mulattoes. The romantic union of Mary and George is used to emphasize the notion that liberty for slaves could be achieved through a physical departure from American society. Critical Context The 1853 publication of Clotel in England represented another verbal attack on the system of slavery in America by Brown, who had arrived in England in 1849. Because the novel was published in England, it cannot be considered the first novel published in the United States by an African American, but it does represent the first novel written by an African American. (Harriet E. Wilson, who published Our Nig in 1859, is credited as the first African American novelist published in the United States.) Clotel did not receive a great deal of critical attention. Some critics have attributed this to its having been published shortly after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which, as an antislavery novel, had captured the attention of the British and American reading public. Another probable reason for Clotel’s neglect was the novel’s obvious attack on Jeffersonian democracy. Clotel was, however, reviewed in a number of British and American newspapers and antislavery publications, receiving mixed but generally favorable reviews. The Literary Gazette noted, “This tale of American slavery is one of deep interest. The writer has not the literary art . . . but he writes with the force and earnestness of one who has himself been a slave, and who keenly feels the wrongs of the coloured race.” Twentieth century critics have noted that Clotel contains material that could be treated in more than one novel, that there are certain historical anachronisms in the book, and that the character Clotel is an archetype of the tragic mulatto. Clotel fits within the body of Brown’s antislavery writings and grows out of his earlier work. Brown’s first published work was Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847); he later published The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848), and a travelogue, Three Years in Europe: Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852). The original Clotel was revised for an American edition, Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864). In this edition, Brown eliminated the references to Jefferson. The next version, Clotelle: Or, The Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States was published in 1867. Brown also published a play and two historical works. Brown’s Clotel is significant to the African American experience because it suggests the relationship between American democratic ideals and slavery, an issue that

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has been central to the legacy of unequal status of African Americans in American society. Furthermore, Brown evoked the conditions of the African American female slave, the plight of the mulatto, and the potential for sexual abuse and exploitation. His portrayal of the fragmentation of the African American family during the nineteenth century, moreover, finds parallels in contemporary dilemmas in black American family life. Just as important, Clotel foretells the revelation in the twentieth century that Jefferson did indeed have a slave as a lover, Sally Heming, whose story is the focus of a novel by Barbara Riboud-Chase. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Analyzes Clotel in terms of Brown’s depiction of antislavery themes as well as Brown’s romanticized presentation of Clotel as an archetype of the tragic mulatto. Argues that Brown’s work is noteworthy because he gives a view of the folkloric elements in American slave culture. Brown, William Wells. Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter—A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. Edited by Robert S. Levine. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. This critical edition includes excerpts from contemporary historical sources that serve to contextualize and comment upon Brown’s novel. Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Contains narratives and critical commentaries by a variety of authors. “I Rose and Found My Voice” points out the significance of Brown’s Narrative as authenticating Brown’s authorial voice and the novel Clotel. Farrison, William Edward. William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Provides a comprehensive critical biography of Brown. Clotel is viewed in terms of its antislavery message as well as its historical anachronisms. Gloster, Hugh. Negro Voices in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948. Notes the importance of Clotel in its depiction of the plight of biracial African Americans. The novel, based on the rumors of Jefferson’s having fathered mulatto children, provides a major irony in Clotel’s suicide within sight of the White House. Heermance, J. Noel. William Wells Brown and Clotelle: A Portrait of the Artist in the First Negro Novel. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1969. Heermance focuses on the development of Brown from abolitionist to artist. The 1864 American edition is included rather than the original 1853 British edition. Heglar, Charles J. “William Wells Brown and Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter— A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States.” In Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Comparison of Clotel to two other seminal slave narratives, providing insights into the representation of marriage in each.

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Mulvey, Christopher. “Liberating an African American Text: Editing Clotel for an Electronic Century.” In Critical Voicings of Black Liberation: Resistance and Representations in the Americas, edited by Kimberley L. Phillips et al. Münster, Germany: Lit, 2003. Details the process of reexamination and reinterpretation that went into preparing Clotel for electronic publication. Oates, Joyce Carol. “‘Tragic Mulatta’: Clotel, or, the President’s Daughter.” In Uncensored: Views and (Re)views. New York: Ecco, 2005. Review essay on Clotel by one of the foremost women in American letters. Joseph McLaren

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THE COLOR OF WATER A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother Author: James McBride (1957) Type of work: Biography/autobiography Time of work: 1920-1994 Locale: Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens, New York; Wilmington, Delaware; Suffolk, Virginia First published: 1996 Principal personages: Ruth McBride Jordan (born Rachel Deborah Shilsky), the Jewish mother of twelve biracial children Tateh, Ruth’s father and former rabbi Andrew “Dennis” McBride, Ruth’s first husband, a black musician and minister James McBride, the book’s author and the eighth child of Ruth and Dennis Form and Content In The Color of Water, James McBride tells the life stories of himself and his mother, Ruth McBride Jordan, in alternating chapters. James persuades his mother to reveal her early identity as Rachel Deborah Shilsky, born in Poland into an Orthodox Jewish family. After her family immigrated to the United States, her authoritarian father Tateh abandoned his career as an itinerant rabbi to run a grocery store in the largely African American section of Suffolk, Virginia. Ruth tells James that her father, although scrupulously religious, was a brutal, racist man who intimidated his meek, disabled wife and his two children—especially Ruth, whom he also abused sexually. Rachel Shilsky is sent to New York for an abortion after she becomes pregnant by her African American boyfriend. She soon moves permanently to Harlem, changing her name to Ruth as a way to close the door on her painful past. Her father officially disowns her when she marries an African American man, Andrew “Dennis” McBride, but she is happy to become a part of the Harlem community, especially a favorite black Baptist church. Eventually, the deeply religious couple moves to Brooklyn, where they found their own Baptist church. In Brooklyn, Ruth gives birth to her eighth child, James, and after Dennis dies, she marries another African American, Hunter Jordan, with whom she has four more children. With no interest in domestic order or domestic arts, Ruth instead instills in her children the value of learning. After her second husband dies, she finds a way to educate them on a bank clerk’s wages, sending all of them to college and some to graduate school. Ruth will not discuss her race with her children, suggesting that her skin color is un-

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important, and informing them that God is neither white nor black but “the color of water.” Nevertheless, the Black Power movement of the 1960’s leads James to feel increasingly concerned about Ruth’s safety and status in the black community: Even though his mother will never admit she is white, James is sure this is the case. The combination of the freewheeling 1960’s and his confusion about his mother’s identity lead James to leave school, to keep bad company, and to steal and take drugs. Although he eventually goes to college and becomes a professional journalist, James still feels that many of his remaining problems are related to the mystery of who his mother really is. After he persuades his mother to tell him her story, James visits Ruth’s hometown in Virginia, where he meets members of the Jewish community who welcome him warmly, allowing him to feel he is on his way to resolving a number of other conflicts in his life. As he stands outside the town’s synagogue, where his grandfather once conducted services, James no longer sees his mother as a source of anxiety or embarrassment but embraces her heritage as a part of his identity. In the end, James accepts his mother’s two selves: the sad and angry Rachel Shilsky, who nevertheless retained her culture’s respect for learning and right conduct, and the independent and indomitable Ruth McBride, whose joyful and generous spirituality became the bedrock of her new life. Analysis The Color of Water revolves around James McBride’s mother, who has two identities: One is Rachel, the frightened Jewish girl who flees her painful past to reinvent herself in New York City’s black community. Rachel’s way of raising her children turns out to be a reflection of her otherwise repudiated Jewish cultural background. This side of McBride’s mother establishes her home as a place of learning and moral instruction and, despite the domestic chaos of her household, maintains strict rules and high expectations for her children both intellectually and ethically. Her other identity is Ruth, a jubilant Baptist and an eccentric but loving mother, who allows her twelve children to assume she is a light-skinned black woman. A strong and spirited matriarch, the Ruth her children know is sustained through many crises by both her personal resourcefulness and her deep religious faith. Despite her strength, however, a layer of Ruth’s personality retains the sorrows and regrets of her childhood. The other major figure in The Color of Water is Ruth’s troubled but curious son James, who senses that he must recover the world his mother abandoned if he is to complete his own sense of identity. The process of releasing his mother from her grief and guilt-filled silence and his discovery that he is indeed biracial allows James to reconcile different aspects of his personality that he has always seen as opposed. Most important, while affirming his sense of himself as a black man, James’s journey into his mother’s past convinces him that he also possesses something of a Jewish soul. James discovers that he must recognize both his African American and his white family background if he is to construct a coherent American identity. This need to acknowledge the complex and plural historical roots of American identity forms a core

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theme of the book. Related to this understanding of identity is the importance of family history and memory: Both mother and son recover aspects of themselves through their excavation of a buried past. As part of this journey of self-discovery, McBride includes the context of America in the twentieth century, weaving his family’s personal story into such events as Jewish immigration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960’s, all of which contributed to both Ruth’s and James’s sense of themselves and their place in the world. The theme of moving beyond racial exclusivity is indicated by the title of the novel, which speaks to a transcendent color-blind ideal. A related theme is the experience of doubleness, which is suggested both thematically and structurally and which shapes the self-understanding of both mother and son. Each has two identities, one that connects to the white Jewish world and one that connects to a black Baptist community. Both mother and son ultimately recognize both of their identities as components of an integral self. Beyond the issue of cultural identity, however, is the larger story of an extraordinary woman who never allowed the numerous obstacles she faced to prevent her from doing a superior job of raising her children. The Color of Water is a tribute to James McBride’s extraordinary mother and to the wisdom of her belief in the values of education, family, and religious faith. Critical Context The Color of Water won high acclaim among reviewers and critics. The book reviewer for The Nation, Marina Budhos, praised the novel for its vivid and accomplished storytelling. Educator and activist Jonathan Kozol praised its emotional power, and Jack Geiger of The New York Times described the novel as a complex exploration of race, religion, and identity in which the power of family love emerges triumphant. In addition to its extremely positive critical reception, the book spent over two years on The New York Times best-seller list; it became the number-one novel on The New York Times paperback best-selling fiction list, remaining there for forty weeks. The novel has sold more than 1.5 million copies in the United States, has been published in more than twenty countries, and was made into a film for television. Considered a major contribution to the genre of the modern biography, The Color of Water regularly appears on course lists and as required reading at numerous American high schools and universities. Bibliography Booker, Harmony Nicole, and Emmanuel S. Nelson, eds. African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. McBride is included in a compendium of sixty-seven African American autobiographers from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Includes biographical material, a discussion of themes, and a summary of the book’s critical reception. Budhos, Marina. “Black Man, Jewish Soul.” Review of The Color of Water, by James

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McBride. The Nation, April 22, 1996, pp. 32-34. Praises the biography for its literary merit and its contribution to the current debates on race and identity. Geiger, Jack H. “Rachel and Her Children.” Review of The Color of Water, by James McBride. New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1996, p. 16. Praises the memoir as a complex and moving story of family love that transcends race and religion. Kovach, Ronald. “James McBride: Illuminating the Past—and Going Beyond It.” The Writer, June, 2003, 22-27. Insightful combined article and interview with McBride about his life, work, and the creative process. McBride, James. “Man in the Middle: James McBride Writes of His Mother’s Struggles.” Interview by Esther Iverem. The Washington Post, December 13, 1997, p. C01. Incisive interview with McBride on the Color of Water’s reception in the Jewish and African American communities; includes McBride’s reflections on race in America. Ramsey, William M. “Knowing Their Place: Three Black Writers and the Postmodern South.” The Southern Literary Journal 37, no. 2 (Spring, 2005): 119-139. Highly perceptive discussion of The Color of Water as a postmodern social narrative of a contemporary family. Margaret Boe Birns

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THE COLOR PURPLE Author: Alice Walker (1944) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: The first half of the twentieth century Locale: Rural Georgia; Memphis, Tennessee First published: 1982 Principal characters: Celie, a homely, uneducated, young black girl who becomes a woman of strength, grace, and joy Albert, Celie’s husband, a poor Georgia farmer who mistreats his wife Nettie, Celie’s smart, beautiful younger sister Shug Avery, a stylish, sexy woman who is Albert’s longtime lover Samuel, a respectable, educated preacher Corrine, Samuel’s wife, a kind woman Harpo, Albert’s son, a poor, uneducated young man Sofia, a stout, strong-willed woman who has been abused by her brothers The Novel The Color Purple is an epistolary novel made up of letters written by the heroine, Celie, to God, and letters exchanged between Celie and her sister Nettie. The correspondence tells the life story of Celie, beginning at age fourteen, when she is raped by a man “us knowed as Pa” and ending three decades later, when Celie has overcome shame and low self-esteem. Letter writing for Celie begins when her rapist stepfather tells her, “You’d better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.” Soon thereafter, Celie’s mother dies, and the mother’s husband marries Celie off to Albert, a widower with four children, whom Celie can only bring herself to call “Mr.——.” As stepmother to Albert’s four unruly and disrespectful children, as housekeeper, homemaker, and sexual object, Celie enters into a life of drudgery and abuse. When Albert’s son Harpo comes to Celie with marital problems, Celie gives him the only advice she knows, which is to beat his wife Sofia. Later, realizing the injustice of physical violence, Celie asks God to forgive her for sinning against Sofia’s spirit. Ironically, it is the entrance of Albert’s lover Shug Avery into Albert and Celie’s household that initiates the changes that lead to Celie’s freedom. Without compunction, Albert brings Shug, who is sick with “some kind of nasty woman disease,” home for Celie to nurse to health. Noisy and lively Shug, who arrives decked out in furs and

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beads, is a dramatic contrast to Celie, who tells herself, “It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree.” At first, Celie is mesmerized by Shug’s glamour and flirtatiousness. In her customary submissive manner, Celie waits on Shug slavishly. Over time, a bond develops between the women. Shug begins to defend Celie, insisting that the mean-spirited Albert quit beating her. When Shug learns that Albert has hidden the letters written to Celie by Nettie, Shug gets the key to the trunk where the letters are kept and helps Celie to retrieve them. Nettie’s letters reveal her day-to-day interaction with her new family of missionaries and with the Olinka tribe in Africa, where she has gone to live. Noting inhumane customs, Nettie finds both positive and negative aspects of her roots in Africa. Nettie intelligently describes her life in an effort to share her experiences with her sister. Until Shug comes into her life, Celie has lived without sustaining personal relationships. Cut off from Nettie by distance and by Albert’s interference, and restricted to communication with God, Celie has no experience of intimacy until friendship with Shug is established. In teaching Celie, Shug tells her, “People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” Shug shows Celie how to laugh and to feel alive. With Shug Avery, no single relationship is confining or exclusive. Shug leaves Albert, then returns married to Grady. Still married to Grady, Shug returns her amorous attention to Albert, then to Celie, and then to a nineteen-year-old boy. Celie, who would like Shug all for herself, learns to accept her friend’s philandering. In time, Shug takes Celie to her Memphis home, a big, pink, wildly decorated barnlike structure, which Shug has purchased with the riches she has earned from singing. Increasingly shedding restraints, Celie begins her own business making “folkpants.” As her life brightens, Celie learns that her father has willed to her and Nettie a house and a dry goods store back in Georgia. With a career, a big home of her own, independence, and a newfound sense of self, Celie returns to her native rural community. Nettie, who has married her good friend Samuel after his wife Corrine has died, returns to visit Celie. Albert, who has taken note of Celie as a woman for the first time, approaches her in friendship. With a sense of well-being at the end of the novel, Celie confesses to God, “But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.” The Characters Celie is a very likable heroine. Grounded in the folk life of African Americans living in the Deep South, Celie is simple yet good, withdrawn yet able to emerge from her self-preserving stoicism. Throughout her early life, Celie is sustained by her belief in God, which has been the only consistent, safe, and hopeful element in her life. Married to Mr.——, Celie becomes resigned to degradation and denial. Celie, though sad, is never disappointed,

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since she has never expected her life to be happy. Less attractive in every way than her sister Nettie, Celie is accustomed to feeling inferior. Female relationships in the novel serve to support Celie in her loneliness and in her effort to become comfortable with herself. Sofia’s pity for Celie for complying so readily with Albert’s commands points up Celie’s weakness and Sofia’s boldness. Shug’s popularity and physical attractiveness enchant Celie, while Shug’s faithlessness dismays her. Nettie’s voice, projected in her letters, is proper, intelligent, educated, and refined. In contrast, Celie’s native tongue is a thick, black dialect that is humorous in its fresh descriptions, original metaphors, and realistic dialogue. Celie develops her identity in large measure by coming to know her similarities with and differences from the other women in the story, by accepting herself as she is, and by learning to blossom—like the purple flowers found growing unchecked in southern fields. Most of the men in the story are portrayed negatively. Albert, who is lazy and disrespectful, considers work to be women’s domain. Likewise, his son Harpo shares some of his father’s patronizing attitudes toward women. Given to drinking, womanizing, and generally indulging themselves, the male characters appear to be weak-willed and amoral. The exceptions to this pattern are Samuel and Adam. A model Christian, Samuel leaves the rural South, escaping inherited and societal patterns of behavior. Adam’s devotion to his African girlfriend, despite the fact that she has had her face carved in accordance with an African tribal custom, shows compassion and commitment not seen in Adam’s male relatives in Georgia. The only characters more negatively depicted than Albert are the white townspeople, who appear to be rude, prejudiced, ignorant, and unprincipled. Sofia’s enforced tenure as a maid for the mayor’s wife is punishment for Sofia’s insubordination. Treated as a slave, Sofia is a servant and a convenience for the mayor’s family. The day Sofia is free to visit her family, the mayor’s wife, unable to drive her automobile back home, sees to it that Sofia turns right back around to take her home. When the mayor’s daughter, Eleanor Jane, visits Sofia with her new baby, it is apparent that the affection between Sofia and this young white girl she has reared is not mutual. Sofia is honest enough to tell Eleanor Jane that, after all the mayor’s family has put her through, Sofia is not endeared to the family’s progeny. In an about-face, Eleanor Jane ends up looking after Harpo’s sick daughter Henrietta so that Sofia can work in Celie’s dry goods store. Thus there is at least partial reparation made to Sofia on the part of the mayor’s family, a fact that underscores Celie’s own journey toward reparation and healing. Themes and Meanings The concept of the regenerative power of love and the murderous effects of meanness is manifest in Alice Walker’s works. The author’s novels, short stories, poetry, and essays are all about a search for understanding and truth. Celie’s story is a transcription of her psychological and spiritual growth. Through the device of letter writ-

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ing, Walker brings her audience into intimate communication with Celie, the principal storyteller in the novel. As a poor, half-literate black woman, Celie lacks the apparatus for success and happiness. Her transfiguration into a joyful soul proves that redemption is possible for all people open to human kindness and love. Soulful poetry emerges from Celie’s speech, with its lyrical cadences. “Angels strike they cymbals, one of them blow his horn, God blow out a big breath of fire and suddenly Sofia free,” Celie writes of Sofia’s homecoming. The figurative and expressive qualities of Celie’s language make the novel more than simply a story. Inherent in the epistolary format of the book is the idea that language itself can be salvific. Celie’s letters for a time are her only sustaining lifeline, as they confirm her existence. Celie’s words are evidence of a life lived. Celie’s relationships, described in Celie’s own disjointed style, are well-drawn and colorful. Her native Georgia community comes to life as a network of individual characters. Sensitive to conflict in male-female relationships, Walker explores masculine and feminine psyches in The Color Purple. Female love is the strongest emotion in the book. Often called a feminist, Walker prefers the term “womanist,” to indicate the sexual and nonsexual affection among women. Celie’s struggle to accept or reject abuse dominates her interaction with Albert. Celie is portrayed as basically good, whereas Albert is portrayed as villainous. Critical commentary on these polar characters varies. Some readers believe that the disparate character depictions are historically accurate, while others believe the book’s men are misrepresented as abject beings. Imagery in the story is drawn from everyday, often domestic, scenery. The image of Celie as a tree suggests that she is a static force, planted in a confining role. Using garden imagery, Walker employs as a primary symbol the purple flowers in the fields. Shug tells Celie, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Knowing the spiritual value of the material world, Shug urges Celie to take pleasures that God gives freely. In this way, Shug gently prods Celie away from her emotional paralysis. The multiple interpretations of the novel show the book’s depth. As with all good literature, The Color Purple can be examined from many contexts: moral, cultural, political, historical, aesthetic, and spiritual. That so much richness comes from the mouthpiece of a character as naïve as Celie is evidence of the power of honest storytelling. Critical Context When Steven Spielberg adapted The Color Purple for film in 1984, Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award-winning novel gained international prominence, as did the writer herself. Not only does the novel mark the apex of Walker’s career, but it is also her happiest, most life-affirming work. Prior to Walker’s triumphant third novel, she had published The Third Life of

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Grange Copeland (1970) and Meridian (1976). Additionally, Walker has excelled as a lyrical poet, an essayist, and a short-story writer. A ten-year anniversary edition of The Color Purple appeared in 1992, the same year that Walker’s fourth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, debuted. Possessing the Secret of Joy is linked to The Color Purple, as the later novel’s main character, Tashi, is Celie’s son’s girlfriend in the earlier novel. Amid the lavish praise for The Color Purple have been some stringent critics, who are offended by the portraits of many of the characters. Contending that racism is strengthened by the unsavory qualities in the book’s black male characters and that Celie is a thin and unbelievable character, some critics believe the book harms, rather than helps, African Americans. Other critics, though, have praised the novel’s effective use of setting and scenery. Walker sees into the life of African Americans living in the Deep South as she picks up on the rhythms of life she came to know in her own youth. In spite of the possible unrealistic aspects of the novel, The Color Purple has become a classic, read and studied by many as an examination of a black woman fighting traditions that could only keep her oppressed, subservient, and enslaved. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Collection of essays about The Color Purple by scholars, who discuss such issues as the role of nation and the representation of the senses in the novel. Christian, Barbara. “Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1983. Examines thematic patterns in Walker’s work. Points out issues inherent in the role of the black female artist, such as the need for conflict leading to change. Davis, Thadious M. “Alice Walker’s Celebration of Self in Southern Generations.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Focuses on themes and patterns apparent in Walker’s work, from her poetry through The Color Purple. Shows Walker’s need to resolve her intellectualism with her rural roots. Dixon, Henry O. Male Protagonists in Four Novels of Alice Walker: Destruction and Development in Interpersonal Relationships. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Comprehensive reader of Walker’s representation of masculinity and gender relationships using four novels as exemplars, as well as making broader points about the novelist’s aesthetic. Iannone, Carol. “A Turning of the Critical Tide?” Commentary 88 (November, 1989): 57-59. Discusses the political dimension of Walker’s fiction. Claiming that Walker writes from a militant feminist standpoint, Iannone contends that praise for The Color Purple results from “literary affirmative action.” Ironically, Iannone notes, the down-and-out characters in Walker’s work move toward more conventional, middle-class lifestyles.

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Simcikova, Karla. To Live Fully, Here and Now: The Healing Vision in the Works of Alice Walker. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007. Argues that a broad multiplicity of discourses, concerns, and issues has shaped Walker’s fiction; attempts to reread that fiction through the lens of late twentieth and early twenty-first century global culture. Towers, Robert. “Good Men Are Hard to Find.” Review of The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. The New York Review of Books, August 12, 1982, 35-36. This oftenquoted review points out major flaws in The Color Purple, including the book’s contrived and overly dramatic plotting. Towers, however, concludes that the poetry of Celie’s language transcends the novel’s imperfections. Watkins, Mel. “Some Letters Went to God.” Review of The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. The New York Times Book Review, July 25, 1982, 7. Comprehensive review of The Color Purple consisting of analysis of theme and technique. Author notes the weakness of Nettie’s stiff voice yet praises the effective implementation of epistolary style. Mary Brantley

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THE COLORED MUSEUM Author: George C. Wolfe (1954) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Satire; experimental Time of plot: 1980’s Locale: Various locations, including an airplane, a television set, and a living room First produced: 1986, at the Crossroads Theatre Company, New York, New York First published: 1988 Principal characters: Miss Pat, a flight attendant Aunt Ethel, the host of a cooking show Guy, a fashion model Girl, a fashion model Junie Robinson, a soldier Miss Roj, a drag queen Mama, a religious matriarch Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie-Jones, Mama’s son The Man, a businessman The Kid, his younger self Lala Lamazing Grace, a singer Normal Jean Reynolds, a woman whose baby is an egg Topsy Washington, a hip young woman The Play The Colored Museum, as has often been pointed out, is not set in a museum, and none of its characters ever utters the word “museum.” Instead, it is a series of eleven separate scenes or “exhibits” performed without intermission. Each has its own title, and each illustrates a different facet of African American life in the 1980’s. In many of the scenes, characters speak directly to the audience, exhibiting different examples of racism and of surrender to victimhood. For example, the first exhibit, “Git on Board,” is spoken by the smiling Miss Pat, a female flight attendant, delivering to the audience a version of the typical instructions given to passengers before an airplane takes off. However, Miss Pat is the flight attendant on a slave ship bound for Savannah, Georgia, and she instructs her passengers not to play drums or rebel but to fasten their shackles and sing spirituals. The second exhibit is “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel,” a parody of a television cooking show whose star speaks, and wears a bandana, like a stereotypical Mammy character. Aunt Ethel demonstrates a recipe for “Negroes” that includes such ingredients as rhythm, attitude, and style. “The Photo Session” features a Guy and a Girl, models for Ebony magazine, who have internalized the values of materialism and consumerism.

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Junie Robinson, the titular “Soldier with a Secret” in the play’s third scene, admits that he has killed some of his comrades in arms, believing that death in combat was preferable to the pain of oppression. “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” one of the play’s most controversial exhibits, is spoken by a beautiful drag queen, who includes homophobia among the types of oppression she has faced. One of the funniest exhibits, “The Hairpiece,” features two speaking wigs and challenges European-influenced ideas about beauty. In “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” the longest scene, an urban African American family struggles with poverty and racism. Characters in this scene include Mama, her son Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie-Jones, his feminist poet wife, and the Greek figure Medea. “Symbiosis” features a successful businessman who tries to assimilate into white culture and put his younger self behind him, while “Lala’s Opening” features an African American woman who adopts a fake French accent and manner, forsaking her own past. Normal Jean Reynolds, in “Permutations,” is a young woman optimistically laying an egg. “The Party,” the play’s concluding scene, brings back characters from earlier scenes, who dance in front of projected slides that quickly summarize African American history. The scene is loud and energetic, with characters talking over one another, emphasizing the chaos and contradictions that make up the museum. Themes and Meanings Beginning with the word “Colored” in the title, The Colored Museum announces its complicated relationship with the past. By 1986, when the play was first performed, the word “colored” was considered at best old-fashioned and at worst racist, and it would have made 1980’s audiences quite uncomfortable. Its inclusion in the title signals George C. Wolfe’s determination to unblinkingly confront African American history. The first “exhibit,” “Git on Board,” is about slavery, and other scenes address segregation, the loss of African religion, and the role of African Americans in the military. Wolfe calls upon African Americans to look closely at their history and to see the ways they have been limited by it, so they might find ways to move forward. He also calls upon white people to see clearly the evils of racism and oppression. His hope is that the attitudes displayed in the play will be regarded as museum pieces: unchanging exhibits of the past, rather than living moments or models for the future. Another theme of the play is the role of African American literature in the development of the culture. In “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” Wolfe boldly makes fun of perhaps the best-known play by an African American writer, Loraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (pr., pb. 1959). Wolfe’s Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie-Jones is a parody of Hansberry’s Walter Lee, and Wolfe makes a mockery of Mama, Walter Lee’s mother, who guides her family with wisdom and strength from her seat on the couch. The play also refers to other African American dramas, to the slave Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1851-1852, serial; 1852, book), and to the music of Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and the Temptations. Wolfe has commented in interviews that he respects the litera-

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ture and music he parodies, but just as it is time for African Americans to leave stereotypical attitudes in a museum, so it is time to retire the old forms of art and create new ones. Critical Context Wolfe was born in segregated Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1954, and he felt unwelcome at the integrated high school he attended, until he found his way to the school’s theater department. He started college at Kentucky State University but completed his degree at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he wrote his first plays. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles and taught theater to inner-city children, experiencing for the first time the diversity of people and ideas that thrives in a major city. In the late 1970’s, he moved to New York City. There, The Colored Museum opened at the Crossroads Theatre in 1986. The Colored Museum was controversial from its opening. While many audience members were offended by the play’s edgy satire, critics generally reviewed the play favorably, admiring Wolfe’s wit and his courage in boldly pointing out ways in which both African Americans and whites were complicit in the oppression of African Americans. Many of these critics were white men, writing for important periodicals such as The New York Times, New York magazine, and The New Republic, and they praised Wolfe for the biting satire directed, in part, at them. An exchange of analyses in The Village Voice, a liberal New York newspaper, demonstrates the controversy surrounding the play: Thulani Davis, an African American critic and playwright, challenged the play as misogynist and reflective of self-hate, while critic Michael Feingold celebrated the plays’s use—and abuse—of stereotypical characters. The controversy fueled ticket sales, and the play was a commercial success, as well as the winner of the Elizabeth Hull-Kate Warriner Award, presented by the Dramatist’s Guild to the best play dealing with a social, religious, or political topic. The play itself makes reference to earlier African American literature, saluting and moving beyond such important works as Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (pr., pb. 1975), and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). In making satirical references to these and other works, The Colored Museum stakes out its own place in African American literature: indebted to earlier work, but making a deliberate break from it. Bibliography Catanese, Brandi Wilkins. “‘And the Rest Is L.A. History’: Autobiographical Strategies in The Colored Museum.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 14, no. 1 (Winter, 2002): 15-28. Examines Wolfe’s life in California between college and his move to New York City, as reflected in his most influential play. Davis, Thulani. “Sapphire Attire.” Review of The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe. The Village Voice 31, no. 45 (November 11, 1986): 91. Finds the play funny but ultimately trivializing.

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Elam, Harry J., Jr. “Signifyin(g) on African-American Theatre: The Colored Museum by George Wolfe.” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 291-303. Explores the ways in which Wolfe’s play parodies, illuminates, and challenges earlier African American plays. Euell, Kim. “Signifyin(g) Ritual: Subverting Stereotypes, Salvaging Icons.” African American Review 31, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 667-675. Places The Colored Museum as the starting point of a black drama charged with challenging racist stereotypes. Lists playwrights following or influenced by Wolfe, including Michael Henry Brown, Robert Alexander, and Matt Robinson. Jackson, Pamela Faith. Black Comedy—Nine Plays: A Critical Anthology with Interviews and Essays. New York: Applause, 1997. Includes the full text of the play, as well as an interview with L. Kenneth Richardson, the play’s original artistic director, discussing The Colored Museum and black theater. Jung, Byung-Eon. “Fantasy Space and the Subversive Desire of ‘the Uncanny’ in African American Drama.” Journal of Modern British and American Drama 18, no. 3 (December, 2005): 165-192. Thematic analysis of The Colored Museum and of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (pr. 1987, pb. 1990). Little, Benilde. “George C. Wolfe: On Our Beauty and Complexity.” Essence 21, no. 10 (February, 1991): 35. To prepare audiences for the public television production of The Colored Museum, Wolfe explains why making viewers uncomfortable is important to his work. Silverstein, Marc. “‘Any Baggage You Don’t Claim, We Trash’: Living With(in) History in The Colored Museum.” American Drama 8, no. 1 (Fall, 1998): 95-121. Argues that The Colored Museum challenges African Americans to understand and live both with and within history. Cynthia A. Bily

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COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI Author: Anne Moody (1940Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1950’s-1960’s Locale: Mississippi First published: 1968

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Principal personages: Anne Moody (Essie Mae), who provides a firsthand account of the emerging Civil Rights movement Toosweet, Anne’s mother, who reflects the Old South in which African Americans were no longer enslaved in name but remained so in practice Diddly, Anne’s father, who abandons the family Raymond, Toosweet’s second husband Form and Content In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody reflects on her childhood as the first of nine children born to poor tenant farmers in rural Mississippi. She also provides a telling glimpse into that period in southern culture between 1940 and 1965 when African Americans still labored in fields as sharecroppers for white landowners but growing unrest led to the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. Dividing her autobiography into four distinct parts, she covers her education in segregated primary and secondary schools then relates her experiences in college and later as a civil rights activist. The Moody family was constantly moving from one run-down shack without electricity or plumbing to another, barely surviving on bread and beans with occasional table scraps from white employers. Anne helped by caring for her younger siblings and then working as a housecleaner and babysitter for white landowners. She was unaware of any racial divide until, when she was seven, she and two siblings followed some white playmates into the segregated lobby of a local movie theater. The ensuing ruckus brought her the sad realization that she was perceived as inferior to whites. Rather than railing at the unfairness of this perception, she became an observer, an inquisitor into the strange idea that skin color had anything to do with who she was. Moody attended segregated schools, initially accepting her status because she was eager to learn. Increasingly, however, her anger grew, especially when she saw the doctrine of “separate but equal” for what it was: separate and inferior, with leftovers used to furnish African American schools, cast-off texts to educate African American students, and sometimes ill-qualified teachers forced through fear into passing along the safe doctrine of “go along, don’t make waves, stay alive.”

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A week before Moody entered high school in 1955, Emmet Till, a young African American visiting Mississippi from Chicago, was brutally murdered for paying special attention to a local white woman. Moody’s white employer warned her that such consequences were to be expected when people didn’t know their station. For a while, she feared for her own life, never before having thought of herself as vulnerable to violence just because of her race. She also feared that her deficient education would hurt her chances to go to college, but she was awarded a basketball scholarship to Natchez Junior College and there proved her mettle academically. Moody’s admittance to Tougaloo College as a junior was stressful because of what was referred to as a “high yellow” student population. Discrimination was rife within the African American community, with lighter shades of skin deemed the most desirable. The dark-skinned Moody forged ahead and made a name for herself. She joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an illegal organization in Mississippi, and, later, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Her defiance of long-held southern tradition through her chosen path of activism caused a severe rift with Moody’s family and among townspeople, because activist activities on the part of even one family or community member put everyone at risk. Beatings, burnings, and murder threats often resulted. Moody’s name appeared on a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) list of undesirables, but she was unrelenting. In 1963, at a Jackson, Mississippi, Woolworth lunch counter sit-in, Moody was slapped across the face and slammed into a wall. She was doused with ketchup, mustard, sugar, and pies and witnessed a fellow demonstrator having salt rubbed into his bleeding wound. About ninety police officers stood outside, bearing silent witness for three hours. Moody’s activism made her subject to constant surveillance, daily threats, and repeated arrests. Once she was held captive with other protesters on a hot summer day, without water or air, in a paddy wagon with the heat turned on full blast. Finding little time for proper eating or adequate sleep while fighting for civil rights, she was on the verge of mental and physical collapse. Eventually, believing that racism was too deeply ingrained in the South for any serious change to occur, she dropped her associations and gained some catharsis through her writing. Her pain led her to a somewhat reclusive life, however, and she remained out of the limelight, refusing requests for interviews. Analysis Moody’s conflicting emotions during these turbulent years led to a level of dissatisfaction and intolerance that flavored most of her contacts. She hated whites for their violence and close-mindedness but was equally distressed by African Americans who succumbed to fear, behaving as whites would have them behave, going along, and suffering injustice. Lukewarm responses to African American voter registration drives left her feeling hopeless and may have been the driving force in her decision to leave the movement.

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She had wanted her community to fight back, face its oppressors, and stand up to club-wielding officers and snarling dogs. She may have been too young and idealistic to understand what lengths parents will go to in order to protect their children, preferring them outwardly subservient to dead. She declared that the African American populace was like a slathering dog on a strong leash. It could bark, sometimes bite, but ultimately it was under the control of the master. She also wondered where the movement was heading. The ministers appeared to be running scared, the leadership unable to provide solid direction. They all spoke from their middle-class backgrounds, not addressing the people she knew. She wanted to see practical steps taken to change the plight of sharecroppers. She wanted to help them buy the land that was rightfully theirs and not have to look to whites for handouts. In the end, Moody concluded that the Civil Rights movement was too narrowly defined, that all people of all races and backgrounds, all minority groups, needed to be guaranteed the rights granted them in the Constitution through the enforcement of the laws already on the books. Critical Context Moody considered herself more of a civil rights activist than a writer, but Coming of Age in Mississippi provided its readers with a significant new perspective on the turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement. Moody was the first to write from within the society of those needing the help: the undereducated, disenfranchised, tenant farmers whose livelihood depended on staying in the good graces of the white population. Hers was the most direct voice of the most oppressed rural African Americans, not coming from the wealthy or middle classes of Martin Luther King, Jr., or W. E. B. Du Bois. She also made it possible for readers to see her fellows’ horrific living conditions and growing anger through the eyes of a child, as she detailed the grinding poverty, the backbreaking labor, the violence, and the hunger amid which she grew up. Moody’s account avoids the easy polemics of good triumphing over evil, a noble cause fought for by noble people with good intent. Instead, it is balanced, in that she faults both sides, sometimes hating whites for perpetrating unspeakable acts of horror, sometimes vilifying African Americans for going along with the sham of a quiet smile in response to an insult. In struggling with conflicting feelings, Moody allows readers to share her dilemma. Her book speaks for and about all those who have endured an oppressive system and continue to fight for rights that should be guaranteed at birth. It goes beyond Mississippi to all places where people are oppressed. She explores the role of race and racism in America, helping readers understand the South before and during the Civil Rights movement, forcing people to see both how far the nation has come and how much further it needs to go. Moody earned widespread critical acclaim. She received the Brotherhood Award from the National Council of Christians and Jews and the Best Book of the Year Award from the National Library Association. The work is considered a classic, and Senator Ted Kennedy called it “ . . . powerful . . . a timely reminder that we cannot . . . relax in the struggle for sound justice in America.”

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Bibliography Andrews, William L. “In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies.” The Southern Review 24, no. 1 (Winter, 1988): 47-64. Presents an excellent overview of Mississippi life as detailed in works by two white and two African American autobiographers: William Percy (1941) and Willie Morris (1967), and Richard Wright (1945) and Anne Moody (1968). Bloom, Lynn Z. “Coming of Age in the Segregated South: Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Black and White.” In Home Ground: Southern Autobiography, edited by J. Bill Berry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Good at putting Moody’s work into the context of autobiographical literature of African Americans, both male and female. Equates Moody’s work with that of Richard Wright, Harriet Jacobs, and Willie Morris. Hart, Joyce. “Coming of Age in Mississippi.” In Nonfiction Classics for Students. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Draws parallels between Moody’s and Richard Wright’s lives and shows how the tenors of their differing times, the 1950’s and the 1960’s, led Wright to communism and to political self-exile and Moody to activism followed by self-imposed social exile. Korb, Rena. “Coming of Age in Mississippi.” In Nonfiction Classics for Students. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Provides a backdrop to Moody’s autobiography and an in-depth analysis of the author’s motivations for joining the Civil Rights movement as well as her possible reasons for leaving it. Nelson, Emmanuel S. “Anne Moody.” In African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Compares Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi to the autobiographical writings of many other prominent African Americans. Gay Pitman Zieger

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COMING UP DOWN HOME A Memoir of a Southern Childhood Author: Cecil Brown (1943) Type of work: Memoir Time of work: 1940’s-1960’s and 1990 Locale: Bolton, North Carolina; New York, New York First published: 1993 Principal personages: Morris (Cecil) Brown, a young black boy Cornelius “Knee” Brown, his younger brother Amanda Freeman, their father’s sister, a warm-hearted, hard-working woman who mothers the little boys after their mother leaves them Lofton Freeman, their uncle and foster father, a good, kindly man whom the boys call “Daddy” Dorothy Brown, their mother, a pretty but weak woman Culphert “Cuffy” Brown, their father, an ex-convict, a harsh, embittered man who rules his wife and his children through fear Connie Marie Dana Waddell, Dorothy’s mother, who is the matriarch of her branch of the author’s family Roy Melvin, a harmonica-playing, good-humored man who works on the railroad with Lofton Form and Content Coming Up Down Home is a touching story of the author’s early years, when, as a black boy in rural North Carolina, he is seeking to understand the world around him. Although eventually he comes to blame racism for many of the evils in that world, Cecil Brown is also aware of the differences in character between the various relatives who have authority over him. In fact, his episodic narrative is unified by this latter emphasis, Brown’s perception of the ways these individuals conducted their own lives and shaped his character. The author has divided Coming Up Down Home into three major sections and a brief epilogue. The first part of the book, “Pickaninny,” deals with his early years, when Cecil, then called Morris, and his brother Cornelius, or “Knee,” who was just a year his junior, lived happily with their aunt and uncle, Amanda and Lofton Freeman. In the second section, “Dancing Without Shoes,” the boys are forced to adapt to a new kind of life with their bitter, abusive father and the mother whom they have never known. “Make Voyages!” describes Morris’s disillusioning but enlightening summer in New York City. It concludes with his returning home and, after a desperate effort,

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winning a scholarship to college. The brief epilogue, or “Coda,” takes place thirty years later, when Brown revisits his childhood home and confronts the father who so long ago forfeited his son’s love. Brown’s memoir begins with scenes in which, when he is still little more than a baby, he comes to realize that he does not have the kind of relationship with his parents that other children have. In the first chapter, he is introduced to a woman who he is told is his mother, Dorothy Brown, but whom he remembers as someone who threw her shoe at him when he tried to follow her in her flight from her children. Seeing her again, Morris is understandably hostile. Soon, however, he realizes that he craves affection from her. On a visit to the prison where their father, Culphert “Cuffy” Brown, is incarcerated, Morris feels a similar ambivalence. On one hand, he is drawn to this man, who seems so gentle and so loving; on the other hand, he cannot help thinking of him as someone who is being punished for bad deeds or, alternatively, as a glamorous outlaw. Fortunately, the childless aunt and uncle who have taken in Morris and Knee are as superior in parenting skills as the boys’ own parents are deficient. Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lofton give them the sense of security they need, assuring them of unconditional love while at the same time transmitting their own uncompromising values. Brown remembers his years with them as a golden time, when Aunt Amanda made even cotton picking fun and when Uncle Lofton demonstrated how to make dreams come true, even those that seemed impossible, such as Morris’s yearning for a bicycle like that of the white store-owner’s son. The lives of the boys are filled with the smells of Aunt Amanda’s pies, with the magic of Roy Melvin’s songs and stories, and occasionally with high drama, such as the first performance of a new preacher or the visit of a group of gospel singers. Even in this sunny world, there are shadows. At school and from his friends, Morris learns that sex, though fascinating, can be tainted with shame. In his excursions into the white community, he sees the contempt that many whites have for African Americans. Most important of all, by taking Morris to visit relatives such as Connie Marie Dana Waddell, the imperious “Mrs. Commie,” Uncle Lofton shows him that his inheritance includes not only the admirable qualities of his highly respected grandfather Cecil but also the irresponsible hedonism of his mother’s people, the Waddells, and, on his father’s side, a tendency toward drunkenness and violence. When Morris is thirteen, Culphert is finally released from prison. With Dorothy, he turns up to claim the boys. They are naturally reluctant to leave the people they think of as parents and the comfortable home in which they have been so happy. Because they have seen their real parents only at their best, Morris and Cornelius have no reason to expect ill-treatment from them. They soon learn better. Taken to an isolated plot of land deep in the swamp, the boys are set to work as farm hands, with Culphert playing the role of overseer, punishing them for even the slightest deviation from his rules. Their terrified mother is afraid even to show them affection, much less to intervene on their behalf. Culphert thinks that education is a waste of time and that books, like shoes, are a useless luxury. Only after Lofton rebukes him does he permit the

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boys to return to school. Toward the end of his time with his father, Morris has some success in outwitting him by appealing to his sense of pride. In this way, he obtains permission to join a young farmers’ organization and the band. His father even buys him a saxophone. When Morris decides to spend a summer working in New York City before returning in the fall for his final year of high school, he has to sneak away without telling Culphert of his plans. In the first two chapters of the third section, Brown describes his first “voyage” out of the South. Although this period in the country boy’s life is exciting, it is also a time of disillusionment, as he comes to see that the freedom to talk with or even to sleep with a white woman does not mean that a black man in the North has any more opportunities for economic advancement than one in the South. What could well happen to him in the North is symbolized by the situation of the old jazz musician Rufus, who “borrows” Morris’s treasured saxophone, supposedly to play it but actually to sell it for drug money. This incident shocks Morris, not only because he has been betrayed by another African American and a fellow musician but also because he realizes that despair can cause anyone to abandon his principles and throw away his life. Without an education, he decides, he would be even more helpless in the North than in the South. After Morris returns home, his father presents him with what to many would seem the opportunity of a lifetime. Having made money from land leases, Culphert promises property to his older son, even a college education, if only Morris will stay and work with him. Although Morris knows that his financial prospects would be brighter with his father than if he worked at a factory job in town, he also knows that he can no longer endure Culphert’s abuse or even his proximity, so he refuses the offer. Then, providentially, he wins a college scholarship. Obviously proud of him, Culphert gives Morris a typewriter and a kind of apology. In the final chapter of Coming Up Down Home, Brown revisits Bolton, his mother and father, his aunt and uncle, and the friends who are still there. Seeing them, he cannot help imagining what might have happened to him if he had remained. More important, despite memories of mistreatment that can never be erased, he comes to terms with his father. When Culphert at last tells Morris what he remembers of the night when, in a drunken rage, he killed a friend, the night that changed him into the man his sons so feared, Brown gains a new understanding not only of his father but also of himself. Analysis The effect of immediacy that Brown achieves in Coming Up Down Home makes the work seem more like a novel than a memoir. Typically a memoir includes comments on the significance of events, reflecting the author’s mature understanding of them. In contrast, in this work Brown forgoes the opportunity to make comments from an adult point of view, instead concentrating on what he recalls thinking and feeling as a child. Appropriately, Brown’s style is simple and precise, almost reportorial. The de-

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scriptive details, the snatches of dialogue, and even the fully developed dramatic scenes are all presented without interpretation, except as Aunt Amanda or, more often, Uncle Lofton use them as object lessons or as Morris, maturing, gains new insights. Thus it is not until Morris returns from his first trip to the North that he sees clearly what southern segregation does to the human spirit, and it is not until the coda, set many years later, that he comes to understand his father’s tragedy. As the title suggests, Coming Up Down Home is a story of the process of growing up. Surprisingly, given the circumstances, Brown’s account is much more positive than one might expect. Although as an African American in the rural South of the 1940’s and 1950’s he experienced his share of humiliation, Brown does not present himself as a stereotypical victim of social oppression. Furthermore, although he was deserted by his mother and abused by his father, thus certainly qualifying as a member of what popular psychologists call a dysfunctional family, he does not use that situation as an excuse for later failure. Instead, he tells an inspiring story of a boy determined to overcome obstacles, a boy who was always, in Brown’s concluding words, “dancing as fast as I can,” with shoes or without them. If Coming Up Down Home is basically an optimistic story, it is neither simplistic nor sentimental. Brown carefully distinguishes between the loss of innocence that is simply a part of growing up and the loss of innocence that is the product of evil in human beings and in society. Morris’s developing awareness of sexuality, for example, is a universal experience. Everyone remembers times of titillation, confusion, and shame in early childhood not unlike Morris’s fascination with his teacher’s scent, his unwillingness to touch his aunt’s “nasty” panties, and his bewilderment when he is punished for saying words he does not realize are not suitable in general conversation. On the other hand, no child should have to experience either parental tyranny or racism, both of which result from human immorality rather than being part of the human condition. Initially, Morris is afraid of people who are white in color simply because they do not look like him. Thus he fears not only the temper of his light-skinned grandmother but also her very appearance. When he realizes that Morris cannot tell the difference between his own part-white relatives and white strangers, Uncle Lofton takes him to meet the extended family in all their variety, dark and light, rich and poor, clean and dirty, pleasure-loving and hard-working. This expedition expands Morris’s sense of his heritage. He is struck by the references to relatives who have moved north to “pass” for white; obviously, he thinks, it must be better to be white than to be black, or they would not break off with their family in order to do so. Gradually, young Morris begins to see a pattern. Black people such as his father are prisoners, whites are guards; African Americans are the customers at stores owned by whites; and African Americans such as his aunt are employees at clubs that only whites can patronize. Even though some African Americans, such as his grandfather Cecil, have attained economic independence and the respect of the white community by acquiring land, most of them accept the white society’s assumption that to be black is to be inferior. Sensing this, Morris and his brother respond with hostility. Knee ex-

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presses himself by urinating through a hole in the Anchorage Club ceiling onto the unsuspecting white guests at a party below. Later, the boys are the victims of blatant discrimination when their magic act is turned down by a television station simply because the amateur magicians are black. In part, it is his experience of racism in the South that causes Morris to flee to New York City, where he assumes things will be better. He discovers that although he can sit in a waiting room with whites and even have an affair with a white girl, he has no more chance of getting a decent job in New York than he had in Bolton. When, after returning home, Morris deliberately breaks a statue of Sambo that is the pride and joy of his father’s employer, he is expressing the resentment of a lifetime. To Morris’s surprise, however, the father he has so feared bows and scrapes to the owner of the statue and even insists on replacing the figure that so insults his own race. It is many years later that Morris comes to recognize what may well be an underlying cause of his father’s brutality to his sons: his own sense of inferiority to whites. Nevertheless, Brown resists the temptation to oversimplify by blaming society alone for Culphert’s cruelty, pointing out a family tendency toward violence and suggesting that his father may be jealous of a son who always succeeds where he fails, not only in school but also at farming. When he gives Morris a typewriter to take to college, Culphert is admitting how much he respects his son. It is regrettable that though as adults Cecil Brown and his father can come to a new understanding, they can never recapture the years they lost. One of the major emphases in Brown’s memoir is the importance of a loving, caring, nurturing family in the life of a child. Perhaps Morris and Cornelius could not have survived the years with their real parents had they not first had an idyllic period with their aunt and uncle, who not only cherished them but also imparted their own values to the children. Brown shows how Aunt Amanda taught the boys that hard work brings its own joys and its own rewards, while evil deeds are never worthwhile. Uncle Lofton gives the children a sense of family. Through their music, their storytelling, and their participation in their community, both foster parents transmit to the children their own pride in their black heritage. With this beginning, it is not surprising that Morris is able to reach maturity firmly convinced that he is equal to anyone. Critical Context Cecil Brown’s first work, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969), was the story of a young man from the rural South who ventured forth to test himself and to learn about life, first in Harlem and later in Copenhagen, Denmark. Although, as Richard Rhodes pointed out in The New York Times Book Review, Brown’s book reflected the influence of such novels as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1915) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), most critics thought that The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger lacked the intellectual depth of the author’s models and was little more than a summary of the protagonist’s sexual exploits. If, as has been suggested, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger was largely au-

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tobiographical, it is evident that during the two decades between its publication and that of Brown’s third book, Coming Up Down Home, Brown learned to view the events of his own childhood with the detachment of an accomplished artist. Ironically, Brown exhibits less self-consciousness in his memoir than he did in his first venture into fiction. Moreover, over the years Brown seems to have replaced his youthful cynicism with a profound perception of the complexity of human motivations and the unpredictability of human life. As a result, it appears likely that Coming Up Down Home, which has been called by one critic “a work of classic proportions,” will place Brown among the best of African American writers. Bibliography Brown, Cecil. Afterword to Target Zero: A Life in Writing, by Eldridge Cleaver. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Brown’s commentary on the importance of Cleaver’s life and writing showcases the writer’s political and literary investments in general and provides a valuable lens for assessing his own work. Carroll, Rebecca. Swing Low: Black Men Writing. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1995. Includes a chapter on Brown’s life and work, reading him at the intersection of race and gender to evaluate his contributions to the ongoing representation of each in African American literature. Kirkus Reviews. Review of Coming Up Down Home, by Cecil Brown. 61 (May 15, 1993). In a simple style reflecting “the child’s naïve perspective,” Brown has told a story that is often touching. Although he focuses on aspects of both South and North that approach the stereotypical, Brown’s memoir is “particularized and engaging in the telling.” Publishers Weekly. Review of Coming Up Down Home, by Cecil Brown. 240 (May 10, 1993): 60. A favorable review noting that, although Brown has skillfully particularized his story, the childhood he recalls has universal dimensions. This story of a boy who grew up “poor but loved” is “totally engrossing.” Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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THE CONDITION, ELEVATION, EMIGRATION, AND DESTINY OF THE COLORED PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES POLITICALLY CONSIDERED Author: Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885) Type of work: Essay First published: 1852 Form and Content The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered is a political essay meant for two audiences— the entire nation and the free black community in the Northern states. It focuses on what Martin Delany called “truths” pertinent to race relations in the United States. Consisting of twenty-three chapters plus an appendix, it covers a wide range of themes on black-white relationships from the colonization of the New World to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of a compromise package meant to diffuse the mounting sectional conflict over the admission of new states. The federal government pledged its resources to the apprehension of escaped slaves (fugitives). Since the law did not set down guidelines for identifying who was a fugitive, it threatened free African Americans with reenslavement. Many of them described the law as yet further evidence of the national capitulation to slave interests and of a nationwide attempt to keep black people in perpetual subordination. Two years earlier, at a state convention of the Colored Men of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, delegates concluded that “complexional intolerance” (racism), and not “conditional basis” (black poverty and backwardness), as hitherto assumed, determined white attitudes toward black people. This declaration signaled the demise of moral suasion, the dominant antislavery ideology of the 1830’s and 1840’s. Abolitionists (black and white) who subscribed to moral suasion preached that, through the cultivation of certain values that would improve their condition—industry, thrift, temperance, and education— black people would appeal favorably to the moral conscience of whites and win rights and privileges of citizenship. This was essentially an attempt to defer to the proslavery contention that black slaves were enslaved and marginalized as a result of their wretched condition. Delany was one of the foremost supporters of moral suasion. Moral suasion, however, failed to change white opinions, and the Fugitive Slave Act finally convinced many black people of the existence of a conspiracy to strengthen slavery and racism. Some turned immediately to politics. Some simply crossed the border into relatively safer Canada. Others chose to resist the law by organizing vigilante groups to frustrate the efforts of fugitive hunters. One such group emerged in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, directed by Delany and John Peck. For two years, Delany actively participated in forcibly securing the release of apprehended fu-

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gitives. Vigilantism, however, made very little dent on the law, and by 1852 Delany was ready to move on to something else. He defined the law as the very essence of the compromise, the part that united the nation. He impressed on black people the futility of resisting a law that, he insisted, united all whites. The Condition was his ideological response to the situation. In The Condition, he criticized the United States for failing to live up to its democratic and republican ideals. He defined African Americans as “a nation within a nation” who (like other minorities in Europe) had been denied all the legitimate rights and privileges of citizenship, a situation he deplored, considering African Americans’ contributions to the settlement and development of the New World, especially in their role as laborers. He also drew attention to black participation in the nation’s wars as a demonstration of patriotism and a preparedness to die in defense of the nation. In spite of these contributions and qualities, black people remained marginalized. The Fugitive Slave Act finally stamped all of them with the badge of slavery and subjugation. Delany offered emigration as the only avenue left for black elevation and specified Central and South America and the West Indies as possible areas of relocation. These regions were rich in natural resources and governed by people of color, who, he opined, would gladly welcome and accommodate blacks. In addition to racism, Delany uncovered an equally serious psychological obstacle to black elevation—a seeming satisfaction on the part of African Americans with menial and servile occupations. Black servants, maids, and laborers far outnumbered all other black professionals, a development Delany blamed on years of enslavement and subordination. He also assigned some responsibility to religion. Black people unduly relied on religion as a panacea for all their problems and consequently concentrated on devotions and prayers instead of actively assuming responsibility for their own elevation. Delany identified three God-given natural laws for the resolution of human problems—“Physical Law,” “Moral Law,” and “Religious Law”—each with fixed and distinct spheres. He accused black people of erroneously applying Religious Law (prayers and devotion) to resolving fundamentally physical problems (slavery and racism). He urged the immediate adoption of Physical Law—industry and wealth accumulation—as the only means of catching up and legitimately contesting for equality with whites. In essence, he favored the adoption of those values (middleclass) that he estimated were responsible for white empowerment. The application of Physical Law was just one aspect of the process of reorientation that he advocated. The other aspect entailed the encouragement of practical and business education. “Our course is a just one,” he assured black readers, yet he added one caveat: “We must go away from our oppressors.” Analysis The preface to The Condition prepares readers for the peculiarity of the book. Delany admits to writing the entire book within one month during a business trip to New York City, during which he divided his time between attending to urgent business, some-

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times lecturing on physiology, and writing. There was also another consideration—he wrote when he was “poor, weary and hungry.” Given these contexts, he cautions readers against any expectations of stylistic or linguistic elegance. His prime consideration was to address the facts and confront entrenched stereotypes about black people. Through the frequent use of words such as “we” and “ours,” he confirms his identity with the experience he writes about. Of the issues he addressed, perhaps the most critical was racism. During the ascendancy of moral suasion, Delany and other black leaders faithfully advanced the doctrine of self-improvement as a means of elevation, strongly believing that a change in the condition of black people would end racism. Some even deemphasized racism and instead dreamed of a unified humankind, the realization of which, they argued, was temporarily delayed by the painfully slow process of black elevation. By the end of the 1840’s, however, this optimism had virtually disappeared. Self-improvement had not dented racism. Many began to wonder if the reverse was not the case—that racism created and actually thrived upon black poverty. The Condition echoes this change in black consciousness and strategy away from improving the condition of African Americans in order to appeal to the moral conscience of whites and toward challenging the moral conscience of whites and actively contesting for the rights and privileges of American citizenship. Delany had two objectives in highlighting the patriotism of black soldiers and the contributions of African Americans to the social, economic, intellectual, and cultural development of the nation in general. First, he wanted to confront and negate proslavery denials of black contributions to national development. For a long time, proslavery advocates had denied that black people contributed anything positive to national development. Slaves and free blacks were both portrayed as lazy, wretched, and parasitic; these characteristics were usually cited to justify their subordination. Second, Delany wanted to show that African Americans satisfied all acceptable criteria for citizenship (by reason of birth, natural right, and contributions to the nation). Emphasizing racism, he hoped, would convince free blacks, particularly those who still harbored faith in the system, that they had little to which to look forward. He did this graphically, by publishing the full text of the Fugitive Slave Act, hoping to give free blacks a “conception of its enormity” and to convert them to emigrationism. His criticism of the psychological orientation of African Americans underlined the continued reliance on moral suasionist values. That he felt compelled to reassert these same values in this book is a measure of the depth of faith the black leadership had in the potency of the prevailing middle-class values. Moral suasion sought the material and educational elevation of black people. Though the ideology subsequently lost its appeal, some of the values it nourished remained popular. Delany’s discussion of black religion is a reprise of his earlier confrontation with the black church. In the course of propagating moral suasion in the 1840’s, he had encountered stormy opposition from some of the leading black churches, which perceived the pursuit of materialism as an unnecessary diversion from the heavenly path. These churches promoted a providential, deterministic outlook, which induced their

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members a fatalistic response to all earthly problems and convinced them that God would redress earthly imbalances in the next world. Delany blamed black poverty partly on providential determinism. While black churchgoers prayed and looked up to heaven, whites appropriated and monopolized the resources of this world. Delany classified slavery, racism, and poverty as physical problems whose solutions required the application of Physical Law, that is, industry, thrift, and education (components of moral suasion). Unlike orthodox moral suasion, which sought to make changes within the United States, Delany maintained that, given the reality of the 1850’s, these changes could be made only if blacks emigrated. Aware of the opposition of several black churches to the pursuit of material wealth, he clothed Physical Law in religious robes, underscoring its compatibility with religion. Since Physical Law was natural and of divine origin, he reasoned, God could not be opposed to materialism. Indeed, he referred to the political and social dominance of whites over religious and righteous black people as graphic representation of God’s approval of materialism. Unburdened by any feeling of guilt or remorse over slavery, whites embraced capitalist ethics and accumulated wealth. To challenge white political empowerment effectively, Delany advised black people to embrace and cultivate those same values. He maintained, however, that the domestic environment did not favor a narrowing of the racial gap. Whites were so entrenched, and so determined to remain so, that even with the appropriation of capitalist values, black people would never attain equality within the United States. The Condition is replete with cases of hardworking and successful black Americans who remained as marginalized as the rest. To render emigration attractive and acceptable, Delany first distanced it from the unpopular colonization scheme of the American Colonization Society. The society had been founded by slaveholders and their supporters in 1817, and its fundamental objective was to settle free blacks in some location outside the United States. Many free blacks abhorred colonization because of its perceived proslavery objective. They interpreted this as an attempt to deny them citizenship and to separate them from the slaves. Delany condemned colonization and urged free blacks to avoid the Republic of Liberia, a creation of the American Colonization Society. He then appealed to history and religion. He defined emigration as a historical phenomenon, a natural reaction of all oppressed and freedom-loving people in search of escape from their ordeal. He reminded his readers of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and also of the migration of a more recent and familiar group, the Puritans who left the Old for the New World. He characterized emigration as “God’s measure for our redemption.” He introduced a practical, but equally religious, justification for emigration. Blacks, he argued, possessed a unique, God-given physical capacity to adapt to all types of climatic conditions, from the temperate to the tropical. This physical superiority allowed them to live in any place of their choice, unlike whites, who “may only live where they can.” Not everyone, however, felt sufficiently alienated to want to leave. Some opposed emigration because it would divert much-needed energy and resources overseas. Others conceived of it as a betrayal of the slaves. Delany, however, portrayed emigration as a positive good whose long-term results would destroy slavery. He en-

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visioned an externally based and economically powerful black nation with enough resources to undermine slavery worldwide. Delany impressed on his ideological opponents, especially those who sought white liberal support, the limitations of white liberalism. Using the abolitionist movement as a yardstick, he drew attention to the paternalistic and condescending attitudes of white abolitionists toward black slaves as symptomatic of the racism of the wider society. Equally significant was his contention that abolitionism originated among slaves and free blacks and that white abolitionists, including the famous William Lloyd Garrison, were the converts of those original abolitionists. Though controversial, several of his claims have been confirmed by modern scholarly research. Critical Context The publication of The Condition thrust Delany into the forefront of the emigrationist movement and officially dates his emergence as a leading Black Nationalist. It represents the shift from condition to race as a key factor in shaping the responses of African Americans to their experience. It was, in fact, the first part of an intellectual effort to provide an ideological conception of the black experience following the crises and confusion unleashed by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. It sounded the alarm and became the bible of Black Nationalism. Emigration quickly assumed a forceful dimension, reaching a climax at a national convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in August, 1854. The book is not merely a commentary on race relations in the United States. It is also a pioneering work in the evolution of slavery and racism, and many of its conclusions have been sustained by modern scholars. One example is Delany’s contention that practical necessity (the need for a dependable, cheap, and productive labor force), rather than racism, led to the enslavement of Africans. Racism developed later to justify and legitimize an accomplished fact. Delany used the experience of free blacks in the Northern states and the Fugitive Slave Act to reveal a consensus on black inferiority that cut across sectional boundaries, thus debunking the myth of the free and open North. By emphasizing this national consensus, the book reveals striking similarities in the experience of free blacks and slaves. More than anything else, The Condition provides graphic insight into the complexities of the African American experience. Black people had contributed their labor, sweat, and blood to the development of the nation, yet they had been denied rights and privileges. Nevertheless, many refused to give up on America. This deep, emotional attachment to a society that denied African Americans their rights and trampled on their dignity was a peculiarity of nineteenth century Black Nationalism, and no black leader more perfectly epitomized this tendency than Delany himself. Toward the end of the book, he expressed deep love for the United States. Emigration suddenly seemed like a reluctant choice, with potential emigrants described as “adopted” children of their host nations.

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Bibliography Adeleke, Tunde. Without Regard to Race: The Other Martin Robison Delany. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Detailed political biography of Delany that emphasizes his willingness to modify or put aside the narrower cause of Black Nationalism in the service of the larger cause of racial equality. Delany, Martin R. Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader. Edited by Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Hefty volume collecting many of Delany’s journalistic and other writings. The collection is organized chronologically, allowing one to see the evolution of Delany’s thought and style over time and to assign The Condition its proper place within that evolution. Griffith, Cyril E. The African Dream: Martin R. Delany and the Emergence of PanAfricanist Thought. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. Discusses the central themes of Delany’s book within the context of his development as a nationalist, emigrationist, and pan-Africanist. Kahn, Robert. “The Political Ideology of Martin R. Delany.” The Journal of Black Studies 14 (June, 1984): 415-440. Summarizes the major issues in the book and discusses them within the context of Delany’s growing separatist consciousness. Levine, Robert S. “Twelve Years with Martin Delany: A Confession.” In White Scholars/African American Texts, edited by Lisa A. Long. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Considered evaluation of Delany as a writer and thinker, based on Levine’s experience editing the 2003 collection of his work. McAdoo, Bill. Pre-Civil War Black Nationalism. New York: David Walker, 1983. Presents The Condition as a reactionary Black Zionist document. Identifies Delany as the leading nineteenth century Black Zionist. Black Zionism had a dualistic character; it combined elements of revolutionary and reactionary nationalism. It dismissed and undermined the possibility of overthrowing slavery within the United States. Finally, it had no confidence in the revolutionary potentialities of the masses. Miller, Floyd J. The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Describes The Condition as heralding the emergence of Delany as a nationalist and emigrationist and argues that some of the views advanced in the book contradict Delany’s earlier writings. Notes that the book synthesized several of Delany’s ideas into a coherent ideology. Pinkney, Alphonso. Red, Black, and Green: Black Nationalism in the United States. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Defines The Condition as the first nationalist book to be published. The central themes in the book reflect Delany’s shifting perspective from condition to race. Among the major themes are the rejection of colonization and the characterization of the United States as a racist society. Tunde Adeleke

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THE CONJURE-MAN DIES A Mystery of Dark Harlem Author: Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Mystery Time of plot: 1930’s Locale: Harlem, New York First published: 1932 Principal characters: Perry Dart, a homicide detective, who is the first African American member of Harlem’s police force to be promoted to detective John Archer, a medical doctor who assists Dart in solving the “murder” of the conjure-man N’Gana Frimbo, a conjure-man educated at Harvard, who is a philosopher and avid reader of a wide range of philosophical and metaphysical texts Bubber Brown, a would-be private detective, a codiscoverer of the body Jinx Jenkins, Bubber’s friend, a codiscoverer of the body and for a time the chief suspect in the murder Spider Webb, a murder suspect and numbers runner Doty Hicks, another murder suspect, a drug addict Samuel Crouch, an undertaker who rents the upstairs of his building to Frimbo Martha Crouch, Samuel’s wife, present when the murder takes place Easley Jones, a friendly railroad man who seeks advice from Frimbo Aramintha Snead, a devoted church worker who wants Frimbo to stop her husband from drinking The Novel The Conjure-Man Dies is a complex mystery story interweaving a number of characters who might normally have little contact with one another. For various reasons, the major suspects have all come to seek advice from N’Gana Frimbo, an African trained at Harvard University who settled in Harlem to practice his conjuring and fortune-telling. In the waiting room of Frimbo’s apartment and in the actual meeting chamber where Frimbo conducts his practice, characters confront the darkness that is Frimbo. Jinx Jenkins, the last of the characters to have an interview with Frimbo,

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realizes that Frimbo is dead, runs to the waiting room, and calls for his friend Bubber Brown. The doctor and the police detective then enter the story. Perry Dart, a police detective, and John Archer, a physician, lead the investigation. The novel’s plot is one of ascertaining who murdered Frimbo. Like any mystery story, people and events are not always what they appear to be. Dart is sensitive to this possibility and begins a process of questioning suspects in order to determine the culprit. Dart and Archer know immediately that their task is not only to determine the murderer but also to make some sense of who Frimbo is so that a motive for his murder might be found. The novel accumulates detail on top of detail. Initial character descriptions become more fully textured, and the actions of characters who apparently are only minor become potential sources of information needed to solve the murder. Both Dart and Archer, as they pull the pieces of the murder together, reveal aspects of their personalities to each other and to the major suspects. In all this detective work, Dart and Archer get to know the suspects in ways they would not have otherwise, and both become fascinated with Frimbo. The major vehicle Dart and Archer use to acquire information is questioning of each of the suspects in Frimbo’s dark, velvet-draped meeting room. Dart sits at one end of the table, shrouded in darkness, and the suspects sit at the other end, just as they would have with Frimbo. The suspects have a spotlight directed at them, so they see little in the room except the detective’s silhouette. In these interviews, Dart discovers what brought each of the suspects to seek Frimbo’s advice. Each character reveals not only his or her own life story but also something of the variety of black lifestyles that made up Harlem of the 1930’s. Bubber Brown is the first suspect. He is eliminated because he immediately sought Archer’s help after the body was found. In addition, Brown was the only one in the waiting room who had not come to see Frimbo. Beyond this, Brown fancies himself a private investigator and goes out of his way to help Dart and Archer solve the case. Dart learns quickly that Brown can be used to assist in discovering the whereabouts of three suspects who have left the crime scene, because Brown knows the underside of Harlem. The two women, Martha Crouch and Aramintha Snead, also are eliminated fairly early as suspects. Mrs. Crouch’s reason for being present when the murder occurred was to collect Frimbo’s monthly rent money, and Mrs. Snead wanted Frimbo’s help to stop her husband from drinking. The other men—Jenkins, Spider Webb, Doty Hicks, and Easley Jones—remain suspects for quite some time after their questioning. In their interviews with Dart and Archer, the men provide information that reveals a complicated and rich black urban experience. Members of the Harlem community are shown to work and play hard. Easley Jones, for example, is a Pullman car worker. Fisher shows what his lifestyle is like, describing the different cities these men visit, their stay in boardinghouses, and where they eat. A number of nightclubs and gambling houses are also kept busy by Harlemites. In addition, men and women struggle to maintain relationships.

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By allowing the major suspects to tell their stories, Fisher showcases and pays homage to the rich cultural life of Harlem. Once characters’ motivations are known and Dart and Archer have some sense of who these men really are, it is easier for them to find the killer. Fisher does not make his mystery a straightforward one. He drops a bombshell into his plot: Frimbo is not dead after all. One man is dead, however, and his death must be solved, along with finding the reasons why someone wanted Frimbo dead in the first place. Fisher moves the mystery forward by allowing Frimbo to assist in discovering his own would-be murderer. The interplay of having Dart, Archer, and Frimbo, three brilliant men, grapple with facts, suspicions, and evidence makes for a complicated unraveling of plot and a fascinating journey into three “talented tenth” minds. In the process of solving the murder, these three men deal with the basics of everyday life in Harlem. The Characters One of the most complicated and original characters to appear in African American literature is N’Gana Frimbo, the conjure-man. Frimbo’s complexity is revealed through the details offered by the author. Frimbo’s mysterious nature is emphasized initially. He is very dark and tall, and he wears long, flowing, silk dressing gowns. When he sees his clients, he usually has his head in a turban. His mysterious qualities are punctuated by his absolute coolness. He never gets emotionally wrought over anything, including the fact that someone tried to kill him. Although he dabbles in the occult and the unseen, he does so with the exactness of any modern scientist. In his character, therefore, Fisher melds modern Western ways of knowing the world with Frimbo’s African perceptions. That Frimbo embodies both Western ideas and traditional African ones is made clear when he and John Archer spend a quiet evening together. Archer is trying to ascertain information about Frimbo that will help him solve the murder mystery, and Frimbo sees in Archer something of a kindred spirit. Like Archer, Frimbo is in his thirties, and he is also a man of science, psychology, and philosophy. Frimbo reveals to Archer something of his African background. Frimbo was king, or chief, of Buwongo, a tiny nation northeast of Liberia, before coming to the United States. As a child, he attended American missionary schools. That early educational experience is the reason he later decided to attend Harvard University. He shares several traditional African rituals with Archer, some of them potentially life threatening and painful, involving, for example, castration and beheading. As he tells this fragment from his life, there is pride in his voice and a longing for home. Archer observes a gentle and compassionate quality to Frimbo and wonders to himself if Frimbo could in fact be capable of murder. Archer also notes that something has happened to Frimbo in his transition from Africa to America. Frimbo’s acquisition of Western ideas, exactness, precision, and objectivity have made him somewhat indifferent. Frimbo counsels people who are in need and generally gives advice that helps his clients gain peace of mind, but there is a

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sense that he does not care about them personally. Archer thinks that Frimbo is largely carrying out pseudoscientific, Western-based philosophical experiments. After Archer reaches these conclusions about Frimbo, he is astounded when he tells Frimbo a mere snatch of information from his own life and Frimbo is able to fill in the remaining and more important details. By focusing on Frimbo’s complex and alert mind, Fisher unfolds Frimbo’s character. Frimbo is best rendered by what he says and by his mysterious ways. The interplay of minds as they solve the murder is the chief way that characters’ traits and personalities are announced. Like Frimbo, Archer devotes more time to his work than to other concerns. Archer is a bachelor who, in attending to the medical needs of the Harlem community, has little opportunity for interpersonal relationships. He might best be described as a workaholic. Like Frimbo, Archer has a side that is rarely expressed. He has few peers who are able to comprehend his complex philosophical disposition. Involvement in solving the murder mystery, then, is presented as being a real treat for Archer. He seems to come alive with every little bit of information and every new thought he must consider. Detective Dart’s character is similarly presented. Although his intellect is equivalent to Frimbo’s and Archer’s, he seems less concerned with the larger philosophical questions that the other two men pursue. Dart has the job of solving the murder, and all is subordinate to that. Bubber Brown’s and Jinx Jenkins’s characters are delineated primarily through their language antics. In their conversations with each other and with other characters, they use language to present their essential selves and to do battle with an environment that does not always appreciate them. Brown has aspirations to be a “big man,” but in the Harlem of the 1930’s, he is out of work, is not valued by many people that he knows, and sees his helping to solve the murder as a way to make a name for himself and to help his friend Jenkins, especially after Jenkins is jailed for the murder. Although Brown and Jenkins argue with each other all the time and “play the dozens,” the two genuinely care about each other. Both are good-natured men who add both humor and social realism to the novel. The other suspects and characters encountered in the novel are realistically portrayed. Most characters are round and individualized, even if they occupy only a small narrative space. Themes and Meanings One of the most significant and obvious themes addressed in The Conjure-Man Dies is the importance of characters living life fully. Each major character involved in the mystery, whether as suspect or investigator, is preoccupied with living a whole and rewarding life, given the particular circumstances of his or her environment. Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkins represent the common black man struggling to survive during the Depression years in Harlem. Both are intelligent men who happen to be down on their luck. In Brown’s attempts first to start his own private investigation business and then later to help Dart and Archer solve the murder, he demonstrates his

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capacity to persevere even when he does not have access to the sort of employment opportunities that might provide him with a secure lifestyle. He always has a wonderful sense of humor and makes the best of any situation. When Jenkins is imprisoned and for a while feels despondent, it is Brown who acquires evidence that can be used to free him. Frimbo’s entire existence, whether in Africa or in America, has been one of seeking authentic meaning. He does this by learning as much as he can about human nature and also by helping to provide peace of mind to his clients. Even Dart and Archer, who have rewarding careers, are positioned as struggling to stay above the waters in their obsession to solve the murder case. Each comes a little more to life as he gets more involved in the case. Harlem of the 1930’s is revealed as a place where it is easy to give up or to stay in a despondent state. Several of the other characters are presented as being in various stages of despondency. Doty Hicks, for example, has turned to drugs. Several characters believe that their spouses are having affairs and therefore must not really love them. The state of the economy and rampant racism mean sometimes unbearable conditions, which some characters seek to escape through drinking, dancing, and gambling. Throughout the novel, characters discover ways to reaffirm themselves. Much of this reaffirmation comes about because characters help one another. In this sense, the novel takes time to explore the notion of kinship in the African American experience, and it does so while keeping readers involved in a murder mystery. Critical Context As the first known mystery novel written by an African American, The ConjureMan Dies launched a new genre in the African American literary tradition. Many African American novels of the 1920’s and 1930’s were significantly a part of the struggle to “uplift the race.” Rudolph Fisher dared to do something different, to create a range of possibilities for black narrative expression. In exploring new terrain, he also revisited many areas and concerns that are staples of African American literature. The novel describes common black urban experience, one major line of development of the African American novel of the 1920’s and 1930’s. The Conjure-Man Dies is a companion piece to such novels as Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928), Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), and Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930), which detail the rich layers of urban black experience and chart the difficult conflicts that characters confront in their struggles to live rewarding lives. As a black mystery novel, The Conjure-Man Dies looks forward to the detective fiction of Chester Himes and even, in exploration of new literary territory, anticipates the novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and the science-fiction novels of Samuel Delany and Octavia E. Butler. Most initial reviews of the novel remarked that it was a mystery of the first class. Dissenting reviews usually focused on the fact that the mystery in Fisher’s novel included characters heretofore not considered a part of the mystery genre: African

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Americans. Some reviewers did not know how to evaluate or appreciate Frimbo, the dark and mysterious African who is at the novel’s center. Bibliography Berghahn, Marion. Images of Africa in Black American Literature. London: Macmillan, 1977. A consideration of the image of the African in history and in literature. The first part of the book discusses the image of Africans in the white imagination. The chapter titled “The ‘Harlem Renaissance’” presents useful information that helps one to understand a character such as N’Gana Frimbo. De Jongh, James. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Discusses major historical and literary events that helped to make Harlem a culture capital for African Americans. Contains a fine, but relatively short, discussion of The Conjure-Man Dies that emphasizes the novel’s ability to mediate black experience in Harlem of the 1930’s. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1975. Gives a good general overview of the development of the African American novel. Two chapters help to position Rudolph Fisher’s work: “The New Negro” and “The Outsider.” Gayle argues that Fisher’s novels advance many of Marcus Garvey’s ideas. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. One of the most readable general discussions of the Harlem Renaissance. Provides ample coverage of the many people and contexts that helped to define this period. Suggests that The Conjure-Man Dies is a breakthrough novel for Fisher. Perry, Margaret. “A Fisher of Black Life: Short Stories by Rudolph Fisher.” In The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, edited by Victor A. Kramer and Robert A. Russ. Rev. and expanded ed. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1997. Discusses Fisher’s short fiction, both published and unpublished. Argues that Harlem and its spirit had an important place in Fisher’s fiction. Fisher explores both urban realism and rural or African rituals and customs, so that his works give full coverage of many parts of the African American experience, including its darker side. Scruggs, Charles. “Sexual Desire, Modernity, and Modernism in the Fiction of Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by George Hutchinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Examines the intersection of modern mass culture and the modernist literary response by interpreting the representation of sex and desire in Fisher’s work. Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Comprehensive overview of the history of mystery and detective fiction by African American writers. Bibliographic references and index. Charles P. Toombs

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THE CONJURE WOMAN Author: Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) Type of work: Novel/short stories Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: Post-Civil War era Locale: North Carolina First published: 1899 Principal characters: John, a white northern businessman who comes to North Carolina with his ailing wife Miss Annie, John’s wife Uncle Julius McAdoo, an elderly former slave The Novel The Conjure Woman is a novel in the form of a collection of short stories about the New and the Old South. John, the narrator, comes to the New South after the Civil War because of the business opportunities and the healthy climate it offers him and his wife. Land and labor are cheap, and the area is conducive to farming. He buys an old plantation and transforms the unproductive vineyard into a lucrative grape business. John and Annie’s boredom with slow-paced southern life is offset largely by Uncle Julius’s stories of the Old South. As John relates these tales, using Uncle Julius’s dialect, readers become aware of the old former slave’s cleverness and wit. The collection begins with “The Goophered Grapevine.” Uncle Julius tells the story to prevent John from buying the old plantation. Uncle Julius lives in one of the slave cabins and makes a living selling the grapes that he gathers from the run-down vineyard. After Uncle Julius tells John about the plight of an ex-slave named Henry who mistakenly ate grapes from the “goophered” vines and died when the vines withered, John permits Uncle Julius to continue living on the place and gives him a job. In telling “Po Sandy,” Uncle Julius’s goal is to prevent the narrator and his wife from tearing down an old schoolhouse on the plantation. John’s wife wants a new kitchen, and John wants to build it with lumber from the schoolhouse. Uncle Julius, who has his own plans for the building, tells John a story to demonstrate that the lumber is haunted. Uncle Julius tells “Mars Jeems Nightmare” to get his grandson reemployed by the narrator and his wife. John fires Tom because of his slothfulness, but his wife rehires him after she hears Uncle Julius’s story. “Mars Jeems Nightmare” is about a cruel slavemaster who does not allow his slaves any respite from hard work. “The Conjurer’s Revenge” is about a slave who is turned into a mule by a conjure man. The narrator hears the tale when he asks Uncle Julius’s advice about purchasing a mule. Accepting the ex-slave’s advice, the narrator purchases a horse from one of

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Julius’s friends. The horse is blind and diseased, and the narrator realizes that he has been duped by Julius. “Sis Becky’s Pickaninny,” a story about a slave mother whose husband and child are sold away from her, illustrates Julius’s belief in good-luck charms to ward off evil. Uncle Julius claims that Sis Becky would not have experienced so much bad luck had she owned a rabbit’s foot. In “The Gray Wolf’s Hant,” Uncle Jube, the conjure man, avenges his son’s death by transforming a husband and a wife into a gray wolf and a black cat, respectively. Uncle Julius tells the story to discourage the narrator from cultivating a piece of land on which Julius has found honey bees. According to Uncle Julius, the area is haunted by the wife’s ghost and by the gray wolf. “Hot Foot Hannibal,” the last story in the collection, is about the plight of Chloe and two young men who love her. Uncle Julius tells the story to John, Miss Annie, and Mabel, Annie’s niece, to explain why the horse hitched to their carriage balks at a certain juncture in the road. According to Uncle Julius, the horse sees the ghost of Chloe, who had died as a result of grieving for her sweetheart, for whose death she was partially responsible. The Characters John, the book’s narrator, and his wife, Miss Annie, become willing listeners to Uncle Julius’s stories. John responds to Uncle Julius’s tales with amusement and skepticism about the ills of slavery and the motives of the storyteller. John is paternalistic and condescending toward African Americans. At first, he thinks that Uncle Julius is merely an old, ignorant, superstitious black man whose dialect stories are picturesque and entertaining. Later, he detects Uncle Julius’s selfish motives for telling his tales; however, John remains an insensitive character who is interested mainly in his wife’s health and his grape business. Miss Annie, who has come to North Carolina to improve her health in the warm weather and leisurely southern atmosphere, is a more engaging character than her husband. She is a perceptive listener to Uncle Julius’s tales, and, unlike her husband, she demonstrates sympathy for the slaves in the stories. She understands the plight of Uncle Julius and the other local African Americans better than her husband does. Uncle Julius is both superstitious and shrewd. He carries a rabbit’s foot for good luck, but his knowledge of his North Carolina surroundings proves indispensable to his employers, and he is able to manipulate them with his crafty storytelling. Each time his welfare is threatened, Uncle Julius tells a story to deter John’s actions or to solicit Annie’s sympathy. However, he is not entirely self-serving, a fact demonstrated by his telling of “Sis Becky’s Pickaninny” to Annie for no other reason than to cheer her up. Themes and Meanings Chesnutt’s collection of dialect stories is considered to be among the best representations of plantation life in American literature. Chesnutt’s purpose was to counteract

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the romantic vision of slavery extolled by writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and Harry Stillwell Edwards. In contrast to the kind-mastercontented-slave myths perpetuated by these authors, Chesnutt’s stories are about tragedy and heartbreak among the slaves and their efforts to ameliorate these circumstances through the aid of a conjure woman. To emphasize the hardships of slavery, Chesnutt creates Uncle Julius, a character similar in some respects to Harris’s Uncle Remus. Unlike Harris’s character, however, who tells tales about good old days on the plantation, Uncle Julius tells stories that reflect tragic themes. A common theme is the forced separation of loved ones. In “Po Sandy,” the protagonist suffers this fate twice. Sandy’s master trades the slave’s wife for a new woman. Sandy grieves about this loss, but he adjusts by falling in love with the new woman, Tenie. When Sandy learns that his new master intends to hire him out to work on a distant plantation, he allows Tenie to turn him into a tree so that he can remain stable and be near her. The lovers are separated permanently, however, when the master loans Tenie to another plantation and cuts the tree (Sandy) down while she is away. Like Po Sandy, the title character in “Sis Becky” suffers twice from separation from loved ones. When the plantation master sells her husband, Becky soothes her grief by finding joy in their child, little Mose. Becky’s master, however, trades her for a race horse, forcing a separation between her and little Mose. The sorrow of both mother and child is eased when a conjure woman turns the child into a bird. Periodically, little Mose flies to his mother, who finds solace in his song. In “Hot-Foot Hannibal,” a separation between lovers causes tragedy. When Jeff is sold away from Chloe, he commits suicide rather than live without her. Chloe assuages her grief by returning every evening to the willow tree where she and Jeff used to meet. Her grief is so intense that even after death her “hant” returns and sits under the willow tree. Another sordid theme deals with the economic interests of slavemasters. In “The Goophered Grapevine,” Mars Dugal does not hesitate to have the conjure woman “goopher” (poison) his grapes to keep the slaves from eating them and limiting his profit. When a new slave, Henry, unaware of the hex, eats the grapes and becomes spry in the spring and listless in the fall as a result of conjuring, the master makes full economic use of Henry’s condition. He sells Henry in the spring for a high price and buys him back in the fall at a low price. Thus, the master profits both from the grapes and from the reselling of Henry, whose fate is closely tied to the vineyard. The master’s greed allows him to be taken in by a charlatan from the North who promises to increase the yield of the crop by using new technology; instead, the Northerner kills the vines. As a result, Henry dies. Intervening supernatural forces are a supporting theme of the fortune or misfortune of the slaves. These forces are realized mainly through the rituals performed by two conjurers, Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jube. The slaves depend on Aunt Peggy to change their circumstances from bad to good. In “The Goophered Grapevine,” she keeps Henry alive by instructing him to anoint his head with grape juice. In “Mars Jeems Nightmare,” she turns a cruel master into a kind one who changes the miserable plight of the slaves by allowing them some re-

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spite from hard labor. In “Sis Becky’s Pickaninny,” she reunites a mother and child sold away from each other. In “The Gray Wolf’s Hant,” she gives the slave Dan a charm to protect him from death, and in “Hot-Foot Hannibal,” she brings the lovers Jeff and Chloe together. In contrast, Uncle Jube’s conjuring brings disaster. In “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” he turns the slave Primus into a mule because Primus mistakenly kills a pig belonging to Uncle Jube. Before his death, Uncle Jube wishes to be forgiven by Primus, so he attempts to transform the mule to man again; however, Uncle Jube dies before the process is completed and leaves Primus with a club foot. In “The Gray Wolf’s Hant,” Uncle Jube destroys a harmonious couple by transforming the pair into animals. Uncle Jube causes Dan (the wolf) to kill his wife Mahaly (the cat). As a final act of revenge, Uncle Jube tricks Dan into drinking a potion that leaves the unsuspecting Dan a wolf forever. Chesnutt’s treatment of the themes regarding the inhumanity of slavery is masterful. His narrative method and ironic tone permit him to remain detached from the subject, allowing his meaning to reach his readers subtly. Chesnutt thus avoids the didacticism and pathos of other well-meaning plantation literature, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853). For example, after hearing “Sis Becky’s Pickaninny,” John calls the story an “ingenious fairy tale,” while Annie exclaims that “the story bears the stamp of truth, if ever a story did.” John’s response shows that he has missed the point of the story, whereas Annie’s remarks indicate that she has understood the subtle meaning that Chesnutt hopes to convey to his readers. Likewise, Chesnutt hopes his readers will see the irony in Uncle Julius’s use of “kind master.” Although several masters in his stories are called “kind,” they sell or exploit their slaves. For example, Kunnel Penleton is kind, but he sells Becky’s husband and trades Becky for a horse. The “kind masters” depicted in these stories treat their slaves as property and not as humans. While Chesnutt wished to counteract the plantation school’s version of slavery, he did not wish to alienate his white readers. Therefore, his themes are muted and intended for sensitive readers. Critical Context The Conjure Woman was hailed as a significant work in American literature. Although Chesnutt began publishing in the 1880’s and “The Goophered Grapevine” received considerable critical acclaim in The Atlantic Monthly in 1887, Chesnutt did not make a substantial mark in American letters until the publication of The Conjure Woman in 1899. This work, followed by another collection of short stories, The Wife of His Youth (1899), assured his solid reputation as a writer of short fiction. Although Chesnutt wrote three other novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905), many critics consider The Conjure Woman to be his best work. Its accurate representation of North Carolina dialect, its portrayal of character and racial themes, and, above all, its narrative technique make The Conjure Woman an American treasure.

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Bibliography Andrews, William L. “Dialect Stories.” In The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Focuses on the literary tradition of The Conjure Woman. Chesnutt wrote The Conjure Woman in the popular local-color tradition of the 1880’s. The dialect, cultural habits, and the terrain of the Cape Fear area of North Carolina are faithfully represented in The Conjure Woman. Ashe, Bertram D. “‘A Little Personal Attention’: Storytelling and the Black Audience in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman.” In From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Analysis of the importance of the framing story to the short stories contained within The Conjure Woman and the function of that frame for African American readers in particular. Babb, Valerie. “Subversion and Repatriation in The Conjure Woman.” The Southern Quarterly 25 (Winter, 1987): 66-75. Compares Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories to The Conjure Woman. Harris uses black dialect to reinforce his views of white supremacy. Chesnutt uses black dialect as a “subversive strategy to undo the ideology of white supremacy.” Frenberg, Lorne. “Charles W. Chesnutt and Uncle Julius: Black Storytellers at the Crossroads.” Studies in American Fiction 15 (1987): 161-173. Focuses on The Conjure Woman’s representation of the reconstructed South. John and Uncle Julius are at a “crossroad” of surviving during a transitional period in history. Chesnutt establishes a barrier between his white narrator, John, and his black storyteller, Julius, that operates as both “mask” and “veil.” Gloster, Hugh M. “Negro Fiction to World War I.” In Negro Voices in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946. Reprint. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965. Identifies The Conjure Woman as high art and asserts that Chesnutt entertains yet presents a realistic view of plantation life. Render, Sylvia Lyons. “Business for Pleasure.” In Charles W. Chesnutt. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Discusses character and theme in The Conjure Woman. Uncle Julius is a stereotype who carries unconventional messages about slavery. The stories are connected by a conjure woman and man who reflect the cultural practices of a region. Wilson, Matthew. “Border Controls of Race and Gender: Crane’s The Monster and Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman.” In Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities, edited by C. James Trotman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Uses the concept of multiculturalism to unearth hidden themes and the social history behind The Conjure Woman. Ernestine Pickens

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CONTENDING FORCES Author: Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1790’s and 1890’s Locale: Bermuda; North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; New Orleans, Louisiana First published: 1900 Principal characters: Sappho Clark, a beautiful mulatto woman Will Smith, a black civil rights activist Dora Smith, a spirited, independent black woman John Langley, an ambitious black lawyer Arthur Lewis, the president of a technical college for African Americans The Novel The novel is divided into two distinct parts. The first part traces the fate of the family of a Bermuda planter, Charles Montfort, who leaves Bermuda in the 1790’s with his wife, children, and slaves to avoid compliance with a British law ordering him to free his slaves. He moves to North Carolina, where he soon incurs the jealousy of Anson Pollack, who has Montfort murdered after spreading the rumor that Montfort’s wife is black. She commits suicide, and the Montfort children are remanded into slavery; one son, Charles, Jr., is purchased and taken to England by a British visitor, and the other, Jesse, escapes to New Hampshire, where he grows up and eventually marries a black woman. The second and main part of the novel traces the fate of one strand of Jesse’s family, the Smiths, a hundred years later. Mrs. Smith, a widow, runs a boardinghouse in Boston. Her son, Will, and daughter, Dora, live with her. Her house is a center for the social and political meetings of the young friends of her children. The plot traces them in their efforts to fulfill their goals in marriage and career. Will Smith is an African American civil rights activist. He is a philosopher whose views on politics and education resemble those of W. E. B. Du Bois. Will is a well-known and highly respected black leader in his community. He falls in love with Sappho Clark, one of the boarders in his mother’s roominghouse. When she leaves him rather than expose him to marriage with a woman of her background, he continues to think of her and seeks her until they are accidentally reunited in New Orleans. His love and devotion finally overcome her hesitation, and they are married. Sappho Clark is a beautiful mulatto woman. Sappho had been born Mabelle Beaubean to a wealthy New Orleans family of multiracial ancestry. At the age of fifteen, Mabelle is abducted by a white uncle and brought to a house of prostitution. She is

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rescued by her father, who accosts his brother and threatens to press charges. The next day, Monsieur Beaubean’s house is burned by a mob and Mabelle is carried to a convent by a servant. There she gives birth to a son, and several years later she appears in Boston in search of a new life. Her son is placed in the custody of an aunt, and Mabelle, under the name of Sappho Clark, supports herself as a typist. She lives at the Smith’s boardinghouse, where she befriends Mrs. Smith, Dora, and Will. She and Will fall in love, but she feels herself unworthy of the love of an honorable man because of her unfortunate past. Nevertheless, she finally succumbs to her desire for happiness, until John Langley threatens her. Without telling anyone, she flees to New Orleans with her son. At the end of the novel, Sappho and Will are reunited and married. Dora Smith is a spirited, independent Northern black woman. Dora is engaged to John Langley and is looking forward to a happy future with him. He betrays her, however, and she turns her attention to a childhood friend, Arthur Lewis, who has long loved her and whom she eventually marries. She also befriends Sappho, and the two become devoted companions. John Langley is an ambitious black lawyer. He is the direct descendant of Anson Pollack (the murderer of Will’s ancestor) and, like Pollack, has a jealous and vicious nature. He is intelligent and aware of the racial problems in his society. He could do great things for his people, but he is too consumed by lust and greed. He betrays his fiancé, Dora, his good friend Will, and the object of his lust, Sappho. He wants to marry Dora because of her respectable position in the community and at the same time maintain an affair with Sappho. He accidentally discovers the truth about Sappho’s past and threatens to expose her if she refuses to give in to him. In the course of the novel, all find out his true nature and reject him. Greedy to the last, he ends his life on an expedition to find gold in the Klondike, where he freezes to death. Arthur Lewis, Dora’s friend, is the president of an esteemed technical college for African Americans in the South. He believes that African Americans must first learn manual skills and work their way up. Lewis is a patient and devoted lover of Dora, whom he eventually marries. The end of the novel finds the Smiths reunited with the British strand of the Montfort family and also finds them the recipients of a considerable inheritance from that side. The Characters Hopkins has made excellent use of the social and historical climate of her day in delineating her characters. In her effort to portray the “contending forces” (“conservatism, lack of brotherly affiliation, lack of energy for the right and the power of the almighty dollar”) that pull African Americans away from their focus on bettering the situation of their people, Hopkins has created characters that are rooted in history and developed by her imagination. Two of her major characters are based on two of the most famous African Americans of the period, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Like Du Bois, Will Smith is a highly educated and respected philosopher whose lifetime dedication is to

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helping his people achieve intellectual equality with whites. He is outspoken and forthright and does not hesitate to get involved in philosophical debates with his brother-in-law, Arthur Lewis, who is modeled on Washington. Like Washington, Lewis is the president of an agricultural and technical school in the South, and he hopes to better the situation of his people by providing them with practical education. Through the dialogue between the two men, Hopkins illustrates the importance of both philosophies of education; she portrays them as complementing rather than confronting each other. She demonstrates through her characters’ dialogue that the farsighted views of Smith would not have had a chance for implementation in the Deep South of the late nineteenth century. Lewis recognizes this, and rather than throwing his hands up in despair, he does what he can. Hopkins shows that both views were important and worthy of respect. Hopkins was also concerned about the African American who had no interest in anything but self-advancement. Such an individual, she believed, was a detriment to the race. To illustrate this point she created the brilliant lawyer John Langley, whose mind could have been a great asset to his people; his desire for self-advancement, however, was so great that he had tunnel vision. Langley’s selfishness almost destroys the two women with whom he is involved, but in the end he succeeds only in destroying himself. In contrast to Langley, Smith and Lewis both thrive (each, interestingly, with one of the women whom Langley almost destroyed). The inclusion of a love interest was almost a prerequisite for Hopkins’s audience, and Hopkins used it to illustrate the independence of the African American female. Unlike her European counterpart, the African woman was never encouraged to live entirely within the home nor to be “idle” if finances permitted. Black women came to America as slaves and laborers. The two major heroines, Sappho Clark and Dora Smith, are strong, self-supporting women; Sappho is a typist, and Dora helps her mother run a boardinghouse. Sappho also serves to illustrate the horrors of sexual exploitation to which many African American women were exposed. Sappho suffers the horror of rape and as a result gives birth to a son. Hopkins shows Sappho’s struggle to deal with this horror and the “stain” she feels it has left on her personality. She feels herself unworthy of marriage with Will, whom she loves and by whom she is loved. Dora is a fine wife for Lewis, whom she learns to love after being rejected by Langley; he, in turn, is rejected by Sappho. Langley wants Dora as a suitable wife and Sappho as an exciting mistress. Through his greed, he loses them both. Both women are portrayed as loving, supportive mates who are strong in their own right. They illustrate that women can survive on their own and that the men with whom they become involved love their independent spirit. Themes and Meanings Contending Forces is a significant piece of nineteenth century African American fiction. It is not only a well-told tale (if filled with typical nineteenth century melodrama) but also contains significant social commentary on the life of African Americans both before and after the Civil War.

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The first part of the novel, set in Bermuda and North Carolina in the 1790’s, shows the corrupting influence of the slave system, a system based on greed and selfishness. A so-called decent human being, Charles Montfort, is so permeated by the evils of slavery and the wealth it brings him that he is willing to risk everything rather than free his slaves in compliance with British laws governing Bermuda. The needs and wishes of his slaves are inconsequential to him; he moves them to the United States, where his accumulation of wealth can continue. Montfort is a thoughtful, kindly person in many respects, but the institution of slavery has placed blinders before his eyes; he is not able to think rationally or objectively when it comes to slavery. Like many others of his time, Montfort believes that slaves are not his equals and that therefore he has the right to do with them as he pleases. Through the very act of owning slaves, he is abusive; furthermore, he exposes his slaves to the possibility of worse brutality in the event of his death. Hopkins successfully makes the point that, by definition, there can be no such thing as a “good” slaveholder. A second important point that Hopkins makes in the first part of the novel deals with the whole issue of skin color. The institution of slavery allowed white slave masters free rein over their slaves, and the sexual liberties some masters took with their female slaves was evident in the many biracial slaves born during the slave era. A sizable percentage of these slaves could clearly “pass” as white, but southern law held that such children belonged to the race of the mother; as a result, white-skinned people were not infrequently remanded to slavery. In short, Hopkins points out that in a slave society in which rape and seduction were prevalent, skin color alone was no protection against being enslaved. All that was necessary to identify a person as “black” was the rumor mill. Once a person was identified as black, slavery was often not far away, as in the case of Grace Montfort. The second half of the novel focuses on post-Civil War life for African Americans in the northern United States, specifically in Boston, where Hopkins spent most of her life. Hopkins sums up the influences on African Americans of her day in the following passage: . . . conservatism, lack of brotherly affiliation, lack of energy for the right and the power of the almighty dollar which deadens men’s hearts to the sufferings of their brothers, and makes them feel that if only they can rise to the top of the ladder may God help the hindmost man, are the forces which are ruining the Negro in this country. It is killing him off by thousands, destroying his self-respect, and degrading him to the level of the brute. These are the contending forces that are dooming this race to despair!

To emphasize these contending forces, she creates the characters of John Langley, Will Smith, and Arthur Lewis. Langley accepts the values that dominate American society. The power of the almighty dollar has just as much influence over him as it did over Charles Montfort. As long as he can obtain wealth and social position, he does not care whom he steps on in the process. He also views women as objects to be used to satisfy his desires. Dora would make an appropriate wife and Sappho a great lover,

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and he plans to have both at the same time. Langley has accepted a worldview similar to that of many white men of his time. He is of no benefit to the development of his race, because, although he has intellectual ability, he lacks compassion and empathy. Hopkins is sounding a warning note: to imitate white society is to promote destruction and corruption. To offset the negative aspects of the “contending forces,” she creates Will Smith and Arthur Lewis. Will is a philosopher whose goal is the uplifting of his people. He takes part in social clubs, church, and politics, always with the goal of producing better conditions for African Americans. He is honest and forthright. Arthur Lewis is the president of a southern black college that trains young men and women to perform technical and agricultural labor. Will and Arthur engage in many lively debates about the education of black youth. Clearly, Hopkins has created these two characters to represent W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. It is interesting that neither Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) nor Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) had been published at the time Contending Forces was first printed. Hopkins treats her versions of both men with great respect. Will and Lewis also show great respect for women. Their attitude is consistently caring; at no time do they try to push themselves in any way on the objects of their affection. In addition, they admire the intellects of the women they love and engage them in the same type of intellectual dialogue they engage in with men. Hopkins’s female characters are especially advanced for their time. Both Dora and the beautiful Sappho are depicted as intelligent women with a lively interest in the social and political concerns of their day. In addition, they are independent and pragmatic, working independently to make their way in the world. Dora’s mother, Mrs. Smith, makes a big success of her venture to run a boardinghouse. Black women have often been portrayed in twentieth century literature as strong survivors, and Hopkins is a true “mother” of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. In addition to a rather thorough and serious coverage of the social climate of the time, Hopkins includes folk humor in the characters Ophelia Davidson and Sarah Ann White. These two residents of Mrs. Smith’s boardinghouse lack formal schooling and speak in the vernacular, but they show “street smarts” and survive in the big city of Boston by setting up their own successful laundry business. They also have a keen sense of humor and offer readers an escape from the serious issues faced by the main characters. Hopkins makes reference to African heritage in discussing conjuring and presenting a modern-day conjure woman in the form of Sappho’s aunt, a fortune-teller. The novel is rich in its portrayal of African American life. In the process of weaving a good story, Hopkins creates a variety of characters who touch on most of the concerns of vital interest to African Americans at the turn of the century. Critical Context Like Hopkins’s other works, most of which were published in Colored American Magazine between 1899 and 1904, Contending Forces had as its initial audience

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mainly African Americans, who praised her work highly. The president of the Colored Women’s Business Club in Chicago, for example, wrote of Contending Forces that “it is undoubtedly the book of the century.” Hopkins was among the few nineteenth century African American writers to receive recognition in her lifetime. In her works, she realized the purpose that she stated clearly in the preface to Contending Forces: “We must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Bibliography Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. Analyzes the relationship between racial activism and gender politics in Hopkins’s work, especially her representations and acts of performance. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Afterword to Contending Forces, by Pauline Hopkins. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Praises Hopkins’s efforts to write an honest novel in which she urges African Americans to cherish, champion, and trust themselves rather than whites. Brooks recognizes Hopkins’s angry moods and depictions and feels Hopkins would be saddened by events of the latter twentieth century. Brooks believes, however, that Hopkins in style and content proves herself a “continuing slave” by imitating white writers. Hopkins’s mulatto heroes and heroines and their use of the English language say little to Brooks of the lives of nineteenth century African Americans. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Colored Magazine in America.” The Crisis 5 (November, 1912): 33-35. Notes that Hopkins was dismissed as literary editor of Colored American Magazine in 1904 because her tone was not conciliatory enough for the new management. Johnson, Abby, and Ronald M. Johnson. “Away from Accommodation: Radical Editors and Protest Journalism, 1900-1910.” Journal of Negro History 62, no. 4 (October, 1977): 325-328. Praises Hopkins for her honest and outspoken approach to her stories and essays. In Contending Forces and other works, she “examined topics widely considered taboo and usually excluded from conciliatory journals.” Shockley, Ann. “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity.” Phylon 33 (Spring, 1972): 22-26. Discusses the facts surrounding Hopkins’s life and literary efforts. Notes that Hopkins did much public speaking, for which she received favorable press. Most of Shockley’s observations are factual rather than evaluative, but she recognizes the merits of Contending Forces, even though it is told “in the genteel and romantic fashion of its time.” Tate, Claudia. “Allegories of Black Female Desire: Or, Rereading NineteenthCentury Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by

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Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Examines nineteenth century African American attitudes toward marriage and freedom and concludes that Hopkins’s texts are liberating. Wallinger, Hanna. Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Extended work of biographically based literary criticism; includes a full chapter on Contending Forces. Rennie Simson

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THE CONTENT OF OUR CHARACTER A New Vision of Race in America Author: Shelby Steele (1946Type of work: Essays First published: 1990

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Form and Content More than anything else, this collection of essays reflects the background and experiences of its author. The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America offers the very personal recollections of an African American university professor living and working in a predominantly white neighborhood in the predominantly white Silicon Valley of Northern California. Professor Shelby Steele, who is middle class, middle-aged, and married to a white woman, has—by his own admission—led an unusually integrated life. This provides him with a perspective that, while original, could not be said to be representative of the major trends in African American life in the latter half of the twentieth century. The author’s unusual life experiences become both a major source of strength and a major source of weakness within this collection. The Content of Our Character consists of nine essays, two previously published in Harper’s Magazine (in 1988 and 1989), one in The American Scholar (1989), one in Commentary (1988), and one in The New York Times Book Review (1990). Other essays contain excerpts from Steele’s early publications on race as well as more recent ruminations. Because the book covers its author’s thoughts and speculations over a five-year period, there are inevitable repetitions and inconsistencies. He attempts, largely unsuccessfully, to tie these essays together in the introduction and in a brief, summarizing epilogue. The overriding theme of the work is that African Americans have failed to take advantage of opportunities presented to them in the United States because of their basic fears of ambition and their outmoded racial attitudes. Critics of the book have pointed out that Professor Steele, in effect, blames African Americans for many of their own failures. Steele’s first essay, aptly entitled “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent? Race and Power in an Era of Blame,” suggests that racial conflict in the United States is primarily a struggle for innocence between African Americans and whites. As each group tries to convince itself that it is entitled to achieve its goals because of its essential “goodness” and its superiority in relation to others, each ends up using victimization and the protracted history of subjugation as a major means of asserting and maintaining power. African Americans, it is contended, believe that they are entitled to be compensated for injustices committed in the past. While stopping short of denying that such compensation is necessary Steele contends that it is “demoralizing” for African Americans on an individual level, since it inhibits them from taking, the initiative

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to improve their own lives. For Steele, self-determination at the individual level is the highest good. The second essay, entitled “Race Holding,” argues cogently that African Americans dealing with whites on a one-to-one basis suffer from “integration shock.” Interracial classrooms and workplaces, for example, are said to expose African Americans to fundamental, unconscious doubts and fears that they may have concerning their own competence and ability in comparison to whites. A primary defense is “raceholding,” or the use of exaggerations, distortions, and lies regarding racial matters that serve, at least according to Steele, to protect the self-esteem of African Americans. The author argues that many African Americans utilize race as an excuse for not competing directly with whites and suggests that African American students often choose to believe in their alleged inferiority because it affords them a degree of comfort, security, and, ultimately, a rationalization should they fail to attain their goals. Steele’s third essay, “Being Black and Feeling Blue: Black Hesitation on the Brink,” again examines what he considers to be the African American community’s seeming inability to take advantage of opportunities presented to it. Professor Steele does not see any value in African American aspirations to develop black pride and black control of black institutions. He states that African American students who demand black student unions, black studies courses, and black cultural centers are involved in a kind of self-imposed apartheid that serves only to mask their own deeply held fears of integration. “The Recomposed Self: More on Vulnerability,” Steele’s fourth essay, posits that African American students at predominantly white, elite colleges tend to exaggerate their sense of racial victimization in order to deny doubts they may have concerning their inability to compete with white students at those same institutions. This essay is an attempt to explain why African American students of the 1980’s and 1990’s seem to complain more about racial discrimination than African American students of the 1960’s (Steele’s own generation) did. Ultimately, Steele sees Black Nationalism as an invalid and inappropriate attempt on the part of African Americans to alleviate their own self-doubts. The fifth essay, “White Guilt,” critiques racial attitudes within the white community. According to the author, there was a single motivating force behind the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s as far as whites were concerned: “the need for white redemption from racial guilt.” He suggests that this white guilt has done little to help, and has perhaps done considerable harm. Steele’s rather limited perspective on civil rights legislation and affirmative action is that such policies are cosmetic cover-ups by the white community. Chapter 6, “On Being Black and Middle Class,” looks at the tensions that middleclass African Americans (such as Steele) may experience as a result of their class standing in the African American community. Because African Americans have been preoccupied with victimization, Steele contends, they have tended to identify with the aspirations of the poorest among them. Upwardly mobile African Americans are thus

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left with feelings of guilt because of the threat they pose to the black community. His prescription, certainly a novel one, is that African Americans should give up their identity with poor African Americans and aspire as individuals to reach their own share of the “American Dream.” The book’s seventh chapter, “Affirmative Action: The Price of Preference,” argues that affirmative action programs, while potentially benefiting many middle-class African Americans (including Steele), ultimately do more harm than good. Steele argues that the preferential treatment that accompanies affirmative action is based almost entirely on color rather than on any evidence of prior discrimination. Many affirmative action programs, he contends, confuse diversity with proportionate representation. Diversity and proportionate representation are not the same. The author views affirmative action as a lowering of standards to increase minority representation. Such actions, he believes, merely serve to reinforce notions that African Americans are inferior to whites. Steele suggests that African Americans unconsciously internalize a message of inferiority and that their ability to succeed in integrated settings is thus impaired. The author’s views on racism in academia are summarized in his penultimate chapter, “The Recoloring of Campus Life.” He suggests that universities should emphasize commonality as a higher value than diversity in campus life and again criticizes African American demands for black cultural centers, black studies programs, and the like as divisive and counterproductive. In statements certain to engender controversy, Steele suggests that black studies departments should be abolished, arguing that nothing is taught in these departments that could not be taught by other departments or elsewhere in the curriculum. In this chapter, he also reiterates his fears that black studies programs may serve to engender racial hostility and restates his aversion to any form of entitlements. Steele’s final chapter, “The Memory of Enemies,” repeats and elaborates themes and suggestions from previous chapters. He points out that African Americans have a tendency to dwell on past injustices and oppression, sometimes resulting in an exaggerated belief in victimization. He also posits that this exaggerated belief in victimization may give rise to an inappropriate emphasis on collective action instead of individual action. The epilogue does not offer any new speculations, but it does give a useful summary of major points. In the epilogue, Steele draws on themes common to all the essays but, unfortunately, does not attempt to relate the essays to one another or to previous studies in a thorough and systematic way. Analysis As befits a professor of English, Steele writes well. His prose is lively, clear, and engaging. He cogently discusses what he sees as the origin of the current conflicts in race relations. Reflection and introspection are his major tools. By looking at his own life in an integrated society and examining his preconceptions about race, he forces readers to rethink their own preconceptions.

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This is an intensely personal book. Most illustrations are taken from the author’s personal experiences and his interpretations of the things going on around him. Professor Steele offers a self-consciously subjective vision and makes no attempt to test or modify that vision. He does not seem to care if his vision is at all representative of the wider African American experience, especially the experiences of lower-class African Americans. The author does not cite evidence from sociology, psychology, or political science in order to substantiate his hypotheses and conclusions. Indeed, one gets the impression that he ignores much of the social scientific literature pertaining to race. For example, his speculations on African American psychology, while insightful, sometimes border on the type of pop psychology that one might expect to find in a self-help book, but hardly in a learned book of essays on such a vital topic. Steele elicits an emotional response from readers. He urges African Americans to embrace a pride based on achievement and cultural contribution and encourages them to abandon what he considers to be the self-defeating pride of victimization. At the same time, Steele does not exonerate whites. He admonishes them to face up to their own prejudices and to treat African Americans as equals—not only before the law, but in their hearts as well. Critical Context The Content of Our Character is Shelby Steele’s first book. It received considerable critical attention and acclaim (from both liberals and conservatives) and won the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award. The author’s style is engaging, thoughtful, and always provocative. He is not afraid to see things differently and to state his case bluntly. He is an iconoclast, a forceful advocate of what he believes. While it is sometimes difficult to categorize Steele’s presentation as either liberal or conservative, there is little ambiguity as to how he stands on the important issues discussed. He offers a clear and consistent vision and forces readers to think about old problems in new ways. Among whites, particularly conservatives, The Content of Our Character has had a profound intellectual impact. It is often cited in conservative publications. Among white liberals, the volume has been praised as an honest and courageous book, a powerful and original contribution to the examination of race in America. African American critics, however, have been more guarded in their praise. Some African Americans have emphasized the book’s potential as a dangerous barrier to the attainment of civil rights by African Americans, especially lower-class African Americans, in the United States. Such fears are unwarranted. While Steele’s proposed solutions to race problems are often unorthodox and bluntly stated for shock value, his overriding concern for and empathy with the plight of African Americans is apparent on almost every page of this compelling book. Bibliography Baker, Houston A., Jr. Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Extended at-

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tack on African American neoconservative individualism and plea for a renewed commitment to activism. Includes a chapter on Steele’s works and career. Barnes, Fred. “The Minority Minority: Black Conservatives and White Republicans.” The New Republic 205 (September 30, 1991): 18-23. Steele is discussed alongside other prominent African American conservatives. Includes Steele’s comments on the furor over the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “Black Voices.” Utne Reader, September/October, 1991, 50-62. Presents the views of a number of African American writers and scholars (including Steele, Bell Hooks, Cornel West, and Manning Marable) on problems facing the African American community. Provides a helpful context for interpreting Steele’s controversial opinions. Bracey, Christopher Alan. “The Rising Tide of Black Neoconservative Intellectualism: The Blame Game, ‘Self-Help,’ Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter.” In Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice. Boston: Beacon Press, 2008. Discusses the importance of the American neoconservative movement to understanding Steele’s particular brand of conservatism. Edwards, Wayne. “Going It Alone: Author Shelby Steele Says Affirmative Action May Do More Harm than Good.” People Weekly 36 (September 2, 1991): 79-83. Discussion (including Steele’s comments) of one of Steele’s more controversial claims. The article’s appearance in a beacon of popular culture points up the depth of feeling Steele’s views arouse in both supporters and detractors. Kirp, David L. Almost Home: America’s Love-Hate Relationship with Community. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Includes a chapter on Steele, emphasizing his refusal to see the United States as comprising a unified African American community and a unified white community. Steele, Shelby. “The New Sovereignity: Grievance Groups Have Become Nations unto Themselves.” Harper’s Magazine 285 (July, 1992): 47-55. Steele argues in favor of integration through the elimination of interest-group lobbying, which he considers self-perpetuating and divisive. Wolf, Geoffrey. Introduction to The Best American Essays of 1989, edited by Geoffrey Wolf. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989. Early comments on Steele’s “On Being Black and Middle Class” (chapter 6 in The Content of Our Character), which is included in the anthology. Stephen D. Glazier

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CORREGIDORA Author: Gayl Jones (1949) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1947-1969 Locale: Kentucky First published: 1975 Principal characters: Ursa Corregidora, a female blues singer Mutt Thomas, Ursa’s first husband Tadpole McCormick, Ursa’s second husband Catherine “Cat” Lawson, Ursa’s friend, a local hairdresser Mama, Ursa’s mother Corregidora, a Brazilian who kept Ursa’s grandmother and great-grandmother as slaves Great Gram, Ursa’s grandmother, a slave and concubine to Corregidora Gram, Corregidora and Great Gram’s daughter The Novel Ursa Corregidora is the main character and first-person narrator of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, a novel that focuses on Ursa’s own psychologically hollowed self. After a miscarriage and hysterectomy, Ursa has to accept not only her personal sense of loss but also the weight of family stories regarding her grandmother’s and greatgrandmother’s lives as enslaved prostitutes in Brazil. Having been told since she was five that she would have to reproduce to create living evidence of this slavery (most of the written records were burned), she faces the burden of having to live her life without being able to fulfill the demand that had been placed on her. Corregidora begins with the event that ends Ursa’s first marriage. Her husband, Mutt Thomas, not knowing she is pregnant, knocks her down a stairway in a fit of jealous rage, causing her miscarriage and forcing her to have a hysterectomy. Tadpole McCormick, her employer, and Cat Lawson, her friend, help to nurse Ursa back to health, but neither fully understands how devastating a blow it has been for Ursa to lose the ability to bear a child. The narrative is frequently interrupted by Ursa’s memories of being told about her grandmother and great-grandmother, whom Ursa calls Gram and Great Gram, respectively. Gram and Great Gram endured lives of sexual bondage to Corregidora, a Brazilian slave owner who thus became both Ursa’s grandfather and great-grandfather. It is clear that without the power to fulfill their wish that she reproduce, Ursa now feels unable to avoid dwelling on these painful stories. Further, she focuses her own angers and resentments toward her husband on these stories,

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and they seem to intensify, so that she feels these memories as strongly as if they were her own. After being released from the hospital, Ursa stays with Tadpole for a few days, and then with Cat Lawson, until she discovers that Cat is a lesbian. Although Cat had been her most strong-minded friend and best source of advice, Ursa avoids her and moves back in with Tadpole. Feeling rootless, Ursa drifts into a sexual relationship and hastily conceived marriage with Tadpole. The marriage soon begins to crumble under the weight of Ursa’s increasingly paralyzing memories of Gram and Great Gram’s lives, which Ursa has a hard time separating from her own life. When her second marriage falls apart, Ursa travels home to her mother for a quick visit. For years, her mother had dismissed Ursa’s questions about her father by describing a casual affair that led to a pregnancy. Now Ursa wants the full story, which she gets; more important, however, she and her mother both acknowledge the burdensome weight of their ancestors’ memories. At the end of this section of the novel, Ursa finally wonders, “What had I been doing about my own life?” As if to answer this question, Ursa begins to focus on her own life in the third section of the novel. In particular, she focuses on the development of her sexuality. In one telling passage, she remembers the revulsion she felt when a childhood friend, May Alice, had a baby out of wedlock; she swore to May Alice that she was never going to have a baby herself. This leads to Ursa’s memories of becoming a singer and to her memories of how Mutt Thomas distinguished himself from the other men who pursued her. Her relationship with Mutt is shown developing from flirtation to intimacy to control in a very quick manner. Mutt becomes obsessed first with trying to control her onstage demeanor—which had originally attracted him to her—and later with wanting to humiliate her. Finally, Mutt’s obsession leads to the incident that begins the novel, in which he knocks Ursa down a flight of stairs. The final two sections of the book skip ahead twenty-one years to 1969. Ursa has been working steadily at a bar called the Spider when Mutt Thomas comes back. Mutt is now presented as a man who has matured greatly and who is seeking some sort of redemption. The novel ends with Ursa thinking about the nature of sexual power in a couple, wondering about a relationship that makes people want to kill and love at the same time. Nevertheless, she and Mutt are going to try to be together again. Although Ursa is not sure that she can have a relationship with a man that will be anything other than destructive, she admits to Mutt and to herself that she wants one that is not. The Characters Ursa Corregidora’s life is presented as almost a battleground of the destructive and controlling aspects of sexual relationships between men and women. The lives of her ancestors are distant mirrors for her own life, and she has to learn from those lives without being overwhelmed. At times, Ursa is a maddeningly passive character. While she is in the hospital after her miscarriage and hysterectomy, she finds herself suspecting that she will probably end up with Tadpole when she regains her health. Cat warns her not to rush into any

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relationship while she is feeling so needy, but when Ursa overhears Cat comforting a female teenager in a clearly sexual way, she more or less blocks Cat and Cat’s advice out of her mind. Ursa then very passively falls into a mutually dissatisfying relationship with Tadpole. To a large extent, however, Ursa’s passivity is the novel’s point. She has been overwhelmed by the sexual forces that lead men and women to try to control one another, forces that to her are embodied by the relationship between Corregidora and Great Gram. Ursa is portrayed in terms of Great Gram’s life: She is controlled by a sex role, but she also relies on that role to offer her some sense of control over her life. Behind Ursa’s life, looming larger than life in her memories, are Corregidora and Great Gram. Corregidora, who came from Portugal to Brazil and established a brothel using slave women as prostitutes, represents embodied evil to Ursa. Great Gram was his slave and concubine, but she was not completely powerless. As Ursa begins to sort through the flood of stories she knows about these two people, she realizes that Great Gram must have had a strong sexual power over Corregidora and that she used it to hurt him. At the end of the novel, Mutt three times says to Ursa, “I don’t want a kind of a woman that hurt you”; she replies three times, “Then you don’t want me.” She thus acknowledges that for her, as it was for Great Gram, sexuality has been a battleground where people try to exert power over one another. When Ursa tells Mutt, “I don’t want a kind of man that’ll hurt me neither,” she is trying to hope for another way of using her sexuality; implicitly, therefore, she is also separating herself from her ancestors. After Ursa, Mutt Thomas is the most important character, though not necessarily the most clearly drawn. Throughout the first two sections of the novel, while Ursa is in the hospital and, later, when she is married to Tadpole, Mutt is an unseen presence. Ursa will not see him, but other characters report to her about him. Because Ursa refuses even to think about him much, Mutt appears only in secondhand glimpses as someone desperately sorry for what he has done, looking for a way to make amends. Throughout these sections, it is unclear if Mutt is the man Ursa accuses him of being or if, instead, she has so confused him with Corregidora that she cannot see him clearly. When Ursa begins to focus on Mutt directly, a confused and conniving man emerges. It is clear that as he feels increasingly threatened by her provocative onstage displays, he tries increasingly to subdue and control her sexuality. Questions about the true nature of his relationship to Ursa are answered, and Mutt emerges clearly as a bully. The reformed Mutt who reappears twenty-one years later is harder to see clearly. It is perhaps somewhat less than credible for Jones to present him as returning to Ursa after so long as a changed man. In other ways, though, his return helps to draw the novel to a close. Even after so many years, the same issues of sexuality and control are still central to these two characters’ lives; now, though, they are able to deal with these issues in a more thoughtful way.

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Among the secondary characters, Cat Lawson is the most interesting and most clearly presented. Cat is depicted as a tough-minded, practical woman who cares strongly for other people. While Ursa is recovering in the hospital, Cat is clearly Ursa’s best source of thoughtful, practical (if not necessarily always correct) advice. After Ursa discovers Cat’s homosexuality and marries Tadpole, she loses contact with Cat until years later, when Cat’s young lover, Jeffrene, stops Ursa on the street to say that Cat has had a serious accident. Ursa thinks that she might go to see Cat, but in her heart she knows that she will not. While Ursa is recovering, Cat represents the possibility of a moral direction in Ursa’s life; when Ursa rejects Cat because of her homosexuality, she also loses one possible moral touchstone in her life. Tadpole McCormick, Ursa’s second husband, is clearly not as significant to Ursa as Mutt is. Tadpole and Ursa marry largely as a result of the emotional bonding that her health crisis forms between them, but Tadpole loses interest in Ursa and her complex psychology fairly quickly. Their relationship is important, however, in that it displays the same pattern of using sexuality for control that ruined Ursa’s first marriage. Clearly, this is not an issue particular to only Ursa and Mutt. Themes and Meanings Corregidora is both an exploration of how sexual and other relationships between men and women can become a battleground for domination and an examination of the ways in which violence done by one generation can continue to inflict itself on future generations. Throughout the novel, the stories of Ursa’s ancestors are told repeatedly in flashbacks and are identified by the use of italics. These are not the only italicized sections, however; many of Ursa’s memories of Mutt are also presented in italics. This emphasizes the confusion of Ursa’s feelings toward Mutt and Corregidora. This confusion is exacerbated by Mutt’s insulting and abusive actions toward Ursa, actions that recall Corregidora’s treatment of Great Gram and Gram. Even when Ursa and Mutt meet after many years, the sex act between them that closes the novel has an element of hostility that makes Ursa begin to reflect on the inevitability of antagonism between men and women in a sexual relationship. The issue of slavery is not nearly so thoroughly investigated in Corregidora, but it is the relationship that establishes the pattern for Ursa’s understanding of malefemale relationships. Great Gram and Gram were owned by Corregidora, and thus he had control over them. Great Gram’s sexuality (which Corregidora also tried to control) was the only ability she could use as a weapon against him. Because the records of Corregidora’s Brazilian prostitution operation were all destroyed when slavery was eliminated in Brazil, Ursa, like her mother before her, grew up with the exhortation to reproduce to create evidence that this slavery did in fact exist. In this way, Ursa has learned that she too must use her sexuality as a weapon against slavery. Beyond that, though, the impulse to dominate one another, so visible in both of Ursa’s marriages, seems to be an impulse to master one another; that is, slavery is a useful metaphor for the destructive aspects of these marriages, especially Ursa’s mar-

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riage to Mutt. This becomes eminently clear when, toward the end of their brief marriage, Mutt tells Ursa that he is going to auction her off the next time she performs onstage. Mutt’s explicit meaning is that he is going to sell her as though she were a prostitute, but the image also suggests the public auction of a slave; further, prostitution and slavery are especially linked for Ursa, whose grandmother and greatgrandmother were both prostitutes and slaves. The fact that Mutt attempts so aggressively to master Ursa’s sexuality suggests that the linkage between sexuality and domination is not caused only by the particularly horrid facts of Ursa’s background. Instead, the novel seems to imply that this linkage is a more general condition affecting the lives and loves of men and women. Critical Context Corregidora was widely acclaimed when it was first published in 1975, and Gayl Jones was often compared to such other black female writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor. Jones’s writing, like theirs, often focuses on the political aspects of private life, particularly of the sexual relationships between men and women. John Updike, reviewing Corregidora for The New Yorker, praised the novel’s historical scope, as well as its tight focus on how a history of brutality affects one woman in her relationships with men. One aspect of both Corregidora and Jones’s second novel, Eva’s Man (1976), that has been particularly praised by many critics is the use of blues motifs. Her novels tend to be very spare in their use of physical descriptions and to contain a great deal of dialogue and repetition. Together with Jones’s persistent emphasis on unhappy relationships between men and women, this approach suggests a conscious and careful echo of blues music. The cumulative effect of the technique is to imply great feeling without using a great many words. In the book’s dialogue, readers are often forced to pay more attention to how the characters are speaking to one another than to what they are saying in order to understand all that is happening in the conversation. Moreover, the blues motif helps Jones to suggest the combination of antagonism and regret that marks the relationships between her male and female characters. The critical consensus has been that Jones was able to repeat much of the success of Corregidora in her next novel, Eva’s Man, but much of her subsequent fiction and poetry has been of a lesser quality. As a result, although Corregidora deserves to be compared with novels such as Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Jones’s inability to build on the artistic achievements of Corregidora and move in other artistic directions—as both Walker and Morrison did—prevents her from being ranked as their peer. Therefore, Corregidora, Jones’s flawed but powerful first novel, may remain her most important contribution to literature. Bibliography Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Collection of essays by and about

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some of the most prominent black women writers of the late twentieth century. The section on Jones features a brief essay by her on how she works, essays by Jerry Ward and Melvin Dixon about her work, and a brief bio-bibliography. Fulton, DoVeanna S. Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Includes a chapter on the relationship between love and the legacy of slavery in Corregidora, comparing the novel to Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston. Jones, Gayl. “Gayl Jones Takes a Look at Corregidora: An Interview.” Interview by Roseann Pope Bell. In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1979. Jones talks about the influences of Brazilian history and folklore on Corregidora. _______. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Of general interest to those investigating Jones’s place in African American literature. Jones’s work has often been praised for its use of oral traditions, folklore, and jazz and blues idioms. In this book, she examines the importance of those elements in African American literature at large. Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. In a chapter on Jones, Robinson claims that the main characters of Corregidora and Eva’s Man do not achieve a clearly defined “identity” because Jones is trying to attack the humanistic idea of identity. Instead, Robinson argues, Jones’s major characters have a radical indeterminacy; they cannot be clearly defined within a humanistic framework. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001. Examination of novels, including Corregidora, that are set in modern times and attempt to deal with the “family secret”—slave owner as ancestor. Tate, Claudia C. “Corregidora: Ursa’s Blues Medley.” Black American Literature Forum 13 (Winter, 1979): 139-141. Investigation of the intricacies underlying the surface simplicity of Corregidora. Thompson, Carlyle Van. Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Discusses Jones’s representation of traumatic memory and the relationship between sexual consumption and misogyny in Corregidora. Updike, John. Review of Corregidora, by Gayl Jones. The New Yorker, August 18, 1975, 80-82. Early, favorable review that praises Jones’s ability to draw on black history to create a space “between ideology and dream” in which to explore the destruction and humanity involved in sex. Thomas Cassidy

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COUNTRY PLACE Author: Ann Petry (1908-1997) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Late 1940’s Locale: Lennox, Connecticut First published: 1947 Principal characters: Johnnie Roane, a young veteran of World War II Mrs. Bertha Laughton Gramby, the wealthiest woman in town Glory Roane, Johnnie’s beautiful and promiscuous young wife Lillian Gramby, Glory’s mother The Weasel, an observant, meddlesome outsider Pop Fraser, the town pharmacist The Novel Country Place is a departure both from Ann Petry’s first novel, The Street (1946), and from African American literary tradition. Country Place focuses on a community of main characters who are predominantly white; the book’s minor characters are of varying ethnicities and cultures within a small, rural New England town. The conflicts that arise between the characters, however, are conflicts of class. Petry focuses on the demarcation between the aristocratic and working classes to expose the town’s underlying foundations of bigotry, malice, promiscuity, and violence. The novel begins with the arrival of Johnnie Roane in Lennox as he returns home from World War II. He immediately discovers, in his taxi ride with the Weasel, that his prolonged absence has forced him to view Lennox more clearly. His dreams of a loving reunion with his wife Glory, who he hopes will help him to “forget wars and rumors of wars,” are dashed by the Weasel’s sly innuendo of Glory’s affair with the town rake, Ed Barrell. Despite his suspicions, Johnnie continues to idealize Glory, even though his love for her thwarts his ambitions and keeps him trapped in Lennox: “You want Glory . . . but having her means Lennox. So you forget you ever heard of a paintbrush or a drawing pencil or a place known in some circles as Manhattan Island.” Glory, however, is not willing to accept Johnnie back. His absence has enabled her to feel independent, and her job at Perkin’s store allows her to receive much attention from the men in town. Bored with the thought of marriage and domestic chores, Glory becomes attracted to Ed Barrell, the town stud with a bad heart, who habitually enters into affairs with married women. Glory’s mother, Lil, haunted by the uncertainties of her harsh financial existence as a working-class single mother, manipulates the unambitious but wealthy Mearns

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Gramby into marriage. Together, the couple lives at the Gramby home with the venerable Mrs. Gramby and the family servants. Despite her manipulations, Lil never seems to get what she wants. She is relegated to the background of the Gramby family and never receives the respect she believes her newfound status deserves, from either the townspeople or the Grambys’ servants. Lil’s prejudice compels her to lash out perpetually at the black maid, Neola, and at the family’s Portuguese gardener; she fantasizes about the day when Mrs. Gramby will die and the Gramby estate and prestige will become her own. The plot becomes complicated, as a violent storm ensues that forces the characters’ “reluctant examination of their lives.” Johnnie’s discovery of Glory’s affair with Ed forces him to cast away his idealized portrait of her, and he comes to see her realistically as “the soapbubble, the dream, the illusion.” He considers himself as not only a veteran of World War II but also a veteran of “the never-ending battle between the ones who stayed at home and the ones who went away.” Escaping his entrapment of Glory and the town, Johnnie leaves for New York in order to find himself as an artist. The darkness of the storm forces Mrs. Gramby to examine her guilt and motives as a woman blindly following tradition. Lamenting the knowledge she now possesses of Lil’s afffair with Ed, and her own complicity in the steps that led to it, she contemplates the nature of society as both good and evil. While she will revenge the cuckolding of her son, she vows to enable good to come out of evil. Transcending narrow-mindedness and the dictates of tradition, she hires the town’s only Jewish lawyer, David Rosenberg, to make out her will, which disinherits Lil to include Neola and the gardener in her place. She also wills land on Main Street to the Catholic church, which has been relegated to the impoverished section of town. Lil, motivated by avarice and wholly unaware of Mearns’s and Mrs. Gramby’s discovery of her previous affair, attempts to kill Mrs. Gramby by withholding her insulin. Mrs. Gramby, however, lives to allow good to triumph over evil. She recovers enough to visit the courthouse in order to revise her will. In leaving, Mrs. Gramby dramatically falls down the institution’s steps, pushing Ed Barrell with her. They both fall to their death, suffering fatal heart attacks. The Characters Although Pop Fraser is initially seen as the narrator of the novel, Petry’s narrative rotates point of view among the characters, a technique that enables the collective history of the characters to emerge from individual points of truth, as well as to illustrate that no single character holds a monopoly on the truth. Pop Fraser acquaints readers with the action of the narrative, and he represents a delightful combination of the best of the old traditions as they merge with the best of the new. Johnnie’s point of view and inner conflict emerges distinctly through his descriptions of Glory’s hair as a shimmering net, “spread wide to hold his heart.” Ironically, through Glory, Johnnie is trapped by his idealization and dreams. Only

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when confronted directly with the truth of Glory’s infidelity can Johnnie see her clearly. His glimpse of reality affords him the opportunity to view himself and his place in Lennox in a harsher light. Glory’s infidelity is the impetus for his change, which mirrors the changes he sees around him in Lennox and in American society as a result of the war. Glory is trapped by her fears of an uncertain future in a society that is reeling from two world wars. She watches her life unfurl before her with the avid interest of an audience watching a cinema show. She imagines herself as a film heroine, a fantasy that is fueled by her affair with Ed, who compares her to the actress Lana Turner. Glory is a representation of the brassy and cheap new society, enamored of glamour and hungry for materialism. Unlike Johnnie, Glory is unable to break free from her workingclass roots and her escapist, fantasy state. A product of a society in which traditions have collapsed, she does not have the moral fortitude to disentangle herself from society’s dictates. She succumbs to the fantasy of the cinema world, the imagined glamour of which becomes her reality. Lil, too, is a product of a changing society. Living through the societal and economic upheaval caused by World War II has made her a grasping, greedy woman, a cold egotist who can see only herself. She, too, represents the new society’s cheap materialism and avariciousness. Despite her machinations, however, she remains thwarted in her attempts to achieve financial security and status. Her husband gives her a pittance of an allowance, and Mrs. Gramby relegates her to the status of an unwelcome guest in the Gramby home. A narrow-minded and bigoted woman, the product of outmoded tradition, Lil schemes for the day when she will own the Gramby home and will be able to establish her dominance over the ethnic servants. Mrs. Gramby, entrapped by dated traditions and her own resistance to change, represents the best of the town’s traditions in the face of a morally lax and vulgar modern age. Mrs. Gramby is able to juxtapose the best of the past’s values with the context of the present, as she reaches out to the minorities her daughter-in-law and the townspeople scorn. She provides them with financial independence as a method of empowerment for herself and the working-class servants, an act that enables those involved to transcend societal conventions. Coming to terms with the inevitability of change, Mrs. Gramby decides to influence the direction of such change for the better. Through her will, Mrs. Gramby can speak from the grave and demonstrate to the town “how impossible it is to control the earth, to arbitrarily decide who is to own it.” The Weasel symbolizes all the ugliness that hides beneath the picturesque town— the pettiness, promiscuity, bigotry, greed, and violence. His sadistic manipulations, not unlike the storm, result in change and transcendence for some characters—and continued entrapment for others. Themes and Meanings Early in the narrative of Country Place, Pop Fraser makes the statement that “wheresoever men dwell there is always a vein of violence running under the surface quiet.” In interviews, Petry described her experience as a member of one of only two

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black families who lived in the small New England coastal town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her father was a prominent and respected member of the community as a pharmacist, yet his status did not prevent Petry and her sister from being stoned by white children on their way home from school. Petry used her tragic firsthand experience to illustrate the violence and bigotry underlying the foundations of any community, be it urban city or rural town. Her narrative dispels the myth of picturesque small-town perfection and challenges the idealized image of serenity and peace within such communities. In its place, Petry offers a picture of bigotry, vindictiveness, greed, and conflict. More important, using Lennox as a microcosm, Petry examines society as a whole to reveal the results of the conflict of tradition as it meets change—a world in a state of flux for all of its inhabitants—regardless of their culture. The metaphor of the violent storm, which rips trees up by their roots, provides a vehicle to convey the deep displacement of individuals as they suffer the winds of change, in this case as a result of a world war. Some characters are more adept at weathering storms of change and their resulting violence than others. Mrs. Gramby has seen many changes throughout her life. Pop tells Lil, “I’ve never known her to be upset by storms. She’s seen a good many of them.” Ultimately, Mrs. Gramby is able to escape and transcend tradition as she faces her final storm. Johnnie Roane, too, is able to avoid entrapment as he faces the reality of change, leaving Lennox and Glory to seek New York. A veteran and a man standing alone, Johnnie no longer defines himself by the confining criteria of small-town tradition, nor by his disillusioned wife’s solicitious embracing of the new. Glory and Lil, however, remain trapped in the perils of their gender and class. Glory, trapped by her physical beauty and the lure of glamour offered by motionpicture illusions, remains entrenched in Lennox, as does her mother, who is trapped once again in her aggressive pursuit of the respect that accompanies status and wealth. Both women are thwarted in their pursuits and discovered in their greed. Glory’s lover, Ed Barrell, dies of a fatal heart attack, and Lil is disinherited of the Gramby estate. Good triumphs over evil. Through the microcosm of Lennox, Petry exposes the violence, treachery, bigotry, and class conflicts inherent in a society reeling from two world wars, regardless of location. The character of Pop Fraser exemplifies societal flux as he tells readers his narration contains “something of life and something of death, for both are to be found in a country place.” Critical Context Country Place, Petry’s second novel, represents a sharp departure from her first novel, the naturalistic and critically acclaimed The Street, which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award. Country Place also deviates largely from much of African American literary tradition and convention. The characters of Country Place represent a cast of largely white characters, with the minor characters representing various ethnic and cultural origins. This aspect of the novel, as well as its rural setting, gave

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rise to criticism of the narrative’s “raceless” aspect. However, literary historian Arthur Davis, in his 1974 text From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 19001960, defends Petry’s choice of a small town as her subject, stating that Petry had written “about a life that in all probability she knew better than the life she wrote about in The Street.” Petry’s skillful manipulation of point of view, her brilliant characterization, and her economical writing style have prompted many critics to judge Country Place her most successful novel. Comparing Petry’s work to that of Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Willard Motley, and Frank Yerby, the renowned literary critic and historian Robert Bone referred to Country Place as “the best of the assimilationist novels.” Bone called Country Place a “distinguished achievement” and judged it among one of the finest novels of the protest period because it is “a manifestation not so much of assimilation as of versatility.” Bibliography Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Pioneering work that traces the evolution of the African American novel from 1890 to 1952. Examines Petry’s work within the context of the postwar expansion. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Examines Petry in the context of other major African American writers and calls Country Place “small-town realistic fiction.” Includes biographical information and bibliography. Ervin, Hazel Arnett, ed. The Critical Response to Ann Petry. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Collection of sixteen book reviews and twenty-six scholarly articles on Petry, ordered chronologically according to the novel to which they respond. Includes a critical and biographical introductory essay by the editor. Lubin, Alex, ed. Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Collection of essays that together stress the importance of Petry’s participation in progressive political action for understanding her work. Includes an essay by Paula Rabinowitz on Country Place as pulp fiction, as well as several more general studies of Petry’s fiction. Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. “Ann Petry.” In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. Examines the “unique double perspective” that Petry brings to her literary work as a result of her middleclass upbringing in a small New England town and her years of living and working with impoverished African Americans in New York City. Explores this dichotomous writing style as it presents itself in Petry’s three novels, including Country Place. Petry, Ann. “A MELUS Interview: Ann Petry—The New England Connection.” Interview by Mark Wilson. MELUS 15, no. 2 (1988): 71-84. Petry discusses her personal and professional life, particularly her New England childhood and its influence upon much of her later writing.

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Shinn, Thelma J. “Women in the Novels of Ann Petry.” In Contemporary Women Novelists, edited by Patricia M. Spacks. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Explores Petry’s novels and their female protagonists. Illustrates Petry’s focus on the individual’s struggle with society, in which the morally weak are misled by illusions and destroyed by impoverishment, and the morally strong are forced to symbolize the very society they reject. Michele Mock-Murton

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CRANIAL GUITAR Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman Author: Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) Type of work: Poetry First published: 1996 The Poems Cranial Guitar is a posthumous collection of poems by Bob Kaufman that includes all of the poems from Golden Sardine (1967), selections from Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965), selections from The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978 (1981), and additional works previously unpublished in book form. The poems in Golden Sardine challenge readers with unconventional expression, even absurdity, but Kaufman’s purpose is to affirm life. In “Carl Chessman Interviews the P.T.A. in His Swank Gas Chamber Before Leaving on His Annual Inspection of Capital, Tour of Northern California Death Universities, Happy,” Kaufman protests the state’s execution of Chessman, asserting, “No one is guilty of anything at any time anywhere in anyplace, ask those Hebrew ecstatics up there on the trees of sorrow.” In “The Enormous Gas Bill at the Dwarf Factory. A Horror Movie to Be Shot With Eyes,” Kaufman produces an absurd film scenario that resumes his challenge of the death penalty for Chessman. Kaufman pays homage to the executed Chessman, who “was an American buffalo filled with glistening embryos.” Kaufman’s protests against capital punishment leave him uncertain and troubled. Kaufman, in “A Terror Is More Certain,” says, “I want to be allowed not to be.” In “Walking Hot Seasons,” the poet confesses, “Everything that never happened is my fault.” In “Results of a Lie Detector Test,” Kaufman regretfully says he has “stolen a month” and “faces the accusing fingers of children who will never be born.” He pledges not to repeat his theft of a month, but qualifies his pledge, admitting that desperation may drive him to repeat the act. Emerging from doubt, Kaufman finds joy in love and jazz. In “Come,” he proclaims, “All that I touch,/ Blossoms from/ a thorn,/ arosearose.” In “Round About Midnight,” jazz references combine with references to “a jazz type chick” to create an atmosphere of music and intimacy. This combination of jazz and sensuality recurs in “Jazz Chick,” a poem that speaks of “Rivulets of trickling ecstasy/ From the alabaster pools of Jazz.” Beyond joy, jazz offers redemption. In “Tequila Jazz,” Kaufman writes, “Unseen wings of jazz,/ Flapping, flapping. Carry me off, carry me off.” In “Believe, Believe,” Kaufman musters his positive energy and generates advice: “Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz . . ./ Not the sick controllers,/ Who created only the Bomb.” This positive outlook proves difficult to maintain, and in “Heavy Water Blues,” Kaufman declares, “I hope that when the machines finally take over,/ they won’t build men that break down,/ as soon as they’re paid for.” In “Suicide,” Kaufman com-

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ments on the “first man,” who “was an idealist,” but who upon learning that “the whole/ world, all of it, was all his,” used “a little piece of string, & a sharp stone” to kill himself. Wavering between grief and ecstasy, Kaufman concludes Golden Sardine optimistically. In “Night Sung Sailor’s Prayer,” he writes, “Sing love and life and life and love/ All that lives is Holy,/ The unholiest, most holy all.” In “Plea,” Kaufman writes, “Seek and find Hiroshima’s children,/ Send them back, send them back.” In “O-Jazz-O,” Kaufman insists, “My father’s sound/ My mother’s sound,/ Is love,/ Is life.” Selections from Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness celebrate art, artists, musicians, jazz, and history. In “Walking Parker Home,” Kaufman salutes Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and especially Charlie Parker, who represent the “fierce dying of humans consumed/ In raging fires of Love.” In “Afterwards, They Shall Dance,” the poet acknowledges Maxwell Bodenheim, Dylan Thomas, Billie Holiday, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Baudelaire; in “Bagel Shop Jazz,” Kaufman describes “Shadow people” on the jazz scene, who speak “of Bird and Diz and Miles” and hope that “the beat is really the truth.” In “Bird With Painted Wings,” Kaufman refers to artists Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Edgar Degas, and others, whose work interprets love, light, madness, truth, and sadness. In “To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room,” Kaufman cites examples from the history of civilization, noting creativity and determination, proclaiming that people are “eternally free in all things.” These poems are offset by poems about alienation. In “Would You Wear My Eyes?” Kaufman says, “I have walked on my walls each night/ Through strange landscapes in my head.” In “Abomunist Manifesto,” which concludes the selections from Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, Kaufman says, “Abomunists do not feel pain no matter how much it hurts.” According to Kaufman, “Abomunists never compromise in their rejectionary philosophy.” In selections from The Ancient Rain, Kaufman affirms life and God. In “All Those Ships That Never Sailed,” the poet grants new voyages to ships, new growth to flowers, and eternal life for the body. In “My Mysteries,” he writes, “God is my green-/ eyed one, whose power is/ Endless.” Renewings his dedication to poetry, Kaufman in “The Poet” writes, “The blood of the poet/ Must flow in his poem.” In “The Ancient Rain,” he declares, “All the symbols shall return to the realm of the symbolic and reality become the meaning again.” A group of uncollected works ends Cranial Guitar. “Hank Lawler: Chorus” pays tribute to a genius “who worked out arithmetic problems in his head.” Lawler created “jazzy psalms, tribal histories in cubist and surrealist patterns.” In “Does the Secret Mind Whisper?” Kaufman creates his own surreal effects and ponders the problem of the atomic bomb. Themes and Meanings Kaufman saluted the heroes of jazz. Kaufman’s poetry features the rhythms, inventions, and surprises of jazz, and like a jazz musician who has a repertoire of melodies

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to draw from in the midst of improvisation, Kaufman had a repertoire of lines and phrases he called on during performances. Kaufman also dedicated himself to surrealism. He constantly created absurd combinations that compel readers to reconcile apparent contradictions and envision fantastic scenes. He was associated with Beat writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, because Kaufman disconnected himself from material pursuits and found his finest expression in public oratory. Distrustful of a society that killed its own citizens and developed atomic weaponry, Kaufman hailed love, art, kindness, and peace. The seeming absurdity of his writing dismantled the seeming sanity of the world as a whole, revealing the profound absurdity of human cruelty. Critical Context Kaufman was an oral poet; that is, he recited his poems from memory in public, sometimes in clubs and cafés, sometimes on the streets. His process of composition was far from formal, and he often wrote poems on napkins or scraps of paper. He took no interest in developing a career as a writer and made little effort to gather his works or seek publication. His wife, Eileen, strove to create a written record of Kaufman’s poetry. In some instances, tape recordings of the poet’s readings were transcribed. Various poets and scholars maintained respect for Kaufman’s inventive imagination. Eileen Kaufman joined with Gerald Nicosia to gather works for Cranial Guitar, and with the cooperation of Coffee House Press in Minneapolis, Nicosia edited this volume of selected poems. When Golden Sardine and Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness appeared, literary critics and academics found nothing worthy of attention. Because Kaufman was outlandish in his public recitations and rejected society’s conventions, he was an outsider—an easy target for abuse by police. Persistent in his dedication to poetry, Kaufman nevertheless won the respect of the bohemian community and now endures as a key figure among Beat writers. Kaufman’s Jewish surname and varying descriptions of his heritage obscured the poet’s African American identity. Although he referred to the troubles of the South and the concerns of African Americans, he did not make African American issues the driving force of his work. In American literature, Kaufman holds a strong place in the revival of oral poetry in the middle of the twentieth century. He was influenced by Andre Breton, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire, as well as a range of visual artists and jazz musicians. These influences led Kaufman to become a surrealist poet and jazz writer. Bibliography Anderson, T. J. “Body and Soul: Bob Kaufman’s Golden Sardine.” African American Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 329-347. Studies Kaufman’s appropriation of the rhythms and tones of jazz.

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Cherkovski, Neeli. “Celebrating Second April: Bob Kaufman.” In Whitman’s Wild Children. Venice, Calif.: Lapis Press, 1988. Cherkovski recalls his friendship with Kaufman. Christian, Barbara. “Whatever Happened to Bob Kaufman.” In The Beats: Essays in Criticism, edited by Lee Bartlett. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1981. Calls attention to the importance of social protest and jazz in Kaufman’s work. Damon, Maria. “Bob Kaufman, Poet: A Special Section.” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 25, no. 1 (Winter, 2002): 105-231. This special section in Callaloo presents articles on Bob Kaufman by Aldon Lynn Nielsen, James Smethurst, Amor Kohli, Jeffrey Falla, Rod Hernandez, and Horace Coleman. Henderson, David. Introduction to Cranial Guitar, edited by Gerald Nicosia. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1996. Summarizes Kaufman’s career and quotes extensively from a two-hour radio documentary on Kaufman. Kohli, Amor. “Black Skins, Beat Masks: Bob Kaufman and the Blackness of Jazz.” In Reconstructing the Beats. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Sees Kaufman’s use of jazz performance as a form of protest. Thomas, Lorenzo. “‘Communicating by Horns’: Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement.” African American Review 26, no. 2 (1992): 291-299. Draws a connection between jazz artists and the rebellion against conformity. Winans, A. D. “Bob Kaufman.” American Poetry Review 29, no. 3 (May/June, 2000): 19-20. Offers a compact review of Kaufman’s life. William T. Lawlor

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THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership Author: Harold Cruse (1916-2005) Type of work: Cultural criticism First published: 1967 Form and Content The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is divided into six parts, comprising twentyeight sections, none of which is strictly chronological or thematically coherent. Nonetheless, some general distinctions can be drawn. Part 1 functions as an overview of the African American cultural landscape, and in this part Cruse summarizes the themes he plans to flesh out in the body of the book. In particular, he argues for the prime importance of the cultural sector (as opposed to the economic or political ones) for the advancement of African American interests in general. Part 2 looks at the influences, good and bad, of West Indian and Jewish traditions in the Communist Party and nascent African political organizations from the early 1900’s to the 1930’s. It concludes with a chapter on Richard Wright, who serves, for Cruse, as the example par excellence of a brilliant talent boxed in by acquiescence to the West Indian- and Jewishbacked ideologies of the period. Parts 3 and 4 focus on the formation and dissolution of African American newspapers in Harlem and the merits and flaws of African American playwrights and actors, addressed in chapters on Lorraine Hansberry and Paul Robeson. Part 5 considers the advancements and retreats of both the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s and the countervailing forces of the cultural nationalist movements. Part 6 is another broad overview of all the aforementioned themes as they have manifested themselves in the early 1960’s. Thus, the circular structure of the book reinforces one of Cruse’s central themes: The promises and failures of African American leadership and cultural nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries repeat themselves in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Analysis In the opening section of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “Individualism and the ‘Open Society,’” Cruse makes short work of the American myth of individual achievement. He argues that, while the bulk of the Constitution recognizes the sanctity of the individual, certain sections—specifically, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—derive from the political and social experiences of groups—for example, the former slaves. This double trajectory of the Constitution is replicated in a number of areas in American life, but for Cruse’s purposes its pertinent incarnation is cultural nationalism and civil rights agitation, loosely corresponding to group segregationism and individual integrationism in African American history. Just as W. E. B. Du Bois’s central argument against Booker T. Washington was that eco-

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nomic development required the a priori deployment of political power, so Cruse’s argument against integrationists is that individual rights in any one sphere of activity (social, economic, and so on) can be protected only by group power in other, if not all other, spheres. Thus, for Cruse, “power” always means the simultaneous wielding of cultural, political, and economic clout. This premise governs every subsequent argument Cruse constructs. Thus, in section 2, “Harlem Background: The Rise of Economic Nationalism and Origins of Cultural Revolution,” Cruse delineates the failure of both ordinary Harlemites and the intelligentsia to support the few businesses and cultural institutions actually owned by African Americans. He traces this separation of cultural and economic power in discussions of the rise and fall of the Afro-American Realty Company, the communist-inspired picketing of a film showing at the Apollo, the failed strike of the Lafayette Theatre, the paucity of productions of African American playwrights, the opportunism of black actors and actresses, and in general the collapse of the Harlem Renaissances. Cruse concludes section 2 of the book with a long discussion on the problem of “outsiders,” specifically West Indians and Jews. His treatment of Claude McKay and Marcus Garvey again aligns itself according to the protocols Cruse established early on: the relationship between the cultural and economic or the cultural and political spheres. What had been a concern with real estate in relation to the formation and ownership of theater companies here focuses on the tensions between those African American artists drawn to socialism and communism versus those transplanted West Indians who, ironically, advocate African American nationalism. Cruse argues that the black and Jewish communism of McKay, like the African nationalism of Garvey, was irrelevant and escapist, negative proof of the irreducible gap between the African American experience and that of other pan-Africans and American ethnic groups. For Cruse, only African Americans can provide cultural leadership, and culture generally trumps the economic and political spheres. Still, Cruse castigates the African American bourgeoisie for its failure to support the owners of African American businesses (both “artistic” and not), a criticism that presupposes economic resources prior to cultural productions. This is why Cruse sometimes argues that the cultural sphere must be developed prior to the economic and political spheres. At other times, Cruse makes the more coherent, if problematic, argument that all three spheres—the cultural, economic, and political—must be developed simultaneously. Underlying all these various ways of viewing African American intellectual history is Cruse’s unwavering belief that development, however and wherever it occurs, must be nationalist (that is, separatist). His evidence for this necessity is outlined in parts 2 and 3, where he covers in more detail the misguided West Indian influence on African American nationalism. In part 5 of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse continues his attack on both the integrationist and the nationalist wings of black leadership, shifting the ground of his argument to the question of violence. Cruse criticizes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other integrationists for refusing

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outright violence in both its offensive and its self-defensive postures. He simultaneously criticizes the Nation of Islam and other nationalists for romanticizing violence, that is, seeking reformist ends via “revolutionary” (violent) means. Black intellectuals, Cruse argues, must move from “protest” to revolution: Only significant institutional changes can alter the landscape of racial power in America. For Cruse, capitalism and social equality for African Americans as a group are fundamentally incompatible. The same holds true for the Constitution and social equality. Because Cruse insists that these alterations must be made within and upon the unique history of America, he rejects foreign solutions (traditional Marxism) and foreign leadership (West Indians), however valuable those discourses may be for diagnosing the crisis of black leadership. Critical Context Harold Cruse’s book appeared in 1967, in the middle of student demonstrations for free speech and black studies programs at universities and colleges, the Civil Rights movement, and a Black Power movement coming to grips with the post-Malcolm X Nation of Islam. His work was widely praised and condemned, not least by African American cultural activists, politicians, historians, and literary critics. Cruse was accused of making ad hominem arguments that were unsubstantiated by real historical analysis and putting forward an unrealistic assessment of the viability of separate black political and economic institutions. Perhaps most damaging was the criticism that took Cruse to task for conflating the unique historical experience of Harlem and its populace with those of other black urban centers. At the same time, Cruse was praised by those who were more sympathetic to the Black Power movement for his willingness to take on the sacred cows of the Civil Rights movement and the Nation of Islam, both of which, in retrospect, were already at the height of their power and influence over the general American public. Cruse’s historical analysis, however scattershot in approach, hit a few nerves for yet another reason. Cruse’s critique of integration and segregation as embodied in the figures of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X was primarily a critique of religion-inspired movements within African American history. In taking this position, Cruse was literally going against certain presumptions underlying the trajectory of black history and culture: the unavoidable reliance of African Americans on religion (whether Christianity or Islam) in their struggles for civil, economic, and political rights and power. Bibliography Cruse, Harold. “Locating the Black Intellectual: An Interview with Harold Cruse.” Interview by Van Gosse. Radical History Review 71 (1994): 96-120. In this interview conducted shortly after the publication of Cruse’s Plural but Equal, Cruse tells the story of his difficult upbringing in Virginia and New York and his adventures in the Army during World War II. He provides his own assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of his analyses in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, concluding with an overview of the “new black intellectual” class.

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Davis, Henry Vance. “Harold Wright Cruse: The Early Years and the Jewish Factor.” The Black Scholar 35, no. 4 (2006): 17-31. Provides an overview of Cruse’s biography and intellectual development, highlighting the sources of the anti-Semitism that detracted from The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, though Davis (like Cruse himself) links the anti-Semitism to the notorious relationship between Harlem and the Communist Party in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Margolies, Edward. “Review.” American Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1968): 249-253. Reviewing four works by African American writers William Demby, Eldridge Cleaver, Lewis Killian, and Harold Cruse, Margolies offers one of the few positive and succinct overviews of Cruse’s book after its publication in 1967. Margolies links it to the advent of a Black Power movement that, for Margolies, must break with a philosophically flawed Civil Rights agenda. Spillers, Hortense J. “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date.” Boundary 2 21, no. 3 (1987): 65-116. Spillers’s long and complex article addresses the problematic relationship between “black intellectuals” and their “communities” in the light of the problems articulated by Cruse and Du Bois in their respective texts. For Spillers, the very nature of “responsibility” must be interrogated in the light of the various temptations of the “theatrical” and “celebrity” that veil the only work that the intellectual can do: thinking and writing. Young, Cynthia. “Havana Up in Harlem: LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and the Making of a Cultural Revolution.” Science and Society 65, no. 1 (2001): 12-38. Discusses the impact of the Cuban Revolution on the formation of cultural nationalism that led to the transformation of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka, as well as the revolution’s reinforcement of Cruse’s ideas about the importance of cultural nationalism for African Americans. Tyrone Williams

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CROSSING THE RIVER Author: Caryl Phillips (1958) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1752-1963 Locale: Africa; the American West; England First published: 1993 Principal characters: Nash Williams, a former slave who is a missionary in West Africa Edward Williams, Nash’s former owner Madison Williams, another former slave of Edward who is a trader in Monrovia Martha Randolph, a washerwoman and cook Joyce, the co-proprietor of an English village grocery Travis, an African American GI James Hamilton, the captain of a slaving vessel Unnamed African father The Novel Crossing the River is a novel of the African diaspora, following the life stories of three Africans. Each is portrayed as being in some sense the child of a nameless father who sells his children into slavery, and, although each spends much of his or her life outside of slavery, this “peculiar institution” has indelibly marked them all. Nash, Martha, and Travis cannot be the actual children of the unnamed father whose lament frames the novel: At least two generations separate Nash Williams from the father’s sale of his children, and an even greater time gap exists for the others. The characters are therefore either the real or the spiritual descendants of the father’s children. The father listens from afar for his children’s voices for 250 years. The biblical echoes of this figure are unmistakable; he lives in mythic time. The novel’s first section, “The Pagan Coast,” tells of Nash Williams’s resettlement in West Africa. He arrives in 1834, filled with enthusiasm and high hopes. Nash first settles in Monrovia, then moves upriver into the countryside, where he starts a school. He converts some fifty Africans to Christianity. He relates these achievements in letters he sends to Edward, his former owner. Thanking God and Edward for his good fortune, Nash pleads for some small items he cannot obtain in Africa. There is no reply. Edward never receives his letters. As time goes on, Nash feels increasing desperation about his situation. Meanwhile, Edward has heard only indirect news of him through Madison, who has his own issues about Edward’s favoritism. After seven years, Madison reports that Nash has disappeared. Unwilling to believe it, Edward

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journeys to Liberia and finds not only that Nash is dead but also that all signs of his mission have faded. The second section, “West,” is Martha Randolph’s story. As she lies dying in a cold Denver house, Martha recalls being put on the auction block after her owner’s death. The sale meant the permanent breakup of her small family. Even as her daughter clung to her, Martha comforted herself that little Eliza Mae would go to a better home if she was sold separately. Martha herself ended up with a pious couple who moved to Kansas. They gave her a chance to escape rather than reselling her. After her escape, Martha settled in Dodge City, doing laundry and running a restaurant for colored cowhands. It was a hard life, but she found a measure of happiness because of her freedom and because of Chester, a gentle wrangler who shared her life. After Chester was shot and her friend Lucy married, a forlorn Martha hid her failing health so she could travel west with a wagon train. Nearing Denver, however, she could not go on. Huddling in a doorway, she was helped inside by an unknown woman, but it was too late. Martha dies, dreaming of finding her long-lost daughter in California. There follows the journal of James Hamilton, the captain of the slaving ship Duke of York. Hamilton’s journal recounts the voyage on which he bought the three African children of the nameless father. The captain’s matter-of-fact notes about weather conditions and the purchase of rice, firewood, and human beings alternate with tender letters to his wife. Hamilton’s ability to separate these two parts of his life is the most powerful part of this section. The final section, “Somewhere in England,” forms the longest part of the novel. Joyce, its protagonist, is a reticent and wary young Englishwoman. At the start of World War II, she marries a shop owner. After her husband is arrested for black marketeering, Joyce runs his village store. There, she meets Travis, who is stationed with an American contingent just outside Joyce’s village. They have a low-key romance. Only gradually and indirectly do readers learn that Travis is African American; it hardly matters to Joyce. When Joyce’s husband comes home from prison, she asks for a divorce. He beats her, then leaves. Travis ships out to the Italian front. Soon, Joyce discovers she is pregnant with Travis’s child. Travis returns on a seventy-twohour leave. They marry, but Travis has to promise not to take Joyce home with him to America. Soon after the baby’s birth, Travis is killed in action. Devastated, Joyce lets a County Council social worker take baby Greer away. The Characters Each story’s style reflects the main character’s era, station in life, and habits of mind. Nash Williams’s letters, for example, incorporate nineteenth century cadences and attitudes. Even Nash’s complaints are couched in polite but regretful language, with phrases that speak of his regard for Christianity and civilization. His frantic requests for seeds, nails, cloth, and other items are phrased respectfully. His struggle to maintain his belief and his mission seems little short of heroic. Nash fails in the end, and his shaky achievements are lost to history, but his efforts represent a triumph of the spirit.

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Martha Randolph’s story is told as an internal monologue during her last few hours of life, with an omniscient narrator filling in the gaps. She is cold and miserable, unable even to move without help. This naturally colors her memory and makes her life seem full of pain and sorrow. It was, but to see Martha only in these terms misses her unique experience. The “proud girl” of the captain’s log survives in her bravery at the auction and her later escape. Her honesty with Chester leads to ten happy years together. Martha’s laundry and restaurant ventures show that she is a woman making the best of the limited options available to her. Her will to see her daughter again is a victory of sorts. Joyce’s story is told in short notes that resemble pages from a spilled diary, reassembled with no regard for dates. This format emphasizes Joyce’s distance from society’s assumptions. While Joyce guards her words when speaking with others, the vignettes reveal a woman who thinks for herself. She doubts most of the war-centered propaganda that bombards the British public, and she finds Winston Churchill a pompous bore. Travis’s entry into her life is her first experience of being genuinely loved and cherished. Only a few glimpses of him are given, but by his actions he shows himself to be a man of honor. In giving up Greer, Joyce joins the long line of mothers separated from their children by the legacy of racism. She is left to find her way in provincial British society however she can. Themes and Meanings Shared themes hold together the diverse life stories of this novel. The original sin of paternal abandonment is repeated down the generations of the diaspora. Even Nash’s substitute father figure, Edward, ultimately casts him off by his failure to investigate Nash’s silence until it is too late. Minor characters too are caught up in this pattern: Martha’s lover Chester admits to having lost track of the children whom he fathered. Maternal absence is a related theme, but its results are shown somewhat differently— in the sorrow of the mother rather than the biblical child’s lament “Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Martha openly grieves for her lost daughter. Joyce’s sorrow is shown indirectly. The motif of the absent father is accompanied by the related motif of dislocation. Each “child” dies not only far from his or her home ground but also in an alien place and culture. Joyce’s dislocation is interior, mental rather than physical. It represents more than typical English reticence: Her mental universe is different from other peoples’. The final message of Crossing the River is one of qualified hope. Even alone and bereft, Nash, Martha, and Travis—and Joyce, the honorary refugee—win a sort of victory by their endurance and their capacity for love despite its dangers. Critical Context Crossing the River was short-listed for the Booker Prize of 1993. It is the least bleak of Phillips’s novels. Most reviews have focused on the unity of its voices and themes. Several point out that the Africa of the ancestral father was also a harsh environment.

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The novel also throws light on some lesser-known aspects of African American history. Nash Williams’s aborted dreams illuminate the difficulties of ex-slaves’ resettlement in Liberia. The roles of African American cowboys like Chester and of nineteenth century black immigrants to California are relatively neglected parts of Western lore. More than one critic has read Edward Williams’s mentorship of Nash as a homosexual relationship. This is indeed possible. The sentimental flourishes of the era’s writing style make it hard either to prove or to disprove. The author’s intent on this point is opaque. More important thematically is the relationship’s foster-father motif and Nash’s bewilderment that his father has betrayed him. In Crossing the River, Caryl Phillips has woven divergent voices into an intricate tapestry that traces the legacy of the slave trade. Bibliography Davison, Carol Margaret. “Crisscrossing the River: An Interview with Caryl Phillips.” Ariel 25 (October, 1994): 91-99. In a wide-ranging conversation, Phillips reflects on influences on his style and content, as well as his aims in writing the novel. Diedrich, Maria, et al., eds. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Massive study of the African diaspora in literature, with two articles on Phillips. Ledent, Benedicte. Caryl Phillips. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002. Critical analysis of the author’s fiction, including Crossing the River. Major, Charles. “Crossing the River.” African-American Review 31 (Spring, 1997): 172. Long, perceptive review; focuses on slaves’ uprooting and its consequences. Pinckney, Darryl. Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002. Includes a long essay on Phillips as a chronicler of the alienated and dispossessed. Warnes, Andrew. “Enemies Within: Diaspora and Democracy in Crossing the River and A Distant Shore.” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 7 (2007): 33-45. Argues that Phillips presents racism as a psychological disorder. In his view, racism is both a cause and an effect of repression in what should be a democratic, all-inclusive, egalitarian society. Emily Alward

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THE CULTURE OF BRUISING Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture Author: Gerald Early (1952) Type of work: Cultural criticism/essays First published: 1994 Form and Content The Culture of Bruising collects essays in which noted cultural critic Gerald Early engages a diversity of topics, ranging from boxing, baseball, and jazz to magic, race, and life with daughters. Most of the essays were previously published in journals as various as The Hungry Mind Review, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, and Harper’s Magazine. As the book’s subtitle announces, the themes that Early examines involve prizefighting, literature, and American culture, but the fourteen essays that compose the volume lack a unifying thesis and exist as separate essays on distinct and sometimes unrelated topics. The book is divided into three sections, each with its own focus, though the essays themselves can easily be read alone without any attempt to understand the relationship among them. In his introduction, Early observes that this collection grew out of the final essay in his previous essay collection, Tuxedo Junction (1989), an essay by James Baldwin on the first fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Early goes to great lengths to convince readers that his essays should not be read simply as explorations of boxing. Rather, they should be read as the work of a literary critic who is interested in examining a set of propositions about a range of subjects with which he is deeply engaged. The book’s first section, “Prizefighting and the Modern World,” contains four essays that deal specifically with boxing. The first and longest essay, “The Black Intellectual and the Sport of Prizefighting,” discusses the lack of black writing on the subject. Early observes that—apart from a few key texts including the opening scene of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) and Jeffrey Sammons’s nonfiction work Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (1988)—no black academic writer has written about the sport. Paradoxically, Early points out, black boxers dominate the sport, and the great fights between white fighters and African American fighters—for example, Jerry Cooney versus Michael Spinks or Jerry Quarry versus Muhammad Ali—were elevated to mythic battles in which the boxing ring itself became the place where ideas of order were contested. In Early’s view, black intellectuals examine boxing only when an African American fighter becomes a hero for the African American masses and fights a white fighter. As Early points out toward the end of his essay, the situation becomes more challenging when two African American fighters square off in the ring, as did Floyd

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Patterson and Sonny Liston. What happens when two such radically different black men confront each other in the ring? Who becomes the model for the preservation of black dignity? Early points out that Patterson had become so trapped in patterns of life created for him by integration that he, unlike Ali or Liston, could do little but play the white nemesis of the African American trickster figure in the ring. The fight thereby perpetuated the notion that the ring was the arena for contesting the established social order. Another essay in the text’s first section, “The Unquiet Kingdom of Providence,” brilliantly analyzes the political and social implications of the 1962 fight between reigning heavyweight champion Patterson and former prison inmate Liston. According to Early, this fight represented the finest hour of 1960’s liberalism. Patterson finally consented to fight Liston and remarked that Liston had paid for his crimes; if Liston were to defeat him and become champion, then Liston would be a changed man and all his good qualities, buried before the fight, would emerge. Early points out the irony of a nation of white men watching two black men beat each other’s brains out. Liston’s defeat of Patterson, however, dashed the liberal notion that the fight might reform Liston. Instead, as Early observes, white Americans and bourgeois African Americans recognized the rage buried in the black underclass as well as the inadequacy of liberal rhetoric to deal with it. In the final essay in the first section, “The Romance of Toughness,” Early compares and contrasts the fighting styles and the machismo of Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano. The book’s second section, “Habitations of the Mask,” comprises eight essays covering a wider range of topics, from multiculturalism, baseball, and jazz to magic, Malcolm X, and race and material culture. In “The American Mysticism of Remembrance,” Early questions the value of Black History Month to an American culture already segregated by the demands of race, gender, and class. With affecting grace, Early recalls his realization in the fifth grade—when he failed to complete his report on Phillis Wheatley for Negro History Week—that he hated Negro History Week, because, in his view, his people had no history worthy of Washington or Jefferson. Early extends his reflections to his present disgust for Black History Month, during which he has become another speaker on a circuit touting the significance of black identity. He points out that the rhetoric surrounding Black History Month is chauvinistic and tyrannical, asserting that black people’s history not only has meaning but must be seen as the source or origin of all meaning in the world. Early challenges such an attitude as anti-intellectual and as one that traps African Americans in a prison of race that offers no more freedom than the prison of race in which whites have trapped them. In “House of Ruth, House of Robinson: Some Observations on Baseball, Biography, and the American Myth,” Early examines the enduring appeal of baseball, as well as the significant differences between two of the first African American ballplayers in the white leagues, Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson. Whereas Mays was content to play ball, Robinson saw life as more than baseball. Robinson spent much of his time after his baseball career ended working on behalf of civil rights, while Mays was still gliding over the grass and robbing opposing players of home runs.

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In “Collecting ‘The Artificial Nigger’: Race and American Material Culture,” Early contends that, rather than opposing the little statues of black jockeys displayed in yards across the South, African Americans should collect them as material artifacts of their past. To do so would allow them to bridge the gap between being black and being American. The second section’s longest essay, “Pulp and Circumstance: The Story of Jazz in High Places,” is itself a virtuoso performance that covers the music of Shirley Caesar, Jelly Roll Morton, and Billie Holiday. Holiday’s comeback, according to Early, signified the acceptance of the black jazz artist in mainstream American culture. In “Notes on the Invention of Malcolm X: Wrestling with the Dark Angel,” Early argues that African Americans must not only learn to value their African identity—as Malcolm X taught—but also accept and embrace the complex fate of being American. The two personal essays in the book’s final section, “Life With Daughters,” explore Early’s relationship with his daughters. They use the lenses of the Miss America Pageant and the movies of Shirley Temple to examine his daughters’ experiences growing up female and black in a white society. Analysis Gerald Early’s second collection of essays features several of his characteristic themes and subjects: black identity, boxing, jazz, movies, material culture, masculinity and femininity, and literature. Most of the essays were first published in periodicals, but their collection into a book testifies to their influence and significance. Many scholars and African American social commentators disagree with Early’s opinions, but his candor, his wit, and his elegant writing draw many partners into an ongoing conversation about the important issues he discusses. Although the title The Culture of Bruising refers to boxing, only four of the book’s essays concern the sport, and Early clearly indicates in his introduction that he wants the book to be read as a collection of cultural criticism, not merely as a collection of pieces on sports. In his essays on prizefighting, he zeroes in on cultural meaning of the sport for African Americans. He questions why more black intellectuals are not writing about boxing and why whites have used the sport as a staging area for a liberal agenda. Such an agenda sees prizefighting as an opportunity to transcend a fighter’s circumstances: If a boxer can become a champion, he will pull himself out of poverty and create for himself opportunities to excel in American society. Early cannily uses famous fights, especially the 1962 and 1963 heavyweight championship matches between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, to examine the persistent themes of African American identity and white stereotypes that underlie boxing. Early could point out in his essays that boxing exploited the differences not only between African Americans and whites but also between African Americans themselves and their beliefs about cultural advancement. When Early wrote his essays, professional boxing was dominated by white athletes whose prowess was being challenged steadily by a group of black fighters. Early elegantly uses this battleground as a metaphor for race relations in general. He also uses it to question

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the role of black intellectuals and their engagement with black sports. In Early’s view, not enough African American intellectuals wrote about the ways in which African American athletes helped African American society construct African American identity. More to the point, Early attempted to encourage black intellectuals to pick up their pens—as he did—in order to bring an intellectual perspective to these issues. In other essays, Early raises questions about race and material culture. In one of the most contentious and challenging essays in the collection, “Collecting ‘The Artificial Nigger,’” Early uses the 1955 Flannery O’Connor short story “The Artificial Nigger” to introduce his argument that yard statues of black jockeys need not be viewed, as they are in O’Connor’s story, as purveying negative stereotypes. Instead, they can be viewed as positive reminders of African American identity: African Americans should be proud of the jockey, he contends, because African Americans were the first to break into horse racing and to become famous. By collecting these statues, African Americans can reclaim a part of their heritage that has been largely forgotten. Rather than being ashamed of these images, then, African Americans should embrace them and welcome them as part of their own culture, not just the culture of whites. In his essay about Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson, Early examines the careers of the two ballplayers and demonstrates that Robinson—although the first player to break the color line—successfully maintained his African American identity in a league that encouraged conformity, while Mays conformed so readily to standards of whiteness that he lost his African American identity. Early uses baseball in this essay, as he did boxing in earlier essays, to argue that in the United States sports provide an arena in which the social order of American culture is often contested. Some of the essays in Early’s collection do not stand the test of time and treat issues in a way that already seems dated. The majority of his essays, however, remain relevant in their struggle to grapple with issues of race, literature, sports, and music. Critical Context In 1994, The Culture of Bruising won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, an indication that this select group of book reviewers and critics found Early’s work insightful and challenging. That same year, he released a memoir, Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood, that took up the concerns of his final two essays in The Culture of Bruising. His essay “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant” was selected by the prestigious Best American series for publication in Best American Essays of the Century (2000). Gerald Early, the Merle King Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has earned a national reputation as an essayist and cultural critic. His writings offer penetrating insights into music (notably jazz), sports, and African American culture and politics and their impact on American culture. His other books include This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960’s (2003), The Sammy Davis, Jr., Reader (2001), Miles Davis and American Culture (2001), and The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998). Early served as a consultant on documentary film-

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maker Ken Burns’s films Baseball (2003) and Jazz (2004). Early’s essays on race and American sports continue to cut against the grain, challenging opinions both inside and outside the academy. Bibliography Barthes, Roland. “The World of Wrestling.” In Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. A seminal piece of cultural criticism on sports, reading the significance of wrestling to modern society. Crouch, Stanley. “An Introduction to Gerald Early.” In The All-American Skin Game: Or, The Decoy of Race. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. Positive evaluation of Early’s work by another controversial African American essayist. Journal of Sport and Social Issues. Review of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, by Gerald Early. 18, no. 3 (August, 1994): 293-294. Offers a brief but useful overview of Early’s essay collection. Sammons, Jeffrey T. Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Another important consideration of boxing and culture by an African American scholar; one of the few precursors to Early’s collection. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

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THE CURSE OF CASTE Or, The Slave Bride Author: Julia C. Collins (d. 1865) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism; social realism Time of plot: Mid-nineteenth century Locale: Louisiana and Connecticut First published: 1865 (serial), 2006 (book) Principal characters: Lina, a biracial slave unaware of her African heritage or her enslavement Colonel Frank Tracy, Lina’s owner Richard Tracy, the colonel’s son, who marries Lina Claire Neville Tracy, the daughter of Lina and Richard Juno Hays, Claire’s African American nurse George Manville, Richard’s false friend and Claire’s benefactor Count Clayburn Sayvord, Claire’s suitor Isabelle Tracy, Claire’s aunt and rival for Sayvord’s affection The Novel Julia C. Collins published The Curse of Caste: Or, The Slave Bride as a serialized novel in 1865, but Collins died in that year, leaving the book unfinished. In the novel, race-based prejudice and the institution of slavery threaten the happiness of a biracial mother and her daughter. Lina, a beautiful woman who does not know that she is a slave and one-eighth black, is purchased by Colonel Frank Tracy. His son Richard has already fallen in love with Lina. Richard arranges for his supposed friend George Manville to purchase Lina so Richard can marry her. After six months of living happily in Connecticut, Richard returns to his family home in New Orleans, Louisiana, to try to mend relations with his father, but Colonel Tracy disinherits Richard and shoots him in a violent rage. While recovering, Richard dictates a letter to Lina to explain his absence, but Manville burns the letter. Lina dies, faithful to the end yet unaware that her husband truly loves her but is unable to return to her. When Manville learns that Lina has died giving birth to Claire, he gives charge of the infant to the African American nurse Juno Hays. Juno never tells Claire the secret of her birth. Manville lies to Richard, claiming that both his wife and daughter are dead. Manville provides funds for Claire to be educated and to develop her vocal talent. At the beginning of the novel, which is not narrated chronologically, Claire is completing her studies at a women’s school and preparing to become a governess. She takes a position at the home of Colonel Tracy, who she does not know is her grandfather. The servants murmur, however, and likenesses between the two are perceived.

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Isabelle Tracy resents Claire and competes with her for the attention of a visiting French nobleman, Count Clayburn Sayvord. Richard returns from France to the United States and learns that his daughter is still alive. Count Sayvord learns the truth about Claire’s parentage and racial background, but he remains determined to marry her. While Claire’s father, grandfather, and the man she wants to marry know of her racial heritage, Claire herself does not yet know. The truth would probably have been revealed in the last chapter of the serialized novel, had the author lived long enough to write it. The Characters The Curse of Caste focuses on Claire and her romantic prospects. Collins builds sympathetic identification with the mother and daughter. These educated, genteel ladies fit the character type in antebellum literature of the “tragic mulatta,” who is young, innocent, beautiful, light-skinned, raised as a white person, and unaware of her true racial identity. Juno Hays, a wise African American nurse, is a central figure who holds secrets and is loyal to Lina and Claire. Probably a former slave, Juno has a happy marriage to a successful man. Juno says in chapter 25 that she sees no difference between people based on race, because black blood is as good as white blood. Juno gives Claire her mother’s ring, which holds an inscription that helps prove Claire’s identity. The book’s antagonist characters are George Manville, who may have predatory intentions toward Claire, and Claire’s young aunt Isabelle Tracy. Antagonistic forces include class- and race-based prejudice and the slavery system in antebellum America. In chapter 6, the hero Richard Tracy is outspoken in favor of social equality and in opposition to slavery. In chapter 22, Richard meditates on the injustice and crime of “the curse of caste.” The author implies that distinctions based on race, money, and appearances should be erased. The story was published at the end of the Civil War and participated in ongoing nineteenth century debates about the proper legal and social roles of African Americans. Themes and Meanings When Lina crosses the “color line” to marry Richard Tracy, the son of a slave owner, Richard acts on his antislavery and antiracist beliefs by challenging the social order that has privileged him and his family. Collins suggests that social change can begin on an individual level, and she depicts a fulfilling marriage in the United States between a woman of color and a white man. According to scholars William Andrews and Mitch Kachun, Collins’s novel argues that African American women should have the right to marry whomever they choose, regardless of prejudice or laws, and that they can be effective, responsible wives and mothers. Andrews and Kachun have written two alternate endings to the novel. The first is a happy ending that rewards Claire for her good character and allows her to speak out against slavery. In the second, tragic ending, Isabelle Tracy kills Claire with a pistol. Collins did offer some foreshadowing to indicate that there might be a violent

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ending, but no conclusive evidence of how she planned to end the book. The Curse of Caste also participates in a literary tradition involving narratives of schools and teachers. Collins worked as a teacher in Pennsylvania, and she presents Claire Neville Tracy and preceptress Miss Ellwood as positive teaching characters. Scholar Gabrielle Foreman argues that the novel represents school as a place of refuge and encourages education as essential for black female liberation. Critical Context Collins published her novel in thirty-one weekly installments in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder between February 25, 1865, and September 23, 1865. She did not write the last chapter before dying of tuberculosis. In addition to the missing ending, four published chapters from the middle of the book have since been lost. Scholars asserted in 2006 that Collins’s The Curse of Caste was the first novel to be published by an African American woman. Although Harriet Wilson published the book Our Nig in 1859, that work is now believed to be more of a novelized autobiography than a work of fiction. Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, discovered in manuscript form by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is believed to have been written in the 1850’s, but it was not published until 2002. The identity of the author, moreover, cannot be definitively verified. Important for the critical context of Collins’s work is author and activist Harriet Jacobs, whose narrative of enslavement was published in 1861 as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Collins was probably also aware of Sojourner Truth’s work and narrative. Authors that Collins herself may have influenced include Frances E. W. Harper, who published novels in serialized form in newspapers including The Christian Recorder. The popular release of Collins’s novel in 2006 demonstrates the contemporary interest in recovering the work of neglected American women authors of the nineteenth century. Bibliography Andrews, William L., and Mitch Kachun. “Editors’ Introduction: The Emergence of Julia C. Collins.” In The Curse of the Caste: Or, The Slave Bride. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. This extended introduction to the first publication in book form of Collins’s novel includes a biographical sketch, discussion of the process of rediscovering Collins, analysis of the novel, and commentary on Collins’s journalistic writing, which is reprinted at the end of the book. This edition also contains the two “alternate endings” proposed for the novel. Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Interpretive overview of early African American literature and themes; one of very few books published before 2006 that mention Collins or The Curse of Caste. Carter, Tomeiko Ashford. “The Sentiment of the Christian Serial Novel: The Curse of Caste: Or, The Slave Bride and the AME Christian Recorder.” African American

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Review 40, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 717-730. Sees the novel as demonstrating Collins’s spiritual and ethical beliefs as also articulated in her journalism for the newspaper that serialized the novel. Collins used the African American religious press to comment on true Christianity, white social responsibility, abolition, and rights for African Americans. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “The Christian Recorder, Broken Families, and Educated Nations in Julia C. Collins’s Civil War Novel The Curse of Caste.” African American Review 40, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 705-716. One of sixteen articles appearing in a special issue of African American Review devoted to Julia Collins, her work, and her cultural contexts. Foreman describes how the newspaper’s cross-class readership followed the novel’s twists alongside the progress of the Civil War. The chapters appeared in the same pages that printed testimonials by black soldiers, requests for information on missing family members, and reports on military developments. Tucker, Veta Smith. “A Tale of Disunion: The Racial Politics of Unclaimed Kindred in Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste: Or, The Slave Bride.” African American Review 40, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 743-754. Addresses what Collins does not do in her novel, such as directly indict the southern slaveholding aristocracy, expose northern racism, or appeal directly for the abolition of slavery. Tucker argues that the novel is nevertheless radical as a revision of the tragic mulatta image, an allegorical reflection of the sectional conflict, and a look ahead to Reconstruction. Amy Cummins

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DADDY WAS A NUMBER RUNNER Author: Louise Meriwether (1923) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: June 2, 1934, to autumn, 1935 Locale: Harlem, New York First published: 1970 Principal characters: Francie Coffin, the bright, loyal, enterprising twelve-year-old narrator Henrietta, Francie’s mother, who holds the Coffin family together James Adam Coffin, Francie’s “beautiful” father, a numbers runner who can barely support his family James Junior, Francie’s fifteen-year-old brother Sterling, Francie’s fourteen-year-old brother Sukie Maceo, Francie’s best friend Maude Caldwell, another good friend of Francie Aunt Hazel, Henrietta Coffin’s sister, a successful domestic worker The Novel Daddy Was a Number Runner is a coming-of-age novel set in Harlem during the depths of the Depression, a psychological story placed in a historically specific setting. First published as a short story in 1967, it was developed by author Louise Meriwether into a novel three years later. Francie Coffin faces the struggles of any adolescent girl poised on the brink of womanhood, but the challenges to her initiation in this setting are almost overwhelming. Her family is loving but about to disintegrate, and the streets outside her Harlem apartment are filled with violence and sexual abuse, police brutality and social protest. It is no easy task growing up in this environment, and Francie’s narration—thin on plot but larded with naturalistic incidents— spares none of her difficulties. Francie is in her first year of junior high school at P.S. 81, “one of the worse girls’ schools in Harlem,” where gangs of girls intimidate the weaker teachers, and where Francie reads trashy romances through her classes. Yet, she has—at least at the beginning—what few others here have, a whole and loving family, which may account for many of the strengths she possesses or acquires. (She is always reading on her own, for example, the works of such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Claude McKay.) Her family lives on the edge of poverty, however, and Francie sleeps on a couch in the front room; the couch is pulled away from the wall every night so that the bed bugs

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will not get her (they do anyway). This is a gritty but powerful novel of survival. The Coffins were happier a few years earlier living in Brooklyn, Francie says, but they moved to Harlem so that her father could get painting work; soon after, the bottom fell out of the economy. Francie’s father does everything he can to keep the family together: He works as a janitor in their building, plays piano at “rent” parties, and plays poker at night to earn more money. He is also a numbers runner for his neighborhood (in an industry controlled by Dutch Schultz and the mob). He also plays the numbers, however, and every “hit” he makes seems to drain back into the game—a metaphor for the economic life of Harlem itself. Francie’s is a realistic Harlem world of King Kong (homemade gin) and “jumpers” (wires that allow families to bypass the electric meter), of crime and exploitation. Mr. Coffin’s pride forces him to oppose welfare, and when he finally gives into his wife’s demands, he is further humiliated by the welfare worker. Mrs. Coffin gets parttime work, again against her husband’s wishes, but the pressures on the family crest when James Junior is arrested, along with other members of the Ebony Earls street gang, for the murder of a white man. James Junior is innocent and is eventually freed, but the economic and psychological pressures on the family are too much: James Junior leaves school to go to work for Alfred the pimp; his younger brother Sterling (who has been the academic pride of the family) soon follows; and Mr. Coffin starts staying away every night at Mrs. Mackey’s, as Francie soon discovers. The novel describes these events without the tragic tone they might betray in another work, for its main focus remains on Francie as she struggles to achieve her sexual identity. If the obstacles to her initiation are enormous, her resilience and strength finally prevail. “Francie, you can beat anything, anybody, if you face up to it and you’re not scared,” her mother tells her early in the novel, and by the end Francie has proven this prophecy true. The Characters Francie Coffin is the first-person narrator of her novel, and the most interesting character in it. On one hand, she is like any twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl, full of dreams, curiosity, and misinformation. She spends a lot of time thinking about boys and resisting sexual advances (from adults as well as from boys) and learning with her girlfriends, Sukie and Maude, about the outside world. (Sukie’s sister China Doll, for example, is a prostitute who is friendly to the girls; Francie, though, observes her beaten up by her pimp, whom China Doll will kill by the end of the novel.) She watches as a neighborhood friend throws his grandmother’s cat off the tenement roof; later, a man tries to rape her in the apartment’s dim hallway. Francie is bright, enterprising, and a survivor: She knows how to hide her father’s numbers receipts so that the police cannot find them when they search the Coffins’ apartment. She sells grocery bags to shoppers who frequent an open Harlem market in order to earn spending money. In the end, she has achieved her initiation: She has had her first menstrual period, and she has survived all the sexual abuse around her. More important for her emo-

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tional growth, she kisses her mother’s cheek in church one morning, thus symbolically forgiving her weaknesses, and she challenges her father for his. She has become a young adult. Many of her best qualities actually come from her parents, who are loving and caring in their limited ways but who are being overwhelmed by the economic and social conditions of Depression-era Harlem. James Coffin does all he can, but it is never enough, and his male pride is battered by his family’s troubles. “I’m a mother-f*cking man. Why can’t you understand that?” he yells at his wife early in the novel. He escapes in the end, less to sexual freedom than from the shame of having a wife and children who must work or go on welfare. The blows to his pride are hard and sharp. Mrs. Coffin is less clearly defined in the novel, but she emerges in the end as the bulwark for what remains of this small family: religious, self-sacrificing, and determined to keep a roof over their heads, even if she has to work full-time and be away from her children. Her pride only grows: When Francie is asked to do dangerous domestic work by the wife of Mr. Rathbone, the local candy-store owner, Henrietta confronts him and then tells Francie, Long as I live you don’t have to scrub no white folks’ floors or wash their filthy windows. What they think I’m spending my life on my knees in their kitchens for? So you can follow in my footsteps? You finish school and go on to college.

Francie concludes that “she was my mother and I loved her but I suddenly realized I almost didn’t know her at all.” All the characters change under the multiple pressures of the Depression. Themes and Meanings The themes of Daddy Was a Number Runner fall conveniently into three everenlarging circles of meaning: from self to family to community. The central meaning of the novel is Francie’s initiation into womanhood, and it is no easy journey. “Finally it was summer and I was thirteen,” she declares toward the end of her story—but she also realizes she is “stuck here in my black valley” where “nothing was too much fun anymore.” On one level, the whole novel is about sexual roles and behavior, for sex pervades this novel more than most about adolescence. It is a violent sexual world that Francie inhabits: She is fondled by Mr. Morristein the butcher, by Max the baker, by men on the roof of her building and by men in the park, and other men expose themselves to her or offer to pay to touch her. Everywhere Francie goes, she encounters this sexual abuse. (Her own sexual awakening actually occurs when she is being molested in a darkened theater.) By the end of the novel, though, she has overcome the abuse: She knees Max the baker, and thus symbolically ends the sexual exploitation. This character or identity she gains in part from her family, from her mother and father and her two brothers. Daddy Was a Number Runner is a historically accurate portrait of the Depression-era black family, in all its strengths and weaknesses. The

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author shows all the pressures that bear on this institution, and by the book’s end, Francie recognizes how many black males are gone: dead, in prison, or (like her father) escaped. It is the women, such as Francie’s mother, who must carry on. This family theme is inextricably connected to the larger question of what it means to be black in Harlem. In a revealing episode, a white teacher tries to get Francie to think of becoming a seamstress, but Francie holds out her dream of one day working as a secretary. “I don’t know why they teach courses like that to frustrate you people,” the teacher sighs. Throughout the novel, Francie hears the answer: the words of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (a famous Harlem minister) and other African Americans who give Francie a political analysis of what is wrong with this racist society—and the tools to change it. By the end of the novel, Francie finds herself rooting for the Indians in the Western films she attends, and she has come to love Harlem: I wanted to hug them all. We belonged to each other somehow. I’m getting sick, I thought, as I shifted my elbows on the windowsill. I must of caught some rare disease. But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn’t want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.

In the novel’s closing page, Francie qualifies this somewhat: “We was all poor and black and apt to stay that way, and that was that.” But she has learned the values of her black community. For Harlem is a community in Daddy Was a Number Runner, and Meriwether portrays it with all of its warts: an area of crime, of white exploitation, of Jewish-black tensions, of numbers and prostitution and sexual violence—but at the same time a place where ethnic identity acts as a positive force. The Coffins have to borrow money to defend James Junior—but they take in a southern black family that is starving to death on the Harlem streets. Earlier in the novel, James Coffin tells his children of their slave heritage, and of Yoruba, their royal African greatgreat-grandmother, stating that “we got a past to be proud of.” The novel’s pivotal part 2, in which Francie gains a balance of self and community, is called “Yoruba’s Children.” Critical Context Daddy Was a Number Runner is linked to its own black roots in a number of ways. Written in the Watts Writers’ Workshop that novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg founded soon after the Los Angeles riots of 1965, the novel uncovers black history and identifies the strands that have meaning for Francie—and for readers. The novel is a tough initiation story, but by the end, Francie has gained insights into the world around her that are still useful. In fact, she has gained her identity in the context of historical reality. In that regard, the novel resembles Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) as black urban initiation novels. What sets Daddy Was a Number Runner apart is its historical accuracy. Meriwether does not make up history for

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Francie to enjoy but instead puts her through what Meriwether herself undoubtedly experienced as an adolescent in Harlem. Francie hears the powerful and charismatic Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., preach in his Abyssinian Baptist Church. She sneaks off to have a chicken dinner at the cafeteria run by the followers of the evangelist Father Divine. She hears street speakers echoing Marcus Garvey, she sees the riots over the Scottsboro boys (nine black youths falsely accused of an Alabama rape), and she witnesses the celebrations after Joe Louis knocks out Max Baer. This is a real Harlem, in a real Depression; what Francie learns is her social identity within it. In the midst of a touching initiation story—a novel in which a young woman learns to beat the violence and sexual abuse around her, and at the same time to gain her own sexual identity—is a larger story of the responsibilities of that self to a larger world. Daddy Was a Number Runner is, in the best sense, a political novel. Late in the book, for example, Francie listens to a street speaker: What are we doing to help ourselves? I tell you, brothers and sisters, the black man in this country must make his own life. The crying Negro must die. The cringing Negro must die. If he don’t kill hisself the environment will, and we been dying for too long. The man who gets the power is the man who develops his own strength.

As Robert (Maude’s brother-in-law), Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., her own father, and others have been telling Francie almost since the beginning of the novel, African Americans must themselves end their economic exploitation and gain political power. By the close of her story, Francie has learned this important message; increasingly, in the 1970’s, others learned it also. For the more than half a million people who have shared the novel since its publication, the message continues to ring true. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. This comprehensive study of the African American novel places Daddy Was a Number Runner in its twentieth century context. This novel about growing up black in Harlem, Bell argues, is a bildungsroman and an example of traditional realism. Dandridge, Rita. “From Economic Insecurity to Disintegration: A Study of Character in Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner.” Negro American Literary Forum 9 (Fall, 1975): 82-85. Argues that “the three interacting factors in the novel—economic insecurity, loss of self-esteem, and self-debasement—all operate in the life of each of the Coffins and contribute to the disintegration of the family unit.” McKay, Nellie. Afterword to Daddy Was a Number Runner, by Louise Meriwether. New York: Feminist Press, 1986. A detailed analysis of the historical context of the book, which McKay calls the “personal side of the story of living and growing up feeling entrapped by race and class in the black urban ghetto between the two great wars.”

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Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: Pandora, 2002. Chronological study of African American women’s literature; includes a chapter on urban realism featuring Meriwether alongside five other female African American realist authors of the 1930’s to the 1960’s. Walker, Melissa. Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women’s Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966-1989. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991. Chapter 3—“Harbingers of Change: Harlem”—contains an excellent analysis of Daddy Was a Number Runner that shows how “the protagonist’s determined effort to acquire historical sensibility” is at the center of the novel. Argues that Francie “matures as she learns to understand how the public arena informs private lives.” David Peck

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THE DAHOMEAN An Historical Novel Author: Frank Yerby (1916-1991) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: Nineteenth century Locale: Africa First published: 1971 Principal characters: Nyasanu, the second son of a village chief in Dahomey Gbenu, the father of Nyasanu and chief of an important Dahomean village Gbochi, the brother of Nyasanu and eldest son of Gbenu Gezo, the king of the Dahomeans Princess Yekpewa, the daughter of Gezo and wife of Nyasanu Kpadunu, a friend of Nyasanu The Novel The Dahomean: An Historical Novel traces the life and times of Nyasanu, the second son of an influential village chief in Dahomey named Gbenu. Gbenu is a thoughtful chief aware of the pitfalls of his rank. Nyasanu is a rebel at heart, particularly opposed to the custom of polygamy. He marries a beautiful young woman named Agbale who is brave and loyal. Before long, the domestic bliss is interrupted by a war against the Maxi tribe, a rather inept foe. Both Nyasanu and Gbenu serve in this campaign under the leadership of King Gezo; Gbenu is killed. A hero, Nyasanu succeeds his father in rank and position, shunting aside the first son, Gbochi, a weak man who lacks leadership qualities. Life becomes ever more complicated for Nyasanu, now the village chief. His first wife dies in childbirth. He marries for a second time, mating with a more stubborn and thoughtful woman who becomes strongly loyal to him. A further complication develops when King Gezo gives one of his daughters to Nyasanu as a reward for his exploits in battle. Nyasanu accepts Princess Yekpewa against his better judgment. Nyasanu is aware that, as one of no royal blood, he cannot command Princess Yekpewa to do anything, and her presence will inevitably cause jealousy and discontent among his other wives. In all, Nyasanu has seven wives, two of whom are inherited from his father. Between the responsibilities of office and his private concerns, Chief Nyasanu is treading on very shaky ground. When Princess Yekpewa and Nyasanu are wed, he discovers that she is not a virgin, having committed incest with her half brother. As

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Nyasanu rises to power as the governor of the province, a position known as “Gbonugu,” his fate is rapidly being sealed. Ultimately, Nyasanu is betrayed by his half brother Atedeku, a self-centered prince, and Princess Yekpewa. In his status as governor, Nyasanu is far removed from his constituents. As a gesture of good faith and humility, Nyasanu erects a virtually indefensible home near the outskirts of his village. He is consequently captured by a tribe of warring Africans who sell him into slavery. As the novel ends, Nyasanu, now known as Wesley Parks, declares his intention to tell his story of life in slavery one day. That story became the sequel to The Dahomean entitled A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest, published in 1979. The Characters Nyasanu is one of the most fully developed and complex characters in Yerby’s canon. Nyasanu is the son of a politically powerful man who has nearly insatiable ambitions for himself and his son. As the son of a village chief, Nyasanu becomes the heir to substantial power. After his father is killed in battle, Nyasanu assumes the mantle of village chief and begins a steady climb to prominence and wealth. It becomes apparent, however, that Nyasanu is trapped; the more he controls, the less he is able to control. He is aware of the pitfalls surrounding him, but he is powerless to change his position. He owes his ultimate allegiance to Gezo; when Gezo commands him to marry Princess Yekpewa, he must, and the action causes his downfall. Nyasanu accepts his fate, which is to be captured and sold into slavery. He remarks stoically that “no man is powerless who is prepared to suffer the consequences of his actions.” Opposing Nyasanu are Gbochi, Prince Atedeku, and Princess Yekpewa. Gbochi is a weak man who becomes embittered by his brother’s success and schemes against him. Atedeku is self-centered and malicious, as is his half sister Yekpewa; though these characters are not nearly so formidable as Nyasanu, together they manage to plot his downfall. King Gezo is generous but not always astute. He rewards Nyasanu for his bravery in battle by furthering his political career and awarding him Princess Yekpewa in marriage; he does not, though, understand that the latter is less a gift than a burden. Gbenu, Nyasanu’s father, is a wise leader and a brave warrior, qualities he transmits to his son. Kpadunu, Nyasanu’s close friend, is thoughtful and loyal; in battle, he sacrifices his own life to protect Nyasanu. Themes and Meanings Nyasanu is one of Yerby’s finest characterizations: His description is based upon historical fact. The Dahomean people were proud, self-sufficient, fierce, and feared warriors. The Dahomean is prefaced with a note to readers stating that all of its historical and sociological aspects are based upon the critically respected anthropological study Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938) by Melville J. Herskovits. Yerby insists that the historical events explored in The Dahomean have a basis in

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fact and that the details of each characterization are based upon exacting research. Moreover, Yerby succeeds in correcting the generally held belief that slavery was useful—at least useful in exposing the backward peoples of Africa to modern and progressive American culture. On the contrary, Dahomey itself and individuals such as Nyasanu were highly sophisticated; this indigenous culture was decimated by the intrusion of slave traders into the African continent. Nyasanu is the central figure in the novel, and Yerby spends much time and painstaking description to create the majestic and imposing figure of his protagonist. As Nyasanu passes from youth into young manhood, his physical, intellectual, and leadership qualities are expanded by challenges, difficult and trying circumstances, and exposure to the ambiguities of life in the public eye. Nyasanu learns well. He becomes a fierce warrior, a gentle lover, a man among men, and an analyst of superior abilities. As The Dahomean progresses, Nyasanu accepts, embraces, and conquers the obstacles that fate, history, and personal ambition present to him. He is tested by battle, the death of his father, his first serious love interest, and the unwelcome responsibilities of becoming a tribal leader. At midpoint in The Dahomean, Nyasanu is a leader of this magnificent society. He is betrayed, however, and by the end of the novel, Nyasanu has lost everything—his status, his family, his pride, and, most important, his freedom. Nyasanu must come to grips with the sad knowledge that he is a slave, a terrible and exacting price to pay for simple human economic greed. It is a tragic scene when Nyasanu, soon to be known as “Hwesu,” is in chains bound for America, the reputed land of the free. From the outset, readers are introduced to the hierarchy of Dahomey, primarily through description of the rise and fall of Nyasanu. In the prologue, readers are introduced to Nyasanu the protagonist, who is now in America. The novel describes how he came to be a slave in America; thus the book draws its readers into the world of African tribal life. Yerby aims to educate readers through the historical umbrella so thoroughly researched. Nyasanu is, if anything, an atypical character, not an outsider. Rather, Nyasanu rises to a level of understanding and a willingness to let matters happen as they will. The novel’s women are primarily stereotypical, with occasional unique characterizations such as those of Nyasanu’s first wife and of Princess Yekpewa. This is an extremely violent novel, with numerous scenes of rape, murder, and mutilation. Yerby’s intent is to describe black-on-black violence as being as destructive as the violence whites have visited upon African Americans. Critical Context The Dahomean is one of the handful of novels in Yerby’s canon that he considered a serious work. It is also one of three novels Yerby wrote that have black characters of central importance. The other two are Speak Now: A Modern Novel (1969) and the sequel to The Dahomean, A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest, in which Nyasanu begins his life of slavery in America.

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The Dahomean was not widely reviewed. As had been the case since The Foxes of Harrow (1946) was published, Yerby’s novels were considered by the critical community as costume novels of the second rank. The Dahomean, however, has been reconsidered as an important work, as has A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest. Both works contain a wealth of information about the African diaspora, and both are judged to be historically sound. Bibliography Benson, Joe. “Frank Yerby.” In Southern Writers, edited by Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Presents an overview of Yerby’s life and career and would serve as a good general introduction. Specifically notes that Yerby’s historical novels are an “attempt to correct the reader’s historical perspective on the themes of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.” A brief bibliography follows the discussion. “Frank Yerby.” In Modern Black American Fiction Writers, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. Broad overview of Yerby’s life and work, commenting on his contribution to the field of African American literature. Graham, Maryemma. “Frank Yerby: King of the Costume Novel.” Essence 6 (October, 1975): 70-71. Argues that Yerby is a unique and neglected talent, particularly with regard to his African American novels. Jarrett, Gene Andrew. “Introduction: Gene Andrew Jarrett.” In African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader, edited by Gene Andrew Jarrett. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Brief essay on Yerby, introducing an excerpt from his fiction that is meant to contribute to a showcase of the complexity and diversity of African American literature. Turner, Darwin T. “Frank Yerby as Debunker.” Massachusetts Review 20 (Summer, 1968): 569-577. Contends that scholars no longer read Frank Yerby and that many resent him. Notes that Yerby was tried first as a symbol but refused to plead for his race as a token author. For that reason, many of his contemporaries resented him. _______. “Frank Yerby, Golden Debunker.” Black Books Bulletin 1 (1972): 4-9, 30-33. Crafty article that describes Yerby’s style in the form of a recipe. Mentions all the elements present in Yerby’s novels that make them best sellers. _______. Review of The Dahomean, by Frank Yerby. Black World 21 (February, 1972): 51-52, 84-87. Says that The Dahomean is Yerby’s most satisfying novel; as a record of an astonishing time and people, it captures readers’ attention. Notes that readers who have devoured Yerby will find many familiar elements; except for the blackness of his skin, the protagonist resembles earlier Yerby heroes. Unlike most Yerby heroes, however, he is not an outcast seeking position. Joe Benson

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DAUGHTERS Author: Paule Marshall (Valenza Pauline Burke, 1929Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1940’s-1980’s Locale: New York, New York; Triunion, West Indies First published: 1991

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Principal characters: Ursa Beatrice Mackenzie, the diminutive daughter of a short, light-skinned American mother and a tall, dark-skinned West Indian father Primus Mackenzie (PM), Ursa’s father, a lawyer and politician Estelle Mackenzie, Ursa’s mother, descended from a long line of schoolteachers and social workers Vincereta “Viney” Daniels, Ursa’s best friend since college Lowell Carruthers, Ursa’s lover for more than six years, a personnel relations specialist in an electronics firm Astral Forde, a Spanish Bay country girl who moves to Fort Lord Nelson with her friend Malvern to improve her lot Celestine Marie-Claire Bellegarde, a servant to Primus Mackenzie’s mother, “Mis-Mack” The Novel Daughters examines the personal and political growth associated with Africa’s diaspora in both the United States and the West Indies. Ursa Mackenzie is a nexus of two cultures who is trying to understand both. Part of the upwardly mobile black middle class, Ursa struggles with personal identity and relationships in a context of privilege while other black people are victimized not only by racism but also by their own people’s participation in a corrupt and corrupting political system. Daughters juxtaposes the personal and the political to demonstrate how inextricably connected the two are: Individual achievement cannot come at the cost of the larger African community. The novel opens with Ursa’s abortion, which is paralleled later by a back-alley abortion Astral Forde undergoes and is contrasted to Estelle’s many miscarriages. The pregnancy and subsequent abortion is emblematic of Ursa’s ambivalence regarding all aspects of her life—her relationship with Lowell Carruthers; a second master’s degree that she cannot bring to closure; her attitude toward and relationship with her parents, especially her father, and with the island of Triunion; and her career, which has gone from corporate success to freelance political research. She is caught in stasis. She cannot decide.

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Ursa’s personal dilemma is twofold. One problem is her relationship with Lowell. Neither is willing to give up independence, to commit completely to each other, to get beyond their Friday evenings, every two weeks, of dinner and sex. There were what Ursa considered “the couple of love years,” but those have long passed. Now Ursa and Lowell meet out of habit, out of the desire not to be completely alone. The novel traces the eventual disintegration of even this minimal connection the two share, when Ursa finally tires of having to listen to Lowell’s incessant complaints about office politics and when Lowell tires of Ursa’s dependence on her father’s love and approval, leaving no room for him. The novel also follows the political career of Primus Mackenzie, Ursa’s father. That career presents Ursa’s second problem. Primus’s political career began with him hoping to change the quality of the lives of Triunion’s people. In a newly established democracy, with a poor economy dependent on whatever the people could grow, since highways, electricity, and telephones required for factories and industry were lacking, he discovered that progress is nearly impossible. He is opposed by corrupt countrymen who favor the status quo and are propped up by the United States government. Primus’s political party threatens to defeat the ruling party, and Primus tries to become the prime minister. In answer to that threat, an American destroyer points its guns at the island, scaring citizens ever after to accept the leadership in power. Primus capitulates to Western millionaires who want to turn his district into a resort. The resort will provide no jobs for his constituents and will not improve the Morlands district’s economy. The rich will not even have to drive on the bad highway past the children with their distended bellies and no seats in their pants. They will fly into a private airport. The resort is one more example of white capitalist exploitation of people of color, endorsed by their own government. Only by losing the election, subverted by his own wife and daughter, can Primus be stopped in his descent into money and resorts, with the concerns of his people forgotten. This situation is paralleled in New Jersey’s Midland City, where Ursa conducts her follow-up study on local politics only to discover that the people who elected the city’s black mayor were betrayed in favor of white men in suits. The Characters The novel begins in the 1980’s and is not a straightforward chronological account. Paule Marshall uses a variety of narrative techniques to tell her story. In the process of moving Ursa’s story forward, Marshall often relies on flashbacks to recount the lives of Primus, Estelle, Celestine, Viney, and Ursa. Marshall also uses an epistolary approach to reveal Estelle’s thoughts and experiences. She permits intimate looks at Celestine through her first-person accounts of her life, along with providing deeply personal narratives by Astral Forde. In order to understand the present, readers must know a character’s past. His pampered and privileged upbringing has turned Primus into a domineering man. Ursa’s childhood memories of him are larger than life, recalling him as a man whose “head would be in the way of the sun.” Celestine’s complete and unquestioning devotion to

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him reinforces his behavior, much to Estelle’s dismay. Celestine will not accept Estelle’s American ways of doing things—wanting air conditioning and louvered windows, dressing her child in overalls with ducks on the bib rather than in starched pretty dresses and gold bangles, and transforming Mis-Mack’s store into an office where Primus can meet his constituents. She can even take Primus’s side in his longstanding affair with Astral Forde since, she rationalizes, all Triunion men have at least one “keep-miss.” Primus, however, is devoted to his wife and child. After wondering why Estelle did not leave her father when she discovered his affair with Astral, Ursa finally concludes that what she has “tried for years to understand about these two is perhaps none of her business.” In her letters to the “homefolks,” Estelle provides an account of her life on the island and her reflections on events back in the United States. Living in two places, she provides perspectives on both: on the new independence of Triunion and the island’s corruption as well as on American historical facts including the Jim Crow laws that her parents endured while traveling in the South in the early 1950’s, the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the marches through the South in the 1960’s (during which her brother’s hip is broken by the police in an Alabama jail), the 1963 March on Washington, the Black Power movement, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. She tells Ursa, “I decided to write off the eighties the day Bonzo’s friend was sworn in.” Astral Forde’s embittered narrative helps readers to understand the silent woman who watches young Ursa swim laps in a hotel swimming pool and who greets her as if she were a maid. Ursa later apologizes for treating Astral this way. Astral and her best friend, Malvern, hoped to improve themselves by moving from Spanish Bay to Fort Lord Nelson. Malvern finds a kind, broad-faced bus driver who gives her more children than can be accommodated in their poor excuse of a shack perched on a hill in Fort Lord Nelson’s shantytown. When she dies of cancer, though, she has husband, children, and Astral to note her passing. Astral has only Malvern, whom she sees when she needs someone upon whom to unload her selfish and obsessive concerns. Even at Malvern’s deathbed, Astral’s most pressing need is to rail at the halfconscious Malvern over Primus’s intention of selling his hotel, which Astral manages. It is the only thing in the world that Astral has left. Ursa, like her mother, is a woman of two cultures trying to reconcile them. She is also a woman of two identities—an independent New York career woman and a daughter tied to her family in Triunion. It is Lowell who makes her confront that dependent daughter, eventually forcing her to return home after a four-year absence to face the island, her parents, and herself. It is her mother who pushes her to break Triunion’s and Primus’s stasis by giving the resort prospectus to her father’s political opponent, a young idealistic schoolteacher who reminds Estelle of the young Primus. It is Viney’s suggestion that Ursa reconcile with Lowell, combined with the Triunion memorial to Congo Jane and Will Cudjoe—slave rebellion heroes about whom Ursa has spent twelve years of her life trying to write—that makes Ursa realize the importance of black men and black women together.

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Themes and Meanings Daughters begins with an epigraph to an Alvin Ailey dance: “Little girl of all the daughters,/ You ain’ no more slave,/ You’s a woman now.” Marshall has stated that these words “immediately suggested to me other kinds of slavery, more political and familiar—the bondage of the mind and heart.” Ursa is the inheritor of the struggles of those daughters who went before her, each one seeking freedom in her own way. Only through heeding their lessons does Ursa gain control over her own life and the freedom necessary to become a complete and happy person. Celestine is the self-sacrificing woman who lives her entire life for other people, first for Mis-Mack and then for Primus and his only child, Ursa. Abandoned by her family, having neither friends nor lovers, Celestine finds her meaning in servitude. When Ursa is a little girl, Estelle suggests that Celestine take the day off or go to the movies with Estelle and Ursa, but Celestine refuses. Her devotion and loyalty to Primus define her. Astral Forde is a daughter bound to status and security. After a passionate moment on the beach with a group of handsome football players that turns to rape and then results in pregnancy and abortion, Astral chooses only those lovers who can help her achieve financial and emotional independence. The one man she could have loved, “the nice young fella name Conrad” with whom she worked at the department store, would never be successful. He is sacrificed in favor of men who pay for her bookkeeping and typing classes, men who get her bookkeeping positions, men who are secretaries of public works departments, and men like Primus who will set her up comfortably for the rest of her life. Ursa’s mother, Estelle, is important for pushing her daughter toward the total freedom she herself was unable to claim. The recurring image of Congo Jane and Will Cudjoe represents an ideal that Estelle believed in when she left her Connecticut teaching job to join her husband in his political life. Ursa had been raised to love the story of these two heroes. Her first memory is being raised on her mother’s shoulders to touch the toes on the memorial to these figures. Ursa had told her resistant college thesis adviser that she wanted to write the slave rebels’ history. She explains that “there was a time when we actually had it together. That slavery, for all its horrors, was a time when black men and women had it together, were together, stood together.” Estelle had written to her homefolks soon after arriving in Triunion, “We’re getting to be quite a team.” She cannot change the politics of the “Do-Nothings” in power, and she cannot watch as Primus is seduced by white money and influence. She tolerates the petty corruption that makes Triunion work (free rice, rum, and Bic pens in exchange for votes) and even grows to accept Astral Forde as Primus’s mistress, eventually even feeling sympathy for her when Primus threatens to sell the hotel. She needs Ursa to stop Primus’s descent. Viney is Ursa’s friend, confidante, and sister, the epitome of middle-class corporate success but also a victim of it. She is what Marshall says her folks would have

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called CTTR, “a credit to the race.” She is beautiful, well respected, and financially secure. Her son Robeson, the product of artificial insemination, attends private school, computer camp, and day camp; participates in Little League; and has a role in the cultural center’s play about Sojourner Truth. Viney seems to have it all. It is Ursa who knows that Viney’s self-imposed celibacy is a subterfuge to mask her loneliness. When Robeson is falsely arrested for trying to steal a car stereo, Viney recognizes a black woman’s need for a man to be there for her and for her children, a man whom her grandfather would call “useful.” Ursa is pushed to shed the bondage of her mind and heart. Marshall has stated that Ursa is struggling to remove “that dependency that gets built in those early relationships. That’s why the symbol of abortion . . . is so important, abortion meaning being able to cut away those dependencies that can be so crippling.” Only after her argument with Lowell can Ursa acknowledge that she has been living for her father. Only by cutting away her dependence on him can she claim the legacy of all the daughters who made the way for her. Throughout the novel, Ursa suspects that the abortion did not take. At the end, as Ursa prepares to subvert her father’s election and sits on the beach at Government Lands (where local men fish, women help them prepare the catch, and whole families spend Sundays in what could be described as religious rituals in the sea and where they will be forbidden to come if the resort scheme succeeds), a “wave of pain wells up and explodes across her belly.” Ursa “just lets it take her.” It is done. She is free of her father. She claims her legacy. Critical Context Daughters is Paule Marshall’s fourth novel. Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) is a classic bildungsroman that has steadily gained respect and popularity since its publication. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) concerns itself not only with an individual and her family but also with an entire people. It is a large book exploring expansive ideas. Praisesong for the Widow (1983), the story of a middle-aged, middle-class African American woman, allowed Marshall, as she has said, to “deal with the notion that one has—women especially have—the absolute right to reconstitute their lives at no matter what age.” Daughters continues Marshall’s exploration of women, often living in two cultures, who come to know themselves as individuals, as women, and as members of the African diaspora. Marshall acknowledges that she was greatly influenced in language, politics, and life by her mother and the other Barbados women who sat and talked in her mother’s kitchen after working long days cleaning other people’s houses. She has said, “I see myself as someone who is to serve as a vehicle for these marvelous women who never got a chance, on paper, to be the poets that they were.” Her novels are tributes to the women who scrubbed so their daughters could write. Bibliography Alexander, Simone A. James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Marshall is one of three

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novelists whose representations of mother-daughter relationships are the subject of this study. Ascher, Carol. “Compromised Lives.” Review of Daughters, by Paule Marshall. The Women’s Review of Books 9 (November, 1991): 7. Describes the novel as “intimately observed, culturally rich, morally serious.” Brownley, Martine Watson. Deferrals of Domain: Contemporary Women Novelists and the State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Includes a chapter on the intersection of romance and politics in Daughters. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Contains two fine essays providing thorough overviews and evaluations of Marshall’s early works. Also includes a detailed bibliography. Marshall, Paule. “Holding onto the Vision.” Interview by Sylvia Baer. The Women’s Review of Books 8 (July, 1991): 24-25. Marshall speaks extensively about her last two novels. Prose, Francine. “Another Country.” Review of Daughters, by Paule Marshall. The Washington Post Book World 21 (September 22, 1991): 1, 4. Points to Marshall’s handling of “a wide spectrum of serious subjects: race relations, female experience and female friendship, history, loyalty, social responsibility, the legacy of memory and the necessity of forgiveness.” Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg. “Cutting Herself Free.” Review of Daughters, by Paule Marshall. The New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1991, 3-4. Claims that the book “attempts to look at black experience in our hemisphere, to praise what progress has been made and to point to what yet needs to be done.” Laura Weiss Zlogar

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THE DEATH OF THE LAST BLACK MAN IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD Author: Suzan-Lori Parks (1963) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Experimental; surrealistic Time of plot: “The Present” Locale: United States First produced: 1990, at the Brooklyn Arts Council Association (BACA) Downtown Theater, Brooklyn, New York First published: 1990 Principal characters: Black Man with Watermelon, the protagonist Black Woman with Fried Drumstick, his wife and companion Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork, who is based on folklore and southern soul food Yes and Greens Black-eyed Peas Cornbread, another food-based stereotype Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who is based on a historical figure Before Columbus, who stands for a time when the world was flat Old Man River Jordan, who is based on a song from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess Ham, a figure from the Bible And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger, a parody of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son Prunes and Prisms, an image of an African American prom queen, whose name is taken James Joyce’s Ulysses Voice on Thuh Tee V, a voice of mass, popular culture The Play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is divided into six sections: the overture and five panels. The panels comprise three scenes—featuring Black Man with Watermelon and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick—and two choruses that, like the overture, include all the characters. Suzan-Lori Parks has said that these choruses are like the refrains of a song, but their connection to the Greek use of a chorus to illuminate and comment upon the play’s action is also clear. Each section features the sound of a bell, often at the end of the scene or chorus. The overture begins with Black Man—who is dead and who will die in many ways associated with the historical oppression of black men during the play—announcing

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he will move his hands, a refrain that he repeats throughout the overture. Black Woman alerts the audience to the play’s fluid, non-linear time frame when she refers to her husband’s death “just uh moment uhgoh in 1317.” Yes and Greens Black-eyed Peas Cornbread urges her to write this piece of history down, a line that will also be repeated. Black Man laments that the world used to be “roun”; Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut notes the addition of the letter d to “round” after Columbus ended things: His discovery that the world was not flat, as Europeans had thought, caused whites to figure out their own place in the scheme of things and consequently to put blacks in their place—outside of history. Panel 1, “Thuh Holy Ghost,” opens with Black Man commenting on the watermelon he is carrying: It is not his; who gave birth to it? Black Woman, who has been waiting for his return, tells him of his deaths by jumping off a slave ship, jumping twenty-three stories off a building, and being electrocuted in a portable electric chair. In Panel 2 (the first chorus), all the figures riff on the varied deaths of the last black man, expanding on Black Woman’s list to include Black Man jumping into the river, being chased by dogs. Panel 3 is titled “Thuh Lonesome Threesome.” Black Man returns from a hard day’s work, unable to breathe. Black Woman notes that he no longer needs to breathe, and it becomes evident why as they describe his “work,” a lynching party. Black Man notes that those who killed him got tired of him; now his question is where he should go. He considers bathing. Black Woman suggests praying to the “lonesome 3some.” Panel 4, the second chorus, begins with the figures listening to Voice on Thuh Tee V announcing the discovery of a sliver of a tree branch that is also a fossilized bone fragment. And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger also feels the rope around his throat. In response to the questions about where Black Man is going, Old Man River Jordan says they must ask Ham. Ham responds with a history lesson that parodies the biblical succession of fathers “begetting” sons. Old Man River Jordan reminds the group that their problems started when Ham saw his father Noah naked. Ham, who has become Ham Bone by the end of the chorus, denies responsibility. Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork announces the death of the last black man. In Panel 5, “In Thuh Garden of Hoodoo It,” Black Man begins to remember his connection to the watermelon, as well as what he liked to eat and, most important, his place in time—in “uh Now” and “uh Then.” He and Black Woman parody a romantic ending: “Re-member me.” In the final panel, the figures reprise the Black Man’s “history,” noting that now it has been written down, and Black Man moves his hands. Themes and Meanings The central theme in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is the erasure of African Americans and their history from the record of the Western world. Parks includes a wide sweep of history—for example, the Old Testament figure of Ham and the Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut—but this is primarily an American play. Parks has called it an epic play in the sense that one character—Black Man with

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Watermelon—stands for many. His deaths represent events associated with the oppression of black people in the United States: jumping from a slave ship on the Middle Passage, lynching, electrocution, and suicide. The greatest “death,” however, is being excluded from history. Parks refuses to accept this exclusion, and her Black Man, considered by some scholars to be a revision of the trickster figure of African American folklore, keeps coming back. Although confused, he and Black Woman work with the other characters to explore the complexity of African American identity and ultimately, through the repetition and revision that is central to the form of this play, get things written down, and moves are made (small moves, but these are the important ones in Parks’s universe.) Parks has compared the form of her play to the Roman Catholic Stations of the Cross, with the choruses representing the spaces between the stations, where there is “nothing.” The play deconstructs this structure, confronting and subverting stereotypes through a ritualized reality that finally acknowledges the central place of what Toni Morrison has called the Africanist presence in American history. Critical Context Parks was born in 1963 in Kentucky. An “Army brat,” she lived in six states and went to high school in Germany before earning degrees from Mount Holyoke College and the Yale School of Drama. In 1989, when Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom was performed at Brooklyn Arts Council Association (BACA) Downtown in Brooklyn, The New York Times named her the year’s most promising new playwright. In 1990, while BACA was producing The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Parks received the Obie for Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. She has continued to write and to win awards, most notably the 1996 Obie for Venus, a MacArthur Fellowship (2001), and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog (pr., pb. 2001). Parks has refused to be predictable, but her plays share a variety of influences. She and others have noted connections to James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, but African and African American influences seem central to her plays, especially to The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Parks herself has referred to that play as a musical in which no one sings, and many note the influence of music, especially jazz and the blues, on her form, including her rhythmic use of language and improvisation. Louise Bernard points to the use of African Kuntu drama with its emphasis on continuum, and the play clearly is reminiscent of the American minstrelsy tradition in its use of African American stereotypes. Moreover, its emphasis on the double consciousness of African Americans relates to W. E. B. Du Bois, and Parks’s forging of connections between folklore and literature is reminiscent of the work of Zora Neale Hurston. A closer influence, perhaps, is the work of contemporary African American female playwrights, especially Adrienne Kennedy’s surreal and fragmented settings and characters and Ntozake Shange’s use of African American speech patterns and stereotypes.

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Bibliography Bernard, Louise. “The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” African American Review 31, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 687-700. Focuses on Parks’s use of language and its connection to African American identity. Haring-Smith, Tori. “Dramaturging Non-realism: Creating a New Vocabulary.” Theatre Topics 13, no. 1 (2003): 45-54. Discusses the process of working with non-realistic theatrical elements in the plays of Parks and Caryl Churchill. Rayner, Alice, and Harry J. Elan, Jr. “Unfinished Business: Reconfiguring History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” Theatre Journal 46, no. 4 (1994): 447-461. Discusses Parks’s use of language to rework African American history. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr., and Alicia Smith-Howard. Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2007. The first critical volume on Parks; contains eight articles and an interview with the playwright. Wood, Jacqueline. “Sambo Subjects: ‘Declining the Stereotype’ in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” Studies in the Humanities, June-December, 2001, 109-122. Discusses Parks’s appropriation and subversion of African American stereotypes. Elsie Galbreath Haley

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DEM Author: William Melvin Kelley (1937Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Satire Time of plot: Early 1960’s Locale: New York, New York First published: 1967

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Principal characters: Mitchell Pierce, a white, middle-class advertising executive Tam Pierce, Mitchell’s bored and demanding wife, the mother of Jake and of unnamed twin boys Opal Simmons, the Pierces’ black maid Calvin Coolidge Williams (Cooley), Opal’s boyfriend, the father of one of the Pierce twins The Novel dem’s unusual title and its lower-case format are a revealing indication of the author’s intentions and orientation. The connotations of a certain vocal tonality and a certain grade of education that the title word conveys are far removed from the white, middle-class milieu in which most of the action takes place. The combination of lexical and auditory element in “dem” also indicates an attitude that, if not necessarily disrespectful, reduces to the status of a common noun material that is generally accorded the distinctiveness of a proper noun. This attitude not only embraces the realm of manners, which occupies the foreground of the novel; it also is the basis for the larger social, cultural, and political perspectives that the story entails, creating them initially by inference but ultimately in fully realized terms, an “us” that exists as an equal and opposite human entity to “dem.” The provocative undertones of dem’s title are developed in a number of ways in the course of the story. The very setting of the main narrative interest, a well-appointed apartment in Manhattan, is one that does not occur frequently in African American fiction, and the family that lives in the apartment is equally unusual, simply by belonging to the white, professional, upper middle class. Despite the deftness with which personal milieu and general social context are established, the author is more interested in what lies underneath the plausible surfaces of the Pierce household than in reproducing whatever interest and quality those surfaces may have in themselves. The various references to middle-class culture are to its conspicuous consumption in such areas as smoking, drinking, and fashion. For that reason, and as a means of informing readers that perspective is critical to what the novel intends to express, the Pierces are first seen from the outside. The first scene in the work concerns a mistaken perspective on Mitchell’s part when he is un-

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able to recognize the human inhabitant of a curbside bundle of rags. This mistake anticipates a tissue of ineptitude in the workplace, emotional bankruptcy in the home, and, ultimately, a state of moral nullity. The assemblage of this tissue constitutes the action of the novel. The action takes place in four sequences. There is an ostensible lack of relationship between each of these sequences. This lack is suggested by the culmination of the first and second sequences in shocking events that have no aftermath. The first of these is the murder committed by John Godwin, Mitchell’s workmate. The fact that this crime has no apparent repercussions is glaring both in itself and as a means of indicating that neither Mitchell nor Tam possesses sufficient sense of social responsibility to ensure that Godwin is brought to justice. The murder and the Pierces’ irresponsible reaction to it establish a state of moral disregard that provides a point from which the irresponsibility of Mitchell’s unreasonable and irrational assault on and dismissal of his maid, Opal, can be viewed. The pretext for this action is Opal’s alleged theft, and the case is judged on the basis of guilty until proven otherwise, with no possibility of such proof forthcoming. Mitchell’s reaction to Opal is in explicit contrast to his reaction to the Godwin murders. In this case, also, he is free to act without sanction and without redress. Again, the link between Opal’s fate and the next section of the novel is not obvious. In this third part, Mitchell becomes infatuated with a soap opera and pursues a woman whom he mistakenly identifies as one of the soap opera’s stars. The spurious freedom to which Mitchell’s outlook and social position evidently entitle him bring about, in turn, the laughable confusion of his infatuation. This scenario is a variation on the novel’s satirical treatment of the distorted relationship between freedom and responsibility among characters who represent America’s most powerful and typical class. In addition, because of the threat to his marriage that Mitchell’s abortive affair exerts, the focus of dem is now shifted to the inner world of Mitchell and Tam, the world of their sexuality, the world in which their individuality is most obviously at issue. By concentrating on this dimension of the characters, the novel is able to devote its fourth and culminating sequence to the point at which Mitchell Pierce is unable to deny realities that he has spent most of his time hitherto evading. In order to reach the heart of the matter, Kelley has to resort to a medical rarity known as superfecundation, the fertilization within a very brief time period of two ova by two different sexual partners. A note at the beginning of the novel authenticates this biological rarity by referring to the appropriate medical literature. The unusualness of this circumstance has the function within dem of giving substance to the issue in his world to which, more than to others, Mitchell Pierce is blind. This issue is race; one of the twins with which Mitchell’s wife Tam is pregnant is the offspring of Opal’s beau, who is known to the Pierces only as “Cooley.” As the novel’s landscape makes clear, considerations of race are unavoidable: The human being in the bundle of rags on the opening page is a Native American; John Godwin makes a number of disrespectful statements about Asian women; there are various

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references to Jews throughout; and a scene set in an Irish tavern is a brief satire of Irish America. It is only when his own interests are impinged upon with a black son that Mitchell attempts to confront the all-pervasiveness of race, and then only in the hope of erasing it. By means of such an outcome, William Melvin Kelley ratifies his hardhitting exposé of the social origins and moral culpability of racism in America. The Characters The protagonist of dem, Mitchell Pierce, is, paradoxically, the novel’s weakest character, a paradox compounded by his being the least vulnerable character. His existence, whether at home or at work, at play or when deadly serious, in Manhattan or in the housing projects of the North Bronx, largely consists of following the lead of others. Although these other characters have nowhere near as strong a claim on readers’ attention as does Mitchell, it is with them that the power rests to shape the course of his life. Kelley adroitly provides them with that power by equipping them with an institutional identity and the security of the type. Mitchell is so consumed with himself that he continually exhibits an air of futile fretfulness and vague unsettledness. It is Mitchell’s narcissistic absorption by the minutiae of his own needs and status that deprives him of a perspective on the world around him. However, the manner in which his ego blinkers him also effectively protects him from the moral consequences of his social and psychological immaturity. His compelling urge not to be disturbed by what the world brings to his attention—whether a murder committed by a friend or his wife’s giving birth to a black son—sees him through life’s moral challenges unscathed. His ludicrous and impetuous decision to forsake his wife for the bohemian Winky, whom he believes to be the character Nancy Knickerbocker from the soap opera Search for Love, has its issue at the same level of moral vacuity that pervades Mitchell and his world. Were it not for the quasi-incestuous attentions of his motherin-law, it is doubtful if Mitchell would pursue his “co-genitor,” Cooley. The only area in which Mitchell leaves aside his spinelessness, biddability, and prevarication is in his sexual relations with Tam. His assertiveness here is less a function of emotional adequacy than it is the implementation of manhood conceived of as a set of generic cultural codes and preconditioned responses. The series of events that leads Mitchell to display his torso for the edification of a bathing beauty, in the hope that she might find a way of reciprocating, leads to his falling flat on his face, showing him that his body is not as reliable as he had imagined and leading to a period of convalescence that makes Search for Love a staple of his days. As the marriage of Mitchell and Tam elapses and as Tam’s pregnancy progresses, Mitchell’s sexual supremacy is increasingly undermined. Tam turns shrewish and dismissive and becomes given to bouts of disenchanted recrimination on the subject of vanished romance. Tam’s dissatisfactions are a mirror image of her husband’s. The feelings of unrelatedness and detachment that sap the marriage are an intimate microcosm of the deficient values that substantiate Mitchell’s position in the world. Tam is as absorbed in her own needs as Mitchell is in his. Her encounter with Cooley that cre-

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ates the problem twins is the result of the tedium of Tam’s life with Mitchell, a life centered around visits to the beauty shop. These visits have the moral standing of Mitchell’s three-martini lunches. Tam’s resolve to keep the twins, regardless of color, is defensive in nature and is adopted to keep her appalled mother and speechless husband at a distance rather than to express a revolution in consciousness. The obstetrical, as opposed to the emotional, consequences of sex underline the essential barrenness of the Pierce marriage, a condition to which Tam makes as complete a contribution as the narrow range of her character can permit. In contrast, the specifically black section of dem details Mitchell’s pursuit of Opal and Cooley. He attempts to provide them with a status that, under normal circumstances, he had arrogantly and unreasoningly denied them. This part of the novel has an atmosphere of community and vivid variety that the novel’s Manhattan world seems implicitly to repudiate and to be incapable of embodying. However, Kelley is careful not to make the contrast too stereotypical. The condition of Opal’s consciousness, the fact that she assumes a certain degree of moral complicity in the false allegations of pilfering on the basis of her association with Cooley, is also susceptible to the author’s critical exposure. The need for the black men whom Mitchell meets to defend themselves, whether by militant rhetoric or more devious and subtle techniques of social survival, provides a telling contrast to the protagonist’s complacent lack of awareness. Also noteworthy is the readiness of such minor characters as Mitchell’s guide, Carlyle Bedlow, the resourceful go-between who occupies the cultural and moral space between exploitable Opal and opportunistic Cooley, to assume that there is an inevitable violent concommitant to Mitchell’s quest. The character of Cooley is more elusive, and for that very reason brings an understated eloquence to the didactic subtext that underlies and animates the satirist’s art in dem. All that transpires between Cooley and Mitchell, and implicitly between the worlds and cultures that the two represent, is a bond that is as inscrutable and subcutaneous as biological reality but that cannot be adequately acknowledged or addressed. The circumstances that bring the characters together and offer the possibility of twinning their destinies has the ultimate effect of bringing into focus all the reasons why the races remain apart. Themes and Meanings By focusing on the white middle class, with its anxieties, disaffections, and strategies for sublimation, dem draws attention not only to issues of race but also to those of class and gender. This trio of concerns has come to occupy a central position in the contemporary sociology of literature and in the culture of present-day literary criticism. Their dynamic interaction in dem is one of the novel’s most provocative and significant achievements. The class element is evident in the manner in which Opal is treated, and in the demoralizing effect of that treatment. Such treatment is the inevitable result of the ethics of advertising, as presented in the novel’s second scene. The manner in which the image of the consumer is identified and addressed in that scene is as heartless and dehu-

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manizing as the manner in which Mitchell deals with Opal. More important than the perception of the economic dimension of class is the representation of class’s cultural dimension. Class is conceived of as a matter of appearance, and of the assumptions that can be based upon appearance, so that the judgmental and exploitative character of class stereotyping is made at the level of impression and reaction, rather than at a conscious, deliberate level. Mitchell’s self-consciousness about his own appearance, and about how other people look, together with Tam’s infatuation with hairstyles, emphasizes the novel’s total comprehension of the deadly superficiality of class consciousness. The mutually exploitative nature of the Pierces’ marriage introduces the language of class into conjugality. Since the marriage is less a partnership than a power struggle, its susceptibility to the language of class is at once obvious to readers and hidden from the characters. In the course of this struggle, Mitchell’s unthinking patriarchy is progressively undermined by Tam’s resistance to it, ultimately leading to the whimsical unconventionality of her insistence on keeping her black twin. Under such circumstances, the human core of marriage, based on the domestic virtues of fidelity, collaboration, and a sense of duty and commitment, is less inadmissible than unconsidered. The sociological cliché that the family is the keystone of society is rehearsed with unexpected bitterness and penetration. The novel’s emphasis on the manner in which its central characters fail to appreciate and therefore squander their human substance is crucial to its thoughts on race. Matters of exploitation, stereotyping, and the various other unfeeling strategies of dehumanization upon which white lives are unthinkingly based in dem reach a critical mass when considered in the context of race relations. Not only are white society’s codes of mastery and manipulation more gratuitously in evidence when applied to black society, but such codes also seem to have little or no force in black society, which is much more organic than white society and which does not articulate its moral energies by means of hierarchical frameworks. The ease with which Mitchell is accepted as kin at a Harlem party may stretch credulity, but it occurs at a point in the novel when action begins to subscribe to a rhetoric of adequacy. The emphasis is less on how Mitchell will erase the problem of the black child from his life than on what the child signifies, particularly since, with the death of its white twin, its presence invokes matters of survival in addition to such other matters as legitimacy, recognition, and tolerance. Kelley’s satire, however, ensures that the child’s significance merely highlights the artificiality of racial divisions and does not provide a basis for moving beyond them. Critical Context The concerns in dem are addressed with such economy and directness that the novel’s considerable literariness may be overlooked. Its satirical extravagances, however, reveal the novel’s illustrious lineage. The complicated variations by which motifs of innocence and culpability, infantilism and maturity, intertwine relate dem to a number of age-old storytelling traditions. Among those that have the most resonance

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with regard to the modern, satirical sensibility of dem are the simpleton narrative, the tale based on the waywardness of fortune, the infant-substitution story, and the career of the confidence man. The latter is used to scathing effect in Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and there is in dem something of Twain’s mordant derision of human cupidity and blindness, though the overall effect lacks Twain’s bleakness. In addition to dem’s intriguing literary lineage and Kelley’s transposition of it to a contemporary urban setting, it is the social and cultural background to that setting that provides the most accessible sense of the novel’s context and relevance. dem may be regarded as a cultural document of some significance. Reflecting very much not only the revaluation of black America that was attempted by African Americans in the 1960’s, the novel also reflects the revolution in African American artistic expression that that decade also witnessed. The daring themes, angry tone, and innovative sense of form that distinguish much African American art of the time are also prominent features of dem, though arguably Kelley does not endorse their revolutionary potential as wholeheartedly as other artists of his generation. The novel’s caustic anatomy of the ineradicable racist element in American society is, however, a noteworthy expression of the outspokenness and righteous impatience of its time, and makes both fitting and understandable its dedication by the author “to the Black people in (not of) America.” Bibliography Abraham, Willie. Introduction to dem. New York: Collier Books, 1969. Makes a strong case for the artistic and cultural significance of dem. Includes a consideration of Kelley’s social thought both as it emerges in the course of the novel and as it is developed in his fiction overall. Bone, Robert. “Outsiders.” The New York Times Books Review, September 24, 1967, 5. dem is one of the novels reviewed in this article, which indentifies the novel’s scope and incisiveness and notes its contribution to African American letters. Jaffe, Dan. “Almost Real.” Review of dem, by William Melvin Kelley. Prairie Schooner 42 (Spring, 1968): 83. Review of dem that is instructively averse to the novel’s satirical character. A revealing footnote to the critical reception of African American fiction. Newquist, Roy, ed. Conversations. New York: Rand McNally, 1967. Includes an indepth interview with Kelley. Of particular relevance are Kelley’s attitudes toward issues raised by the Civil Rights movement. Rosenblatt, Roger. Black Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Discussion of dem focusing on the novel’s perspective on interracial relations, which has a crucial bearing on how the book’s conclusion is assessed. Sundquist, Eric J. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Study of the literary representation of the relationship between Jewish Americans and African Americans after World War II. Includes a chapter on Kelley’s fiction.

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Weyant, Jill. “The Kelley Saga: Violence in America.” CLA Journal 19 (December, 1975): 210-220. Examination of Kelley’s fiction focusing on his critique of the moral and physical violence of American society. Conceived as an overview, the article contains numerous scattered excerpts from dem to illustrate the overall perspective. Wright, John S. Foreword to dem, by William Melvin Kelley. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 2000. Reappraisal of dem and of Kelley’s career from the point of view of the turn of the twenty-first century. George O’Brien

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DESSA ROSE Author: Sherley Anne Williams (1944-1999) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1847-1848 Locale: Northern Alabama First published: 1986 Principal characters: Dessa Rose, a freed slave, who is notorious among white people and admired by black people Ruth Elizabeth Sutton, a young, red-haired white woman Adam Nehemiah, a socially ambitious white writer Nathan, a huge driver for a slave trader Harker, the former slave of a confidence man Cully, a light-skinned escaped slave The Novel Dessa Rose is a fictional slave narrative, the story of a strong black woman committed to fight until she and those she loves can “own ourselfs.” The novel begins with Dessa imprisoned in a sheriff’s cellar. She has been sentenced to death for participating in a revolt on a slave coffle that killed five white men and maimed the trader, Wilson, but her execution has been delayed pending the birth of her child. When Dessa is interviewed by Adam Nehemiah, her indirect answers thwart his efforts to uncover details of the revolt. A sketchy outline of her history emerges, however, and readers learn of Dessa’s harsh life on a plantation, her attack on the plantation’s mistress, her subsequent beating and sale to Wilson, the revolt, and her escape, recapture, and trial. Adam is outraged when Dessa escapes again with the help of Nathan, Cully, Harker, and the sheriff’s slaves. Dessa wakes, disoriented, in a feather bed. She is alarmed to see a white woman suckling Dessa’s newborn son. The woman, Ruth Sutton, allows her farm to be a haven for escaped slaves. The assumption that they belong to her protects them from being caught as fugitives; they work the farm and share the profits. Ruth distrusts Dessa because of her violent history. Dessa distrusts Ruth because she is white and resents the necessity of being dependent on her goodwill. Recovering from childbirth and her long ordeal, Dessa rejoices in the intimacy created among Nathan, Cully, Harker, and herself by the act of freeing themselves. Harker and Nathan devise a plan for the community of escaped slaves to emigrate to free territory in the West. Adapting a moneymaking con game of Harker’s old master, they plan to sell themselves back into slavery and then escape, moving on to repeat the scam. They know that having a white person, rather than the light-skinned

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Cully, posing as seller will improve their chances for success. Dessa’s horror at the thought of any of her friends going back into slavery, even temporarily, is compounded when she discovers that Nathan has ensured Ruth’s cooperation in the plan by initiating a love affair with her. Furious that a white woman, her symbolic enemy, can invade her tightly knit company of friends, Dessa insults Ruth by calling her “Miz Ruint.” Eventually, an uneasy truce is established, and the plan goes forward. With Dessa posing as Ruth’s personal maid, Nathan as her driver, and Harker and three others as slaves to be sold, the seven work their scheme successfully through several Alabama counties. During their travels, the relationship between Dessa and Ruth remains tense while growing closer. At one overnight stop, a drunken white man’s attempt to rape Ruth opens Dessa’s eyes to the fact that white women as well as black women are vulnerable to sexual abuse; their cooperation in beating him off creates a bond of sisterhood. At the last rendezvous point, Dessa hears someone call her name and to her horror recognizes Adam Nehemiah. He hauls her before the sheriff and demands that her scars be examined to prove she is the runaway criminal he seeks. She is saved by the lie of the black woman called in to examine her and by Ruth’s intervention. Deranged by his obsession with regaining power over Dessa, Adam is unable to make his case, and Dessa goes free. After her escape from Adam, Dessa accepts Ruth’s offer of friendship. The company succeeds in reaching free territory in the West. Ruth accompanies them to Council Bluffs, Iowa, then goes to the Northeast, unable to live any longer in the slave South. The Characters Williams uses multiple voices and perspectives to create characterization in Dessa Rose. Of the five principal characters, Harker is the least complexly developed. Like Dessa’s first husband, Kaine, who appears in the novel only in Dessa’s memories, Harker is presented chiefly through Dessa’s description of him. However, the crucial scene in which Harker convinces Dessa to participate in the risky scheme that will make their future possible is structured as a dramatized conversation in which readers, like Dessa, feel the force of Harker’s words. Nathan is seen through the eyes of a number of other characters: Dessa, who initially trusts him implicitly but feels betrayed by his choice of a white woman; Harker, who in his conversation with Dessa defends Nathan’s right—and by implication the right of all the escaped slaves—to make free choices; and Ruth, who finds him the most honest adult companion she has ever had. Williams also includes a brief section in which Nathan’s thoughts are presented to explain the complex effect of Miz Lorraine’s demand for his sexual services on his sense of identity and self-esteem. Adam Nehemiah’s history, ambitions, and assumptions are thoroughly developed in the section of the novel called “The Darky,” which begins with him as the focus of narrative point of view. Lengthy passages reproduce the language of the journal in which he records Dessa’s story, his own reflections, and the events of his interaction

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with “the darky.” His language reveals that speculation about sex between Dessa and her master stirs his lust for her, which he explains to himself as a desire for paternalistic control, in accordance with the precepts of his book. His last journal entry at the end of “The Darky” betrays him; he angrily denies the sheriff’s charge “that I acted like one possessed.” Williams represents Nehemiah’s loss of control over Dessa’s story through his disappearance from the narrative; when Nehemiah reappears in the last scenes of the novel, he is seen through Dessa’s eyes and in Dessa’s words as a “crazy white man” who “wasn’t too much bigger than me.” Even his name has shrunk—the Acropolis sheriff calls him “Nemi.” The sexual nature of his obsession is revealed by his lewd language to Dessa and by the sheriff’s reluctance to allow what he calls another “peep show.” Though the novel begins with Nehemiah’s effort to define Dessa, Dessa defines him at the end. It is ironic that Nehemiah’s thoughts and language reveal more to a reader than the character understands about himself. However, when the author focuses on Ruth’s thoughts and experience in “The Wench,” the narrative depicts a character who, though ignorant and self-deluded in many ways, struggles toward understanding. While Nehemiah becomes smaller, Ruth grows up. Ruth too is characterized by multiple voices and perspectives: the critical gossip of the black women; Nathan’s teaching her to recognize his humanity as he recognizes hers; and Harker’s willingness to trust her. Most important, Ruth is characterized by her interaction with Dessa. In “The Wench,” the shifting narrative focus reveals their mistrust and misunderstanding of each other. In “The Negress,” narrated by Dessa, Ruth is characterized by an ambivalent progress in Dessa’s language, from “white woman” in the first sentence to “Ruth” and “friend” at the end of the book. Dessa, of course, is the most complex character of the novel. All the other characters describe her, define her, or react to her in one way or another. Italicized streamof-consciousness passages reproduce her dreams and memories; Nehemiah’s transcription records what he understands of her words; narration by the authorial voice describes her thoughts and experiences; and dramatized scenes show her in action and conversation. Her assumption of first-person narration in “The Negress” and the epilogue demonstrates that her character has achieved self-definition. Themes and Meanings In Dessa Rose, Williams creates an account of two lives that can be glimpsed only as possibility in the historical record. Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (1947) mentions two women, one a pregnant slave who led an 1829 revolt on a trader’s coffle in Kentucky and the other a white woman who harbored runaway slaves on a remote North Carolina farm in 1830. Williams joins their stories in a fictional time and place, creating an imaginative revision of documented history. Williams describes experiences usually ignored in historical texts, in literature by white authors, and even in slave narratives by black men. She counters stereotypes of the passive slave mother and the cruel plantation mistress with the story of a pregnant slave woman who dares to fight for her freedom and of a white woman who defies law

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and taboo to seek friendship with black companions. Though she never minimizes the dehumanizing brutality of slavery or the criminal threat of the slavemaster’s power, Williams emphasizes the strength of black culture and the loving interaction of slaves on the Vaugham plantation, on the coffle, and at Sutton Glen. The narrative structure of Dessa Rose demonstrates the theme of Dessa’s struggle for self-definition. The novel is divided into three parts, with a prologue and an epilogue. Part 1, “The Darky,” is dominated by Adam Nehemiah’s attempts to discover Dessa’s story and appropriate it for his own purposes. Dessa’s indirect replies give only the glimpses into her past that she is willing to disclose. Williams reflects the ambiguity of historical records in creating no definitive account of Dessa’s history; different versions of her various attacks on whites are alluded to throughout the novel. Both Dessa’s story and Dessa herself elude Adam’s grasp. In part 2, “The Wench,” the narrative focus shifts between Dessa and Ruth, reflecting the tension of their relationship. In part 3, “The Negress,” the narrative voice for the first time is Dessa’s own, as she takes command of her own life. Though Adam tells the sheriff he knows her, the notes by which he seeks to capture her are blank pages scattered on the floor. In the epilogue, Dessa, an old woman, rounds off her life story, preserving it from the Adam Nehemiahs of the world who would define her for their own purposes. Williams uses naming, one way of defining self or others, as an important method of characterization, best illustrated with the novel’s most fully developed characters, Dessa and Ruth. Dessa is called “the darky” by Adam Nehemiah; the name represents the stereotype he sees as the subject of his book. She is called “the wench” by Ruth, who distrusts her because of her reputation for violence. Part 3, in which Dessa begins to narrate her own story, is called “The Negress,” a French word Harker has told her means “black woman”; Dessa is amused that “blank” means “white” in French. Throughout, Dessa is referred to as the “devil woman” because of her part in the revolt. At first she resents the name, but she comes to accept its use by black people as an assertion of pride in her strength and daring. Ruth thinks of herself as “Rufel,” the pet name Mammy gave her, but she is offended if others use her baby name. Usually, they call her “Miz Lady” or “Mistress,” and she demands an apology when Dessa calls her “Miz Ruint.” Nathan clarifies his relationship to Ruth when she calls him “the funniest darky” and he replies, “My name Nathan.” When speaking of her to the angry Dessa, he determinedly calls her “Ruth.” The name “Mammy” is the focus of an argument between Dessa and Rufel. Though they soon realize that they are talking about different people, the controversy shocks Ruth into recognition of how little she knows about the human being she loved more than anyone else and spurs Dessa to an impassioned recitation of the names of her mother’s children, preserving the oral history of her family. At the end of their travels, Ruth objects to Dessa’s calling her “mistress,” saying, “My name Ruth.” Dessa counters that her own name is Dessa Rose, not Odessa, as white people assume it is. The exchange cements a friendship between equals. In her author’s note, Williams says that Dessa Rose was written in response to the

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perception that “there was no place in the American past I could go and be free.” Dessa frees herself both physically and mentally. She affirms her own power when she tells Adam she kills for the same reason the Master does: “Cause I can.” Participation in Harker’s moneymaking escape scam is evidence of psychological liberation. By deliberately choosing to play-act the dehumanizing roles slavery forced on them, Dessa and her companions can themselves profit from a system designed to make its profit from their status as commodities. Dessa hopes that her children “never have to pay what it cost us to own ourselfs.” Critical Context Before Dessa Rose, her first novel, Williams had published critical studies of black literature and music, short fiction, and poetry. With an emphasis on the lives of black women, her work reflected her interest in the interaction of the black oral tradition with Western history and literature. At the time of its publication, Dessa Rose was widely praised by reviewers and was listed in the recommended reading list of The New York Times for two weeks. Since then, critics have seen the novel as a significant contribution to the debate about who has the authority to interpret the texts of American history and to the creation of a multicultural literature. In giving a voice to a slave woman, a voice usually silent in the historical record and in the literary canon, and in representing kinds of black experience under slavery that are conventionally ignored, Williams asserts an African American self-definition within the context of the Western novel. Bibliography Byerman, Keith. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Study of the representation of history in African American fiction. Includes a chapter on the subersive nature of Dessa’s voice and its effect upon the American historical imagination. Davenport, Doris. Review of Dessa Rose, by Sherley Anne Williams. Black American Literature Forum 20, no. 3 (Fall, 1986): 335-340. Places Dessa Rose in the context of the debate over the literary canon. Davenport sees both Ruth and Adam as attempting unsuccessfully to exercise control over black female reality. Davis, Mary Kemp. “Everybody Knows Her Name: The Recovery of the Past in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose.” Callaloo 12, no. 3 (Summer, 1989): 544558. Argues that Williams uses names and naming to critique the language and ideology of slave culture and to assert the slave’s power of self-definition. Fulton, DoVeanna S. Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Analyzes Williams’s representation of the past horrors of slavery as an intervention in present injustices. Compares Dessa Rose to work by Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and Jewelle Gomez. Goldman, Anne E. “‘I Made the Ink’: (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved.” Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (Summer, 1990): 313-330.

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Argues that both the bodies and the words of slave mothers were means of production controlled by the slavemaster. Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Dessa Rose reclaim their own texts to pass on to their own children. McDowell, Deborah E. “Negotiating Between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery After Freedom—Dessa Rose.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Sees Dessa Rose as a contemporary rewriting of the text of slavery, one which emphasizes agency and control by the black woman subject. Reames, Kelly Lynch. Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. This study of the representation of female interracial friendships in American literature includes a chapter on Williams’s treatment of such friendships in Dessa Rose. Carol E. Schmudde

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DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS Author: Walter Mosley (1952Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Detective Time of plot: Late 1940’s Locale: Los Angeles, California First published: 1990

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Principal characters: Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins, a factory worker turned detective Daphne Monet, a companion to rich businessmen and crime figures, the “devil in a blue dress” Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, Rawlins’s friend and partner Dewitt Albright, a lawyer turned criminal handyman The Novel Devil in a Blue Dress tells the story of Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins’s efforts to find Daphne Monet and also tells the concurrent story of Rawlins’s self-discovery. Set in post-World War II Los Angeles and centering upon the emergent African American community, Devil in a Blue Dress is both conventional detective story and commentary on American social relations. The book’s plot is difficult to describe, as the novelist attempts to portray almost all the story’s events as duplicitous or as having hidden meaning. At the novel’s conclusion, many characters’ motivations, fates, and identities are purposely left unclear. Having lost his job in an aircraft factory, Rawlins is desperate to take any kind of work that will help him to protect his home. Joppy, Easy’s bartender friend, encourages Dewitt Albright to offer Rawlins work in the search for Monet. Rawlins, like most literary detectives, is naturally suspicious but still takes the work. As the story unfolds, Rawlins discovers that the case is much more than a simple search for a missing person. His entry into the underworld of Los Angeles parallels his struggle to come to terms with his war experiences and the guilt associated with Mouse’s killing of his stepfather. Although Dewitt Albright has presented the job to Rawlins as strictly a case of obtaining information that might lead to the discovery of Daphne Monet, the very process of asking questions leads to Rawlins’s implication in Coretta James’s death. James was often a companion to Daphne Monet, and her speaking with Rawlins cost her her life. Having provided Albright with the information he needed, Rawlins must still deal with the police. Every time he has the opportunity to clear himself, he is drawn in deeper. The sense that he is in over his head leads to his sending a message to Mouse in Houston asking for his help. Ironically, despite Rawlins’s reservations about his friend’s violent past, it is Mouse’s ability to provide physical defense, to act violently, that Rawlins needs desperately.

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Rawlins’s complete involvement is ensured when Daphne Monet contacts him. She tells him that she is desperate for his help in obtaining funds to escape the men who are searching for her. Although he initially contacts her to put an end to the “complications,” it is through this contact that he is connected to the murder of Richard McGee. Monet abandons Easy and causes him to be the target of both Dewitt Albright and the police. His only chance at survival is to search for her companion, Frank Green, a runner of illegal liquor. McGee had held money for Daphne and was killed by someone in search of those funds. Frank Green, whom readers know only as Daphne’s protector, must be found by Easy if he is ever to have any peace. Rawlins is also implicated by his attraction to Daphne and by their eventual sexual encounter. Daphne ensures that there will be no easy way out for Rawlins. He must deal with the pattern of criminality that surrounds her and with his own belief that she is white. Additionally, Rawlins’s meetings with Matthew Teran and Todd Carter suggest to Rawlins the depth of the moral degradation around him. Teran, a potential candidate for mayor, worries more about Daphne Monet revealing information about his underworld life than he does about the condition of a small child he sexually abuses. In a similar fashion, Todd Carter, a prominent local businessman and Daphne’s exboyfriend, is less concerned with violence or even the loss of $30,000 taken by Daphne than he is with recapturing her, whom he views as his property. By now Rawlins has also learned that he enjoys the business of asking questions, the role of detective. The search for Frank Green is dangerous and involves much subterfuge, but it is also emotionally satisfying. Rawlins is innovative and ingenious in his attempt to have a meeting with Green, and he recognizes his talent for and love of the work. He has more difficulty, however, determining the nature of his new vocation. It is difficult for him (and readers) to determine whether Rawlins is to be seen as the symbol of goodness or only as the representative of his own self-interest. Mouse’s arrival on the scene acts as continuation of Easy’s moral confusion and catalyst to the resolution of the plot. Dependent upon Mouse’s violence for his own protection, Rawlins is further implicated in past crimes. The struggle to control Mouse is also a struggle to control his own dark side. Ironically, Mouse’s recognition of Daphne Monet’s true identity as Ruth is also the ultimate solution to the puzzle: She is black, not white; Frank Green is her brother, not her boyfriend. Since Monet is “found out,” she must divide Todd Carter’s money with Mouse and Easy. Joppy is killed by Mouse, ostensibly for misleading Easy. Mouse also kills Dewitt Albright, who had waited in ambush for Easy. The story ends as it has proceeded, with human life shown as extremely fragile in the face of deception and greed. The shape and meaning of the plot is best described by reference to the long list of murder victims: Coretta James, Howard Green, Frank Green, Richard McGee, Joppy, and Dewitt Albright. Despite his break from both Mouse and Monet and the temptations that each represents, Easy must still deal with police detectives, who do not appreciate the numerous murders or Rawlins’s sometimes sincere, sometimes contrived explanations. The mystery solved, the novel concludes with Easy settling into his newfound vocation. He tells a friend that he has taken further detective work, although he is capa-

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ble of living off his share of Todd Carter’s $30,000. The concluding image is of Rawlins tending his garden and struggling with the same moral dilemmas with which he began. The police will not go away, nor will the paradoxes and contradictions of an African American man quietly trying to live the American Dream. The Characters The protagonist, Easy Rawlins, has no family connections and is largely selfeducated. He is a former Texas factory worker who has moved to California in part to escape the influence of his friend Mouse. When he is fired from his aircraft factory job after a racial incident with his foreman, however, Easy accepts the job of searching for Daphne Monet; ironically, the danger into which the search leads Easy causes him to contact Mouse and ask for his help. Easy’s is a divided character. Part of him wants to pursue the American Dream (he has recently bought a house, and he undertakes detective work in order to pay his mortgage), and this side of him finds the confusion and risk of his new job unsettling. He is haunted by his World War II combat experiences in Europe, and he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the violent situations into which he is repeatedly drawn. Another side of Easy’s nature, however, enjoys his new lifestyle. Eventually, Easy discovers that detective work provides him with an independence and self-confidence that he has not previously had. Easy’s friend and partner, Mouse, is shadowy and mysterious. It is known that he has killed his stepfather in a dispute over an inheritance, but little more is revealed about his past. Although he is violent and unpredictable, he values loyalty and friendship. Dewitt Albright, the shady attorney who hires Easy, is less ambiguously presented. Like Mouse, he is unpredictable and dangerous, but he lacks Mouse’s loyalty and other values. Albright seems to have no morals or scruples. Daphne Monet, the “devil in a blue dress,” is mysterious and elusive. Her real name is Ruby Hanks, and her mother is African American. As Daphne Monet, however, she passes for white. She leaves her home in Louisiana and the identity of Ruby Hanks to escape the memory of an incestuous relationship with her father. She has so perfected her escape from the past that she is described as a “chameleon.” She is able not only to assume different racial identities but also to become radically different personalities. Themes and Meanings Easy Rawlins has accepted the reality of the American Dream; he has fought for his country, he believes in hard work, and his life increasingly centers on his ownership of his home and his self-education. His genesis as detective extends this theme of selfreliance and self-help. As a man of property, he wants little to do with criminals or crime. In his travels as hired hand for Dewitt Albright, though, he discovers that this kind of work provides him with a sense of self-confidence and purpose that he has never before experienced. This paradox is part of the central structure of the book: Can Ezekial Rawlins live a life that is both “good” and “evil”? The detective is required to synthesize wit, commanding presence, deductive rea-

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soning, and instinct. Within the context of the African American literary tradition, the detective is potentially a powerful figure. This radical self-reliance, which contradicts racial stereotypes, allows the detective to explore and experience the boundaries of good and evil and the underside of American culture. The use of ironic commentary and omniscient narration allows the detective to speak safely about the realities of racism and to expose hypocrisy. Unlike more conventional protagonists of African American novels, moreover, a detective is not merely portrayed as a victim of racism. The focus of the mystery is not limited to racial themes. As a heroic individual and as an American detective, Rawlins demonstrates ingenuity, power, and an ultimate victory that are unquestioned. The fragmentation of Rawlins’s character—as marked by the emergence of an inner voice that acts sometimes as a conscience, sometimes as a survival instinct—is representative of Walter Mosley’s manipulation and revision of the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel. Rawlins claims to trust this inner voice, yet he does not always follow its directions. Mosley’s portrayal of Ezekial Rawlins challenges even the safety of the self. Just as African American detective novelist Chester Himes’s novels often flirted with chaos and anarchy against the convention of neatly solved crimes and passing moral dilemmas, Mosley’s story shifts the moral focus away from the objective world and toward the complex subjectivity of the detective. The investigation of the boundaries between good and evil has always been a staple of detective fiction. In Devil in a Blue Dress, many of the authority figures are immersed in the criminal underworld. The law is at best a double standard; Easy’s treatment by the police and his accompanying commentary reveal that what is believed to be good may be corrupt just below the surface. The moral corruption of powerful white men (as incestuous, as child abusers, as pathologically violent) is seen as the natural extension of political corruption. The randomness of American racism makes personal and cultural identity itself a moral problem. Daphne Monet is portrayed as “evil” and a “devil” but also as the object of desire. Men want to possess her, and she is able to change her identity to best meet their desires. Devil in a Blue Dress is less a parable than a paradoxical proverb. As cultural history, Devil in a Blue Dress fills out the picture of mid-century Los Angeles as more than just Hollywood. Mosley’s work reveals this place and time to be culturally diverse and never a utopia. California is clearly portrayed as the end of the frontier and is supposed to provide hope for the dispossessed. The novel also provides vivid and detailed descriptions of African American life in this locale. A central part of Mosley’s accomplishment is his manipulation of the detective-fiction formula to dramatize African American vernacular language, settings, concerns, and values. The story is both puzzle and solution. It reveals the paradoxes of the American Dream while suggesting both preferred and likely conduct. It is highly appropriate that readers are left with Easy Rawlins’s moral dilemmas, as they quite possibly correspond to a reader’s own; it is also appropriate that readers are left to wait for the next story and for the continuation of the solution.

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Critical Context Walter Mosley builds upon the hard-boiled tradition of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler and the revisionary work of the African American novelist Chester Himes. The hard-boiled tradition is masculine to the point of chauvinism and revels in dark settings, moral ambiguity, and the unreliability of appearances. Himes is not Mosley’s only African American predecessor; W. Adolphe Roberts (The Haunting Hand, 1926) and Rudolph Fisher (The Conjure-Man Dies, 1932) also wrote detective fiction. Like the best of Chandler and Macdonald, Devil in a Blue Dress is a complex morality play; like the best of Himes, the novel uses American race relations as the vehicle for moral commentary. Analyses of Mosley’s work will be most complete with an acknowledgment of both the Macdonald-Chandler tradition and Himes’s African American revision. The emergence of Mosley’s work is coincident with a rediscovery of Himes’s detective works and more particularly the 1991 film adaptation of Himes’s A Rage in Harlem (1957). It is also coincident with the emergence of Terry McMillan’s romance novels Mama (1987) and Disappearing Acts (1989) and marks the reevaluation of the possibilities within formula fiction by African American novelists. Devil in a Blue Dress was meant to initiate a whole series of Easy Rawlins mysteries. It met with positive critical response but little extended analysis or discussion; few individual detective novels have been given close textual readings. Literary critics and historians who have directed their attention to this genre tend to focus on the development of series and their relationship to other series within the tradition. Devil in a Blue Dress has been followed by nearly a dozen Easy Rawlins novels. As the Rawlins series has grown, it has attracted increased critical reflection. It is now compared to series by such noted authors as Raymond Chandler and Dasiell Hammett. Bibliography Bailey, Frankie Y. Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Comprehensive examination of the emergence and development of black characters in contemporary detective fiction. Includes the thoughts of a number of detective writers on their portrayal of black characters. Also provides information on the emergence of the black writer of detective fiction. Binyon, T. J. Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Discusses the detective as character within a variety of fictional styles, both British and American. A useful catalog of themes, plots, and settings. Not very strong, however, on African American writers or characters. Geherin, David. The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. Comparative study of American detectives in fiction. Mosley, Walter. “Walter Mosley: Writing About Easy.” Interview by Elsie B. Washington. Essence 21 (January, 1991): 32. Includes discussion by Mosley of the sources and purposes of his detective fiction.

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Nolan, William F. The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction. New York: William Morrow, 1985. Compendium of representative short fiction (by such writers as Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett) from Black Mask magazine 1920-1951, and a useful analysis of the hard-boiled style. Skinner, Robert E. Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Critical and historical study of Himes’s detective fiction. Provides useful information on models and African American predecessors. Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Comprehensive overview of the history of mystery and detective fiction by African American writers. Bibliographic references and index. Wesley, Marilyn C. Violent Adventure: Contemporary Fiction by American Men. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Study of masculinity in American fiction that includes a chapter on the representation of power in Devil in a Blue Dress and Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men. Wilson, Charles E., Jr. Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Complete overview of Mosley’s career, including a biographical essay, an essay on the writer’s literary heritage, and a chapter devoted to Devil in a Blue Dress. James C. Hall

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A DIFFERENT DRUMMER Author: William Melvin Kelley (1937Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1957 Locale: A mythical southern state First published: 1962

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Principal characters: Mister Harper, an old white man who tells the story of the mighty African, which has grown into a local legend The African, the founder of the Caliban line and great-great-grandfather of Tucker Caliban Tucker Caliban, the chauffeur for the wealthy Willson family and a quiet rebel David Willson, the great-great-grandson of Dewitt Willson, the plantation owner who purchased the African Bennett Bradshaw, David’s friend Dewey Willson III, David’s son and Tucker’s friend Mister Leland, the eight-year-old son of a white sharecropper The Novel A Different Drummer charts the uneasy relationship between two families, the white Willsons and black Calibans. Specifically, the book examines Tucker Caliban’s symbolic destruction of his slave past and the effects of his acts upon the townspeople of Sutton, a fictional small town in the South. Much of the novel is told in flashbacks. The present action of the novel, told from the point of view of several characters and out of chronological sequence, spans a three-day period from Thursday, May 30, when a salt truck arrives in town, through Saturday, June 1, the day of the lynching of Bennett Bradshaw. On Thursday, the arrival of a truck loaded with rock salt creates a commotion at Sutton’s general store. The driver asks directions to the Caliban farm, part of the former Willson plantation where the first slave Caliban worked; Tucker has bought the property from David Willson. The news soon arrives that Tucker is spreading salt on his land to kill it, and the loungers at the store adjourn to watch Tucker slaughter his livestock, smash a grandfather clock that arrived on the same slave ship as his African ancestor, and burn his house to the ground. Mister Leland is there with his father, trying to understand what is happening, and Tucker tells him, “You young, ain’t you. . . . And you ain’t lost nothing, has you.” Later, the boy begins to understand that Tucker “had been robbed of something but . . . never even knew he owned what had been taken from him.”

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Tucker has recognized that his family has had the chance to be truly free but has not taken it. Earlier, when he refused to give his wife a dollar to renew her membership in the National Society for Colored Affairs, he declared, “They ain’t working for my rights. . . . I’m fighting all my battles myself.” Methodically, he has set about destroying all remnants of slavery in his own life. By Friday, the African Americans of Sutton have begun to pack and leave their homes behind. When the Black Jesuit Bennett Bradshaw arrives from the North in a shining black limousine, he asks Mister Leland to accompany him to Tucker’s farm to explain what has happened. Bennett has long hoped to become a national leader, and he is dismayed and yet admiring to discover that Tucker has begun a movement of great power. On this same day, David Willson, a liberal white who has regretted the loss of his ideals, recognizes that Tucker has freed not only himself but also David: “I contributed to it. I sold him the land and the house. . . . Anyone, anyone can break loose from his chains.” On Saturday, Dewey Willson III returns from college, clutching a letter from his boyhood friend Tucker. He remembers the anger Tucker had expressed during his grandfather’s funeral the previous year, when someone praised the old man as one who sacrificed for others. “Sacrifice be damned!” cried Tucker, and walked out. This death was the catalyst for Tucker’s decision to buy part of the old plantation. Dewey rides his old bicycle to Tucker’s farm, encounters Bennett Bradshaw there, and agrees to ride to town with him. He learns that Bennett and his father had been young men together at Harvard University, hoping to build a world where race would not matter. Bennett’s patronizing attitude toward Tucker Caliban becomes regretful as he realizes that Tucker has needed no leader, no one to give him his freedom. He has claimed it for himself. Bennett has worked his whole life only to have someone else succeed where he has failed. The men on the porch of the general store pass around a jug and begin to realize what the exodus of African Americans from Sutton and from the whole state will mean to them. When Bennett’s limousine passes, they halt it, strike down and tie Dewey, and force Bennett, whom they blame for the exodus, to perform a humiliating song and dance. Then they take him to Tucker’s farm, where they kill him. The naïveté of Mister Leland, who has been taught to respect people of color as equal human beings, offers some hope in the darkness of the novel. Asleep in his house close to the Caliban farm, he is awakened by a scream, which he interprets as a scream of laughter. He imagines that Tucker has returned and that there is a party going on. He thinks of morning, when he will go to Tucker’s field and find his friend again; he imagines that they will eat candy and popcorn and that Tucker will tell him that he has found what he has lost: “And all the while, they would be laughing.” The Characters The novel’s use of multiple points of view and stream-of-consciousness narration allows several characters to reveal themselves directly. Chapters narrated by Dewey Willson and his mother disclose their inner turmoil and add dimension to their charac-

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ters. David Willson’s journal entries establish the longing and self-loathing of an otherwise silent and misunderstood man. Although Mister Leland and his father do not narrate chapters, their direct thoughts are divulged in interior monologues. The ambiguous figure of Bennett Bradshaw is revealed by his speech, which is not only formal but also rather stilted. Accused of using a fake English accent, Bennett really echoes his family’s West Indian origin. When he shifts from this speech to the more familiar dialect of Sutton, Mister Leland immediately distrusts him: “Someone else’s voice was coming out of the man’s body.” Bennett’s dual speech pattern suggests that he is at home neither in the intellectual world of New York nor in the rural South. Although the novel centers on the actions of Tucker Caliban, no clear protagonist appears. Tucker is observed only through the eyes of other characters or through their memories. Consequently, Tucker is always seen, a small and determined figure, from a distance that cannot be traversed. He, like the African, becomes almost a figure of legend. In fact, all viewpoint characters in the novel are white. African American characters are presented only through observation or dialogue, which underscores the confusion of the whites, who can sense but not understand the important undercurrents taking place. In this novel, the real outsiders are white. Kelley’s weakest characters are female, in particular Dewey’s sister Dymphna, who never rises above teenage caricature. The figure of Bethrah, Tucker’s wife, an educated and beautiful woman who chooses small, dwarfish Tucker as her husband, would be an intriguing character in her own right, but she is never developed. The men on the porch are poor whites. Although one is a stereotypical redneck, others are fleshed out enough to be seen as individuals, and they are not automatically evil, even though they decide to lynch Bennett, “our last nigger.” Some, like the store owner, try to dissuade them, and Mister Harper tells Dewey that “none of them’ll come to town tomorrow . . . won’t be able to face each other for a while.” Kelley’s most successful and sympathetic character is the child Mister Leland. Wide-eyed and without guile, trying hard to remember that the word “nigger” is one he must not use, he notes that his father speaks respectfully to white and black men alike. His innocent and ironic perception of the lynching as a joyful welcoming party for Tucker offers some tempered hope for the new South that he will inherit. Themes and Meanings Kelley has borrowed his title and epigraph from philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854): “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” The role of the individual in society and the importance of self-reliance are central themes of this novel. As Tucker tells David, “You tried to free us once, but we didn’t go and now we got to free ourselves.” The strongest individual, who steps to no music but his own, is the African, and that trait emerges again in Tucker, the true revolutionary who refuses to join the National Society for Colored Affairs or any other group. He does not wish to destroy his soci-

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ety but only to change it, and he does that by renouncing or obliterating all connections with his family’s slave past, except for the small white stone that formed part of the African’s makeshift altar more than a century ago. He and the African Americans who leave the state are the real marchers. Others try to march, but fail. The young Bennett Bradshaw, fired with enthusiasm, “walked as if to some music, a march, his arms swinging at his sides.” Later, though, he is sidetracked by greed and a desire for power, and sells out by creating his own fanatical group of followers. Young David Willson, fired from the newspaper for which he works, regrets that he lacks the courage to continue writing antiracist articles: “I am watching a parade and I know I should be marching proudly, but I am shackled to the curb,” he says. Even David’s son Dewey has a symbolic dream in which the Confederate general Dewey Wilson hands Dewey his head, like a football, and tells him to run with it; Dewey, however, is “paralyzed from the waist down” and cannot run. Finally Mister Harper, the old storyteller who represents tradition and the past, is not truly paralyzed; he simply prefers to sit in his wheelchair. Even as child-sized Tucker leads the African American community by example, the child Mister Leland seems to lead the white adults. At one point, Mister Leland feels his father’s hand on his shoulder, “light, not guiding him, but being guided by him, as if his father was a blind man.” Kelley’s implication seems clear: Those who see clearly, those who have the vision of innocence, and those who remain pure of heart will become the true leaders. Revolution does not require violence, but only the courage to act. Critical Context A Different Drummer was Kelley’s first novel, and many critics believe it is the best. Although the book received lukewarm early reviews, it has been praised for its “brilliant manipulation of point of view” and “inventive stylistic versatility.” In 1963, Kelley was awarded the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for the work. Kelley, who has identified himself as “an American writer who happens to have brown skin,” argues that a writer “should ask questions. He should depict people, not symbols or ideas disguised as people.” A Different Drummer is faithful to this ideal, as Kelley explores the separate lives of his characters without anger or didacticism. He expresses compassion and understanding for even the most unpleasant characters. Although in A Different Drummer Kelley stressed his concern for the plight of humanity, by 1965 he believed that the mission of the African American writer had been broadened sociopolitically “to help the Negro to find those things that were robbed from him on the shores of Africa, to help repair the damage done to the soul of the Negro in the past three centuries.” Several critics note a philosophical evolution in his first five books, as Kelley moves from his original humanitarian focus to a more militant concern with ideas. Some African American critics, however, suggest that even in later works Kelley withholds judgment on issues of race. Critical reception of his

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fourth novel, Dunfords Travels Everywhere (1970), has been mixed, some praising its experimental language and others finding it too derivative. Bibliography Faulkner, Howard. “The Uses of Tradition: William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer.” Modern Fiction Studies 21, no. 4 (Winter, 1975-1976): 535-542. Affirms that Kelley incorporates many of the traditions of European American literature, often ironically, including the tall tale (the African), the Transcendental notion of self-reliance (Tucker), and biblical symbolism. Also examines the influence on Kelley of southern novelist William Faulkner, as evidenced by the use of child narrators and multiple points of view and by stylistic parallels in sentence structure and the use of italics. Harris-Lopez, Trudier. “Salting the Land but Not the Imagination: William Melvin Kelley’s A Dfferent Drummer.” In South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Extended analysis of Tucker and his relationship to Kelley’s fictional landscape. Klotman, Phyllis Rauch. Another Man Gone: The Black Runner in Contemporary Afro-American Literature. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977. Examines the figure of the black runner within the larger framework of the “Running Man”—one who ultimately rejects the values of his culture or society by leaving it—in Western literature. Tucker, like his rebel ancestor the African, is able to act and has the courage to do so by breaking the pattern of the past and rejecting all tangible symbols of black servitude. Running for both of these characters is seen as a positive act. Newquist, Roy. Conversations. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967. Contains an interview with Kelley, who discusses his “belief that the novel should educate men’s hearts” and argues that the racial struggle should not cause art to be used as propaganda. “It seems to me that the writer’s job is to raise questions and to criticize in a constructive way,” Kelley says, adding, “Without this freedom one cannot be a writer, much less a person.” Wardi, Anissa J. “William Melvin Kelley.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Includes biography of Kelley, critical overview of his works, and bibliography of those works and of secondary sources. Weyant, Jill. “The Kelley Saga: Violence in America.” CLA Journal 19, no. 2 (December, 1975): 210-220. Discusses how Kelley challenges racial stereotypes, depicting white characters as incomplete, having lost the ability to feel and express emotion; in his fiction, these repressed emotions erupt in violence and aggression. Kelley’s white characters, Weyant argues, are more cerebral; his black characters, in touch with emotion, are more vital. Notes Kelley’s reshaping of William Shakespeare’s rude character Caliban into a hero. Weyl, Donald M. “The Vision of Man in the Novels of William Melvin Kelley.” Cri-

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tique: Studies in Modern Fiction 15, no. 3 (1974): 15-33. Discussion of Kelley’s first novel in the context of his next three books. Notes a shift away from the focus on individual struggles in A Different Drummer to an emphasis on ideas, as in his third novel, dem (1964); Weyl detects a corresponding decline in quality. Williams, Gladys M. “Technique as Evaluation of Subject in A Different Drummer.” CLA Journal 19, no. 2 (December, 1975): 221-237. Analyzes Kelley’s integration of the contrasting elements of romance, myth, allegory, realism, and naturalism in the novel. Also explores the contrasts between characters and symbols, noting that the novel achieves a balance and unity through opposition. Joanne McCarthy

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DISAPPEARING ACTS Author: Terry McMillan (1951Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Early 1980’s Locale: Brooklyn, New York First published: 1989

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Principal characters: Franklin Swift, an intelligent, handsome, ambitious man Zora Banks, an attractive teacher and aspiring musician who falls in love with Franklin The Novel In Disappearing Acts, an African American laborer, Franklin Swift, and a teacher, Zora Banks, both in their early thirties and living in Brooklyn in the early 1980’s, speak independently about their experience of the problems of their shared lives. Franklin has educated himself for his high school equivalency certificate and beyond through his love of reading. He plans to earn a college degree and to start his own business. Zora has a college degree and plans to become a professional singer. They meet, are attracted to each other, and admire each other’s goals. Soon they are in love and living together. As the novel progresses, each narrates the joys and struggles of their twoyear relationship. This dual point of view makes evident not only their deep love for each other but also the problems raised in their attempt to support each other’s goals. Franklin’s inability to find steady employment although he is hardworking and skillful highlights the racist and dishonest social forces that impede African American men from moving up the economic ladder. Each time he finds employment that pays enough to enable him to share expenses with Zora, make payments for the support of his ex-wife and two sons, and save for his college tuition, he is soon laid off. Frustrated, Franklin drinks, lashes out at Zora, and loses faith in himself. Zora finds herself supporting him financially and psychologically and struggling to keep her own dreams intact. Holidays mark the progression of the novel and the realities of the protagonists’ relationship. A Thanksgiving visit to Franklin’s dysfunctional family convinces Zora that his mother has almost destroyed Franklin’s ego, urging on him white, middleclass values while convincing him that he is worthless. This increases Zora’s compassion for Franklin. That night, reacting to the day’s tensions, Zora suffers an epileptic fit. She has concealed her epilepsy from Franklin for fear that he would leave her if he found out about it. He assures her that his love is stronger than that. Their knowledge of each other’s strengths and weaknesses deepens their relationship while revealing its complexity.

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At Christmas time, Franklin meets Zora’s father and stepmother, who live in the Midwest. Franklin knows that the Bankses, in contrast to his own parents, are generous with both love and money for Zora. The peaceful family environment, a combination of middle-class prosperity and soul-food culture, appeals to Franklin. His acceptance by Zora’s father, who serves as a father figure to stand in place of Franklin’s own wife-dominated parent, seems a positive force for Franklin and for the couple’s relationship. However, Franklin and Zora’s day-to-day life together has numerous problems. Zora urges Franklin to divorce his former wife so they can marry, but he refuses, not because he does not want to but because he cannot afford to—a fact he will not admit to Zora. When Zora finds herself pregnant and has an abortion without consulting Franklin, he is deeply hurt. Pregnant a second time, Zora acquiesces to Franklin’s pleas that she keep their child. Franklin, however, suffers depressions that turn him against this pregnancy, for which he now blames Zora. As Franklin’s moodiness and self-pity increase, Zora struggles to keep her faith in him, thus allowing him in many ways to control her life. When their son is born, happiness returns, but it is short-lived. Franklin’s moodiness increases, as does his anger at the system, at Zora, and at himself. However, even as their relationship weakens, there is evidence that their struggle to love against all odds affects their compassion for others positively. When Franklin’s lifelong but needy friend Jimmy asks him for bail funds, the already-broke Franklin finds a way to help him. Likewise, Zora, finding her alcoholic friend Marie a drunken mess owing back rent, gives Marie all the money she has saved for music lessons, although there is little hope of repayment. In justifying these acts, Zora and Franklin both echo a common motivation: Faithfulness and caring are values sorely needed in this world. Finally, the onslaught of internal and external forces makes both characters conclude that they need to end their relationship to ensure each other’s survival. Significantly, they describe feeling as if they have done mutual “disappearing acts.” Franklin reflects that all that was admirable in him has disappeared from his view of himself; similarly, Zora reflects that she seems to have disappeared into her efforts to be faithful to Franklin. At this point, Franklin’s failure raises his anger to threats of violence. Zora, loving Franklin but exhausted from coping with him and supporting him, finally forces Franklin out. When Franklin recovers from his self-destructive reactions to the separation, it motivates him to stop drinking, enroll in college, and find steady employment. Apart from Franklin, Zora decides to give up her planned singing career and to become instead a songwriter, a career she can pursue at home while rearing her child. Three months later, a restored Franklin visits Zora and their child. They profess their love, but they decide to wait for Franklin to achieve more progress before trying to live together again. Obviously, Zora will welcome him then. The ending is romantic if it is seen as a happy ending. It is realistic if it is interpreted as showing Zora and Franklin back where they started, doomed to the relational failure that was the pattern of their lives together.

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The Characters Franklin’s name alludes to Benjamin Franklin. Like that of his prototype, Franklin’s first-person voice is clear and self-confident as it gives his view of the novel’s events. Franklin Swift is self-educated, lives a healthy, spartan life, and dreams of owning his own business. The time is the early 1980’s, however, and his source of assistance, the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) office named “A Dream Deferred,” portends unfulfilled dreams. Hired by white construction companies under equal opportunity laws, Franklin is inevitably laid off, a victim of American racism. Though his voice sometimes belies it, Franklin suffers from the negativity that is the result of childhood attacks on his worth by his domineering mother. Franklin’s frustrations resulting from external forces and internal wounds seriously affect his relationship with Zora. He admires her college education, her steady employment, and her Standard English, but he resents these, too, as his dreams burst. Though he admires Zora’s voice, he accuses her of preferring white songwriters and films about white people—accusations that stem from depression and self-pity. Franklin also believes that Zora should bear with him no matter how he acts, because he is a victim. To some degree, then, Franklin is the voice of the beleaguered African American male, heaping his anger on the back of the enduring, resilient black woman. Franklin’s first-person voice, however, shifts too often to a manipulative, melodramatic, self-pitying whine. After the first months of their relationship, only occasionally, usually in his periods of economic plenty, does Franklin’s other voice, a confident and loving one, sound. Overall, his tone lessens a reader’s ability to connect with Franklin’s struggle. When Franklin and Zora separate at last, he needs only a brief three-month separation to reappear a new man, no longer angry or violent. His first college course, psychology, has solved his mother problem. He has a job and is cured of his alcoholism. This radical change, however, is not developed enough to justify Zora’s conviction that Franklin has changed. Franklin and Zora can also be seen as a 1980’s version of the characters in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Terry McMillan’s Zora parallels Hurston’s protagonist Janey; Franklin combines the traits of Janey’s three husbands—oppressor, achiever, and caring lover. Like Franklin’s, the love of Janey’s husband Tea Cake turns violent. Janey, however, discovers after Tea Cake dies that she can voice her story alone, and she becomes content in her own personhood; Zora waits for the day when the very much alive Franklin will be again by her side. As first-person narrator, Zora tells her own story; she starts where Janey ends, with a powerful voice and a way with words. Zora is also comfortable with her sensuality at the novel’s start, while Janey journeys to such an awareness. Perhaps Zora, finding a man who is an ideal sexual partner, has unfortunately also found a man who wants to speak for or to her, not with her. Thus, Janey is re-created. Zora has her voice, her words, her sensuality. The 1980’s version of Janey still faces old problems. Whenever Franklin stands

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motionless, he renders Zora motionless, first by his words and eventually by physical intimidation. She shrinks her boundaries to Franklin’s, giving up friends, enjoyments, career, freedom from parental responsibility, financial independence, and even her desire to marry before having a child. Though she is a first-person narrator, she rarely describes experiences beyond those she shares with Franklin. For example, only once does she bring readers with her to the schoolroom in which she spends long hours. On the other hand, she plays endless Scrabble games with Franklin. In this symbolic ritual, Franklin usually wins and thus overpowers her intellectually—which is why he insists they play every night, no matter how Zora feels. She usually acquiesces. Concern for her child causes Zora to leave Franklin when he turns oppressive and violent. Separated from Franklin, she still wants him back. Without him, she does regain her momentum, but her dreams are changed. She forfeits her singing career and writes songs instead, an ambiguous act: She is choosing to voice her inner-found words, as Janey did in Hurston’s novel; yet her motive is to remain home, where she can care for her son, another black male, and wait for Franklin. If Zora is a 1980’s professional woman seeking an African American man who can accept her as she is, the ending seems to suggest that she will have to take second-best, after all. Franklin will dominate the life of the African American woman, no matter what. Minor characters suffer from the book’s narration, which the dual-first-person point of view centers on the protagonists. In general, the book’s minor figures are neither well developed nor integrated successfully in the narration. Themes and Meanings McMillan creates an African American woman character who is comfortable with her sensuality, who has achieved professional status and financial independence, and who seeks a life-giving relationship with an African American man. Both Zora and Franklin, the man she finds, seek to make meaning of their lives in the 1980’s. Both are first-person narrators, alternating chapters. Their voices are rich in the vocabulary of African American culture. Franklin, however, speaks a nonstandard English African American dialect, and Zora speaks Standard English. Occasionally Franklin self-consciously imitates Zora’s speech, with pride; if Zora notices his “correction” of his speech, she approves. Though her voice seems the norm, Franklin’s holds the power. As these two characters talk and listen, they try to build a bond of love across a range of widely separated experiences. Their love bond is real, including but going beyond sexual compatibility. Franklin is supportive of Zora’s hopes of becoming a popular singer; Zora is supportive of Franklin’s hopes of earning a college degree and becoming a successful businessman. Yet, McMillan seems to say that these bonds will break because the African American male is by both tradition and social forces the one who must dominate in a relationship. So when Franklin’s professional failures are juxtaposed with Zora’s achievement of education and professional employment, his frustration intensifies his

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need to dominate her and eventually raises this need to a violent pitch. Zora accepts the guilt Franklin piles on her, giving with a patience that strains credibility. Given these characters in their world, the result is mutual destruction via mutual “disappearing acts.” Franklin recognizes that his better self has disappeared into insignificance and rage because he cannot catch up to and, therefore, deserve Zora. Zora, moreover, sees that her better self has again disappeared into a man’s world, where she must keep giving no matter what the return. The novel asks if this pattern of relationship can ever change. Three months after Zora and Franklin separate, he has begun his renewal. At the novel’s end, he has changed from what he was at the novel’s beginning: He has his divorce, and he has started college. Although also employed, he tells Zora that he needs more time on his own to continue his progress toward his personal goals. Meanwhile, Zora is what she was at the beginning, a professional woman; however, she also is changed. She is a mother now, and as a result she will leave her urban world for a rural setting suited to her child’s needs. She has decided to forfeit her singing career for a songwriting career, so that she can care for her child while waiting for Franklin. Thus the relationship between a successful African American professional woman and an ambitious but unsuccessful African American man, which falls apart when the two protagonists “disappear,” might resume, says the novel. That ending is not entirely satisfying, but the fact that the contemporary African American professional woman, comfortable with her sensuality and speaking in her own voice, has arrived in fiction is what gives importance to Disappearing Acts. Critical Context Terry McMillan published her first novel, Mama, in 1987. On the strength of her evident skill in Mama, McMillan received grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockland Center for the Arts, enabling her to write and publish Disappearing Acts in 1989. Her second book was received with less enthusiasm than her first; however, her third novel, Waiting to Exhale (1991), remained on The New York Times’s list of best sellers for more than six months. Mama focused on a resilient single black mother rearing her family in the midst of poverty, drugs, and violence and succeeding against these social forces. The title character has power and originality. In Disappearing Acts, McMillan looks closely at the relational problems of a single and successful African American professional woman but leaves both protagonists’ development incomplete and their relationship in limbo. Her third novel, Waiting to Exhale, a romance, is similar to the popular fiction of Danielle Steele. However, its theme of specifically African American professional women supporting one another in their problematic relationships with men remains important. In Disappearing Acts, McMillan first stepped away from the work of many other contemporary African American women novelists in her portrayal of a heroine comfortable with her sexuality and with white artistic norms. Moreover, Zora, unlike most African American fictional characters, lacks a strong foremother figure in her life.

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Such departures from the norm have earned the author some unfavorable criticism. Nevertheless, Disappearing Acts ranks as a valuable contribution to African American literature. Bibliography Heininge, Kathy. “Terry McMillan.” In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement 13, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. Overview of McMillan’s life, career, and contributions to literary history. McMillan, Terry. “Terry McMillan Exhales and Inhales in a Revealing Interview.” Interview by Laura B. Randolph. Ebony 48 (May, 1993): 23-27. Discussion with McMillan in the wake of the enormous success of Waiting to Exhale. Provides an interesting comparison with the Publishers Weekly interview below. _______. “Terry McMillan: The Novelist Explores African American Life from the Point of View of a New Generation.” Interview by Wendy Smith. Publishers Weekly 239 (May 11, 1992): 50-51. McMillan discusses Mama, Disappearing Acts, Waiting to Exhale, and her publisher’s plans for promoting the latter book. Max, Daniel. “McMillan’s Millions.” The New York Times Magazine, August 9, 1992, 20. Asserts that McMillan’s success disproves the publishing industry’s assumption that African Americans do not buy books. Richards, Paulette. Terry McMillan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Book-length study of McMillan’s works, treating them as objects of serious study and cultural importance. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Interviews in which African American women writers discuss both the content and the style of their writing and reflect on their influences. To understand choices made by a newer writer such as McMillan, it is helpful to compare her narrative technique, characterization, and themes to those employed by her peers. Francine Dempsey

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A DISTANT SHORE Author: Caryl Phillips (1958) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Early twenty-first century Locale: An English village and an unnamed, war-torn African nation First published: 2003 Principal characters: Dorothy Jones, a music teacher forced into retirement who suffers the psychological aftereffects of divorce, the death of her parents and sister, and two ill-fated affairs with married men Gabriel, who later calls himself Solomon, a soldier in an African rebel army who flees to England as a refugee The Novel Dorothy Jones has reached the end of the road—literally. Now in her fifties, she has moved into a tract house in the housing estate of Stoneleigh, which lies a few miles outside the village of Weston, England, where she grew up. Dorothy is lonely, aimless, and emotionally disturbed by the events of her past. The only ray of hope in Dorothy’s life is Solomon, Stoneleigh’s black handyman and night watchman. The pair strikes up a shallow, tentative, yet reassuring friendship. Born to blue-collar, rigid parents, Dorothy was the only member of her family to attend university. There she studied music and met Bryan, whom she married, but their alliance soon proved loveless. Bryan deserted Dorothy for another woman. Dorothy then conducted a brief affair with a married, Punjabi shop owner named Mahmood, but he soon lost interest in her, as did Geoff Waverley, a married substitute teacher at the school where she taught. She made too many advances toward Waverley, and he accused her of harassment. Siding with Waverley, school authorities forced Dorothy into early retirement. The narrative shifts from this English setting to the story of Solomon’s past life in an unnamed African nation. As a young man, Gabriel (Solomon’s real name) joined the “liberation army” in a bloody civil war, only to see the troops under his command turn into murderers, pillagers, and rapists. At home, he watched his father, mother, and two sisters savagely murdered. He escaped to France with a group of his compatriots. Gabriel was determined to reach England, where he believed that black people were better accepted. With another refugee named Bright, he clung to the side of a ship that crossed the English Channel, then dropped into the water and swam ashore. Taking refuge in an abandoned house, he was befriended by an English girl, Denise.

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He was subsequently accused of raping her. His court case was dismissed when Denise refused to press charges. His immigration lawyer, Katherine, advised him to escape to the north of England, where he would have a better chance of finding work. A lorry driver, Mike, befriended him and took him to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, who treated him well. He eventually received asylum and secured the job at Stoneleigh, but despite the kindness of a few, he encountered racism from many. Dorothy, fearing her relationship with Solomon is growing too close, travels to a seaside village, telling Solomon she is going to visit her sister, Sheila. In truth, Sheila is long dead of cancer. When Dorothy returns to Stoneleigh from the bogus trip, she finds that Solomon has been kidnapped, beaten, and drowned in a canal. The perpetrators are known to be local youths, but no official justice is recounted. As the novel ends, Dorothy is living in a mental health institution where, she says, her heart remains a desert. Only Solomon understood her, and he is gone. The Characters Dorothy is a complex character. Although she is judgmental and rigid, she is also vulnerable and insecure. She rejects those who do not meet her standards, while simultaneously yearning for loving contact with others. Solomon (Gabriel) is a sympathetic character, despite his past evil deeds. He is consistently hardworking, polite, conscientious, and helpful. He struggles to adapt in England, because he cannot return home. A Distant Shore is populated with minor characters whose roles are important to the plot but whose lives and personalities are only superficially developed. Dorothy’s sister, Sheila, for example, turned from a rebellious and abused child into a wandering and isolated adult, abandoned by her lesbian lover. Dorothy was never able to make an emotional connection with Sheila. Nor was she abel to connect with her husband, Bryan, or her lover, Mahmood, both of whom (apparently) left her out of boredom. Themes and Meanings Dorothy and Solomon share little in their life histories, circumstances, or views of the world, but they are united in the depth of their loneliness. Dorothy’s tract house lies at the end of a cul-de-sac. She says that she is glad she lives there but, as events unfold, the irony in Dorothy’s opinion becomes evident. The cul-de-sac is neither the vantage point nor the safe haven she believes it to be, but rather is a metaphor for the dead end that is Dorothy’s life. The path that took her to this dead end was one of abandonment. Her husband deserted her to run away to Spain with another woman. During the same time, Dorothy lost her sister to cancer. Her affair with Mahmood was short-lived, sinking rapidly from passion into indifference. Her brief liaison with Geoff Waverley was equally unsatisfying, and it cost her her job. Abandonment of a different sort stalks Solomon, for he is forced to leave all that he knows and loves. He escapes the ravages of war in Africa only to fall victim to the more subtle but equally lethal forces of racism. Refugee Gabriel dreamed of a

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different England, where amicable prosperity united all. Immigrant Solomon finds instead an England where passersby study the ground as they walk, avoiding eye contact. English people are strangers, Solomon observes, and they are determined to stay strangers. Both Solomon and Dorothy had a place in the world. Both lost it through abandonment, betrayal, dashed hopes, and ravaged dreams. Cautiously, they reach out to each other, but connectedness is denied them. Solomon loses his life to racist violence. Dorothy loses hers to mental illness. Critical Context Phillips tells Dorothy’s and Solomon’s stories in disjointed segments, with frequent and abrupt shifts in time, place, and point of view. Shifts in verb tense and sudden swings between first-person and third-person narration can be jarring, and some critics have faulted Phillips for the technique. Others have applauded him for it, arguing that the disorderly pattern of presentation mimics the random perceptions of memory and reality, of “I-ness” and “they-ness,” that make up human experience. Some critics have seen A Distant Shore as a critical commentary on modern England. Through the eyes of Dorothy and Solomon, Phillips portrays the country as a nation stagnating, a culture in decline. The streets are crowded with disaffected youths and disfranchised homeless people. The decorum of England’s past is gone. The language is obscene, the behavior raucous and cruel. Some critics have noted, however, that Dorothy and Solomon are unreliable narrators. Are their observations accurate gauges of cultural and societal decline, or merely the narrow views of social misfits? Critics have noted a common thread in Phillips’s work: This life may be hell, but it is a hell of its inhabitants’ own making. Although Solomon and Dorothy seem unable to escape the futility of life, some of the novel’s minor characters show kindness. Phillips offers hope though them, despite the despair that reigns supreme in this novel. Bibliography Calbi, Maurizio. “Encounters on the Estate: Memory, Secrecy, and Trauma in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore.” In The Representation and Transformation of Literary Landscapes: Proceedings of the 4th AISLI Conference, edited by Francesco Cattani and Amanda Nadalini. Venice, Italy: Cafoscarina, 2006. Sees Dorothy and Solomon as strangers to each other and to themselves. Argues that ironies multiply between them, and each is guilty of what he or she sees lacking in the other. Cooper, Richard Rand. “There’s No Place That’s Home.” Review of A Distant Shore, by Caryl Phillips. The New York Times, October 19, 2003. Observes that, in all his works, Phillips explores the displacement of Africans to foreign lands where they can never feel truly at home. Kirkus Reviews. Review of A Distant Shore, by Caryl Phillips. 71, no. 16 (August 15, 2003): 104. Argues that A Distant Shore plumbs the depths of racial foolishness; the story is harsh and sad but worth the emotional investment.

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Lengeman, William I., III. “Part 4: Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore.” Knot Magazine (May 5, 2004). http://www.knotmag.com/?article=1292. Reads A Distant Shore as presenting death, hatred, violence, murder, and racism without remorse or apology, as simple facts—to be neither denied nor decried. The book depicts all humans as adrift; some just do not know it. Sarvan, Charles. “Caryl Phillips: A Distant Shore.” International Fiction Review 32 (January, 2005): 131. Reads the multiple meanings of the novel’s title: being cast away—lonely and lost—in a foreign place, seeking happiness and peace that are beyond the human grasp, or missing the last chance to travel to a better place. Warnes, Andrew. “Enemies Within: Diaspora and Democracy in Crossing the River and A Distant Shore.” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 7 (2007): 33-45. Argues that Phillips presents racism as a psychological disorder. In his view, racism is both a cause and an effect of repression in what should be a democratic, all-inclusive, egalitarian society. Faith Hickman Brynie

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THE DRAGON CAN’T DANCE Author: Earl Lovelace (1935) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Late 1950’s-1960’s Locale: Port-of-Spain, Trinidad First published: 1979 Principal characters: Aldrick, the protagonist, who is skilled in making the intricate dragon costume Fisheye, the supreme “bad john” of Calvary Hill Cleothilda, the mulatto woman who plays the queen of the band on Carnival day Philo, a calypso singer who courts Cleothilda Sylvia, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl Pariag, an East Indian The Novel The Dragon Can’t Dance is the story of the existence of the people of Calvary Hill and the culture they create in the process of surviving. The novel is episodic, with a greater emphasis on character portrayal than on story line. Earl Lovelace uses a prologue to focus on those special elements that are responsible for and are manifestations of the culture of the Hill’s inhabitants. The Hill attracts people from throughout Trinidad, who are quickly absorbed into the life and culture of the Hill, except the East Indian Pariag and his wife, Dolly. Carnival, a festival marked by steel band and calypso music, totally transforms the Hill and its occupants, so that even a snob like Miss Cleothilda can claim “All o’ we is one.” The time is the late 1950’s, a period marked by violent clashes between the politicized steel bands and between toughs known as “bad johns.” In this environment, Fisheye and the other bad johns assert their manhood and act out the aggression that colonialism has nurtured in them. Aldrick uses his Carnival dragon costume to threaten and intimidate. All this is not to last, however; sponsorship and commercialism step in. The steel bands are quieted down, and their warriors are “emasculated.” Fisheye is asked to behave, and when he refuses, he is thrown out of his band. Aldrick’s dragon is unable to dance, Philo gives up on his “calypsos of rebellion,” and Carnival, once an expression of rebellion, becomes placid and empty. The bad john and the dragon, major symbols of rebellion, resist the change and, for a while, perpetuate their warriorhood. They terrorize the community until their continued defiance leads to confrontation with the police. Fisheye seizes a police jeep

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with two policemen as hostages, and for two days, he and his gang ride through Portof-Spain in a futile attempt to stir the people to rebellion against the system. Fisheye and Aldrick’s failure results in their trial and imprisonment and brings about a transformation in Aldrick, who henceforth rejects the notion that playing a dragon once a year for two days is sufficient to constitute living. Older and wiser, Aldrick returns to see whether there is still a life for him and the beautiful Sylvia, only to discover that the Hill has already claimed her. She is on her way to being married to Guy, not out of love but because he can provide her with material comforts. For Aldrick, it is also late for a rapprochement with Pariag, who has become a shopkeeper. Both Aldrick and Pariag pass up the opportunity to connect. Aldrick stops before the shop and moves on, while Pariag admits that “I had a chance to call him in. I didn’t do it. I paused too. Just like him—and moved on.” The author begins with the depiction of life in the community known as “the yard,” where most of the major characters live, and the story line returns to the yard at the conclusion of the text. The yard community has disintegrated with the departures of Fisheye, Aldrick, and Pariag. Philo has moved away, and Basil, Aldrick’s apprentice in costume making, is about to join the police force. Cleothilda, now looking her age, no longer spurns the advances of the now successful and popular Philo. The Characters Lovelace’s technique is to present his characters one after another in successive chapters, imposing upon each chapter the title of the role the character plays, both in the actual Carnival and in the life of the yard, itself a carnival. This role is crucial to an understanding of each character. “Queen of the Band” may be a sufficiently appropriate title for Miss Cleothilda, who believes that her mulatto complexion and her fading beauty entitle her to be queen not only on Carnival day but throughout the year as well. “To her being queen was not really a masquerade at all, but the annual affirming of a genuine queenship that she accepted as hers,” Lovelace writes. The role assigned to Aldrick, though, falls far short of encompassing his total character. As protagonist, Aldrick is the one character who is connected to everyone else on the Hill, as well as being the one character who undergoes a profound change in the course of the novel. Like Miss Cleothilda, Aldrick takes his Carnival role seriously, but unlike her, he knows that it lasts only two days of the year. While it lasts, however, the role becomes the means through which he asserts himself, through which he demands that “others see him, recognize his personhood, be warned of his dangerousness.” Lovelace focuses on Aldrick’s attitude toward his skill and toward the significance of what he weaves into his costume in order to make a statement about Aldrick himself. The author invokes religious imagery to describe Aldrick’s attitude toward his dragon costume. He is “Aldrick the priest,” for “it was in a spirit of priesthood that Aldrick addressed his work.” Aldrick’s costume depicts the racial past and the cultural struggle that has made survival possible. With this kind of knowledge, Aldrick grows and develops.

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In spite of Aldrick’s commitment to playing the Carnival dragon, thoughts of Sylvia keep “nagging at his brain”; but he cannot go after Sylvia decisively, because it would mean having to accept an unwanted level of responsibility. He is unable to buy her a Carnival costume, just as he is unable to pay his rent. His sole responsibility is to the dragon. Because of this, he has to look on while Sylvia prostitutes herself to Guy, who, unlike Aldrick, is incapable of fully appreciating the real self in Sylvia. Although Aldrick joins Fisheye in perpetuating “warriorhood” and in rebelling blindly, he is never comfortable with that role. Of those who have been imprisoned, jail has the most profound effect on Aldrick. It gives him an opportunity to think through the social situation. Aldrick understands the full significance of the aborted rebellion. He also knows that the action was a demand for recognition, a struggle for self, and an insistence upon the Hill residents’ “peoplehood.” The quality of change that Aldrick experiences increases the distance between himself and Fisheye, making communication almost impossible. He is called crazy by the others, because they are unable to make the analysis that he does. When he visits Sylvia after leaving prison, the change manifests itself in the way he deals with her. She recognizes it and exclaims “you know, you change.” The new Aldrick has come to Sylvia “not to claim her, but to help her claim herself.” His new awareness allows him to understand that “one is saved only by one’s self.” No one else on the Hill understands the new Aldrick. Lovelace develops each of his major characters as a full human being, with no one subordinated to the others. As the omniscient author, he fills in all the little details of character, including personal backgrounds, which are revealed through flashbacks. Analysis and commentary are also used for character revelation. In presenting many of his characters, Lovelace had specific personalities in mind. Many facts of his characters’ lives parallel the real-life experiences of individuals. In fact, some characters in the novel appear unchanged from real life. In an interview given in 1980, Lovelace admitted that he portrayed these characters because he wished “to celebrate real people in a kind of way that other West Indian writers have not done.” The basis for his characters is his own experience. Themes and Meanings The Dragon Can’t Dance is primarily about the ability of the poor black people of the Hill to survive and, in the process of surviving, to create cultural traditions as a guarantee of their existence. Surviving, enduring, and producing, just like the plum tree that has “battled its way up through the tough red dirt and stands now, its roots spread out like claws, gripping the earth,” these people represent a race that has resisted slavery, colonialism, and the continuing dehumanization of the present system. Out of this struggle for survival and resistance to oppression come the cultural forms and institutions that give these poor people a measure of identity and establish their personhood. Primary among these is Carnival, which reaches “back centuries for its beginnings, back across the Middle Passage, back to Mali and to Guinea and Dahomey and Congo, back to Africa when Maskers were sacred and revered.” This mem-

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ory, according to Lovelace, remains “if not in the brain, certainly in the blood,” because it has endured up to the present. Carnival allows it to be made manifest in the dragon costume of Aldrick Prospect. The music, the dance, the calypso, and the costumes, which intensify at Carnival time, are all products of the people’s endurance and existence. These are all aspects of the people’s culture, fashioned both out of the past and out of their present environment. This is an environment of deprivation and stagnation, where children lose their innocence as soon as they are born; this is the environment that produces the bad johns such as Fisheye and the dragon Aldrick. Both are products of the same will which in the past produced “Maroons,” “Bush Negroes,” and “Rebels.” It is also the environment that has led the people to “cultivate again with no less fervor the religion with its Trinity of Idleness, Laziness and Waste.” Whatever form the strategy for survival and resistance has taken, at the center is the desire to reclaim the self, to assert the presence of a basic self. Everyone wants to be seen and acknowledged. Fisheye struggles against the new direction that the steel bands are taking because it will eliminate the need for bad johns and turn him into an anachronism. Miss Cleothilda needs to assert herself as a queen in the public’s gaze during Carnival. Aldrick in his dragon costume becomes formidable and demands attention because of the threat that the dragon represents. Pariag does everything possible to get the yard to acknowledge his existence. Lovelace suggests, however, that this self is often masked because of the need to survive; progress is possible only when the mask is removed and the real self is uncovered. Fisheye’s bad john pose, Sylvia’s “whorish” behavior, Aldrick’s dragon role, Miss Cleothilda’s queen image, Philo’s “Axe-Man” posturing—all are masks beneath which is hidden the real self. Aldrick will no longer play the dragon, because he realizes that the dragon hides the self that is buried deep within him. Philo realizes that the new image that he is projecting is not his real self, which is hidden under his gaudy clothing and his middle-class residence. He has to leave his new neighborhood and return to the Hill to find himself. Similarly, it is only when Pariag begins to accept himself and ceases to want to be part of the “Creole” culture of the Hill that he begins to be comfortable with his life. The presence of Pariag in the novel allows for a serious treatment of the theme of the African-Indian relationship in Trinidad. Lovelace realizes that the existence of these two races and cultures must be reconciled if there is to be genuine cooperation and progress in the society. The answer is not to be found in the “Creolization” of the Indian, an option chosen by the character Balliram, who “liked to curse and get on like Creole people,” boasting about “his Creole girl friends and about the dances he went to.” Pariag, who has chosen his wife in the traditional Indian way, represents the Indian community. The yard is unable to accept him because he falls outside the shared experience of its inhabitants. Their philosophy of nonpossession and their addiction to idleness, laziness, and waste—functional and positive during slavery but now selfdefeating—are at variance with Pariag’s desire to progress materially.

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Unable to accept Pariag as he is, the yard culture smashes his bicycle, the symbol of his material progress, in its strongest rejection yet of the Indian. Only then does Pariag turn away from wanting to be accepted and realize that the solution is not in his absorption into the yard culture. In the end, Lovelace gives Pariag the solution to the racial problem through a vision of the fusion of Indian and African music: “I wish I did walk with a flute or a sitar, and walk in right there in the middle of the steelband yard . . . and sit down with my sitar on my knee and say, Fellars, This is me, Pariag from New Land. Gimme the Key. Give me the Do Re Mi.” Pariag now realizes that “we didn’t have to melt into one. They woulda see me.” The cultures should and can exist side by side. Yet, it is still a long way from “All o’ we is one.” Critical Context In its frank discussion of the Indian-African theme, The Dragon Can’t Dance broke new ground. Lovelace examined critically the position of the East Indian as an outsider in West Indian society and considered what could be done to reverse this position. In this, he showed a remarkable sensitivity toward the Indian reality. In his use of the language of the ordinary folk as the medium of expression, Lovelace distinguished himself as a pioneer, infusing into folk language the rhythms of steel band and calypso music. To do this, he eschewed grammatical convention, focusing instead on capturing the sensations of music and dance in his writing. Lovelace also gave literary value to the speech of the carnival people of the Hill. When The Dragon Can’t Dance was published in 1979, Caribbean critic and scholar C. L. R. James stated that nowhere had he seen “more of the realities of a whole country disciplined into one imaginative whole.” James was merely expressing what so many others saw as the supreme achievement of Lovelace’s novel. Until that time, no novel had focused so directly and so comprehensively on the historical basis for and evolution of a people’s culture within the English-speaking Caribbean. The novel, like no other before it, explained the critical social function of culture in the Caribbean. Bibliography Barratt, Harold. “Metaphor and Symbol in The Dragon Can’t Dance.” World Literature Written in English 23 (Spring, 1984): 405-413. Argues that the rebellion and Carnival are forms of expression by those seeking to claim their “personhood.” Explores the larger theme of the quest for identity in the major characters. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1984. Overview of the subject that includes a discussion of Caribbean literature. Useful for placing Lovelace’s work in context. Ilona, Anthony. “‘Laughing Through the Tears’: Mockery and Self-Representation in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance.” In Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, edited by Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein. New York: Rodopi, 2005. Argues that derisive humor in

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The Dragon Can’t Dance tears down individual characters’ egos in order to make possible a more authentic representation of the complexity and diversity of collective Caribbean identities. King, Bruce Alvin, ed. West Indian Literature. Hamdon, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979. Survey of the West Indian literary scene published contemporaneously with The Dragon Can’t Dance. Index, bibliography. Meeks, Brian. Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean. Mona, Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000. Compares the representation of resistance in The Dragon Can’t Dance to that in Michael Thelwell’s Harder They Come (1994). Nazareth, Peter. Review of The Dragon Can’t Dance, by Earl Lovelace. World Literature Today 56 (1983): 394-395. Argues that Aldrick carries the message of the text. His development as a character demonstrates that self-understanding, which comes from looking inward and not from material possessions, is the key to life. Ramchand, Kenneth. “Why the Dragon Can’t Dance: An Examination of IndianAfrican Relations in Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance.” Journal of West Indian Literature 2 (October, 1988): 1-14. Argues that it is possible to focus on Pariag and still offer a response to the whole novel, since the theme of the AfricanIndian relationships allows for an examination of the concepts of alienation and selfhood. Roosevelt J. Williams

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A DREAM DEFERRED The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America Author: Shelby Steele (1946) Type of work: Cultural criticism First published: 1998 Form and Content In his first book, The Content of Our Character (1990), Shelby Steele wrote that it is a mistake to identify white racism as the principal cause for current problems in the African American community. He further asserted that a “victim-focused identity” produces excessive pessimism, thereby discouraging individuals from achieving their full potential. Steele expands on these themes in his second major work, A Dream Deferred (1998), in which he also argues that racial policies since the 1960’s have been aimed more at the “expiation of American shame” than at the achievement of true racial equality. The book consists of four chapters: “The Loneliness of Black Conservatives,” “Wrestling with Stigma,” “Liberal Bias and the Zone of Decency,” and “The New Sovereignty.” The first three chapters were first published in the book, whereas the fourth appeared earlier in Harper’s Magazine. In the treatise’s first chapter, Steele begins with the premise that the strategy of the current civil rights leadership is to cause whites to internalize a sense of shame (or “white guilt”). In order to promote this “peculiar liberalism generated by shame,” moreover, it is important for African American leaders to convince a significant percentage of the population that the legacy of white supremacy is the major reason for continuing racial disparities in family income, educational achievement, and related matters. These leaders, according to Steele, expect that such ideas will help promote the expansion of affirmative action and other policies that provide compensation for the evils of slavery and institutional racism. Since they want African Americans to present a united front in advocating these orthodox doctrines, they look upon conservative dissidents as a threat. Such dissidents, therefore, can expect to meet “a stunning amount of animus, demonization, misunderstanding, and flat-out undifferentiated contempt.” In the second chapter, Steele asserts that both white and black Americans have experienced the unpleasant consequences of stigmatization. For whites, the primary stigma has been the history of racism and white supremacy. Steele goes so far as to assert that the liberals who brought about the Great Society reforms were motivated less by the goal of promoting equality than by a desire to fend off the shameful stigma of racism. For African Americans, on the other hand, Steele believes that the worst stigma has been the assumption of an inherent lack of intellectual ability. He asserts that it is inevitable that affirmative action programs, at least those that include preferences, reinforce this stigma. As long as African Americans are not required to meet the same qualifications as persons of European and Asian ancestry, many people will

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assume that successful African Americans would not have succeeded without the help of racial preferences. The theme of the third chapter is “redemptive liberalism,” or the desire of white elites to prove that they are not racists. Since the 1960’s, Steele says, a form of “politically correct” liberalism has propelled whites to provide grants of license to African Americans. African Americans’ educational requirements have been lowered, and they have not been required to compete on an unregulated playing field with other citizens. Unfortunately, such preferences logically imply that recipients are unable to compete because of an “intractable black inferiority.” In the last chapter of the book, “The New Sovereignty,” Steele defines sovereignty as the “power to act autonomously,” and he asserts that a special autonomy is now granted to aggrieved groups that claim to be victims of historical discrimination. In institutions of higher education in particular, proponents of this new sovereignty have been able to establish thousands of separate academic departments, such as women’s studies departments, black studies departments, and gay studies departments, among others. Additional manifestations of the new sovereignty include separatist policies and special privileges that are not available to other citizens. Steele insists that all public polices that push citizens outside the “same sphere of rights” are undemocratic, despite their noble intentions. Steele does not in any way deny the historical evils of white racism and its consequences, and he acknowledges that racist attitudes and discrimination continue to exist. He emphasizes, however, that conditions have fundamentally improved since the 1960’s. The glass, in other words, is more than half full and less than half empty. When Steele refers to William Julius Wilson’s book about the “truly disadvantaged,” or the persons living in central cities without employment, he observes that uneducated immigrants with limited English skills often move into such communities and thrive. He is particularly angered by the condescending attitudes of those white liberals who appear to assume that African Americans have inferior abilities and cannot succeed without preferential advantages. Analysis Just as African Americans were betrayed by slavery and the establishment of the Jim Crow system following Reconstruction, Steele holds, a “second betrayal” has been the failure to treat them the same as other citizens. In particular, he charges that they have been denied full equality by public policies such as affirmative action preferences, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Rather than concentrating on improving educational standards and insisting on equal competition, in his view, the civil rights establishment has chosen to encourage African Americans to harbor bitterness and resentment for the injustices of the past, which has tended to result in an unproductive culture of victimization. A Dream Deferred deals disproportionately with issues relevant to institutions of higher education. Time and again, Steele returns to the issue of affirmative action programs that utilize race or gender preferences in an attempt to increase the members

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of underrepresented groups in education and employment. From his perspective, such programs represent an appeal to white philanthropy rather than African American achievement, an attitude that he believes is incompatible with the goal of first-class citizenship. The emotional tone of his analysis gives the impression that he takes the existence of racial preferences as an insult against his personal competence. Steele’s writings are extremely polemical, and, not surprising, they have provoked strong reactions. Persons who agree with his perspective praise his courage in challenging political correctness. Critics, on the other hand, charge that he severely underestimates the continuing persistence of white racism, and some assert that he misunderstands the nature of racism by focusing on individuals’ attitudes rather than social structures. Even more, they strongly disagree with his negative judgments in regard to race-conscious programs. In their view, such programs are moderate means to “level the playing field” and to bring about a modest degree of compensation for centuries of oppression. Although many critics concede that race-conscious programs can sometimes result in a stigma of inferiority, they insist that Steele exaggerates the danger. They insist that such programs have helped promote an equality of opportunity, and they deny that any practical alternatives are available. Critical Context Although Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, describes himself as a “classic liberal,” he is commonly classified as one of the most prominent of the “black conservatives.” In public discourse, his name is particularly associated with two topics: “white guilt” and opposition to affirmative action. His writings are clear and cogent, and they have been widely quoted by persons who hope to end (or severely limit) affirmative action programs. In 2006, he published White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, which expands and develops the themes of his previous works. Bibliography Asumah, Seth N., and Valencia Perkins. “Black Conservatism and the Social Problems in Black America: Ideological Cul-de-Sacs.” Journal of Black Studies 31 (September, 2000): 51-73. While critical of Steele and other black conservatives, the authors argue that African American conservatives and liberals should find ways to work together to achieve their common goals. Ellison, Julie. “A Short History of Liberal Guilt.” Critical Inquiry 22 (Winter, 1996): 344-371. Writing that “liberal guilt” since the 1960’s has been synonymous with “white guilt,” Ellison includes several interesting pages about Steele’s views on the topic. McCabe, J. P. “Social Critics of Color and Normative Approaches to Democracy.” Polity 29 (Winter, 1996): 221-245. Interesting comparison between right-wing proponents of radical individualism such as Steele and left-wing writers such as Cornell West who emphasize group solidarity. Megalli, Mark. “The High Priests of the Black Academic Right.” The Journal of

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Blacks in Higher Education 9 (Autumn, 1995): 71-77. Balanced summary and comparison of the writings of Steele, Glen Loury, Walter Williams, and Thomas Sowell, as well as more moderate African American conservatives. Moskowitz, Milton. “Shelby Steele Views the Texaco Race Discrimination Case.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 22 (Winter, 1998): 135-136. Emotional and extremely critical judgment on Steele’s minimization of racial discrimination in a racial discrimination lawsuit and in American society in general. Sheridan, Earl. “The New Accommodationists.” Journal of Black Studies 27 (November, 1996): 152-171. Sheridan is highly critical of black conservatives, asserting that Steele is “afraid of offending white people” and wants “to let white Americans off the hook.” Steele, Shelby. “The Race Is On.” Interview by Julianne Malveaux. Transition 56 (1992): 166-174. Steele remembers his experiences with racism, describes himself as a “classic liberal,” and claims to support government programs that help poor persons. Thomas Tandy Lewis

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DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN Author: Derek Walcott (1930) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Surrealistic Time of plot: Unspecified Locale: A West Indian Island First produced: 1967, at the Central Library Theatre, Toronto, Canada First published: 1970 Principal characters: Makak, an elderly charcoal burner who lives on Monkey Mountain in the Caribbean backcountry Moustique, a cripple, Makak’s best friend and business partner Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto officer of the English-speaking police force Tigre and Souris, two criminals who share a prison cell with Makak The Play Derek Walcott has described Dream on Monkey Mountain as a “dream” that “exists as much in the given minds of its principal characters as in that of its writer.” This accurate description of the illogical progression of action must be taken into account when confronting this strange play. A surrealistic fable, the play does not adhere to the tenets of a realistic narrative. Since it concerns Makak’s belief in an unseen force (a white goddess) and the power of his imagination to will unnatural events to happen, it is appropriate that readers, too, should be asked to suspend disbelief in the improbable. Walcott asks his audience to accept the pleasures and possibilities for personal growth available to those who, like Makak, have given themselves over to an irrational force. Many events in this play do not make sense in naturalistic terms. Characters such as Moustique die and then return to life with a renewed sense of purpose. The sick are healed by the humblest of men, Makak, an old charcoal burner who first appears in a prison for drunken conduct and petty thievery. A cabinetmaker named Basil turns out to be a figure for death itself. These strange occurrences must be accepted at the outset if the play’s symbolic meanings and political function are to emerge. The absence of naturalistic content also allows readers to pay attention to the beautiful lyricism and the rhythms of the West Indian dialect known as patois. An acclaimed poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, Walcott has suggested that the play should be “treated as a physical poem with all the subconscious and deliberate borrowings of poetry.” In addition to its dreamlike plot and its emphasis on poetic language, the play is also designed to be produced in a highly stylized manner. The playwright has compared his play’s style to the ritualistic nature of Japanese Kabuki theater, but the ori-

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gins of Dream on Monkey Mountain also reside in the folk customs, dances, and chants native to the Caribbean islands. There is a political reason behind Walcott’s employing a Caribbean setting and elements of West Indian folk traditions in his play. By using the West Indian theater as a showcase for the oral culture of the West Indies, Walcott hoped to create a more secure social identity for West Indians living under English rule. The play’s ritualistic style is related to the system of belief held by many of the characters in the play. These characters, who live in the village near Monkey Mountain, accept on faith the healing powers of Makak’s magic. Walcott, therefore, creates an analogy through the style of the play between the villagers’ belief in Makak’s healing function and the significance of a nativist theater in enhancing the meaning and value of the lives of Caribbean villagers. Although the play does not, finally, portray a revolution against the colonial regime by the impoverished followers of Makak, the play’s style and setting do acknowledge a distinct Caribbean culture. In this sense, Dream on Monkey Mountain is a radical political statement that affirms the cultural autonomy of Walcott’s native Caribbean islands. Like the setting, the play’s characters are presented in a stylized manner. They embody different, often ambiguous, responses to living under the yoke of colonialism. Many of the villagers, Moustique and Tigre among them, deny the mysteries of their own customs. They do not believe in Makak’s dream vision of descent from a line of ancient African kings. Moustique and Tigre are, for most of the play, interested only in how they can turn the phenomenon of Makak’s healing powers into their own economic profit. “You black, ugly, poor, so you worse than nothing,” Moustique tells Makak. Although he does not believe Makak, Moustique is quick to “sell [Makak’s] dreams” when he realizes that Makak’s powers are believed by other villagers. Makak tells Moustique that his ability to heal “is not for profit.” Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto, presents a different response to the confusion of living in a racially mixed and culturally bifurcated society. The corporal identifies himself completely with his colonial oppressor by becoming part of the long arm of English law. Instead of taking pride in local traditions, the corporal believes he must “protect” the villagers from their own beliefs. Unlike Makak, the corporal thrives on the official rule of law and on a belief system based in Judeo-Christian religious principles. The corporal’s authority stems from what has been acknowledged to be true by the members of the society in power, rather than from what must be taken on faith. In the course of the play, however, Makak convinces the racist corporal that the lowly coal burner is worthy of being enthroned as a holy king. In contrast to these characters, who in different ways live in self-hatred and denial of their own racial and ethnic identity, many other villagers believe without equivocation in Makak’s powers. Makak tells them that his power is really a belief in their own powers of hope and imagination. In one scene, for example, Makak prays not that Joseph, a dying villager, will be cured, but that his people will believe in themselves. Joseph’s sudden recovery after Makak’s visit spurs a general recognition among other villagers that Makak is a savior.

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The main action of the play’s first part is Makak’s quixotic sojourn through the West Indian countryside with his skeptical companion and business partner, Moustique. These scenes are framed by a prologue and epilogue that bring the action back to the oppressive circumstances of a West Indian village under colonial rule. No matter how uplifted the audience may feel when Makak is empowered to heal sick villagers such as Joseph, the two scenes that frame the play’s main action leave open the question about the communal value of Makak’s “dream” of African nobility. In the epilogue, Makak is released from prison after he slays the apparition of the white goddess. He is let free to resume his life as a humble coal salesman. There are strong indications that nothing has changed in a material or economic sense in the life of Makak or in the lives of any of the villagers who believed in him. The corporal, for example, thinks that Makak suffered a drunken fit in his night in jail and that none of the scenes of healing and liberation actually took place. Regardless of whether or not Makak’s powers were real or only imagined, he has experienced an internal transformation by the end of the play. In his last speech, Makak affirms that he has been touched by God and that he is on his way home to the origins of his people, which he now locates on Monkey Mountain, rather than in the distance of Africa. “This old hermit is going back home, back to the beginning, to the green beginning of this world,” he says. In the epilogue, Makak also for the first time recalls his legal name, Felix Hobain. Makak’s return to his home with Moustique as companion and his remembering of his legal name suggest his acceptance of a West Indian identity that is distinct from either a purely African or purely English identity. Themes and Meanings In the essay “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” Derek Walcott recalled his own doubts about affirming a nativist tradition in the theater arts of the West Indies. As a young playwright born of mixed racial and ethnic heritage on St. Lucia, a West Indian island where French/English patois is spoken, Walcott was educated as a British subject and taught to speak English as a second language. Like many of the characters in his play, Walcott held an ambivalent relationship to the mysticism of the West Indian culture. He felt estranged from his African origins and skeptical about those West Indians who longed for a return to an “African Eden.” This longing for an obscure past, Walcott felt, placed many West Indians in a schizophrenic situation in which they were alienated from their truest selves. Because of his distance from an important part of his racial origins, however, Walcott, like many of his characters, held doubts about his legitimacy as a creative person. “Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles,” he wrote. This self-doubt about the legitimacy of Caribbean life as a subject for literature led writers of Walcott’s generation to become “natural assimilators” of an English cultural tradition unrelated to “the outward life of action and dialect” that Walcott heard on the streets of St. Lucia in his boyhood. “We knew the literature of Empires, Greek, Roman, British, through their essential classics; and both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom

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hid the elation of discovery,” he recalled. The “discovery” of how to meld the two cultures into a meaningful literary statement about his own relationship to African, English, and West Indian traditions took place in Dream on Monkey Mountain, in which the author’s conflicted heritage of European and local Caribbean traditions becomes the thematic focus of the work itself. Walcott’s primary theme in many of his plays and in his beautifully crafted poetry is the dichotomy between black and white, between subject and ruler, and between the Caribbean and European civilizations present in his culture and ancestry. This last theme, which he has described as “one race’s quarrel with another’s God,” is mirrored and reflected in Dream on Monkey Mountain. In the play, Walcott explores the question of how a colonial people living under the rule of Western Christianity and English law can affirm its own leaders, its own dialect, its own spiritual beliefs, its own relationship to an origin in Africa that remains remote even from its own experience. Walcott’s sense of divided loyalties, his ability to see the world through the eyes of the ruled and the ruler, is evident in his ambivalent portrayal of Makak. If Makak is, indeed, the recipient of messages from a mysterious white goddess, and if he does possess the power to heal, how do other West Indians who have already assimilated the language, customs, and beliefs of Europe trust in a figure who, in the light of waking reality, is not easily construed to be a reliable character? Makak, after all, has his hallucinatory vision during a night in prison, where he is sleeping off the effects of a drunken night. His relationship to Africa as a source of his feelings of power is, by itself, problematic. This source of nobility is illusory and is as distant from the current affairs on the streets of the village as are the original homes of the European rulers. The conflict for many characters in the play becomes the struggle to overcome doubts about their own sense of what is valuable and powerful, and to see in the least among them, Makak, the best possibilities of the self. Critical Context Dream on Monkey Mountain is Derek Walcott’s most highly praised play. It won a 1971 Obie Award and is considered by many critics to be an important statement in dramatic terms about Walcott’s ambivalent relationship to his island’s folk traditions as well as to his colonial heritage. His theater work, however, has generally received only mixed reviews in the United States. Perhaps because the play is about Walcott’s own ambiguous relationship to African culture, some critics, such as Errol Hill, have found it to be tangled and incoherent. Other critics, such as Denis Solomon, have been more generous to Walcott, choosing to interpret the play’s ambiguities as the basis for its antithetical structure. Critics including Laurence Breiner and Robert Hamner have understood Dream on Monkey Mountain to be the culmination of Walcott’s attempt in the 1950’s and 1960’s to produce and design an authentic West Indian theater through the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which Walcott began to direct in 1961. David Mason of The Literary Review has suggested the political function of the Theatre Workshop by arguing that Walcott’s plays were designed to create a “catalytic theater responsible for social

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change or at least social identity.” In terms of subject matter (the common West Indian villagers), style (the chants, jokes, and fables associated with Caribbean folk culture), and language (the patois or Creole language), Walcott affirmed his island roots, but not unequivocally or without strain. With its tense, questioning relationship of Makak’s African origins and personal identity in a bifurcated culture, Dream on Monkey Mountain embodies the major theme of much of Walcott’s work. Bibliography Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Comprehensive overview of Walcott’s life and career, including the dramatic and poetic works. _______. Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision—“Another Life.” London: Longman, 1978. Baugh links Another Life (1973) to Dream on Monkey Mountain by noting the connection between Makak and the narrator of the poems, both of whom must struggle to gain their own artistic vision against a debilitating past that often leads to self-contempt. Bloom, Harold, ed. Derek Walcott. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Collection of essays on Walcott’s work by noted scholars in the field. Includes an essay on his role in founding a school of epic drama, as well as considerations of the importance of postcoloniality to Walcott’s drama and poetry. Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1991. Collection of twelve essays, plus an introduction and bibliography to Walcott’s poetry and plays. Among the contributions is Laurence A. Breiner’s “Walcott’s Early Drama,” which views Dream on Monkey Mountain as the culmination of a series of plays written by Walcott in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Breiner argues that Walcott’s trips to New York in 1957 and 1958 on a Rockefeller Fellowship enabled the playwright to formulate a view of what was distinctive about a West Indian theatrical style. Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Analyzes the figure of the mulatto in Dream on Monkey Mountain and its implications for theatrical aesthetics the representation of identity. Walcott, Derek. “Conversation with Derek Walcott.” Inteview by Robert D. Hamner. World Literature Written in English 16 (November, 1977): 409-420. Walcott discusses his feelings about the political involvement of the writer in a developing country, the use of patois in his poetry, and West Indian and foreign critics. _______. “An Interview with Derek Walcott Conducted by Edward Hirsch.” Interview by Edward Hirsch. Contemporary Literature 20 (Summer, 1979): 279-292. Walcott discusses his early influences, the poverty of early West Indian poetry, and the problems of being a West Indian in the political and social climate of the time. Daniel Charles Morris

MASTERPLOTS II African American Literature, Revised Edition

MASTERPLOTS II African American Literature, Revised Edition

2 Dri–Ma

Edited by

Tyrone Williams Xavier University

Salem Press Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Editorial Director: Christina J. Moose Development Editor: Tracy Irons-Georges Project Editor: Andy Perry Editorial Assistant: Dana Garey Research Supervisor: Jeffry Jensen

Research Assistant: Keli Trousdale Acquisitions Editor: Mark Rehn Production Editor: Andrea E. Miller Design and Graphics: James Hutson Layout: Mary Overell

Cover photo: Willis Avenue Bridge, 1940. Ben Shahn (The Granger Collection, New York)

Copyright © 1994, 2009, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or in the copying of images deemed to be freely licensed or in the public domain. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Some of these essays, which have been updated, originally appeared in Masterplots II: African American Literature Series (1994). New material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Masterplots II: African American literature / edited by Tyrone Williams. — Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-1-58765-438-1 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-439-8 (v. 1: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-440-4 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-441-1 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-442-8 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. American literature—African American authors—Stories, plots, etc. 2. African Americans —Intellectual life. 3. African Americans in literature. I. Williams, Tyrone. II. Title: Masterplots 2. III. Title: Masterplots two. PS153.N5M2645 2008 810.9′896073—dc22 2008036694 First Printing

printed in the united states of america

LIST OF TITLES IN VOLUME

page

Complete List of Titles in All Volumes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxvii Drinking Coffee Elsewhere — ZZ Packer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 Dust Tracks on a Road — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529 Dutchman — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533 Erasure — Percival Everett. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Essays of Amiri Baraka — Amiri Baraka . . . The Essays of Ralph Ellison — Ralph Ellison . . . The Essays of C. L. R. James — C. L. R. James . . The Essays of Ishmael Reed — Ishmael Reed . . . The Ethics of Identity — Kwame Anthony Appiah . Eva’s Man — Gayl Jones. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Faith and the Good Thing — Charles Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . Fallen Angels — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family — J. California Cooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Farming of Bones — Edwidge Danticat. . . . . . . . . . . . Fatheralong — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fences — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Part Last and Heaven — Angela Johnson . . . . . . . . The Fisher King — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun — Geoffrey Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . The Flagellants — Carlene Hatcher Polite. . . . . . . . . . . . . Flight to Canada — Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Free Enterprise — Michelle Cliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Slavery to Freedom — John Hope Franklin . . . . . . . . . Funnyhouse of a Negro — Adrienne Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . .

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581 587 591 597 601 605 611 618 622 626 630 636

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A Gathering of Old Men — Ernest J. Gaines . Gemini — Nikki Giovanni . . . . . . . . . . . Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin . . . . . . Give Us Each Day — Alice Dunbar-Nelson . . Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin .

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MASTERPLOTS II

God Bless the Child — Kristin Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 694 The Great Wells of Democracy — Manning Marable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 700 The Guyana Quartet — Wilson Harris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 704 Having Our Say — Sarah Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Healing — Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Heart of a Woman — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich — Alice Childress . . High Cotton — Darryl Pinckney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His Own Where — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Home to Harlem — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Homewood Trilogy — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . The House Behind the Cedars — Charles Waddell Chesnutt How Stella Got Her Groove Back — Terry McMillan . . . . Hunting in Harlem — Mat Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hurry Home — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . Hush — Jacqueline Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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710 714 718 722 728 734 739 746 752 758 762 766 772

I Get on the Bus — Reginald McKnight . . . . . . . . . . I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou . . . If He Hollers Let Him Go — Chester Himes . . . . . . . . If You Come Softly — Jacqueline Woodson. . . . . . . . In the Blood — Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Castle of My Skin — George Lamming . . . . . . . In the Wine Time — Ed Bullins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl — Harriet Jacobs . . Infants of the Spring — Wallace Thurman . . . . . . . . . The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African — Olaudah Equiano . . The Interruption of Everything — Terry McMillan . . . . Intimate Apparel — Lynn Nottage . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Intuitionist — Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iola Leroy — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper . . . . . . .

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Jazz — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelly Roll — Kevin Young . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelly’s Last Jam — George C. Wolfe . . . . . . . Jitney — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joe Turner’s Come and Gone — August Wilson . John Henry Days — Colson Whitehead . . . . . Joker, Joker, Deuce — Paul Beatty. . . . . . . .

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LIST OF TITLES IN VOLUME

Jonah’s Gourd Vine — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké — Charlotte L. Forten Grimké . Jubilee — Margaret Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juneteenth — Ralph Ellison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Just Above My Head — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Kindred — Octavia E. Butler. . . . . . King Hedley II — August Wilson . . . The Known World — Edward P. Jones Krik? Krak! — Edwidge Danticat . . . Kwaku — Roy A. K. Heath . . . . . . .

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Lady Sings the Blues — Billie Holiday, with William Dufty. . . . . . . . . . . 935 The Land — Mildred D. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 942 Lawd Today — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 946 The Learning Tree — Gordon Parks, Sr.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 952 A Lesson Before Dying — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 958 Let Me Breathe Thunder — William Attaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 964 Let the Circle Be Unbroken — Mildred D. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 970 Let the Dead Bury Their Dead — Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 975 Life on the Color Line — Gregory Howard Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 982 Like One of the Family — Alice Childress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 986 Linden Hills — Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 992 Local History — Erica Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 998 The Lonely Londoners — Samuel Selvon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1002 The Long Dream — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1008 A Long Way Gone — Ishmael Beah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1014 Lost in the City — Edward P. Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1018 Love — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1022 Lucy — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1026 M. C. Higgins, the Great — Virginia Hamilton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1032 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1037

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES Volume 1 page

Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Contributing Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Afrocentricity — Molefi K. Asante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Ain’t I a Woman — Bell Hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 All-Bright Court — Connie Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The American Evasion of Philosophy — Cornel West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Anancy’s Score — Andrew Salkey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Angela Davis — Angela Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Annie John — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Another Country — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Appalachee Red — Raymond Andrews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 The Artificial White Man — Stanley Crouch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 At the Bottom of the River — Jamaica Kincaid. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 The Autobiographical Writings of William Wells Brown — William Wells Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The Autobiography of a Jukebox — Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man — James Weldon Johnson . . . . . 77 The Autobiography of Chester Himes — Chester Himes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . 96 Autobiography of My Dead Brother — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . 102 The Autobiography of My Mother — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois — W. E. B. Du Bois . . . . . . . . . . 110 Babel-17 — Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baby of the Family — Tina McElroy Ansa. . . . . . . . . . . Bailey’s Café — Gloria Naylor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Banana Bottom — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Battle of Jericho — Sharon M. Draper . . . . . . . . . . Beetlecreek — William Demby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beloved — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Betsey Brown — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander — Langston Hughes . xxxvii

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MASTERPLOTS II page

Bird at My Window — Rosa Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Betty — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Boy and American Hunger — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . Black Ice — Lorene Cary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman — Michele Wallace Black Men — Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Black Muslims in America — C. Eric Lincoln . . . . . . . . . Black No More — George S. Schuyler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Thunder — Arna Bontemps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Blacker the Berry — Wallace Thurman . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Blue Meridian” — Jean Toomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blues for Mister Charlie — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bondwoman’s Narrative — Hannah Crafts . . . . . . . . . . . Breath, Eyes, Memory — Edwidge Danticat. . . . . . . . . . . . . Bright Shadow — Joyce Carol Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brighter Sun — Samuel Selvon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronx Masquerade — Nikki Grimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronzeville Boys and Girls — Gwendolyn Brooks. . . . . . . . . . Brothers and Keepers — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . Brothers and Sisters — Bebe Moore Campbell. . . . . . . . . . . . Brown Girl, Brownstones — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . Brutal Imagination — Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bucking the Sarge — Christopher Paul Curtis. . . . . . . . . . . .

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165 171 175 182 188 192 198 202 206 212 218 227 233 239 243 247 253 259 263 267 273 277 284 289

Cambridge — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cancer Journals — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . . Cane — Jean Toomer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Captain Blackman — John A. Williams . . . . . . . . . . Captivity — Toi Derricotte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Catherine Carmier — Ernest J. Gaines. . . . . . . . . . . Ceremonies in Dark Old Men — Lonne Elder III . . . . . The Chaneysville Incident — David Bradley . . . . . . . The Chinaberry Tree — Jessie Redmon Fauset . . . . . . A Chocolate Soldier — Cyrus Colter. . . . . . . . . . . . The Chosen Place, the Timeless People — Paule Marshall Clifford’s Blues — John A. Williams. . . . . . . . . . . . Clotel — William Wells Brown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Color of Water — James McBride . . . . . . . . . . The Color Purple — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Colored Museum — George C. Wolfe . . . . . . . . . Coming of Age in Mississippi — Anne Moody . . . . . .

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293 299 306 312 318 322 328 333 339 345 351 357 361 369 373 379 383

xxxviii

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

Coming Up Down Home — Cecil Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered — Martin Robison Delany The Conjure-Man Dies — Rudolph Fisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Conjure Woman — Charles Waddell Chesnutt . . . . . . . . . . . . Contending Forces — Pauline Hopkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Content of Our Character — Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Corregidora — Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Country Place — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cranial Guitar — Bob Kaufman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual — Harold Cruse . . . . . . . . . . . Crossing the River — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Culture of Bruising — Gerald Early . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Curse of Caste — Julia C. Collins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Daddy Was a Number Runner — Louise Meriwether . . . . . . The Dahomean — Frank Yerby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daughters — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World — Suzan-Lori Parks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dem — William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dessa Rose — Sherley Anne Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Devil in a Blue Dress — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Different Drummer — William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . . . . Disappearing Acts — Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Distant Shore — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dragon Can’t Dance — Earl Lovelace . . . . . . . . . . . A Dream Deferred — Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dream on Monkey Mountain — Derek Walcott . . . . . . . . .

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393 399 405 410 417 422 428 434 438 442 446 451

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471 475 482 488 494 500 506 510 516 520

Volume 2 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere — ZZ Packer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 Dust Tracks on a Road — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529 Dutchman — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533 Erasure — Percival Everett. . . . . . . . . . . . The Essays of Amiri Baraka — Amiri Baraka . . The Essays of Ralph Ellison — Ralph Ellison . . The Essays of C. L. R. James — C. L. R. James . The Essays of Ishmael Reed — Ishmael Reed . . xxxix

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539 543 551 557 564

MASTERPLOTS II page

The Ethics of Identity — Kwame Anthony Appiah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571 Eva’s Man — Gayl Jones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 Faith and the Good Thing — Charles Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . Fallen Angels — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family — J. California Cooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Farming of Bones — Edwidge Danticat. . . . . . . . . . . . Fatheralong — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fences — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Part Last and Heaven — Angela Johnson . . . . . . . . The Fisher King — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun — Geoffrey Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . The Flagellants — Carlene Hatcher Polite. . . . . . . . . . . . . Flight to Canada — Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Free Enterprise — Michelle Cliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Slavery to Freedom — John Hope Franklin . . . . . . . . . Funnyhouse of a Negro — Adrienne Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . .

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581 587 591 597 601 605 611 618 622 626 630 636

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643 650 654 657

A Gathering of Old Men — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . Gemini — Nikki Giovanni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . Give Us Each Day — Alice Dunbar-Nelson . . . . . . Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin . . . . . God Bless the Child — Kristin Hunter . . . . . . . . . The Great Wells of Democracy — Manning Marable . The Guyana Quartet — Wilson Harris . . . . . . . . .

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663 669 675 681 688 694 700 704

Having Our Say — Sarah Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Healing — Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Heart of a Woman — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich — Alice Childress . . High Cotton — Darryl Pinckney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His Own Where — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Home to Harlem — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Homewood Trilogy — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . The House Behind the Cedars — Charles Waddell Chesnutt How Stella Got Her Groove Back — Terry McMillan . . . . Hunting in Harlem — Mat Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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710 714 718 722 728 734 739 746 752 758 762

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

Hurry Home — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 766 Hush — Jacqueline Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 772 I Get on the Bus — Reginald McKnight . . . . . . . . . . I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou . . . If He Hollers Let Him Go — Chester Himes . . . . . . . . If You Come Softly — Jacqueline Woodson. . . . . . . . In the Blood — Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Castle of My Skin — George Lamming . . . . . . . In the Wine Time — Ed Bullins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl — Harriet Jacobs . . Infants of the Spring — Wallace Thurman . . . . . . . . . The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African — Olaudah Equiano . . The Interruption of Everything — Terry McMillan . . . . Intimate Apparel — Lynn Nottage . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Intuitionist — Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iola Leroy — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper . . . . . . .

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775 781 787 793 797 801 807 812 818

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824 828 832 836 840 847

Jazz — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelly Roll — Kevin Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelly’s Last Jam — George C. Wolfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jitney — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joe Turner’s Come and Gone — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Henry Days — Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joker, Joker, Deuce — Paul Beatty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonah’s Gourd Vine — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké — Charlotte L. Forten Grimké . Jubilee — Margaret Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juneteenth — Ralph Ellison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Just Above My Head — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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852 858 862 866 870 876 880 885 891 897 903 907

Kindred — Octavia E. Butler. . . . . . King Hedley II — August Wilson . . . The Known World — Edward P. Jones Krik? Krak! — Edwidge Danticat . . . Kwaku — Roy A. K. Heath . . . . . . .

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913 918 922 926 930

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Lady Sings the Blues — Billie Holiday, with William Dufty. . . . . . . . . . . 935 The Land — Mildred D. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 942 Lawd Today — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 946 xli

MASTERPLOTS II page

The Learning Tree — Gordon Parks, Sr.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 952 A Lesson Before Dying — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 958 Let Me Breathe Thunder — William Attaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 964 Let the Circle Be Unbroken — Mildred D. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 970 Let the Dead Bury Their Dead — Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 975 Life on the Color Line — Gregory Howard Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 982 Like One of the Family — Alice Childress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 986 Linden Hills — Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 992 Local History — Erica Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 998 The Lonely Londoners — Samuel Selvon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1002 The Long Dream — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1008 A Long Way Gone — Ishmael Beah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1014 Lost in the City — Edward P. Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1018 Love — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1022 Lucy — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1026 M. C. Higgins, the Great — Virginia Hamilton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1032 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1037

Volume 3 The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins — Pauline Hopkins Maker of Saints — Thulani Davis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mama — Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mama Day — Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Man Who Cried I Am — John A. Williams . . . . . . . . Manchild in the Promised Land — Claude Brown . . . . . . . Marked by Fire — Joyce Carol Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . Maud Martha — Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Measure of Time — Rosa Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meridian — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Messenger — Charles Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Middle Passage — Charles Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minty Alley — C. L. R. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miracle’s Boys — Jacqueline Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . Monster — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Montgomery’s Children — Richard Perry . . . . . . . . . . . Moses, Man of the Mountain — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . The Motion of Light in Water — Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . Mumbo Jumbo — Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Amputations — Clarence Major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xlii

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1043 1050 1054 1060 1066 1072 1078 1084 1090 1096 1102 1107 1113 1119 1123 1127 1133 1139 1145 1152

COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

My Brother — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1158 My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. — Coretta Scott King . . . . . . . . . . 1162 A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave in the State of Delaware, North America — Solomon Bayley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — Frederick Douglass . . A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black — John Marrant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man — Briton Hammon . . . . . . . . The Narrows — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Guard — Natasha Trethewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Son — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natives of My Person — George Lamming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New Negro — Alain Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1959 — Thulani Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1183 1188 1194 1198 1204 1210 1216 1222

Once upon a Time When We Were Colored — Clifton L. Taulbert One More River to Cross — Keith Boykin . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Nig — Harriet E. Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Outsider — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oxherding Tale — Charles Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1228 1232 1236 1242 1249

Painted Turtle — Clarence Major. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents — Octavia E. Butler . . . Paradise — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Passing — Nella Larsen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Patternist Series — Octavia E. Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philadelphia Fire — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Photograph — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Piano Lesson — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Platitudes — Trey Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plum Bun — Jessie Redmon Fauset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral — Phillis Wheatley. . . The Poetry of Ai — Ai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Maya Angelou — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Amiri Baraka — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Edward Kamau Brathwaite — Edward Kamau Brathwaite . The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks — Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Sterling Brown — Sterling A. Brown . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1255 1260 1264 1270 1276 1281 1287 1293 1298 1304 1310 1316 1322 1328 1335 1345 1351

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MASTERPLOTS II page

The Poetry of Lucille Clifton — Lucille Clifton . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Wanda Coleman — Wanda Coleman . . . . . . . The Poetry of Jayne Cortez — Jayne Cortez . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Countée Cullen — Countée Cullen . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Owen Dodson — Owen Dodson . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Rita Dove — Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar — Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Poetry of Mari Evans — Mari Evans. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni — Nikki Giovanni. . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Michael S. Harper — Michael S. Harper . . . . . The Poetry of Robert Hayden — Robert Hayden . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of George Moses Horton — George Moses Horton . The Poetry of Langston Hughes — Langston Hughes . . . . . . The Poetry of June Jordan — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Etheridge Knight — Etheridge Knight. . . . . . . The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa — Yusef Komunyakaa . . . . The Poetry of Audre Lorde — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Claude McKay — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Haki R. Madhubuti — Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . The Poetry of Thylias Moss — Thylias Moss . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Dudley Randall — Dudley Randall . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Carolyn M. Rodgers — Carolyn M. Rodgers . . . The Poetry of Sonia Sanchez — Sonia Sanchez . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Melvin B. Tolson — Melvin B. Tolson . . . . . . The Poetry of Derek Walcott — Derek Walcott . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Alice Walker — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Sherley Anne Williams — Sherley Anne Williams The Poetry of Jay Wright — Jay Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Al Young — Al Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Volume 4 Possessing the Secret of Joy — Alice Walker . . . . . Praisesong for the Widow — Paule Marshall . . . . The President’s Daughter — Barbara Chase-Riboud. Purlie Victorious — Ossie Davis . . . . . . . . . . .

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Quicksand — Nella Larsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1578 Race Matters — Cornel West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1584 A Raisin in the Sun — Lorraine Hansberry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1588 xliv

COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

A Rat’s Mass — Adrienne Kennedy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reckless Eyeballing — Ishmael Reed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflex and Bone Structure — Clarence Major . . . . . . . . . Right Here, Right Now — Trey Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The River Niger — Joseph A. Walker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rivers of Eros — Cyrus Colter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RL’s Dream — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry — Mildred D. Taylor. . . . . . Roots — Alex Haley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Runner Mack — Barry Beckham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom — William Craft and Ellen Craft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sally Hemings — Barbara Chase-Riboud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Salt Eaters — Toni Cade Bambara. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Phillips — Andrea Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scenes from a Sistah — Lolita Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Season of Adventure — George Lamming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seduction by Light — Al Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seraph on the Suwanee — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . Seven Guitars — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Shadow Bride — Roy A. K. Heath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window — Lorraine Hansberry . . . The Signifying Monkey — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. . . . . . . . . . Singing in the Comeback Choir — Bebe Moore Campbell . . . . . . Slavery and Social Death — Orlando Patterson . . . . . . . . . . . Sleeping with the Dictionary — Harryette Mullen . . . . . . . . . . A Soldier’s Play — Charles Fuller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soledad Brother — George Jackson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Some People, Some Other Place — J. California Cooper . . . . . . Some Soul to Keep — J. California Cooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soul Clap Hands and Sing — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . Soul on Ice — Eldridge Cleaver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. — Martin Luther King, Jr. The Speeches of Malcolm X — Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spook Who Sat by the Door — Sam Greenlee . . . . . . . . . . The Sport of the Gods — Paul Laurence Dunbar . . . . . . . . . . The Spyglass Tree — Albert Murray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Squabble, and Other Stories — John Holman . . . . . . . . . . . . Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand — Samuel R. Delany . . . . xlv

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The Stories of Toni Cade Bambara — Toni Cade Bambara . . . . The Stories of Henry Dumas — Henry Dumas . . . . . . . . . . . The Stories of Langston Hughes — Langston Hughes . . . . . . . The Stories of James Alan McPherson — James Alan McPherson. The Street — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Suder — Percival Everett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sula — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush — Virginia Hamilton . . . . . . . The System of Dante’s Hell — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Taking of Miss Janie — Ed Bullins . . . . . . . . . Tar Baby — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Technical Difficulties — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston . There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden — Leon Forrest The Third Life of Grange Copeland — Alice Walker . . . This Child’s Gonna Live — Sarah E. Wright. . . . . . . Those Bones Are Not My Child — Toni Cade Bambara . Through the Ivory Gate — Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . Topdog/Underdog — Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . Train Whistle Guitar — Albert Murray . . . . . . . . . . Trouble in Mind — Alice Childress . . . . . . . . . . . . The Truly Disadvantaged — William Julius Wilson . . . Two Trains Running — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . Two Wings to Veil My Face — Leon Forrest . . . . . .

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Up from Slavery — Booker T. Washington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1932 The Venus Hottentot — Elizabeth Alexander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1939 A Visitation of Spirits — Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1943 Voices in the Mirror — Gordon Parks, Sr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1948 W. E. B. Du Bois — David Levering Lewis. . . . Waiting to Exhale — Terry McMillan . . . . . . Walk Me to the Distance — Percival Everett . . . Walkin’ the Dog — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . The Wind Done Gone — Alice Randall. . . . . . The Wine of Astonishment — Earl Lovelace . . . The Women of Brewster Place — Gloria Naylor .

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Yearning — Bell Hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1995 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down — Ishmael Reed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2001 Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine — Bebe Moore Campbell . . . . . . . . . . . . 2007 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2013 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2017 Electronic Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2024 Chronological List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2031 Type of Work Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2043 Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2050 Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2057

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DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE Author: ZZ Packer (1973) Type of work: Short stories Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: 1960’s-1990’s Locale: Atlanta, Georgia; Baltimore, Maryland; Louisville, Kentucky; Washington, D.C.; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; Japan First published: 2003 Principal characters: Snot, the young girl who narrates “Brownies” Dina, an African American freshman at Yale University who later lives in Japan Tia, a fourteen-year-old girl who runs away to find her mother in Atlanta, Georgia Dezi, a manipulative drug dealer who takes Tia in Lynnea, a young teacher in one of Baltimore’s toughest schools Sheba, a six-foot resident of a home for girls who befriends Lynnea Spurgeon, a high-school debating champ who takes his father to the Million Man March Ray Bivins, Jr., Spurgeon’s father, a former Black Panther Clareese Mitchell, a cross-eyed choir member in an African American church Doris Yates, an African American teenager at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement The Stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a collection of eight stories that are less about people who have been disenfranchised because of race or economic status than they are about a new generation of middle-class African Americans who have previously been ignored because of attention paid to the children of the ghetto. Like immigrants, ZZ Packer’s characters are caught between an old world to which they feel they no longer belong and a new world that has not yet arrived. For example, “Brownies,” whose narrator, nicknamed Snot, is a young African American girl at summer camp with her Brownie troop, begins as a typical race prejudice story. Snot’s friends vow to fight a troop of little white girls who have come to camp with complexions like a blend of strawberry and vanilla ice cream. When one of them hears a white girl use the hated “N word,” they talk tough about retaliation. The title story, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” focuses on a middle-class young African American woman named Dina who has entered her freshman year at Yale Uni-

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versity. Impatient with politically correct counselors, she reluctantly plays a getacquainted orientation game in which participants must say what inanimate object they would like to be. Just to fulfill white expectations, Dina says she would like to be a revolver. “The Ant of the Self ” is about a young African American named Spurgeon who is caught in the gap between the stereotypical African American world of an older generation and a new middle-class African American image in which racial identity seems less important. He has just bailed his father, an ex-Black Panther, out of jail after yet another drunk-driving arrest and wants to take him home. However, his father wants to go to Washington, D.C., for the Million Man March—not to assert his community with other African American men but rather to take advantage of their nostalgia for all things African by selling them his collection of exotic African birds. The remaining stories include “Speaking in Tongues,” focusing on an African American girl who tries to find her mother, only to be exploited by a fast-talking expimp; “Every Tongue Shall Confess,” about an evangelistic nurse pursued by a patient; “Our Lady of Peace,” about an African American teacher in a tough urban school who is befriended by one of her students; “Doris Is Coming,” featuring a teenage African American girl caught on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement in Louisville, Kentucky in 1961; and “Geese,” about Dina, the main character in the title story, who is down and out in Japan and who ultimately fails in her efforts to avoid falling into a black stereotype. These stories are competent, but they fail to create characters as interesting and engaging as those in “Brownies,” “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” and “The Ant of the Self.” The Characters Although the young African American girls in “Brownies” are hard to resist with their childlike streetwise talk, they are really middle-class kids, posturing the way they have seen others do. The story succeeds because it allows African American girls to make fun of white girls and talk tough about beating them up for using racial slurs, but since they are only small children at summer camp, it is all within a harmless, comic context. Dina, in the title story, comes from a middle-class background in which she was an honor-roll student. However, at Yale she finds herself instantly transformed into a hard-bitten, recalcitrant kid. Dina insists that she likes being outcast and alone, but when an overweight white girl named Heidi seeks her advice and friendship, they become such constant companions that people being to think they are lovers. Like “Brownies,” “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” succeeds because it presents a rebellious African American who is not a streetwise tough but a middle-class good girl. Dina does not want to be a compliant African American, but she is not sure how to find a place for herself.

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Themes and Meanings The narrator of “Brownies” says that the desire for revenge was no longer about one of her troop being called a derogatory name, for the word that started it all now seems to have turned into something deeper and unnameable. However, Packer does not suggest what this ominous unnameable thing is, except perhaps the inevitable tension that results from “difference.” When the little white girls are actually confronted, the African American girls discover that they are mentally handicapped, evoking the derogatory epithet “retarded” and suggesting an easy sort of turning-the-tables discrimination. Furthermore, the African American girls are told that the white children are echolalic, which means they say whatever they hear, like an echo. The story thus ends as a sort of cautionary fable about prejudice and about how older generations pass down racial intolerance to younger ones. In the climactic thematic scene of the title story, Dina’s psychiatrist tells her that she spends her life pretending and lying, concluding that perhaps it is her survival mechanism in response to being African American in a white world. Dina knows it cuts deeper than that, although Packer does not provide any clear indication of what this “deeper” meaning really is. The story is not really about sexual or racial identity; race and sexual preference serve, rather, as metaphors for the general problem of discovering an authentic, acceptable self. Once Spurgeon and his father are at the Million Man March in “The Ant of the Self,” Spurgeon is unimpressed with the clichés and rhetoric of the speakers and rejects the advice of a man he meets there who urges him to atone for his split with his father. Packer emphasizes the basic irony that the public march is supposed to heal the very kind of split between father and son, brother and brother, that Spurgeon feels so personally with his father. Critical Context Packer’s rise to momentary media stardom began with the publication of the summer, 2000, special debut-fiction issue of The New Yorker. Accompanying her story “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” was a full-page photo of Packer sitting on some rough city steps beside a cracked, graffiti-covered wall, staring at the camera with a sullen, even angry, look. However, ZZ Packer is no child of the ghetto who has risen up shaking her fist in righteous anger at white economic oppression. Her parents were a middle-class small business owner and a schoolteacher. She is a Yale graduate who has also attended the prestigious Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University as well as the influential Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” saw print, Harper’s published Packer’s story “Brownies,” which was later chosen by E. L. Doctorow for the 2000 edition of Best American Short Stories. The buzz over Packer’s writing increased when Riverhead Books won a bidding war for her first book, paying her an advance of approximately $250,000. She went on a whirlwind thirteen-city book tour, with picture spreads appearing in Vogue and Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O. In May, 2003, John Updike picked her book for the Today Book Club.

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Bibliography Goldberg, Michelle. “Strangers in a Strange Land.” Newsday, March 9, 2003, p. D30. Goldberg argues that Packer is more attuned to her characters’ often self-sabotaging motivations than to the circus of their surroundings. Packer, ZZ. “The Aerial View.” Interview by Cressida Leyshon. The New Yorker. November 25, 2002. www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/11/25/0211205on_online only01. Packer discusses her efforts as an African American writer to create complex characters rather than simply representing her race. She says that she does not try to write as a member of her community but rather as an observer of it. _______. “Author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Talks with Robert Birnbaum.” Interview by Robert Birnbaum. Identity Theory, April 29, 2003. www.identitytheory .com. Packer talks about her education at Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Iowa, and Stanford, commenting on the writers’ workshop experience and how the writing world is moving closer to popular culture. Thompson, Jean. “Notorious in New Haven.” Review of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, by ZZ Packer. The New York Times, March 16, 2003, Section 7, p. 7. In this appreciative review, Thompson focuses on Packer’s ability to create well-realized characters, especially those coming of age. Wiegand, David. “Packer Blends Race, Lessons, and Craft.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 9, 2003, p. M1. Wiegand argues that Packer’s stories are political, meant to make a point. As a result of her preaching, he says, African American readers will have a different experience reading her stories than will white readers. Charles E. May

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DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD An Autobiography Author: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1903-1942 Locale: Eatonville and Jacksonville, Florida; Washington, D.C.; New York, New York First published: 1942 Principal personages: Zora Neale Hurston, a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, an affluent patron of the arts Cudjo Lewis (Kossola-O-Lo-Loo-Ay), an aged former slave Fannie Hurst, a novelist Ethel Waters, a vocalist and jazz musician, a close friend of Zora Dr. Franz Boas, a professor of anthropology Carl Van Vechten, a novelist, literary critic, and friend to Zora Form and Content Dust Tracks on a Road commences with a description of Eatonville, Florida: its history, traditions, and inhabitants. Eatonville provides the setting for Hurston’s childhood. As a central feature of the community, Joe Clarke’s back porch provides a source for the collection of folktales. While Zora’s mother encourages her to “jump at de sun,” her father warns her that she will be shot for her sassiness. Her unabated childhood curiosity suggests that her mother was the stronger influence: She climbs trees to catch a glimpse of the end of the world, plays with “Mr. Corn-Shuck” and “Mr. Sweet Smell,” and tells tales about alligator men. Her recitation of classical myths so impresses visitors to her school that she is invited to their home, asked to read, and given a roll of pennies, books, and clothes. The security of this childhood world is destroyed when Zora’s mother dies. Although she is only nine when this tragedy occurs, it has lasting effects: It reinforces her commitment to “jump at de sun” and gives her some ideas of how to do so. On her deathbed, her mother asks Zora to intervene against custom—to prevent the turning of the bed and the removal of the pillow at the moment of death. Zora says her mother depended on her for “a voice,” but the elders ignore her pleas, and Zora feels she has betrayed her mother: “I was old before my time with grief of loss, of failure, and of remorse.” Although she is unable to fulfill her mother’s request, her determination to stay in school and to become a writer reflects her unshakable promise to be a voice, to speak for her mother and her community. After her mother’s death, Zora is sent to Jacksonville to attend school. Shortly thereafter, her father remarries, and Zora begins ten years of wandering and homelessness. At fourteen, she gets a job as a domestic,

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but she acts more like a family member than a maid. The other servants, envious of her favored position, complain and cause her termination. One day she discovers in the garbage a copy of John Milton’s complete works. She recalls the incident, proud that she can read work of such difficulty and proud that she liked it before she knew of its reputation: “So I read Paradise Lost and luxuriated in Milton’s syllables and rhythms without ever having heard that Milton was one of the greatest poets in the world. I read it because I liked it.” Her next job as a maid with a repertory company touring the South assists in the cultivation of her tastes, so that she decides that her next stop is school, no matter what. After a frightening attack of appendicitis, Zora enrolls at Morgan College, where caring teachers help Zora support herself. She wins oratory competitions and begins the first school publication on the blackboard. Friends encourage her to attend Howard University, so she moves to Washington, D.C., and works part-time as a manicurist in a barbershop. She joins the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and The Stylus, a literary organization. Charles S. Johnson expresses interest in her writing and publishes “Drenched in Sunlight” and “Spunk” in Opportunity magazine. With his encouragement, she moves to New York and gets a scholarship to attend Barnard College and a job as secretary to Fannie Hurst. After graduation, Franz Boas gets her money to research folklore in the South. When this money is exhausted, Mrs. R. Osgood Mason takes over the task of supporting Zora’s research. Zora then travels to the Bahamas to record the events and stories of sawmill camps, “jooks,” and porches. Her mingling of anthropology and storytelling, fact and fiction, makes her work unique. She returns to New York with musicians and dancers and several volumes of folklore. This material becomes the basis for a show at the John Golden Theatre and for her book Mules and Men (1935). As Zora’s story moves closer to the present, the narrative shifts from descriptions of specific events to ruminations about friendship, love, and religion. At the close of the chapter “Love,” Zora recalls a whimsical folk saying: “Love is a funny thing; Love is a blossom;/ If you want your finger bit, poke it at a possum.” Analysis Like many autobiographies, Dust Tracks on a Road provides a flattering portrait of its author. Zora depicts herself as an intelligent young girl whose love of reading provides the inspiration for her staying in school. Her mother’s advice to “jump at de sun” fuels her determination to succeed. Readers come to admire her for her fortitude and her unwavering optimism. Such optimism reflects a blindness to her surroundings, however, and causes readers to lament her naïveté. Her belief in the ability to control destiny and in individual responsibility for fate precludes recognition of both social and historical forces. In an amusing and revealing scene, Hurston recalls a black man who insisted on having his hair cut at the “for-whites-only” barbershop where she worked. Acknowledging her sanctioning of Jim Crow, she says, “I wanted him thrown out too.” In an effort to defend herself, Zora says that putting her concerns for her job first is just “human-like,” “an instinctive thing.” Zora’s belief in the ability of the individual to overcome all

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odds does not allow her to identify with the black man who was testing the strength of unfair laws, nor does it allow her to understand his objective and purpose. Hurston’s refusal to speak out against segregation cost her many friends. Hurston’s view of history seems equally shortsighted. In “Looking Things Over,” she remarks that she sees “nothing but futility” in recalling slavery or “trying to fix the blame”: From what I can learn, it was sad. Certainly. But my ancestors who lived and died in it are dead. The white men who profited by their labor and lives are dead also. I have no personal memory of those times, and no responsibility for them. Neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks.

Zora believes in the importance of the present and views the past as negligible and without influence on the present. With eyes glued to the horizon of a promising future, she tramples the past and ignores its lasting effects. In another way, however, there is no one person who has done more than she has done to save that past, to give it voice, record it, and celebrate it. While many of her contemporaries changed black art to make it appeal to white audiences, Zora insisted on serving up the authentic material. She was convinced of its worthiness and its appeal. When one looks at her work, much of which is described in Dust Tracks on a Road, one encounters a pioneer who fused the skills of anthropology and storytelling, academic and folk traditions, to celebrate a way of living. Critical Context Like Hurston’s fiction and folklore, Dust Tracks on a Road represents a synthesis of traditions, borrowing from the Euro-American tradition of autobiography popularized by Benjamin Franklin and the African American tradition of autobiography that commences with Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. Like many works in the former tradition, it is the story of one determined individual’s success; like many in the latter, it reflects a struggle for voice and authorial control. Reflecting what Zora herself most appreciated in black culture, it contains stories that are “embroidered truths,” whose contents are shaped by the telling as much as by the events described. Dust Tracks on a Road is of special historical significance because it provides a look at one of the most important and controversial figures in the Harlem Renaissance. The book’s second edition is especially interesting because it contains the three chapters that were omitted from the original publication in 1942. In “Seeing the World as It Is,” Zora expresses strong anti-American sentiment. She argues that American international politics are riddled with hypocrisy: Imperialism cannot be right when it is enacted by the United States and wrong when enacted by others. This chapter and the unrevised chapter “My People, My People” serve as powerful reminders of the restrictions that impeded Hurston’s writings. Whether such restrictions came from her editors, her “godmother,” or “Papa Franz,” Boas Hurston’s free-

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dom to say what she thought was always subject to outside intervention. Her dependency on these people made compromise an unpleasant necessity. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Excellent collection of essays on of Hurston’s life and work. Contains early commentary by Franz Boas and Langston Hughes. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. Landmark study that contains a chapter devoted to Hurston. Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2002. Detailed biography of Hurston, covering her personal and professional lives and relating them to the major historical events through which she lived. Duck, Leigh Ann. The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotrope” to analyze Hurston’s representations of the South. Feracho, Lesley. Linking the Americas: Race, Hybrid Discourses, and the Reformulation of Feminine Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. International study of four women writers in the Americas. Compares Dust Tracks on a Road to novels by Clarice Lispector, Julieta Campos, and Carolina Maria de Jesus. Argues that each novel is itself a hybrid of various discourses, as well as contributing to a larger hybrid structure of American female writing. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. A close study of Hurston’s life and writings that includes a discussion of their historical context and Hurston’s contribution to the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Doubleday, 2002. A collection of more than five hundred letters, annotated and arranged chronologically. Lionnet, Françoise. “Autoethnography: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Discusses Hurston’s voice, tone, and literary objectives. Suggests that Dust Tracks on a Road is an oral as well as a literary text and examines the parallels of author and storyteller. Walker, Alice. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View.” In In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. An essay that chronicles Walker’s discovery of and interest in Hurston. Walker discusses key events in Hurston’s life, the history of critical responses to Hurston’s work, and her own contributions to the preservation and celebration of Hurston’s work. Madelyn Jablon

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DUTCHMAN Author: Amiri Baraka (Everett LeRoi Jones, 1934) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Allegory Time of plot: Summer, around 1960 Locale: A subway in New York, New York First produced: 1964, at the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York, New York First published: 1964 Principal characters: Lula, an attractive, seductive, sexually aggressive white woman of about thirty Clay, a young black man, conservative in dress and manner The Play Glancing out the window of a subway train, a conservatively dressed black man of about twenty catches the eye of an attractive, thirtyish white woman who is standing on the platform. They exchange smiles. It is the sort of meaningless casual encounter, leading nowhere, that can leave a pleasant afterglow. As the train moves on, the woman from the platform enters the car. She is wearing bright, skimpy summer clothes and sandals, and she carries a net bag full of paperback books, fruit, and other articles. A beautiful woman with long red hair, she is very daintily eating an apple. Taking the seat beside the young man, she confirms that she is the woman he was just looking at, but she insists that his look carried more of a sexual charge than he is willing to admit. He denies that he was running his mind over her flesh, and he finds it “funny” that she has sought him out, as she says she has done, in response to his sexual aggression. She remarks that he looks as though he is trying to grow a beard; when he asks if he really looks like that, she replies that she lies a lot. This is the first of a series of verbal attacks, retreats, and evasions that will keep Clay for much of the play in a mixed state of curiosity, desire, and confusion. His curiosity is aroused by her uncannily accurate guesses, if they are guesses, about himself, his associates, and his life. How does she know, for instance, that his friend Warren Enright is tall and skinny, with a phony English accent? She just figured he would know someone like that, she says. She keeps Clay’s desire alive by a pattern of verbal and nonverbal sexual innuendo. She puts her hand on his thigh, then removes it, checking his reaction as she does. She asks if he would like to get involved with her. She is a beautiful woman, the young man replies; he would be a fool not to. She confuses Clay by sudden swerves from whatever has become the topic of conversation. “I bet you’re sure you know what you’re talking about,” she says.

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She offers him an apple. On the surface, this seems unrelated to the curiosity, desire, and confusion she arouses, but her comment that eating apples together is always the first step puts a sinister spin on this apparently innocent action. She suggests that Clay invite her to a party. He playfully objects that he must first know her name. “Lena the Hyena,” she tells him, then attempts to guess his name. Gerald? Norman? Everett? She is sure it must be one of those “hopeless colored names” creeping out of New Jersey. It is Clay, he tells her. Her name, she now declares, is not Lena but Lula. That settled, Clay formally invites Lula to the party. Her reply, given her behavior to this point, sounds disconcertingly prim and conventional. She does not know him, she says. In another of her turnabouts, she then insists that she knows him like the palm of her hand. The play of sexual titillation continues. She says that she knows him like the palm of the hand she uses to unbutton her dress, to remove her skirt. Why, she wants to know, is Clay dressed in a three-button suit, with narrow shoulders? Why is he wearing a striped tie? Those clothes are for white men. Your grandfather was a slave, she reminds him. Clay corrects her: His grandfather was a night watchman. How does Clay see himself? Lula asks. In college, Clay says, he considered himself to be a poet, a Baudelaire. Lula wants to know if Clay ever once thought he was a black nigger. The word stuns Clay for a moment, but he decides to take it as a joke. He is willing to be called a black Baudelaire. When Lula tells Clay that he is a murderer, he is simply confused once again. Lula says in another swerve that they are both free of their history, or at least they can pretend to be. As the second scene begins, Lula has established complete control. Clay kisses her neck and fingers as she enunciates promises of sexual delights to come. After the party, they will go to her house, where the real fun begins. Clay thinks he knows what the real fun is, but Lula says they will talk endlessly. About what, Clay wants to know. About the subject they have been talking about all along, Lula tells him: about his manhood. Clay notices other passengers entering the car. As the scene proceeds, the car fills with passengers, both black and white. Do the other passengers frighten him? Lula asks. They should. After all, he is an escaped nigger. Lula’s behavior becomes more outrageous, her language more provocative and obsessively racial. She calls Clay a middle-class black bastard, then says he is no nigger, just a dirty white man. When Clay tells her to be cool, she tells him that he must break out. He must not sit there dying, the way “they” want him to die. Finally Clay does break out. He slaps Lula and forces her to sit. At this show of power, the other passengers avert their eyes and retreat behind their newspapers. Now Clay talks. Lula knows nothing, he says, understands nothing. She does not know “belly rub.” She does not know that when Bessie Smith sings the blues she is saying, “Kiss my black ass.” She does not understand that the great jazz musician Charlie Parker would never have played a note of music if he had just walked up to East Sixtyseventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. The poem of a black poet—

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Clay implicitly includes himself—is a substitute for the thrust of a knife. The simplest and sanest act for Clay as a black man would be to murder a white person: to murder Lula. Clay draws back from so stark and lucid an act. Who needs it? He would rather be a fool, safe with his words. He offers a final warning, though. Do not preach the advantages of white Western rationalism to black people, for if you do, they will one day murder you and offer very rational explanations for what they have done. When Lula says that she has heard enough, Clay prepares to leave. It appears as though they will not be acting out those erotic fantasies in which they have been indulging. As Clay bends to retrieve his belongings, Lula plunges a small knife into his chest. At her command, the other passengers, black and white, dispose of the dead body. They disembark at the next stop, leaving Lula alone in the car. A young black man enters the car. When he sits a few seats behind Lula, she turns and gives him a long, slow look. Apparently in response, he drops the book he had begun to read. A black conductor does a sort of soft shoe dance down the aisle. He and the young man exchange greetings. The conductor tips his hat to Lula, who stares after him as he continues out of the car. Themes and Meanings A question bound to arise at some point in one’s experience of Dutchman, or in one’s reflections on it, is that of the application of the title to the play. There are, after all, no Dutchmen on the stage. The play is set in a New York City subway. Its characters are a white American woman and a black American man. Why has the author given the play so (apparently) irrelevant a title? The question has received a number of answers in the extensive body of criticism the play has inspired, but perhaps most useful is the suggestion that the title alludes to the legend of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the seas forever, with no hope of release from the curse of endless repetition. The relevance of this legend to the play is suggested both by the parallel of ship’s voyage and subway’s journey and by the ending of the play, which most critics see as implying that the process the play has enacted is about to begin again. That process culminated in the death of Clay. The challenge of the play, then, is to arrive at some understanding of several questions: What killed Clay? Why is the process endlessly repeated? Is there any hope of liberation from the repetition, of release from the curse? It is clear that Lula is the active force in Clay’s destruction. Who is Lula? She is, at a mythic level, a seductress, an Eve figure who has already eaten the apple and now offers it to Clay. Her sexual aggressiveness also has implications in the context of social realism, one of the levels at which the play operates. For a young, unattached man of Clay’s generation, a generation for whom the man was the “normal” sexual aggressor, failure to respond to the openly sexual overtures of an attractive woman would raise questions about his manhood. Thus, Clay affirms that he would be a fool not to want to get involved with a beautiful woman like Lula—precisely the manly response expected of him.

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The situation becomes potentially more explosive, even if thereby more exciting, because Lula is a white woman, apparently offering herself sexually to a black man. The audience comes to understand that Clay’s race has not been a neutral factor in Lula’s decision to make him her target. Her goal is to seduce this young black man to his own destruction. Clay proves to be a cooperative victim. His sexual desire for Lula, his desire for what this white woman offers him, compromises his judgment. He is prepared to rationalize her contradictions, even to treat her racial abuse as all in good fun, because he does not want to pass up this unexpected chance. He is susceptible to the white woman’s advances, and easily manipulated (note the connotations of his name) because of the many prior compromises he represents. His appearance, his manner, and his self-definition in terms of European models make clear his confusion about his identity. He can be seduced, because he has already internalized the seductive values of a white America whose real, and profoundly destructive, hostility of him, along with its undeniable attractiveness to him, is symbolized and embodied in Lula. The playwright himself has said in a comment on the play that Lula is America, or at least its spirit. Clay finally makes a stand against Lula and what she represents in his great climactic speech. He sees with frightening lucidity and articulates with dreadful clarity the rage he has concealed, that is concealed at the heart of black culture, but that he knows in every breath and pulse beat. Suddenly, and briefly, Clay takes control of the situation, and of his life and being. He speaks out of a fully realized awareness of himself as a black man. Lula has been waiting for this, and she quickly disposes of Clay with the help of the other passengers, who are, it must be remembered, both black and white. Clay has survived only as long as he has denied the deepest truth about himself. Forced to remove his mask, he is destroyed as he achieves one moment of authenticity. Even as he realizes this moment, Clay remains vulnerable. He is defenseless. Here, as elsewhere, he is reacting, rather than initiating action. His reaction remains individual and therefore isolated, and in the moment, without consequence, as the end of the play suggests. The repetition, with only minor variations, of the initial situation at the end of the play, combined with the ritualistic quality of Clay’s murder, moves the play beyond the boundaries of realism and demands a symbolic interpretation. The movement beyond realism in fact begins with the invitation of the title to see the play in mythic terms. What is involved here, it is clear, is not merely the story of the chance encounter of one man and one woman but an attempt by the playwright, through the interaction of realism and symbolism, to probe the troubled and troubling relation of black and white in the United States. In the seduction and death of Clay, the writer points to a repeated pattern of destruction arising out of a history of racism. Clay’s fate suggests that this pattern will go on being repeated endlessly unless release from the curse can be found in a lived authenticity that goes beyond the isolated moment of illumination that is all that Clay achieves.

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Critical Context Dutchman has remained perhaps its author’s best-known work and holds a place of honor among the plays of the African American theater. Its dramatic power was recognized from the beginning, as reflected in the Obie it received as the best OffBroadway play of 1964. The play also very quickly became controversial. Although concerned with clarifying black-white relationships, and in that sense implicated in what may be called the discourse of integration, the play proved unpalatably harsh for some critics, mostly but not exclusively white. This reaction is reflected in the action of the superintendent of instruction in the state of California, who banned the play from black studies programs carried on under the auspices of the state. Looking back, it is clear that Dutchman appeared on the eve of a major shift, both in American society and in the life of the playwright. The accommodationist ideology of the Civil Rights movement was about to be challenged by the new, often separatist, accents of Black Nationalism. The discourse of integration would be tested by the discourse of identity, as the question of how African Americans could relate to whites came, for many, to seem less important than the question of what it is to be black. LeRoi Jones, for whom the creation of Clay seems to have acted in part as a kind of exorcism of an earlier, accommodationist self, was on his way to becoming Amiri Baraka, a name he chose in preference to his “slave name,” an artist identified with Black Nationalism. What Dutchman may represent, then, is the outer limits of integrationist discourse. Baraka would later move to what he called a Third World Marxist position, and Black Nationalism by no means stood still. The power of Dutchman may in large part reside in Baraka’s success in absorbing and giving expression to the tensions of the historical and personal moment in which he wrote the play. For him, at this moment, the historical and the personal had virtually become one. Bibliography Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. Argues that Clay’s is a tragedy of lost direction and lack of knowledge: In deciding not to kill Lula, he rejects the power and violence that would allow him to dominate the situation; he thus reaffirms his vulnerability and falls victim to Lula’s malevolence. Bigsby, C. W. E. “Black Theater.” In Beyond Broadway. Vol. 3 in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Analyzes the play in the context of the early 1960’s, as reflecting the self-awareness of a black playwright balancing a successful career as a writer and political necessities that seemed to require actions rather than words. Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Although Clay is killed, Brown sees a kind of triumph in the assertion of humanity that makes his death inevitable. Fabre, Geneviève. “LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka: An Iconoclastic Theatre.” In Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre. Translated

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by Melvin Dixon. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. For Fabre, a paradox of the play is that Lula reveals Clay to himself. His awakening comes too late, because he has already made too many compromises and too soon, because it is merely an individual, rather than communal, awakening, and therefore it is ineffectual. Luter, Matthew. “Dutchman’s Signifyin(g) Subway: How Amiri Baraka Takes Ralph Ellison Underground.” In Reading Contemporary African American Drama: Fragments of History, Fragments of Self, edited by Trudier Harris and Jennifer Larson. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Argues that Baraka, despite his claims to the contrary, was strongly influenced by Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and that Dutchman is as much informed by Baraka’s worries about staking out an identity as an original African American writer as it is about his concerns with how to be an authentic African American man. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Popular Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Asserts that Dutchman combines a realistic look at American society with the absurdist and surrealist traditions of European theater. Lula, although a negative force in the play, expresses many of the playwright’s own ideas in his own language. Walker, Victor Leo, II. “Archetype and Masking in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.” In Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Looks at the antirealist aspects of Baraka’s play and their function in the representation of racial identity. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Frank reappraisal of Baraka, focusing on the contradictions between his public and private personas and balancing his brilliance with the more derivative aspects of his work. Based on rereadings of other people’s interviews, rather than new interviews conducted by the author himself. W. P. Kenney

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ERASURE Author: Percival Everett (1956) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Satire Time of plot: 1960’s through the early twenty-first century Locale: Washington, D.C. First published: 2001 Principal characters: Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, the protagonist, a college professor and writer of “dense, obscure novels” Benjamin Ellison, the deceased father of Thelonious, a family physician who was emotionally estranged from his own family Mrs. Ellison, Thelonious’s eighty-two-year-old mother and Benjamin’s widow, a victim of Alzheimer’s disease whose identity resides almost exclusively in her maternal function Lisa Ellison, sister of Thelonious, a physician and part owner of an inner-city women’s clinic Bill Ellison, brother of Thelonious, a plastic surgeon in Arizona who is the married father of two children and who belatedly acknowledges and reconciles himself to his homosexuality The Novel Having long grown accustomed to the fact that his experimental, intellectually challenging novels will probably never find a popular readership, Thelonious Ellison is nevertheless dismayed by the relative success of those African American fiction writers who, in his eyes, exploit cultural stereotypes and reinforce a monolithic vision of the African American experience. When his sister is murdered by a fanatical antiabortion activist, Thelonious is forced to take a leave of absence from his college professorship: With his sister gone, he must move back into his family home in Washington, D.C., to take primary responsibility for his increasingly disabled mother’s health. Ellison thus finds himself with no money and plenty of time. Dismayed by the twentieth rejection of his latest fictional work, in which two ancient Greek dramatists murder a rival and “then contemplate the death of metaphysics,” Ellison writes a parody novel, initially entitled My Pafology, that embraces all the “demeaning and souldestroying drivel” that he finds in most supposedly realistic depictions of contemporary inner-city life. Most of Erasure takes the form of Ellison’s journal—interrupted by the text of a paper on experimental fiction that the main character delivers at an academic conference under his own name and by the ten-chapter manuscript of My Pafology, penned under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. Patterned in part after Bigger Thomas in Rich-

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ard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the juvenile protagonist of My Pafology, Van Go Jenkins, is an illiterate, self-loathing, oversexed, and hyperviolent African American man trapped in an urban jungle, victimized by socioeconomic conditions and bedazzled by pop culture. The text that Ellison generates in anger and personally characterizes as “offensive, poorly written, racist and mindless” soon earns a publishing contract, garners a host of glowing critical reviews, and attracts a multimillion-dollar movie deal. At the public ceremony to celebrate the novel’s having won the prestigious Book Award, Ellison, who, as a member of the judging panel, tried to sabotage the text’s prizewinning prospects, confronts his own imminent exposure. The often farcical plotline focuses on the fate of Ellison’s parody novel and the consequent erasure of the identity that he has cultivated since his youth. This persona— encouraged by his late father, who compelled his son’s future as an artist—is counterbalanced by the protagonist’s evolving discovery of his past. In returning to his native city, he confronts long-held family secrets and is forced to redefine his place not only in the family unit but also in the larger world. He had always been treated by his father differently from his two siblings, but he eventually discovers the root of his father’s preference. Ellison is, in effect, the accidental byproduct of an affair that his father conducted during the Korean War; when the woman he loved refused to be with him, Benjamin Ellison returned to his wife, and the child conceived during the course of their reunion was Thelonious. The Characters The character of Thelonious Ellison offers an object lesson in the difficulty of establishing an individual identity. Accused time and time again of being “not black enough” because he does not conform to popular cultural expectations, Ellison is the product of generations of education and economic privilege. Even as a child, he did not think, feel, or speak like his peers. Like the nameless main character in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Thelonious Ellison is engaged in a struggle for self-definition. By virtue of his “brown skin, curly hair, wide nose, and slave ancestors,” he is African American; by virtue of the fact that he comes from three generations of medical professionals and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, he lives a middle-class existence whose attributes often do not match contemporary stereotypes regarding African Americans. Other characters in the novel also struggle to define themselves. After fifteen years of living a lie, Bill Ellison finally tries to accept his sexual orientation and learn to navigate the treacherous waters of contemporary dating. Lisa Ellison sacrifices a personal life for a medical career marked by social activism and becomes the unwitting target of a pro-life fanatic. The matriarch of the Ellison clan turns her back on her blue-collar roots when she marries Ben Ellison and chooses to live in service to his vision of the world.

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Themes and Meanings The concept of “erasure” is central to Percival Everett’s novel, since each of its characters offers evidence of some form of personal deletion. Ironically enough, for example, the main character achieves his greatest success, both critical and popular, when he assumes the identity of a fictitious alter ego. Much of the poignancy of the novel is derived from the main character’s belated attempts to reconnect himself to his parents, his siblings, and his racial identity, only to be left in the end with an overwhelming sense of displacement. The novel’s other characters also offer evidence of erasure. Thelonious’s brother Bill had felt pressured in his early adulthood to erase his identity as a gay man to conform to paternal and societal expectations. Lisa’s life is erased by an ideological terrorist who thinks that he is saving lives by taking lives. Mrs. Ellison’s memory is gradually being erased by a degenerative disease of the brain cells. In addition to the main character’s simultaneous journeys of personal discovery and deconstruction, the novel enacts its author’s abiding preoccupation with the prevailing definitions of the nature of mainstream African American literature. Ellison’s career mirrors much of Everett’s own résumé as a writer. Everett’s many novels, all of which reflect his ongoing exploration of content and form, posit the question of whether the common reader, regardless of race, will ever be receptive to a writer whose work resists popular expectations and aspires to the status of art. Critical Context According to general estimates, Erasure is the most reviewed and most acclaimed of Everett’s fictional works since the publication of his groundbreaking first novel, Suder, in 1983. The book won both the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction, sponsored by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, administered by the Hurston/Wright Foundation and underwritten by Borders Books. Because of the success of Erasure, some of Everett’s earlier novels were reissued in paperback editions. Critics have acknowledged Erasure as a skillful commentary on the dubious merit of some fixtures of contemporary African American pop culture, including pulp fiction purporting to be inspired by the realities of ghetto life in the country’s urban centers and the wildly successful and arguably disproportionately influential television book club of Oprah Winfrey. Many reviewers have also seen the novel as the author’s plea for the publishing world and its readers to acknowledge the existence and legitimacy of a broad range of African American experience and artistic intention—a range matching the breadth of experience found in the work of European American writers. In particular, Everett chooses to parody a work of literary naturalism to emphasize the limitations of defining a broad literary tradition in terms of a single genre. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. In

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a section labeled “The New Black Aesthetic,” Bell acknowledges the merit of Erasure as a semiautobiographical experiment, but he is essentially critical of what he sees as the author’s apparent lack of regard for how his racial identity has informed his aesthetic practice. Dickson-Carr, Darryl. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. This brief article argues for Everett’s inclusion among the ranks of literary modernists such as Ralph Ellison; it provides some information on the critical reception of Erasure. Eaton, Kimberly. “Deconstructing the Narrative: Language, Genre, and Experience in Erasure.” Nebula 3 (September, 2006): 220-232. Explores how the novel questions the reliability of language, genre categories, racial identity, and belief in stereotypes. Masiki, Trent. “Irony and Ecstasy: A Profile of Percival Everett.” Poets and Writers 32, no. 3 (2004): 33-39. Focuses on Everett’s life and work with a special emphasis on the contention that art transcends the boundaries of race and ethnicity. Ramsey, William. “Knowing Their Place: Three Black Writers and the Post-modern South.” Southern Literary Journal 37, no. 2 (2005): 119-139. Discusses Everett’s personal canon, including Erasure, in the context of the achievements of two other contemporary African American authors, Yusef Komunyakaa and James McBride. Russett, Margaret. “Race Under Erasure.” Callaloo 28, no. 2 (2005): 358-368. One of the most extensive readings of the novel, drawing many parallels between the main character and Everett himself. Sanchez-Arce, Anna Maria. “‘Authenticism’ or the Authority of Authenticity.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 40 (September, 2007): 139-155. Provides a close reading of Erasure as part of a general discussion of the notion that a work of literature needs to be tied to its origins in order to be properly evaluated. S. Thomas Mack

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THE ESSAYS OF AMIRI BARAKA Author: Amiri Baraka (Everett LeRoi Jones, 1934) Type of work: Essays First published: Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963; Home: Social Essays, 1966; Black Music, 1967; Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971; Selected Plays and Prose, 1979; Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1984; The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, 1991 (edited by William J. Harris); The Essence of Reparations, 2003 A Poet’s Politics Amiri Baraka achieved early recognition as a talented poet among the Beat generation writers and found early fame as a playwright with the award-winning Dutchman (pr., pb. 1964), but his essays are also of major significance. These essays are not limited to literary concerns but comment incisively on music, cultural history, politics, and economics. They are clearly the work of a poet in both their language and their conceptual approach. Baraka’s political views, although controversial, are for the most part visionary. His is a poet’s politics. Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey. After attending public schools and graduating with honors, he attended Rutgers University and Howard University. He served in the U.S. Air Force. After his discharge, he moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1958 to pursue a career as a writer. In New York, Baraka and Hettie Cohen began to publish a literary magazine titled Yugen, which soon became influential as a showcase for poets associated with the Beat generation and in avant-garde art and music circles. Baraka’s associates included poet and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara, painter and jazz musician Larry Rivers, and Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima. In the early 1960’s, Baraka’s essays on literature and political issues began appearing in the avant-garde journal Kulchur (published by art patron Lita Hornick). When collected in book form, these controversial essays reached a large and diverse audience that reacted with varying degrees of enthusiasm and alarm. The essays present Baraka’s thoughts with a challenging directness, and his style of expression is eloquently colloquial and dramatic. The essays were timely when they originally appeared and remain important for the penetrating light they shed on the period and on the literary development of the author. Themes and Concerns Three major themes appear consistently in Baraka’s works. First is an antagonism toward mainstream American culture that begins as an expression of personal disillusionment in poems of Baraka’s Beat generation period (1958-1964) and is later developed during his Black Nationalist (1965-1973) and Marxist (after 1974) periods into a more directly political critique. Baraka persistently views mainstream culture as shal-

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low and hypocritical. He is even harsher in his judgment of the African American middle class. Influenced by Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s assessment of this group in Black Bourgeoisie (1957), Baraka finds the members of this group to be intimidated and unimaginative imitators of their white counterparts. This view is expressed in poems such as “Hymn for Lanie Poo” (1961) and “Poem for Half-White College Students” (1964) as well as in many of his essays. In the discussions of the African American middle class from his later Marxist period, Baraka seems to think of its members as mendacious rather than misguided. He adopts the word comprador, a term used in the Portuguese colonies in Africa to denounce a native who actively assisted the colonial authorities. Baraka’s second theme, complementing this attack on supporters of the status quo, is the political potential of the alienated black masses, whose members are depicted both as victims of a racist society and as inheritors of an authentic vernacular culture rooted in surviving Africanisms. This thesis is developed in Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) and “The Myth of a Negro Literature” (1962), and it reappears in many later essays. Finally, Baraka asserts the efficacy of art to inspire social and political change. In essays such as those collected in Black Music (1967) and “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” written a decade later, Baraka expands this idea into a declaration that it is the artist’s duty to work toward what he variously terms “Black nation building,” “Black liberation,” or “revolution.” Much of the controversy attending Baraka’s essays may be the result of his own suggestion that they be read as an ongoing narrative of the author’s increasingly militant race consciousness and political radicalization. The essays in Home: Social Essays (1966), pointedly arranged in chronological order, present a dramatic record of Baraka’s intellectual development, prefaced by an alarming statement: “By the time these essays appear I will be even blacker.” The book is framed by the biblical metaphor of the prodigal son, which Baraka presents as the testimony of his own repentance. “Having read all of whitie’s books,” he writes, and as the victim of a racially dichotomized society, “I wanted to be an authority on them. Having been taught that art was ‘what white men did,’ I almost became one.” He feels redeemed when he discovers that, as he states in Blues People, “Culture is simply how one lives and is connected to history by habit.” The meaning of this statement is explored in all of Baraka’s essays on literature and music. He extends this investigation into areas of politics ranging from the election of city councilmembers to global concerns. If the status of the African American is less than equal, if “the black man in America has always been expected to function as less than a man,” then Baraka offers African American art as a lever to counter this inequality. Similarly, in “The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation” (1965), Baraka sees the slain minister as a figure who confronted the status quo primarily through the dignified and fearless assertion of his personal manhood and his behavior as a role model for others.

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Essays of the Early 1960’s Home contains a number of eloquent and provocative essays. “Cuba Libre,” first published in Evergreen Review in 1960, is an account of Baraka’s journey to Havana, under the auspices of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, to inspect the cultural results of Fidel Castro’s revolution. With insight and humor as well as righteous indignation, Baraka reports both changes in Cuba and the emergence of his own nascent selfcriticism. “Cuba Libre” and other essays of the early 1960’s are grounded in the same critical view of middle-class America that was the impetus for the poetry of the Beat generation writers. These writers thought that the peaceful image projected during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower masked persistent social problems and deepseated racial resentments that erupted in full force during the 1960’s. On his visit to Cuba, Baraka became aware of the marginality of American literary protest and recognized that what the Beats thought of as social rebellion was, when compared to the political commitment of Latin American writers, rather mild. “The rebels among us,” he wrote, “have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics.” As a result of his experience in Cuba, Baraka’s thought and writings became more politically engaged. In “The Myth of a Negro Literature,” Baraka writes that early African American writers were even less effective than the Beat protesters. In “A Dark Bag,” Baraka reviews several anthologies and collections of African and African American poetry and complains that one will find poems that tell us the black man has been oppressed and generally misused, usually by the white man. Very few of these poems, however, tell us what that is like, at least very few do with even the intensity of Kipling telling us what it is like to do the oppressing, or know people that do.

Baraka redefines his own quest as both poet and critic as an attempt accurately to describe oppression from the victim’s viewpoint, with an intensity that will mobilize resistance to it. Music Criticism In the early 1960’s, Baraka found the intensity that was lacking in African American literature, which was hampered in expression by African American authors’ acceptance of middle-class concerns. The missing intensity was vibrantly expressed in jazz, blues, and gospel music. Black Music (1967), a compilation of magazine writings on jazz, displays Baraka’s considerable talent as an advocate of the racially conscious and artistically advanced art of musicians such as Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman. “Jazz and the White Critic” (1963) argues that the desire of African American intellectuals to be accepted in middle-class American society had prevented them from seriously studying the music, thereby consigning the field to misinterpretation. Ba-

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raka’s own Blues People is a major critical history that offered an innovative thesis. Blues People and Baraka’s subsequent essays on African American music explicitly interpret jazz as the product of the African American masses and as constituting a historical record of their experience as outcasts from mainstream American society. This definition of vernacular art traditions, though controversial, would have an influence on academic critics such as Addison Gayle, Jr., Stephen E. Henderson, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., in their discussions of black aesthetics and African American expressive culture during the next two decades. Baraka argues in Blues People that the art of an oppressed people cannot take the place of freedom and cannot be discussed merely in aesthetic terms. In the place of classical aesthetics, he advocates learning how art expresses either the actual or the desired social condition of those who produce it. In this sense, although the artistic production of slaves might profoundly affect American culture, that art must still contain the protest of its creators and also reflect their vision of how society must be changed to accommodate them. Baraka attempts to identify such values in African American folk and popular music and to trace them to an older set of African survivals and an inherited style of cultural adaptation. Black Music extends the argument into explicitly political terms and also contains one of Baraka’s most important explications of his aesthetic and political philosophy. “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)” presents themes that appear throughout Baraka’s work in all genres. Slavery in the Americas, he contends, not only eliminated African languages but also destroyed the formal artistic traditions of the captives’ native cultures. African American music, therefore, represents a form created in lieu of the older traditions. Baraka suggests that this art form was nurtured primarily in the black church and, among the most alienated masses of African Americans, was extended into secular adaptations such as rhythm and blues. Baraka goes on to compare rhythm-and-blues musicians to contemporary jazz artists, noting that the sophisticated, avant-garde musicians value the African American vernacular tradition more highly than the European artistic approach they have learned. Finally, Baraka attacks the way the commercial music industry coopts and exploits African American musical styles, enriching white performers and producers at the expense of the originators of the art form. The musicians themselves, he says, are very much aware of the political implications of their creativity and resent the socioeconomic situation in which they are forced to work. Baraka’s own contribution is to call for the development of a “unity music” that will combine the political and artistic advancement of avant-garde jazz musicians with the authentic African-derived traditions of popular rhythm and blues and thereby affirm the cultural values that he believes are the legacy of African American history. In 1965, Baraka moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem and renounced his former art world associations. Along with Black Nationalist artists such as Larry Neal, Steve Kent, and Askia Muhammad Touré, he established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. This group vigorously avowed the principle that African American art should be used in the service of political empowerment or, at the very

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least, consciousness raising. The school was also the unofficial flagship of a loose nationwide network of similar community-based art centers and political activist organizations. By 1970, in Newark, Baraka was deeply involved in a successful campaign to elect that city’s first African American mayor. His essays from this period often focus on literary and aesthetic issues but also reflect an increasing political engagement. The Political Essays of the Late 1960’s and 1970’s Raise Race Rays Raze (1971) contains essays that are essentially polemical and are so much addressed to their specific moment that they have not been collected in later editions of Baraka’s work. These essays reflect Baraka’s adoption of the Kawaida philosophy articulated by Maulana Ron Karenga, leader of the militant Los Angelesbased group US. Kawaida, described by Karenga as a black value system, is based on seven moral principles known as the Nguzo Saba and is the basis of the popular yearend holiday called Kwanzaa, which many African Americans embrace as an alternative to increasingly commercialized Christmas celebrations. Baraka’s essays of this period have a sort of religious fervor. They discuss the tactics of grassroots political organizing more often than they engage the political effects of music and poetry. Such grassroots organizing culminated in the National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana, in 1972. By the middle of the 1970’s, Baraka had abandoned Black Nationalism and electoral politics and had begun describing himself as a Third World Marxist-Leninist. The political essays included in Daggers and Javelins (1984) confront global issues and anticolonial revolutions in the developing world and are written from a perspective that Baraka admits has “all the fervor of a recent convert.” The collection’s literary essays reflect the same viewpoint and attempt to discern a revolutionary tradition in African American culture that might parallel anticolonial political struggles. Many of these pieces are relatively brief hortatory speeches, ideological lectures, or book reviews. The volume does, however, include important essays such as “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” “Notes on the History of African/ Afro-American Culture,” and “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle.” “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature” covers much the same ground as Richard Wright’s “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” from Wright’s White Man, Listen! (1957). It reiterates pejorative judgments of early writers found in Baraka’s 1962 essay “The Myth of a Negro Literature.” Baraka’s assessment, with its high regard for folk and vernacular expression, is opposed to Wright’s views. The attempt to trace an enduring left-wing political voice in African American poetry seems awkwardly forced. The style of this and other essays in the collection is a simple, almost textbook prose lacking the clever and entertaining allusiveness of Baraka’s best writing. “Notes on the History of African/Afro-American Culture,” written for a seminar at Yale University, begins from the premise that one must understand both African and African American culture in order to understand either one. Unlike the history pre-

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sented in Blues People, this essay defines culture in terms of the economic organization of societies inhabited by African people and the effects of the slave trade on these systems. Baraka’s sources here are the theoretical writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Among the most effective statements of Baraka’s own revised view of cultural history is “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle” (1979), which applies his theories to contemporary writers as well as to those included in the African American literary canon. This essay also underscores Baraka’s unwavering belief that aesthetics cannot properly be discussed without reference to the economic structures of society that affect both the production and the appreciation of art. From his earliest practice of poetry, influenced by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley’s assertion that “form is never more than the extension of content,” Baraka continued to see literature and art as a process of discovery and instruction. In “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” he chastises Harlem Renaissance writers such as James Weldon Johnson for their adherence to Eurocentric or bourgeois aesthetic concepts. Baraka prefers a “people’s art” of collective and communal participation similar to that of jazz music. Until such an art is made possible by a society that will nurture it, Baraka sees the role of the artist as oppositional both to the value system of the status quo and to those who benefit from an economic system that he believes exploits African Americans. Work in the Twenty-First Century In 2000, Baraka published The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. This collection of the author’s fiction collects the contents of two previous volumes, The System of Dante’s Hell (1965) and Tales (1967), as well as four short stories and the previously unpublished novel Six Persons. His fiction, like his essays, provides an unapologetic look at African American consciousness. The collection is autobiographical, in that it traces Baraka’s development from a young advocate uncertain about his role in the struggle into a conscious social critic and activist. The short fiction dates from 1958 to 1974, and all but one story in the collection portrays Baraka’s Black Nationalist ideology. The single piece that does not is Six Persons, written after he became a Black Marxist. Six Persons represents an intense look at contemporary African American culture, as well as a documentation of his ideological development. In 2003, Baraka published The Essence of Reparations, which provides a detailed discussion of reparations for African Americans. He corrects the misconception that reparations would be a kind of paycheck, positing them instead as a means of social, political, and economic reform. Baraka outlines the oppressing and damaging history that reparations would work to reverse not only by rebuilding African American communities but also by empowering all oppressed peoples worldwide. Being true to his interpretation of Malcolm X, Baraka calls for all working-class and oppressed people to ally themselves against their common capitalist, imperialist, and white supremacist enemies. Baraka has a remarkable Web site, where, in addition to a short biography, a book

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list, and visual and audio materials, he has posted full-text essays. The posted essays include the powerful “I Will Not Apologize, I Will Not Resign,” which is a response to the attacks he received on his poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” “On Teddy Harris’s Work,” “The Slavemasters’ Bloody Banner,” “A Knowers Survey,” “The Revolutionary Theatre,” and the poetic essay “Joseph to His Brothers” are also included on the official Baraka site. Critical Evaluation Critics have complained that Baraka’s essays are uneven, offering flashy rhetoric more often than logically presented evidence or original thought. His music criticism, however, is generally accepted as insightful and innovative. It is clear that his writing has influenced wide audiences and strongly affected younger African American artists. Critics have seen Baraka’s changes of political philosophy as contradictory and confusing. The philosophies he espouses have ranged from Black Nationalism to grassroots political organizing, from Beat generation alienation to a self-proclaimed and idiosyncratically defined Marxism-Leninism. There are, however, several consistent themes in Baraka’s essays. There is also a very clear and unwavering commitment to the social utility of art. “Who is our audience, for whom do we write?” asks Baraka. “Are we educating or titillating? Audience is one large shaper of content, and content is principal.” His essays, beginning about 1965, are most often aimed at an African American readership, and his purpose is to define methods by which those readers can both understand their cultural history and devise strategies of political empowerment that will redress a history of racial and economic disadvantage. Whether or not Baraka’s suggestions are practical, they have been effective in awakening a critical consciousness in an entire generation of readers. Bibliography Baraka, Amiri. Preface to Home: Social Essays. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1998. Baraka’s preface to the 1998 edition summarizes the chronological progression of the writer’s thought over the decades and situates this 1966 collection within the context of his Black Nationalist period. Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A critical biography of the author. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Includes a review of Blues People that questions Baraka’s interpretation of African American music and culture. Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Critical study of Baraka’s ideas as reflected in his poetry. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Thorough discussion of Baraka as poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist. Includes an excellent bibliography.

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Tate, Greg. “Growing Up in Public: Amiri Baraka Changes His Mind.” In Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Opinionated overview of Baraka’s political ideas, as reflected in his poetry and prose. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Massive, comprehensive examination of Baraka’s aesthetic and political work and their mutual imbrication. Lorenzo Thomas, updated by Michael H. Washington and Lori I. Morris

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THE ESSAYS OF RALPH ELLISON Author: Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) Type of work: Essays First published: Shadow and Act, 1964; Going to the Territory, 1986 Literary Career Despite his relatively few major works, Ralph Ellison stands as one of the most influential modern African American writers and cultural critics. Ellison published one novel, Invisible Man (1952), and two essay collections, along with a number of uncollected essays, speeches, and reviews; he also labored for decades on a second novel that remained unfinished at the time of his death. As an essayist and critic, Ellison held to an optimistic view of the possibilities of American life, celebrated African American cultural contributions, especially in jazz and blues, and criticized sociological views that emphasize the bleakness of African American life. Ralph Ellison grew up in Oklahoma City during the years shortly after the territory became a state. He partook of the optimism of frontier life and imagined himself something a renaissance man, capable of achieving whatever he set his mind to accomplish. His interest in writing was at first a response to his wide reading, and he focused more of his time and interest in music, especially jazz and blues, being particularly attentive to craft and technique. After he was graduated from the Frederick Douglass School, a scholarship brought him to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he studied music for three years before leaving for New York to study sculpture. In Harlem, he met the poet Langston Hughes, who introduced him to novelist Richard Wright. Wright encouraged Ellison’s interest in writing, giving him book review assignments and challenging him to write a short story for New Challenge, a magazine Wright edited. Ellison started a novel, Slick Gonna Learn, in 1939 and published eight short stories by 1944. During that time, he worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in New York and edited Negro Quarterly for a year before entering the merchant marine in 1943. During his time in the service, Ellison started a novel dealing with a black American pilot in a German prisoner-of-war camp, but a serious kidney ailment forced him to put the novel aside. When Ellison returned to his writing after the war, he found a different story emerging from his interest in African American folklore and from images of the hero in myth and history. Ellison continued to work on the manuscript of Invisible Man for the next seven years before publishing it in 1952. His first novel was well received and won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison’s first essay collection, Shadow and Act (1964), serves as something of an intellectual autobiography in which he discusses the formative influences of his childhood in Oklahoma City, touching upon themes of racial and cultural identity, folklore, music, and literature. The book’s title alludes both to a line from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (“Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the Shadow”) and to the

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role of cinema as a cultural mythmaker. Ellison comments in his introduction that the essays are concerned “with literature and folklore, with Negro musical expression— especially jazz and the blues—and with the complex relationship between the Negro American subculture and North American culture as a whole.” There are three sections in Shadow and Act: “The Seer and the Seen,” with ten mainly literary reviews; “Sound and the Mainstream,” with seven essays on jazz and the blues; and “The Shadow and the Act,” with five essays on African American culture. The entire collection includes Ellison’s essays and reviews from 1942 to 1964. Creative Possibilities Throughout his essays, Ellison stresses the freedom and creative possibilities inherent in African American culture. A tough-minded individualist, Ellison is more the product of the frontier than the ghetto, more influenced by the library than the storefront church. He is more concerned with the possibilities inherent in his life as a writer than with the limitations. He views the question of identity as universal, not as limited by race, class, or culture. Ellison has always insisted upon his right to define himself, to choose his identity, in the broadest and most expansive terms, rather than to accept the limitations of a sociological description of African American culture. On this point Ellison defines himself most clearly in opposition to Richard Wright’s artistic vision. He insists upon the richness of the African American experience and rejects any sense of impoverishment of spirit, insisting upon his broader literary connections with other American and European writers such as Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, André Malraux, and Fyodor Dostoevski. The two essential essays by Ellison on the question of the African American writer’s identity are “The World and the Jug” and “Hidden Name and Complex Fate.” The second is a fascinating personal and critical essay about Ellison’s reasons for becoming a writer and the formative influences upon him. He defines the act of becoming a writer as a complex act of choice and will. Writers may be “forged in injustice,” Ellison observes, but they transform that experience into a significant art form, rather than insisting upon the importance of the experience itself. In the end, it is the quality of the African American writer’s art, rather than his political engagement, that is primary. Ellison consciously chooses the stance of the African American writer as artist— which is to a certain degree isolating, even alienating—but he disparages what he calls the “stylized recitals” of the African American writer’s past, because that suffering is not necessarily of special interest in itself. Ellison asserts that the process of claiming one’s identity, what he calls making “our names . . . our own,” is basically a personal experience, often an intensely private one. Here is where the writer must struggle to master his or her own craft. Better, he claims, to accept the ironies implicit in one’s condition than to invent an entirely new, untainted identity. In this way, he leads up to a discussion of what it meant for him to be named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was at first a puzzlement, a burden, an embarrassment for “such a

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small brown nubbin of a boy carrying around such a heavy moniker,” but it later became a source of pride. Emerson’s transcendentalism, he implies, provided an ideal inspiration for the young African American writer determined to transcend the barriers of racism and claim his freedom and identity as an artist. Becoming an American Writer Accepting his identity as a writer, however, also entailed certain obligations—to master a bit of technique, to develop a sense of taste, and to address the central cultural issues of his nation and his time. This is what it means to be an American writer. One of the most important of these themes is the disparity between national ideals and the actual behavior and practices of the American people. Ellison insists upon the importance of the African American writer working within the American literary tradition, not outside it. He addresses a broader question of identity beyond that of individual peculiarities—how Americans are all, despite their differences, recognizably “American,” and what that means for the society and for its literature. Thus he would enrich his art as an American writer with the resources of African American speech, folklore, and music to express the complex reality of American experience. Ellison concludes “Hidden Name and Complex Fate” by alluding to Henry James, affirming that being an American is an arduous task, and that difficulty begins with one’s name. Ellison takes great pains to deny that there is a separate African American tradition or aesthetic in American literature. This distinction becomes clear in his essay “The World and the Jug,” in which he answers critic Irving Howe’s attack on Ellison and James Baldwin for ignoring Richard Wright’s militant tradition. Ellison castigates Marxist critics who would tell the African American writer how to think and feel. He rejects the notion that the African American experience is limited to suffering and deprivation, and that to be “authentic” the African American writer must write only of these things. As Ellison insists, the real question is “How does the Negro writer participate as a writer in the struggle for human freedom?” Works of literature are less ideological weapons than affirmations of life, or a particular vision of life. Ellison also warns against any “literary apartheid” of artistic performance or evaluation. African American culture is not a steel jug; it does not isolate the African American writer from white cultural experience. Richard Wright freed himself to become a writer because he had the talent and imagination to do so, not because of any segregated view of his identity or aspirations. His novels are his most important achievement, but his characters should not be confused with the author himself. Nor should Wright’s rather bleak artistic vision be held up as a standard for subsequent African American writers. Ellison insists upon the right to those dimensions of his identity as a writer that do not depend upon race. He refuses to be cast as a protest writer and argues furthermore that what the African American writer must guard against is not lack of anger or indignation but failure of craft—bad writing. Ellison’s goal has been to transcend the conditions of his fate, not be bound by them. In part 2, “Sound and the Mainstream,” Ellison offers portraits of jazz, gospel, and blues performers such as Mahalia Jackson, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, and

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Jimmy Rushing. These Saturday Review sketches from the late 1950’s show Ellison to be a keen and appreciative critic of a variety of African American musical traditions. He praises the improvisational freedom and discipline of the jazz musician as growing out of a musical tradition as demanding as that of European classical music. “The Golden Age, Time Past” offers a nostalgic reminiscence of the Harlem jazz scene in the 1940’s, especially of Minton’s Playhouse on 118th Street, the home of bebop. In “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz,” he criticizes the followers of Charlie Parker for promoting Parker’s self-destructive side without really understanding the sources of inner pain that drove the legendary jazz performer to become a kind of sacrificial figure for a decadent and culturally disoriented public. Ellison much prefers the quiet, underappreciated talent of jazz guitarist Charlie Christian or the funky exuberance of blues and big-band singer Jimmy Rushing. Going to the Territory Ellison’s second essay collection, Going to the Territory (1986), continues his interest in literature, music, and cultural identity. Lacking an introduction or subsections, the book is not as well organized as Shadow and Act, but it does contain sixteen additional essays, speeches, interviews, and book reviews that Ellison wrote between 1957 and 1985. The title of the collection alludes to the end of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), when Huck announces that he is going to light out for “the Territory,” as well as to a blues song by Bessie Smith with the same theme. Ellison’s first essay, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” is based on an autobiographical recollection of his music teacher at Tuskegee, Hazel Harrison, a highly respected concert pianist and teacher who insisted that Ellison must always play his best, regardless of the audience. The essay’s title comes from the image of a hypothetical little man behind the stove at the railway station at Tuskegee who can recognize a poor performance because he knows the music, the traditions, and the standards of performance. Regardless of the supposedly egalitarian nature of American culture, there will always be someone in the audience with high aesthetic standards who can recognize a mediocre performance. Ellison uses this argument to affirm the “melting pot” metaphor of cultural integration, asserting that some knowledge of high culture works its way down through the layers of a democracy. Using the image of a young African American with an eclectic wardrobe, Ellison observes that Americans have continually ransacked and appropriated each other’s cultural forms and modes of expression. In his West Point talk “On Initiation Rites and Power,” Ellison discusses some of the formative influences from his Oklahoma boyhood in shaping his later art. He affirms the richness and diversity of his native Southwestern culture, despite the burden of segregation, and implies that in the tendency to ignore the variety of their society’s cultural expression, Americans are victims of inadequate conceptions of themselves. Ellison affirms the importance of America’s geographical diversity in shaping its national identity, and he reminds his audience that American society cannot define the

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role of the individual, because “it is our fate as Americans to achieve that sense of self-consciousness through our own efforts.” In the talk “What These Children Are Like,” given at the Bank Street School of Education, Ellison talks about the rich linguistic skills of culturally deprived children and reminisces about the rich jazz traditions to which he was exposed as a child. He emphasizes that the term “culturally deprived” is relative, and that, as he discovered in his teaching at Bard College, even white, middle-class college students can be culturally deprived if their education does not adequately prepare them for the real world that they will enter. “The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner” is a defense of Lyndon Baines Johnson against attacks from black militants, and “If the Twain Shall Meet” reflects on the discontinuities of southern history. The title essay, “Going to the Territory,” was originally given at Brown University as part of the Ralph Ellison Festival and as a tribute to the African American educator Inman Page, the principal of Douglass High School in Oklahoma City, which Ellison attended. “An Extravagance of Laughter” presents Ellison’s recollection of a Broadway production based upon Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932). The essay is both a brilliant discussion of the nature of humor and a passionate plea to recognize the full humanity of all Southerners. Ellison points out that he found the production hilarious and laughed to the point of embarrassing his host because he found Caldwell’s poor white stereotypes, grotesques, and caricatures to be so similar to southern racist stereotypes of African Americans. He talks about the power of laughter in defeating discrimination and recalls the “laughing barrels” that boisterous Negroes were required to use in small southern towns so as not to offend white sensibilities. “Remembering Richard Wright,” given as a talk at the University of Iowa in 1971, pays tribute to Wright’s early influence on Ellison, dating back to their initial meeting in New York in 1937. Ellison acknowledges Wright’s impressive self-education and his influence on Ellison’s intellectual development. Ellison argues that Wright had enough confidence in his talent and ability to accept the artistic challenge of making America conscious of itself, especially in regard to race. “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday” pays tribute to the great African American composer and arranger who demonstrated through his work that American jazz possessed a range of expressiveness comparable to that of European classical music. Ellison regrets that, because of the musical and racial prejudices of some of the members of the awards committee, Ellington did not receive a special Pulitzer Prize in music. In his last three essays, Ellison shows a keen knowledge and appreciation of the American literary tradition. “Society, Morality and the Novel” offers a theoretical discussion of the nature of the novel and the social responsibility of the novelist. Ellison differs from Richard Wright and critics such as Irving Howe in insisting that the novel has a broader mandate than merely to serve as a vehicle for social change. In “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy,” Ellison affirms that the health of the novel reflects the health of society. He praises Hemingway and Faulkner for their

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truthful depictions of American life. The United States is only a partially achieved nation, Ellison affirms, but in times of change people lose their sense of who they are and look to the novel and other art forms for reassurance. He criticizes contemporary literature for its cynicism and lack of optimism about the possibilities of American life. In “Perspectives of Literature,” he celebrates the African American as the keeper of the American conscience, the symbol of American hope. The creative imagination of the writer is essential for American democracy because laws and freedom expand in response to the challenges posed by American writers. In Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, Ellison demonstrates his growth as an American literary and social critic, from the young Marxist-oriented WPA worker of the 1930’s to the polished and mature novelist and essayist of the 1980’s. Throughout his essays, Ellison remained a consistent cultural integrationist, insisting upon the central contributions and importance of the African American writer and resisting calls by Black Nationalists for a new black separatist literary aesthetic. Working in the mainstream of American literature helped him, he wrote, to avoid any “segregation of the mind.” Bibliography Benston, Kimberly, ed. Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987. Part 2 of this collection of critical essays on Ellison’s works contains discussions of Shadow and Act by Hollie West, R. W. B. Lewis, John M. Reilly, and John Wright. Busby, Mark. Ralph Ellison. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Chapter 6 of Busby’s critical biography contains an excellent discussion of Ellison’s nonfiction. Hershey, John, ed. Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Includes some early reviews of Ellison’s work, including an important critical evaluation by Robert Penn Warren, and the two essays by Irving Howe and Stanley Edgar Hyman that Ellison responds to in Shadow and Act. Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. Evaluates Shadow and Act within the larger corpus of Ellison’s work. A good discussion of the influences on Ellison’s art. O’Meally, Robert G. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Perhaps the best critical discussion of Ellison’s art. Chapter 8 examines Ellison’s aesthetics in terms of Shadow and Act. Posnock, Ross, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Collection of critical essays on all aspects of Ellison’s career, significance, beliefs, and works. Thomas, P. L. “The Essay as Collage: Ralph Ellison and the Art of Nonfiction.” In Reading, Learning, Teaching Ralph Ellison. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Detailed analysis of Ellison’s nonficton style and its importance for understanding the content of the essays. Andrew J. Angyal

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THE ESSAYS OF C. L. R. JAMES Author: C. L. R. James (1901-1989) Type of work: Essays First published: The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, 1932; The Case for West Indian Self-Government, 1933; World Revolution, 1917-1936, 1937; The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 1938; A History of Negro Revolt, 1938; The Invading Socialist Society, 1947; State Capitalism and World Revolution, 1950; Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, 1953; Facing Reality, 1958; Modern Politics, 1960; Party Politics in the West Indies, 1962; Beyond a Boundary, 1963; Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, 1977; The Future in the Present: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1977; Notes on Dialectics, 1980; Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1980, C. L. R. James’s Eightieth Birthday Lectures, 1984; At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1984; Cricket, 1986 (edited by Anna Grimshaw); The C. L. R. James Reader, 1992 (edited by Anna Grimshaw) A Voice from the Margin C. L. R. James was the first major West Indian writer to publish in Great Britain, but he was much more than that. In his long life, C. L. R. James was a historian (his 1938 account of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, is a classic); a novelist (Minty Alley, 1936); a leftist activist and thinker (he debated Marxist theory with Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky during Trotsky’s exile in Mexico); a pan-Africanist (Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, 1977); an original literary critic (Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, 1953, discusses the ship in American novelist Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick, 1851, as a factory or proletarian society ruled by the entrepreneur/Stalin-figure Captain Ahab); a nationalist politician (he returned from England to his native Trinidad in 1958 and briefly edited The Nation, the newspaper of the People’s National Movement, during the island’s transition to independence, before breaking with his former pupil, prime minister Eric Williams); and a cricket enthusiast and journalist (his highly original 1963 book Beyond a Boundary is an argument for cricket as an art form and a discussion of the sport in its West Indian social context). Despite his many and varied achievements, James is little remembered except by a rather small group of aficionados and fellow left-wing writers and activists. Much of his writing concerns doctrinal points of socialism, and some of his best and most original books (Beyond a Boundary, for example) had trouble finding publishers. He was not only a pioneer for younger West Indian and other black writers but also a prolific and original thinker and essayist. His best writing resonates with a palpable, infectious enthusiasm for ideas and argumentation. The range and quality of his writing qualify him to be included in the first rank of twentieth century intellectuals.

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Background James was born into a middle-class black family in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1901. He was a precocious student. At the age of nine, he won a scholarship to the island’s most prestigious secondary school, Queen’s Royal College, from which he was graduated in 1918. His original ambition, to be a novelist, bore fruit with Minty Alley (published in England in 1936 but written in 1928), a partly autobiographical novel of Port-of-Spain street life in the same tradition as later West Indian fiction such as George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and the early novels of V. S. Naipaul. Soon James discovered political and intellectual interests that took him away from fiction. Although he had contemplated and promised a sequel to Minty Alley, he never wrote another novel. He came under the influence of Captain Arthur Cipriani, a white Trinidadian labor leader. James’s biography of Cipriani was published privately in England in 1932, the year James emigrated there; parts were republished by Hogarth Press, the firm of novelist Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, as The Case for West Indian Self-Government in 1933. In 1933, James joined the left-wing Trotskyist movement in England. That same year, he traveled to France, where he began research for his history of the Haitian revolution of 1791 to 1804, which, he argued in The Black Jacobins (1938), was a harbinger of liberation movements to come in Africa and elsewhere. As he wrote with a characteristic touch of pride in a preface to the book’s 1963 edition, “In 1938 only the writer and a handful of close associates thought, wrote and spoke as if the African events of the last quarter of a century were imminent.” He remained to the end ideologically a socialist, though eventually he broke with the orthodox Trotskyists. He was an early and eloquent anti-Stalinist, and a number of his essays deal with the ideological and historical complexities of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the internecine feuding within the Bolshevik Party. James’s socialism ultimately was based on a deep-seated belief in the political wisdom and good sense of the mass of ordinary people. This belief is in evidence as early as Minty Alley, the middle-class protagonist of which, writes Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, “comes to understand what Trinidadian life is like by listening to ordinary people instead of by writing books.” Writing on the Whole of Culture James’s interests were too broad, and his intellect too supple and wide-ranging, for him to settle on a single topic or set of topics to write about. He wrote essays on literature (“Bloomsbury: An Encounter with Edith Sitwell,” “Whitman and Melville,” “Notes on Hamlet,”), history and contemporary politics (“Abyssinia and the Imperialists,” “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro,” “Abraham Lincoln: The 150th Anniversary of His Birth”), the history and theory of revolutionary socialism (“Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA”), African liberation movements (“The People of the Gold Coast,” “The Rise and Fall of Nkrumah”), and—one of his greatest loves and

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enthusiasms—cricket (“What Is Art?” from Beyond a Boundary, and “Garfield Sobers,” a profile of a prominent West Indian cricketer). A major theme of James’s literary criticism is an insistence on the importance of the social and historical context of all literature. The American poet Walt Whitman “was caught and swept away by the grandeur of the national awakening in 1860, and to this day he achieved the heroic only in celebration of the Civil War and the victory of national union,” he writes in “Whitman and Melville” (1953). In the same essay, he calls Melville’s portrayal of Ahab “a masterpiece—perhaps so far the only serious study in fiction of the type which has reached its climax in the modern totalitarian dictator. . . . [Melville] saw the characteristic social types of his day and because he lived at a turning point, he saw also a characteristic social type of the age which was to follow.” Even more sweepingly, he asserts in “Notes on Hamlet” that Hamlet’s position, his training, his sense of duty, his personal affections and the spirit of his father, embodiment of the old regime—all are telling him what he ought to do. But he himself, his sense of his own personality, is in revolt, against this social duty. That in itself, however, would not be sufficient to make Hamlet what it is—the central drama of modern literature. What gave Shakespeare the power to send it expanding through the centuries was that in Hamlet he had isolated and pinned down the psychological streak which characterised the communal change from the medieval world to the world of free individualisation.

James goes on in the same essay to dispute with Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare’s fellow Elizabethan playwright, who called Shakespeare “not of an age but for all time” (James’s paraphrase). “Not quite,” retorts James. “Shakespeare was for all time precisely because he was so much of an age. But he was fortunate in his age.” What Norman Sherry, the biographer of the British novelist Graham Greene, has said of his subject could also be said of James: “Fame was part of the spur, but only part. I think he was ambitious to write well.” Writers, like the practitioners of many other professions, are driven in part by the desire for fame. James was no exception to this. His emigration to England, like that of other West Indian writers to follow, was motivated largely by literary ambition. Early in his career, however, he became politicized, and an ineradicable devotion to intellectual honesty led him away from the mainstream spotlight. Any writing career involves a tension between ambition and integrity; there was never a doubt which of the two James chose when forced. As Anna Grimshaw writes in her introduction to The C. L. R. James Reader (1992): “At a time when Stalinism was pervasive among the British intelligentsia, James was often reminded that it was his Trotskyist politics which stood in the way of a promising career as a writer, historian and critic. But by 1938 James had moved a long way from his early ambitions.” James’s 1954 essay “Popular Art and the Cultural Tradition” displays his intellectual, rather than personal, ambition. The essay begins with a characteristically bold Jamesian claim: “I propose to show that artistic creation in the great tradition of Aes-

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chylus and Shakespeare finds its continuation today in films by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Eisenstein.” James goes on to argue that the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus and Shakespeare wrote plays for the popular audiences of their days, and that their works “were not produced as culture. And it is noticeable that the greatest of all literary critics, Aristotle, did not know drama as culture but as a popular art.” Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and the filmmakers “give three stages in the development of the individual man to his social environment which is the true history of humanity.” This essay, like James’s literary criticism generally, conveys boldly his faith in ordinary people as carriers of human freedom and culture, and incidentally his disdain for other critics. “Whenever I read that school of critics who persistently treat Shakespeare as if he were engaged in writing cosmic profundities for philosophic minds, I say to myself: if indeed it were so, it is very strange that he did not take more care to see that these were printed.” “American criticism,” he sniffs, “lives almost entirely in little magazines read only by students and professors.” Postcolonial Politics Throughout his life, James was concerned with the history, societies, and political prospects of peoples of African descent. His first important polemical essay was The Case for West Indian Self-Government, published as a pamphlet in England in 1933. In it he mercilessly skewers the English colonial class. “Bourgeois at home, he has found himself after a few weeks at sea suddenly exalted into membership of a ruling class,” writes James of the colonialist. Empire to him and most of his type, formerly but a word, becomes . . . a phrase charged with responsibilities, but bearing in its train the most delightful privileges, beneficial to his material well-being and flattering to his pride. Being an Englishman and accustomed to think well of himself, in this new position he soon develops a powerful conviction of his own importance in the scheme of things and it does not take him long to convince himself not only that he can do his work well—which to do him justice, he quite often does—but that for many generations to come none but he and his type can ever hope to do the work they are doing.

These surely were provocative words in the England of 1933. He goes on: “Always the West Indian of any ambition or sensibility has to see positions of honour and power in his own country filled by itinerant demigods who sit at their desks, ears cocked for the happy news of a retirement in Nigeria or a death in Hong Kong.” In the same essay, James discusses the uneven rivalry between light- and darkskinned black people in Trinidad. He takes to task local politicians of color, asserting that “sycophancy soon learns to call itself moderation; and invitations to dinner or visions of a knighthood form the strongest barriers to the wishes of the people.” Anna Grimshaw calls “Abyssinia and the Imperialists” (1936) “an early acknowledgment of the importance of an independent movement of Africans and people of African descent in the struggle for freedom.” In “The Revolutionary Answer to the

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Negro Problem in the USA” (1948), James asserts: “On the question of the state, what Negro, particularly below the Mason-Dixon line, believes that the bourgeois state is a state above all classes, serving the needs of all the people? They may not formulate their belief in Marxist terms, but their experience drives them to reject this shibboleth of bourgeois democracy.” “Abraham Lincoln: The 150th Anniversary of His Birth” (1959), published in the Trinidadian nationalist paper The Nation while James was its editor, celebrates Lincoln as a writer and visionary statesman, calling him “the champion of democracy, such a champion as it has rarely had in all its brief and troubled modern history.” He compares Lincoln’s speeches favorably to those of Edmund Burke, Demosthenes, and Pericles, and displays his own learned egalitarianism by claiming that Lincoln owed his simplicity of language to his childhood in a “backward” rural community. “All those who are continually bemoaning the backwardness of the common people would do well to meditate on this,” he notes. This appreciation of Lincoln shows the remarkable empathy of James’s biographical sensibility as well as the pedagogical tone of much of his writing. James wrote “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro” as an appendix to the 1963 edition of The Black Jacobins. In it he asserts: “West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people in the Haitian Revolution. Whatever its ultimate fate, the Cuban Revolution marks the ultimate stage of a Caribbean quest for national identity.” He makes explicit a thematic link that had been evident even in the book’s first edition: “The writer [James] had made the forward step of resurrecting not the decadence but the grandeur of the West Indian people. But as is obvious all through the book . . . it is Africa and African emancipation that he has in mind.” “Lenin and the Problem” (1964), a discussion of the role in the Russian Revolution of Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin, appeared in a journal in the African country of Ghana, whose anticolonial revolution of 1957 set the stage for national independence movements elsewhere in Africa. Its opening is characteristically both defiantly bold and pedagogical: “The countries known as underdeveloped have produced the greatest statesmen of the twentieth century, men who have substantially altered the shape and direction of world civilisation in the last fifty years. They are four in number: Lenin, Gandhi, Mao Tse-tung and Nkrumah.” Kwame Nkrumah was the leader of the Ghanaian revolution, the background of which James discusses in “The People of the Gold Coast” (1960). In “The Rise and Fall of Nkrumah,” James writes of the revolutionary leader’s “former grandeur and present decadence” and of his own reasons for breaking relations with Nkrumah. He asserts that “democracy is not a matter of the rights of an opposition, but in some way or other must involve the population” and prophesies darkly that “Africa will find that road or continue to crash from precipice to precipice.” James’s later essays include “Black Power” (1967), “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student” (1970), “Black People in the Urban Areas of the United States” (1970), “Picasso and Jackson Pollack” (1980), and “Three Black Women Writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange” (1981). Although James was in-

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tensely interested in the rights and social and political status of African-descended peoples, he always discussed those issues in the context of a liberal, mass-based, Marxist-inspired democratic socialism. This emphasis has led some to accuse him of Eurocentrism. Selwyn Cudjoe writes that “Even though James alludes to the English periodicals that came to his [childhood] home and his fascination with English literature, the influence of African religions and culture upon his life seems to have been elided in his attempt to demonstrate that he hadn’t learned about European literature under ‘a mango tree.’ ” He wished to demonstrate “how much the origins of his work are to be found within Western European thought and civilization.” James was, in other words, an extremely complex person and writer. No brief overview can adequately convey the substance and breadth of, and the intellectual pleasure given by, his writing. The best place to start is with either The Black Jacobins, his lively, rigorously researched history of the Haitian revolution, or The C. L. R. James Reader, edited by Anna Grimshaw, which contains most of the essays referred to in this overview. James’s work “has never been critically and theoretically engaged as it should be,” argues Stuart Hall. “Consequently, much writing on James is necessarily explanatory, descriptive, and celebratory.” The essay collection C. L. R. James’s Caribbean (1992), edited by Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, is all three, yet avoids being either fawning or superficial. It is the mostly very readable work of scholars serious about exploring the biographical and historical background and ideological implications of James’s life and writing. Also valuable is the biography by Paul Buhle. Bibliography Buhle, Paul. C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso, 1988. The first biography of James. Gair, Christopher, ed. Beyond Boundaries: C. L. R. James and Postnational Studies. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pluto Press, 2006. Evaluation of James’s body of work from the point of view of cultural studies. Emphasizes points of intersection and dialogue with such other major thinkers as Jacques Lacan and Antonio Gramsci. Argues that James’s work can be used to found the field of postnational studies. Grimshaw, Anna. The C. L. R. James Archive: A Reader’s Guide. New York: C. L. R. James Institute, 1991. Annotated list of James’s unpublished papers and manuscripts. Henry, Paget, and Paul Buhle, eds. C. L. R. James’s Caribbean. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. Collection of mostly well-written and challenging essays by scholars of James and of the Caribbean, providing an extremely helpful biographical, historical, and theoretical base from which to approach an understanding of James. Stuart Hall’s and Selwyn R. Cudjoe’s biographical profiles of James are especially useful, as is Walton Look Lai’s history of Trinidadian nationalism. Naipaul, V. S. “Cricket.” Review of Beyond a Boundary, by C. L. R. James. In The Overcrowded Barracoon. London: Andre Deutsch, 1972. Reprint. New York: Vintage, 1984. A contemporary review of James’s important, original book on cricket by another prominent West Indian writer.

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Rosengarten, Frank. Urbane Revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for a New Society. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Considers James’s writings on Marxism and postcolonial struggles, as well as his lesser-known commitment to women’s movements, his research methods, and the importance of style in his work. St. Louis, Brett. Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics: C. L. R. James’ Critique of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Attempts to catalog the uniqueness of James’s critique of modernity, which derives from his unique circumstances as a prolific and multifarious voice of humanist Marxism and a political activist negotiating postcolonial realities. Ethan Casey

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THE ESSAYS OF ISHMAEL REED Author: Ishmael Reed (1938) Type of work: Essays First published: Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, 1978; God Made Alaska for the Indians, 1982; Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper, 1988; Airing Dirty Laundry, 1993; Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War, 2003 A Provocative Essayist Though he is one of the best-known contemporary American writers of both poetry and fiction, Ishmael Reed has created the greatest level of controversy with his efforts in the genre of the essay. Beginning with his first published collection of essays, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), which contains pieces from the early and mid1970’s, Reed displays a talent for both satire and humor that led one writer in The Nation to compare him to Mark Twain. Refusing to argue from any one limited cultural or political paradigm, Reed has criticized, and been criticized by, all sides of the political spectrum. His conflict with what he calls right-wing “ethnic chauvinists” motivates much of his nonfiction. His even more famous feud with feminists such as the African American novelist Alice Walker (who refers to herself as a “womanist”) has also drawn considerable publicity. Whether commenting on racism, religion, writing, or popular culture, Reed maintains one constant in his nonfiction: He wittily and strenuously argues the merits of turning a multicultural perspective on all areas of American culture. Reed is most eloquent on the need for multicultural education and publishing. He comments on this topic in the title essay of his first volume of nonfiction, “Shrovetide in Old New Orleans,” and multiculturalsim is a constant theme throughout many of his collected essays. The resistance to multiculturalism is, in Reed’s opinion, one of the many legacies of racism. While in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, Reed is struck by the many African and Caribbean African components of the celebration. In particular, he is impressed by the many elements of the African religion of Vodoun, or Voodoo, in the midst of a nominally Christian celebration. Not surprising, Mardi Gras becomes for Reed an emblem of the unacknowledged contributions of African Americans to American culture, ranging from the jazz music that accompanies many parades to the costumes and disguises that are of obvious African or African American origin. Reed also finds that there are many African Americans eager to capitalize on the reputation of Mardi Gras; one native Louisianan, the self-appointed “prince” of Voodoo, makes a living by defrauding tourists on “Voodoo” tours, sleeping in a coffin, and “geeking,” or biting the heads off chickens. Even after observing this display, though, Reed finds Mardi Gras to be the most enjoyable of American holidays, a welcome mingling of cultures replete with such inescapable contradictions. As he writes,

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Mardi Gras is also of ancient origins, when it was a celebration involving fornication, self-castration, human sacrifice, and flagellation with goatskin whips. Therefore, it’s appropriate that it takes place in the South, where, in a former time, whipping was the chief entertainment.

Reed’s most pointed comments on North American racism appear in three later essays, “God Made Alaska for the Indians,” from the volume of the same name; “Race War in America?” a chronicle of a discussion among a group of African American intellectuals and writers; and “Hymietown Revisited,” a defense of Jesse Jackson, a contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential slot in 1984 and 1988. In “God Made Alaska for the Indians,” Reed reports on the conflict among two groups of Native Americans, the U.S. government, and several environmental organizations spearheaded by the Sierra Club. The Sitka Tlingits, a Native American tribe, attempted to develop a portion of tribal property on Admiralty Island, Alaska, only to be opposed by environmentalist legislators and sued by the Sierra Club. The resulting legal battle, Reed notes, included and in many ways paralleled much of the history of the struggle of Native Americans with European Americans. Reed considers the conflict to be paradigmatic of relations among the races, though after protracted litigation the Sitka Tlingits won the right to use the land that they already owned and achieved an unexpected victory against the American system. “Race War in America?” is another meditation on racial conflict in the late 1970’s. Similar to the longstanding conflict between European immigrants and Native Americans, the relations of the races in South Africa serves as a starting point in this discussion. Reed, at different times and locations, asks a distinguished group of guests including novelist Al Young, playwright Ntozake Shange, and critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., about the possible effects that a racial war in South Africa might have on race relations in the United States. Few of those questioned think that a racial war is imminent, but many see a recurrent fear of such a war operative in American culture. Reed theorizes that it is indeed a fear that recurs during American political and economic crises. In “Hymietown Revisited,” published in Writin’ Is Fightin’ (1988), Reed defends an often-publicized remark made privately by presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, who referred to Jewish Americans as “Hymies.” Reed compares the treatment accorded Jackson with that given to notable white politicians, including Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Richard Nixon, and others, who have made public comments with strong racial overtones. While Jackson’s comment received tremendous attention in the media, comments by white politicians that were insulting to a wide range of ethnic groups garnered little if any attention. Reed discovers here the same thing that he found in his previous essays: the double standard that lies at the heart of both American media and official culture, in which the dominant race is innocent until proven guilty and minorities are treated in the opposite fashion.

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Religion and Multiculturalism Reed’s views on religion reflect his multicultural concerns. He often writes on the topic of Vodoun, an African religion that is known in the Americas as Hoodoo or Voodoo. Unlike Christianity, which is monotheistic, Vodoun is pantheistic and even animistic in its various forms. Reed offers some commentary on the influence of Vodoun in the New Orleans Mardi Gras in “Shrovetide in Old New Orleans,” but his most extended analysis and exposition on African-originated religions is found in the essays “I Hear You, Doc,” in the same volume, and “Soyinka Among the Monoculturalists,” in Writin’ Is Fightin’. “I Hear You, Doc,” is the chronicle of Reed’s trip to Haiti, where Vodoun is practiced extensively. Reed finds Haiti to be a country of contradictions but not the grisly place many Americans believe it to be. The political situation, according to Reed, is no different from that of many U.S. allies. Reed discovers Haitian culture and religion to be refreshingly energetic, contrary to the stereotypes disseminated by U.S. media. He first encounters relics of Vodoun shortly after his arrival at the Port-au-Prince airport, which is decorated with a huge mural of a Voodoo ceremony. Prepared for all eventualities, Reed travels with a “Watson Cross,” which allegedly melts when it comes in contact with the evil eye (Haitian president Joseph Nemurs Pierre-Louis is said to have been brought down by the evil eye). Reed sees evidence of the practice of Vodoun everywhere in his travels around the impoverished island, but eventually he becomes disturbed by the number of armed guards and policemen who also appear to be everywhere. He is relieved when he finally arrives back at the Miami airport, only to be ignored by a Cuban American waiter and insulted by an airline official. In a typically ironic comment, Reed notes that the insults assure him that he is back home. Reed draws parallels between the negative stereotyping of African religions by the media and the negative reception given to an American production of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman (pb. 1975, pr. 1976). Reed’s essay “Soyinka Among the Monoculturalists” is a metacommentary on the North American critical response to Soyinka. Reed finds most of the criticism of the play to be based on a misunderstanding of African religions, referred to as “cults” by one critic. Reed ironically notes that even the Muslim character in the play, Sergeant Amusa, voices his appreciation of the Yoruban religion, something that American critics apparently missed. One critic terms the traditional tribal beliefs of the African characters in the play to be “tribal superstition,” which leads Reed to compare the criticisms to the tradition of the persecution of religious nonconformity in North America, from the Salem witch trials to the hanging of the Quaker Mary Dyer. Reed and the Critics Just as Reed finds evidence of intolerance and monocultural bias in religion, he finds no end of bigotry in his relations with critics and fellow writers. Reed has written a number of laudatory essays about fellow writers, founded his own publishing company, and served as the president of the Before Columbus Foundation, which is dedicated to recognizing the achievements of writers from a wide range of ethnic

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backgrounds. He continues, however, to answer criticism that he is bigoted and intolerant in his views concerning writing and American culture. One of Reed’s most provocative essays on contemporary writing, “American Poetry: Is There a Center?” is featured in God Made Alaska for the Indians (1982). Reed wrote the essay after attending a benefit poetry reading in 1977. Many of the writers present at the reading had connections with the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, proclaimed to be the center for American poetry by an article in Time magazine, although in this case, as Reed notes, the Buddhists were primarily transplanted Easterners. Reed deconstructs the idea of a center for American poetry by pointing to the multicultural flowering of the arts taking place on the West Coast and in many other areas in the United States. The atmosphere and hype concerning Boulder finally bears out Reed’s thesis that poetry includes many of the components of modern urban civilization: “competition, greed, sexism, and racism.” Reed’s decentering of American poetry is balanced by his lauding of those writers who he feels best represent the multicultural tradition. Among African American writers, he is especially complimentary of the works of Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara. Reed has written several essays on the works of Richard Wright, the most detailed being “Native Son Lives!” included in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. Wright, in Reed’s opinion, is an exemplary writer who went beyond mastery of his art to question the taboos that lie at the center of black-white relations. Hurston, whose revival was occasioned by admirers such as Reed, is noted not only for her fiction, which accurately depicts African American folklife, but also for her extensive nonfiction works, such as her pioneering work on North American Voodoo. Chester Himes, whose work has also enjoyed a revival, received a positive review from Reed for The Quality of Hurt (1972), the fascinating first volume of his autobiography, covering his years as an Ohio State University fraternity man, an Ohio state prison inmate, an expatriate in Paris, and a literary celebrity. Meanwhile, playwright August Wilson and the novelists Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara are among the contemporary African American writers whom Reed admires most. All these writers function, to paraphrase Reed’s comment on Wilson, as bearers of the African American tradition. In addition to his concern for writers who sustain the African American tradition, Reed has written essays on numerous other North American writers from outside the Anglo-American tradition. Reed introduces the subject in “The Multi-Cultural Artist: A New Phase in American Writing,” written in 1976 for the French newspaper Le Monde and included in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. Reed notes, as have many following him, that demographic and other changes have dethroned New York as the centralized capital of American writing. New York, Reed argues, has been replaced by a number of regional centers, especially areas populated by Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans. Because of Reed’s California connection, all four of these ethnic groups have influenced his own writing, a fact evidenced by, for example, the Native American raven figure in his novel Flight to Can-

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ada (1976) and his references to Japanese culture in Japanese by Spring (1993). In other essays, Reed proudly points to his own ethnic background, including his Cherokee heritage. Reed’s concern with multiculturalism has often led him into the realm of popular culture, usually to criticize the representation of ethnic groups by the information and film industries. Among the most publicized conflicts that Reed has faced has been his dispute with the African American novelist Alice Walker over the 1985 film version of Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple. In the essay “Stephen Spielberg Plays Howard Beach,” in Writin’ Is Fightin’, Reed attacks the portrayal of African American males in the film. He begins the essay with the observation that an audience of feminists in Berkeley, California, had identified the typical rapist as an African American male, although, he notes, more than three-fourths of convicted U.S. rapists are white. Such a stereotype, Reed argues, can be attributed to the images purveyed and sold by the multinational media, in particular the film studios. Reed argues that in the film version of The Color Purple “all of the myths that have been directed at black men since the Europeans entered Africa are joined.” In particular, Reed emphasizes the depiction of African American males in the film as rapists and wife-beaters; these characterizations, he argues, are soon generalized to include all African American males. In particular, Reed points to the eager adoption of the generalization by the mainstream media, including such film critics as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. The media began to use the film’s fictional African American male characters as examples of the behavior of real African American men. Reed appeared on The Today Show in 1986 to criticize this media trend. His remarks caused a furor, during which he was described as a misogynist and a racist. Reed responded that American film and television function as propaganda organs and that they can easily be used to demonize a segment of the population, just as the Nazis used film to demonize Jews. Airing Dirty Laundry (1993) is a frontal attack on media propaganda, mainly concerning the portrayal of ethnicities in the news and, more specific, the connection of crime and varying ethnicities. Reed’s main argument is that the correlation between crime and African Americans represented explicitly and implicitly throughout the American media is fictional: Crime is widespread through all ethnicities, including whites, and it is widespread through all locales, including suburbia. The collection’s title essay, “Airing Dirty Laundry,” explores these points in depth. Reed reviews media portrayals of various minorities in the United States and takes a closer look at the idea of a “model minority.” Noting that African Americans receive praise for airing their race’s dirty laundry, Reed’s final call to action is to air everyone’s dirty laundry. Doing this, Reed argues, will free the United States from its fear and its secrets, providing the opportunity for Americans to rebuild racial relationships. To further these goals, the essays that follow the title essay investigate specific representations of race within the public arena. The collection includes such titles as “Clarence Thomas Lynched Again,” “Rodney King and I,” and “Mike Tyson and the White Hope Cult.” This volume also contains

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profiles and reviews of many African American leaders Reed feels have been misrepresented or underrepresented by the media. The essays in Reed’s Another Day at the Front (2003) reinforce his claim that, for African Americans, each day is another day at the front. African American life represents a battle for freedom and justice, in which every African American is a veteran of the front lines. In his introduction, Reed recounts a question posed to him by Patrick Reardon of the Chicago Tribune, who wanted to know if Reed thought the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, would affect Americans’ civil liberties. Reed replied that African Americans’ civil liberties had been threatened for three hundred years. Thus, the essays of this volume reveal the discrimination faced by many contemporary African Americans, in direct rebuttal to those who argue that racism is no longer a problem, that it no longer occurs, or that it is falsely attributed to some as a result of political correctness. In “Another Day at the Front,” Reed suggests that people who “believe that blacks are P.C.-ing or making up things” can learn at first hand by imitating the GriffinSolomon test. Griffin and Solomon were white men who changed their features and passed as black and who experienced discrimination they never had as whites. Other essays discuss veterans such as Quincy Troupe, a poet and professor who has been integral to African American arts and politics, and civil rights leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, both of whom developed the Tuskegee Institute and cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), among other accomplishments. Reed also covers figures on the other side of the front, such as John Calhoun, vice president to Andrew Jackson and a supporter of slavery. While his references to September 11 are few, his point that it was not the first terrorist attack to take place on American soil is well made. Reed has become an articulate spokesman discussing a wide range of problems facing not only African American men and women but also a number of other oppressed ethnic groups. His relentless pursuit of the truth as he sees it has made him a popular figure in American culture, as well as an object of fear to those who oppose him. Bibliography Bugeja, Michael J. Review of “New and Collected Poems” and “Writin’ Is Fightin’,” by Ishmael Reed. Southern Humanities Review 24, no. 3 (1990): 291-295. Omnibus review of Reed’s poetry and nonfiction. Notes that Reed has progressed from the avant-garde to the mainstream of North American poetry (or that the mainstream has moved toward him). Argues that Reed continues to be one of the most honest, thoughtful, and provocative writers on the literary scene. Dick, Bruce Allen, ed. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. London: Greenwood Press, 1999. Comprehensive collection of interviews, criticism, and reviews of Reed’s work from the 1960’s to the late 1990’s. Points out that Reed’s work changes with each publication, in an effort to shake up the status quo, necessitating a corresponding change in scholarship.

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Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Fundamental work of African American literary criticism. Using the work of Ishmael Reed as a paradigmatic example, Gates investigates the importance of the rhetorical tactic of “signifying” in African American literature. “Signifying” is a form of verbal gamesmanship often introduced into Reed’s fiction and nonfiction. McWhorter, John H. “Still Losing the Race?” Commentary 117, no. 2 (February, 2004): 37-41. Disagrees with Reed and several other scholars, claiming that they misrepresent contemporary American race relations. Argues that racism is not as prevalent as Reed claims and that, for the problems that do exist, Reed offers no viable solutions. Mercer, Joye. “The Improvisations of an ‘Ethnic Gate Crasher.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 1993, p. A5. Short biographical and literary portrait of Reed emphasizing his later work, particularly the novel Japanese by Spring. Emphasizes Reed’s efforts on behalf of multiculturalism, including remarks by Reed concerning the necessity of preaching and improvising. Punday, Daniel. “Ishmael Reed’s Rhetorical Turn.” College English 54 (April, 1992): 446-461. Extended analysis of Reed’s use of rhetorical techniques in his fiction, with the novel Reckless Eyeballing (1986) used as a paradigm. Punday examines the various rhetorical modes present in the fiction, including signifying and “double-consciousness.” Reed, Ishmael. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Edited by Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Collection of interviews conducted between 1968 and 1995. Reed offers commentary on some of his more controversial views, particularly concerning the role of the media in the characterization of African American males. Jeff Cupp, updated by Ashley Argyle

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THE ETHICS OF IDENTITY Author: Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954Type of work: Cultural criticism First published: 2005

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Form and Content In his wide-ranging book The Ethics of Identity, Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the enormous scope of human “identities,” including beliefs, self-concepts, patterns of behavior, and labels. For Appiah, identities are multiple, overlapping, and context-sensitive; some are fundamentally important and enduring, while others are trivial and transient. Each normal individual possesses a unique sense of personal identity, and almost everyone also shares a variety of collective identities with other persons. The range of identities is almost infinite, as they can be based on nationality, race, religion, gender, profession, political ideology, or family, as well as many other associations and activities. Observing that one’s choices among alternative identities largely determine one’s individuality, Appiah refers approvingly to John Stuart Mill’s ideas about individuality, which Mill sees as an “enterprise for self-discovery,” and becoming the “captain of one’s own soul.” He argues that the development of individuality is a significant element of well-being and is an “intrinsic good” so long as it is part of a good life that gives others their dues. There is, however, an inevitable tension between treasuring this individuality and taking collective identities seriously, for individuality necessarily involves characteristics that make one distinct and unlike others. For the most part, Appiah argues, collective identities serve as “instruments of selfcreation,” provide purpose and meaning to people’s lives, and “create forms of solidarity.” In addition, participation in identities is a good thing, “because we enjoy it and, other things being equal, it is a good thing for people to have and to do what they enjoy having and doing.” Nevertheless, when looking at the great diversity of collective identities in the world, Appiah recognizes that there are numerous ways in which collective identities can go wrong; for example, they can be tyrannical and provide motivation for oppression and social conflict. When discussing the intriguing question of why a person develops a particular kind of individuality, Appiah makes a distinction between two psychological points of view. The first, which he calls the “authenticity picture,” holds that a person discovers his or her true self, which was just waiting to be found. The other perspective, the “existentialist picture,” asserts that a person exists first and then has the ability to choose the kind of individuality that he or she wants to achieve. Appiah declares that neither of these perspectives is entirely correct. The authenticity picture mistakenly suggests that a person’s nature is entirely fixed at birth. In contrast, the existentialist picture ignores the extent to which environment and genetic inheritance have profound impacts on the development of individuality.

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The identities of a person are unquestionably rooted in both informal socialization and formal education. In discussing the latter, Appiah quotes James Mill: “the end of education is to render the individual as much as possible an instrument of happiness, first to himself, and next to other beings.” Appiah recognizes the state’s interest in the role of public education for promoting those civic values that are conducive to the development of competent citizens. Because he is somewhat pessimistic about the capacity of humanistic knowledge to perfect the moral faculties of young persons, he suggests that humanistic knowledge is best pursued for its own sake. He notes, for instance, that Radovan Karadzic, who shelled Bosnian Serbs in the pursuit of ethnic purity, was an eminent scholar of the works of William Shakespeare. Analysis Appiah defends a perspective of “liberal cosmopolitanism” based on the premise of universal human dignity—the idea that “each human being has responsibilities to every other.” He insists that this perspective is entirely compatible with particularistic identities and endorses the value of commitments to local allegiances and communities—even moderate forms of nationalism. Rejecting those forms of cosmopolitanism that enjoin “uniformitarianism,” he fondly remembers that his father, a patriot of Ghana, taught him that he was a citizen of the world, but his father “went on to tell us that we should work for the good of the places where—whether for the moment or for a lifetime—we had pitched our tent.” In contrast to those cosmopolitans who view nationalistic and tribal loyalties as inevitably associated with hatred and conflict, he asserts that “living in political communities narrower than the species is better for us than would be our engulfment in a single world-state.” While recognizing the values of localism and moderate nationalism, however, Appiah is highly critical of extreme ethnocentrism, whether it be Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, or another such variety. Emphasizing that humans can learn from the open-minded examination of alternative achievements, he quotes his favorite philosopher, John Stuart Mill: “there is no nation that does not need to borrow from others, not merely particular arts or practices, but essential points of character in which its own type is inferior.” He observes that Mill’s statement is similar to a proverb from his home country of Ghana: “In a single πολις [polis, or political order] there is no wisdom” (Kuro koro mu mni nyansa). Appiah assumes that humans share a common biological nature (with a range of individual variations), an idea related to his criticism of moral relativism. Some moral principles, moreover, such as toleration, individual liberty, and benevolence, are of universal validity and application. Appiah distinguishes between two kinds of identities, those based on “ethics” and those based on “morality.” In defining the two terms, he follows Ronald Dworkin’s distinction, using the “ethics” to include “convictions about which kinds of lives are good or bad for a person to lead,” while reserving “morality” to refer to “principles about how a person should treat other people.” Although Appiah finds the distinction helpful, critics will note that behavior toward others is always a major criterion in deciding whether a life is good or bad. More important, Appiah describes a “well-lived

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life” as “something more than a life in which our preferences are well satisfied,” insisting that moral duties normally take priority over ethical considerations. At the same time, however, many ethical identities (unrelated to morality) are also of fundamental significance to individuals and societies. Although he “largely tries to abstain from metaphysical commitments,” Appiah admits that this is not entirely possible. On the issue of free will, for instance, he endorses Immanuel Kant’s position: “We have to act as if freedom is possible even though we can’t provide any theoretical justification for it.” The choices of human beings are responses to reason, not just the consequences of a web of cause and effect. Based on this premise, Appiah can write that “the final responsibility for each life is always the responsibility of the person whose life it is.” At the same time, nevertheless, much of a person’s individuality is a consequence of socialization within the context of the cultural ideas in which a person is raised. The notion of identity “posits both a self with the freedom to create itself and a self created in relation to collective identities.” While humans possess a margin of free will, they live their lives within “webs of interlocution.” Appiah concludes: “We do make choices, but we don’t individually determine the options among which we choose.” As a result of some of his previous writings, Appiah gained a reputation (sometimes unfairly) as one of the most prominent critics of Afrocentrism. In The Ethics of Identity, nevertheless, he praises the political and cultural achievements made by autonomous Africans while living under difficult and oppressive circumstances. When discussing diversity, he observes that Africa has much more cultural variety than does North America, particularly in regard to languages. He also makes some interesting comments about the historical identities of African Americans. He observes, for example, that during the era of Jim Crow many African Americans desired recognition of what they had in common with white people. He therefore finds it ironic that many African Americans have been attracted to Afrocentrism since the Civil Rights movement, at a time when cultural differences and discrimination have been diminishing. Although The Ethics of Identity is provocative and stimulating, its arguments are sometimes rather abstract and without clear conclusions, which is a not uncommon feature of philosophical writing. Appiah does not claim that he has solved all the philosophical problems relevant to the ethical analysis of human identities. Indeed, he declares that he perceives his book to be “a conversation starter, not a conversation stopper.” Critical Context Appiah is widely admired as an eminent philosopher of the early twenty-first century. Because of his multicultural and outsider experiences, he is extremely well positioned to write about the complex relationship between personal and collective identities. He was born in England and raised in Ghana by an English mother and an African father who was a prominent politician. After completing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Cambridge University, he moved to the United States to teach at several prestigious universities. As an openly gay man, moreover, he understands what it means

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to be disrespected and considered an outsider by many persons in the dominant society. While he praises and identifies with aspects of Western culture, he also celebrates numerous traditions and cultural achievements of Africa, and he makes it clear that he continues to take pride in his Ghanaian identity. Bibliography Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Difference. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Short book that discusses most of the themes in The Ethics of Identity, but is more concise and accessible. _______. “Response to Jorge Gracia, Michele Moody-Adams, and Martha Nussbaum.” Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (Summer, 2006): 314-322. In answering three critics of The Ethics of Identity, Appiah clarifies and summarizes several key theories put forward in the book. Feldman, Noah. “Cosmopolitan Law?” Yale Law Journal 116 (March, 2007): 10221077. Critical analysis of Appiah’s writings about personal identity, ethics, and cosmopolitanism. Gracia, Jorge. “Individuality, Life Plans, and Identity: Foundational Concepts in Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity.” Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (Summer, 2006): 283-291. Praises the book as a major accomplishment but criticizes Appiah’s refusal to write more about metaphysical issues. Leib, Ethan. “Rooted Cosmopolitans.” Policy Review 137 (June/July, 2006): 89-96. Discusses Appiah’s views about the tensions and complexities of both being a “citizen of the world” and having local allegiances and particularities. McLean, David. Review of The Ethics of Identity, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Philosophia Africana 9 (August, 2006): 133-139. One of the best of numerous reviews of the book, with an emphasis on Appiah’s views on cosmopolitanism. Moody-Adams, Michele. “Reflections on Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity.” Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (Summer, 2006): 292-300. Asserts that Appiah does not sufficiently appreciate the values of collective identities and criticizes his avoidance of metaphysics. Thomas Tandy Lewis

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EVA’S MAN Author: Gayl Jones (1949) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1940’s-1970’s Locale: Upstate New York First published: 1976 Principal characters: Eva Medina Canada, a forty-three-year-old black woman in jail for killing her lover Davis Carter, Eva’s lover and her murder victim Elvira Moody, Eva’s cellmate, who is intensely interested in the details of Eva’s story Marie Canada, Eva’s mother, who is woven into many of the memories Eva relates The Novel Eva’s Man tells the life story of Eva Medina Canada as she remembers it during her incarceration in a psychiatric prison in upstate New York for the brutal killing of her lover, Davis Carter. The murder was simple enough—Eva poisoned his drink with arsenic. Immediately after Davis’s death, however, Eva bit off his penis and wrapped it in a silk handkerchief. It is for this molestation that she is under psychiatric care. Eva’s Man is divided into four parts. The first, which makes up more than half the novel, begins with Eva’s arrest. In the first person, Eva takes readers back to incidents throughout her life that formed her view and led up to this moment. Eva is the only child of John and Marie Canada; her story begins at the age of five, after the family has moved to New York City. The events of her childhood make up most of this first part of the book. Some center around her mother: She remembers listening in on conversations between her mother and her mother’s friend Miss Billie, particularly those about “The Queen Bee,” a fabled woman whose men all die; she relives her mother’s affair with the musician Tyrone and his advances toward Eva herself. She recalls her nights out with her married cousin Alfonso, who thinks she is too old to stay at home. Alfonso himself wants her, as do the men whom she meets with him—the man with no thumb who frequently eats with them, and Moses Tripp, whom she stabs outside the restaurant to ward off his advances. As her memories intertwine throughout the chapters, they stay silent about her marriage to James “Hawk” Hunn, but she finally devotes a chapter to this time in her life. Hunn is the one man who does not sexually abuse Eva, and she feels great tenderness for him, yet his jealousy is great. When he insists on removing the phone from their home just in case she might hear from imagined lovers, she knows the marriage will not work.

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It is through her intertwined memories that readers learn the story of Eva and Davis Carter, who picks her up in a restaurant and takes her home with him. During the days and nights that they spend together in his room, Eva becomes ever fonder of this man, who waits three days to make love to her because neither wants to do it while she is menstruating. He cages her there and uses her, yet he is patient; he brings her food and drink, and he tries to get close to her. She cannot, however, respond emotionally. She cannot translate her tender thoughts into words, and Davis talks about moving on. Part 2 of Eva’s Man tells the details of the murder. The memories in this short section mix the murder itself with incidents from Eva’s earlier life, particularly her rape, dreamed or real, by Alfonso. Part 3 is made up of dreams and memories that follow the murder, all of which are like nightmares. In this very short section, Eva gives hints of her own misery, telling readers more than she tells those who question her throughout her life: “Yes, I was hurt by love. My soul was broken. My soul was broken.” Part 4 is primarily conversation between Eva and Elvira in prison. The memories that float into Eva’s mind now are liberally punctuated by Elvira, who questions Eva about Davis and begs to “help” Eva. Eva eventually gives in to Elvira’s demands, allowing her to provide the sexual satisfaction Eva has missed since she killed Davis. The Characters Eva Medina’s dilemma could be expressed by a remembered conversation from her childhood: “Mama, where does the bee sting?” “Your heart,” Mama says. “Down in your draws,” says Miss Billie. Is your heart in your draws?

Her own ambivalence about her role as a person, sex object, and lover is made more difficult by the attitude of men toward her: “All they think about is where they going to get their next piece.” Although she thinks often that she must “keep her legs closed,” she remembers and quotes her mother, the voice of experience, who told her that “after you’ve done it the first time, you won’t be satisfied till you’ve done it again.” It is through such fragmentary and often contradictory thoughts, dreams, and statements made in conversation that Jones reveals Eva Medina Canada. The character that appears as she tells her own story is a lonely, silent woman hardened by abuse and desperate for love, incapable of breaking out of the patterns of her past. When Davis keeps her in the room and will not let her comb her hair, it is not surprising that she thinks of herself as “Medusa. . . . Men look at me and get hardons. I turn their dicks to stone.” Jones portrays her both as a defenseless victim of the animal desires of the men who stalk her and as an animalistic temptress herself: the Medusa image, her name (Eva/Eve), and her perceived connection with the Queen Bee. The

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motive behind her final molestation of Davis is unclear; it could be an act of hatred, of getting even for all men’s abuse, or of love, as she wraps the severed member in the silk handkerchief that Davis had wiped her with after they had made love. Equally complicated is Eva’s final submission to Elvira, which ends five years of yearning for sexual and emotional release. Throughout the book, Jones hints at the experiences Eva has had and the places she has been: from the tobacco factories to college, from Connecticut to New Mexico. The person who appears on each page, however, is one whose experience with men pervades her existence and her memories. For her, as for readers, the rest seems not to exist. Davis Carter is a stock character, the typical man to stay away from. He is on the move, fast-talking, and ready to take advantage of Eva. He is presented only through fragments of dialogue and action as Eva remembers them, as are the other men in Eva’s life. All men are bad, Eva seems to say, but all men are somehow irresistible. Elvira serves as a vehicle for the story to be told. It is her insistent questioning that causes Eva to remember and tell the events of her past. She demands to know Eva’s story, and she begs Eva to satisfy her desires: “You could be so sweet to me, if you wanted to,” she says. The parade of men who appear through the book—Freddy Smoot, cousin Alfonso, Marie Canada’s lover Tyrone, and Moses Tripp—present a stereotype of black men taught to treat women only as objects. They are in many ways interchangeable. The interchangeability is emphasized by Jones’s style; as she weaves together fragments from different times in Eva’s past, it is often unclear from which man the remembered remark has come. The few other women mentioned in the novel—Eva’s mother, Miss Billie, the Queen Bee, Alfonso’s wife Jean, Eva’s reform-school roommate Joanne, and Miss Billie’s daughter Charlotte—are presented in terms of their sexual lives. From the beatings Alfonso regularly gives Jean to the advances of the lesbian Charlotte, Eva’s own story is seasoned with the sexual dissatisfaction of the women she comes to know. Themes and Meanings Eva’s plight is recounted in a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness manner. The only organizer is the memory, jumping from one moment in time to another, backward then forward, sometimes by chapter, sometimes by page, sometimes by line. Often a reader is in doubt for a moment about place and character, but the logic of the jump is always clear, for the memory is jolted by specific words and images. She describes watching from behind, as a child, as the Queen Bee crossed the street: “She had a little waist and big hips.” Suddenly she shifts to a conversation with Davis, who tells her, “You got the kind of ass that a woman should show off.” Eva’s Man is a statement about the life of one black woman and, from her point of view, an indictment against men, perhaps black men. All of Eva’s men have thrust themselves upon her, both figuratively and literally, and she has been defenseless

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against their abuses. Her defenselessness is partly because they impose their desires on her and partly because she desires them at the same time that she resents and fears them. She longs for a kind of love that they cannot give her, so she feels like “her heart is in her draws.” She, like her mother before her, is never asked, “How do you feel?” but is repeatedly asked, “How does it feel?” It is being treated as an object, a body, that she resents, and Jones makes this clear by the repetition of images of blood, milk, and semen. Even these fluids become confused, as Eva Medina’s mind does: “The sweet milk in the queen bee’s breasts has turned to blood.” The references to the body fluids punctuate the story. The blood of Eva’s first abuse by Freddy Smoot becomes the blood of her period, which forces Davis to wait three days to have sex with her, then becomes the blood of his mutilation and the blood of a scab on Elvira’s leg. The milk that should have been for babies seemed meant for the men to suck. If Eva has been drained of life by her men, the draining is portrayed by the fluids of her body, which are replaced by the fluids of theirs. Eva frequently refers to herself as Medusa, the snake-haired monster who turned men to stone. However, her application of the name is ironic, because it is Davis who makes her into a Medusa; he never lets her comb her hair. Her self-consciousness about her hair makes readers conscious of her particular predicament: She is a killer of her lover (turned him to stone), but only after she has been made a monster by him and his predecessors (all of whom she turned to stone in the sexual sense). In a sense, Eva herself has been turned to stone by her experience; she is a silent partner in all her relationships and is constantly asked why she will not talk. Her silence is her defense, but it is her shortcoming as well. Davis never knows that she cares for him, and the police never hear her story: “A motive was never given. She never said anything. She just took the sentence.” Critical Context Reviewing Eva’s Man in The New Yorker in 1976, John Updike stated that “we never doubt the honorable motive behind [Jones’s] methods—the wish, that is, to represent the inner reality of individuals who belong to a disenfranchised and brutalized race.” Her reviewers did not agree on whether Jones has accomplished this task in a believable manner. The fact that her interior monologue is “structurally unsettled” and “remote,” as Darryl Pinckney suggests, has given rise to both praise and criticism. The question appears to be whether Jones has given readers a believable character in Eva Medina Canada. If she has, the implications are terrifying, for the world of people such as Eva is even more sinister than one might imagine. If Jones has not, her book may be an unfair indictment on a whole race. Coming after Corregidora (1975), Jones’s first novel (which Pinckney called “harsh and perfectly told”), Eva’s Man first met with a bit more skepticism. Jones herself says that “Eva Canada stands for no one but Eva Canada,” and if anything, Jones has written, she wishes that she had presented Eva in a less realistic, more fragmented manner. Jones has stated that she is interested in “getting at the ‘truth’” of a “particular character.” However, Eva also fits in a long line of American characters

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imprisoned by race and/or sex. Her double bind, made worse by the shackles of her madness and her own lack of identity, results in an extreme case of enslavement. Jones has been praised for her ability to control language; those who praise her argue that the madness, the confusion, and the inability or unwillingness to articulate needs belong to Eva, not to Jones. Her work puts her in the African American tradition with writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Her use of the interior monologue, her fusion of disparate moments from the past, and her interest in motives for violence put her in the tradition of William Faulkner as well. Bibliography Barksdale, Richard K. “Castration Symbolism in Recent Black American Fiction.” CLA Journal 29, no. 4 (1986): 400-413. Considers Eva’s Man an example of fiction depicting men whose sexual insensitivity and violence merit their castration. Eva’s crime is not against Davis Carter specifically but against all black men who have helped to create the sexual world in which women such as Eva and her predecessors have had to live. Byerman, Keith. “Black Vortex: The Gothic Structure of Eva’s Man.” MELUS 7, no. 4 (1980): 93-101. Suggests that Eva’s Man uses the structure of Gothic literature, specifically the downward spiral of the whirlpool, to express the violence and sexuality of the novel. As an insane woman obsessed with sex and certain that men are by nature brutal, Eva gets herself into ever-worse situations. At the same time, her narration conveys to readers her experiences in the same intensifying, spiral fashion, providing an appropriate form for Eva’s madness and dark vision. _______. “Intense Behaviors: The Use of the Grotesque in The Bluest Eye and Eva’s Man.” In Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” edited by Harold Bloom. Updated ed. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007. Suggests that Eva is a “grotesque” character used by Jones to reproach the even more grotesque characteristics of American society, specifically the problem of male dominance. Eva’s final act represents both revenge upon many men and the sexual liberation of all women. Dixon, Melvin. “Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels by Gayl Jones.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Discusses the importance of language in Jones’s work and shows how she ritualizes language to emphasize the rhythms of dialogue. Suggests that Eva’s lack of redemption and inability to control her world are shown by her inarticulateness, her lack of control over language. Mills, Fiona, ed. After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Collection of scholarly studies of Jones. Includes an essay by Megan Sweeney on reactions to Eva’s Man by incarcerated female readers. Pinckney, Darryl. Review of Eva’s Man, by Gayl Jones. The New Republic 174 (June 19, 1976): 27-28. Review that states that Jones’s work is an indictment of black men but that her works are an important addition to American literature in general and not merely to African American literature.

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Updike, John. Review of Eva’s Man, by Gayl Jones. The New Yorker 52 (August 9, 1976): 74-77. Negative review that argues that Jones’s artistic vision gives her character as many problems as do her circumstances. Ward, Jerry W. “Escape from Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1983. Examines the unrealistic, nonlinear form of Jones’s books. Suggests that although Jones’s novels represent a departure, Eva’s Man is similar to slave narratives; Eva is enslaved both by racism and sexism. Janine Rider

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FAITH AND THE GOOD THING Author: Charles Johnson (1948) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1960’s Locale: Rural Georgia; urban Chicago, Illinois First published: 1974 Principal characters: Faith Cross, the protagonist, a young African American woman who embarks on a pilgrimage in search of “the good thing” Lavidia Cross, Faith’s mother Todd (Big Todd) Cross, Faith’s father, a storyteller and a believer in spiritual magic The Swamp Woman, a physically grotesque werewitch who haunts the bogs near Faith’s home Alpha Omega Holmes, Faith’s first love Richard M. Barrett, an elderly former philosophy professor Isaac Maxwell, a young African American journalist Arnold Tippis, a shape-shifter who appears to Faith in various forms The Novel Faith and the Good Thing is a half-philosophic, half-comic narrative that describes the metaphysical odyssey of young Faith Cross. That narrative is related by a voice that is familiar, folksy, and intrusive; it is a voice, moreover, that Charles Johnson favors in much of his fiction. As a result, readers are ever-conscious of listening to (as much as reading) a story being told by a highly self-conscious storyteller. The very physical facts of her parents’ deaths have left Faith alone and suddenly dislocated, though there was tension enough in her world even when her parents were alive. Faith’s father, Todd, had been a man fond of the folk story and a believer in the magic of hoodoo and folk belief; he is a sort of Georgia griot who tries to sensitize his daughter to the mystical possibilities of her world and who tries to describe the often indescribable. At the same time, Faith’s mother, Lavidia, has pulled her daughter in the direction of a traditional, conservative Christianity, and from her deathbed leaves Faith with the legacy of the search for what she enigmatically calls “the good thing.” Trying to identify and to locate that good thing becomes the essence of Faith’s quest. Faith’s first important step in that quest leads her to the Swamp Woman, who lectures Faith on the ambiguities of the good thing itself. Lectures are not enough, however, and after reading a hog’s entrails, the Swamp Woman tells Faith the story of the loss of the good thing (story, storytelling, and the proper “reading” of all sorts of

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stories figure largely in Johnson’s novel—readers, like Faith, must be able both to tell and to appreciate the telling of a good story). That particular story describes the mythical quest pursued by Kujichagulia—a man literally born with a question upon his tongue—for the good thing. Beaten back and down by the allied forces of nature, Kujichagulia, near death, is saved, nursed, and powerfully loved by a mountain girl named Imani; that love, though, proves less powerful than the need to discover the good thing, and Kujichagulia resumes his quest. Finally, Kujichagulia beholds the good thing and is bathed and warmed by its light, but the effect of his discovery is too great. He dies simultaneously knowing and losing the good thing. The story, as Faith comes to learn, is as much the good thing as the subject of that story is. The good thing itself is a thing now hidden, a “wish deferred.” What truly matters, the Swamp Woman tells her, is that the story of the good thing be good and true and beautiful. That is Johnson’s aim in his novel, and that is the Swamp Woman’s aim in her tale. With the wisdom and music of the Swamp Woman’s voice ringing in her ears, Faith heads off in the direction of Chicago. The alien landscape of Chicago, however, only heightens Faith’s dislocation, and a nature that is already precarious, fragile, and innocent suffers mightily on the mean streets. Robbery, rape, and prostitution, in quick succession, annihilate Faith’s personality, strip her of her essence, and turn her into a mere object. Her quest for the good thing veers radically off course and sends her into “West Hell.” Temporary redemption presents itself in the form of a marriage to Isaac Maxwell, a marriage Faith manipulates into being. The marriage provides an immediate ascension into the material comforts of middle-class life, but it does not unlock the secret to the good thing. Indeed, nothing good really ever comes of this marriage, largely because of Faith’s failure to assert her own self and her own identity. When Faith asserts what she feels to be her own desire, her own will, and involves herself with Alpha Omega Holmes, that assertion leads to pregnancy, childbirth, abandonment, and fiery death. Faith has little choice, finally, but to return to Georgia, where, coming full circle, she seeks and discovers the meaning of the good thing in the being of the Swamp Woman herself. Identities are there exchanged, as are the secrets and stories inherent in those identities. Faith relocates herself and discovers within that self the elements of the good, the true, and the beautiful. These elements, says Johnson, sustain us and are, in fact, always with us. The Characters Faith Cross bears the philosophical burden of her name: She searches for meaning, holding on to a faith that at times weighs her down. Competing modes of belief flow through her like the blood in her veins, feeding both heart and mind with the energies of spiritual desire. Her quest moves through descent and ascent, and at that quest’s end, Faith emerges resilient and reborn and literally reimagined. Faith’s origins in the deep South implicate her in a complex web of belief: folk legend, African hoodoo, revivalist Christianity. Those varied strands work to entangle

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her in a philosophical crisis, although Faith, in her youth and innocence, hardly recognizes the extent of that crisis. Told by the Swamp Woman that she is a “Number One”— a good person, but one who must be directed on the right path to avert disaster—Faith elects a path that she hopes will lead her to the good thing her mother described in her dying breath. As she later learns, though, that path is but one of many to the good thing. The characters she encounters along that path all figure as philosophical emblems— the quest becomes nearly allegorical—as well as flesh-and-blood eccentrics in an eccentric landscape. Each character who enters and disrupts Faith’s life has a story to tell, and usually that story ends up challenging Faith’s own slowly developing confidence in herself and in the good thing. Only Richard M. Barrett, the penitent robber and philosopher, comes close to affirming Faith’s quest; his Doomsday Book, filled with pages of white emptiness, suggests the indefiniteness of the essence that Faith seeks. His presence in Faith’s life as a “haint,” even after his death, confirms the hopeful virtue of his intent. Faith’s self-designed marriage to Isaac Maxwell marks the complete and profound extinction of Faith’s identity. Maxwell looks to possess Faith in every way, to use her spirit and thereby transform her into mere shadow, one of the “dead living.” Maxwell is tortured by a philosophical avarice that demands the acquisition of power—power enough to sustain the awful expenditure of will that so enervates his spirit. When Faith’s child is killed in a boardinghouse fire and Faith herself is burned almost into nothing but a ghastly shell, she is summoned back to Georgia by the Swamp Woman and back to the spirit that inhabits that more familiar landscape. Faith finds her spirit linked more closely to that of the Swamp Woman than to the spirit of any other creature she has come to know in her search. Indeed, the search is the good thing and is just one of several searches Faith will eventually pursue. Meanwhile, she literally takes on the guise and form of the Swamp Woman, who leaves the Swamp to live the character of Imani, widowed wife of that other searcher after the good thing, Kujichagulia. Faith is back home in the good place, her life itself transmogrified into the good thing. Themes and Meanings This novel overflows with philosophical content, largely because Charles Johnson himself is an academically trained philosopher. Faith’s search for the good thing almost naturally shapes itself as a search for the essence of the good life and for spiritual certainty in a world darkened by the ineluctable fact of death. Johnson is certainly concerned with the establishment of self in such a world: How do we (or “I”) form relations with all that is not part of that “I”? How can Faith define an independent and coherent identity amidst a world crowded with imperious “others”? To what degree is “the good thing” linked to the nature of the self? One of the places Faith looks for answers is in the art that is the story. Storytelling figures largely in this novel as a form that best expresses those qualities of goodness, beauty, and truth that have long been fundamental to the humane life. Unimaginable

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power resides in the story, in its magic, in its transforming potential; art and artful language shape the chaos of life into a kind of order that allows the self to emerge in full. To grasp the force of language is to discover the energy inherent in the “code,” that secret and subversive pattern of expression known to the surviving selves. That code may be structured upon silence as well as sound: What we hear in the gaps between words may bear as much meaning as the noise of the words themselves, and the code that describes our private selves becomes a language that demands public usage. What readers ultimately find in both the story and in the telling of the story is the good thing. This is a truth that many contemporary fiction writers, Johnson among them, are coming to understand and to express in their work. It is perhaps the preeminent truth of the modern storytelling art. Storytelling bears intimate connection to perception as well. What is perceived is what becomes real. What is imagined into story becomes the substance of life. In such a way, humans bear the awesome weight of the past and their responsibility to history; they reconfigure that past as part of a still-evolving present, and by doing so liberate themselves into that present. People so often attempt, says Johnson, either to live free of history or to live overburdened by history; while the force of the past is undeniable and real, people do have other choices available. What people must find, Johnson argues, is the story that best reconciles their present lives with the long and effective history that precedes it. Thus, Faith moves through several stories that are not immediately her own, and she translates those stories into a language that she makes her own. Grasping language—breaking the code—Faith assumes the ultimate force: the force of the storyteller energized by the unfettered imagination. She shapes her life into a story that takes her to the core of the mystery of the good thing. She becomes the conjure woman, the hoodoo woman, the woman of magical and redeeming power. Faith also uncovers the miraculous nature of love, though that discovery very often is made in love’s absence. Love exists in several dimensions of Johnson’s fictive world, and the objects of love are varied. Quality and quantity are unpredictable factors, but what is predictable is the redeeming essence of love. Love, suggests Johnson, is part of the world’s most basic magic: We do not comprehend its meaning, we cannot measure its extent, yet we know its fine transforming power even as we face (and perhaps face down) the fact of death. As much as life is defined by death in Johnson’s vision, so is it defined by love. Critical Context This first novel by Charles Johnson was quickly noted as a startlingly original effort when it appeared in 1974. Critics remarked on its narrative flair, its challenging philosophical substance, and its unique vision of the African American experience. Faith Cross was described as a “rural Candide,” and the story of her journey was called a fanciful, “latter-day Arthurian legend.” Important to the context within which the novel developed is the fact that Johnson worked on it under the eye of writer John Gardner. The signs of Gardner’s profound

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influence are evident in both the novel’s style and content. Johnson’s penchant for the exaggerated, for the fabulistic, for the sometimes outlandish strikes a most Gardneresque note for the attentive reader. Like Gardner, too, Johnson sought to create a particular type of “moral fiction” (to use Gardner’s phrase), one that affirmed certain philosophical and ethical verities. As a result, Johnson was early on pegged as a “philosophical novelist,” a title he does not particularly dispute and one that has been borne out in his subsequent works of fiction. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, is the fact that Gardner demonstrated to Johnson the place of the African American writer within “the Great Tradition”; aesthetics, argued Gardner, transcend race. The well-told and significant story takes its content from very basic philosophical and moral truths; what shape those truths assume in their telling remains the prerogative still of the writer. This interracial, artistic connection between Johnson and Gardner deserves closer study. The shifting nature of this novel—its swings from hoodoo incantation to philosophical surmise to historical account—also hints at certain connections to the work of Ishmael Reed, though Johnson does not possess Reed’s radical wit or irreverence. In Faith and the Good Thing, Johnson urges a fairly realistic vision of the modern African American personality upon his reader. The heady infusion of Western European philosophy into the African American spirit of the novel makes this work unusual in African American fiction, giving it an impressive and ironic intellectual and cultural range. This first novel, above all, revealed the promise that Johnson has certainly gone on to fulfill in his later work. Bibliography Byrd, Rudolph P. Charles Johnson’s Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Reads Faith and the Good Thing philosophically, as a treatise on the nature of the good. Conner, Marc C., and William R. Nash, eds. Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Another consideration of Johnson’s work as an intervention not just in literature but also in philosophy. Collects essays on both the philosophical issues raised in Johnson’s novels and the issue of the relationship between the novel and philosophy as such. Davis, Arthur P. “Novels of the New Black Renaissance, 1960-1977: A Thematic Survey.” CLA Journal 21 (June, 1978): 457-491. Thematic and historical survey of New Black Renaissance writing. Places Faith and the Good Thing squarely in the heart of this resurgence of African American fiction. Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Within a broad and sophisticated discussion of African American writers, Johnson talks about Faith and the Good Thing. Comments on the dramatic structure of the novel, a structure fed by the tension felt by Faith as she moves between the beliefs of her father and of her mother, and between the beliefs in magic and in science. O’Connell, Nicholas. At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest

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Writers. Seattle: Madrona, 1987. Contains an interview with Johnson in which he discusses the nature of the artist, a figure almost naturally infused with a sort of passion. He also dissects the intricate relations between philosophy and literature, defining himself in the process as a philosophical novelist. Olderman, Raymond M. “American Fiction, 1974-1976: The People Who Fell to Earth.” Contemporary Literature 19 (Autumn, 1978): 497-527. Examines Johnson as part of a generation of writers who share a “mutuality of concern” in their fiction. Identifies Johnson as an eclectic writer, as one who partakes of various modern and postmodern elements in the shaping of his fiction. Like other writers of this generation, Johnson evinces in his fiction an impulse toward change and toward movement. Olderman describes Faith and the Good Thing as a “new-style fable” that fashions a model world replete with soul as well as with sorrow. Gregory L. Morris

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FALLEN ANGELS Author: Walter Dean Myers (1937Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1967-1968 Locale: Vietnam; Harlem, New York First published: 1988

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Principal characters: Richard Perry, a seventeen-year-old African American who enters the army and serves in Vietnam in hopes of bettering himself and serving his country Harold “Peewee” Gates, another young African American soldier who accompanies Richard on his horrific journey and who provides much of the bravado and humor of the story Judy Duncan, a nurse from Texas who befriends Perry but becomes a casualty of the war Lieutenant Carroll, a religious officer who coins the phrase “angel warriors” for the soldiers and who inspires the men with his prayers and self-sacrifice Kenny Perry, the narrator’s brother, who appears in letters and flashbacks and who motivates the narrator to be a role model The Novel Fallen Angels is a graphic and poignant story that details the coming-of-age of Richard Perry, a young man from Harlem, during his tenure “in country” in the middle years of the Vietnam War. Interestingly, Perry is not immediately identified as African American. The narrator’s race can be deduced by readers, but students tend not to focus on his racial identity until he comes in conflict with both whites and African Americans. Perry is sent to Vietnam due to a “glitch” and is awaiting a medical release because of knee problems resulting from a high school basketball injury. The medical release comes only after Perry has bonded and engaged in striking confrontations with several squad members and has begun to feel a loyalty to them. The novel contains several extremely explicit and disturbing scenes that delineate the violence and ambiguity of the American soldiers’ position in a country they do not understand: Jenkins dies after stepping on a land mine, Perry positions claymores backwards but ironically still wounds the enemy, “friendly fire” kills Americans, and the soldiers come upon beheaded babies and burning villages. In the process, Perry confronts his own mortality and the insanity of war, as when, in self defense, he kills a Viet Cong—an image that haunts the young recruit. The heart of the book is Perry’s voluntary stay with his group after being wounded

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and recuperating. In another episode, Perry and newfound friend Pee Wee Gates become separated from their squad and must strategically and horrifically kill again to preserve their own lives. Both survive with wounds but witness the terrible toll the war exacts on their sense of humanity—as well as in the number of lost lives represented by the parade of silver caskets being sent home. The novel gives no definitive answer to the question of why these U.S. soldiers are fighting in Vietnam. Attempts to answer this question are presented, including answers given during a particularly striking interview by a television camera crew, but none seem satisfactory. The question remains unanswered and gives rise to the perception Perry possesses at the end of the novel: Those not personally involved in the war will never understand what the “warrior angels” have seen and experienced. It is an alienating moment that is depicted in the novel’s final pages, when Perry’s thoughts are back “in country” with those left behind and a man seated next to him in the plane complains about a minor discomfort. The juxtaposition epitomizes the lack of understanding of the war. The Characters The narrator, Richard Perry, is an apt describer of events who acts as a camera lens for readers, viewing the action without filter and without judgment—a reader becomes a participant in the experience alongside the naïve yet forthright young man. Perry comes from a poor family, and the Army acts as his “college” of sorts. He writes home to his younger brother, reminiscing about the old life and advising his sibling on life matters. Like so many of the squad members, Perry must find ways to cope with his fears, guilt, and increasing sense of the absurdity and uselessness of this particular war. Pee Wee Gates provides humor and exciting human interactions. His confrontational style appears to act as his “tonic” for dealing with slaughter and the brutality of his daily experience “in country.” Jenkins, the stereotypical doomed soldier who joins the Army because of family expectations, provides truly felt tragedy when he demonstrates that he is woefully unprepared emotionally for the world of war. His brief appearance is pivotal, forcing readers to question what is required to survive such experiences and underscoring the coping strategies the other soldiers must develop. Lobel deals with the war by visualizing it as a “movie,” thereby abstracting the reality of what he faces. Lieutenant Carroll has coping strategies that include a strong religious faith, prayer, and idealization of the “angel warriors.” It is he who teaches Perry to pray when the young narrator most feels despair and loss. Through these and other characters, Walter Dean Myers shows that war strains human emotional resources to the limit: Perry hallucinates and experiences an out-ofbody episode. He portrays the ability of warfare to destroy the human spirit and the struggle of warriors to preserve their humanity. Themes and Meanings A major theme of Fallen Angels centers on the multiple meanings and ironies of the book’s title. Fallen soldiers may be seen as becoming angels, and Judy Duncan, who appears in the initial pages of the book, is a kind of ministering angel for the injured.

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Furthermore, innocence is often seen as an “angelic” quality, and the loss of this innocence is a powerful motif in the novel, involving all the men who must kill and who learn the realities of war’s evils. Fallen angels may also refer to war’s corrupting effects: Literal fallen angels are former angels who have fallen from grace, succumbed to sin, and become devils. The ambiguity of the title underscores the ambiguity of the war itself and raises the question of who are the devils and who the angels of the story. The title thus raises complex questions and signals difficult answers, contributing to the complexity and multidimensionality of the story as a whole. Myers also portrays the multiple possible responses of soldiers to war’s horrors, as his characters deploy myriad coping devices to deal with their experiences. They attempt to create more acceptable realities to counteract the unacceptable reality of barbaric warfare. They also develop a solidarity that transcends race, petty rivalries, and class status to face their common enemy. The members of Perry’s unit support one another—even in the face of a captain who seeks to sacrifice the unit for his own self-aggrandizement. Finally, multiple ironies in the novel emphasize the contradictory nature of war: Perry is not supposed to be on active duty, and when his medical release is granted and he can leave, he does not. Furthermore, when he sets the claymore mortars facing his own men, enemy soldiers sneak in and reverse them, damaging themselves and saving Perry’s fellows. Gates makes a doll for a child who is then used to deliver an explosive device, killing herself and American soldiers. Critical Context Fallen Angels was written in homage to Myers’s younger brother, who died in the Vietnam War. In addition, the journey of the novel’s protagonist parallels Myers’s own early life. The author left school in 1954 to enlist in the Army. He never served in combat but experienced the military life that infuses so much of the book with realism and pertinence. The novel rings frightfully true. Myers’s ability to bring immediacy to his story through first-person narration, intense situations, vivid language, and striking characters helps young adult readers visualize and understand somewhat what the war was like. Additionally, the novel combines the issue of race relations with the larger issue of war. In Vietnam, the percentage of African Americans volunteering for combat relative to their percentage of the overall population was extremely high. In a government push to increase numbers (Project 100,000), over 41 percent of new recruits were African American. By creating intensely realistic and complex characters, Myers avoids stereotypical one-dimensional depictions, thereby contributing to the depth and meaning of his work. This powerful novel is considered a classic of young adult literature. Bibliography Bishop, Rudine Sims. Presenting Walter Dean Myers. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Brief monograph meant to introduce readers to Myers and his work, providing serious analysis of the novels and of young adult literature generally.

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Goff, Stanley, and Robert Sanders. Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam. Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1982. Study of the experience of African American soldiers in the Vietnam War. Provides useful context for Myers’s novel. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Walter Dean Myers: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Extensive study of the author’s life and work, emphasizing literary analysis of those characteristics of his fiction that are of particular interest to young adult readers. “Walter Dean Myers.” In Writers for Young Adults, edited by Ted Hipple. Vol. 2. New York: Scribner, 1997. Overview of Myers’s career and his place in the young adult canon. “Walter Dean Myers: Fallen Angels.” In Civil Rights Movements to Future Times. Vol. 5 in Literature and Its Times: Profiles of Two Hundred Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them, edited by Joyce Moss and George Wilson. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Study of the place of Fallen Angels in American literary and cultural history, as well as of the Vietnam War and its influence on the book and on American culture. Sherry L. Morton-Mollo

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FAMILY Author: J. California Cooper (1931) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1840’s through the early twentieth century Locale: The rural South First published: 1991 Principal characters: Clora, the narrator, who is born a slave to a woman who kills herself and her master Always, Clora’s daughter, a young girl who loved all natural life as a child only to become embittered by slavery Sun, Clora’s son, who is light-skinned enough to pass as white Peach, Clora’s other surviving daughter Doak Butler, a slave owner who buys Always and fathers her child Sue Butler, the wife of Doak Butler Loretta Butler, Doak’s second wife and the half sister of Always Doak, Jr., the son whom Always swaps with her master’s son The Novel Family is a story of the slave Clora’s children and how her blood flows from its African roots around the world, thus intermingling with that of other races, nationalities, and classes. In the years before the Civil War, Clora gives her master six children, three of whom survive to adulthood. Clora herself commits suicide but “lives” as the narrator of her family’s tale. She glides through time to watch over her favorite child, Always. Always, sold to Doak Butler, learns misery and hatred from her first day as his slave. In short order, he rapes her and causes the death of her beloved sister Plum. By the time he brings home his new bride, Sue, Always has already made herself the real mistress of his small farm. She becomes indispensable to Sue and to Doak’s crippled brother, Jason. Meanwhile, Clora’s other children have found freedom. Sun, her son, has fled north to become a successful businessman. He “passes” for white. Peach, her other daughter, is literally sold into freedom; bought by a man who falls in love with her, she moves to Scotland as the mistress of her own household. Always swaps her son with her master’s. She rears the child whom she names Soon, who was in fact born to Doak and Sue. Her real son is reared as Doak, Jr. As youths, the boys are inseparable. Always watches over both of them but reserves her greatest love for the young master, Doak, Jr. She cares for Soon and loves him in a dif-

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fident fashion, molding him into a good son. She even acquiesces in his going to serve in the Civil War as servant to Doak, Jr., so that he can watch over her real son. In spite of her machinations, she is outmanipulated by the war, in which Doak, Sr., is killed. Before the war, Sue died in childbirth and Doak married Always’s half sister Loretta, who as a girl had helped Sun escape from slavery. Because she had relied on Sun’s unfulfilled promise to rescue her from the boredom and poverty of the rural South, Loretta is angry. Her initial goodness of heart has been replaced by a meanspirited bitterness. As mistress of the plantation, Loretta also must rely on Always, particularly during the hard times of the Civil War, when food is scarce and the threat of violence from runaway slaves and former soldiers is a constant fear. One of those runaways is Sephus, Always’s son, who comes looking for his mother. In one of the most surprising plot twists in this action-packed short novel, Loretta takes him to her bed and conceives a child, Apple. Cooper purposefully makes the blood relationships of this child confusing in order to stress how Clora’s seed has taken root in strange and unforeseen ground: “My father was Loretta’s and Always’s grandfather. They had the same father. Always’s children was Loretta’s husband’s, so Sephus was Loretta’s stepchild and nephew and the father of her child, which was mine and Always’s grandchild and Loretta’s step-grandchild and child and, oh, it can go on and on.” The “yellow” child becomes a real bond between the black woman and the white woman; they settle into an uneasy truce. Throughout the war, Always continues to hoard gold and silver and to dream of having her own place. When Doak, Jr., comes home, he demands that she tell him where his father’s money is buried. In a harrowing scene, Always barters the gold first for her life and then for her own land. In so doing, she gains the everlasting enmity of her son. Reared as a white man, he cannot adjust to his blackness. True to the author’s argument throughout the novel, the real corruptor of blood is money, the basis on which slavery as an institution existed. Clora, whose time on earth is now fading, hurries the final parts of her narrative, in which she witnesses the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Depression, and the pervasive racism that is the legacy of slavery. By this time, her family has spread to the far corners of the earth, and she has lost track of most of them: “All my family, my blood, is mixed up now. They don’t even all know each other. I just hope they don’t never hate or fight each other, not knowin who they are.” The Characters Cooper is an expansive storyteller, and she uses a narrative device in Family that is tricky and not entirely successful as the novel winds down. She asks her readers to suspend belief early in the story by making her narrator a spirit, one who is capable of describing not only events but also states of mind. Consequently, point of view tends to become skewed at times, even though Clora promises from the beginning that Always is her favorite child and the one to whom she will devote most of her narrative attention. Through this narrative device, a reader may be better able to appreciate the

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plight of Always as well as her motivation and character, but the other characters for whom the narrator also professes love become peripheral, tangential to the plot except as foils. Cooper also tends to use dialect only when it is convenient, and the shifts from Standard English to argot are sometimes jarring. Spelling of words in dialect is also not standard; “y’all” in Clora’s mouth becomes “you’ll,” a decidedly unsouthern spelling and pronunciation. Dialogue, however, is limited. The longest exchanges are between Always and Tim on their wedding night and between Always and Doak, Jr., in her hut. Clora, while still alive, seems to suggest that her fate of suicide is inevitable. What she fails to consider is that her children would survive her to continue their suffering. Clora’s spirit, then, is bound to earth so that she can “live” through Always. Unable to impart to her daughter the limited wisdom she gained from her earthbound experiences, she can only observe and cheer as Always takes control of her own fate. None of the characters has psychological depth, barring Always and Loretta. Cooper’s technique eschews emotional subtlety. Her characters are victims or oppressors, enslaved or free, good or bad. In the case of Sue, however, goodness is characterized as essential weakness. White people, even the one “turned” white by his mother’s trickery, are tainted with power. Of the black characters, Always gains power through self-education and ambition, through hatred of her condition and an overweening desire to rise above it. The moment of her change from an ineffectual girl to a determined woman occurs after her rape by Doak Butler. She refuses to follow her mother’s example and kill herself: “I will live. I will live to destroy them like they’ve destroyed me and my mama and my family.” The allegorical nature of the novel is best seen, perhaps, in the very names of the characters, most of whom are purposefully one-dimensional. Sun, Peach, Plum, Apple, Poon: their names come from the concrete, everyday world of antebellum life. “Always” and “Soon,” however, are abstractions, adverbial names meant to suggest the timelessness of the situations of their lives. Always is always hoping, scheming, plotting, and becoming; Soon is the embodiment of the promise of freedom. The former endures; the latter holds within his name the idea of hope. The characters themselves are symbolic and figurative, even as their lives are literally reduced to brief plot notes, for example, “under the invisible hand of Always and the crippled body of Masr Jason, the farm did better and better.” Always embodies the quiet, unnoticed force that makes the land prosper, while Jason, a broken white man tied to his horse, is the ostensible master, representative of the failed system that limped along until war’s end. Language is rich and expressive in shaping plot and character. Sun becomes successful through necessity: “But hunger can see things when satisfied can’t.” Always and Jason “catch” money. An erstwhile suitor is defined by his profession: He is a freedman, the scissor-man.

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Themes and Meanings The offense that was slavery is the central theme of Family. Cooper uses one group of people to symbolize the whole family of African Americans who suffered as slaves. The trials and tribulations of Clora’s children as they live as human chattel serve as stark comparisons to the fulfillment and prosperity they achieve when free. Only Always remains a slave in the South. Her ruthless acquisition of land and money reflects her belief that the earth over which she has toiled all her life belongs rightfully to her. Her freedom is more dear; paradoxically, it is rooted in the very soil to which she is chained. Emancipation, however, does not bring justice but a more pernicious racism, every bit as offensive as slavery. Cooper turns Always’s own son, reared as a white man, into a harbinger of the violence and hatred to come. It is he who invites the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Always and her family, even to the point where her husband, Tim, is killed in defense of his wife and land. Clora, who effortlessly weaves through time, is a sort of black Eve, the mother of a tribe that becomes too numerous, polyglot, and scattered for her to follow. Her family is, after all, the human family. Cooper consciously attempts to raise the hope that from the rotten, inhumane system of slavery can come fraternity, peace, and harmony. Central to the meaning of the story is the relationship between women. Alice Walker has remarked on Cooper’s abiding interest, in her short stories, in how women relate to one another. In Family, even though she is distrustful of Always, Poon realizes that the younger, stronger woman will better both of their lives, and she acquiesces in teaching Always to read, even though it means sure punishment if they are caught. They share understanding not only as slaves but also as women. Always does not question Poon’s devotion to Jason, even after the South’s defeat. She understands that for women such as herself and Poon, who have seen their children sold away, survival is the only concern. Always does not “bond” with any man until Tim comes along. She has reached an accord with Loretta that is shaky at best, but she realizes that the fundamental ties that bind them as women will hold even when subjected to the stresses of the mistress/slave relationship. Clora begins and ends the novel with digressions on the nature of Time, which is “so forever” that it appears seamless. Time is not to be confused or mistaken for history, “lived, not written,” something “to marvel over.” History is past, yet existing in “Time. Time and life. They moves on. History don’t repeat itself, people repeat themselves! History couldn’t do it if you all didn’t make it. Time don’t let you touch it tho.” The author also stresses the importance of freedom, not only in the sense of emancipation from slavery but also in the sense that men and women should be free to become whatever they can. After the war is over, daily life for Always changes abruptly, not perhaps in the actual chores or drudgery but in the knowledge that from then on she was working for herself. She had already realized that all she had to do was die, and with that knowledge came a certain freedom. How much sweeter then was temporal freedom when it came. Slaves and former slaves celebrate the coming of freedom by going to church to

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praise God. Just as education had been denied to many slaves, so had the freedom to worship; in their desire for these basic freedoms, African Americans in the novel share a sense of community. Cooper is not blind to those among the slaves who were snitches or who toadied to the masters, and she even hints, without exploring in any detail, at a slave hierarchy of house versus yard or field workers. She also does not analyze the question of color, except to remark that both Always and her grandmother wanted black men, not whites or mulattoes, for lovers. Implicit in her plot, however, is the theme of blood changing color as it moves through Clora’s children throughout the world. Blood, family, time, history, and freedom: Although specific to one slave woman and her issue, the novel deals with these eternal verities. Always bargains gold for freedom and pride, and her mother, Clora, barters death for time, so that she, too, can see freedom. Critical Context Little has been written, aside from reviews, on Cooper’s fiction. She is better known, perhaps, as a playwright; some of the action in Family is theatrical, even melodramatic. Such a scene is the one in which Always reveals to Doak, Jr., his true birthright. In the soft, flickering light of her mean chicken shack turned into a home, he chokes her in an attempt to stop her from telling the truth. She is able to croak through the stranglehold a barter agreement with her son, who never forgives her. Always is not blameless; it is she who has created this monstrous, vengeful son. The author avoids dealing with the moral complexity of the situation of a loving mother allowing her son, passing as a white man, to go off and fight to preserve slavery. Her other son, Soon, is also problematic in the context of the novel’s ostensible themes. The author certainly does not develop the character of Soon, who never knows that he is white. He is neglected by Always, his mother, and by J. California Cooper, his creator. Cooper is an accomplished short-story writer, and her novel tends to read somewhat like a novella: dense with plot, short on character development, a “mopping-up” denouement. She tells her tale with a certain Rabelaisian gusto and depends on devices familiar to readers of eighteenth century French farce to advance the action. Certainly, Mark Twain is one of her literary antecedents. Family is in the tradition of the slave narrative, as if an oral history project had been transcribed by a ghost. Its language is colorful, vibrant, and seething with outrage at times. It is also a sorrowful plaint against the indignities and unspeakable cruelties that people visit upon one another. The writing also has more than an edge of feminism. Men, aside from Sun and Doak, Jr., are important as types, not as human beings. Whether symbolic, as in the depiction of crippled Jason, or literal, as in the portrait of brutal Doak Butler, masculine character development is limited to action. Always and Loretta are strong women, complex and multidimensional. Lest it be too subtle, Cooper allows Doak, Jr., to articulate the issue before he slaps his mother and dares her to repeat an inso-

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lence: “You are tryin to deal, to bargain with me! A white man!? You are a nigga slave tryin to be smart! And a woman, too!” In her quiet response lies the meaning of the novel: “Just tryin to live, suh.” Bibliography Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann. Black Women Writers and the American Neo-slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Analyzes the role of myth in Family, emphasizing Cooper’s creation of new myths by destroying more traditional ones. Farr, Moira. Review of Family, by J. California Cooper. Quill & Quire 56 (December, 1990): 24. Comments on Cooper’s dialogue, which reflects her experience and is believable. Hoffman, Roy. Review of Family, by J. California Cooper. The New York Times Book Review (December 30, 1990): 12. Describes the novel as being about survival. Even though Clora, the narrator, is a ghost, the book is a living woman’s monologue. Library Journal. Review of Family, by J. California Cooper. 115 (December, 1990): 160. A positive review of the novel. Notes that Cooper occasionally slips out of dialect into Standard English. Matuz, Roger, ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 56. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. Contains excerpts from reviews of Cooper’s short stories and plays, although not from reviews of Family. Mitchell, Angelyn. The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Emphasizes the role of death and disembodiment in Family as a necessary precondition for the psychological liberation and achievement of historical and cultural understanding Cooper portrays. Publishers Weekly. Review of Family, by J. California Cooper. 237 (November 2, 1990): 64-65. A review of the novel, generally laudatory. William Eiland

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THE FARMING OF BONES Author: Edwidge Danticat (1969) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1937-1961 Locale: Dominican Republic and Haiti First published: 1998 Principal characters: Amabelle Désir, a Haitian servant in the Dominican Republic Señora Valencia, Amabelle’s Dominican mistress Colonel Pico Duarte, Valencia’s churlish husband Don Ignacio, Valencia’s Spanish father Sebastien Onius, a sugarcane worker and Amabelle’s lover Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, the dictator-president of the Dominican Republic The Novel Two small nations—the Dominican Republic, originally colonized by Spain, and Haiti, once ruled by France and settled largely by the descendants of African slaves— share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Steeped in their uneasy coexistence, Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian American, uses as the background of her novel a haunting event in the island’s history: the 1937 massacre of Haitian immigrant workers by order of the Dominican dictator, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo. His action was designed to rid his country of Haitians, some of whom had lived there for generations, even though they were needed to work the land. Within two weeks, his militia slaughtered some twenty thousand Haitian men, women, and children. Danticat’s narrator, Amabelle Désir, is a Haitian worker, a housemaid for the pureblooded Spanish family of Don Ignacio and his daughter, Señora Valencia. Years before, Don Ignacio discovered eleven-year-old Amabelle, who had just witnessed the accidental drowning of her parents in the Massacre River, which separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic. He reared her with his own daughter in the latter nation until the two were young women, when their relative stations became clear. Danticat employs alternating chapters written in two distinctive voices. The first, lyric, impressionistic voice reveals Amabelle’s inner self—her dreams, memories, and intense love for the cane cutter Sebastien Onius. The second is Amabelle’s “testimonial voice,” relating events that actually happen. These voices combine narration of ongoing action with glimpses of the narrator’s lost childhood, and they expose her deep longing for her parents. Valencia’s husband, Pico Duarte, a colonel in the militia, leaves his family, because the Generalissimo has put him in charge of a “new border operation” that will result in the mass murder of Haitian workers. The family physician, however, has

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heard rumors of this operation and plots an escape for the servants. Then Haitian watchmen are arrested by Pico and his soldiers; one man is deliberately run over by a heavy truck. The soldiers employ machetes, rather than rifles, to make their attack seem to be the work of angry Dominican peasants rising against the Haitians. Amabelle plans to escape across the border with Sebastien but soon learns that he has been captured. As she flees with Sebastien’s friend Yves, they pass an oxcart piled with bodies, some still alive. They join other refugees in the mountains and eventually arrive at the border town of Dajabón, where they hope to find someone to take them across the river to Haiti. Young bullies in the crowd challenge them to pronounce perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, a test that will identify Creole-speaking Haitians, who cannot properly trill the r. When they fail, their mouths are stuffed with peppered parsley, and they are viciously kicked and beaten. After the beating stops, others rescue Yves and Amabelle. Eventually they cross into Haiti, where she, barely alive, is taken to a makeshift clinic with other severely wounded refugees. Sebastien is never found. Yves brings Amabelle to his mother’s home, where she is welcomed and remains. Following Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, she secretly returns to the Dominican Republic, only to learn that she and Valencia no longer have anything in common. Amabelle chooses not to tell her story or to return immediately to Haiti, but instead enters the river and rests, comfortably suspended, between two worlds. The Characters Amabelle, although relatively naïve, is careful and resourceful, and she knows her place. She still grieves for her parents, but she loves Sebastien—a very quiet, limited love that they both live for, although they are seldom together. After her arrival at the Haitian tent clinic, where she is surrounded by wounded, she sees her reflection in the tin ceiling and cannot tell which face is hers. She has lost her former identity; her face, like her life, has changed completely. The Dominican characters represent different facets of their country. Sheltered Valencia, of pure Spanish extraction, chooses to overlook her husband’s negative qualities, although subconsciously she suspects he will some day leave her. The mestizo Pico, raised in poverty, takes pride in his marriage into a good family. He admires the successful Trujillo and hopes some day to become president himself. Driving carelessly in his haste to join his wife after the birth of twins, he inadvertently kills Joël, Sebastien’s fellow worker, but refuses to search for the body. To Pico, the Haitian’s life is of no importance, although Don Ignacio, who accompanies him, feels shock and guilt at Joël’s death. Devoted to tradition yet constantly questioning it, the old gentleman is troubled by a conscience that the others ignore. Generalissimo Trujillo, a historical figure who is never seen directly, looms over the whole novel. He sets the story in motion; he is Pico’s inspiration, the cruel scourge of the Haitians, and a man so powerful that even the Dominicans dare not speak out against him. His thirty-one-year rule will leave an indelible mark on the island of Hispaniola.

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Themes and Meanings Critic Heather Hewett suggests that The Farming of Bones “explores the impact of nationalism, race, and gender on the bodies of men and women.” Certainly, racial prejudice runs rampant through the novel. In an opening scene illustrating the respective positions of three races, Amabelle serves as an involuntary midwife to her former friend, assisting at the birth of Valencia’s twins. Pico arrives at his wife’s bedside, dismisses Amabelle, and is delighted with the birth of his fair-skinned son Rafael, proudly named in honor of the dictator. He is less pleased with his tiny, darkcomplected daughter. Later, after cane workers invited by Valencia take refreshment on their veranda, Pico smashes the cups they have used. As another critic points out, cane itself becomes symbolic of Haitian suffering. Cane stalks are the “bones” of the title, their sound reminding Sebastien of the breaking of chicken bones. Cutting cane is difficult, brutal work: “ . . . cane stalks have ripped apart most of the skin on [Sebastien’s] shiny black face, leaving him with crisscrossed trails of furrowed scars,” and he bears infected boils on his legs. Watching women workers bathing in a stream, Amabelle notes that “one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.” Such disfigurement is both real and emblematic. As the workers bathe, they scrub themselves with parsley, as they would corpses. For them, parsley is not only a food and a cleansing agent, but also an instrument of torture, as is language (perejil). Haitian bodies cruelly testify, “We are nothing.” Critical Context Typically, the African Caribbean novel reexamines social and political issues through a first-person voice, a commoner who provides an eyewitness account. Danticat follows this pattern in The Farming of Bones, basing her work upon written accounts and Haiti’s strong oral tradition. Her second book, Krik? Krak! (1995), was modeled on some of the stories she heard in her youth and was nominated for a National Book Award. The author has named among her literary influences successful Haitian writer Marie Chauvet. She has also been influenced by the honesty of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) and Barbadian American writer Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Danticat’s strongest influence comes from Haiti itself, a nation largely poor and rural, with a rich folklore. Some critics have questioned the use of so much violence in her work, but such violence is part of the nation’s dark and bloody past. Others praise her inclusion of Creole, the language of the people, in her dialogue. Her great gift is to render so clearly, in simple, powerful words, authentic details that give the true flavor of Haitian and Haitian American culture. In 1999, The Farming of Bones won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Danticat has also received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation grant and was named one of twenty Best Young American Novelists of 1996 by Granta. Critics generally agree that hers is a significant new voice, and she takes a well-deserved place with other writers of African Caribbean immigrant literature.

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Bibliography Hewett, Heather. “At the Crossroads: Disability and Trauma in The Farming of Bones.” MELUS 31, no. 3 (Fall, 2006): 123-145. Examines Danticat’s use of symbols with respect to the mythology of voodoo and the themes of disability, death, and healing. Hicks, Albert C. Blood in the Streets: The Life and Rule of Trujillo. New York: Creative Age Press, 1946. An American journalist’s contemporary account of the 1937 massacre of twenty thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Danticat calls this the most powerful book that her research uncovered. Lyons, Bonnie. “Edwidge Danticat.” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 2 (Summer, 2003): 183-198. Offers a brief history of Danticat’s life in Haiti and the United States, as well as background for the continuing tensions of the novel. Shemak, April. “Re-membering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 83-112. Particularly fine, wide-ranging discussion of how the continued mutilation of Haitian bodies symbolizes the repressive nature of Dominican nationalism. Trescott, Jacqueline. “Edwidge Danticat: Personal History.” The Washington Post, October 11, 1999, p. C2. Excellent short article exploring Danticat’s life and the culture that motivated her. Wucker, Michele. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. Colorful study of social and racial relationships between the two nations, including a chapter on the 1937 massacre and a helpful glossary of Haitian and Dominican terms. Joanne McCarthy

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FATHERALONG A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society Author: John Edgar Wideman (1941Type of work: Memoir/essays First published: 1994

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Form and Content The five essays that constitute Fatheralong are prefaced by “Common Ground,” an introductory essay that defines the terms and assumptions about race and society John Edgar Wideman will use throughout the remainder of his memoir. The common ground that African Americans share as survivors of slavery, Wideman argues, covers a continent, a gene pool, and a history, but African Americans also share the higher ground, both physical and spiritual, that they aspire to reach. What often stands in the way of African American progress, however, is the notion of race itself—the idea that not all people are created equal and that some are born with the right to exploit others. Race not only reduces the complexity of African American cultural history but also confuses and cripples people of any color. If people listen, however, Wideman insists that they can also hear stories of African Americans trying to work out ways to transcend race, such as the stories told in Fatheralong. One antidote to the distorting notion of race, then, is the book itself. The stories here may help African Americans, Wideman hopes, in their struggle to reinvent themselves by giving them a better understanding of what they share as human beings. The memoir itself is less theoretical and much more personal. In essence, the five essays of Fatheralong that follow “Common Ground”—“Promised Land,” “Fatheralong,” “Littleman,” “Picking Up My Father at the Springfield Station,” and “Father Stories”—describe trips that Wideman takes with his father. Some trips are short, as when his father drives him to the Pittsburgh airport after a family visit; some are longer, as when the two men fly to South Carolina to find their Wideman roots. Some are celebratory journeys, as when the whole family converges on Amherst, Massachusetts, for the wedding of one of Wideman’s sons. The trips in Fatheralong are not only geographical and historical but emotional and psychological as well. They describe Wideman’s attempts to understand his father, their roots, and Wideman’s relationship to his own sons. (Appropriately, Fatheralong is dedicated both to Wideman’s father and to his sons.) The book is a memoir of fathers and sons, a geography of growing up African American, and a history of one family’s struggle to come to grips with itself and its society. Wideman’s father, Edgar Lawson Wideman, abandoned his family when his children were still in various stages of youth. The son does not give all the reasons for this breakup, but readers witness its consequences. On occasions when John Edgar and his own family return to Homewood, the African American section of Pittsburgh where he grew up, the visits with family members are difficult, involving complex

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maneuvering to see everyone in turn. Afterward, Wideman feels guilty that he has not spent enough time with his father during these visits. This guilt is one impetus for Wideman’s suggestion to his father that they take a trip together to Promised Land, the crossroads near Greenwood, South Carolina, where Wideman’s grandfather was born. The longest sections of Fatheralong concern that trip and its successful conclusions: the friends they make, the history they uncover, and the relationship they reestablish. Fatheralong is filled with wonderful family detail: It tells of the Reverend T. W. Wideman, who died with his mouth open; the memorable residents of South Carolina whom Wideman and his father meet, such as James “Littleman” Harris and Bowie Lomax; and the cemetery they visit where other Widemans rest. Readers share Wideman’s memories of his Pittsburgh childhood and see him visiting his father at work or sitting on his shoulders at a snowy Thanksgiving Day parade. They also feel the conflict between his parents, the pull of loyalty and betrayal, the tension between competing parental philosophies of life. Wideman’s father stresses self-reliance, while his mother’s emphasizes love. As is the case in his fiction, Wideman’s writing style is well suited to convey this personal story. His prose is full of long, rich sentences that wind around the complex, convoluted family history they relate. His use of repetition—lists of people and places encountered—brings readers closer to the family history. His voice is lyrical throughout, even when it is angry. Analysis In socioeconomic terms, Fatheralong is about places and about the history of African Americans’ journeys to reach them, including the Atlantic crossing to America as slaves in the distant past; the journey to the town of Promised Land, South Carolina, as survivors during Reconstruction in the nineteenth century; the migration to Pittsburgh at the beginning of the twentieth century looking for a better life; and Wideman’s trip back to South Carolina as an adult trying to understand something about this complex history. The book is thus a personal course on reading history and geography in terms of self and family. Throughout the memoir, Wideman analyzes or comments on a great number of current social and political problems, including prejudice, violence, and the economic geography of Pittsburgh, amid which Wideman grew up and which, like so many cities, still stultifies human lives. The United States, Wideman argues, stands between African American fathers and sons, for, among its many scarring effects, the paradigm of race denies African American diversity and makes color a fixed sign of class and thus of inferiority. In the course of Fatheralong, Wideman reveals not only his own personal history, the unique cultural background he shares with his family, and the rich ethnic history he shares with so many others, but also the effects of racism. Wideman tries to penetrate his father’s pride and to describe his dignity during their time together, but, in the United States, neither is an uncomplicated feeling. Because he never details his father’s abandonment of his family, it is difficult to understand the role of “society” in this family’s breakup, except in a very general way. Likewise, and

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as several critics have noted, Wideman does not address his own role in his sons’ lives and in particular his relationahip to the son who is serving a life sentence for murder. The book is thus fractured between a sweeping theoretical opening and moments of poignant memoir of a father and son, but the two halves do not adhere. Like his best fiction, Wideman’s essays balance ideas and images easily. Several incidents have found their way into Wideman’s other work. For example, the autobiographical story of visiting his father in the restaurant in Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh, where Edgar worked as a waiter, was originally told in the short story “Across the Wide Missouri,” published in the collection Damballah (1981). Much of the history of Wideman’s jailed brother Robby, mentioned in Fatheralong, was earlier related in the powerful nonfictional Brothers and Keepers (1984). Many of Wideman’s novels and short stories, finally, are set in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh he revisits in Fatheralong. Critical Context Like Richard Wright (in the autobiography Black Boy, 1945) and James Baldwin (in the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son, 1955, and Nobody Knows My Name, 1961) before him, John Edgar Wideman issues a wake-up call to America about race and racism. Wideman also writes about the sons who have been abandoned along the road of American progress and emphasizes both the responsibilities of fathers for their children and the responsibility of the culture for the deterioration of paternal relationships. Wideman’s book contains important messages about fathers and sons, identity, and relationships. In many ways, Wideman may remind readers of other contemporary African American writers, such as Alice Walker or Toni Morrison. Walker’s rendering of the South The Color Purple (1982) resemble’s Wideman’s representation, and Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) portrays a son searching for his father’s roots in Virginia. Fatheralong also rings with the reverberations of works by male writers, including Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991), Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), and Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book about Men (1990). All are part of an emergent literary consciousness of male roles and gender history. Like Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), finally, Fatheralong is about African Americans reclaiming their history and, by telling it, gaining the higher ground above the shackles of racial ideology. Bibliography Berben-Masi, Jacqueline. “Prodigal and Prodigy: Fathers and Sons in Wideman’s Work.” Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters 22, no. 3 (Summer, 1999): 677-84. Draws on French theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault and finds the parable of the prodigal son in Wideman’s text. Part of an issue of Callaloo devoted to the European response to Wideman’s work. Byerman, Keith. “Reviews.” African American Review 30, no. 2 (Summer, 1996):

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292-93. Good overview of Fatheralong; finds that Wideman has compounded the problem he discusses by not fully addressing issues with his own sons. Hoem, Sheri I. “Recontextualizing Fathers: Wideman, Foucault, and African American Genealogy.” Textual Practice 14, no. 2 (Summer, 2000): 235-251. Deconstructionist study that uses Wideman’s text as the opportunity to talk about the values and limits of genealogical analysis. Pinsker, Sanford. “The Moose on the Family Dinner Table.” Virginia Quarterly Review 71, no. 2 (Spring, 1995): 369-372. Pinsker, like Byerman, points out the issues of race and family Wideman fails to grapple with fully in his memoir. TuSmith, Bonnie, ed. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Reprints interviews with the author by Gene Shalit, Ishmael Reed, and seventeen other writers; includes Michael Silverblatt’s 1995 “Interview with John Edgar Wideman about Fatheralong,” which provides Wideman’s own summary of his book. TuSmith, Bonnie, and Keith E. Byerman, eds. Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Collection of essays addressing both Wideman’s fiction and his nonfiction, from 1967 forward, in a comprehensive study of his career. David Peck

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FENCES Author: August Wilson (1945-2005) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: 1957 and 1965 Locale: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania First produced: 1985, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut First published: 1985 Principal characters: Troy Maxson, a vigorous man of fifty-three Rose, Troy’s wife, ten years his junior Cory, Troy’s son, a high school senior Gabe, Troy’s younger brother The Play The central action of Fences unfolds in the space of a few months in the late 1950’s; it is 1957 when the play begins. The last scene takes place in 1965, on the day of the funeral of the protagonist, Troy Maxson. On that day, the other characters in the play come to terms with the flawed human being who has been the most powerful force in their lives. Their effort to arrive at a just understanding of this man duplicates the effort in which the play involves its audience. Fences offers a sympathetic but unsentimental portrait of its unforgettable central character. In 1957, Troy Maxson is fifty-three years old. He has been married for eighteen years to Rose, whose devotion to him has not necessarily blinded her to the more difficult traits of his character. Their son, Cory, is a high school senior, and his accomplishments on the football field have led to his being sought by a recruiter from a college in North Carolina. Troy also has a thirty-four-year-old son, Lyons, by a previous marriage. Lyons’s visits to his father are generally motivated by a desire to borrow money. Troy also has a brother, Gabe, who as a result of a war injury carries a metal plate in his head; in his damaged mind, he carries the conviction that he is the Archangel Gabriel. Troy feels guilty that money paid to Gabe for his disability has made it possible for Troy to buy the house in which he now lives. Troy has provided Gabe with a roof over his head, but Gabe has recently moved out to Miss Pearl’s rooming house, desiring increased independence. Troy’s past emerges in the course of the play. At the age of fourteen, after a showdown with a brutal father, Troy set out on his own, hitching his way north to Pittsburgh. With no job and no place to live, he stole to survive. After the birth of Lyons, it seemed he had to steal even more. After killing a man in the course of a robbery, Troy was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, where he developed a gift for baseball. By the

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time Troy was released from prison, his wife had gone, taking Lyons with her. Troy married Rose but continued to dream of playing baseball in the major leagues. He was born too soon, however, for that dream to be possible: By the time Jackie Robinson was playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Troy was in his mid-forties. Troy now works for the sanitation department, and he has dared to question the practice of assigning the responsibility of driving the trucks to white workers, while black men do the lifting. His friend Bono listens patiently to Troy’s complaints, but Troy now has something else on his mind. Troy has been giving his attention to Alberta, who works at Taylor’s, a local hangout. He claims there is no harm in his conduct. Troy used to run around with women, but that was before he married Rose. Troy is skeptical about his son’s football ambitions. Troy’s experiences with baseball have taught him that young black men have no future in major-league sports. In addition, Cory’s obsession with football is leading him to forget his chores, including helping Troy build the fence Rose has asked for, and to neglect his job at the A&P. In fact, Troy has obstinately refused to talk seriously about signing the paper that would allow Cory to accept the football scholarship he has been offered. He is angry that Cory has cut back on his hours at the A&P; he is now, Troy understands, working only on weekends in order to give himself time for football. Troy is so hard in his refusals that Cory asks Troy why he has never liked him. Troy asserts that liking is not the issue. Cory is his son, and he looks after his son because that is a man’s responsibility. Two weeks later, Troy is promoted to driver. Bono notices that he has stopped by Taylor’s on his way home to give the good news to Alberta. Troy has no driver’s license, but he is not worried. He has other matters on his mind. He has learned that Cory has been lying to him; Cory has not been working at the A&P at all. As a result, Troy has ordered the coach to dismiss Cory from the football team, thus killing Cory’s dream of college and all its promises. Cory accuses Troy of being motivated by fear; he is afraid that his son will turn out to be better than he is. That, says Troy, is “strike one.” The following day, after bailing out his brother Gabe, whose habit of breaking into song when the spirit moves him has led to an arrest for disturbing the peace, Troy tells Rose that Alberta is carrying his baby. He tries to explain that his relationship with Alberta does not imply any rejection of Rose, to whom he has otherwise been faithful for eighteen years. With Alberta, he can momentarily escape the pains, pressures, and disappointments of his life. Rose reminds him that she has shared those pains and has not looked for her own escape. As the anger of the moment grows, Troy grabs Rose’s arm. When Cory comes to his mother’s defense, Troy tells him that that is “strike two.” Alberta dies giving birth to Troy’s daughter. Troy begs Rose to take care of the child, who is, after all, innocent. Rose agrees. The child will have a mother. However, Rose tells Troy that he will be a womanless man from then on. At work, Troy is doing well. He has been promoted; he is now picking up white people’s garbage. Gabe, however, is now in an institution. Troy carries the guilt of having signed the commitment papers, an act all the more troubling because it means

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that some of the pension money that is rightfully Gabe’s now comes directly to Troy. Cory, in the wake of Troy’s infidelity, now treats his father with open disrespect, telling Troy he no longer counts. This provokes a struggle in which Troy manages to prevail. There is no longer any hope of reconciliation between the two men, and Cory leaves home. He returns on the day of Troy’s funeral in 1965. Troy’s daughter Raynell, now seven, meets her brother for the first time. Lyons is there, too, released for the occasion from the workhouse, where he is serving time for cashing other people’s checks. Cory, now a corporal in the Marines, tells his mother that he will not attend the funeral. Rose tells Cory that he will not become a man by disrespecting his father. Troy had many faults, she says, but he always meant to do good more than he meant to do harm. Cory does not directly answer what his mother has said, but he tells Raynell to get ready so they will not be late for the funeral. Gabe has come with his trumpet to blow open the gates of heaven for his brother’s arrival. The trumpet has no mouthpiece, and when he raises it to his lips, no sound comes out. On the verge of an awful realization, Gabe instead begins a dance and something like a song. As he finishes his dance, he is satisfied that the gates of heaven stand open for Troy. Themes and Meanings August Wilson has said that the creative process that led him to write Fences was set in motion not by an idea for a plot, or even for a character, but by an image: the image of a black man holding a baby. The work of the playwright, then, was to come to know who this black man was and to discover and expose the particulars of his situation. In hands less assured than those of Wilson, the image might have yielded a sentimental caricature. Wilson, however, had no desire to create a plaster saint. The many flaws that Troy Maxson acquired in the course of coming into being do not finally cancel out the strength that Wilson must have responded to in the initial image. Whatever else may be true of Troy, he is a man who will not abandon a child. Troy stands at the center of Fences, one of the handful of great dramatic characters that have so far emerged in African American theater. The challenge this character represents to an actor seeking to portray him constitutes the surest guarantee that the play will continue to hold the stage. That Troy Maxson is a hard man is one of the most immediately evident things about him, and one way to uncover the meanings of the play is through an examination of the origins, the limits, and the consequences of his hardness. The origins of Troy’s hardness are to be found in his personal history. His clearest early model of manhood was the father he was forced to reject. On his own at fourteen, Troy had to harden himself against a world at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to his desires. Released from prison to a world that defined itself in the limits it places on his aspirations, he made his bargain. He married, fathered a child, and he worked hard. Prison drove him to stop committing robberies. To a painful degree, however, life has driven him to stop hoping. A man can perhaps advance himself in small ways if he is willing

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to stand and fight; thus, Troy can improve his position in the workplace. Big dreams, like Troy’s dreams of baseball glory, lead only to frustration and despair. Troy has looked death in the face and survived. He will not let himself be vulnerable. No man who retains his humanity, however, can be merely hard, and Troy’s hardness has its limits. He is not hard toward Rose, toward his friend Bono, or toward his brother Gabe—although in one way or another betray he betrays all three. His relationship with Alberta is in its own way a confession of his limitations: He must find some kind of escape or crack under the strain. The consequences of the hardening process are seen most dramatically in Troy’s conflict with his son. It is ironic how near Troy approaches to repeating his own father’s behavior. The approach remains partial, however, representing a small victory for the character. When Cory asks for love, Troy answers with responsibility. One may understand Troy’s response and respect it, yet still feel it is a hard answer for a father to give his son. Part of the trouble arises out of Troy’s failure to find anything of substance in his son’s dreams. It is as though Troy’s own rejected dreams have returned to haunt him. Troy, though, has hardened himself against the lure of possibility. Times have changed, Rose and Cory insist; Troy, however, does not believe— perhaps will not permit himself to believe—that the time has come when a young black man can move confidently in the direction of his dream. The consequences of Troy’s hardness are by no means all negative. At its best—for example, in his sense of responsibility and in his affirmation of his own human worth against the outrages of prejudice—that very hardness comes to look strikingly like strength. If Cory may represent the hope of moving beyond what Troy stands for, Rose nevertheless wants Cory to see that hope as founded on the struggles of men like Troy. Of the symbols that further articulate the play’s meanings, two stand out. Baseball serves not only as the focus of Troy’s dream and disappointment, but also as his metaphor for what he sees as the essentially combative nature of life itself. The “fences” of the title suggest the importance of looking beyond the literal fence that Troy is working on through most of the play. That fence is itself a rich symbol, as the focus of interaction among the three principal characters. It points as well to invisible fences, created in the desire to hold in and to keep out. If Troy has been fenced in by the rules and conventions of a racist society, he has also created his own fences, which are both barriers to the understanding and affection of his son and obstacles to Troy’s own spiritual expansion. Ironically, none of the fences proves strong enough to withstand the catastrophe brought on by Troy’s wandering. Finally, the meaning of this play arises from the audience’s experience of its central character in all his complexity. Wilson has determined that no simple judgment of Troy Maxson can be adequate. He has created a character so rich and vital that, in the effort to evaluate the man and his actions, audiences discover what their own values are.

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Critical Context Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, a Tony Award, and a Pulitzer Prize, Fences is among the most honored plays by any American of August Wilson’s generation. Set in 1957, it is one entry in Wilson’s cycle of ten plays representing the African American struggle during the ten decades of the twentieth century. Wilson wrote as a self-proclaimed Black Nationalist, but his mature plays were enthusiastically received by multiracial audiences, and Wilson recorded the pleasure he experienced when an eighty-seven-year-old Yugoslavian man spoke of his identification with Wilson’s characters. Wilson’s work delved so deeply into the world he knew that what he found there spoke far beyond his particular experience. Certainly an awareness of the history of the oppression and exploitation suffered by African Americans plays a significant part in Wilson’s work. In Fences, the white baseball owners who have denied Troy and others their opportunity to play in the major leagues and the sanitation department officials who reserve the driving jobs for whites impose limits on black aspirations. Wilson refuses, however, to grant the oppressors and exploiters a place at the heart of African American life. Beyond question, they often place limiting external conditions upon that life. Wilson is concerned, though, not with the surrounding conditions of African American life but with the life itself. African Americans have, in Wilson’s eyes, their own identity, dignity, and significance. Troy Maxson is not defined by the limits that are imposed on him by a white-dominated society. His struggle is in part against those limits, to be sure. It is also, however, a struggle against his own demons. In the course of that struggle, he finds his strength. That is why his failure has the force of tragedy. Bibliography Berkowitz, Gerald M. “August Wilson.” In American Drama of the Twentieth Century. London: Longman, 1992. Asserts that Troy’s tragedy is that, although he represents the first generation of black Americans to progress into the middle class through pride and determination, his instinct is to preserve and consolidate what he has. Bigsby, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collection of scholarly essays on Wilson’s plays, including studies of Fences and other individual works, as well as broader discussions of the playwright’s overall project. Brown, Chip. “The Light in August.” Esquire 111 (April, 1989): 116. Says Wilson emphasizes black life on its own terms, not in confrontation with the white system. Parts of Fences may be inspired by Wilson’s uneasy relationship with his stepfather. Freedman, Samuel G. “A Voice from the Streets.” The New York Times Magazine 136 (March 15, 1987): 36. Reads Fences as reflecting Wilson’s concern with legacy. Harrison, Paul Carter. “August Wilson’s Blues Poetics.” In Three Plays, by August Wilson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. Claims that, unlike Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), Troy has no respect

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for the limitations imposed on him by a hostile world. Troy’s declarations of patriarchal authority resonate in the hearts and minds of most African Americans. Reed, Ishmael. “August Wilson: The Dramatist as Bearer of Tradition.” In Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper. New York: Atheneum, 1988. Sees Fences as informed by Wilson’s belief that a man should have responsibility for his family. Shannon, Sandra G. August Wilson’s “Fences”: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Invaluable resource for students of Fences. Includes essays summarizing Wilson’s life, his aesthetic agenda, and his place in American dramatic history, as well as focused analysis of the play itself, a history of its production and critical reception, and a bibliographical essay. W. P. Kenney

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THE FIRE NEXT TIME Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987) Type of work: Essays First published: 1963 Form and Content Novelist William Styron once remarked that The Fire Next Time shook the conscience of a nation, and that claim was no exaggeration. The book appeared at an edgy moment in American race relations; those fighting for social change were seeking tactics to face down segregationist practices that were, in many communities, centuries old. Baldwin wrote a plea that called for nothing less than an activism of all Americans, whom he urged to reconsider the true state of their land in order “to end the racial nightmare . . . and change the history of the world.” The text of The Fire Next Time was on newsstands, more or less in its entirety, all in the same week. “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (reprinted in the book as “Down at the Cross”) was featured in the November 17, 1962, issue of The New Yorker. “A Letter to My Nephew” (reprinted in the book as “My Dungeon Shook”) appeared in the December, 1962, issue of The Progressive. The two essays appeared together as a book printed by Dial Press in 1963. A surprising frame for the book is suggested in “My Dungeon Shook.” Turning any paternalism in the integrationist struggle aside, the author acknowledges the reality of segregation; still, he tells his nephew, the challenge is not to earn acceptance from white society. Rather, the struggle for the nephew is to find acceptance for the white culture in his own heart. “Down at the Cross,” originally conceived as a commentary on the rise of the Nation of Islam in northern U.S. cities, became a great, synthetic sermon focusing themes of national, tactical, religious, personal, and activist concerns. “A Letter to My Nephew” runs a mere seven pages in the original edition, while “Down at the Cross” takes up ninety-one pages of text. The title change for the second essay had less to do with its conception than with The New Yorker’s editorial policy. At the time, the magazine was running a series of subjective analyses as “letters” from its stable of writers and from selected guests. Lecturing on the politics of race, the work is a cry for the exercise of imagination and intellect, and it remains a seminal testament long after its moment: a time when retrenchment of legalized and de facto segregation left many whites unwilling to examine their heritage and when national philosophies pushed the black community to react more systemically and militantly to retrenched oppression. The Fire Next Time spoke to these questions in passion, drawing on elements both autobiographical and historical. The book is insistently self-referential in drawing models of experience. Autobiography, this suggests, is as valid a historical model as any conventional teaching. The skill to speak to an integrated audience is one that Baldwin mastered early, honed by the rhetoric of childhood preaching, international education, eclectic activ-

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ism, and wide reading. Thus, the emergent voice is deeply informed in fact and spirit but keeps a tone of practical applicability. As strident and demanding as Baldwin’s message is, an air of extraordinary reasonableness dominates the language. In point of fact, the tone of this work deserves particular scrutiny. If this small book’s embrace seems ambitious, it is. The range of subjects (childhood to race relations to the Cold War) is enormous, and the structure does not attempt to be comprehensive about any of these topics. Rather, the work is the extended monologue of an agitated intellect associating the implications of his observations. The observations that Baldwin makes are often ominous. Word choices are under careful control throughout; within that even temper, however, are subtle machinations. The two years Baldwin spent as a child preacher coincided with the mysteries of sex unfolding. He recalls seeing girls turn into “matrons” just as swiftly as they were becoming women; simultaneously, the boys were victimized by street fighting and bitter police encounters. The culture of ghettoization—with the human cost it takes in victims—is portrayed as inherently sinful (using the minister’s vocabulary, rather than the moralist’s or the sociologist’s “wrong”). A lamentation rises over the separateness of urban cultures, white and black, eager to prey on each other. A litany of family examples sets the foundation for the essay’s activist conclusions. “Down at the Cross” raises the ethos of self-esteem in an internal frame that speaks for a substantial population. If the culture teaches exclusion, how can one generate a much-desired sense of inclusiveness for the culture? For the young Brother Baldwin, the church created an exciting, though finally inadequate, opportunity. Some of the most passionate passages in the book are on the theme of the ways in which selfhatred is taught. The author returns to this theme throughout his work, with an appreciation of the culture, expression, and art that make embattled lives sustainable. For Baldwin, the church served purposes both personal (as a field for competition with his father) and social (as a place of refuge from the crime-ridden streets). It initiated, too, a searching among institutional models for guidance. Following Baldwin’s descriptions of his skills as a preacher and as a salesman, more of his youth comes into focus: the sociology of the Jewish and Italian cultures in his high school, the critical recognition of a complex social fabric. All this weighs into the book’s conclusions. As the view of a cultural tapestry matures, the adult author is able to be inclusive of even separatist cultures. A genuine appreciation of Black Muslim accomplishment marks Baldwin’s reporting of his experiences with the Nation of Islam, as Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad initiate the author into Black Muslim teachings. Separatism and reconstruction of an exotic past do not provide an adequate answer to society’s problems, the book argues, but coming to terms with the past remains crucial, for both the white and African American communities. With his keen eye for paradox, Baldwin registers an appreciation of Malcolm and Muhammad’s illumination of the double standards in American culture. Why is a critical cry of “violence” raised, Malcolm asked, only when black men assert that they will fight for their rights? “And he is right,” Baldwin notes.

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The latter part of the book is an extension of the previous argument concerning the coming of self-esteem. In a broad net (too broad for the book’s detractors), the writer dwells extensively on perceptions across the races. Recognize the reality of fear and hope in the “other,” the book seems to plead. Baldwin’s imagination is able to comprehend both the powerful and the powerless. To illustrate the need for inclusion in social systems, the book compares the domestic civil rights struggle to the dreams of peasant revolutionaries. However, if dreams or fears might run wild across race lines, how might they fare within each community? Here, readers must acknowledge harsh truths. Baldwin discusses slavery, the Dred Scott decision, and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, providing a context from which the toughness of an “up-from-under” argument must be understood. Accommodation means a fundamental change, especially in recognition of national history. It is in human nature to find change frightening; Baldwin views international Cold War stereotypes as holding the same dangers that domestic race stereotyping holds. Recognize the danger of these old ways, he argues, for they hold us back. The celebrated plea for understanding in the book’s closing pages is understood as a necessary and binding contract between the races, a bond as “between lovers.” Accurate in observation and record, much of the book’s interest lies in its complex connections between inward meditation and national implication. Analysis “If the word integration means anything,” Baldwin tells his nephew, “this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” That process of changing reality is not limited to a knowledge of fact alone; fact must be seen with a simultaneous acknowledgment of alternatives and with a willingness to remake society. The journey here is to go beyond contradictions, and “Down at the Cross” explicates the contradictions in American Christianity and culture with a sharp critical eye. Often Baldwin’s book is interpreted as a bellicose warning of impending racial holocaust; in truth, the book is anything but that. The book is a statement of pride in perseverance and a testament to the spirit of African Americans one century after emancipation. The Fire Next Time is, in fact, a call for the ending of America’s racial insanity, and a clear social analysis of America’s pluralistic possibilities. “Down at the Cross” (and “down” carries its literal and vernacular suggestions), the book’s longest section, begins with a flat statement: It is a measure of the distance to be traveled in the coming pages, a starting point from which life and experience will distance the writer. I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use the word “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one.

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A discursive analysis follows: Not only is this model of deity limited, but limiting. If an assertive, loving, black Christianity can be realized in an embrace of an inclusive God and vision, it cannot be in the confines of conventional white Christianity. Thus, the book’s exploration of theology and culture proceeds. The progress, while neither neat nor systemic, brings the failures of Western culture to task, then attempts to deconstruct them against the teachings offered in an extended interview with the Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad. Baldwin’s discussion of the Nation of Islam had its origin in an August, 1961, meeting, actually an unplanned one. Baldwin had come to Chicago on business, and he was invited to the Chicago Temple after appearing on television with Malcolm X. At the core of the exposition is Baldwin’s own twin sympathy with both integrationist and nationalist struggles. While he disagrees with Elijah Muhammad’s selective view of humanity, Baldwin shows compassion and sympathetic analysis, rather than enmity. The view of Elijah Muhammad is an emotional one, the dispatch from a distanced and fascinated reporter. Baldwin admires the persuasive abilities of the leader, much as he admires the Nation of Islam for its sensibility of community—a reach for the embracing love that is Baldwin’s desire. At the same time, both Muhammad’s presentation of the “white devil” theology and his autocratic control of his following disturb Baldwin. Since part of the book is a passing from organized religion, Baldwin has some wry fun when Muhammad insists on offering him a car and driver to protect him “from the white devils” on the way to his destination. “I was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side of town,” he notes. It makes sense that individualism and cultural inclusiveness prompted the distancing of author and subject. Both early and late in his nonfiction, Baldwin tempered his social criticism with a soulful patriotism. America, with all its warts of racism, classism, homophobia, and historical unconsciousness, remained the most ambitious experiment in pluralism imaginable. The author’s social criticism was, in part, measured to encourage that experiment. A separate measure of that tribute emerges in a published dialogue (conducted between 1964 and 1965, shortly after the publication of The Fire Next Time) with playwright Budd Schulberg: A prominent Negro is reported as having said that he wanted a U.S. victory in Vietnam because otherwise the U.S. would be weakened, and he wanted to be part of a great nation. Well, in this hard world, one must make choices, and I prefer to be part of a just nation.

As faith is inexorably linked to justice in Baldwin’s exploration, he examines black Christian belief to locate what might be reconcilable with his own goals. If Elijah Muhammad’s critique of Westernism remains inadequate, this does not exonerate Christianity. Baldwin views Christianity as inadequate to “the torment necessary for love,” an essentially fallible vehicle; the Bible itself is analyzed as a text written by men and used as a convenient tool for structural repression.

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This recalls the failure of the black church for the author as well. If the Christian church is left for its lack of loving embrace, however, this does not lead to the abyss of hatred. Christianity, as Baldwin was brought up to preach it, has been left behind, exchanged for a more abiding faith in human capacity. If human capacity can make the Bible, it too can remake the code of human behavior. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign,/ No more water, the fire next time!” instructed the spiritual. Remaking human society into a just, ethical contract was the covenant with Noah, and the overriding covenant for which Baldwin’s essays reach. The power of love in human affairs is regarded as a transcendent quality much larger than the temple of artifice, the church. Since an examination of social hypocrisy roots this book, Baldwin never diminishes the community accomplishments of Elijah Muhammad’s life and movement. Recounting that he is interviewing a man who as a child witnessed his own father’s lynching, Baldwin expresses sincere appreciation of the Chicago Temple’s work to clothe, feed, and grant self-respect to the dispossessed. This tribute embraces those victories as real, but limited. The self-respect Baldwin promotes is universal, not parochial. The struggle to integrate African Americans as full citizens of the country demands conversions for white Americans as well. Baldwin believes in America’s capacity for this conversion. This constitutes the “love ethic” on which the book was damned or praised. As prophecy, the text holds a stubborn certainty that a peaceful pluralism not only can but must work in American society. Critical Context The publication of The Fire Next Time created a sensation. The promising writer found that he had quickly become a public figure, his face looking out from the cover of the May 17, 1963, issue of Time. The book marked a turning point in Baldwin’s reception, raising him from the status of an acclaimed writer to that of a major one. It is noteworthy that a book receiving such a widely favorable popular reception was initially greeted by mixed reviews. While the book was praised in some venues, it also drew fire for its lack of homework and its panacea of universalism. The reviewers underlined the curious act the book commits—as a serious exercise of intellect and spirit, it is too public to be memoir, too personal to be sociology, and too unmethodical to be political science. In The New York Review of Books, reviewer F. W. Dupee charged that Baldwin’s material on the Nation of Islam was inadequately researched. Psychologist Robert Coles and scholar Marcus Klein went into print charging that the book was altogether too simplistic. However, the book has a staying power and has earned its merit in the literary canon. Covering turf that the literary canon usually overlooks as ephemera, The Fire Next Time has endured far beyond its considerable immediate glory. Only a handful of other “classics” of social analysis exist as exceptions to prove the literary rule that art and sociopolitical essays do not mix; others include Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and The Jungle (1906).

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Rhetorical skill accounts partly for the book’s continued resonance, but there is more. The shape of the questioning in Baldwin’s analysis, personalizing such very large conflicts, keeps its fascination. For this book crystalizes the key concerns of the author’s large and public life: activist work for the African American struggle and the personal quest as universal drama. The Fire Next Time is unique among Baldwin’s works in that this is his book that most thoroughly treats religion as substance. The culture of pulpit and gospel informs plots, motivates passions, and guides action throughout Baldwin’s work. In his other plays, fictions, and essays, these elements define a community to be discussed. Here, however, the focus is not on religion as iconography. Instead, the author grapples with religion simply as religion. This wrestling match provides enduring interest and terrible beauty, for God is found wanting while humankind is not. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006. Part of the Bloom’s Biocritiques series, this collection comprises four extended biographical essays on the author’s accomplishments. _______. James Baldwin. Updated ed. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. Bloom’s introduction pays tribute to the prophetic intensity of The Fire Next Time. Collection also includes a study by Nick Aaron Ford of Baldwin’s evolution as an essayist. Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking Press, 1991. Considers the essay “Down at the Cross” as Baldwin’s masterwork, most successfully merging the creative work with advocacy of the black struggle. Too, in the context of literary biography, he records the range of reactions to the book. Contains thorough notes and a chronological bibliography. Eckman, Fern Marja. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1966. Early analysis of the biographical aspects of the work appears in a sensationalized portrait. Eckman’s skill as a feature writer emphasizes human interest and psychological dynamics at the expense of serious content considerations. Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. The thesis narrows points of reference for Baldwin’s art, particularly the works of Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry James. In an extended discussion, The Fire Next Time is compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852) in the relationship both books strike with readers, wanting the audience to “feel right” on race issues. The good of artists, for both Stowe and Baldwin, is to humanize their readers. Pratt, Louis H. James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Centers discussion on religious issues. He sees the context of Baldwin’s rejection of his youthful ministry as a statement on “Black Culture,” dismissing Christianity as a white religion. Pratt’s logic connects Baldwin’s concerns to those of playwrights Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka.

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Troupe, Quincy, ed. James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Tribute collection that sets out to acknowledge the breadth of Baldwin’s social and literary contributions. Budd Schulberg’s interview clarifies themes of nationalism versus integrationism in The Fire Next Time. Contains a useful bibliography. David Shevin

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THE FIRST PART LAST and HEAVEN Author: Angela Johnson (1961) Type of work: Novels Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Late twentieth century Locale: Brooklyn, New York; Heaven, Ohio First published: Heaven, 1998; The First Part Last, 2003 Principal characters: Bobby Morris, a boy who fathers a child at age sixteen Nia, Bobby’s girlfriend and the mother of his daughter Feather, Bobby and Nia’s baby Marley, a teenaged girl who lives in Heaven, Ohio, with Momma and Pops, whom she believes to be her parents Uncle Jack, Marley’s real father The Novels In Heaven and The First Part Last, Angela Johnson explores the meaning of family and of parent-child relationships. Heaven was published first, in 1998, and five years later, Johnson produced The First Part Last as a prequel. In Heaven, fourteen-year-old Marley has it all. Heaven, Ohio—where Marley lives happily with Momma, Pops, and her brother, Butchy—is the essence of small-town bliss. It is quiet, safe, friendly, and traditional. Marley goes to school and enjoys spending time with her best friend, Shoogy Maple, whose family is “perfect.” Frequently, Marley’s parents send her to the store to wire money via Western Union to Pops’s twin brother, Jack. Uncle Jack writes Marley letters about his ramblings though the Midwest with his dog, Boy. Marley babysits for Feather Morris and becomes close friends with her father, Bobby, who lives above a frame shop in Heaven and paints billboards for a living. Sometimes Marley, Bobby, and Feather take Bobby’s car and visit Amish country. Bobby reveals that he identifies with the isolation of the Amish. Suddenly, Marley’s tranquil world is shattered. A letter addressed to Monna Floyd arrives from a burned-out church in Alabama. The letter explains that records have been destroyed in the fire and need to be replaced. The letter reveals that Momma and Pops are not Marley’s biological parents. Jack is her father, and her real mother, Christine, died when Marley (Monna) was an infant. Jack could not stand her loss and left the baby with his brother and sister-in-law. This revelation sends Marley into a morass of despair and confusion. She feels betrayed and nameless, uncertain of whom she can trust and whose identity is hers. Her adoptive parents are liars, and Butchy, whom she always believed was her brother, is actually her cousin. As Marley struggles with her redefinition of self and family, Jack decides to travel to Heaven to meet his daughter at last. Marley comes to accept the

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love of her adoptive family and finds a new kind of family bond in her redefined relationships with Butchy and Jack. In The First Part Last, Bobby Morris is a teenager living in New York. On his sixteenth birthday, he receives some unexpected news: His girlfriend Nia is pregnant. Soon, school and friends are forgotten, as Bobby accompanies Nia to doctor’s appointments and meetings with a social worker, who encourages them to put the baby up for adoption. The couple waits too long for an abortion, and eclampsia sends Nia into an irreversible vegetative coma. Bobby rejects the option of adoption and shoulders the full responsibility of raising his baby girl, Feather. Bobby struggles with fatherhood, but his adoration of Feather is unshakeable. Despite his love for his daughter, Bobby feels conflicted. At times, he wishes he could run to his own mother, Mary, and turn all his responsibilities over to her, but she insists that Bobby care for Feather himself. Bobby sees himself as a child with a child, yet he is determined to prove himself a man. His parents are estranged, so he leaves his mother’s apartment and moves in with his father, Fred, in his “old neighborhood” in Brooklyn. Bobby’s stay with Fred is short. After being arrested for painting graffiti, Bobby decides that he cannot continue to care for Feather and go to school in an urban setting. He moves with Feather to the small town where his brother lives: Heaven, Ohio. The Characters Johnson’s major characters are not perfect, but they are consistently sympathetic. Their flaws make them believably human, and their love for one another and their commitment to what is right approach heroic—sometimes overinflated—proportions. In the hands of a writer less skilled than Johnson, Bobby would too good to be true. Motivated only by love, he gives up friends, family, neighborhood, and school to devote his life to the care of an infant. Marley, initially unremarkable as a character, becomes deeper and richer as she explores the secrets of her past and resolves her conflicting notions of self, family, and community. Bobby and Marley are teen protagonists to whom young adult readers can relate. The books’ minor characters are thinly developed, playing walk-on roles as friends, family members, or neighbors. The reader learns little about Bobby’s parents or Nia’s family. Marley’s parents are stereotypes: they are consistently loving, forgiving, supportive, and forbearing. Only in the paradisaic Heaven, Ohio, are they credible. Jack is a phantom wanderer, and his character grows no more accessible when he returns to his daughter in Heaven. Themes and Meanings In Heaven and The First Part Last, Johnson explores the meaning of family and alternative family structures. Unequipped for parenting and unprepared to go it alone, Bobby nonetheless finds himself managing the challenges of single fatherhood. Marley learns that she is adopted, having been abandoned by a father she perceives did not want her after her mother died tragically. Loving and being loved redeems

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both characters, teaching them that families are what people choose to make them. Bobby’s all-consuming love for Feather leads him to happiness redefined, while Marley learns that shared love, not shared blood, forges family bonds. In both books, Johnson explores the notion that the harsh truths of the past may scar people, but their choices for the future can heal their wounds. Marley has to construct a new identity for herself, as does Bobby, and both characters behave bravely (albeit predictably) in doing so. Both Bobby and Marley want to do what is right, and they succeed after encountering some of false starts and misdirections that are the essence of growing up. Although Johnson’s characters are African American, their dilemmas, motivations, and actions are universal—crossing the bounds of time and ethnicity to appeal to teens of all colors and backgrounds. Critical Context Some reviewers criticized Heaven for its unrealistic portrayal of small town life as idyllic and for its lack of conflict among characters—all of whom are consistently (and incredibly) loving, kind, and supportive. The First Part Last garnered similar criticism for its rose-colored portrayal of a conscientious, loving, competent, and caring sixteen-year-old single father, still going to school and tirelessly struggling to care for his baby daughter on his own, never wavering in love and devotion. Both books feature predictable, rather trite happy endings that please readers more than they please literary analysts. While the characters and plot fail to ring true for some critics, Johnson is nearly always praised for the controlled emotional impact of her plain, spare writing. Her wellchosen, concrete details tap into her readers’ emotions. In one scene of The First Part Last, for example, Bobby paces the floors of his father’s apartment at five thirty in the morning with a wide-awake Feather in his arms. The sounds of the neighborhood are unfamiliar to him at such an hour, and he grabs the first thing he can find—his old Mets sweatshirt—to warm his shivering baby. Johnson’s plots may be trite, but her execution saves her narratives from saccharine romanticism. The use of the present tense in both books draws readers into the minds and hearts of the main characters. In The First Part Last, alternating “Then” and “Now” chapters integrate Bobby’s struggles in the present with the backstory of the pregnancy and the loss of Nia. Johnson is a poet, and her images are often fresh and symbolic. In Heaven, for example, sheer curtains blow with a warm breeze across Marley’s face as she naps peacefully. In minutes, the thin, translucent veil they represent will be ripped away, and the serenity of Marley’s comfortable family life will be shattered, when the truth about her parentage is disclosed. Critics found more to love than to hate in these books, both of which won numerous honors, including the Coretta Scott King Award. Bibliography Beram, Neil. Review of The First Part Last, by Angela Johnson. The Horn Book Magazine 79, no. 4 (July/August, 2003): 459. Emphasizes that the alternation be-

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tween “Then” and “Now” chapters allows readers to journey with Bobby through the tragedies and challenges that confront him. Hinton, KaaVonia M. Angela Johnson: Poetic Prose. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2006. This compendium of reviews, interviews, and critical commentaries analyzes Johnson’s insights into contemporary culture and the connections between her work and African American literary history. Hinton-Johnson, KaaVonia M. “Angela Johnson: Award-Winning Novels and the Search for Self.” ALAN Review (Fall, 2006). Looks at the extent to which identity is represented as socially constructed and constantly changing in Johnson’s work. Johnson, Angela. “The Booklist Interview: Angela Johnson.” Interview by Gillian Engberg. Booklist 100, no. 12 (February 15, 2004): 1074. Johnson reveals that characters drive her fiction. Rochman, Hazel. Review of Heaven, by Angela Johnson. Booklist 95, no. 2 (September 15, 1998): 219. Sees kindness and love triumphing over deception in the novel. Rosser, Claire. Review of The First Part Last, by Angela Johnson. Kliatt 37, no. 3 (May, 2003): 10. Praises Johnson for creating characters that readers care about and evoking strong emotions with few words. Faith Hickman Brynie

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THE FISHER KING Author: Paule Marshall (Valenza Pauline Burke, 1929Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1984 Locale: Brooklyn, New York First published: 2000

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Principal characters: Sonny Carmichael Payne, an eight-year-old schoolboy from Paris, France, who comes to Brooklyn to attend a memorial concert for his grandfather Sonny Rett Payne, Sonny’s deceased grandfather, who is an expatriate jazz saxophonist Hattie Carmichael, the former lover of Sonny Rett who is raising Sonny Carmichael Edgar Payne, brother of Sonny Rett Payne and granduncle of Sonny Carmichael Payne Florence Varina McCullum, Sonny Carmichael Payne’s maternal great-grandmother, who gives lectures to tourists about her home under the auspices of Brooklyn’s Landmarks Conservancy Cherisse McCullum, Florence’s daughter and Sonny Carmichael Payne’s grandmother Ulene Payne, Sonny Carmichael Payne’s paternal greatgrandmother and mother of Sonny Rett Payne The Novel At the opening of The Fisher King, Edgar Payne writes to Hattie Carmichael in Paris that he is planning a memorial concert to take place in the spring of 1984 in honor of his deceased brother. He invites Hattie to attend the concert and to bring with her young Sonny, who is his brother Sonny Rett Payne’s grandson. Edgar invites Hattie because she was the closest person to his brother’s work and she understood it better than anyone else. Hattie arrives in Brooklyn with Sonny and introduces him to his great-grandmothers, Florence McCullum and Ulene Payne, both of whom are nearly ninety years old. Florence is an African American who looks down on Ulene’s West Indian heritage. She also resents the fact that her daughter, Charisse, ran off to France with Ulene’s son. When Sonny Rett Payne was a small boy, Ulene taught him to play the piano, but she only cared for classical music, considering jazz “the Sodom and Gomorrah music!” She beat him when he played jazz and finally drove him to move to France,

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where he lived the rest of his life with Cherisse and Hattie. Cherisse and Sonny Rett had a child who became Sonny Carmichael Payne’s mother. Among these family grievances, young Sonny tries to sort out the truth about his family members, whom he has never met before. He frequently escapes the adults to draw pictures of medieval castles and knights in armor in his drawing pad. The concert takes place, and through the stories of his great-grandfather that Sonny hears recounted there, he realizes that the musician was an amazing and admirable man. His granduncle, Edgar Payne, takes him to meet Edgar’s two grandchildren, who are Sonny’s cousins, and after a few awkward sallies the three children become great friends. Sonny warms to Edgar’s breezy, American ways, such as giving the boy gentle uppercuts to the chin, and grows to love going to Ulene’s house, where she has a player piano that she teaches him to play. By the end of the novel, Edgar insists to Hattie that they have to do better by young Sonny than to let him grow up in poverty in Paris, attended most of the time by an incompetent neighbor. Edgar wants Sonny to live in Brooklyn, where he can look after him and make sure he gets the care and opportunities a young boy needs. Hattie is charged with making the proper decision, and although the ending is ambiguous, a reader may sense she is ready to make some changes in her and Sonny’s lives. The Characters Edgar Payne is the catalyst for the action of novel. When he was a young man, he refused to have anything to do with the kind of music his brother, Sonny, played, but shortly after he heard that Sonny had died, Edgar happened to hear a jazz station play an all-night tribute to his brother. He listened, and by morning he went out and bought every record his brother had released. He finally understood jazz. Edgar has changed since he was young, and his extended family is now his major concern. The concert to which he invites Hattie and young Sonny is a way for Edgar to make up for the years of neglect of his brother and a way to resolve the late jazz musician’s anger with his family in Brooklyn. The fate of young Sonny rests in the hands of Hattie Carmichael. She is the novel’s major link to a past that makes up a great deal of its plot, as she is the one whose memories of Sonny Rett Payne in France compose the background of the unfolding story. She has great strength of character, determination, and practical competence, having ably handled the business and publicity demands on her musician lover when he was alive. After his death, she adopted his child. Although she provides as well as she can for the boy and seems to have raised him well, young Sonny has none of the advantages that are considered standard in an American middle-class childhood. She is bitter on behalf of her late lover, but she is able to change when she understands how much richer a life young Sonny can have in the United States. There is a thaw within her at the end of the novel. Both Edgar and Hattie change throughout the novel, becoming fully realized, successful characters. Sonny, only eight years old, also changes during the novel. He learns to accept his family with all their physical and mental quirks, and he is quick to

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respond to their well-intentioned kindnesses and love. The novel ends with the hope of a bright future for the boy, in which he will enjoy a loving family and opportunities to develop his strengths. In their struggles with the past and the present, these characters transcend their circumstances and become universal. Themes and Meanings Paule Marshall’s work centers on several major themes that recur throughout her novels. One of them is the search for identity, with which Marshall herself has struggled. It is a major theme of her 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones, a story of a firstgeneration Caribbean American girl growing up in an African Caribbean community. The search for identity is also prominent in The Fisher King. Young Sonny tries to discover his identity in the context of a family he has never before met. Previously, Hattie was his only family; suddenly meeting his entire family leaves him confused, hesitant, and even fearful. By the end of the novel, however, Sonny is beginning to accept the odd configuration of characters to whom he is related. The novel’s title is taken from an Arthurian legend concerning a wounded king imprisoned in his castle who waits for a knight to arrive to heal and protect him. Young Sonny is fascinated by castles and repeatedly draws them, in addition to drawing himself in knight’s armor complete with lance and halberd. He says that he is guarding his grandfather, who died in the Paris metro, but it is ironically young Sonny himself who is in need of healing and protection. Critical Context By the time The Fisher King appeared, Marshall was an acclaimed American novelist who had won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a National Institute for the Arts Award, and a John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Her 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, is considered among the best novels written by an African American woman. The Fisher King, Marshall’s seventh novel, was inspired by a photograph of her own cousin, Sonny, whom she never met due to a family feud. She eventually learned that in his teen years her cousin became a jazz saxophone player, which was a brave undertaking in his upwardly mobile community. Sonny died mysteriously after being recruited into the Army in World War II, but his determination to be an artist remained with Marshall. She invented a life for him in The Fisher King, to compensate for the full life he might have led. Bibliography DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Focuses on a complex and repetitive pattern in Marshall’s work. Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Traces the development of Marshall’s Afrocentric vision and shows how her distinctive style combines Western forms with the African oral tradition.

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Gadsby, Meredith M. Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Offers a special emphasis on the creative artistry of Paule Marshall, drawing on critical and ethnic studies to cover a wide range of topics. Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Explores the ways in which literature can probe the complexities of displacement and identity construction that often accompany migratory experiences. Pettis, Joyce. Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. An exploration of the gender, race, and class oppression that contributes to the problems faced by Marshall’s characters. Places Marshall’s work squarely in the tradition of African American and Caribbean culture. Sheila Golburgh Johnson

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FIST, STICK, KNIFE, GUN A Personal History of Violence in America Author: Geoffrey Canada (1952) Type of work: Autobiography/cultural criticism Time of work: 1952-1995 Locale: South Bronx and Harlem, New York; Bowdoin College, Maine First published: 1995 Principle personage: Geoffrey Canada, an author and activist, who alternates between narrating his own life story and analyzing the culture of violence in the United States’ inner cities Form and Content Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America, Geoffrey Canada’s first published book, is the story of his childhood and youth in the South Bronx. As the subtitle indicates, the book also offers his perspective on the issues that have made life in U.S. inner cities increasingly dangerous for children. Ghetto life was brutal enough while Canada grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, as he recalls in countless painful vignettes. That violence, though, was at least governed by a code of street honor: Any show of fear would be cruelly punished, but youths were to fight fairly, and weapons were generally limited to fists, sticks, and knives—the first three words of the book’s title. A turning point came later, when guns became increasingly common on inner-city streets. As an adult, Canada has worked to help low-income urban children escape from the cycle of poverty and indiscriminate gun violence that, since the 1970’s, has defined life for many denizens of the nation’s inner cities. He was born in 1952, the third of four brothers raised by their mother. The children’s father left the family early on. Geoffrey’s first lesson in street fighting comes when a boy steals his brother’s jacket and Mrs. Canada orders her two oldest sons to retrieve it. Mastering their fear of a possible beating from the thief, they soon return triumphantly with the jacket. For the young Canada, the primary lesson of the episode is that self-protection—through violence if necessary—is essential when not even parents can protect children adequately. Later, he comes to recognize that children often “acted violently because their parents told them to.” Parents foster self-reliance, but they also teach children “to cope by acting more violently than the others.” Thus the cycle is perpetuated. The author grows up knowing that audacity is as important as fighting skill. Courageous youths can shake the confidence of adversaries; they also find allies and sources of protection, while cowards find no sympathy anywhere. Canada witnesses the beating of a boy who has consistently refused to fight anyone. The boy’s cries for mercy only infuriate his assailants and make his punishment worse. Canada himself, somewhat established as a street fighter, becomes the protégé of an older teenager

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named Mike, learning about “codes of conduct,” about sheer nerve and street-smart behavior. Under Mike’s tutelage, he is no longer “a small, helpless boy, confused and scared.” Mike “was like a knight in shining armor.” As an adult, Canada resolves to be a “knight” for younger generations—but not to educate them in street fighting. In 1974, he graduates in social sciences from Bowdoin College, then completes a master’s degree in education at Harvard University. During his career, he leads several organizations dedicated to helping youth escape the traps of poverty and endless violence. He teaches martial arts to young people as a path to self-discipline, self-protection, and personal dignity. At the end of Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, Canada relates two incidents that together underscore both the urgency of the gun-violence issue and the hope of resolving it. In the first incident, his wife’s nephew dies in agony on the street, an innocent bystander in a shooting that targeted someone else. In the second, the author enjoys a time of closeness with young people in his community organization, talking with them “about values, about violence, about hope. I try to build within each one a reservoir of strength that they can draw from . . . to resist the drugs, the guns, the violence.” Analysis Interwoven with Canada’s personal recollections are his analyses of the forces giving rise to the “handgun” and “Uzi” generations and his proposals for stemming the tide of senseless, indiscriminate bloodshed in the United States’ inner cities. In alternating personal recollections with general observations, he conveys that Americans’ basic attitude toward violence has changed little over the decades. “Violence has always been around, usually concentrated among the poor.” Ghetto youths might live in poverty, he argues, but “if we had nothing else, we could still act as men.” Moreover, he argues, popular culture has strongly supported an ethic of violence: When Geoffrey and his friends watch film heroes like the Bowery Boys, Shaft, and Bruce Lee—men “ready to fight and even to die for what they believed in”—they know that “sooner or later violence was the way to achieve what the characters wanted.” Historically, then, violence in a good cause was considered an honorable expedient. Canada argues, however, that the prevalence of firearms among underage people has introduced a chilling new note in the modern United States. “The nature of the violent act has changed from the fist, stick, and knife to the gun.” Implicitly, Canada sees the possession of guns as detrimental to individual character. Relying on guns for protection, contemporary youths are not forced, as were earlier generations, to develop personal courage and fighting skill. Gun culture undermines the street code of honor. Older gangsters of earlier decades, “although often ruthless, did not kill indiscriminately.” Only their enemies had anything to fear from them. “For many of today’s child gangsters,” says Canada, “how tough you are is measured by how lethal a gun you carry. They may never have won a fight, or even fought one; if you are willing to carry a gun and use it, you qualify to sell drugs.” Through their lack of caring, they allow innocent bystanders to get caught in the crossfire. Young people are in grave peril, and that is Canada’s deepest concern.

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As Canada sees it, the rise of handguns, at least in New York state, was an inadvertent result of well-meaning laws designed to rid society of drug dealers. First proposed in the early 1970’s by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, these laws provided long mandatory prison sentences for adults convicted of possessing even small quantities of illegal drugs. Drug dealers avoided jail by recruiting minors to carry their merchandise. Running drugs in the ghetto, a youth could earn income and status, and a boy caught with drugs would receive a relatively light sentence in juvenile court. Boys began to arm themselves to protect against thieves and rival dealers. Next, young people outside the drug trade acquired guns too, and the nation underwent “a major and lethal shift.” Canada maintains that this culture of drugs and guns could never have taken hold but for the dismal poverty of urban ghettos. As dealers, youths who had never had enough food or warm clothing suddenly became enviably prosperous and respected. They had never had any other occupation but drug trafficking. Indeed, they never knew any adult male role model except drug dealers. To find an alternative to this doomed existence, Canada says, young people need someone to believe in them, as his mother and teachers believed in him during his boyhood and adolescence. Canada illustrates his point with a poignant description of a visit to his Beacon School in Harlem by Attorney General Janet Reno. She attempts to shoot a basket in the gymnasium; but, despite the students’ wholehearted encouragement, she misses at least fourteen attempts to get the ball through the hoop. Finally, she tips it in: The young people screamed their approval. You would have thought the Knicks had just won the championship. . . . This is what we are trying to do at our Beacon school— believe in our children, support them, be patient with them, knowing that eventually they will succeed. And then cheering with all our heart when they do.

Critical Context Canada has a rare combination of traits: knowledge born of personal experience, the literary skill to tell his story effectively, and a zealous desire to make a crucial difference in children’s lives. For this reason, most critical reaction to Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun was highly favorable. Reviewers praised Canada’s straightforward, descriptive prose and his passionate advocacy for personal and systemic reform. The Christian Science Monitor, for example, described Canada’s book as “an urban coming-of-age story. Part memoir, part social reform advocacy.” Some reviewers complained that Canada does not outline a sufficiently concrete program of reform. Actually, he does offer a detailed proposal for a government program focusing on the ubiquity of handguns, a program that includes licensing, insurance against injury, ammunition identification, and gun buybacks. In a larger context, he proposes the creation of a “peace officer corps” (not a police unit) and the adoption of measures designed to reduce the demand for drugs, the prevalence of domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and the glamorous portrayal of violence on television and in movies. Canada has spent his adult life working with youth, bringing demon-

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strable results in individual lives. For this work he has received awards from numerous sources including the Heinz Family Foundation and his alma mater, Bowdoin College. Bibliography Bencivenga, Jim. “Telling It Like It Is.” Review of Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, by Geoffrey Canada. Christian Science Monitor 87, no. 132 (June 5, 1995): 13. Emphasizes Canada’s perception—unusual for its time—that the absence of fathers has a negative effect on the development of boys in urban ghettoes. Canada, Geoffrey. Review of Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, by Marian Wright Edelman. Black Issues Book Review 2, no. 1 (January/February, 2000): 27. In reviewing a work by one of his important mentors, Canada sheds light on the development of his own thinking. By noting Edelman’s work with Malcolm X and Medgar Evers—two martyrs of the Civil Rights movement—he underscores the perils involved. Cohen, Leah Hager. “Mean Streets.” The New York Times Book Review, June 18, 1995, 17. Provides an update on the street situation that makes Canada’s call for action so urgent. Acknowledges the danger involved in working with children on the streets but describes it as a path of hope. Lee, Felicia R. “For Harlem’s Children, a Catcher in the Rye.” The New York Times, January 9, 2000, section 14, p. 1. Offers a perspective on Canada’s life, his work as head of Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in New York City, his broader efforts to help struggling children, and the long-term outlook for his projects. Thomas Rankin

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THE FLAGELLANTS Author: Carlene Hatcher Polite (1932) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: Late 1960’s Locale: New York, New York First published: In French as Les Flagellants, 1966; English translation, 1967 Principal characters: Ideal, a headstrong young black woman who was reared in a southern black community Jimson, a black poet who responds to Ideal’s demands that he seek employment by telling her that it is a waste for him to squander his mental energy working for the white society Adam, Ideal’s first husband, an older man whom Jimson vilifies for his weaknesses Papa Boo, Jimson’s grandfather Rheba, a white librarian with a “pitiful lackluster birdface” who hires Jimson to work for her Johnny Lowell, Jimson’s sharp-dressing, manicured, West Indian supervisor at the Bureaucratique The Novel The Flagellants is the story of the romantic relationship between Ideal and Jimson. After a brief prologue establishing Ideal’s childhood connection to a black community called “the Bottom,” the novel unfolds as a series of arguments between the couple, representing the historical gender conflicts between black men and women. The first chapter introduces Ideal, who huddles alone on the bed in a dingy New York City apartment she shares with Jimson. Her mind weaving a frantic interior monologue, Ideal attempts to come to terms with her deteriorating relationship with Jimson. Troubled because she is unable to do anything but sit around each day waiting for his return, Ideal takes her anger and frustration out on Jimson. On their way home from the local bar, the ongoing quarrel about why their relationship is a failure explodes into a public spectacle, with Ideal climbing onto an overturned trash can and publicly denouncing Jimson for failing to live up to his own goals as an artist. Jimson has betrayed both of them, Ideal drunkenly announces, because he has not been working on his poetry and is having an affair. Jimson enters into the verbal sparring match, accusing Ideal of setting up standards that no man could fulfill and thus causing her own unhappiness. Later he tells Ideal that if she ever calls him a “black dog” again, or reminds him of his race, he will use violence against her. Jimson then recounts the story of his grandfather, Papa Boo, a miserly, hypocritical black man who worshiped the white man he worked for but

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treated his own family like dirt because they were black. Papa Boo told the young Jimson that his dark brown skin was a curse from the devil. The tension between Ideal and Jimson stems from financial pressures, coupled with the fear of being deprived of independence and being forced into stereotyped gender roles. Ideal is depressed by their poverty as well as by having to work at a mindless secretarial job to support them. She resents what she perceives as Jimson’s irresponsibility and urges him repeatedly to get a job. Jimson, fearing that employment in the white-dominated culture is merely a glorified version of slavery that will distance him from his self-defining poetry, resists Ideal’s request. Eventually Jimson finds a job, one that he believes is worthy of his time, at the Bureaucratique, a company dealing in social services and peace activism. Relishing the chance to work at a socially meaningful position, Jimson is disappointed when he learns from his flashy supervisor, Johnny Lowell, that he need do nothing more than look busy while discreetly helping himself to as many job perks as he can. As the novel builds to its dramatic conclusion, the couple engage in a violent dispute. Ideal chastises Jimson for betraying her with another woman, and Jimson defends himself by claiming that although he loves Ideal, her constant demands made him insecure and in need of affirming romantic involvement. Jimson says that Ideal’s overbearing demands are like those of all black women, who need to reduce their men to dependent weaklings in order to maintain their status as strong matriarchs. The novel ends with Jimson telling Ideal that now that she has suffered as much as he has, he wants to stay with her. Ideal, finally able to act on her recognition that she and Jimson are destroying each other with their fears and defensiveness, begs Jimson to leave her, telling him to “go out there and find . . . [your] giant, kill him, become his spirit.” The Characters Ideal and Jimson, both articulate and fiery, are doomed because their ingrained fears and defenses prevent them from trusting each other. Language, instead of working as a communicative bond between them, becomes so exaggerated and overblown that it creates a divisive wall. They rail against each other in florid, convoluted prose, often becoming so involved in their tirades that they seem to disappear into a forest of words. Polite gives almost no description of either Ideal’s or Jimson’s physical characteristics. The work of characterization is done through dialogue. What starts as realistic conversation between the two invariably picks up speed and becomes more and more grandiose. The monumental quality of their words elevates both characters above the realm of everyday reality and transforms them into larger-than-life figureheads of “black man” and “black woman.” Polite’s use of dialogue establishes an ironic inconsistency between what the characters say and what they do: Both are trying to escape from the stereotyped roles their defensiveness forces them to project onto each other, but their language works against their demands for individuality and reestablishes them as stereotypes. The more the two argue about their individuality, the more their hyperbolic language suggests that they are indeed representations of stereotypes.

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Even the characters’ names imply that they are larger-than-life, mythical figures. Ideal’s name suggests that she is the perfect model of womanhood. Ironically, Ideal does come to represent the black matriarch, the woman who can “do it all.” At one time this role model may have been necessary for the survival of the black community. Because she presents Ideal struggling against this role, Polite raises the question of the damage done by such a stereotype. Jimson’s boyish name hints that he does, in fact, represent the emasculated black “son” of the all-powerful white man. By illustrating Jimson’s refusal to sacrifice his art in order to have a stable life in the white community, however, Polite suggests that her hero is not as powerless as he believes he is. Jimson is presented as suffering because he has been made to feel so helpless that he is unable to acknowledge his own strengths. Polite introduces Ideal as a child in a prologue. As the first chapter opens, Ideal is a young woman who has already abandoned her first husband and her career as a dancer to live with Jimson. The device of the prologue allows Polite to show the magical influences that have shaped her heroine. As a child, Ideal is merely a sensitive, observant filter for the dazzling characters of “the Bottom.” She hopes always to remember the vivacity of the black community: the near-sexual religious ecstasy of the worshipers in the Baptist Church, the preacher who ascends the pulpit and in her childish imagination is transmuted into a giant, the clawlike hands of her ex-slave grandmother, the circus-trained tightrope walker named Frog, the men who populated the corner pool hall, the murdered woman Inez who is slashed to ribbons on the street corner, and whiskey-drinking Red John, who sold his soul to the devil. After showing the individuality of the characters who shaped her heroine’s consciousness, Polite uses the body of the novel to trace the transformation wrought on Ideal by her relationship with Jimson. By contrasting the unique perceptions of the child Ideal with the stereotyped role into which Ideal evolves, Polite emphasizes the damage inflicted on the consciousness of black men and women by their fear of losing their identity to one another. Themes and Meanings Polite presents The Flagellants as an exploration of the extent to which individuals shape one another while being influenced by the society in which they live. Unfortunately for Ideal and Jimson, the historical stereotypes of the dominant black matriarch and the emasculated black man still influence black relationships, and life in a largely white environment places economic pressures on the couple that cause these stereotypes to surface. Polite’s novel questions the ways in which the fear of losing identity, ingrained in the American black community after centuries of violence, warps the potentially positive transforming force of love. By setting Ideal’s childhood in the black southern community of “the Bottom,” Polite establishes that her heroine is shaped by the superstition as well as the beauty of her traditional African American religious background. Ideal’s identification with this community foreshadows the struggle she will have with the stereotyped role of

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women in African American culture. The fact that Ideal left the community early in life suggests escape from traditional stereotypes, but it becomes apparent that Ideal cannot shake off the fears that have evolved after years of exposure to racism. Polite establishes the stereotyped gender struggle between Ideal and Jimson by showing their different adaptations to living in New York City. Ideal’s willingness to abandon her artistic goals as a dancer for the practical need of making a living suggests the sacrifice of the stereotyped black matriarch, whose necessary function as caretaker of others comes at the expense of her individual fulfillment. Jimson, however, refuses to give up his poetry, which functions symbolically as his manhood. Because his identity is so strongly linked with his writing, Ideal’s plea that he try to find a job seems to him an aggressive attempt to take away his art and thus to emasculate him. Jimson embodies the plight of the black man, caught between the practical need to support himself and the human need to maintain his identity in an environment that is unwilling to value him as an individual. As the novel’s title implies, flagellation, the act of whipping oneself for public penance or for sexual arousal, is a central theme. The idea of public penance suggests that Ideal and Jimson, who scourge each other both verbally and physically, are acting not on their individual natures but in response to larger social forces. Their sexual attraction to each other is based largely on their ability to inflict wounds to the same degree. Jimson dismisses Ideal’s first husband Adam as a masochist, interested only in receiving pain. At the end of the novel, Jimson begs Ideal to stay with him: “And now that I have caused you suffering equal to mine, and you still love me, I want you, Ideal.” The act of whipping is an allusion to the cruel abuse of slaves at the hands of their masters. Polite suggests that African Americans may yet be killed off by slavery. Centuries of violence perpetrated by whites have been internalized by African Americans, so that there is no longer a need for a white overseer to punish the victim, because the victim now punishes herself or himself. Critical Context Noting the important influence that earlier generations of African American writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison had on younger black authors, critic Robert Gross pointed out that these older writers often found it hard to interest publishers in books that dealt frankly with the African American experience. After the Civil Rights movement, more people became interested in the black experience. Polite’s experience has been that relationships between black women and men are destroyed by the pervasive gender stereotypes grown out of racism. Because it addresses the ways in which black men and women battle against one another within these stereotypes, The Flagellants is generally considered in context with other novels that remove politics from the global arena and place it on the individual level. Polite fulfills author Franz Fanon’s insistence that the black writer take on the role of “awakener of the people” not by writing a didactic, revolutionary text but by drawing attention to the power struggle in the relationship of one black couple.

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Responses to The Flagellants, Polite’s first novel, have been mixed. Author and critic Irving Howe called the book “an arty duet of rant,” and complained that Polite writes with “excruciating badness.” Gross disagreed, saying that Polite’s “unique, concrete language . . . captures the feel of real, sensory objects and takes on an independent, stylized life of its own,” appropriate to the characters’ struggle to escape their psychological dilemma. Unlike many writers who believe that the novel has great potential for social change, Polite is doubtful. Her ornate language and the high-pitched intensity of her characters have been recognized as attempts to reinvest the novel with contemporary relevance, but Polite questions the value of writing: “My work has no meaning if people are unable to eat every day.” Bibliography Bracey, John H., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds. Black Matriarchy: Myth or Reality? Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1971. Examines developments in the African American family after the end of slavery. Provides statistical evidence of the various adaptations black families have made, focusing on matriarchal trends and the importance of the extended family. Dobson, Frank E., Jr. “Carlene Hatcher Polite.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Includes biography of Polite, critical overview of her works, and bibliography of those works and of secondary sources. Eaton, Kalenda C. Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980. New York: Routledge, 2008. Discusses the rise of African American feminist literature beginning in the mid-1960’s, when The Flagellants was published. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. Selections from personal narratives by African American writers, civil rights activists, and cultural critics. Different aspects of African American life are presented. Many of the excerpts deal with gender relationships within the black community, as well as topics such as the suppression of African American individuality. Gross, Robert A. “The Black Novelists: ‘Our Turn.’” Newsweek 73 (June 16, 1969): 94. Gross calls Polite an original and stylistically gifted writer, identifying her with other contemporary authors such as Ishmael Reed and Ernest Gaines who inject vitality into the American literary scene with their willingness to address the complexities of black life and grapple with the problems of American society. Hooks, Bell, and Cornel West. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1991. Series of dialogues and interviews between contemporary cultural critics Bell Hooks and Cornel West. Focuses on gender relations in the African American community, analyzing ways in which race and gender relate to Marxism, African American spirituality, sexuality, and liberation

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struggles. The authors consider the role of the intellectual within the black community as well as the ways in which education forms ideology. Howe, Irving. “New Black Writers.” Harper’s 239 (December, 1969): 130-131. Emphasizes the individuality of contemporary black writers. Rather than belonging to a single school or movement, each author works to present unique views of African American life. Howe admires the thematic importance of The Flagellants but condemns what he perceives as excessive hyperbole and self-pity in Ideal and Jimson. V. Penelope Pelizzon

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FLIGHT TO CANADA Author: Ishmael Reed (1938) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Parody Time of plot: 1860’s and 1970’s Locale: United States and Canada First published: 1976 Principal characters: Raven Quickskill, a fugitive slave Arthur Swille III, a wealthy and powerful plantation owner, Quickskill’s former master Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, an American Indian princess Yankee Jack, a pirate-philanthropist who builds Emancipation City Abraham Lincoln, a shyster and prototype of the corporation lawyer, not the Great Emancipator of mainstream American history Stray Leechfield and 40’s, the two slaves with whom Raven Quickskill escapes Uncle Robin, the novel’s Uncle Tom figure Mammy Barracuda, the woman who presides over Swille’s plantation The Novel In an interview with John O’Brien, Ishmael Reed once defined the novelist as a “fetish-maker” and the novel as an “amulet.” The language he used is instructive in that it “conjures” (another of Reed’s favorite words) a cultural perspective quite different from the more conventional European one that Reed’s densely and enthusiastically intertextual approach opposes and parodically undermines. Against the linear and largely univocal tradition of the European novel, Reed offers a fiction that is both diffuse and multivoiced, close in structure to the Sufi “scatter style” that characterizes Reed’s essays. His innovativeness involves a recycling of older, often previously marginalized (in the West, that is) styles and materials. This recycling is, however, not at all nostalgic. Reed uses material from the past “to explain the present or the future,” he has written. “Necromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs to receive visions of the future. That is prophecy. The black writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future.” In the case of Flight to Canada, this past is most specifically and hilariously Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852). Far from being a simple parody, Reed’s novel is, in Jerome Charyn’s words, “a demonized Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that draws

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upon two additional aspects of Reed’s “Voodoo” (or, alternately, “NeoHooDoo”) aesthetic. First, it brings together past and present at a single spatial-temporal narrative point, and second, it amalgamates a vast variety of materials, of which Stowe’s novel and the slave narratives upon which it is based are only the most obvious. Just as Stowe exploited the slave narrative tradition for her own novelistic and moralistic purposes, Reed exploits Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this time in a self-conscious rather than (as in Stowe’s case) self-effacing manner. Flight to Canada is divided into three parts. The first, “Naughty Harriet,” makes abundantly clear Reed’s satiric thrust. Reed’s opening gambit does more than ironize Stowe and her novel. It calls into question the very idea of openings, something Michel Foucault was doing at around the same time, though in a far more theoretical manner. Thus, “Naughty Harriet” opens with what in effect may be described as a series of openings. The allusion to Stowe is immediately followed by the poem “Flight to Canada,” signed by Raven Quickskill, whose signature forms an integral part of the poem. The next fifteen pages offer a brief, italicized account by Quickskill that narratively precedes but chronologically follows the rest of the novel. Quickskill’s account is in turn followed by a brief third-person account of the Swilles in Virginia, which segues into the arrival of Abraham Lincoln, who has eluded both Confederate soldiers and the far more pertinacious and dangerous bill collectors. Freely mixing narratives, voices, and typefaces, and making a variety of “Liza Leaps,” from Underground Railroad to buses and jumbo jets, from historical fact to outrageous imaginings, Flight to Canada is clearly a novel in motion. It “travels in style,” as Quickskill says in his poem, in more than one sense. Lincoln’s arrival at Swille’s estate, Swine’rd, sets in motion one of the novel’s two major intertwined plots. The other concerns Quickskill and his poem, which is about to be published in the Beulahland Review three years after “submission.” (Literary enslavement and emancipation are two of the novel’s satiric targets.) Not quite the autobiographically revealing poem it first appears to be, “Flight to Canada” affects Quickskill in several ways. First, it makes him famous. Second, it reveals his whereabouts and therefore forces him to become a fugitive once more. (Swille, incidentally, accepts what the novel lampoons as the conventional scientific wisdom of the day: that because escaping from slavery is an illness, it is the owner’s paternalistic responsibility to treat and cure—that is, catch—a “sick” slave.) Third, it finances Quickskill’s flight to Canada and (he believes) freedom. Realizing that his “lease” is up, that he is “overdue,” and that Swille wants his “investment” back, Quickskill uses the two hundred dollars he receives for his poem in an attempt to realize what he has thus far only written about. Along the way, he resumes his affair with Princess Quaw Quaw. Interesting as their flight is, it exists less in competition with than alongside the plots involving Lincoln, Swille, Uncle Robin, and others. Even together, these multiple narratives make up only a part of Reed’s extraordinary novel. Quickskill’s odyssey may repeat similar escapes by other slaves as recorded, conventionally enough, in slave narratives such as that of Frederick Douglass, but Swille’s death just as carefully and parodically follows the conventions of another literary type, Edgar Allan

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Poe’s Gothic fiction, including Roderick’s death in “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Swille’s sister Vivian (playing the part of Poe’s Madeline) returns from death to embrace her sadomasochistic, necrophiliac brother one last time. Reed, however, compounds matters by suggesting that this Poe-esque tale of forbidden love and final retribution may be nothing more than an equally Poe-esque hoax, a fiction used to cover the fact that Mrs. Swille has murdered her husband (for causing the death of their son) by pushing him into the fire. Lincoln’s death follows a no less curious script, that of President Kennedy’s assassination, recorded live and endlessly replayed for a television audience. Just as the novel makes its leaps from one historical period and narrative convention to another, Reed leads his reader to leap from the reality of the story to the reality of the page. Readers must deal not only with Quickskill and Swille but with Lincoln and Stowe, with Kennedy and contemporary African American writer John A. Williams, with the 1860’s and the 1960’s, and too with footnotes and material reprinted verbatim, including a lengthy passage from Our American Cousin, the Tim Tyler play that Lincoln was watching when he was shot by John Wilkes Booth. Readers will likely find it easier to accept Quickskill, a fictional writer, meeting William Wells Brown, the country’s first black novelist, on a Lake Erie ferry, or even Swille meeting Lincoln, curious and comical as their meeting is, than to have the notion of the inviolability of historical time overturned and the boundaries of both history and the historical novel transgressed with such carnivalesque delight. The Characters There are three keys to understanding Reed’s handling of his characters. One is his free mingling of fictional and historical figures. The second is his turning away from character as it is generally defined, in terms of realistic detail, psychological development, and the like, toward those “essential elements,” as Reed calls them, that “distinguish the character from other people.” Instead of fleshing out his characters physically and psychologically, Reed attempts to “abstract those qualities from the characters just like someone making a doll in West or East Africa.” Acknowledging that this approach may appear “grotesque or distorted” to the modern (Western) reader, Reed contends that “I’m not interested in rendering a photograph of a person. I’m interested in capturing his soul and putting it in a cauldron or in a novel.” Reed’s mode of characterization, like his mode of fiction writing, suggests that “black” magic and a doubly black humor are connected, even interchangeable. The third key to Reed’s approach to character involves adapting his African aesthetic to an American context by drawing on the native culture’s own contributions to an art of abstraction and broadly defined strokes: vaudeville, newspaper headlines, and, above all, cartoons and comic strips. The result is a fiction of types deliberately sketched along the crudest, most satirical lines possible in an art designed to give offense, where grotesquerie and buffoonery prevail, and where the chief Western models are Nathanael West and François Rabelais, not Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. It should not, therefore, be altogether surprising that when Quickskill meets Brown, the fictional character should call the (seemingly) historical figure “the great-

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est satirist of these times.” It is as improbable a claim as one could make about Brown, yet one that in a strange way comes closer to the essence of his art than have scores of scholarly studies. Similarly, Reed inverts the generally accepted portrait of Stowe: that in writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin she was less an author than God’s amanuensis and, as Lincoln is supposed to have said, the “little lady” who started the Civil War. Reed’s “Naughty Harriet” appears quite differently, as just one more “toady to the Nobility,” as ready at novel’s end to exploit Uncle Robin’s Horatio Algerish rags-to-riches story as earlier she had exploited Josiah Henson, the “real” Uncle Tom whose tale she borrowed—whose soul she stole and sentimentalized. Significantly, Reed’s Henson, like the real one, ends up in Canada, turns to the East African art of wood-carving, and founds a utopian community that proves less successful than Yankee Jack’s Emancipation City and that becomes the forerunner of Reed’s own alternative publishing projects. Even the characters’ names contribute to the novel’s overall comic effect. There is little Reed can do with historical figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and Robert E. Lee, other than to play on the Honest Abe theme and rewrite Stowe as “Naughty Harriet.” “Swille” nicely testifies to the moral hog lurking just below the patrician surface. Arthur and Vivian are drawn from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (18591885), which becomes as much the target of Reed’s satire as Sir Thomas Malory’s work was of Mark Twain’s. The oxymoronic Mammy Barracuda inverts a stock type that stretches from Stowe’s Aunt Chloe to William Faulkner’s Dilsey. Uncle Robin ironizes the African American folktale about picking poor Robin clean (also used in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man), and Princess Quaw Quaw stands in much the same ironic relation to the Native American tradition as Princess Winterfallsummerspring on the 1950’s children’s television program Howdy Doody, hosted by “Buffalo Bill.” “Quickskill,” like Swille, speaks for itself. “Raven,” however, does double duty: It links Quickskill to both the African American community (by color) and to the Native American culture (specifically, the Tlingit version of the raven myth). Although Raven and Robin are clearly the novel’s “heroes,” the novel’s most vicious characters—the Swilles and Mammy Barracuda—interest readers more, largely because (as Edmund White has pointed out) it is they and not the novel’s more admirable figures who embody Reed’s own creative energy. Themes and Meanings Reed has defined his “Neo-HooDoo” aesthetic as a stance rather than as a school, a means for undermining the dominant culture’s grip and thus opening up a space in which can be heard a multiplicity of multicultural voices previously marginalized, coopted, or silenced. In his own novels, Reed does more than merely allow such voices to be heard. He espouses his aesthetic, openly and polemically in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), and less pugnaciously and more successfully in Flight to Canada. More than an ironic and irreverent retelling of American history, Reed’s eclectic novel incorporates often unfamiliar material, opening up old wounds, pointing to the scars, leaving

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the seams ragged, refusing either to monologize or homogenize. Read in terms of the Neo-HooDoo aesthetic, Swille’s love for his dead sister does double service. More than a grotesque joke at Swille’s expense, it points to Swille’s love of the dead, including dead traditions, his obsession with sameness and purity, including racial purity, and his opposition to change of any kind. A thoroughgoing revisionist, Reed uses satire, parody, farce, invective, and allegory to create a narrative space free of Western hegemony—free, that is, from narrowly Western notions of theme, plot, character, time, and space. His crafting of an alternative story of American history, particularly the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, parallels the work of the two European writers who have influenced him most. William Blake and William Butler Yeats chose (as Blake stated) to create their own systems rather than to be enslaved by another’s. As editor, publisher, and cultural gadfly, as well as poet, novelist, and essayist, Reed has enlarged this space to include as many alternative voices and systems as possible. He served as cofounder of the East Village Other and later of Yardbird Publishing (named for jazz great Charlie “Yardbird” Parker), and also founded the Before Columbus Foundation, dedicated to the repatriation of art, especially folk art, expropriated from various colonized peoples. The thrust of Reed’s work is summed up in the title of an essay that appeared in Le Monde in the same year that Flight to Canada was published: “The MultiCultural Artist: A New Phase.” One can assume that the use to which Uncle Robin will put Swille’s fifty-room castle will be similarly multicultural, with the freedomloving, Indian-influenced former slave Raven Quickskill already its first writer-inresidence. Critical Context Reed’s fiction demands to be read in terms of a dual critical context, its parts at once overlapping and conflicting. One is the African American literary tradition, which begins with and remains largely influenced by the slave narratives written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The slave narratives are autobiographical in focus, moral in intent, and realistic and documentary in approach. Far more than any other African American writer, Reed has, as Jerry Bryant has pointed out, “cut his links” to that tradition. The other side of Flight to Canada’s critical context is postmodernism, particularly as it manifests itself in the new kind of historical novel written by Reed, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, E. L. Doctorow, and others. (It is worth noting that Reed is the only African American writer included in Joe David Bellamy’s pioneering 1974 collection The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers.) This is not to imply that Reed’s fiction represents a flight from the African American tradition to the postmodern. It represents instead a flight from the narrow manner in which the former came to be defined and accepted. Instead of perpetuating the slave-narrative line, of which Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is undoubtedly the best known and most influential example, Reed emancipated the tradition itself by tracing it back further still, to its roots in older African and African American cultures, with their emphasis on the fantastic and their abiding interest in

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the trickster figure. Equally important, Reed situated his act of literary liberation within a larger conflict: the overthrowing of the very idea and practice of cultural dominance. It was an approach that put him at odds not only with the cultural establishment but also with the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. At the very least, Reed has redefined the African American literary tradition and played his part in reshaping both the historical novel and American history. The multiculturalism that Reed explored and expounded in 1976 in Flight to Canada has become an accepted, if still contentious, fact of American life. The same passage of time that has served to validate Reed’s multiculturalism has, however, also served to underscore what many readers have felt is the least attractive feature of his writing, a misogynist streak that, while most pronounced in Reckless Eyeballing (1985), has manifested itself throughout his career (though not, Reed would say, without good reason, given the attacks on black males by such prominent women as Alice Walker). Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Although brief and largely introductory in nature, Bell’s discussion is valuable both for its overview of Reed’s career and aesthetic and for its situating of Reed’s work within the tradition of the African American novel. Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Argues that the fiction of Baraka, Reed, and Delany proves that historically informed and historically relevant postmodern fiction is possible. Sees Reed as the most “spontaneous” and “brazen” of the three, deconstructing the black literary tradition and reasserting the folk aesthetic upon which that tradition is founded. McConnell, Frank. “Ishmael Reed’s Fiction: Da HooDoo Is Put on America.” In Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945, edited by A. Robert Lee. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980. Discusses the relation of Reed’s HooDoo aesthetic to the monologues of stand-up comics such as Lenny Bruce and, more especially, to “bop,” in which “the improvisational art of jazz becomes selfconscious.” McConnell treats all of Reed’s first five novels. In Flight to Canada, Reed “has passed beyond the idea of HooDoo . . . or, rather, has assimilated that idea into a larger and more capacious aesthetics and politics of national liberation and rebirth.” Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Provides a detailed analysis of the “New Black Aesthetic” and Reed’s “battle” with it and its proponents. Martin analyzes Reed’s syncretic and synchronic fiction, poetry, and essays in the context of and as an advance on the New Black Aesthetic. His discussion of Flight to Canada emphasizes Reed’s use of the HooDoo concept of time.

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Mvuyekure, Pierre-Damien. The “Dark Heathenism” of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed: African Voodoo as American Literary Hoodoo. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Pointedly reads Reed’s work as postcolonial rather than—or more importantly than—postmodern. Uses the concept of hoodoo writing to examine Reed’s intervention in and appropriation of colonialist discourse. Nazareth, Peter. “Heading Them Off at the Pass: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4 (Summer, 1984): 208-226. Focusing on Flight to Canada, Nazareth contends in this wide-ranging discussion that “the difficulty for [a critic] is that Reed always has a hundred things going on at the same time while the critic goes in a straight line, pursuing one lead.” Settle, Elizabeth A., and Thomas A. Settle. Ishmael Reed: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Comprehensive and well-annotated, indeed, indispensable, guide to works by and about Reed through 1980. Spaulding, A. Timothy. Re-forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Study of supernatural, antirealist representations of slavery. Includes a chapter on the representation of time in Flight to Canada and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979). Spillers, Hortense J. “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Reads Flight to Canada “against and with” Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an “iconoclastic reinvention” that “wants to speak both for itself and against something else.” Reading semiotically, Spillers reads Flight to Canada not as a rewriting of Uncle Tom’s Cabin but instead in terms of Reed’s imitating various discursive and interpretive strategies. Weixlmann, Joe. “Ishmael Reed’s Raven.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4 (Summer, 1984): 205-208. Discusses the Tlingit legend of the raven (both a creator and a trickster) and the way Reed plays that legend against Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.” Robert A. Morace

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FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/ WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF Author: Ntozake Shange (Paulette Williams, 1948) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Feminist Time of plot: 1970’s Locale: Outside the cities of Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; Houston, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; San Francisco, California; St. Louis, Missouri; and New York, New York First produced: 1975, at Studio Riobea, New York, New York First published: 1975; revised, 1976 Principal characters: Lady in Red, one of the seven nameless characters; she enumerates the many methods she has used to get a man to love her Lady in Blue, a victim of emotional and physical abuse who speaks of the myriad excuses black men contrive for inexcusable behavior Lady in Orange, who tries to use music to cure her pain Lady in Purple, who chooses as a companion someone she knows cannot comprehend her, as a means of avoiding hurt Lady in Green, who squanders her love on an indifferent man Lady in Brown, who pays the choreopoem’s only positive tribute to a black man Lady in Yellow, the character who summarizes the predicament of black women The Play Written to “sing a black girl’s song . . . to sing her rhythms/ carin/ struggle/ hard times/ [to] . . . let her be born,” this play is a compilation of twenty poems performed by seven African American actresses. The poems are unified by a series of similar shared experiences of the charackers, who present a collage of experiences that articulate what it means to be a young black woman in the modern world. The play addresses the physical and emotional violence that is committed against women of color as well as addressing all women’s potential to triumph over the pain of rejection, brutalization, and devaluation. The essence of the play, Shange has noted, is contained within its title. The rainbow, which follows a storm, suggests the opportunity “to start all over again with the power and the beauty of ourselves.” The play, which Shange refers to as a “choreopoem,” is an exploration of people’s lives and offers hope to women who have endured the harshness of the storm.

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The play begins with a plea to echo the song of the black girl’s possibilities. The subsequent panorama of African American characters and their behavior, customs, and language includes poems about an eight-year-old girl in St. Louis, Missouri, who falls in love with the idea of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a prostitute who “wanted to be a . . . wound to every man,” a lonely black woman imprisoned in the six-block universe of Harlem, and a high-school girl who deliberates on the question of surrendering her virginity “in a deep black buick/ smellin of thunderbird & ladies in heat.” Other sketches include an ashamed woman’s abortion, three friends who share the affections of one man, and a woman who almost loses her stuff—her body, her soul, and her spirit—to a worthless man. The “sorry” poems depict rambunctious street humor, as women mock the men who exit from their lives while the men provide myriad weak alibis for their inexcusable treatment of women. Some noteworthy poems underscore the richness of the play. These include “now i love somebody more than” and “i’m a poet who,” which address the urgency of music and dance in the lives of black women as means to ventilate their repressed anxieties. Equally remarkable is the poem “latent rapists.” This work is about date rape and voices the concerns of women who are afraid to press charges against rapists who have been friends and who are men that hold prominent positions. Another poem deserving recognition is “a laying on of hands,” which centers on self-love, self-empowerment, and sisterhood. “a nite with beau willie brown,” perhaps the most powerful sketch, commands attention for its portrayal of a maniacal woman-beater who drops his son and daughter out of a fifth-floor window because the mother of his children, whom he has battered, refuses to marry him. The characters in this play are seven nameless African American women dressed in dance costumes with long skirts that are each a different color but are otherwise identical. The skirts are the colors of the rainbow, plus brown. Each character is identified by the color of her dress: lady in brown, lady in yellow, lady in purple, lady in red, lady in green, lady in blue, lady in orange. The women take turns presenting poems that illustrate what it means to be young, black, and female—and thus triply oppressed—in a white patriarchal society that forces black women to fend for themselves. Mistreated and abused, these characters suffer tragedies that include rape, abortion, unrequited love, battery, and the murder of their children. They find strength within their individual and collective selves to recover after being assaulted and to improve the quality of their lives. To this purpose, these women become selfabsorbed after being frustrated by the significant men in their lives, for whom they were too self-sacrificing, too self-effacing, and too submissive. These ladies resolve that no man shall again tyrannize them. Apprehensive of experiencing physical and emotional abuse in subsequent relationships, the women become independent of men. These ladies articulate the deepest pains of their individual lives and then unite to ward off their mutual adversaries and authors of their grief. Shielded against men, these women console their “sisters” as they share their personal struggles for integrity and autonomy. In commiserating with one another, the women experience both a communal and

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an individual discovery of their value and power. They gradually realize that they are survivors of monumental adversities who did not succumb to mental breakdown in the wake of life’s crises. The lady in red provides a case in point. She enumerates the many methods she used to get a man to love her. The man did not return her love, though he used her to satisfy his lust. When the lady in red dissolves the exploitative relationship, her metamorphosis into an individual who values herself becomes apparent. Summarizing the ordeal, the lady in red says this waz an experiment to see how selfish i cd be if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover if i waz capable of debasin myself for the love of another if i cd stand not being wanted when i wanted to be wanted & i cannot so i am endin this affair this note is attached to a plant i’ve been waterin since the day i met you you may water it yr damn self

Lady in blue offers another narrative that exemplifies the survival of the black woman and her ability to regenerate after victimization. This woman speaks of the myriad excuses black men give black women for their inexcusable behavior. These men, who are unable to provide love, intimacy, and security because of the paralyzing effects of subjugation in the United States, perpetrate emotional and physical abuse against the women in their lives and then attempt to placate them with apologies. The lady in blue is exhausted with her lover’s apologies and suggests that battered African American women cultivate enough self-love to protect themselves and, if necessary, to survive without their abusive men. Her closing statement reflects the intensity of her intolerance of men’s vain apologies: i loved you on purpose i was open on purpose i still crave vulnerability & close talk; & i’m not even sorry bout you bein sorry you can carry all the guilt & grime ya wanna just dont give it to me i cant use another sorry next time you should admit you’re mean low-down triflin & no count straight steada being sorry alla the time enjoy bein yrself

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Lady in orange, in reflecting on her experience with heartache, gives another example of the black woman’s ability to rebound from adversity. This woman has used music as a panacea for her pain, explaining, “i can make the music loud enuf/ so there is no me but dance/ and when i can dance like that/ there’s nothin cd hurt me.” The music is no tonic for her lover, who is obsessed with another woman whom he had left but returned to several times. To salvage her pride and to regain her self-respect, lady in orange kills her love for the man who trifled with her affection. In the same vein, lady in purple chooses to “linger in non-english speakin arms so there waz no possibility of understandin” to ensure her own survival against a man who could destroy her. Lady in purple’s deliberate involvement with someone she knows cannot comprehend her suggests that she finds protection against hurt in the inability to communicate the mutual needs and expectations of her lover and herself. Having not voiced their mutual desires, the couple cannot be disappointed when the needs are not met. Lady in green squanders her love on an indifferent man but averts annihilation the moment she realizes her self-bereavement. Exclaiming “i want my stuff back/ . . . you cant have me less i give me away,” she reclaims her self-esteem and rebuilds her life. Her statement “i gotta have me in my pocket/ to get round like a good woman shd/ & make the poem in the pot and the chicken in the dance” testifies to her self-possession and to her readiness to contribute to life. Lady in brown pays the choreopoem’s only positive tribute to a black man, in the person of Toussaint L’Ouverture. To an eight-year-old narrator, he is a combination of the Haitian liberator and the friendly black boy who symbolizes audacity and strength. When lady in brown accepts the companionship of a boy named Toussaint Jones, she remarks, i felt TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE sorta leave me & i waz sad til i realized TOUSSAINT JONES waznt too different from TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE cept the ol one was in haiti & this one wid me speakin english & eatin apples

Lady in yellow summarizes the black woman’s predicament: “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical/ dilemma.” Her statement emphasizes the determination of African American women to rise above the brutality of men and the women’s effort to cope in a universe that militates against their survival. Themes and Meanings Although the play delineates the brutal treatment accorded to black women by black men, it also addresses the universal battery of women by men that women experience worldwide. The story of Beau Willie Brown, a crazed Vietnam War veteran who brutalizes his girlfriend with knives and beatings, embodies the violence and the

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physical abuse that African American women suffer at the hands of black men. The contributing factors to Beau’s cruelty—his maladjustment as a Vietnam War veteran, his victimization by racism in school, his frequent harassment by police officers, and his job as a gypsy cabdriver—must be mentioned in order to resist viewing him as the instrument through which Shange castigates all black men. Rather than depicting Beau and his ethnic counterparts as stereotypical brutes, the playwright seemingly suggests that violent black men like Beau are the products of racial and economic oppression. Frustration, rather than will, prompts these offenders to vent their anxieties upon women. Therefore, to an extent, society is responsible for the violence that African American men and all other victimized men commit against women. From this perspective, this play can be seen as addressing the abuse that all women have experienced at the hands of thwarted and embittered males. Shange’s play underscores women’s need to rise above this bondage of maltreatment. It is an exhortation for bruised women to fight back after they have been injured and to construct an improved life-style. The characters’ response to the Beau Willie Brown tragedy reflects their internalization of this lesson. The ladies, after hearing about the abuse of a woman and the murder of her children, discover that the black woman must learn to trust herself and to believe in her own elemental value despite all the cruelties that are waged against her. Dramatist and scholar Elizabeth Brown-Guillory finds additional significance in the play’s symbols. The colors that the actresses wear suggest the diversity of women and an infinity of possibilities. The rainbow myth, which maintains that a pot of gold can be found at the end of a rainbow, illustrates that these colored women are progressing toward something good, liberating, and dynamic. Moreover, the elusiveness and ephemeral nature of the rainbow demonstrates the mystery of life, particularly of the lives of the women who have been damaged by both strangers and acquaintances. There is a certain amount of hope expressed by these women, who do not always comprehend the reasons for their victimization. Their lack of names and the lack of capital letters in the printed poems suggest self-effacement, invisibility, and a lack of self-confidence. These women battle the storm before they can enjoy the quiet of the rainbow. Another important symbol is the tagging that occurs at the beginning of the play. Six characters, those with skirts of the rainbow colors, stand motionless until lady in brown tags each one. This touching invigorates each woman. They come alive to share experiences with the world. The tagging also suggests a spiritual and a cultural communion among women. The concluding gesture in the play is more powerful than the tagging. The seven women experience a laying on of hands, chanting that they have God within themselves and that they love her fiercely. This locking of hands represents a cementing of spirits and sensibilities. These women celebrate their wholeness. They form an impenetrable circle that stands for the shield they wear to buffer their pain and to empower themselves with the courage to begin again. This closure represents freedom to move beyond anguish and pain. Shange emphasizes that women must nurture and

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protect one another and that women must turn to the god within themselves for sustenance. Dancing is another symbol that contributes to the overall meaning of the play. Dancing is a freeing agent, a catharsis, for these “colored girls.” Shange’s female characters also use dancing as a defense mechanism. While whirling around on the stage, lady in yellow says, “we gotta dance to keep from dying.” There is a sense of desperation and outrage in Shange’s tone as she flings these characters across the stage to dance out the pain of their lives. The dancing also suggests exploration. The characters come to know their bodies, and invariably their souls, through dancing. Shange uses dancing in “graduation nite” to suggest the surrendering of virginity. The lady in yellow tells how she danced “nasty ole tricks” frenetically, reminiscent of an African tribal ritual, just before giving up her innocence in the backseat of a Buick on graduation night. Choreographing both their vulnerability and their resiliency, Shange portrays the spirit of survival of these colored girls. Critical Context Shange’s for colored girls was the second play by a black woman to reach Broadway, preceded by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. The choreopoem won numerous awards and accolades, including the Golden Apple, the Outer Critics Circle, the Mademoiselle, an Obie, and an Audelco. In addition, it was nominated for the Tony, the Grammy, and the Emmy. Following its Broadway run, for colored girls toured London in 1977 under the sponsorship of the Samuel French Company and was produced for the Public Broadcasting Service in collaboration with stations WNET and WPBT-TV in 1982. The play established Shange as a serious American playwright, one who voiced the sentiments of women everywhere and of every race who have suffered emotional and physical abuse. In particular, she initiated a sober examination of the specific plight of modern African American women, an examination previously absent from drama. Shange created a permanent place for herself in American theater history as she brought to the stage the choreopoem, a distinct art form that included chants, poetry, dance, and rituals. Although the play incurred the wrath of many black men for its sketches of men who seem only to know how to lie, seduce, beat, rape, and abandon women, it was generally well received by critics. Edwin Wilson, in The Wall Street Journal, acclaimed Shange’s good ear and eye for the behavior and customs of black people. He also praised her capture of “the raw emotions of the modern black woman who against great odds fights for her integrity and her self-respect.” Jack Kroll of Newsweek wrote, “Shange’s poems aren’t war cries—they are outcries filled with controlled passion against the brutality that blasts the lives of colored girls.” Most critics restricted for colored girls to being merely a play about the existing relationships between African American women and their men rather than a work about men and women in general.

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Bibliography Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Assesses the contributions of Ntozake Shange, Alice Childress, and Lorraine Hansberry to American and African American theater. Provides a particularly insightful analysis of for colored girls. Clarke, Cheryl. “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Includes a chapter on African American feminist communalism in for colored girls. Effiong, Philip Uko. In Search of a Model for African-American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Evaluates Shange’s plays as potentially exemplary for African American theatrical aesthetics. Flowers, Sandra Hollin. “Colored Girls: Textbook for the Eighties.” Black American Literature Forum 15 (Summer, 1981): 51-54. Focuses on the quality of relationships between African American men and women. Discusses several of the poems that compose for colored girls. Gussow, Mel. “Stage: ‘Colored Girls’ on Broadway.” The New York Times, September 16, 1976, p. 20. Examines the play as it defines what it means to be a black woman in white America. Gussow also explores the evolution of the play, beginning with early performances while it was still in the process of being composed. Kalem, T. E. “He Done Her Wrong.” Time 107 (June 14, 1976): 74. Suggests that the play is an indictment of African American men, who in the play “are portrayed as brutal con men and amorous double-dealers.” Wilson, Edwin. Review of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, by Ntozake Shange. The Wall Street Journal, September 21, 1976, p. 19. Observes that the play captures the triple disfranchisement of being young, African American, and female. Notes that rather than despairing, Shange’s black women discover their own rainbow in humor and in an increasing awareness of worth. Young, Jean. “Ritual Poetics and Rites of Passage in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf.” In Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Part of a collection studying the importation of African ritual traditions into black theater, this essay looks at the relationship of traditional rites of passage to Shange’s play. Patricia A. Young

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FREE ENTERPRISE Author: Michelle Cliff (1946) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism; social criticism; feminist Time of plot: 1858-1920 Locale: The Caribbean; Carville, Mississippi; Boston, Massachusetts First published: 1993 Principal characters: Mary Ellen Pleasant, a successful black businesswoman who finances efforts to abolish slavery Annie Christmas, an abolitionist and resister who fled her privileged situation in Jamaica to fight for freedom Alice Hooper, an upper-class Boston woman who opposes slavery yet is afraid to express her beliefs in society Clover Hooper Adams, Alice’s cousin, a photographer with artistic aspirations who commits suicide The Novel Free Enterprise recounts the lives and interactions of two women dedicated to the abolition of slavery and the very different outcomes of their involvement in the antislavery movement. The novel begins near Carville, Mississippi, in 1920. Annie Christmas lives near the riverbank in a house that appears to be slipping into the river. The trees in front of her house are decorated with an odd assortment of ordinary bottles whose lingering aromas reawaken the past for Annie. She remembers her girlhood in the Caribbean, the first time she met Mary Ellen Pleasant (M.E.P.), and how she came to be named Annie Christmas. The novel recounts the meeting of the two women at a lecture given in Boston. M.E.P. invites Annie to supper at a restaurant called Free Enterprise that is owned by a black fisherman and his wife. During the meal, M.E.P. suggests she take the name of Annie Christmas, a woman who had worked barges on the Mississippi River. The story returns to Carville, Mississippi, and Annie’s involvement with a leper colony. The lepers of the colony join Annie in telling stories. These stories are oral histories that conflict with the official versions of history: They present historical events from different perspectives and with different facts than do standard accounts. The novel then reproduces a letter sent by M.E.P. to Annie. M.E.P.’s letter recounts an unpleasant evening at Alice Hooper’s home. The occasion is the unveiling of a painting by the English artist Joseph Turner entitled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On.” M.E.P., upset by the subject of the painting and the comments of other guests, abruptly leaves. The next morning, she receives a letter of apology from Miss Hooper. M.E.P. accepts the apology.

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The incident at Alice Hooper’s home shifts the story line away from both M.E.P. and Annie, as the novel concentrates instead on Alice Hooper’s trip to Washington, D.C. She travels to the nation’s capital with her cousin Clover Hooper to see the Civil War victory celebrations and to visit places of historical importance. There, they meet a mysterious multiracial woman in the alley behind Ford’s Theatre. Clover asks to take her picture; the woman agrees. During preparations for the photograph, the women engage in a conversation in which the alley woman reveals that she is contraband and discloses details of her life. She knows how to read and has read many books. Clover and the woman talk of books and of women’s ability to escape into them. The narrative shifts once more to M.E.P. and her journey to Martha’s Vineyard. It then digresses into M.E.P.’s life as a successful businesswoman in San Francisco and her ability to use the free enterprise system to save runaway slaves and fund abolitionist causes. Her parents’ lives are also detailed. M.E.P.’s father, Captain Parsons, was a dark-skinned boat captain who successfully transported contraband slaves, and her mother, Quasheba, was a gunsmith. M.E.P. recalls her involvement with John Brown and her sorrow over the failure of the raid on Harpers Ferry. A series of letters concludes the story of the Hooper cousins. Clover commits suicide, and Alice dies a natural death. Annie recounts her years on a Confederate chain gang during the Civil War and her subsequent retreat to the seclusion of the riverbank. M.E.P. returned to San Francisco and the fight for freedom until she herself became a victim of prejudice. The Characters Through the four principal characters of the novel, Michelle Cliff considers the question of slavery, as well as the denial of freedom in a broader sense and the importance of resistance by the disenfranchised. M.E.P. is a fictionalization of an actual historical figure who participated in the fight to abolish slavery. Cliff emphasizes her independence and success as an African American businesswoman. She utilizes the many stereotypes that surround M.E.P. in official histories to create a character who is powerful, determined, and feared by the white society to which she caters. Cliff proves willing to alter Mary Ellen Pleasant’s life to suit the needs of her narrative. For example, she adds fortuitous incidents, as when M.E.P. slips away and returns to San Francisco after the failure of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. M.E.P. is a strong, disciplined individual who refuses to let her disappointment at the failure of Brown’s attempted slave revolt defeat her. Back in San Francisco, she continues to work for abolition, and after the Civil War she fights for the rights of African American citizens. In contrast to Pleasant, Annie Christmas, christened Regina, retreats into an almost hermetic existence after her capture and servitude on the chain gang. Annie’s life in a sense comes full circle. She left the Caribbean to avoid a rich white man’s bed; on the chain gang, her sex is discovered. She is fitted out with a collar and leash and led from one prisoner to another. They are made to engage in sexual intercourse for the enter-

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tainment of the guards. One day a woman friend of one of the guards comes to enjoy the entertainment as well. When she is finally freed, Annie is broken in both body and spirit. Circumstances bring Annie to a point of no return. She can no longer actively resist and feels she has given up. She maintains a passive resistance, however, through her friendship with the lepers: She encourages them to keep alive their oral histories in resistance to the official history. Alice and Clover Hooper, although not victims of slavery, are not free. They dream of setting off together for the West to challenge the male-dominated society in which they live. Alice does not merely refrain from expressing her opinions at social gatherings: She does not even permit “unacceptable” thoughts to come to her. It is only at night, when she is alone with her pet bat, Atthis, that she allows herself to have ideas. Even then, she rarely voices them. She is ridden by feelings of guilt and cowardice, because she does not have the courage to speak up, to resist. Clover also feels a need to resist. She is not either physically or mentally what her society insists that a woman should be. She is intensely driven to record in photographs the history of the fight to end slavery. She has pretensions to be an artist, but Clover feels unreal, as though she does not physically exist. Clover goes beyond a point of no return: She commits suicide by drinking potassium cyanide, the chemical she uses to develop her photographs. Themes and Meanings The title Free Enterprise has a multiplicity of meanings and adds subtle overtones of irony to the novel. The term refers to commerce, including the slave trade. Free enterprise also makes it possible for M.E.P. to function economically within the white society and business community of San Francisco. Through this system of commerce, she gains the profits with which she funds resistance to the slave trade, a lucrative part of that very system. The restaurant Free Enterprise, owned by the African American fisherman and his wife, is a “free enterprise” as long as they keep their place. The title also refers to the initiative taken by M.E.P., Annie, and the other resisters to slavery. Attributes and entities that divide, differentiate, and classify play an important role in the novel. Language, skin tone, and sex are all means of determining who is free, who is privileged, and who is not. Disguise, therefore, becomes extremely significant. Hiding identity—passing sexually, racially, or both—are integral parts of the intrigue of the novel. M.E.P. disguises herself as “Mammy,” a person whom white San Franciscans can accept. She hides her real self, the shrewd calculating entrepreneur and abolitionist. She often wears men’s clothing and passes for male when she is traveling. Annie Christmas also disguises herself by wearing male clothing. In addition, rejecting her privileged position as a light-skinned individual, she has darkened her skin.

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Critical Context Free Enterprise is a rewriting of the history of M.E.P. and the raid on Harpers Ferry. Cliff sought to reclaim the history neglected by the official history. The novel has been recognized as a novel of resistance that belongs in the canon of African American literature and of feminist literature. Bibliography Cliff, Michelle. “History as Fiction, Fiction as History.” Ploughshares 20, nos. 2/3 (1994): 196-202. Cliff explicates her goals in writing Free Enterprise. _______. “Journey into Speech—A Writer Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff.” Interview by Opal Palmer Adisa. African American Review 28, no. 2 (1994): 273+. Cliff discusses race, oppression in Jamaica, resistance as a form of community, and the importance of women in the history of resistance. Edmonson, Belinda. “Race, Writing, and the Politics of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff.” Callaloo 16, no. 1 (Winter, 1993): 180191. Useful analysis of Cliff’s propensity to seek out obscure events from history and her ability to work with multiple perspectives. Elia, Nada. Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives. New York: Garland, 2001. Elucidates Cliff’s use of alternative and oral histories, and her representation of sexual and racial passing. Chapter 3 provides an analysis of Annie Christmas. Useful bibliography. Hudson, Lynn M. The Making of Mammy Pleasant: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Contrasts Cliff’s portrayal of M.E.P. with her portrayal in Mammy Pleasant (1953), Devilseed (1984), Pale Truth (2000), and Sister Noon (2001). Illustrated. Shawncey Webb

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FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM A History of American Negroes Author: John Hope Franklin (1915Type of work: History First published: 1947

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Form and Content From Slavery to Freedom is a pioneer, seminal work of scholarship, chronicling the history of African Americans. First published in 1947, it recounts the narrative of a minority whose history and role in American society had hitherto been widely ignored. Continuously in print since its first appearance, the book was released in its eighth edition in 2000. The original title, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes, changed with the seventh edition (1994) to From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. The book transformed a topic that had been marginal in American history into a staple of the discipline. Moreover, it proved a catalyst for the development of the field of African American studies. From Slavery to Freedom begins with a history of peoples and cultures of Africa. The work then examines the ways in which these peoples and cultures were transferred to and developed in various parts of the Western Hemisphere. Focusing on the United States, it examines the roles of both enslaved and free Negroes from colonial times through the twentieth century and analyses the stages of accommodation and opposition they followed regarding their sociopolitical status. Subsequent editions have updated and expanded previous ones, progressively chronicling the ongoing saga of African Americans. Editions vary in length, organization, format, text, illustrations, and bibliographic materials. Changes in the term used to describe the book’s subject have reflected the growing interaction between the book and the movement it fostered. With the fourth edition (1974), the term “blacks” appeared as a variant for “Negroes.” The change demonstrated the extent to which growing pride and assertiveness made the movement more confident in positioning itself as the antithesis of “white.” Chapters referred to the Black Panther Party, black power, and a “Black Revolution.” The term “African Americans” came to dominance as the movement became more aware of its historic heritage and its growing minority identity and weight. Thus, the collective editions of From Slavery to Freedom have come to comprise a canon not only of scholarship and advocacy but also of the evolving historiography of the field Franklin helped found. Illustrations have increased with the editions, adding a rich visual dimension of historic photographs, drawings, cartoons, posters, and maps. Color supplements emphasize African and African American artwork. Tables of comparative demographics have been added, together with primary source texts, providing statistical analysis and eyewitness accounts of historical events and reproducing key historic documents.

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Analysis John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom has proven of fourfold importance. It substantiated in impressive scholarly detail and critical analysis the history of African Americans. Its scholarship laid the groundwork for the academic discipline of black and African American studies. Its historiographic and academic achievements lent momentum to the developing cultural consciousness of African American achievement in the latter part of the twentieth century. Finally, this developing consciousness encouraged the parallel evolution of academic scholarship in relation to Hispanic, women’s, and gay and lesbian studies. The scholarly balance and objectivity in From Slavery to Freedom countered charges of racial “chauvinism” that had appeared in previous efforts at such history by other writers. Franklin, nonetheless, has emphasized that his work did advocate racial “vindication” in order to counter prejudices regarding racial “inferiority.” He felt that he needed to incorporate into U.S. history an adequate sense of the presence of African Americans to make the narrative of the American past both complete and fair. Franklin has himself been an agent for political change. Following publication of the first edition of From Slavery to Freedom, he worked with the legal defense office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to develop the case for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decision that ended racial segregation in public schools. In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Franklin to chair the advisory board of the newly created President’s Initiative on Race. Critical Context Franklin emerged as a founding father of African American history and cultural awareness. A distinguished member of numerous faculties, including those of the University of Chicago and Duke University, Franklin received his doctorate in history from Harvard University. Since its sixth edition (1988), From Slavery to Freedom has been coauthored with Alfred A. Moss, a specialist in African American social and religious history with a doctorate from the University of Chicago. For a book of scholarship, it has been an exceptional best seller, appealing to a readership composed not only of academic specialists but also of students, advocates for minorities, and a literate general public. Numerous scholars and public figures have testified to the intellectual integrity of From Slavery to Freedom, as well as its role in framing their knowledge of and engagement with African American culture. These include David Brion Davis, author of the 1967 Pullitzer Prize-winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., head of the Afro-American Center at Harvard University; Eugene Genovese, historian of race relations in American society; James McPherson, Civil War historian at Princeton University; and C. Vann Woodward, author of the 1951 Bancroft Prize-winning Origins of the New South and professor at Yale University. Franklin received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995. The following year, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education cited Franklin as the historian of the century. In 2006, the Library of Congress awarded him the John W. Kluge Prize for life-

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time achievement in the study of humanity. The Association for the Study of AfricanAmerican Life and Culture dedicated the 2007 Black History Month to a celebration of the work of John Hope Franklin. Bibliography Dittmer, John. “The From Slavery to Freedom Fiftieth Anniversary Symposium, September 19-20, 1997.” The Journal of Negro History 85, nos. 1/2 (Winter/Spring, 2000): 1-5. Summarizes seven editions (1947 through 1994) of From Slavery to Freedom, discussing their scholarly and sociopolitical insights and relevance. Observes the changing context of black studies that each edition addressed. First Person Singular: John Hope Franklin. Alexandria, Va.: PBS Home Video, 1997. One-hour public television program in which Franklin and some of his contemporaries recount events of his life in terms of challenges to and accomplishments of the movement against racial prejudice and inequality. Franklin, John Hope. A Life of Learning. ACLS Occasional Paper 4. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1988. Text of the 1988 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture, which Franklin gave before the the American Council of Learned Societies. Details the development of Franklin’s intellectual and scholarly interests and their application to social and political issues and events. _______. Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Franklin recounts his life in terms of the racial prejudices he confronted and overcame and the cultural, social, academic, and political efforts he made to reverse them. Franklin, V. P. “From Slavery to Freedom: The Journey from Our Known Past to Our Unknown Future.” The Journal of Negro History 85, nos. 1/2 (Winter/Spring, 2000): 6-12. Reviews scholarly reception of From Slavery to Freedom and details changes in the editions published between 1947 and 1994. Hine, Darlene Clark. “Paradigms, Politic, and Patriarchy in the Making of a Black History: Reflections on From Slavery to Freedom.” The Journal of Negro History 85, nos. 1/2 (Winter/Spring, 2000): 18-21. Refers to From Slavery to Freedom as the “bible of Black history” insofar as it provided “legitimacy to, and served as an anchor for, the academic study of African Americans.” Jarrett, Beverly, ed. Tributes to John Hope Franklin: Scholar, Mentor, Father, Friend. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Collection of articles by students, colleagues, family, and friends of John Hope Franklin, recounting his life in its professional and personal dimensions and testifying to his designation as the “father of black studies.” Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. “Contextualizing From Slavery to Freedom in the Study of Post Emancipation Black Women’s History.” The Journal of Negro History 85, nos. 1/2 (Winter/Spring, 2000): 36-39. Discusses the evolving representation of African American women in the various editions of From Slavery to Freedom. Edward A. Riedinger

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FUNNYHOUSE OF A NEGRO Author: Adrienne Kennedy (1931) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Surrealistic Time of plot: Mid-1960’s Locale: New York, New York First produced: 1962, at the Circle-in-the-Square Theater, New York, New York First published: 1969 Principal characters: Sarah (Negro), a student at a city college in New York Duchess of Hapsburg, a psychic projection of Sarah’s divided mind Queen Victoria Regina, another extension of Sarah’s mind Jesus, yet another projection of Sarah’s mind Patrice Lumumba, the fourth of Sarah’s selves The Mother, a dreamlike figure who represents Sarah’s image of her own mother, who was white The Landlady (Funnyhouse Lady), the white woman who runs the rooming house in which Sarah lives Raymond (Funnyhouse Man), Sarah’s boyfriend, a white Jewish poet The Play Funnyhouse of a Negro is the dreamlike enactment of Sarah’s internal struggle over who she is and where she belongs. Although many of the specific incidents in this one-act play are drawn from Adrienne Kennedy’s own life, the drama attempts, through the poetry of word and image, to enlarge these very personal conflicts and to make them relevant to problems in the culture at large. The style of this play is surrealistic, expressionistic, and absurdist. The plot of the play should not, therefore, be regarded as a credible or realistic story, nor should readers attempt to make literal sense of the dialogue or visual effects. Although the play offers different specific settings such as Sarah’s room, the staircase of the rooming house, Raymond’s room, and the jungle, the action depicted takes place inside Sarah’s mind. At the same time, this play is often quite openly theatrical in its use of space. From the opening scene, which has the Mother walk out in front of the drawn curtains, to the very end, in which walls fall away and the action jumps abruptly from one part of the stage to another, readers should try to imagine how the playwright intended the fully staged work to be seen and heard by an audience. The play begins before the curtains have even opened. The Mother crosses in front of the white curtains. As she exits, the curtains part to reveal Queen Victoria Regina and the Duchess of Hapsburg, who converse about their (that is, about Sarah’s) life.

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All the while, there is a persistent knocking at the door; the knocking, they say, is their father, a black man who they say is dead but who keeps returning. Both characters are made up to appear as if they are black women trying to look white. Headdresses with thick black hair attached hide the fact that both characters seem to be going bald. Abruptly, lights fade. The Mother returns, this time carrying a severed bald head and saying that the black man has defiled her. Lights come on to reveal Sarah in her room in a rooming house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She is wearing black, and her hair seems to be falling out. Her long monologue, delivered directly to the audience, describes her life, mixing the details of the real, external world with her troubled inner feelings. Implicit in her ramblings is her conflict between identifying with the white culture in which she has been raised and her realization that as an African American she is different from the white people whom she knows. Then, through a hole in the wall, four characters representing different parts of herself enter: the Duchess, the Queen, Jesus Christ, and Patrice Lumumba, represented as a black African whose bloody head appears to be split in two and who carries an ebony mask. Sarah addresses the audience again and in the same illogical way tries to describe who these characters are. The Landlady (also described as the Funnyhouse Lady), who is now revealed at the foot of the rooming house staircase, seems to be talking to someone offstage about Sarah’s life. She seems aware that Sarah’s imagination has magnified the girl’s guilt about her father’s alleged suicide and has caused her delusions about who she really is. In spite of the seriousness of the subject, her speech is filled with maddened laughter. The lights black out and rise again on a different setting, the room of Raymond, Sarah’s boyfriend, a white Jewish poet. The room is located upstairs in the same rooming house. Raymond, referred to in the scene as the Funnyhouse Man, laughs maniacally throughout his conversation with Sarah, who does not appear. Her role is played by the Duchess of Hapsburg. The two discuss Sarah’s parents: her black father, who has hanged himself, and her white mother, who has gone mad and been put into an asylum. Again, lights black out. The knocking from earlier in the play rises, and an obscure, faceless figure carrying a mask emerges. He addresses the audience directly, talking about his fears. He says that his hair has fallen out and that this is symptomatic of an African disease. After another blackout, the scene changes to the Queen’s bedchamber, where Queen Victoria and the Duchess examine their heads for baldness. The balding Duchess attempts to take the hair she has gathered in a red paper bag and return it to her scalp. The figure from the previous scene returns. He is Patrice Lumumba, and yet, because he is in reality an extension of Sarah’s inner being, he speaks to the audience of her life and expectations, reiterating much of what Sarah mentioned earlier in the play. A bald head appears mysteriously, but his monologue continues. The various elements of his irrational rant reveal more about Sarah. She believes that she has betrayed both of her parents. The next scene is set in the Duchess’s ballroom, where the Duchess receives Jesus,

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who carries the red bag of hair from the previous scene. Both are almost completely bald. After a quick blackout, the Duchess and Jesus attempt to comb their remaining hair, until the knocking at the door from earlier in the play begins once more. Both characters speak in unison about their (again, Sarah’s) father. The scene suddenly shifts to the Landlady at the stairs. She describes Sarah’s relationship with her father and recalls a time when he came to see his daughter and the two tried unsuccessfully to reconcile. The scene then shifts again, returning to the chamber of the Duchess, where Jesus, the Duchess at his side, awakes from a deep slumber and speaks to the audience about Sarah’s inner fears and fantasies. Following a blackout, the stage is consumed with a new set, the jungle. Here, in slow motion, the different characters who are really embodiments of Sarah’s fragmented mind emerge from the lush growth, speaking frenetically of Sarah’s father and his role in her life. The black missionary who went to Africa may be dead, but he keeps returning to haunt Sarah’s life. Her desire to destroy his memory and to obliterate both him and that part of her that he has created sends the four characters into maniacal laughter. In a final tableau, a wall falls away to reveal a hideous statue of Queen Victoria. Nearby, Sarah’s father accosts his daughter, who is in fact hanging from a rope, dead. Raymond and the Landlady (the Funnyhouse Man and Lady) talk about Sarah’s suicide. Raymond suggests that much of what the characters have said has been invented, that Sarah’s father never killed himself, that he is alive, living somewhere in New York City. Themes and Meanings Funnyhouse of a Negro is a one-act play that combines the playwright’s personal experience and larger social concerns through a deliberately nonrealistic, often dreamlike style of dramatic presentation. To a significant extent, the play uses devices that are expressionistic, that is, that depict the main character’s internal rather than external notions of reality. Much of what the audience and readers encounter is intended to depict what is going on inside Sarah’s torn and troubled mind. Thus, the images of Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg as they appear at the beginning of the play are meant to reveal something about how Sarah feels about herself. Because both characters are represented as women with distinguished European titles who wear masks or makeup to hide their black identities, they seem to suggest that Sarah tries to use her knowledge of Western culture to cover up her African American ancestry. The play also relies on some of the conventions of what has become known as the Theatre of the Absurd. The plot seeks to explore how certain situations feel rather than to tell a story. The importance of language is diminished, while spectacle and nonlinguistic sound take on a larger, highly symbolic meaning. Thus, the play appears to be fragmented and illogical, progressing in short scenes with irrational dialogue and bizarre visual effects. The often repetitive and nonsensical speeches by different characters make the audience look to the sights and sounds of the play for meaning. For example, in the long jungle scene near the end of the play, what the characters are

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saying seems to matter far less than their tone of voice—frenetic, maniacal laughter— and their dramatic emergence from the jungle, which has taken over the stage. With these techniques in mind, audience members and readers may see particular symbolic patterns surface that on first sight appear peculiar but after some consideration appear to make sense, much as an image in a dream may initially seem incongruous but eventually becomes understandable. The playwright’s preoccupation with hair, for instance, remains an odd but consistent motif. Sarah’s loss of hair, the bald head carried by the Mother, the fear of various characters of disease characterized by hair loss, and the red bag that contains hair may at first seem meaningless but begin to connect various pieces of Sarah’s mind. Although the play is obviously not written as a realistic protest drama, it clearly points toward major sociopolitical and cultural issues that originated in the 1960’s. The theme of identity is crucial to an interpretation of the play, and ideas about race and background permeate the script. At the same time, one of the play’s most appealing aspects is its ambiguity, perhaps best exemplified by its title. Is the “funny-house” a carnival funhouse, a lunatic asylum or madhouse, or the comedy theater where audiences see the play? Critical Context From the beginning of her career, Adrienne Kennedy’s work has been viewed with great interest. Perhaps because of its imaginative use of the stage and its haunting, frightening obscurity, Funnyhouse of a Negro has remained one of her most highly regarded plays. Early commentators tended to see Kennedy as an important African American dramatist who had begun her career at a time when many black writers were beginning to emerge in the United States. Later, she was viewed as an important female playwright who in many ways embodied and commented on the ideals of feminist thinkers. Both opinions are reflected in a variety of articles, most of which use Funnyhouse of a Negro to support their central arguments. Kennedy has resisted defining herself as any particular type of writer, although she fully acknowledges the powerful influence of her own search for identity on her plays. Her interviews offer glimpses of a profoundly thoughtful and intuitive writer who is perhaps first and foremost a serious and gifted theater artist. Much of the later criticism, although tending to hark back to some of the political concerns of earlier commentators, focuses on the extraordinary and powerful techniques used in this play. Such techniques have led many to consider her to be an experimental playwright. The majority of Kennedy’s works have been presented, both in the United States and overseas, in small theaters, by nontraditional companies and avant-garde actors. Even though Kennedy’s work is not intended for Broadway and has had comparatively limited exposure, many critics regard Adrienne Kennedy, on the basis of Funnyhouse of a Negro and a few other plays, as one of the most important dramatists of the United States.

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Bibliography Blau, Herbert. “The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy.” Modern Drama 27 (December, 1984): 520-539. Important article in which the noted theater critic discusses why both Shepard and Kennedy ought to be regarded as major American playwrights. This essay has had a significant influence on virtually all later commentators on Kennedy’s work. Bryant-Jackson, Paul K., and Lois More Overbeck, eds. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theater of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Varied and comprehensive collection of essays dealing with diverse aspects of Kennedy’s works, including literary and theatrical criticism, discussion of the plays’ production histories, and several interviews with the playwright by theater scholars. A number of essays look at Funnyhouse of a Negro. Kennedy, Adrienne. “An Interview with Adrienne Kennedy.” Interview by Elin Diamond. Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 4 (1989): 143-157. The playwright speaks at length about her personal and professional concerns and interests. Much of what Kennedy reveals here sheds light on the autobiographical dimension of her plays as well as on her experiences as a writer. _______. “A MELUS Interview with Adrienne Kennedy.” Interview by Wolfgang Binder. MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 12 (Fall, 1985): 99-108. Interesting discussion with the playwright on issues of race and culture as they apply to her plays and to her concerns about writing for the theater. _______. “On the Writing of Funnyhouse of a Negro.” In The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Kennedy’s own account of the process of writing the play. The reader also includes the complete text of the play itself. Kintz, Linda. The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Chapter 4, which deals with Kennedy and offers an analysis of Funnyhouse of a Negro, is especially interesting in the context of feminist politics. The author is especially adept at exploring the ways Kennedy fuses art and politics. Kolin, Philip C. “From the Zoo to the Funnyhouse: A Comparison of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story with Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro.” Theatre Southwest (April, 1989): 8-16. Examines and compares the two plays. Because Albee was an important influence on Kennedy (he was instrumental in the first production of Funnyhouse of a Negro), the critical connections and disparities are significant. Some of the differences between Kennedy’s use of absurdism and more traditional uses become apparent. _______. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Extended study of the playwright’s work; includes a chapter on Funnyhouse of a Negro, as well as general chapters on Kennedy’s life and aesthetic commitments.

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Meigs, Susan E. “No Place Like the Funnyhouse: The Struggle for Identity in Three Adrienne Kennedy Plays.” In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Careful analysis of three of Kennedy’s plays, including Funnyhouse of a Negro, with an emphasis on the playwright’s concerns with individual and group identities. Shinn, Thelma. “Living the Answer: The Emergence of African American Feminist Drama.” Studies in the Humanities 17 (December, 1990): 149-159. Looks at Kennedy’s plays in the context of the pioneering work of Lorraine Hansberry and the succeeding work of Ntozake Shange and other African American women dramatists. A line of development is drawn from Hansberry’s efforts through the work of the later generation of writers. Sollors, Werner. “Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 63 (September, 1991): 507-532. Highly useful study of several Kennedy plays, including Funnyhouse of a Negro, examining specific recurring motifs in the broad context of American culture. The author attempts to decipher some of Kennedy’s more idiosyncratic images. Kenneth Krauss

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A GATHERING OF OLD MEN Author: Ernest J. Gaines (1933) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1970’s Locale: Southern Louisiana First published: 1983 Principal characters: Mathu, the one black man on Marshall’s Plantation who has never been afraid to stand up to the whites Candy Marshall, the daughter of the original owners of the plantation Sheriff Mapes, a powerful, often brutal man who is yet to some extent free of the rigid racism of the past Fix Boutan, the patriarch of the Cajun Boutan family Gil Boutan, Fix’s son and Beau’s brother The Novel The story of A Gathering of Old Men is told by fifteen narrators. Violence is part of the story they tell. The book, however, is also a story of the sometimes painful and uncertain processes of change and growth. Beau Boutan, a brutal Cajun farmer, has been shot and killed. His body lies in the yard of Mathu, and, because old Mathu is known as the only black man in the area who has ever stood up to the whites, most people will surely conclude that he is the killer. He faces both the retribution of the law and the revenge of the Boutan family. Fix Boutan, the patriarch of the family, has lived by a harsh, simple, and brutally racist code. The death of his son at the hands of a black man will certainly lead him to demand more than an eye for an eye. Candy Marshall, who was half reared by Mathu, is determined to protect him. She is prepared to say that she, a white woman from a plantation-owning family, killed Beau—and she has a plan. At Candy’s urging, the old men of the plantation will gather at Mathu’s. Each will carry a shotgun and shells like those that killed Beau. Each will have recently fired the shotgun. And each, like Candy, will claim to be Beau’s killer. As the men move toward Mathu’s, singly, in pairs, eventually as a group, they begin to feel a sense of joyful resolution. All of their lives, they have given in. They have lived in fear of the whites. Now they have been granted an unlooked-for last chance to take a stand as men. A sense of destiny surges in them as Clatoo, an old man who has discovered qualities of leadership in himself, makes sure that they pass by the graveyard where their dead are buried.

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Sheriff Mapes is baffled by the situation. He knows that Mathu must be the killer, and he wants by decisive action to divert the vicious retaliation that can be expected from Fix Boutan. What can he do, though, when every old man on the place—and a white woman, as well—is claiming responsibility? Fix Boutan has called his own gathering. What is the will of the family? Most, as Fix probably expects, seem ready to ride out in the old way, and Luke Will, an outsider to the family, urges them to follow that course. However, two of Fix’s sons, brothers of Beau, speak against violence. Jean, a local butcher, fears the effect of violence on business. Gil, the other son, has hurried back from Louisiana State University on hearing of his brother’s death. Gil is a nationally recognized football star. Together with a black teammate, the other half of a pair sportswriters call “Salt and Pepper,” he is expected on this very weekend to lead his team to victory in the big game against Mississippi. He represents something new in the South, and both his concern for his personal future and his acceptance of the social changes that have helped to open up that future lead him to call for an end to the cycle of violence. Fix accepts what his sons say; the Boutans will take no revenge. Fix, though, can no longer regard Jean and Gil as his sons. The real identity of Beau’s killer is revealed when Charlie, a childlike giant of a man, turns up at Mathu’s. Now in his fifties, Charlie has been afraid of white people all his life. When his first act of defiance resulted in Beau’s death, he panicked and ran, but he has run enough, now, for a man. He will accept responsibility for his act, and thereby, for his life. He is ready to face what must be faced—and that means Luke Will and his gang, who refuse to abide by the decision of the Boutans. They have come for what amounts to a lynching, but they find themselves in a fight, in which the old men participate while the wounded Sheriff Mapes can only look on helplessly. At the end of the fight, Charlie and Luke Will are dead. The survivors, black and white, are brought to trial, and a judge places them on probation. This means, among other things, that they may not touch a gun for five years— or, the judge wryly proclaims, until death, whichever comes first. Candy offers Mathu a lift back to the quarters. He thanks her, but he chooses to ride back in Clatoo’s truck, with the other black men. The Characters At the center of this novel is a remarkable group of characters: the “Old Men” of the title, who have lived all of their long lives in rural southern Louisiana, surviving by adapting to the demands of the dominant white society. The inner action of the novel follows the growth of these old men from frightened creatures into men who are prepared to stand together against the law and against the Boutan family and their allies. Readers come to know these men as individuals. Each has a story; each story is different. However, the repeated pattern of disappointment and frustration in the face of injustice and oppression clearly emerges. This pattern lends further stature to Mathu, the great exception. He is thus defined in part in terms of the contrast he represents to the other old men and in part by their

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willingness to put themselves at risk on his behalf. Sheriff Mapes’s evaluation of Mathu as a better man than most he has known, black or white—praise a man such as Mapes would not give lightly to a black man—reinforces readers’ sense of Mathu’s moral power. Another side of Mathu is revealed through his relationship with Candy. Upon the death of Candy’s parents, Mathu assumed along with Candy’s Aunt Merle the responsibility of rearing her. The white woman would teach her how to be a lady; the black man would help her to understand the people on the plantation. This is the background that motivates Candy’s determination to protect Mathu from the consequences of killing Beau, an action she, like everyone else, assumes Mathu committed. Her determination attests to her strong will and her clear loyalties. Without Candy, it seems, the gathering of old men might never have taken place. Candy’s understanding is perhaps not so quick as her reaction. She is determined to protect her people, as, she affirms, her daddy did before her. However, this attitude, obviously well-intentioned, is ultimately inadequate. These people are not, after all, her possessions, and they must reject her protection as they accept responsibility for themselves. Candy’s character is tested, as she must recognize and deal with her growing and offended sense of exclusion from the deliberations of the men. Of the Cajuns, Fix Boutan, as patriarch of the Boutan family, is the central figure. It is Fix’s reaction with which the old men are concerned. What Fix is going to do is also foremost on the mind of Sheriff Mapes as he tries to break the old men’s resistance. No one expects Fix to accept the death of his son at the hands of a black man without exacting a harsh revenge. However, Fix, an old man himself, no longer moves with the unreflective violent haste of his earlier years. The family is involved; the family must decide. When two of Fix’s sons speak against revenge, against the old ways, Fix accepts what they say, even as he rejects them for saying it. Themes and Meanings Growth, change, and time are the three great organizing themes of A Gathering of Old Men. The process of growth within the old men motivates the inner action that structures much of the novel. What the men have been is clear enough. They have felt the contempt of the white men. They have felt even more bitterly their own selfcontempt. These men, old as they are, can still grow. They have too little left to lose to live any longer as frightened children. The growth each experiences, moreover, is linked to another growth. Before the novel is over, the “gathering” is becoming a community, as the men stand together on an increasingly conscious foundation of common values, common goals, and common history. The growth they undergo is related in complex ways to violence. These are hardly violent men; most of them cannot shoot straight. Yet a recognition that some situations demand at least a readiness for violence is for these men a liberating insight. At the same time, the comic deflation of the sentence handed down by the judge keeps the theme of violence in its properly subordinate position.

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The theme of growth is not embodied only in the old men. Charlie’s growth takes place offstage, so to speak, but before he dies he has heard a white man address him as “Mister Biggs.” Candy, too, must experience some of the pains of growth, as she is forced to recognize that these men no longer need her protection. The story takes place within a broader context of social change. Mapes is just close enough to the old stereotype of the southern lawman for his variations from that stereotype to stand out all the more clearly. A Louisiana sheriff of an earlier generation could never have brought himself to say “Mister” to a black man. Gil and his black teammate are reminders of changes that would have been unthinkable in the South just a few years before, and Gil’s determination to take a stand before his father suggests that these changes are more than cosmetic. Yet Luke Will represents the brute resistance to change that gives the lie to any facile optimism about the course of social progress. Growth and change may finally be seen as possibilities within time, and time is the novel’s third great theme. Gil speaks for the future: his personal future, the future of the South, and, one may suppose, the future of the nation. Yet his father’s words of rejection threaten to cut Gil off from his own past. Fix proves capable of emancipating himself from the destructive patterns of the past, yet his rejection of Gil gives voice to the pain of a man who has lived beyond his time. Luke Will ignorantly, compulsively, and destructively repeats the patterns of the past. Candy, more ambiguously and more positively, brings the paternalistic values of a sentimentalized and idealized past to bear on the present situation. The old men, who have so little time, find in their relation to the past, especially as symbolized in the graveyard scene, a source of strength and community. Discerning the meaning of the novel involves more than an enumeration of its themes. The generosity of spirit that informs the characterization, and the note of humor that often lends a richness of human texture to events that could easily be reduced to melodrama, are part of the novel’s meaning, as is its loving but clear-eyed depiction of the life of black men and women in the rural South, a topic that Gaines has made his special subject. Finally, the sound of the voices, of the narrators and the others, reflects a deep involvement in the oral culture that is so vital a component of the African American tradition—and that, too, is a part of what the novel means. Critical Context As a new novel by the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which had been published in 1971, A Gathering of Old Men was assured of a respectful response upon its publication in 1983. The novel was widely and, on the whole, favorably reviewed, and its reputation has held steady ever since. Some critics have regarded it as Ernest J. Gaines’s finest novel. Gaines was reared in southern Louisiana by older women. His stepfather, who was in the merchant marine, was often away from home. His relationship with the men who worked in the fields was, he has commented, “quite tenuous.” It was when he started coming back to the South as an adult, and as a writer, that he became closer to

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older men, men of the generation of the characters in A Gathering of Old Men. These men had been thrust into competition with white men from a position of almost absolute social, political, and economic weakness. One of Gaines’s accomplishments in his novel is to get their story told with sympathy and understanding. The stories the old men told him are a source, not necessarily for the particular details, but for the general qualities of the stories embedded in A Gathering of Old Men. True to his source, Gaines employs a multiplicity of narrators, giving the characters the opportunity to speak for themselves. This choice reflects Gaines’s commitment to black oral folk culture as a literary source. Gaines has learned much from white writers, but the sound of black speech has remained an abiding inspiration, an important factor in his significance within the African American literary tradition. Gaines has especially given voice in this novel to the sound of his native southern Louisiana. Gaines’s career, from the early novel Catherine Carmier (1964) to the present, has been consistently shaped by his insight that his calling is to the depiction of the lives of black men and women in the rural South. He even rejected Richard Wright’s great novel Native Son (1940) as a model, finding it too “urban” to meet his needs as an artist. Gaines has always found his subjects in the African American experience, yet that experience, as presented by Gaines, involves an infinity of interactive patterns with whites. His novel Of Love and Dust (1967) and his short story “A Long Day in November,” included in the collection Bloodline (1968), illustrate the fineness of observation and generosity of sympathetic imagination Gaines brings to this material and, in this respect, anticipate his accomplishment in A Gathering of Old Men. Gaines is aware that he is sometimes accused of being “too nice” to his white characters. He is also sometimes accused of being too nice to his black characters. His goal, however, is not to be nice, but to be true. His ability to extend his sympathy over a wide range of characters, black and white, is what makes it possible for him to treat the explosive materials of A Gathering of Old Men with the psychological richness that is one of the great strengths of the novel and that is one basis of Gaines’s claim to be considered an important novelist. Bibliography Babb, Valerie Melissa. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Argues that Gaines’s writing transcends African American experience and voices the concerns of humanity. The power to act, to be identified, is central to A Gathering of Old Men. Charlie experiences self-actualization when he kills Beau. Byerman, Keith E. “Negotiations: The Quest for a Middle Way in the Fiction of James Alan McPherson and Ernest Gaines.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Notes that in depicting the emergence of a black male identity, A Gathering of Old Men ends in renewal, even though the future may be no easier than the past. Callahan, John F. “One Day in Louisiana.” The New Republic 190 (December 26, 1983): 38-39. Observes that, like the rest of Gaines’s fiction, A Gathering of Old

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Men explores how and why the old ways with the land and the old customs between African Americans and whites have changed and are still changing. Gaines knows and loves his world so well that he cannot reduce even the most loathsome redneck to a stereotype. Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Focuses on Gaines’s achievement in capturing the oral traditions and the linguistic cadences of African American culture. Argues that the varied voices of his characters combine to generate the unique voice of the author himself. Harper, Mary T. “From Sons to Fathers: Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men.” CLA Journal 31 (1988): 299-308. Asserts that the transformation of the old men from “men-children” to fathers symbolizes a recognition that thwarted dreams can become present realities. Jeffers, Lance. Review of A Gathering of Old Men, by Ernest J. Gaines. Black Scholar 15 (March/April, 1984): 45-46. States that the two cores of the novel are the overwhelming need of many African Americans to overcome fear of whites and the urgent need for racial unity. Wardi, Anissa Janine. Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Looks at the representation of funereal rites in A Gathering of Old Men and traces such representations in African American novels to a pastoral literary tradition begun by Jean Toomer in Cane (1923). W. P. Kenney

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GEMINI An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet Author: Nikki Giovanni (Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, 1943Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1950-1970 Locale: Knoxville, Tennessee; Cincinnati, Ohio First published: 1971

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Principal personages: Nikki Giovanni, a black poet who relates her early experiences as a child and as a young woman Louvenia Terrell Watson, her maternal grandmother Gus Giovanni, Nikki’s father Yolande Giovanni, Nikki’s mother Gary, Nikki’s older sister, whom the young Nikki idolized Tommy, Nikki’s son Form and Content In Gemini, Nikki Giovanni wrote not only autobiography, she also wrote essays concerning many of the issues that were foremost in the late 1960’s. Thus the subtitle, An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet, is entirely accurate. Gemini is both an autobiography and a statement. Giovanni wrote about events that shaped her as a poet, and then as that poet commented on such topics as black artists and the black liberation movement. Giovanni’s family background does not suggest the revolutionary that she would become. Her parents, both graduates of Knoxville College, maintained a middle-class lifestyle. Her mother was a supervisor in Cincinnati’s welfare department, and her father was a social worker. Like other middle-class parents, they encouraged piano lessons and college. At the age of seventeen, Giovanni enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, but she was expelled when, without permission, she visited her grandparents at Thanksgiving. She returned a few years later, graduating with honors. She describes herself as an “Ayn Rand-Barry Goldwater” conservative who became radicalized, partly because of the influence of a roommate, Bertha, who introduced her to the ideas of the Black Power movement but also because of the example of her grandmother, Louvenia, who was “terribly intolerant when it came to white people.” Giovanni’s early collections of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgment (1968), reveal her as a revolutionary poet who could ask “Nigger can you kill?” She argued for black power and social change, advocating violence to effect that change. In the late 1970’s and subsequent years, her work focused more on the

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humanity of all people. During the time that Gemini was written, she was at her most radical. The 1960’s, a time of Vietnam protest, the rise of contemporary feminism, and the Civil Rights movement, was a turbulent period. In 1968 alone, Eugene McCarthy won the primary in New Hampshire, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and street violence erupted in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. A few days after King’s assassination, Giovanni wrote the poem “Nikki-Rosa,” the title suggesting a transformation from the naïve girl Nikki to the more politicized Rosa, the name alluding to Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her bus seat, thus precipitating the Montgomery bus boycott. The radical 1960’s provided both the backdrop for Gemini and the catalyst for writing it. About half of Gemini’s thirteen chapters contain what one commonly associates with autobiography. In the first chapter, “400 Mulvaney Street,” Giovanni, a recognized poet, has been invited to give a reading in Knoxville, the city where her maternal grandparents had resided, where her parents met, where she was born, and where she lived for two of her high-school years. The visit provides an occasion for reminiscing about such things as ten-cent double features, street vendors, and Sunday chicken and biscuits. Most important are the reminiscences about her grandmother, Louvenia Terrell Watson, who, as readers learn in subsequent chapters, left her hometown of Albany, Georgia, “late at night under a blanket in a buggy” because her outspokenness made lynching a possibility. Racism could not defeat her, but progress, under the guise of urban renewal, did. When Louvenia was forced to move to a new home which “was pretty but it had no life,” she lost her roots. Without her memories, the old woman was left with little. Louvenia had already taught the young Giovanni about the necessity of belonging somewhere, of having a sense of identity, and of accepting her responsibility to other African Americans. When her grandmother’s friends attend her poetry reading even though they “shouldn’t even have been out that late at night,” Giovanni realizes that she belongs, and she also knows that she must instill that sense of community in her son: “I thought Tommy, my son, must know about this. He must know we come from somewhere. That we belong.” The second chapter, “For a Four-Year-Old,” presents Giovanni as a four- and fiveyear-old who is both vulnerable and tough. All summer, she readies herself for school: “I was going to knock kindergarten out. When fall finally came I was overprepared. I had even practiced nap time.” As a little child would, however, she cries when her mother leaves her at school the first day. The young Giovanni is also a fighter who, often against larger and older opponents, defends her beloved but timid sister Gary. Even at the age of five, Giovanni is politically acute. She writes of her challenge to a fifth-grade boy: “Sure, all the kids knew I could handle myself but teachers never know anything. I had him in a double bind. All the grown-ups ever saw was big brown eyes, three pigtails and high-top white shoes. He would really catch it if they saw him fighting—me especially. My stock in trade was that I looked so innocent. So he backed down.” Giovanni, in kindergarten, would challenge Gary’s fifth-

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grade nemeses, including Skippy, Gary’s boyfriend. She is tough but also vulnerable: She cries after her mother leaves her in her kindergarten classroom for the first time, and she is confused when Gary is “mortified” that she challenged Skippy. The autobiographical sections illustrate the importance of belonging not only to a place but also to a family, ideas later developed in her poetry. Other autobiographical segments include anecdotes about her parents, her grandparents, her roommate Bertha, and her son. The emphasis is always on belonging, sometimes to a specific place but often to a family. Her father was reluctant to move to a new house in a black suburb of Cincinnati, a house with a big kitchen, separate bedrooms, and space for a garden, until his family asked, “Who will promise to build a barbecue pit if you don’t come?” Giovanni, though she might resist her parents’ guidance, demands her place in the family. In the fifth chapter, “Don’t Have a Baby Till You Read This,” Giovanni describes her pregnancy, which for the first four months she thought was constipation, and the birth, four weeks premature, of her son. The birth was difficult, and Giovanni’s heart stopped during the Caesarean delivery. The love and support of her family are evident, but Giovanni, because of her parents’ attention to the new baby, feels displaced: “ALL YOU CARE ABOUT IS TOMMY AND I WON’T STAND FOR THAT. I’M YOUR BABY AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT.” Other chapters, primarily in the second half of Gemini, constitute an overt political statement. Giovanni views her development into a militant radical as natural, considering her background: “My family on my grandmother’s side are fighters. My family on my father’s side are survivors. I’m a revolutionist. It’s only logical.” As a revolutionist, she rails against the injustice that she observes. She suggests that African Americans have been killed deliberately not only through assassinations but also through drug overdoses, accidents, and illnesses because they, through their ability to unite other black people, threatened the white power establishment: “Anybody the honkie wants to take off he not only can but will.” Political figures such as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., are targeted, but so are musicians such as Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Sam Cooke, and John Coltrane, because “Music has been the voice of the Black experience most especially here in America.” As a revolutionist, Giovanni advocates change: “We’re trying to make a system that’s human so that Black folks can live in it. This means we’re trying to destroy the existing system.” She suggests that racial injustice will cease only when African Americans acquire the power to control their own lives and to tell their own stories, which have been distorted or erased by white narrators. With power comes obligation and responsibility to the black community. Giovanni, although arguing that violence is necessary to counteract the violence directed toward African Americans, is saddened because “the world . . . doesn’t have to be that way.” She concludes on an optimistic note: “I really like to think a Black, beautiful, loving world is possible. I really do, I think.”

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Analysis In the 1970’s, Giovanni was hailed as an important black poet and thereafter maintained a large following. Part of Gemini’s importance lies in the fact that it shows the influences, both familial and cultural, that shaped Giovanni into a poet. She presents her decision to be a poet somewhat more modestly: “I can’t do anything else that well. If I could have held down a job in Walgreen’s I probably would have.” It is clear that her grandmother, her sister, and her parents were instrumental in shaping her consciousness. Her decision to be a poet rests in her desire to be a voice for African Americans and to tell their stories; she believes that poets pass on the truth of a people. In Gemini, she explores what threatens the black community: fragmentation as various groups focus on fulfilling their own group’s needs rather than on working together; appropriation by whites of black achievements, especially in the field of music; and the determination of whites to maintain their hold on power and to keep African Americans in a state of submission. As Giovanni notes, “Angela [Davis] is wanted and may be destroyed because she is Black. Her capture and destruction serve . . . to show Black people . . . what will happen if they step out of line.” Giovanni’s antiwhite stance is understandable in the context of the political events of the 1960’s. Although she reacts strongly to racism, her venom is directed more toward “honkies,” those who perpetuate racism, rather than toward whites in general, who “all clearly are not evil.” Gemini is also a book about love. Both in the autobiographical sections and in the political passages, Giovanni envisions a strong black community, and she suggests ways to achieve that goal. She stresses the importance of a strong, supportive family. Her own family serves as an example. She recalls that her grandmother “was the first to say and make me understand, You’re mine, and I’ll stick by you no matter what. Or to quote her more accurately, ‘Let me know what you’re doing and I’ll stand between you and the niggers.’” She also relies on her parents and her sister. Family for Giovanni is not limited to the traditional family. She chose to have a child without marrying, a decision she does not regret. She emphasizes the importance of belonging someplace. Her grandmother, forced to move, “died because she didn’t know where she was.” She also emphasizes the importance of the support of a larger group, the community, that promotes and values black endeavors. In Gemini she recounts how, as a young woman, she organized the Black Arts Festival in Cincinnati and also published a small magazine, Love Black. Both activities were directed at instilling pride in a black audience. Even though Gemini is prose, Giovanni the poet is evident in the language, especially in the autobiographical sections, where the style is often warm and humorous and at times self-deprecating. For example, on a visit to her parents, she writes of playing cards: “And we were up late playing bid whist because I love bid whist and since most of my friends are ideologists we rarely have time for fun.” Even in the more serious political segments, she is still aware of the effect of language, often engaging in wordplay and rhythmic repetitions: “And none of us is free. The guns should be toward the West. Nix(on) him. Spear o Agnew. Won’t we ever learn?”

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Critical Context Although Gemini received a National Book Award nomination, reviews of it were mixed, primarily because of its combination of autobiography and manifesto. Most critics praised the autobiographical sections as witty and engaging but criticized the militant rhetoric in the other sections as foolish, boring, or abstract. Gemini presents Giovanni at an important stage in her life and in her work. Her early poetry collections, such as Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement, contain in poetic form some of the militant ideas found in Gemini, while her later collections, such as My House (1972) and The Women and the Men (1975), focus on the more personal moments that are recorded in the autobiographical sections. Thus Gemini both explains her militancy and indicates her interest in more universal themes—the need to belong, to have a home, to love, and to be loved—that appear in the later collections. On a broader scale, Giovanni, in voicing her own concerns, also voiced the concerns of many African Americans in the early 1970’s. The 1960’s saw the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, a heady time in which the hopes and aspirations of African Americans were raised only to be dashed by resistance that was sometimes subtle but often not. The realization came to many African Americans, as it did to Giovanni, that the only way to achieve equal rights and to have equal opportunity was to fight, responding to violence with violence. In Gemini, she gives expression to frustration and issues a call to revolution. Gemini can also be placed in the context of the black-is-beautiful movement. Giovanni and other black leaders of the 1960’s promoted black pride. As she has written elsewhere, “We must . . . rediscover that we are Black and beautiful and proud and intelligent.” To that end, Gemini contains tributes to various black political leaders such as Angela Davis and to artists such as Lena Horne and Charles Chesnutt. Giovanni’s goal is to contribute to building a strong black community. Bibliography Cook, Martha. “Nikki Giovanni: Place and Sense of Place in Her Poetry.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Good biographical information. Good analysis and discussion of Giovanni’s poetry collections, including a favorable assessment of Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983). Places Giovanni within the southern literary tradition because of her use of place and history. Giddings, Paula. “Nikki Giovanni: Taking a Chance on Feeling.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Praises Giovanni’s poems written in the 1960’s and early 1970’s but argues that Giovanni never matured and developed as a poet. Suggests that her technique and craft are inferior in her later poems. Giovanni, Nikki. “An Interview with Nikki Giovanni.” Interview by Bonner Carrington. Black American Literature Forum 18 (Spring, 1984): 29-30. Covers topics ranging from contemporary writers, such as Amiri Baraka, to the feminist movement.

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_______. “Tennessee.” In These United States: Original Essays by Leading American Writers on Their State Within the Union, edited by John Leonard. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003. Giovanni writes about her home state of Tennessee, its place in the United States, and its importance to her own life. Harris, William J. “Sweet Soft Essence of Possibility: The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Argues that Giovanni should not be dismissed because she is a popular poet. In her poems, she explores the revolutionary 1960’s and the disappointment felt by many African Americans in the 1970’s, issues that are relevant and ones that she treats honestly. Harris concludes that Giovanni’s best poems show her to be a serious poet, but that her worst provide fuel for her detractors. Loyd, Dennis. “Contemporary Writers.” In Literature of Tennessee, edited by Ray Willbanks. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984. Provides a mixture of biographical information and analytical discussion of Giovanni’s poetry. Some discussion of her Tennessee heritage and her use of it in her poetry. General discussion of her poetry up to and including The Women and the Men. McDowell, Margaret B. “Groundwork for a More Comprehensive Criticism of Nikki Giovanni.” In Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Tradition. Vol. 2 in Studies in Black American Literature, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1986. Contains biographical information, discusses the need for serious criticism of Giovanni’s poetry, argues that critics should assess the whole body of her work, and suggests that she is more than the revolutionary poet who wrote militant poems. Her shift to a more personal mode in My House should not be viewed as betrayal but instead as development. Barbara Wiedemann

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GIOVANNI’S ROOM Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Early 1950’s Locale: New York, New York; Paris, France First published: 1956 Principal characters: David, a young, attractive white American who flees his country to “find himself ” in Paris Giovanni, a young Italian who meets David in Paris and becomes his lover Hella, the art student David meets in the expatriate bohemian community of Paris Jacques, an aging Belgian-born American businessman to whom David frequently turns for financial help Guillaume, the jaded and flamboyant proprietor of the gay bar where Giovanni works Sue, a big, puffy, “disquietingly fluid” American girl from Philadelphia whom David encounters in a Montparnasse bar The Novel Giovanni’s Room begins with David standing in a great house in the south of France, looking at his reflection in the window as night falls. As he stands, drinking what will be the first of many drinks before the night ends, he casts his mind back over the chain of events leading him to this “most terrible morning of my life.” On this morning, his former lover Giovanni will die on the guillotine. The novel, divided into two parts, is one long retrospective view of David’s life, a series of brooding flashbacks that rehearse the story of his failed attempt to resolve his sexual identity crisis and understand his betrayal of Giovanni. With his former fiancée headed back home and his former lover sentenced to death, David is left alone to sort out his past life in order to see what he can make of his future. His nightlong vigil leaves him facing the dawn with a “dreadful weight of hope.” While he regards his face in the darkening glass, he conjures up images of his early years in America, particularly his first homosexual experience with a young friend, Joey. He has always refused to admit the significance of this potent and defining event, lying to himself and everyone else to evade the shame of the “beast” inside that threatens to condemn him to an “unnatural” life. He fears the force of his awakened sexuality and adopts a pattern of flight to avoid coming to terms with it—flight from an interfering aunt and a distant, adulterous father, from meaningless friendships and pointless jobs. He finally flees his country, with the half-formed thought that in Eu-

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rope, in Paris, he will discover and understand this identity that has so far only frightened and confused him. In Paris, David falls in with the vaguely bohemian crowd of young expatriates, flirting occasionally with the gay world he knows through an older homosexual acquaintance, Jacques, but remaining proudly above what he sees as its dirt and shame, yet he is lonely and unsatisfied. Prompted by persistent concerns about his manhood, David rather flippantly asks an American art student, Hella, to marry him. While she is in Spain considering this proposal, however, David meets Giovanni in a seedy gay bar; it is this handsome young Italian bartender who forces David to confront his sexual fears and ambivalent desires. Terrified but ecstatic, David spends the night in Giovanni’s room. He capitulates at last to the “morning stars” of Giovanni’s eyes: “With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.” So part 1 ends with David’s reluctant but growing acceptance of his homosexuality and Giovanni’s love. In part 2, David turns from that acceptance, and in doing so denies himself and a world of bright possibilities with Giovanni. The blissful months David and Giovanni have, living together in Giovanni’s crowded little room, are not enough to free David from his confusion. When Hella returns, the room begins to seem claustrophobic and dirty, another thing to flee. He does flee, taking up with Hella again and leaving Giovanni jobless and in great emotional pain. Giovanni’s love is passionate, violent, complete. It both exhilarates and terrifies David because it demands an equal intensity in return. This David cannot give. When they stand, each with a brick in his hand, they could kill each other or embrace each other. It is a decisive moment. David is paralyzed. His only response is flight, and he runs away with Hella. His escape, however, comes at extreme cost: In despair, Giovanni murders Guillaume, his predatory former employer, and is sentenced to death. It is only on this last night of Giovanni’s life that David can confess that he loved Giovanni; but extracted so late, this confession can provide only a filament of hope for David’s future. The Characters Baldwin employs a first-person point of view in the novel, a choice that appropriately foregrounds the confessional nature of David’s narrative. Throughout the retrospective account of his life, David seems to need to unburden himself, to speak his guilt and purge his conscience of multiple betrayals. He needs to confess his homosexuality, confess his love for Giovanni, confess his complicity in Giovanni’s death. He needs to speak the truth, but his life has been one long evasion of that. Giovanni’s charge that “you have never told me the truth” is echoed by Hella’s pained question and demand, “What do you want? . . . Why don’t you tell me the truth? Tell me the truth.” When the hapless Sue sighs, “I don’t know what you want,” David cannot or will not tell her. Even if he could respond, he is, as he says of himself, “too various to be trusted.” Facing up to the answer truthfully means abandoning years of practiced self-deception for a painful self-awareness. The first-person narrative also ensures that the primary focus remains on David, on

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his wavering, fearful, deeply divided consciousness. This mental conflict renders him strangely passive: He is carried along to Giovanni by the events of one night and carried away from him by events some months later. His failure is a failure to act on what he knows about himself and to embrace the possibilities for happiness based on that knowledge. In this failure he is depicted as being peculiarly American, behaving like a typical American tourist who keeps to the surface of things, longing to trade in his innocence for the rich volatility of real experience but fearing to be soiled in the process. In contrast, Giovanni emerges as the embodiment of Mediterranean experience, a sensibility open at once to the sacred and the profane, soiled by life but capable of a redeeming purity. His is an old culture, steeped in pagan myths instead of puritan prohibitions. He has all the passion and single-minded intensity that David lacks. He is vital, frank, and generous, and he has an integrity that keeps him clean in a dirty world. A patron at the bar tells David that Giovanni is “dangerous,” and indeed he is a danger to David’s safe, bodiless existence. He is dangerous precisely because he forces David to confront the body, to choose whether to be at home in it, accepting its potent complexity, or to deny it, struggling to silence its insistent desires. This clash of New World and Old World, of Mediterranean and American temperaments, is what leads readers to see Baldwin’s characters and their conflicts in Jamesian terms. Giovanni is the opportunity for David, in Henry James’s phrase, to say “yes” to life. He declines the opportunity, however, and takes refuge in the safety of Hella, who has likewise declined her chance at real living and sought the safety of a prescribed gender role. The two Americans have tried to preserve their innocence but have succeeded only in destroying the means of discovering their vital selves. Both Giovanni and David are distinguished from the other members of the gay subculture. The denizens of Guillaume’s bar are a decadent bunch, desperate, predatory, pitiful. They appropriately inhabit the twilight world of tawdry bars and sordid encounters. David and Giovanni, however, are surrounded by images of light and water, suggesting that homosexuality need not, in and of itself, sentence one to a grotesquely loveless underworld. These two young lovers are given a chance at affection and tenderness, at a shared life without shame. However, they miss it, just as Jacques and the rest of the gay characters do. Nevertheless, to build such a life, in the face of a hostile straight society and a self-loathing gay society, is presented as a heroic enterprise. As David self-accusingly laments, though, “heroes are rare.” Though he too embodies the failure of love dramatized in the book, the character of Jacques is significant for the way he underscores the value of two men at least attempting the difficult business of love. He sums up the novel when he says, “Somebody . . . should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.” Jacques knows. In spite of his own unsatisfyingly promiscuous and secretive life (perhaps even because of it), he can say that sex is only shameful when it lacks affection and joy. Thus his advice to David is simply to let Giovanni love him and to love in return: “Do you really think anything else under heaven really matters?”

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Themes and Meanings The thematic heart of the novel in many ways resides in the image of the title itself: Giovanni’s room. This room to which David and Giovanni retire at the end of their long first evening together, and which is the center of their world during their idyllic spring and summer months together, becomes a symbol of their relationship in all of its dimensions. Remote from the center of Paris and the dingy haunts of urban gays, it is a room where love triumphs and where it ultimately fails. It is at first a refuge, a glowing creation of their own lovemaking, where they can shut out the intrusive, judgmental world and where David can experience that part of himself that he has fought to deny. It is tiny, crowded, dirty, but it is also theirs, and their passion expands it, investing it with a natural purity. Gradually, however, as David begins to withdraw in fear from the “beast that Giovanni had awakened” in him, the images of the room change. It becomes a trap; surveying its curtainless whitepainted windows, torn wallpaper, piles of dirty laundry and tools and suitcases, David recoils, feeling suffocated by the clutter of Giovanni’s life that had earlier seemed so charming. Oppressed, unable to breathe, he longs only to escape; yet he admits in his retrospective meditation that it was in fact like “every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter.” The room is not a prison, but David is a prisoner: He is a prisoner of his own flesh in any room he inhabits. At the novel’s end, he comes to the liberating realization that “the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my flesh.” What David rejects in rejecting Giovanni’s room is the task of making this room a real home, of reclaiming it from the dirt and squalor and transforming it into a clean and wholesome space. He and Giovanni in fact begin to remodel the room, bringing bricks and plaster that are eventually abandoned. Until he can answer the tormenting question—“What kind of a life can two men have anyway?”—David is unable to make a start; he can only feel trapped by gender roles and social taboos. Thus he fails to accept what he recognizes is his responsibility. He knows that “I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which in order to transform Giovanni’s, must first become a part of Giovanni’s room.” David is Giovanni’s potential salvation, just as Giovanni is David’s. Salvation, however, is ultimately a dirty business, and David struggles to keep his white hands clean. Giovanni, speaking out of his deep experience of suffering and loss, accuses his American lover of wanting to stay clean (“covered with soap”), of not wanting to be tainted by “the stink of love.” He makes a powerful case that there simply is no love without this stink, and that all of David’s little lying moralities cannot eliminate this fact. Indeed, David cannot love until he embraces this reality. However, to do so, he must be reborn. The water imagery of the enclosed room suggests as well a womb from which he must emerge with an enabling self-knowledge, an acceptance of his true identity and of Giovanni’s love. It is again Jacques who makes clear the hopeful message that love can transform sex into something beautiful. David’s moments with Giovanni are dirty only if he thinks of them as dirty. Jacques cautions David that if he plays it safe and refuses to

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give himself to Giovanni, David “will end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.” Fearful and ambivalent, David does play it safe, and his love is doomed along with Giovanni. However, the weight of hope with which he walks out into the dawn suggests that he has come through this penitential night with a new self-awareness. He has looked at himself in the mirror, confronted his “troubled sex,” and said “yes” to it. Soiled at last by the painful knowledge of a homosexual body, of real love and real loss, he can begin to live. Critical Context The publication of Giovanni’s Room in 1956 produced a round of generally favorable reviews. Although there were dissenting voices that balked at the “sentimental” and “sensational” treatment of homosexuality, and although some critics wished that Baldwin would return to the theme of race he had so powerfully explored in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), the reception of this second novel was, on balance, positive. Both John Clellon Holmes and Mark Schorer described the book as “beautifully written,” and Granville Hicks in The New York Times Book Review wrote that Baldwin handled the book’s bisexual triangle “with an unusual degree of candor and yet with dignity and intensity.” The praise was solid, if not wildly enthusiastic. Such reviews were more than sufficiently satisfying, however, given the difficulty of getting the book published in America at all. Because of the explicitly homosexual nature of the novel, no American publisher would touch it. Only after the British firm of Michael Joseph brought out an English edition to good reviews did a young editor at Dial Press accept the manuscript and publish, in 1956, the American edition. The book did come as a surprise to readers in that it included no black characters, focusing instead on a sexual triangle among three white characters in Paris. Baldwin had been working on a novel that would take up the twin issues of race and homosexuality, but decided to split it in two. When asked in 1984 why he eliminated the black characters, reserving them for his next novel, Another Country (1962), Baldwin confided that “Giovanni’s Room came out of something I had to face . . . I certainly could not possibly have—not at that point in my life—handled the other weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. To have a black presence in the book at that moment, and in Paris, would have been quite beyond my powers.” Though this decision seems to have left race out of Giovanni’s Room, it is in this novel that perceptive readers can see Baldwin beginning to collapse race and homosexuality into the single theme his later novels will unrelentingly investigate: America’s denial of its promise of equality to the “Other”—to the black, to the gay—and the confrontations such racism and homophobia produce. Thirty years after it appeared, Baldwin referred to Giovanni’s Room as a “declaration of independence.” In it, he had declared himself a black writer and a homosexual; ignoring the advice of editors who predicted the book’s publication would destroy his credibility as a new and important black voice, he had insisted on defining his own identity and asserting that, in America, questions of race and sexuality are inextricably connected.

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Bibliography Adams, Stephen. “Giovanni’s Room: The Homosexual as Hero.” In James Baldwin: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Examines the novel in the context of Baldwin’s first four books, all of which reflect the troubled relationship between questions of personal identity and social survival. Suggests that Baldwin mourns the unrealized possibilities of homosexual love while celebrating its heroic and redeeming capacities. Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006. Part of the Bloom’s Biocritiques series, this collection comprises four extended biographical essays on the author’s accomplishments. Fiedler, Leslie. “A Homosexual Dilemma.” In Critical Essays on James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley and Nancy V. Burt. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Critical response typical of some early reviews that found the novel a curiously melodramatic morality play. Still, Baldwin is seen as a religious writer who is to be congratulated for attempting a tragic theme, the loss of the last American innocence. Henderson, Mae G. “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: Expatriation, ‘Racial Drag,’ and Homosexual Panic.” In Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Analysis of the interplay of national, racial, and sexual identity in Giovanni’s Room, as well as in the author’s own life. Macebuh, Stanley. James Baldwin: A Critical Study. New York: Third Press, 1973. Claims the source of the novel is Baldwin’s religious imagination, not his psychosexual preoccupations. Macebuh asserts that the novel is less about homosexuality than it is about the implications of homosexuality in a world where the relationship between God and human beings is defined by terror. Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Argues that the novel takes up Henry James’s theme of American innocence confronting European experience but explores new cultural territory, charting an alienation based not on class or race but on sexuality. Refutes the novel’s low critical standing, claiming it is significant in Baldwin’s literary development as well as in African American literature generally. Pratt, Louis H. James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Identifies four symmetrical episodes at the center of the novel that shape David’s struggle: David’s relationships with Joey and Giovanni, on the one hand, and his relationships with Sue and Hella on the other. From the first, he derives satisfaction and shame, from the second, acceptance and emptiness. Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. “‘Making Love in the Midst of Mirrors’: Giovanni’s Room and Another Country.” In James Baldwin, edited by Harold Bloom. Updated ed. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. Analysis of the interrelationship between love, sexuality, and self-image in two of Baldwin’s novels. Thomas J. Campbell

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GIVE US EACH DAY The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Author: Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) Type of work: Diary Time of work: 1921-1931 Locale: Wilmington, Delaware; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C. First published: 1984 Principal personages: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a teacher and writer, widow of Paul Laurence Dunbar Patricia Moore, her mother, a dictator in Alice’s woman-centered household Mary “Leila” Ruth Young, Alice’s older sister, a teacher and the principal breadwinner in the Dunbar-Nelson/Young family after Alice was terminated from her teaching job at Howard High School Pauline A. Young, Alice’s niece and eventual custodian of her diary Henry Arthur Callis, the man whom Dunbar-Nelson secretly married in 1910 Robert J. Nelson (Bobbo), a journalist, Alice’s third spouse Helene London Ricks, a Chicago artist and friend of Alice Fay Jackson Robinson, a Los Angeles newspaperwoman and friend of Alice Form and Content Written between 1921 and 1931, the diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson is one of the first journals by an African American woman to be published in the United States. The core of Dunbar-Nelson’s diary discloses what it meant to be an educated black woman in the middle class in early twentieth century America. The journal recounts the experiences of one privileged African American woman, whose caste and Caucasian features allowed her to enjoy rights and advantages denied to most black people. Dunbar-Nelson maintained her diary during a period of personal turbulence. When she initiated her writing on July 29, 1921, Dunbar-Nelson was attempting to adjust to the previous year’s tragedies. These included the termination of her teaching position and chairmanship of the English department of Howard High school, chronic money problems, and the death of her favorite niece. The diary ends on December 31, 1931. After that time, Dunbar-Nelson enjoyed a prosperous lifestyle made possible by her husband’s appointment to the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission. Dunbar-Nelson’s journalizing throughout this traumatic period of her life seems to support the maxim that diaries are frequently maintained during times of calamity.

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Many of the entries are mechanical or journalistic, while others reflect introspective thinking. There are only two recorded instances of her rereading what she had written earlier, the anniversary of her 1930 trip to California and her birthday in 1931. Dunbar-Nelson wrote in her diary when the spirit moved her. During the first years of the journal, she vowed to write daily, but she was never able to keep her resolves. Some lapses were five to ten days long; others lasted three or four weeks. Once she failed to write for two months. She stopped writing in 1922 and did not begin again until 1926. The kinds of entries varied from year to year, ranging from the leisurely sentenced ones of 1921, to the choppy ones of 1926-1927, to the intense and briefly reflective entries of 1930. She wrote in every one of her many moods, only confessing once, in 1931, that she deliberately refrained “when the misery and wretchedness and disappointment and worry were so close to me that to write it out was impossible, and not to write it out, foolish.” When Dunbar-Nelson begins her chronicling, at the end of July, 1921, she writes about the battle to continue the Wilmington Advocate, a liberal African American newspaper that she and her husband, Robert Nelson, had been publishing for two years. This publication, financed by the Republican Party and subject to its whims as well as to the negative effects of prejudice and powerlessness, consumed much of Dunbar-Nelson’s attention for the year 1921. She wrote editorials and compiled news items for it, she conducted fund-raisers to support it, and she participated in the allnight sessions required to get the ill-fated newspaper on the street to sell by Friday afternoon. When the newspaper officially collapsed in 1922, Dunbar-Nelson suffered a loss of standing and political clout. Another concern of Dunbar-Nelson in 1921 was her involvement with the Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. An officer in the Delaware chapter, she also participated in other states’s chapter activities. Dunbar-Nelson also was interested in her lecture circuit. Her journal is filled with details of travel and information about the towns, churches, and schools in which she lectured. Perhaps Dunbar-Nelson’s greatest speaking engagement of the year was as a member of a delegation of prominent black citizens who presented President Warren Harding with racial concerns. With notables such as James Weldon Johnson and Mary Church Terrell, Dunbar-Nelson petitioned Harding to grant clemency for the sixty-one black soldiers serving lengthy prison terms for participation in the Houston “race riot” of August, 1917. As Dunbar-Nelson examined 1921, she called it “one of the unhappiest years I ever spent.” By the conclusion of 1921, Dunbar-Nelson had introduced many of the concerns that pervade the journal in subsequent years: her financial crises, her club activities, her delight in good food, and her love of pinochle. The next portion of Dunbar-Nelson’s diary begins with an entry dated November 8, 1926. No internal evidence exists within the writing to provide clues about the fiveyear lapse in her journal. During the years between 1922 and 1926, Dunbar-Nelson led a very active life. One of her most important projects involved her leadership of the Delaware Anti-Lynching Crusaders, a group that in conjunction with a national

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effort agitated for congressional passage of the 1922 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. This legislation aimed to curtail the widespread lynching that assailed African Americans. The defeat of this bill was instrumental in Dunbar-Nelson’s defection to the Democratic party. In 1924, Dunbar-Nelson became an educator and a parole officer at the Industrial School for Colored Girls, where she remained until 1928. She taught mixed-grade classes, attended court parole sessions, and directed musicals and dramatic presentations. In 1924, she and Robert began a close association with the Black Elks. Alice wrote a column, “As in a Looking Glass,” for the Elk newspaper, the Washington Eagle, which her husband managed. Because Robert’s job anchored him in Washington, D.C., Dunbar-Nelson spent much of 1925 and 1926 in a futile effort to secure a teaching position in the District of Columbia. In 1927, Dunbar-Nelson invested much effort scheming for the secretaryship of the Society of Friends’ American Inter-Racial Peace Committee, a subsidiary of the Friends’ Service Committee. She coveted this position because it could free her from teaching responsibilities. Perhaps the biggest secret of Dunbar-Nelson’s life is revealed in this year. On January 19, she cryptically alludes to her secret marriage to Henry Arthur Callis: “January 19, 1910-1927. This is the date, is it not. . . . Seventeen years we would have been together.” Stylistically, the 1926-1927 diary entries contrast markedly with those of 1921. Dunbar-Nelson seemingly had fewer satisfactory opportunities to write. She did not keep her journal current and lapsed in 1927 for periods ranging from a few days to two months. At the beginning of 1928, Dunbar-Nelson was still teaching at the Industrial School for Girls. She quit when the American Inter-Racial Peace Committee (AIPC) offered her full-time employment. The Philadelphia location of her new job required her to commute daily from Wilmington. The racist attitudes and remarks of Wilbur K. Thomas, a white executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, made Dunbar-Nelson’s tenure at the workplace challenging and uncomfortable. While working for the AIPC, Dunbar-Nelson also wrote poems, articles, and newspaper columns. Her prescient comment that her diary is “going to be valuable one of these days” suggests Dunbar-Nelson’s source of motivation in maintaining her journal. In 1928, Dunbar-Nelson had the job of her choice as well as speaking engagements. Still, she was not completely happy. In an entry dated Monday, December 17, she grieved her loss of “social touch” and the fact that she no longer was invited to parties. By 1929, Dunbar-Nelson’s AIPC secretaryship had become very demanding, to the point of pressuring her to raise money for the group’s programs. She was still a member of the Industrial School Trustee Board and was participating in club activities, but she believed that she was losing friends and becoming an outsider. The entry from Saturday, February 16, reflected her concern. “Something wrong with me somewhere. Can’t keep friends I want and can’t get rid of friends I don’t want.” The year 1930 was much happier. She described the year as “one glorious fling.”

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She began it by taking a ten-week tour, which the AIPC sponsored. California was the backdrop for one of the major narratives in the diary. Here she had a “romantic fling” with Fay Jackson Robinson, a younger newspaperwoman and socialite whom she met on the trip. Another woman, Helene Ricks London, a painter, also entered the relationship that Dunbar-Nelson and Fay shared. Biographer Gloria Hull explains that “Helene and Fay were involved with each other before Dunbar-Nelson entered the picture and that both of them were passionately interested in her. This intrigue accounts for many letters, sonnets, domestic scenes, arguments, heartaches, and tears” following Dunbar-Nelson’s return from her tour. Professionally, Dunbar-Nelson was discouraged. Most of the writing that she submitted was rejected. Her niece Ethel died, and her mother’s health deteriorated. Dunbar-Nelson was beset with suicidal yearnings and on August 2 wrote “Life is a mess. I am profoundly in the D’s—discouraged, depressed, disheartened, disgusted. Why does one want to live?” As she assessed 1930, Dunbar-Nelson wrote that the only good thing about the year was that it “brought me California. I shall you bless you for that.” Dunbar-Nelson characterized 1931 as “a year of marking time.” She waited for her Inter-Racial Peace Committee job to dissolve, and in April, it did. She and her family waited for her mother to die, a process that took a year. She waited for Robert to secure a political sinecure, which he did in 1932. The high points of the year included Alice bobbing her hair, changing her signature to Aliceruth, and visiting Helene London in Bermuda. Analysis The heart of the journal is its revelations about the meaning of being an African American woman early in the twentieth century. One insight can be gleaned from a look at the impact of Alice’s marriage to the eminent poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. During her career, Dunbar-Nelson received attention for being Dunbar’s wife and widow and not primarily for her own achievement. After Paul died and Alice remarried, she continued carrying his name to ensure the linkage with her famous husband. Perhaps Dunbar-Nelson did so partly because she was aware that, in a racist, sexist society, such a linkage could be useful. She knew that, as an African American woman, she needed as much help as she could get. Dunbar-Nelson’s living situation also provides insight into the meaning of being an African American woman in the United States during the first three decades of the twentieth century. At the beginning, it is apparent that Dunbar-Nelson’s basic living situation is that of a woman-centered household with strong female-to-female family relationships. The core consisted of Alice, her sister Leila, their mother Patricia, and Leila’s four children, three of whom were daughters. Even though they acquired husbands and other children, these women always remained together. Dunbar-Nelson never bore any children herself, but she became the mother of two when she married widower Robert Nelson. Alice helped to rear Robert’s two children as well as Leila’s four.

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Dunbar-Nelson’s helping relationships with the women of her family were also part of a larger system of black female support. She knew nearly all the active and prominent African American women of her time including Nannie Burroughs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Jessie Fauset, Laura Wheeler, and Bessy Bearden. Many of her eminent contemporaries were a part of the flourishing black women’s club movement. African American women of all classes united to combat negative stereotypes about themselves and to materially and spiritually aid in the overall amelioration of the race. Dunbar-Nelson’s work included attending meetings; cooperating with other clubwomen and the public to execute official duties, tasks, and projects; and planning and participating in conventions. The next aspect of Dunbar-Nelson’s life illuminated by the journal is the question of class. Educated, middle-class professional black women such as Dunbar-Nelson almost always came from and/or had firsthand knowledge of working-class or poorer situations. In addition, they enjoyed no entrenched security or comfort even in this achieved class status, their position rendered doubly marginal and complicated by their being both black and female. On March 28, 1927, Dunbar-Nelson wrote grimly about having to pawn her rings and earrings to pay the water bill. She had some social status but little money. Related to this issue of class is the notion of the “genteel tradition” in African American life and literature, with its special ramifications for black women. DunbarNelson is viewed as conservative, stiff, uptight, and accommodationist. This genteel stance was part of the attempt to counter negative racial stereotypes and to put the best racial foot forward. Black women were always heedful of the need to be living refutations of sexual slurs. Recognizing this situation may aid in understanding why Dunbar-Nelson carried herself in a manner that was called “distinctively aristocratic” and provide a perspective from which to view some of her less flattering utterances and attitudes related to people of lower classes. Hull observes that Dunbar-Nelson was a down-to-earth person who, when she allowed herself, enjoyed all kinds of people and all kinds of activities. She drank bootleg whiskey, “played the numbers,” bought “hot” clothes, had friends whom she dubbed “rough-necky,” went to Harlem dives, and indulged what she called a “low taste” for underworld films and S. S. Van Dine novels. One would not have guessed any of this by her appearance. Dunbar-Nelson’s diary also indicates a complex duality in the area of love and sexuality. Dunbar-Nelson’s marriage to Robert Nelson apparently was characterized by strong mutual respect. The two were partners and friends in life. Robert had conventional male attitudes, and he was jealous and rather possessive. Before marrying Robert, Dunbar-Nelson had secretly married Henry Arthur Callis, a man twelve years her junior. Callis affords the occasion in the journal for Dunbar-Nelson to muse about her former loves: “I walked slowly home through the beautiful streets thinking after all, love and beautiful love has been mine from many men, but the great passion of at least four or five whose love for me transcended that for other women—and what more can any woman want?”

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Hull notes that Dunbar-Nelson wanted much more, indicating at least three emotionally and physically intimate relationships that the diary shows Dunbar-Nelson shared with women. Her journal explicitly records two lesbian relationships, the more profound being with Fay Jackson Robinson. Dunbar-Nelson was ecstatic about their touching and commemorated their joy in a sonnet, which began “I had not thought to ope that secret room.” That the duality in Dunbar-Nelson’s sexuality was representative of that experienced by many of her counterparts is substantiated by the existence and operation of an active black lesbian network, of which she speaks in her diary. Dunbar-Nelson mentions a “heavy flirtation” between two clubwomen friends. These clubwomen were prominent and professional, and many had husbands. Somehow, they contrived to be themselves and to carry on these relationships in an extremely repressive context. Equally crucial for Dunbar-Nelson were the conditions and struggles of the workplace. Perhaps the most graphic revelation of what it meant to be an African American woman on the job emerges from her work with the Inter-Racial Peace Committee. Her white male boss questioned her executive ability and even complained about her lipstick. There were such incidents as a Quaker woman coming into the office and, not knowing Dunbar-Nelson’s race because of her fair complexion, inveighing against black people in Dunbar-Nelson’s presence. The diary also reveals Dunbar-Nelson as a female African American writer and public figure. Fortunately for Dunbar-Nelson’s posthumous reputation, she flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. During the height of the Renaissance, her poetry, some of which had been written earlier, was consistently published, even though Dunbar-Nelson, strictly speaking, did not belong to the group of bold, young, experimental poets and did not achieve new popularity or refurbish her basically traditional style. As a credentialed, older contemporary, she enjoyed the respect of younger writers. Her position as author was adversely affected by her themes and style and certainly by her gender, which automatically excluded her from male circles of prestige and power. Journalism occupied most of Dunbar-Nelson’s time. None of her attempts at film scenarios, short stories, or a novel were successful. The screenplays did not suit film companies, and the novel, a satirical one entitled Uplift, was damned by the author herself as “inane, sophomoric, amateurish puerility.” Critical Context Dunbar-Nelson’s diary may be the most significant and enduring piece of writing that she produced. Its revelations about African American culture and about women’s existence are priceless. Her diary provides private glimpses of public figures and inside reports of major events. For example, a 1927 entry gives readers a view of Dunbar-Nelson and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois cooking breakfast. The diary also affords a view of numerous national African American conventions, such as the research conference held in Durham, North Carolina, in December, 1927 and the annual assembly of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The

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diary also shows that at one point, Dunbar-Nelson and Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, were collaborating on researching and writing a book. Dunbar-Nelson’s journal is invaluable for its revelations about black culture. As Gloria Hull states, it should force a radical assessment of generalizations about black women writers during the early twentieth century. Bibliography Berry, Linda S. “Georgia Douglas Johnson and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.” In American Women Writers, edited by Barbara White. New York: Garland, 1977. Brief biographical essay on Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Broussard, Jinx Coleman. Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists. New York: Routledge, 2004. Examines and elucidates DunbarNelson’s experience as an African American journalist in the Jim Crow era. Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore. Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice DunbarNelson. Edited by Gloria T. Hull. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Hull, DunbarNelson’s biographer, studied and researched the author’s diary with the assistance of Dunbar-Nelson’s niece, Pauline A. Young. Although a few researchers had cursorily glanced at it, it had never before Hull’s study been thoroughly read or studied. Remarks by Hull are very useful in providing an overview of the diary. Hatch, James Vernon. Black Theater USA: Forty-Five Plays by Black Americans, 1847-1974. New York: Free Press, 1974. Refers to an interview given by DunbarNelson’s niece Pauline A. Young. Young states that her aunt “taught us English in the high school. She produced her play and we all took parts. The audience loved it. . . . but nobody would publish it.” Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Provides an analysis of the life and works of Dunbar-Nelson. Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, NY.: Feminist Press, 1982. This anthology contains Hull’s illuminating essay, “Researching Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Personal and Literary Perspective,” which tells how the critic discovered and edited Dunbar-Nelson’s journal. Patricia A. Young

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GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1880-1935 Locale: An unspecified southern state and New York, New York First published: 1953 Principal characters: John Grimes, a fourteen-year-old boy apparently destined to be a preacher and a leader of his people Roy Grimes, John’s younger brother, expected to be in trouble Elizabeth Grimes, a true believer in the sense that she bears the cross of her past sin, John’s conception The Reverend Gabriel Grimes, a tyrannical, puritan man, the husband of Elizabeth and the father of three of her children, but not of John Brother Elisha, a seventeen-year-old preacher in the storefront church of John’s family Florence Grimes, Gabriel’s sister and the only person who will stand up to him The Novel Go Tell It on the Mountain describes a long day in the life of John Grimes, who awakens on his fourteenth birthday as the novel opens. He hopes that someone will remember that this day in March, 1935, is a special one, his day. Only his mother remembers; she gives him a chance to be by himself for the day. During the day, John, who is given to introspection, ponders his life and what he wants to make of it. Religion and art are the two contradictory impulses that seem to war for control over his future. The spiritual and physical attraction he feels toward Brother Elisha, a young preacher in his church, also torments him. John comes by his ambivalence naturally. It is a condition perhaps destined for him by the nature of his birth. He is the illegitimate son of Elizabeth and Richard. His mother seeks solace for her misery from religion, but her lover, John’s father, selftaught and street articulate, favors art over the ignorance of Christianity. Consequently, the child of their union is torn between the sensual life of the artist and the more ascetic life of a preacher and leader. The conflict is further symbolized in his attraction to Brother Elisha, who becomes his spiritual father in ways that his stepfather, the Reverend Gabriel Grimes, cannot. John’s plight is developed not through dense plotting but rather through a psychological portrait of him and his family. What action there is arises from recollection. The novel is divided into three parts.

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The first, “The Seventh Day,” is an exploration of John’s psyche. For readers to understand fully this complicated young man, Baldwin must explain his family history. Part 2, entitled “The Prayers of the Saints,” includes, therefore, the stories of his family elders. Florence, his stepaunt and Gabriel’s sister, bitterly resents her wayward brother, who as their mother’s favorite avoids the labor and drudgery that is a daughter’s due. “It became Florence’s deep ambition to walk out one morning through the cabin door, never to return.” When her mother falls mortally ill, that is precisely what she does. Even though she leaves the South and Gabriel behind, she keeps up with him, knows his sinfulness, and serves as a constant reminder of his hypocrisy. The second “prayer” is that of Gabriel, whose story really begins when Florence leaves him to look after their mother. Saved, or “blood-washed” in Baldwin’s language, Gabriel becomes an accomplished preacher, one who moves his audience as much through the power of his rhetoric as through the depth of his emotionally charged Christian conviction. He marries Florence’s friend Deborah, a good, holy woman whom he respects for her saintliness but does not truly love as a man loves a wife. Deborah is barren, and Gabriel yearns for a son, “who would carry down the joyful line his father’s name, and who would work until the day of the second coming to bring about His Father’s Kingdom.” He begets such a son, Royal, by Esther, but overcome by remorse for his sin and regret for unfaithfulness to Deborah, he forsakes this illegitimate family. After Royal, Esther, and Deborah die, Gabriel is overcome by guilt, which eventually causes him to despise the son of his second wife, Elizabeth. It is no accident that in the brief retelling of Gabriel’s “prayer,” the biblical tone of the narrative becomes even more apparent. Elizabeth’s “prayer” is the tale of her own spiritual torment and mental anguish. Reared by an unyielding aunt, Elizabeth is also in conflict over her memories of an absent father, a man who never came to rescue her from a loveless childhood. Richard comes into her life, and “from the moment he arrived until the moment of his death he had filled her life.” They meet again, up north, in “the city of destruction.” Elizabeth knows from the instance of her loving him that such passion will be her undoing, that its all-consuming intensity is an offense to God, that “being forced to choose between Richard and God, she could only, even with weeping, have turned away from God.” Richard’s fate, that of the proud, intelligent black man, is suicide in the face of white society’s indifferent cruelty. Elizabeth, pregnant and alone, agrees to marry Gabriel Grimes because he promises to take her child as his own. He reneges on the promise and hates John from the beginning as a constant reminder of Elizabeth’s “pride, hatred, bitterness, lust—this folly, this corruption—of which her son was heir.” The circumstances of his birth are too similar to those of Gabriel’s own lost bastard child, Royal. In the final part, “The Threshing Floor,” John’s soul is to be reaped for service to the Lord. The saints and elders gather to call him home. In a mystical, powerful climax, John falls comatose to the floor. He pleads with Jesus to save him from hatred, from sinfulness, and, perhaps most of all, from indecision. For all the saints, it is a night of testimony: Witnessing, or professing one’s sins, requires remembering.

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The Characters John Grimes, the protagonist of Go Tell It on the Mountain, has often been thought to be the young James Baldwin. He is a character from a bildungsroman, yet one with such psychological depth and complexity that his coming of age can be explained only through the circumstances of his parents’ lives. Baldwin lets his readers know right away that much, perhaps too much, is expected of this good son, who stands in bold contrast to his bad half brother Roy. Everyone says that John is destined to be a great black man. For such a destiny, only one profession is appropriate, that of preaching. John aspires to another kind of greatness, that of the artist. On his birthday, John sees that rebellion against what others have planned for him is futile. Baldwin describes John as terrified that he will fail as a holy man. His desire to be an artist; his knowledge of the ways of the flesh, emphasized in the very opening of the novel; and his inexpressible homosexual longings condemn him to uncertainty and unhappiness when he should be most content. His long night of ecstasy will prepare him for a future of denial, purity, and probable agony. The third-person narrative allows for limited physical description but boundless emotional exploration of the characters. Baldwin’s themes arise from the relationships between characters rather than from dialogue or action. John hates his father, Gabriel, but wants his approval and respect. His self-knowledge, his intelligence, and his sense of being anointed combine to save him from imitating Roy’s waywardness. John is Elizabeth’s hope; her love is his consolation for self-abnegation. Gabriel hates the boy, ostensibly because of his weakness and self-absorption. Underlying this refusal to accept John is his own self-loathing for having wavered from the path of righteousness. His profound animosity toward white people arises as much from his own past and that of black people as from his personal fear of powerlessness. Although the relationships of the characters to one another is essential in giving meaning to the novel, on another level, and crucial to the narrative, is each character’s relationship to God, the God of poor black people, the God who demands adherence to His laws in spite of the afflictions and oppression of His people. In such suffering, the characters define themselves. Roy, for example, to whom God is just an abstraction, is really a peripheral character without psychological depth. Even Florence, who distrusts the ways of the pious, has her night of tormented prayer. Baldwin’s voice is that of a commentator, more sophisticated than his characters yet for the most part sympathetic to them. He employs monologue in place of dialogue to reveal character, with flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness description used as devices to reinforce the “prayers” of interior soul-searching. The effect is appropriately biblical; Baldwin relies on hymns and Scriptures to emphasize meaning. The central and secondary characters are not just believable but also vital. Never stereotyped even in the traditions of African American literature, they benefit from the imaginative nuances of their creator. They are placed within the straitened community of the black church, it, too, an émigré from the South, with its strict conventions, its intense, almost overpowering emotion, and its sense of community.

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Themes and Meanings It is no accident that John’s mother is named for Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. The relationship of black people to their church is a central theme of Go Tell It on the Mountain, the title alone signifying that the real protagonist of the novel is God. He is a stern, forbidding deity, and the characters see him as vengeful and angry. He takes away Gabriel’s beloved Esther and Royal because of the errant preacher’s sin. John is Elizabeth’s consoling reminder of Richard, with whom she has transgressed. The child’s unhappiness is Elizabeth’s repayment for lust and folly. Florence is cold, shrewish, and self-righteous, and her hatred for her brother, who is a man of God, marks her distance from real religious conviction. God’s status as father to the saved is mirrored in the nature of the human fathers in the novel. Paternal imprinting is central to Baldwin’s descriptions. Elizabeth finds in Richard a substitute for the father’s love she did not know; Gabriel desires a son to continue his work, preaching devotion demanded in turn by the Almighty Father; and John, symbolically fatherless, yet blessed with too many fathers—the dead Richard, the tyrannical Gabriel, and God—relies on his mother’s compassion and, tellingly, finds in Brother Elisha the spiritual mentor who will understand what he has endured in the long night of his soul on the threshing floor. A secondary but important theme here is John’s latent homosexuality. It has been curiously unremarked upon, except peripherally, in criticism of Go Tell It on the Mountain, possibly because of the overwhelming religiosity of the novel. It is, however, an important element, particularly in the light of the autobiographical aspects of the novel. Baldwin himself said that he considered this novel as a kind of love song, “a confession of love.” The absence of love is a guiding force in the narrative. John feels rejected precisely because the man he should most admire, the man who points the way toward salvation, his stepfather Gabriel, is so wrought with his own longings and guilt. Hatred of the unforgiving Gabriel fuels John’s own sense of sin. His tenderness for his mother and for Brother Elisha is his only source of happiness as he struggles to understand what he is and what he is to become. It is important to emphasize that John turns away from Gabriel after his salvation to receive a kiss on the forehead from Elisha. Gabriel does not smile on his son, and John must turn to the object of his physical attraction for validation of the experience he has just undergone. John and his family are part of a community, and Baldwin takes great pains to express the experience of black people as they attempt to reinforce their identity, their sense of community, and their reliance on each other in the face of a hostile society. In one passage at the end, John hears the rage and weeping of his people in the terrible darkness of his passion. Without words or even meaning, the voices from the darkness tell him of his people, “of boundless melancholy, of the bitterest patience, and the longest night; of the deepest water, the strongest chains, the most cruel lash; of humility most wretched, the dungeon most absolute, of love’s bed defiled, and birth dishonored, and most bloody unspeakable, sudden death.” From this passage, too, readers may note the power of Baldwin’s cadenced language, especially in the almost incantatory repetition that occurs in the biblical exhor-

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tations so often quoted or sung to the characters. The narrator not only tells a tale but also probes into character. His language is richly symbolic, laden with explicit and implicit meaning, and his point of view is not so omniscient, not so distant or so direct, that his reader does not share his sorrowful compassion for Elizabeth, his mistrust for the puritanical Gabriel, and his self-imposed quandary over John, for whom he seems to oppose happiness with holiness. Critical Context Baldwin is considered to be the heir to Richard Wright for giving a powerful voice to African Americans. Go Tell It on the Mountain is arguably his best work, one in which the self-pity and sentimentality of later novels are noticeably absent. It is, perhaps, best compared to his cogent, beautifully written essays, in which he also displays the ambiguities he felt as a black man, as a writer, and as a homosexual. Of major interest to critics of his works have been the autobiographical elements of the novel. Baldwin himself was unclear on the issue, at one point remarking that his characters and plots are distortions and therefore true fictions but at another point revealing that he thought constantly about his own father in writing the novel. Certainly the themes of the book arose from Baldwin’s own life experiences, but the incidents in it are probably fabrications in the true meaning of the word. Such a gifted writer could not possibly rely on memory without elaboration. It is in the context of Baldwin’s relationship with Richard Wright that several critics have approached Go Tell It on the Mountain. As his first novel, the book owes a considerable debt to Wright’s works. One critic even goes so far as to say that the novel is proof for Baldwin that he is worthy of standing in Wright’s shadow; once this work was accomplished, Baldwin could cast his own. Horace Porter finds Baldwin’s antecedents in the works of Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry James. Others point out the Freudian nature of John Grimes’s situation, physical and psychological, and see the novel as a one-day coming-of-age for the young man. The symbol-packed language masks the true meaning of the novel as a young black man’s attempt to remove himself from the specific persecution of society by relocating his conflict on a more universal realm, that of his relationship to God and to history. A more traditional interpretation holds that the novel is ironic in form and in meaning, that in spite of the falsity and corruption of the characters’ lives, the truth of God’s love, the object of all their yearning, is entirely validated and made manifest in John’s final bout of soul-searching. For those who subscribe to this construct, however, it would be well to remember the baleful glare of the cat who noses around the garbage can as John and his family leave the church. The story of Richard’s unjust imprisonment and suicide has been crucial to evaluations of the novel’s standing in the history of African American literature. It is an egregious example of an issue that pervades the novel, that of the prejudice and destruction attendant to racism. Thus, Go Tell It on the Mountain achieves through plot, through language, through character, and through theme a portrait of a community bound together by religion and oppression.

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Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006. Part of the Bloom’s Biocritiques series, this collection comprises four extended biographical essays on the author’s accomplishments. Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking Press, 1991. Baldwin himself gave the author his title for this biography, which purports to be a description of the writer’s life. It is an elegantly written work, one that draws effectively on documentary evidence and on the memories of Baldwin’s friends and acquaintances. Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Discusses the representation of normative sexuality and reactions against it in Go Tell It on the Mountain and the nonfictional study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), by Gunnar Myrdal. Henderson, Carol E., ed. James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain”: Historical and Critical Essays. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Collection of nine scholarly essays detailing the place of the novel in history, as well is engaging with it on a textual level. Includes a bibliography of Baldwin scholarship and criticism. Köllhofer, Jakob J., ed. James Baldwin: His Place in American Literary History and His Reception in Europe. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 1991. This collection of essays by a polyglot group of European literary critics and theorists is, in effect, a Festschrift on the occasion of Baldwin’s death. It includes the results of a symposium of international scholars who assess the impact of Baldwin, the man and his work, on European readers. Of particular interest to this group of scholars is Baldwin’s representation of African Americans to European readers. Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Inspired by the author’s dissertation, this book is a series of critical essays on Baldwin’s early works and ideas, and it professes to reinterpret his “genesis as a writer.” Essentially, Porter finds in the early works Baldwin’s ambivalence as a writer and as a black man. Standley, Fred L., and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Contains an excellent introductory essay on the literature of Baldwin studies and surveys of some of the principal sources for the study of Baldwin, together with the discussion of the evolution of Baldwin criticism. Of particular interest are essays by Fred Stanley and Shirley Allen on Go Tell It on the Mountain. Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989. A biographical “portrait” of Baldwin based on conversations and interviews with his friends as well as the recollections of Weatherby, who knew him for more than twenty-eight years. This biography takes as its starting point and theme the mystical view that Baldwin had of his life. It also is particularly instructive on the autobiographical aspects of Go Tell It on the Mountain. William Eiland

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GOD BLESS THE CHILD Author: Kristin Hunter (1931) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1950’s-1960’s Locale: An unspecified northern city First published: 1964 Principal characters: Rosalie “Rosie” Fleming, a young woman driven by her need for love and escape from her ghetto beginnings Lourinda Baxter Huggs, Rosie’s grandmother Queenie Fleming, Rosie’s weary, alcoholic mother Dolores “Dolly” Diaz, Rosie’s friend since childhood The Novel God Bless the Child is the tragic story of the short life of Rosie Fleming, who chases a false dream and dies in pursuit of it. The narrative begins when Rosie is seven years old. Readers soon learn of the early influences that indelibly shape the impressionable mind of young Rosie. The first is Rosie’s father, who has already abandoned the family when the novel opens. That event has led Rosie to believe she is unlovable. This initial seed of insecurity is inadvertently fed by Queenie, whose attempts to make Rosie independent are interpreted by Rosie as further evidence of her own inadequacy. Lourinda, the self-absorbed grandmother who idolizes the white world in which she vicariously lives as a servant, is responsible, however, for strengthening and bringing to fruition the self-hate growing within Rosie. The seemingly harmless reveries in which Lourinda regularly indulges about the lives and possessions of her white employers further diminish Rosie’s chance to find the nurturing she needs. Unlike her golden-skinned mother and pale grandmother, Rosie is as dark-skinned as her father, a man Lourinda describes as “no count” and “black as tar.” Not only is Rosie not white, she is impossibly black, impossibly removed from the full affection Lourinda reserves for her white employers. Despite her problems, Rosie is a precocious and shrewd child. She knowingly negotiates The Avenue, a neighborhood street populated by derelicts, drunks, and members of the criminal underworld. At only seven years old, Rosie seems to have no illusions about or apprehension of these adults or places, except an intuitive fear of a local pimp, Shadow. Further insight into Rosie’s emerging character is gained when the usually truant Rosie encounters schoolmate Dolly Diaz, who is dutifully heading to school. From this chance meeting, two things become clear. First, Rosie has developed a strong contempt for proper or legitimate means of action. Second, Rosie has indeed devel-

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oped a tough veneer, which she uses to scare away Dolly’s tormentors. In school Rosie is smart, despite her regular truancy. Rosie is seen again at seventeen years old. This seemingly adult Rosie is really the same, needful child of seven, grown physically but emotionally stunted. Rosie begins to concentrate on getting the money she fervently believes can provide escape from the ghetto she despises and entry into the life her grandmother has spoken of so often. She quits school and starts working as a salesgirl. With her driving need for money, it is not long before Rosie is seeking a quicker source of revenue in the illegal numbers racket. At first, she succeeds only in gaining more employment as a night-shift waitress in a disreputable bar. Within months, the wear of two full-time jobs is taking its toll on Rosie, but she stubbornly keeps working. It is not until Rosie hears a chance remark from Lourinda about a vacant house in the white neighborhood where she works that Rosie is able to focus her incredible drive on something substantial. With the objective of buying the house for her grandmother foremost in her mind, Rosie is able to push her physical need for rest aside and continue working. The way to quick money seems to come in the form of a partnership with Tommy Tucker, a numbers runner and Rosie’s first lover. Just as it seems that everything is coming together for Rosie, it is also falling apart: Queenie is stabbed in a barroom brawl. Rosie’s own health is declining. She loses one job and is betrayed by Tucker. Nevertheless, instead of failing, the resourceful Rosie triumphs against all odds and is able to move into the house she wants. For a while, it seems Rosie will be able to have all she desires. Her relationship with Queenie, however, remains poor. Queenie attempts to use Larnie Bell, who has become a family friend and Rosie’s lover, to intervene in her daughter’s affairs, but Larnie is no match for Rosie. Larnie’s own plans for the future have faltered since he was forced out of college after a socially impermissible affair with a white coed. Soon he becomes disillusioned and dependent on Rosie; he moves in with the family. Rosie’s relationship with Larnie suffers, too, because she distrusts his love and cannot understand his interest in music. When Rosie becomes pregnant, it seems she must finally acknowledge her limitations. Her refusal to do so signals the beginning of the end, as the façade she has tirelessly erected crumbles. After an illegal abortion and the death of Queenie, Rosie’s own collapse is imminent. When Rosie collapses, Dolly is then able to see that her friend does not lead a charmed life. With this understanding, Dolly realistically sees that her attraction and engagement to Tommy Tucker has been a poor attempt to escape her own bland circumstances. Rosie marries Larnie and grows closer to him. He is able to find his own manhood, but the control he begins to exert over Rosie is too little, too late. Rosie’s death is hastened when she realizes her supposedly inviolable white house is as decrepit and infested as the tenement slum she sought all of her life to escape.

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The Characters Rosie Fleming is driven by her need for love and escape. During her childhood, the father she adores abandons the family, leaving Rosie with her mother, whom she cannot fully love because she partially blames her for the father’s desertion. Rosie turns to her grandmother for solace and love, and her need goes unmet. Instead, Rosie’s sense of inadequacy increases; she cannot compete with her grandmother’s romanticized vision of white people, whom the grandmother idolizes, mimics, and serves as a live-in domestic. At an early age, Rosie learns to despise herself and her roachinfested home, which cannot compare to the immaculate, fairy-tale image presented in her grandmother’s stories about whites. When she is old enough, Rosie leaves school and doggedly trudges toward her warped American Dream. After she is physically worn and wasted, Rosie finally questions all that she has worked for and believed. Lourinda Baxter Huggs, Rosie’s grandmother, is a devoted servant and admirer of her white employers. Of southern origins and Creole heritage, Lourinda reveres the chivalric idea of a noble South with benevolent white masters and happy black servants who know and relish their place. After decades of service to a white family, Lourinda considers her employers more her family than she does her own daughter and granddaughter, who cannot possibly attain the gentility Lourinda values above all else. She imparts her twisted love to Rosie, and soon Lourinda’s poisonous dreams capture and consume Rosie’s imagination. Queenie Fleming, Rosie’s mother, was once pretty, but her exuberance and vitality have vanished. Unable to rise above racial and sexual conditions, Queenie, a beautician, dreams of finding a good man. Instead, she settles for a hustler who cons her for money. Queenie is able to see through her mother’s pretension but is unable to produce more than sporadic outbursts of impotent rage against her mother’s ludicrous values. Because Queenie knows how difficult life is for a black female, especially an unattractive one like Rosie, she treats her daughter roughly to make her tough and able to survive. She succeeds, but she alienates Rosie. Queenie is finally presented with an opportunity to help and possibly reclaim her daughter. The ensuing failure is too much for the already ailing Queenie, who dies. Dolly Diaz, Rosie’s friend, envies Rosie’s impoverished life, which appears glamorous and exciting. While Rosie is common, strong, and independent, Dolly is prim, repressed, and weak. They are also opposites in appearance. Rosie is skinny and dark, with coarse, short hair; Dolly, on the other hand, has light skin and long, “good” hair. Dolly’s preoccupation with her own internal conflicts make her unable to save Rosie. In time, she comes to see the folly of Rosie’s life and her own. Themes and Meanings God Bless the Child borrows its title from Billie Holiday’s signature composition of the same title and is meant to evoke Holiday’s tragic life. Hunter uses lyrics from the song to divide, and connect thematically the three sections of the narrative, which roughly parallel and chronologically trace the equally tragic life of Rosalie Fleming.

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The novel can most obviously be described as tragic realism, but it is really an examination of how the socioeconomic forces of racism and sexism affect the black community. More specifically, the author explores the dynamics of intraracial racism and how it damages the psyche of the darkest members of African American families. Hunter’s work is in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), works that expose the futility of aggressive materialism. Hunter goes a step further by adding another dimension, the black female experience. This perspective sets God Bless the Child apart, because the novel’s greater implications further indict the so-called American Dream. The principal characters, three generations of African American women, each represent levels of historical progression in the African American condition. Lourinda is in the slave tradition literally and figuratively. She is satisfied with her place and glories in the position of preferred house servant. Queenie represents the post-Civil War disgruntled but directionless masses of black people who wanted to move forward but lacked the means. Although Rosie is not an active member of the Civil Rights movement, she reflects its evolving spirit of dissatisfaction with the status quo and its determination to rise above racial obstacles. She heralds the beginning of a movement. There are only a few explicit references to racial disharmony or unequal conditions in God Bless the Child. Although social ills permeate and shape the lives of every character, Hunter manages to create a novel that is not overtly political. Lourinda, the unlikely antagonist, represents the divisive nature and futility of dogmatic social traditions that separate America racially. Moreover, her notion of “improvin’ the race” by encouraging marriage between light-skinned African Americans reinforces the belief that white is better and summarizes the plight of darker African American children in their own communities, where they may be considered limited in looks and opportunities. Hunter creates Lourinda to expose the symbiotic relationship of racism and materialism, the triumph of appearance over substance. The characterization of Queenie as dependent on men and alcohol to cope reveals how limited opportunities to escape squalor can lead to destruction. Rosie is the seldom-explored result of what happens to dark-skinned children exposed to intraracial racism. Rosie becomes resentful, mean, and incapable of trusting love because she has always felt unloved. Her quest for expensive things is her pathetic attempt to buy love. In Rosie, Hunter creates for readers the combined effects of racism and materialism at the extreme. The roaches Rosie despises and views as unique to black neighborhoods symbolize the infestation of self-hate, which gnaws away at her health. The male viewpoint is considered through the minor characters Larnie Bell and, to a lesser degree, Tommy Tucker. Larnie’s taboo sexual alliance with a white girl effectively halts his bright future, and Tucker’s impoverished youth leads him to embrace white values. Dolly, whose name suggests her plastic, ornamental existence, comes from a literally spotless home where her parents’ black bourgeois values reign. Her family’s fanatic cleanliness mirrors Lourinda’s obsession with appearance and indicates the un-

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stated desire to erase their blackness. This sanitized upbringing explains the strong attraction Dolly feels for Rosie and her disheveled world, which is unlike Dolly’s own carefully controlled life. It also explains the mutual attraction between Tommy Tucker, Rosie’s street soulmate, and Dolly. She sees him as an escape from the suffocating middle-class black society, and he sees her as entry into it. In this character, perhaps, Kristin Hunter incorporates herself; Hunter’s early life, like Dolly’s, was determined by a controlling family. While the primary message of God Bless the Child seems negative, hope is offered through Dolly, who, as the novelist did, breaks away from confinement and becomes free to seek her own meaningful path. Critical Context Kristin Hunter is the author of fiction for adults and children. God Bless the Child stands apart as her first novel and the only one not marked by a fortunate conclusion. It received the Philadelphia Athenaeum Award and critical acclaim. While God Bless the Child has not been Hunter’s most commercially successful work, it is one of her most memorable. The novel is considered important in the canon of African American literature because it set the stage for further exploration of the black female experience by later authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. It also holds a place in contemporary American literature because it addresses the immorality of the American Dream. Bibliography Buckmaster, Henrietta. “The Girl Who Wanted Out.” The Christian Science Monitor, September 10, 1964, p. 7. Praises the novel despite what Buckmaster sees as flaws in length and pace. She considers God Bless the Child further insight for white readers into the African American experience. Graham, Maryemma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Collection of essays providing thematic and stylistic overview of the history of African American fiction. Includes an essay by Steven C. Tracy on the role of blues in that history that helps contextualize Hunter’s use of Billie Holiday’s song to structure her novel. Hunter, Kristin. Interview by Claudia Tate. In Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Hunter discusses her life and work. She offers observations about the effect her own experiences have had on her writing and her views on social conditions. Kelley, Mary E. Review of God Bless the Child, by Kristin Hunter. Library Journal 89 (September 15, 1964): 33-36. Suggests that the novel is valuable as a guide to understanding interracial issues and is appealing, convincing, and moving but flawed by the author’s style. Schraufnagel, Noel. “Accommodationism of the Sixties.” In From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973. Views the 1960’s as a literary period that spawned the militant protest novel but that still provided many accommodationist novels, the characters of which acquiesce to con-

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vention and work within the system. To Schraufnagel, God Bless the Child is accommodationist because Rosie embraces white values to progress, even though her motives are more complex than acceptance of black exploitation. Simson, Rennie. “Kristin Hunter.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Includes a biography of Hunter, critical overview of her works, and a bibliography of those works and of secondary sources. Turner, Darwin T. Introduction to God Bless the Child, by Kristin Hunter. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1986. Considers God Bless the Child a product of the social gains made in the decade prior to its publication, a period in which writers such as James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry focused on the more personal aspects of oppression, an approach continued in Hunter’s novel. Kenneth D. Capers

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THE GREAT WELLS OF DEMOCRACY The Meaning of Race in American Life Author: Manning Marable (1950Type of work: Cultural criticism First published: 2002

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Form and Content Inspired by the belief of Martin Luther King, Jr., that a flawed American democracy can be made more inclusive, Manning Marable pledges in the introduction to The Great Wells of Democracy to begin a new conversation about race. Using personal recollections and recent events as illustrations, Marable claims that the United States has fallen short of its ideals because “racialization,” or the “social expression of power and privilege” based on past discrimination and present inequalities, has permeated democracy. A revitalization of civil society is necessary to bring the United States closer to the promise of democracy. Marable’s book—and his argument—is organized into three sections. The first section, “The American Dilemma,” describes two incompatible narratives on race and democracy in the United States. The first narrative claims the United States is the finest example of democracy in the world, and the second claims that democracy is shaped by “structural racism,” defined as institutional barriers that limit democratic rights as well as social and economic opportunities. Through a brief historical account, Marable demonstrates that this racism existed before American democracy began. In response to structural racism, he says, some have advocated “state-based”— political and legal change—change, while others have advanced “race-based” change based in Black Nationalism and racial separation. Finally, a third group advocates “transformationist” policies, which are essentially “class-based.” The book’s second section, “The Retreat from Equality,” describes the dimensions of structural racism and explains why the responses to it have so far been ineffective. Marable begins by demonstrating that “state-based” approaches, the focus of early “integrationist” civil rights leaders, have failed. A history of electoral politics reveals that neither major party is interested in addressing race. African American politicians, Marable asserts, follow a “post-black” politics of surrendering to white corporate or political interests to gain reelection, while sympathetic white politicians like Bill Clinton, who have the political authority to advance racial equality, lack the political and moral will to do so. Marable uses the example of the Million Man March to demonstrate that “race-based” approaches have also failed because such efforts led to division over Black Nationalism, and permanent structural change failed to emerge. Marable goes on to describe the “civil death” that results from structural racism. The erosion of public education through school choice policies, as well as the cost of higher education, limits people’s access to the knowledge they need to transform their lives. Increasing levels of incarceration threaten more African Americans with “civil

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death” by denying felons suffrage. The emerging African American middle class separates itself from other African American communities and creates so-called race traitors who work to destroy racial categories or even deny the reality of racism. Each of these elements has contributed to maintaining structural racism and has fueled the “civil death” that threatens to undermine the ideal of American democracy. In the third and final section, “Reconstructing Racial Politics,” Marable advocates building a new kind of politics that accesses the capacity for change present in the activities of ordinary African Americans. By engaging in grassroots struggles based in the problems of everyday life, African Americans can begin rebuilding democracy from the bottom up. From the collective experiences of African Americans and other, allied groups, new social theories and political strategies can then be devised. A discussion of reparations will include the historical consequences and moral challenges emerging from structural racism, and reparations can take the form of civic and economic compensation that addresses “civil death.” Marable believes that connecting to present areas of strength in the African American community, such as socially conscious hip-hop artists and faith-based initiatives, can bring legitimacy to these new politics. Such efforts can be used to revitalize those suffering the “civil death” resulting from structural racism. Finally, Marable argues that opposition to some of the “racialized” policies that followed the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, can be used to address the central international problem of the twenty-first century, “global apartheid.” Marable hopes that by engaging in these actions, African Americans will be able to convince white Americans that white supremacy—and the power, privilege, and prejudice that fuel structural racism—cannot be sustained. Analysis Marable, a professor at Columbia University, brings together academic analysis and social activism. By addressing electoral politics, grassroots movements, and inequitable concentrations of wealth, Marable unites several intersecting elements that he believes are all necessary aspects of a complete examination of issues of race and American democracy—elements that are too often considered only in isolation. Marable writes in a style that is accessible to general readers and those who are not well informed about African American history. Each of his chapters centers on postCivil Rights-era events, giving the book a currency that readers will find useful if they are unfamiliar with such later events as the Million Man March, changes in the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and twenty-first century debates about reparations. The concept of racialization is one of the most important elements of Marable’s work. Defining “racialization” as an expression of power is particularly useful when considering the often confusing history of race in America. By broadening his discussion to address power, Marable makes possible an examination of the economic and social policies that contribute to structural racism and that should be targets for the political action he hopes will emerge from the grass roots. His decision to target the

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extreme concentration of wealth and privilege that perpetuates structural racism, as well as his hope that social movements will emerge from multiethnic and multiracial communities of working-class people, suggests that he will engage in Marxist analysis. He seems unprepared to follow this course, however, which might lead to a classbased discussion in which race becomes a secondary issue. Instead, Marable pointedly makes race the primary lens of his analysis, and it is class that is secondary. Marable’s political agenda is aimed at gradual social change, not revolution. The change, moreover, is to be guided by people at the grass roots, not a vanguard political party or set of leaders. Marable stresses the need for middle-class African Americans, the “talented tenth,” to reconnect with those in the African American community who have fewer privileges and to forge such connections through shared experience, not class identity. Marable’s deepest scorn seems reserved for those “race traitors” who would deny the realities of racism and ignore their community connections. The political agenda emerging from this position is somewhat undefined. Is the social change Marable discusses possible without the connection of a class-based mass movement or a labor-based political party? Marable stops short of calling for such a party, instead advocating a “multiracial, multiclass political movement” similar to what the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson’s political campaign movement of the 1980’s, could have become. The final section of the book may be entitled “Reconstructing Racial Politics,” but how far those politics could go without some connection to class issues is unclear, and the potential costs of forging such alliances, when weighed against potential benefits, also deserve further exploration. Critical Context Throughout his work, Manning Marable’s dedication to African Americans and to progressive change has been evident. Through a gradual reconsideration of the nature of such change, however, Marable has come to conclude that leadership has largely failed. For example, in Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (1985), Marable examined the history of social protest movements and argued that such movements were taking on an electoral form, as exemplified by the Rainbow Coalition. The concept of leadership was revisited in Black Leadership (1998), in which Marable concluded that contemporary black leaders remain mired in the strategies and language of the Civil Rights movement. The Great Wells of Democracy brings those concerns together in a single work. While Marable’s belief in the possibility for social movements to take electoral forms seems to have waned after Black American Politics was written, his confidence in social protest movements as a method of change only grew. Bibliography Dauphin, Gary. “Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority.” Review of The Great Wells of Democracy, by Manning Marable. Black Issues Book Review 5, no. 1 (January/February, 2003): 53-54. Favorable review of Marable’s work. Valuable for reflections on the September 11 attacks and racial history.

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Harris, Robert. Review of Black Leadership, by Manning Marable. The Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (March, 1999): 1673-1674. Review of Black Leadership that includes a significant discussion of Marable’s doubts about leadership and the need for more “group-centered” movements. Kirkus Reviews. Review of The Great Wells of Democracy, by Manning Marable. 70, no. 21 (November, 2002): 1593. Brief but interesting critical review accusing Marable of “foggy” thought and frequent generalizations. McWhorter, John. “Still Losing the Race?” Review of The Great Wells of Democracy, by Manning Marable. Commentary 117, no. 2 (February, 2004): 37-41. McWhorter’s critical review of Marable’s work, written partly in response to Marable’s criticism of McWhorter’s work in The Great Wells of Democracy. Particularly interesting for the very different account of racism offered by McWhorter. Marable, Manning. “An Interview with Manning Marable.” Souls 7, no. 2 (Spring, 2005): 75-87. Lengthy discussion with Marable about the role of electoral politics in transforming black America, especially using third parties as an avenue for change. David Smailes

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THE GUYANA QUARTET Author: Wilson Harris (1921) Type of work: Four novels Type of plot: Allegory Time of plot: Twentieth century Locale: Guyana First published: 1985: Palace of the Peacock, 1960; The Far Journey of Oudin, 1961; The Whole Armour, 1962; The Secret Ladder, 1963 Principal characters: Palace of the Peacock Donne, an ambitious colonizer who is trying to develop an estate in the Guyanan interior The Far Journey of Oudin Oudin, a mysterious drifter of uncertain racial lineage Mohammed, a wealthy landowner who is gradually losing his property and his moral fiber Beti, Mohammed’s niece Ram, a crafty, materialistic entrepreneur The Whole Armour Magda, a lusty, strong-minded prostitute of mixed African and Chinese parentage Cristo, Magda’s son, who has returned to Guyana after completing his education and finds himself a stranger in his native land Sharon, a beautiful young woman who appears to be pure white but has black ancestors The Secret Ladder Russell Fenwick, a government official in charge of measuring water levels Poseidon, a black squatter so old that he has become a mythical figure The Novels The Guyana Quartet is an omnibus volume made up of four novels originally published separately. The first of these is Palace of the Peacock, a strange story about a crew of men fighting their way into the Guyanan jungle on a small riverboat powered

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with an outboard motor. The mechanical power is supplemented by oarsmen at the many passages where roaring rapids threaten to capsize the fragile craft. Harris’s densely metaphorical style of writing is strongly reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s rich, impressionistic prose. Like Conrad, Harris is keenly interested in revealing the influence of environment on human character. One by one, the crew members are killed, most of them swept away by the river, one or two murdered in irrational quarrels. The driving purpose of Donne, the colonizer leading the crew, is to recapture a group of runaway workers and force them to return to toil on his estate. He ends up achieving only his own destruction. The Palace of the Peacock, which he reaches at the end of his journey, is a fantastic dreamlike structure housing nothing but dead men. Harris has an impressive knowledge of the world’s literature, and the influences of many different authors can be detected in his novels. These include the poets William Butler Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Blake. Palace of the Peacock, in addition to being reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), calls to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s greatest poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), in which the crew of a ship met with disaster. It is, of course, also reminiscent of Herman Melville’s greatest novel, Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851), in which a whole shipload of men meet with disaster on a futile quest motivated by one man’s arrogant pride. Palace of the Peacock is a novel about the virtually unexplored interior of Guyana, a country about the size of Great Britain but populated by fewer than three-quarters of a million inhabitants. The next novel, The Far Journey of Oudin, is about the ricelands of Guyana and the East Indian farmers who work them. The dominant racial group of Guyana is made up of the descendants of Hindus and Muslims who emigrated from India. The next largest racial group is of African descent. There are also significant populations of Portuguese, Chinese, and native South American Indians. There has been some intermixture of racial strains, but by and large the ethnic groups remain distinct, separate, and mutually suspicious. Harris’s principal concern as an author is to find, or perhaps to create, a uniquely Guyanese consciousness they all share. This consciousness would be comparable to that which makes all citizens of the United States perceive themselves as Americans regardless of race, creed, color, or even native language. The Far Journey of Oudin explores the deterioration of a prominent family of East Indian landowners and the rise of a greedy moneylender, who represents a new wave of exploiters of the beautiful land. Oudin, an outsider and stranger, represents a new breed of Guyanan who refuses to be motivated by avarice and exploitation. His influence destroys the existing balance of power and begins to create a new status quo based on justice and tolerance. The Far Journey of Oudin is strongly reminiscent of novels by William Faulkner, especially the so-called “Snopes trilogy” consisting of The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). The Whole Armour deals with the seacoast of Guyana and the Pomeroon River, which empties into the Caribbean. Magda, a prostitute, attempts to save her son Cristo

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from being hanged for murder by persuading a friend to hide him. When the friend is killed by a jaguar, Magda has her son change clothes with the dead man so the authorities will think her son is dead and will give up hunting for him. Cristo falls in love with a beautiful girl named Sharon and becomes careless about concealing his identity. He is eventually captured by the police. In the meantime, Sharon has become pregnant and bears a son whom she names Cristo, symbolizing the indestructibility of the common people. The last novel in The Guyana Quartet, titled The Secret Ladder, deals with the perpetual struggle between land and water. Russell Fenwick is more aware of this situation than any other person because of his job as surveyor. His explorations of the maze of Guyanese rivers arouses suspicion and hostility among black squatters, who first try sabotaging his equipment but eventually attempt murder. Fenwick is a civilized man who ultimately finds it impossible to deal in a civilized manner with the primitive settlers and his own unruly crew. Like Palace of the Peacock, The Secret Ladder focuses on descriptions of the jungle and waterways of Guyana. The novel’s lush prose is intended to mirror the lush vegetation and beautiful but treacherous rivers that can rise as much as ten feet in a matter of days. Both Palace of the Peacock and The Secret Ladder strongly resemble Joseph Conrad’s famous story Heart of Darkness. The Characters Although Harris’s characters stand out as individuals, he wanted to represent all the different types of people to be found in multiracial, multicultural Guyana. His characters therefore are also chosen to represent the population spectrum. The crew members fighting their way upriver in Palace of the Peacock represent most of the ethnic types to be found in Guyana, including a mysterious old Arawak Indian woman who symbolizes the original inhabitants of the land before the time of Columbus. Again Harris can be compared to William Faulkner, who sought to represent the entire South of the past and present in the panorama of characters he presented. Harris does not limit himself to a single point of view or even to several points of view in his novels. He feels free to take readers inside any character’s mind to reveal what that character is thinking and feeling. This is sometimes confusing and occasionally threatens to destroy the illusion of reality. Harris has often stated that he is not interested in portraying characters in the traditional manner most commonly associated with nineteenth century fiction. He does not confine himself to a particular time frame but feels free to go backward and forward in time, with sometimes confusing results. In The Far Journey of Oudin, both Oudin and Beti seem to be simultaneously taking two separate journeys at different stages of their lives. Harris enters his characters’ memories to reveal past events and even describes his characters’ dreams as if they were real events, sometimes making it difficult for readers to differentiate between fantasy and reality. The effect of Harris’s experimentalism is to make readers conscious of the presence and purpose of the author as a sort of puppeteer manipulating his characters and

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even throwing them away if he gets bored with them. Harris seems to wish to keep reminding readers that his characters are not real people but instead are symbols of the heterogeneous people of Guyana, their hopes, their fears, their struggles to survive in a harsh land, and their efforts to understand themselves as individuals and as a people. Harris uses the traditional artistic device of contrast to differentiate his characters. As one example, he pairs the ignorant, superstitious, gullible Mohammed against the hardheaded, self-educated Ram in The Far Journey of Oudin. Harris has plenty of colors to work with on his palette because of the unique history of Guyana, which has brought together people from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. Harris handles dialogue quite effectively as a tool for delineating human character. He understands the heterogeneous peoples of Guyana better than they understand one another. Often his characters speak a pidgin English peculiar to Guyana. A short example from chapter 2 of Palace of the Peacock indicates the flavor of this exotic speech: How come you answer so quick-quick for another man? You think you know what mek a man tick? You can’t even know you own self, Boy. You really think you can know he or me?

Themes and Meanings The main theme of The Guyana Quartet is succinctly expressed by the character Ram in chapter 11 of The Far Journey of Oudin: This country so mix up, one never know who is Christian, Hindu, Moslem or what, black man, white man’s fable or red. Sometimes is all the same it seem but it got a technical difference.

Harris wishes to see Guyana become a nation rather than a colony. He sees that if this is to happen, Guyanans of all racial and religious backgrounds will have to develop a national consciousness. He believes it is the duty of writers such as himself to lead the way. Like Irish novelist James Joyce, a writer to whom he has often been compared, Harris wishes “to forge the uncreated conscience of his race.” It has been Harris’s lifelong goal to define the essence of Guyana as a land and as a nation. The four novels of The Guyana Quartet attempt to survey the entire landscape and the entire population, including those who live in the wild interior, along the river banks, in the cultivated regions, and along the coast. Harris evidently believes that the only viable consciousness for the heterogeneous people of Guyana is socialist. He is not sympathetic to traditional religion or to any traditional views of the world. He seems to be in sympathy with many radical political thinkers of the Caribbean region and Africa.

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Critical Context Critics are almost universally agreed that Wilson Harris is a very difficult writer to understand. The difficulty is created by Harris’s poetic use of language in his prose fiction. He is certainly not as difficult as the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake (1939) but is at least as difficult as the James Joyce of Ulysses (1922). Hostile critics say that Harris is unnecessarily opaque, while sympathetic critics assert that he is worth the effort it takes to understand him. An example of his densely metaphorical prose from chapter 2 of Palace of the Peacock illustrates the characteristic that is the main bone of critical contention: The rocks in the tide flashed their presentiment in the sun, everlasting courage and the other obscure spirits of creation. . . . A white fury and foam churned and raced on the black tide that grew golden every now and then like the crystal memory of sugar. From every quarter a mindless stream came through the ominous rocks whose presence served to pit the mad foaming face.

A phrase such as “the crystal memory of sugar” is perplexing and threatens to break the fragile illusion of reality while readers pause to decipher its meaning. Although each of the novels in The Guyana Quartet is short, each requires a long time to read because of the complexity of the prose. Mirroring the feelings of the boatmen on the furious, foaming river in Palace of the Peacock, readers begin to feel wary of Harris’s beautiful but impetuous prose. Harris is a novelist who must be read slowly and attentively. Critics, whether antipathetic or sympathetic, are almost universally agreed that Wilson Harris is one of the most important West Indian writers because of his ambition to create a new consciousness for the people of Guyana. In doing this, he has set an example for authors of other former European colonies around the world, especially those of the Caribbean region and Africa. Some critics consider him to be one of the most important writers of the twentieth century because of his leading role in the emerging cultural, intellectual, and political influence of the Third World. Bibliography Cartey, Wilfred. Whispers from the Caribbean: I Going Away, I Going Home. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1991. Detailed discussion of English-language Caribbean novels. Contains lengthy discussions of Wilson Harris, including analyses of all four novels in The Guyana Quartet. Drake, Sandra E. Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Scholarly examination of four works by Harris, with a focus on his bold use of language, his literary precursors, his interest in the connections between different cultures, his belief in the possibility of an apprehension of truth and of knowledge, and his emphasis on the need to review the way the modern world views its own history.

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Fazzini, Marco, ed. Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness. New York: Rodopi, 2004. This volume collects an essay and fiction excerpt by Harris himself, as well as scholarly studies of his work and of that of writers similarly concerned with the nature and representation of otherness. Gilkes, Michael, ed. The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris. London: Macmillan, 1989. Collection of essays on various aspects of Harris’s work by leading authorities on the subject of Caribbean literature. Contains many references to The Guyana Quartet, a useful bibliography, and an essay by Harris himself. Maes-Jelinek, Hena. The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Broader consideration of Harris’s work than Maes-Jelinek’s earlier study. She emphasizes the extent to which Harris sees complex interrelations between humans, animals, nature, history, the present, politics, and landscape. _______. Wilson Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Maes-Jelinek, an authority on the literature of the Caribbean, considers Harris to be one of the most important writers of the twentieth century while admitting that he is also one of the most difficult to understand. This book attempts to explicate Harris’s writings and devotes separate chapters to each of the four novels in The Guyana Quartet. Moore, Gerald. The Chosen Tongue: English Writing in the Tropical World. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Excellent overview of literature written in English by nonwhite authors in Africa and the Caribbean region. Contains many references to Harris and his works. Useful for appreciating the ongoing interrelationship between Africa and the New World. Bill Delaney

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HAVING OUR SAY The Delany Sisters’ First One Hundred Years Authors: Sarah Delany (1889-1999) and A. Elizabeth Delany (1891-1995), with Amy Hill Hearth (1958) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1889-1991 Locale: Raleigh, North Carolina; New York First published: 1993 Principal personages: Sarah Delany (Sadie), the older of two one-hundred-year-old sisters A. Elizabeth Delany (Bessie), Sarah’s younger sister Henry Beard Delany (Papa), the sisters’ revered father, who influenced them with his wisdom and example Nanny James Logan Delany (Mama), the sisters’ beloved mother, who nurtured them as children and shared life with them after her husband’s death Form and Content Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First One Hundred Years is the result of an interview with Sarah and Elizabeth Delany conducted by Amy Hill Hearth on the occasion of Elizabeth’s one-hundredth birthday. Hearth, a writer for The New York Times, published an article about the sisters that received such positive public reaction that editors at the Kodansha America publishing company proposed that they write a book. Though reluctant at first, the two unassuming centurions were persuaded that telling their story would preserve an important part of history for the next generation. They thus collaborated with Hearth to produce a work that is part autobiography and part biography. Capturing an oral history in the alternating voices of the two sisters, the text, interspersed with cultural and social background, describes an entire era as well as two exemplary lives. The sisters describe their early lives, explaining the importance of their backgrounds and accounting for their longevity. They enjoyed a sheltered upbringing in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the college campus of Saint Augustine’s. Their father, Henry—a former slave who was the first elected African American bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States—served as an Episcopal priest and vice principal of the school. Their mother, Nanny, who was born free of a white father and an African American mother, served as matron of the school while making a home and giving birth to the ten Delany children. Growing up in this privileged environment, the children all developed the values and pride of their parents, and they were largely protected from the acrimony of

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southern culture. As the children were growing up, their father—a strong, wise, protective figure—insisted that all of his children be home by dark and that a chaperone accompany his daughters whenever they left the campus. Despite this closely supervised, reclusive setting, all suffered from the Jim Crow laws passed in 1896 that prohibited African Americans from sharing public space with whites. Their educated father strongly urged his children to continue their education beyond St. Augustine’s, insisting that they work to pay for subsequent degrees themselves so that they would be beholden to no beneficiary. Both Sarah (Sadie) and Elizabeth (Bessie) spent a few years teaching in the South after graduating from St. Augustine’s. They then moved to Harlem, joining the great cultural explosion of the Harlem Renaissance, where they sought to further their education and develop careers. Their worthy goal demanded persistence, hard work, and at times conniving in order to break into a white culture intent on thwarting the advancement of the “colored.” The latter term was then used for African American people, and the sisters preferred it as a descriptor, asserting that they were wholly American. The sisters confronted prejudice. Bessie, called Queen Bessie by her father, was what her family considered a “feeling child,” one especially sensitive and emotional. Insults and injustice led her to her bedroom to weep or shout. Waiting in the “colored” waiting room of the train station on one occasion, she “answered back” to a drunk, obnoxious “rebby boy,” the family name for southern, white bigots. He rallied his friends, and, had the train not arrived and had he not been so inebriated, she might have been lynched. Sadie, contrary to her sister, was known as a “mama’s girl,” and she handled discrimination by subverting restrictions with charm and by playing dumb. She was reputed to be sweeter than molasses. Despite facing prejudice, even in the North, both sisters earned graduate degrees from Columbia University in New York City. Bessie earned a doctorate in dentistry and became the second African American woman licensed to practice dentistry in New York State. Sadie earned a master’s degree in education. Using a little cleverness and deception to gain entrance to a public school system that did not hire African Americans, Sadie was offered a job teaching at a public school. Once she showed up on the first day of classes, she manipulated the school’s bureaucracy, enabling her to keep her position. Sadie thus became the first African American person to teach domestic science in a New York City public school. Though both were professional women, the sisters survived by practicing the frugality and good sense that they grew up with. From their father, they adopted the habit of setting aside money first for the Lord and then for hard times. Both served and responded to their communities. Bessie often pulled teeth for free; Sadie made and sold cake and candy to supplement their income. For a while, her business venture thrived. After the stock market crashed, though, she closed, observing that hungry people did not have a nickel for cake. Ultimately, it was Sadie’s position with the school system that provided financial security during the Great Depression and in retirement. After their father’s death, Bessie retired to care for her mother, who moved to New York to

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live with them. With their mother, they traveled abroad. After their mother’s death, they moved to Mount Vernon, New York, helping integrate Westchester County. In their comfortable home at age one hundred, Bessie said with glee that she thought they had outlived the rebby boys. Analysis The story of the Delany sisters’ long lives describes and symbolizes the journey of freed African Americans after the Civil War, which the sisters refer to as “the Surrender.” While Henry Delany was born into slavery, he was among the fortunate few slaves who were taught to read. He believed success for his people depended on the success of one individual after another. He devoted himself to education and selfpreservation, sequestering his family within the confines of a religious and educational community. However, there was no complete protection from bigotry and cruelty. Adopting their family’s values and life skills, Sadie and Bessie developed their own ways of staying safe, coping, and maintaining a positive attitude toward life. They constantly nurtured and enjoyed the support of their large family and of the large culturally and educationally sophisticated community they lived in, both in Raleigh and in Harlem. Working hard, focusing on what they could do, they tactfully made a niche for themselves, developing nourishing habits of mind and body. Eating garlic, consuming vitamins and minerals, doing yoga, and taking care of themselves (including protecting themselves from the outside world by having no telephone), the two ladies persevered as charming and idiosyncratic icons, not only of African Americans, but also of Everywoman. Critical Context The world was ready for the wise observations of the Delany sisters, two humble but proud women who, having lived through many troubling times, earned the privilege and the benefit of thanking God for each new day. The biography of the women was a best seller. It then became an acclaimed Broadway play written by Emily Mann and was later adapted as a television movie. After Bessie’s death in 1995, Sadie Delany and Amy Hill Hearth published On My Own at 107: Reflections of a Life Without Bessie. The sisters, in their generally quiet way, did just what their father advocated. Each earned an advanced degree, and each made a career at a time when such action was unusual for any woman, especially an African American woman. They were friends with such Harlem Renaissance legends as Cab Calloway and W. E. B. Du Bois. They challenged the “rebby boys”; they helped their community with their careers in health and education; and they were among the first to integrate a white neighborhood. Their lives and their voices inspired and charmed many people. Bibliography Delany, Yvonne. “Sadie Delany Passes at 109.” New York Amsterdam News 90, no. 5 (January 28, 1999). Briefly summarizes Sadie Delany’s life and provides highlights of her autobiography.

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Hansen, Joyce. Women of Hope: African Americans Who Made a Difference. New York: Scholastic Press, 2007. Profiles the Delany sisters alongside eleven other influential African American women. Henneberger, Melinda. “Secrets of Long Life from Two Who Ought to Know.” Review of Having Our Say, by Sarah Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany. The New York Times, September 23, 1993. Focuses on the wisdom accrued over long lives that is presented in the book. Jefferson, Margo. “Books of the Times: Two Maiden Ladies and Their Century.” Review of Having Our Say, by Sarah Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany. The New York Times, September 8, 1993. Describes the joys experienced and the pains suffered by the two sisters. Laird, Holly A. Women Coauthors. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Study of female collaborative writers. Includes a chapter that compares the Delany sisters’ representation of America to that of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Robinson, Grace. Review of Having Our Say, by Sarah Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany. Southern African Feminist Review 1, no. 2 (December 31, 1995): 127. Points out the unique role of oral history in the Delany sisters’ autobiography, noting the interaction of the sisters in the development of the narrative. Bernadette Flynn Low

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THE HEALING Author: Gayl Jones (1949) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Comedy; feminist; picaresque Time of plot: Late twentieth century Locale: United States First published: 1998 Principal characters: Harlan Jane Eagleton, a faith healer and former music manager Joan Savage, a rock singer Josef Ehelich von Fremd, an African German horse breeder Naughton James “Jamey” Savage, a scientist and Joan’s exhusband Norvelle, a medical anthropologist and Harlan’s ex-husband Nicholas J. Love, a former bodyguard to Josef, who witnesses Harlan’s faith healing Grandmother Jaboti, Harlan’s beautician grandmother and a former Turtle Woman in a carnival The Novel The Healing is the story of a woman’s journey to wholeness and self-knowledge. Rather than telling the story in strict chronological order, the novel opens at a time when its protagonist is near the achievement of her quest. Harlan Jane Eagleton is on her way by bus to yet another “little tank town,” to perform faith healing at a church. The bus ride, the healing ritual itself, and the novel’s side events are all narrated in a run-on, stream-of-consciousness style. The narrative voice is usually Harlan’s, but it often slides into those of other characters, either spoken or assumed by Harlan. The novel’s opening is confusing but intriguing, and it leads into an extended series of flashbacks. Harlan Jane was brought up in Louisville, Kentucky, by her mother and grandmother, who owned a beauty salon. Harlan too becomes a beautician. She meets Joan, the rock singer, at a party. Joan, always keen on fashion experiments, asks for a sample makeup job. Harlan hires on as the singer’s makeup person, starts helping with her books as well, and ends up working as her manager. She negotiates more and better deals than the singer had been getting on her own, but Joan remains a small fish in the ocean of pop music. The relationship that develops between Harlan and Joan is complex and often infuriating to both. They spend much time together when on tour, and they share a running commentary on such diverse topics as popular culture, the rarity of African American scientists, and even the pros and cons of song titles. Joan’s manipulative nature begins

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to wear on Harlan, however, and after she sets her up for a liaison with Joan’s exhusband Jamey, sexual jealousy is added to their complicated friendship. In between tours, Joan retreats to a farm she owns in Minnesota. Harlan Jane goes off to play the ponies at various racetracks. At Saratoga she meets Josef, who calls himself an arbitrager but who is in America to buy and breed top-ranking thoroughbreds. Josef surrounds himself with bodyguards; he is paranoid about some mysterious danger. Although Harlan enjoys the luxury she shares during their affair, she knows early on that they have little in common besides horseracing. They end up with a casual friendship. The narrative flows back and forth in time. There are scenes from Harlan’s marriage and from her grandmother’s beauty shop. Harlan and Norvelle have a good rapport until he wants to stay in Africa, following a Masai medicine woman he is studying. Grandmother Jaboti teaches Harlan lessons in life by word and example, including the importance of “confabulation” and imagination. The tensions simmering between Harlan and her employer explode over a group of Caribbean refugees. Joan has financed their ill-fated invasion of their island. Harlan accuses her of quixotically playing with the lives of people they had both promised to protect. She dreams that Joan fires her. Instead, while both are at Josef’s horse farm, Joan pulls a knife on her. It goes into her chest and seems to touch bone. Nicholas, still acting as bodyguard, rushes to deflect Joan, but before he can do anything, the knife falls out. Harlan puts her hand to the wound, and it heals. This is the start of Harlan Jane’s calling as a healer. At the novel’s conclusion, she finds the man she first loved, Norvelle, waiting for her at her current stop. The Characters Harlan Jane Eagleton is at the same time a sharply unique character and a sort of African American Everywoman. There is an edge to her outlook on life; she does not believe or trust everyone she meets, but at the same time she approaches most people and happenings with a bracing openness. Joan notes that Harlan always seems to fit in anywhere she wants to be. She is largely self-educated, yet her conversations show a surprisingly wide range of knowledge. While envying Joan’s glamour and sense of style, Harlan is usually content to look—in one church lady’s words—like she belongs on a motorcycle. Harlan bears little resemblance, physically or psychologically, to the popular stereotypes of a faith healer. She readily admits she has no idea how she does the healing, and she does not mystify her gift with ceremony or magic formulations. Joan Savage, in contrast, takes pride in being mercurial and flamboyant. She even considered calling herself Joan “The Darling Bitch” Savage, but she changed her mind after hearing an announcer use the term to introduce her. Like many artists, she is never quite confident about her talent but rushes offstage to wring her hands in her dressing room. Her friendship with Harlan serves as a catalyst to both women’s selfknowledge. The novel’s other characters have some interesting complexities too, such as

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Josef’s disdain for most of American culture and his contradictory regard for American women. Nicholas J. Love is especially memorable in his roles as head bodyguard and witness to a miracle. A giant of a man, he indulges in only a little hyperbole when he says “Y’all know I’m a powerful man,” but his inner persona is gentle and honest. Norvelle is possibly the least well defined of the several male characters, but that may be because Harlan Jane still sees him through the eyes of love. His enthusiasm for gathering African medical folklore despite personal discomfort or exhaustion forms the very image of the dedicated professor. Themes and Meanings In contrast to the grim and violent themes of Gayl Jones’s previous novels, The Healing is surprisingly upbeat. The only explicit violence is Joan’s attack on Harlan. Instead, the book is full of subtle humor, with story threads reflecting the American motifs of remaking oneself and of the saving grace of love. African American lore, cultural assumptions, and even speech cadences are integral parts of the novel, and all the significant characters are African American. Clearly, the “healing” of the title is meant metaphorically as well as literally. The story is about Harlan Jane’s journey into self-knowledge and wholeness. Her statement that she had to heal herself before she could heal others stands as the novel’s major theme. No healing is possible unless the person seeking to heal either physical wounds or spiritual deficiencies starts with his or her own ills. Harlan’s story is also about the nature and redeeming power of love. Grandmother Jaboti claims that she used to be a turtle. Not until a young man loved her enough to see her as herself rather than as Turtle Woman did she begin to turn human. Harlan cannot see herself following a man in that way, and in the end it is Norvelle who seeks her out, but the theme is not gender specific. Love is a part of being fully human, and people ignore it at their peril. Finally, the very type of story Jones has written conveys a message. After writing two prior novels focusing on violence and degradation as legacies of slavery, Jones created a novel of multifaceted human relationships. The idiom and context is African American, but the larger themes are universal. This work represents a recognition that African American characters and settings have become mainstream rather than remaining set apart in a specialized literary ghetto. Critical Context The Healing was Jones’s first novel in more than two decades. It was also the first novel to be published by the venerable Beacon Press in its 144-year history. For most critics, the book lived up to its prepublication expectations. Reviewers expressed some surprise that the novel was so different from the author’s earlier work but went on to praise it for its innovative use of language, its rich portrayal of character, and its theme of hope. Unfortunately, just a week after its publication, the book’s content was overshadowed by personal tragedy. The author and her husband, Bob Jones, had been living

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quietly in Lexington, Kentucky. The ballyhoo surrounding the book caught the attention of local police, who set out to arrest Bob Jones on a prior weapons charge. He barricaded himself and Gayl inside their house. As the police closed in, he cut his own throat with a knife. It was a scene that brought the horrific events of Jones’s earlier novels into real life. Its drama and pathos almost overwhelmed the novel’s impact. Since that time, however, The Healing has taken its place in the canon of contemporary African American literature. It is by no means an easy book to read, but its unique take on human frailties and relationships makes it worth the effort. Bibliography Grossman, Judith. “The Healing.” Review of The Healing, by Gayl Jones. The Women’s Review of Books 15 (March, 1998): 15. Comprehensive review that notes Jones’s consistent use of women’s voices and her characters’ “open destinies.” Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. A book of history and criticism by the author. Examines the role of oral tradition, folklore, and music in African American literature. Mills, Fiona, ed. After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Essays from a feminist perspective. Articles on The Healing examine its Afro-Latino elements, jazz rhythms in Jones’s prose, and other topics. Nelson, Jill. “Hiding from Salvation.” The Nation 266 (May 25, 1998): 30. Review article with comments on Jones as a private writer in a demandingly public age. Woodson, Jacqueline. “The Healing.” Review of The Healing, by Gayl Jones. Artforum International, March, 1998, p. S24. Points out the novel’s contemplative qualities and its many possibly imagined elements. Emily Alward

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THE HEART OF A WOMAN Author: Maya Angelou (Marguerite Annie Johnson, 1928) Type of work: Memoir Time of work: Late 1950’s and early 1960’s Locale: San Francisco, California; New York; Cairo, Egypt; Ghana First published: 1981 Principal personages: Maya Angelou, an African American woman who moves and changes careers frequently Guy Johnson, Angelou’s teenage son Billie Holiday, a legendary jazz singer Godfrey Cambridge, a New York taxi driver, comedian, and producer John Killens, a writer and the founder of the Harlem Writers Guild Rosa Guy, a Harlem novelist Thomas Allen, a bail bondsman and Angelou’s fiancé Vusumzi Make, an African freedom fighter and Angelou’s husband Abbey Lincoln, a jazz singer and composer Form and Content The Heart of a Woman is the fourth book in Maya Angelou’s series of memoirs, which includes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002). The author’s fourth memoir chronicles the years 1957-1963 and finds Angelou in transition, moving across the country to New York City to join John Killens in the Harlem Writers Guild and hoping to hone her writing skills after years of performing as a singer and dancer. Beginning the story in California, Angelou and her twelve-year-old son, Guy, find themselves unexpectedly entertaining a houseguest, the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday. Nearing the end of her life, Holiday seeks solace and comfort in the normalcy of Angelou’s life, eating Maya’s fried chicken and singing Guy to sleep with a repertoire of jazz standards. Though Holiday plays the role of spoiled diva and rants in a string of freestyle curses during her stay, Angelou chooses to look beyond the rough image and instead appreciate the tenderness Holiday displays in her interactions with Guy. New York City offered new opportunities and challenges for Angelou, including the production of Cabaret for Freedom that she staged with Godfrey Cambridge. This

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fund-raising venture brings her to the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who recruits her to succeed Bayard Rustin as the northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a post she holds for six months. Meanwhile, Angelou attends weekly meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild and suffers through the initial critical comments of her fellow members. As an activist, Angelou helps organize a demonstration at the United Nations, protesting the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Republic of the Congo. New York City not only provides the background for Angelou’s creative endeavors and civil rights work but also plays an important role in her love life. Thomas Allen, a bail bondsman, strikes her fancy. He also suits her fantasies, as Angelou imagines herself as a domestic goddess, preparing delicious, wholesome meals in her kitchen while waiting for her man to come home. As her teenage son grows older, Angelou dreams of a steady male influence in the home, and this dream may be the impetus for her unlikely love affair with a man who gives her confiscated luggage as a wedding gift. Fate steps in to deliver Angelou from her engagement to Allen. At a party one night, Angelou meets Vusumzi (Vus) Make, an African freedom fighter. A rotund, well-dressed, patriarchal man of Africa, Make utilizes his considerable charms to woo Angelou. Though they never actually have a wedding ceremony, the two live as husband and wife. Vus takes Guy under his wing and begins to teach him what it mean to be an African man. All seems to be going well, but little by little telltale signs of Make’s infidelity arise. To make matters worse, the bills are not being paid. Angelou confronts Vus with both of these problems, and her solution is for the family to move to Cairo. Once in Egypt, Angelou falls in love with Africa but finds herself to be a stranger in a strange land. Her ignorance of the language and Islamic traditions puts her at the mercy of a male-dominated society. Not surprisingly, the problems she and Vus experienced in New York follow them to Cairo, and Angelou decides that she must somehow find work and pay her own way. This determination leads her to accept an associate editorship on the staff of the Arab Observer, becoming the only woman editor in an office of men. Ultimately, Angelou’s upbringing as an African American woman is revealed to have made her too strong to bow down to an African man’s ego. While Make continues chasing other women, Angelou begins to plan an exit strategy. She leaves Vus and is vindicated by the community, recognized as a woman wronged. She and her son move to Ghana in order to enroll Guy at the university there. While in Ghana, Guy is seriously injured in an automobile accident. The Heart of a Woman concludes with Guy leaving his mother’s home in Ghana to attend college. Analysis In Angelou’s case, the heart of a woman is her son, Guy who was named Clyde at birth. He chose the name Guy for himself and it is the name he is known by in Angelou’s fourth memoir. It is sometimes difficult to discern Angelou’s motivations.

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Like many creative people, she is susceptible to whimsy. She seems almost to stumble in and out of careers, in and out of passions, in and out of relationships. Her son is the constant throughout most of his mother’s story. Angelou resembles Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump, popping up at important times in American history, meeting influential people, and knowing some of the most iconic personalities of the twentieth century. She lived, for instance, in San Francisco during the vanguard days of the Beat generation, when Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady were heading ever westward to the eventual hub of the hippie movement. She moved to Brooklyn during the early 1960’s, and she met Malcolm X and discussed civil rights and civil disobedience with him. She seemed to be on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement and the women’s movement at the same instant. She was there to take the baton from Bayard Rustin, and she became the chief executive and fund-raiser for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Before history could catch up with her, before Malcolm X and King were gunned down, she moved on to Africa. Her work and her experiences there seemed to be early harbingers of the long war against apartheid. All the while, she remained her grandmother’s baby, her mother’s daughter, the South’s pearl of great price, an African American woman simultaneously somehow both at the center and always on the fringe of history, retaining her dignity and identity and finally, inevitably, returning to her role of mother. Critical Context As a writer and poet, Angelou has justly earned a place in the pantheon of American authors. Her first autobiographical work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, caused a sensation in the late 1960’s and was nominated for a National Book Award. At the time, it was not recognized as the first of what would ultimately be a series of memoirs. Over the intervening years, no book in the series has garnered the acclaim of the original. However, as time has passed, The Heart of a Woman has grown in reputation as perhaps the second-best of the series. Angelou is at times less than forthcoming as an autobiographer. Her books seem to be composed of vignettes woven together to form an attractive pattern, rather than seamless tapestries. Her story is thus a quilt, and pieces of the quilt are selected for their colors, their textures, and their harmony in complementing the other pieces. Angelou makes her life’s story mysterious by omitting motivations and disguising connections. One minute, she is a singer and dancer; the next, she is producing a major fund-raising event in New York City. The transition is unexplained. Similarly, as a woman with no college education whose background is in singing, dancing, and acting, she nevertheless becomes the administrator for the northern office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The details remain hidden and perhaps are better left unknown.

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Bibliography Blundell, Janet Boyarin. Review of The Heart of a Woman, by Maya Angelou. Library Journal, October 1, 1981, p. 1919. Finds the text insightful and skillfully narrated, focusing on her familial relationships as providing the “emotional center of the book.” Lupton, Mary Jane. “Singing the Black Mother: Maya Angelou and Autobiographical Continuity.” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 2 (Summer, 1990): 257-277. Examines the consistent exploration of motherhood—both literal and metaphoical—throughout Angelou’s autobiographical series. McWhorter, John. “Saint Maya.” Review of A Song Flung Up to Heaven, by Maya Angelou. The New Republic, May 20, 2002. Dismisses Angelou’s autobiographical writings as conveying “a contrived arrogance” to her readership. Neubauer, Carol E. “Displacement and Autobiographical Style in Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman.” Black American Literature Forum 17, no. 3 (Autumn, 1983): 123-129. Examines the interplay of fantasy, truth, and self-knowledge in Angelou’s representation of her life and experience. O’Neale, Sondra. “Reconstruction of the Composite Self: New Images of Black Women in Maya Angelou’s Continuing Autobiography.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Contrasts Angelou’s prose memoirs with her poetic style; emphasizes the literary lineage of the prose and Angelou’s mastery of plot structure. Randy L. Abbott

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A HERO AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT A SANDWICH Author: Alice Childress (1916-1994) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: Early 1970’s Locale: Harlem, New York First published: 1973 Principal characters: Benjie Johnson, a thirteen-year-old heroin addict Rose Johnson, Benjie’s mother Craig Butler, a struggling maintenance man who wants to marry Rose The Novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich traces the devastating effects of drugs on its principal character, Benjie Johnson, his family, and society. Born into a poor family in the ghetto of Harlem, Benjie wanders aimlessly into the jaws of destruction. Benjie has been taught never to be “chicken,” so when he is challenged into taking drugs, he responds by showing his friends that he can take heroin without becoming a casualty. The issues of identity and the quest for wholeness that surround Benjie’s motivation for taking drugs become significant in the light of the fact that the novel is set in the period immediately following the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich mirrors urban ghetto life, depicting African Americans who seem fragmented and alienated because of race, gender, and class barriers. The novel opens with Benjie trying to convince himself that he is not a junkie and that he can give up heroin at any time. He suffers from depression because his mother loves Craig Butler, a struggling but dignified maintenance man whom Benjie feels has replaced him as head of the house. While Butler tries to act as a positive role model and strong stepfather for Benjie, the youth moves to discredit and to enrage him at every turn. Benjie copes with feelings of displacement by associating with gang members, who influence him to experiment with drugs. Benjie smokes marijuana until one day he finds himself in the company of young men who have moved from marijuana to heroin. Benjie proves to the gang that he is not afraid of drugs by taking heroin. Childress portrays Benjie as an arrogant teenager who believes he has to prove something to the world while simultaneously depicting him as a hurting, confused, sensitive youth who craves love and security. Before Benjie is aware of what is happening to him, he becomes a junkie. He finds himself demanding that Tiger, a small-time pusher, introduce him to a “connection” who has easy access to heroin. Tiger introduces Benjie to Walter, a callous pusher

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who cares only about money. Walter sells Benjie heroin and later involves him in the sale of drugs. Benjie soon crumbles under the pressure of drugs and school. Two of his teachers notice that Benjie is inattentive in class. Once a bright young student, Benjie nods daily or skips school. His teachers report him to his parents, and he is placed in a detoxification center. Benjie’s treatment is short-lived; within a week after treatment he steals to get a fix. His stealing is connected to his resentment toward Butler’s relationship with his mother. Benjie sets out to prove that Butler, like Benjie’s father, can be made to leave. He succeeds in provoking Butler by selling his suit and overcoat to buy drugs. Butler moves because he fears he will physically abuse Benjie. Although Butler has good cause to abandon Benjie, he does not. When Benjie steals a toaster from the boardinghouse where Butler lives, Butler chases him to throttle him. During the chase, Benjie tries to leap over rooftops and finds himself hanging on to the edge of one. He begs Butler to let him die, to end his misery, but his stepfather saves him. The novel concludes with Butler waiting in the cold for Benjie to appear for a counseling session. Childress leaves readers wondering whether Benjie, who claims to be drug free, has chosen to seek another fix. The Characters Benjie Johnson searches for love to fill the void left by his biological father, who abandoned him. He is angry, frustrated, distrusting, manipulative, and rebellious. He experiments with drugs because he believes that taking drugs will make him a man, especially in the eyes of his wayward friends. Childress suggests that without proper nurturing, Benjie and others in his predicament are on their way to becoming statistics. Alice Childress’s use of multiple narrators in A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich vivifies the trauma, uncertainty, and dangers experienced by a poor, young black male growing up in the ghetto, where, as Benjie says, “a chile can get snatch in the dark and get his behind parts messed up by some weirdo.” The myriad narrators help to illuminate Benjie’s real problem: insecurity. Each of the narrators sheds light on a young man who is in dire need of someone to give him a sense of self. He deliberately tries to alienate everyone who offers him help because he does not see himself as a drug addict but as an occasional drug user. Benjie’s perceptions of reality are countered by his mother, his teacher, his friend Jimmy Lee, his doctor, and his stepfather. Rose Johnson and her mother are presented as women who head the Johnson household but who are powerless to help Benjie. He sees his mother and grandmother as nervous women who make him nervous in turn. His inability to relate to them is exacerbated by their going to a conjure woman/fortune-teller to secure a potion meant to steer Benjie from drugs. With these two women, Childress suggests the ineffectuality of the efforts of women trying to teach boys how to be men in a society that strangles them. While these women love Benjie dearly and make sacrifices for him, he seems to need something more, something they cannot give him.

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Childress clearly suggests that in many cases black men are better suited to nurture black boys. Benjie’s teacher Nigeria Greene, a Black Nationalist, tries to instill selfesteem in Benjie. He spends hours with Benjie, trying to shield him from the destructiveness of the streets. When Benjie comes to class in a daze and with needle marks in his arm, Nigeria turns him over to the principal and subsequently to the authorities for drug rehabilitation. He tells Benjie that it is “nation time,” a time for black people to save one another. Benjie distances himself from his drug-free friends, especially Jimmy Lee. It is from Jimmy Lee that readers learn that Benjie started experimenting with heroin as a result of peer pressure. When Jimmy Lee tells Benjie to straighten up because heroin will kill him, Benjie merely dismisses Jimmy Lee as a would-be social worker. Another character Childress uses to suggest that black men can and must take responsibility for other black men is Benjie’s doctor, who, in a fatherly manner, tries to give Benjie hope. He tells him to start over, noting that “the world ain’t perfect” but, nevertheless, “Hard as it is, life is still sweet.” It is these words of encouragement that Childress places strategically to anchor Benjie. The doctor is a significant character because he represents for Benjie the possibility of survival and success for black men. While Benjie has Nigeria Greene, Jimmy Lee, and the doctor to bolster his selfesteem, it is Craig Butler who comes closest to saving Benjie. Butler accepts Benjie as his son, even though Benjie berates him and steals from him. Benjie resents Butler for loving Benjie’s mother. Benjie feels displaced. The harder Benjie tries to push Butler away, though, the more his stepfather demonstrates that he will not abandon him. When Benjie is hanging from the rooftop and Butler risks his own life to save him, Benjie comes to see that he is loved and that he can feel secure in his relationship with Butler. As the novel ends, Butler is waiting outside the rehabilitation clinic for Benjie to show up for a counseling session. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich offers a portrait not just of Benjie Johnson but also of a whole generation of young black boys who could be swallowed up by the ghetto. Childress makes it clear that the responsibility for these young black men rests primarily with older black men. She calls to black men to accept the challenge of “nation time.” Themes and Meanings Benjie Johnson is a haunting character. At the novel’s conclusion, the question of whether he will survive his drug use goes unanswered. Benjie is appealing because he is a typical American boy. In some respects, he resembles Oedipus Rex, whose tragic flaw, his pride, leads to great suffering. Benjie spends countless hours thinking up ways to unseat his stepfather. Each time Butler tries to reach out to Benjie, the young man recoils. Benjie is especially annoyed that Butler wants to help him with his drug problem. When Butler tells Benjie that he can make something of his life if he tries, Benjie ridicules Butler for calling himself a “maintenance man” and reminds him that he is merely a janitor.

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Benjie tells Butler not to offer him advice, because he does not see where opportunity has come for Butler. As Benjie moves from marijuana to heroin, his resentment grows. Benjie becomes more and more alienated from his friends and family. When Butler tries to lend Benjie support, Benjie tells him to stop trying to be a hero. Benjie’s feelings for Butler are compounded by his relationship with his mother. The closer Rose and Butler become, the more Benjie seeks drugs to dull his feelings. He feels as if his mother has abandoned him, too. Childress links Benjie to Oedipus in her characterization of him as an adolescent perhaps too attached to his mother and too resentful of her relationship with his stepfather. He is exceptionally sensitive about his mother’s pain when she and Butler begin to argue over his drug addiction. He is angry that his mother loves Butler, but he aches when he sees her crying after Butler moves out of the house. Benjie’s guilt about his mother is exacerbated when he learns that his mother, in a state of desperation, has gone to a fortune-teller to find a way to end his addiction. While she bathes him in indigo water, Rose cries about Benjie’s problems and about her arguments with Butler. Benjie’s response to his mother’s crying is to wonder why someone thirty-three years old, essentially an old woman, is carrying on about some man. He cannot understand why she is not satisfied with simply being a mother. Later in the novel, however, the young man comes to understand why his mother loves Butler, who is truly a hero. The day Butler risks his life to keep Benjie from falling from the rooftop is the day that Benjie realizes that he does, indeed, have a father. Childress uses a near-death experience to shock Benjie into a new level of growth, one that allows him to accept his mother and stepfather as parents. Childress leaves readers guessing about Benjie’s future. She suggests that the power of love may not be enough to reclaim him from the throes of drug addiction. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich delves into the complexity of parenting in a society where humans dull their senses with drugs instead of finding ways to heal themselves. The novel also examines a host of other issues. Poverty, for example, is a major theme in the novel. Childress portrays life in the ghetto of Harlem, where poor people struggle to survive in a stifling environment. She calls attention to the fact that children suffer the most from poverty and other ills such as drug addiction. Childress’s novel also addresses racism, sexism, and ageism. Butler, in particular, seems to be the spokesperson for Childress’s views on racism. Essentially, Childress links poverty experienced by African Americans to racism. The world of her novel shows the have-nots as people who are doubly victimized because of their race and class. Childress’s Mrs. Ransom Bell embodies the author’s belief that sexism and ageism run as rampant as racism and classism in America. Mrs. Bell, the mother of Rose and grandmother of Benjie, is an old, black, poor female. She recalls her days in the South before she came to the North looking for a better life. She points out that there were only two ways in her day for black women to survive: by doing housework for whites or by getting married. Childress, however, illustrates that the narrow, prescriptive

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roles for black women only empowered many of them to struggle harder to achieve against the odds. Mrs. Bell becomes a shake dancer, earning a living by shivering every part of her body at once or each part separately. She tells that she became a shaker because she promised never to let anyone starve her off the face of the earth. Even after her marriage, Mrs. Bell was not free from hard times. She tells of her husband’s inability to get a job because he did not belong to the all-white bricklayer’s union. Childress depicts a world where black people suffer but remain optimistic and confident in their own will to survive and succeed. Childress’s treatment of the theme of ageism is perhaps one of the most passionate in contemporary literature. She demonstrates clearly that it hurts to be old. Mrs. Bell complains that her family treats her as if she is senile. Even more disrespectful are the young people who mug her and other elderly people in their Harlem neighborhood, robbing them of money, groceries, and dignity. Mrs. Bell sums up the misery of old age when she says that maybe old is more than pain; it is the loneliness that occurs when the mind goes one way and the body goes another. Childress speaks of the strangeness of living in a society that places no value on the wisdom that comes with age. Nowhere is Childress’s point more evident than in her depiction of Benjie, who is an anomaly to his grandmother because he does not see her for the resource that she could be in helping him survive adolescence. Critical Context A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, Childress’s first novel, drew recognition for her in a way that her plays had not. Childress began her writing career in 1950 as a playwright. Her play Trouble in Mind (1955) won an Obie Award. Childress’s Wedding Band (1966) was broadcast nationally on ABC television, and Wine in the Wilderness (1969) was presented on National Educational Television. Her plays are as saturated with alienated, fragmented, poor people as are her novels, which include A Short Walk (1979), Rainbow Jordan (1981), and Those Other People (1990), and her book-length collection of vignettes, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956). A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich gave high visibility to Childress as a skilled author of adolescent fiction. For the first time in her writing career, she was able to reach the masses. Childress, who was born into a poor South Carolina family and reared in Harlem, wrote about poor people who struggle with dignity. Childress’s novel is a milestone, because it treats, sensitively and perceptively, life in the ghetto for African Americans. Unlike many of her contemporaries, moreover, Childress creates a loving, sensitive, generous, black man, Craig Butler, taking responsibility for his family. She portrays African Americans who struggle to survive in a world that often turns a deaf ear to them and captures both the pain and the beauty of being African American.

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Bibliography Bullins, Ed. Review of A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, by Alice Childress. The New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1973, 36-40. Highly laudatory early review from a noted playwright. Bullins praises the book for offering a “suggestion of hope” while still presenting “the unconcealed truth.” Childress, Alice. Interview. In Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, edited by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. Childress comments on her fiction and drama and discusses attempts to ban A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich from some school libraries. Draper, James P., ed. Black Literature Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Most Significant Works of Black Authors over the Past Two Hundred Years. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Contains a thorough overview of Childress’s life and writing. Includes well-chosen excerpts from relevant criticism. Jennings, La Vinia Delois. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne, 1995. Monograph examining Childress’s life, work, and place in African American literary and dramatic history. Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: Pandora, 2002. Chronological study of African American women’s literature; includes a chapter on urban realism featuring Childress alongside five other female African American realist authors of the 1930’s to the 1960’s. Washington, Mary Helen. “Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front.” In Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, edited by Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Traces Childress’s activities as a radical activist and the importance of her organizing for her writing (and vice versa). Elizabeth Brown-Guillory

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HIGH COTTON Author: Darryl Pinckney (1953) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: Early 1960’s through the end of the 1980’s Locale: Indianapolis, Indiana; New York, New York; southern United States; London, England; Paris, France First published: 1992 Principal characters: The narrator, never given a name and determined to escape any pigeonhole, racial or other, into which others might be tempted to place him Grandfather Eustace, a graduate of Brown and Harvard who, after several business failures, becomes a minister of the Congregational church Aunt Clara, the narrator’s mother’s aunt, obsessed with blood mixture Uncle Castor, a jazz musician who has fallen on hard times Jesse, a security guard at Columbia University Jeanette, an alcoholic singer the narrator comes to know in Harlem Djuna Barnes, a writer, an actual historical figure Bargetta, like the narrator a member of the Also Chosen, his friend in college and his guide to Paris The Novel “If you’re chopping in high cotton you’ve got it easier.” The narrator and protagonist of this novel has certainly had it easier than many of the black men of his generation. He is a member of the Also Chosen, a product of that educated black middle class that, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, would yield the “Talented Tenth,” the gifted minority who would lead the black race along the path of progress. The narrator makes no claim to racial leadership. In fact, he rarely makes much of a claim to racial identity. Never an Africanist, he is for much of his life an Anglophile. When he finally flies to England for the first time, following his graduation from a predominantly white high school in a suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana, he has already affected an accent that makes him sound like a cross between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. He is, to be sure, not quite untouched by the momentous historical events of his time. In the early 1960’s, he participates in a civil rights march in Indianapolis. Of course, he is a child, his parents have brought him, and the whole thing reminds him

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of milling around on the lawn after church on Sunday. He is briefly, and ludicrously, involved with the Heirs of Malcolm, a minor, more-righteous-than-thou variation on the Black Panther Party, while a student in a suburban junior high school. Branching out politically while in England, he wanders into a gathering of radicals but discovers that political commitment involves getting up too early in the morning, especially if one happens to be hung over. Returning to the United States, he studies at Columbia University. This brings him into contact with Harlem, but the contact remains very much on his terms. He hangs out one summer at a Harlem bar not on the customary Columbia students’ circuit. When Jeanette, a woman he has come to know, confides her fear as she awaits the result of medical tests, he is not prepared to provide the emotional support she obviously needs. No one, he reflects, has to know that he sets himself apart. He passes through a series of meaningless jobs, the lax standards of performance of which he consistently fails to meet. He sets out to sink into the lower classes, managing to reach the level of handyman. In this capacity, he is for a time employed by Djuna Barnes, whose novel Nightwood (1936) is a minor classic of literary modernism. They part on unfortunate terms when she does not quite succeed in stopping herself from a racist comment. By 1978, the narrator has his first real job, in a publishing house. His tenure is brief. A sojourn in Paris follows. There he enjoys the company of Bargetta, a striking black woman who has been his friend since college. In college, she refused to be answerable to the Soul Sisters of Barnard. She knew very well who she was; she was not going to tell anyone else. In Paris, the narrator sees Bargetta drifting into obsession as her relationship with an untalented white artist falls apart. In these and other episodes, the protagonist’s position is often passive, more observer than agent. He is also primarily an observer in relation to his family, whose most memorable figure is Grandfather Eustace, a university graduate, sometime educator, failed businessman, preacher in the Congregational church, and formidable presence in the life of the narrator. Grandfather seems determined to hold the protagonist to standards the protagonist will not meet, even though Grandfather himself cannot point to a life of impressive achievement. After failing in business, he entered the church for want of somewhere else to go. Even as a preacher, he was never exactly a success. One episode of the novel deals with Grandfather’s dismissal from his church in Louisville, Kentucky. As a teenager, the narrator comes to regard his grandfather as a shattered idol. He recognizes how compromised the old man is in his relations with whites. He sees through Grandfather’s refusal to face the ugliness that is an essential part of American racism. He is even critical of Grandfather’s indifference to the past, especially to the African past, in his exclusive concern for the future advancement of the race. By the end of the novel, the narrator has come to a more precise appreciation of his grandfather, who has died, as a man who knew the real but loved the ideal. When the narrator attends a Black Muslim meeting at the Felt Forum in New York City, he feels himself still to be a detached observer rather than a participant. He has, it

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seems, come to realize that his story, while very much his own, has also been the story of a black man of his generation. His racial identity is not all there is to him, but it is not something he could escape even if he wanted to. What he cannot know, as the novel closes, is whether in setting himself apart for so long he has squandered some opportunity to live authentically the life of a black man in his time. He is sorry, he says, that he went to such lengths not to be of use to himself, solely so that no one would be able to ask anything of him. To have nothing to offer, he now sees, was not the best way to have nothing to lose. The Characters The unnamed narrator is the elusive protagonist of this novel. Although the novel follows him through adolescence and young manhood, readers discover nothing about his sex life, apart from an allusion to someone he is not reconciled to losing and a reference to the nights of the wide bed, now over. Such evasions are characteristic of his presentation of self throughout the novel. If he seems in such respects to evade readers of the novel, it may be that he is following a project of evasion throughout the novel itself. As a young black man, he finds that others, black and white, are always ready to define him, and he is unwilling to live within the limits of other people’s definitions. He sometimes turns others’ compulsion to define to his own interest, as when he slips into a role prescribed by one of society’s scenarios, but he never commits himself to any role he tries on. Ironically, his determination to distance himself from stereotypes, for example by ostentatiously carrying a highbrow journal when he rides the subway, threatens to distance him as well from any possibility of developing an authentic self. His recognition of this irony and his acceptance of what his elusiveness may have cost him indicate the level of maturity he is approaching as the novel comes to an end. What this narrator does best is observe, but his powers of observation are for some time baffled by his grandfather, who is second in importance only to the narrator himself in the design of the novel. The narrator brings to his observation of his grandfather his usual ironic detachment. He sees through the proud old man’s defenses and deceptions. Irony proves inadequate as a key to one who is such an intimate presence in the narrator’s psychological and moral life. The narrator cannot understand his grandfather by distancing himself from the old man, because by so distancing himself he risks missing the essential truth of their closeness. Like the narrator, his grandfather is obsessed with racial scenarios, although, like the narrator, he is unwilling to play a prescribed role in one. He becomes a minister, but he does not offer the “heart religion” of the stereotypical black preacher. His choice of the Congregational church, the tiniest of black denominations in the South, places him out of the mainstream of African American spiritual life but firmly in the tradition of New England rectitude—at least until he is dismissed by his congregation. Like the narrator, Grandfather struggles with the problem of vocation: To what life, if any, is he called? If the answer is that he is called to none, where can he look for meaning? Like the narrator, Grandfather is obsessed with the presentation of self. He lives in terror of being mis-

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taken for a welfare client. As the narrator sets himself apart from Harlem, Grandfather sets himself apart from Dorchester, from Roxbury, and from the Rutherford Street projects. With the cruelty of adolescence, the narrator at one point sees in his grandfather a shattered idol. The truth toward which he moves, and it is a truth that may set him free, is that Grandfather Eustace is more like his spiritual twin. Themes and Meanings The central theme of any bildungsroman is the education and formation of its protagonist. Understanding High Cotton is to a considerable extent a matter of following the process that leads the narrator to the level of self-understanding he has reached by the end of the novel. The issue with which he must contend, in spite of his gift for evasion, is how to deal with the questions of race and status that confront him as one of his generation of the Also Chosen. Spokesmen such as W. E. B. Du Bois have defined the responsibilities that go with the advantages he enjoys, and Grandfather Eustace relentlessly enunciates the theme of advancing the race. The narrator’s instinctive strategy can be described as one of refusal. As a child, he withdraws from his environment into his Anglophile fantasies. In his adolescent flirtation with the militancy represented by the Heirs of Malcolm, he assumes briefly a role that asserts his racial identity, but in a form deviant from the calling of the Talented Tenth. Although he seems for a time to immerse himself in the life, or a corner of the life, of Harlem, spiritually he is there as a visitor: No one has to know that he sets himself apart. His deliberate descent into the lower classes seems to be an unsuccessful attempt to deny the status into which he was born; it is an irony that he finds himself employed as handyman by a writer he might have studied at Columbia. If refusal were all, however, there would be no education. The narrator’s efforts at refusal are all, at another level, forms of engagement. It is finally clear that the spirit of Grandfather Eustace lives on in his grandson, just as it is clear that his grandson is not merely a later version of Grandfather Eustace. In living out his individual story, the narrator has been living out what could only be the story of an African American man of his generation and his background. He has escaped nothing, even if it has often seemed that the defining events of modern African American history have occurred at several removes from his life. His individual story cannot help being part of the story of what it means to be black in the United States. A question that may be implicit here is whether it is equally true that any story of what it means to be black in America must be an individual story. Are there as many ways to be black in America as there are black Americans? Or is this a question that may arise more easily out of the experience of the privileged minority than out of the agony of the inner cities? At any rate, the narrator of High Cotton seems finally to arrive at a black identity in his own way. Emphasizing the education and formation of the protagonist is an appropriate way to examine the meaning of this novel considered as a bildungsroman. The meaning of so rich a novel as this one, however, is scarcely exhausted by a single approach. For some readers, High Cotton works above all as a fascinating portrait gallery, offering in Aunt Clara, Uncle Castor, Jesse, Bargetta, and the others a display of the vitality

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and diversity, if also of the pathos, of African American life and of the life that surrounds it in the second half of the twentieth century. Still other readers respond most intensely to the qualities of style and voice that mark the novel. Each of the major characters has a distinctive voice, and the voice of the narrator gives to the novel as a whole a unifying style. Critical Context Of the black male children born in the United States during the “Negro Nadir,” the period of the ascendancy of Booker T. Washington and his eloquent espousal of vocational training for black people and the strict separation of the races in all things social, how many attended Brown University? How many attended Harvard University? How many were graduated from both? Reflection on these questions makes clear what a tiny minority within the African American community is represented in the family of the narrator of High Cotton. Drawing, it seems, on his own family history, the author is exploring a subject matter that hitherto has been largely neglected in African American literature. He is also clearly distancing himself from the tradition of protest in African American fiction. This is not to say, of course, that Pinckney is in any way an apologist for racism and the injustices generated by racism. For him, art is not propaganda, and the novel is not a weapon. Every black American man must learn what it is to be black, American, and a man, and must study how, indeed whether, these three components of the self can relate to one another. A novel such as High Cotton, apart from the formal satisfactions it may offer, can make some contribution to understanding these questions. Of the African American novelists who have preceded him, Pinckney seems closest in spirit to Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man (1952) also features a slippery and anonymous narrator who undergoes a process of education and formation through a series of episodes that bring him from childhood to manhood. Like Pinckney’s narrator, Ellison’s goes through a number of identity shifts on his way to defining himself. Both novels have marked autobiographical elements, and both make a theme of the riddles of racial identity. Finally, both are characterized by an allusive and virtuosic verbal style, reflecting in each case the author’s delight in the possibilities of language itself and his eagerness to place the African American experience in the widest possible frame of cultural reference. Before writing High Cotton, Pickney had already established himself as an independent and provocative critic of African American literature. His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books and Granta, and his treatment of writers such as Alice Walker, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Countée Cullen has been characterized by his refusal to reiterate orthodox pieties. High Cotton extends, rather than inaugurates, his importance as an African American writer.

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Bibliography Als, Hilton. “Word!” The Nation 254 (May 18, 1992): 667-670. Argues that, by not naming the narrator, Pinckney implicitly asks whether an African American can be different from that monolith, “The Negro.” The apparent independence of the individual episodes is deceptive; the novel moves within a strict narrative line. Bell, Pearl K. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 59 (Spring, 1992): 288-291. Sees Pinckney as struggling to convey the confusion and uncertainty about race and status that someone born into the black elite in the 1950’s had to try to sort out. At the end, the narrator is fiercely honest about the understanding he has reached regarding his blackness and about himself as an individual in relation to his race. Mars-Jones, Adam. “Other People’s Identities.” The Times Literary Supplement, August 14, 1992, 17. Claims the novel’s narrator is one of the least self-revealing in literature. The book shows a pattern of too little experience and too much analysis. Pinckney, or his narrator, seems to suffer from a morbid fear of direct statement. Schultheis, Alexandra W. Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and the Nation as Family. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Uses the metaphor of the nation as a family to forge an interpretive lens that combines postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory. Reads High Cotton and other texts through this lens as sites of reinscription of and resistance to dominant ideologies. White, Edmund. “Black Like Whom?” The New York Times Book Review 97 (February 2, 1992): 3. Sees in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood a model for High Cotton. Unlike Barnes, however, Pinckney has a subject, that of race: He treats his theme with excruciating honesty and a total freedom from restraint. Wood, Michael. “Living Is Easy.” The New York Review of Books 39 (March 26, 1992): 13-14. For Wood, the narrator and Grandfather Eustace are the novel’s dubious but memorable heroes. The narrator does not deny his blackness but cannot accept the drastic simplifications that acknowledgment of blackness seems to imply. One’s color, the novel implies, is not who one is, but it is something one cannot fail to have. W. P. Kenney

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HIS OWN WHERE Author: June Jordan (1936-2002) Type of work: Novella Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Mid-1960’s Locale: Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York First published: 1971 Principal characters: Buddy Rivers, the protagonist, a sixteen-year-old boy living alone Angela Figueroa, Buddy’s companion, the oldest of five children, with three brothers and a sister Mrs. Figueroa, Angela’s mother, a nurse Mr. Figueroa, Angela’s father, a cab driver who is often angry about his life Mr. Rivers, Buddy’s father, an essentially unseen but powerful presence, confined to a hospital bed with serious injuries suffered in a traffic accident Mrs. Rivers, Buddy’s mother, who has left before the narration begins but remains in Buddy’s memory The Novel His Own Where covers several months in the life of Buddy Rivers, a student at Boys High School in Brooklyn who is at a point at which he realizes that he must assume complete responsibility for his decisions and choices. He has been living with his father in a house in the heart of the African American community of BedfordStuyvesant in the borough of Brooklyn, a house that they have been personally renovating so that it reflects their sense of who they are. Buddy’s mother has returned to the Caribbean, discouraged by her inability to order her life as she wishes. Buddy is devastated when his father is seriously injured in a traffic accident shortly before the action of the novel begins. The book is set in the mid-1960’s, a time when ideas of black pride and black power were capturing the minds and spirits of many African Americans. Buddy’s journey toward independent existence is an expression of a communal aspiration and is marked by the same difficulties that most black people had to confront. The narrative action, revealed almost entirely from within Buddy’s mind and expressed as a series of thoughts and images as Buddy realizes them, is framed by a scene in a cemetery, a symbol of loss and isolation but also of spiritual sanctuary. As the book opens and closes, Buddy and Angela, a girl he meets in the hospital where his father is and where her mother works, are separated from the world and together with each other, a nascent “family” creating a space that is theirs alone, their “own

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place for loving” at the beginning of “a new day of the new life” they are attempting to build. The first chapter shifts back slightly in time to show Buddy and Angela on a kind of first date. Buddy leads Angela to his private place of refuge from the din of the streets, a reservoir in a wooded glen in the heart of the city. Buddy tells Angela about his father. There is another shift, back further in time, to describe Buddy meeting Angela’s mother while maintaining his nightly vigil at his father’s bedside. He sees Angela for the first time and is attracted to her “coolness.” He overcomes his shy politeness with strangers to speak for Angela when her mother launches into a tirade against her. As Buddy learns about Angela’s life with her restrictive parents, he begins to dream about giving her the freedom and space she needs to grow and of sharing the house he and his father have “made simple” but functional and comfortable, an extension of their desire for a clean, uncluttered, carefully crafted home. Angela’s parents cannot see Buddy’s positive qualities, regarding him as a threat because of his youth. Her father, in a drunken rage, beats her badly enough so that Buddy must rush her to the emergency room. From there, she is sent to a shelter while the police investigate the situation. Buddy believes that he has been blamed. He transfers his irritation with unfeeling authority to his high school, where he organizes demonstrations against useless exercise in gym class and against the prison-style seating in the cafeteria. His high spirits and spontaneous organizing instincts give the regimented and sullen student body, as well as the cafeteria staff, a moment of joyful release that amuses even the police. The school principal, Mr. Hickey—whose name suggests an Irish American background not exactly suited to his job overseeing an African American student body—suspends Buddy, effectively placing both Buddy and Angela outside the formal social structure of the community. Their exile is effectively irreversible, since Buddy’s parents, who are unavailable, would have to intercede for him at school, and Angela has been moved to a Catholic home for girls north of the city. Buddy recognizes that he must act if Angela and he are to remain in contact. After a practice drive in his father’s car, extending the range of his experience beyond the neighborhood he is familiar with, he drives to the home for girls (actually a kind of prison) and overwhelms the nuns (guards), rescuing Angela from what he regards as a sexless, soulless unnatural state. In high spirits, he proclaims their liberation, announcing, “Jesus was a one hundred percent, hip to the living, female-loving dude.” Angela visits her parents and then joins Buddy in his house. He has carefully prepared the setting, trying to make it as special for her as it is special for him. They spend a tender night together but realize that the nuns, the police, and Angela’s parents will be in pursuit of them. They depart for the retreat/refuge of a park department utility shed near the reservoir. With sparse furnishings they have brought and some supplies they have purchased, they establish a new home, minimal but planned and decorated together. There, they both dream of possibilities. Although aware of the temporary state of their “home,” they are fortified by their mutual resolve, their commitment to each other, and their dream of a life together.

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The Characters June Jordan’s conception of character presentation is the fundamental component in her development of the narrative in His Own Where. To present the mind and heart of protagonist Buddy Rivers as intensely as possible, she has written the book almost entirely from his perspective, using primilary present-tense narration in the form of a stream-of-consciousness projection of his thoughts at the moment that they occur. Jordan alters the conventional rules of syntax to concentrate on the most appropriate word clusters to express Buddy’s emotions and to illustrate the process of his thinking at the moment each thought is formed. The structure of each sentence—or, more appropriately in many cases, each line, since the separate units of meaning often resemble lines in a contemporary poem—is determined by the logic of his understanding of a situation rather than by conventional rules of grammar. For example, in a description of a family dinner, Buddy’s reactions to the surroundings are presented in a catalog of sensory stimuli and his responses to them. The perspiration smell of toilet water. Buddy, helping carve, he feel the swarm of aunts and uncles cousins. Feel them sweaty near, amazing and predictable. And rhinestones and the wellmade gray-plaid special suit. The hugging and the jokes. The sudden ashtrays and his mother in a brandnew apron serving. Serving and remote. Retreating to the kitchen sink excuse from laughter where the family relax drink rum to celebrate another year survival.

Buddy’s point of view is so central to the narration that even when Jordan describes him from the outside, the language she uses is consistent with his speech and thought patterns. Because he is present at almost every instance of the narration, his understanding of who is speaking eliminates the necessity for an authorial intrusion in the form of “He said” or similar attributions. The other characters are seen almost entirely from his perspective, so that each tends to be reduced in complexity to a single, dominant trait. Angela is the only real exception, as she is so significant an element in Buddy’s world. Buddy also recalls his father with a surge of feeling that tends to make him, even in the limited and fragmentary way in which he is seen, a person whose life suggests a depth and resonance beyond the fleeting glimpses of Buddy’s recollections. The contrasts between the couples in the book—Buddy and Angela, Mr. and Mrs. Rivers, and Mr. and Mrs. Figueroa—are designed to emphasize the pain and loss of the older generation, the instinctive apprehension of the younger one, and, most significant, the vitality and promise of the younger one. Buddy’s linguistic facility is an expression of his creative imagination, an exciting capacity for a metaphoric vision that can conceive of the entire city as a hospital with people caring for each other, a dreary building as a warm home, a ragged garden as a private Eden, and a public school as the scene of a rock party. Buddy’s warmth, energy, decency, intelligence, and determination contribute to his attractiveness as a character, while the style of Jordan’s presentation defines the distinctive, individual nature of his personality.

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Themes and Meanings June Jordan argued that Black English is “an endangered species . . . a perishing, irreplaceable system of community intelligence,” and that its extinction means “the extinguishing of much that constitutes our own proud and singular identity.” Survival of what she regards as “our own voice” is threatened when “white standards control our official and popular judgements of verbal proficiency and correct, or incorrect, language skills, including speech.” As a poet whose own voice skillfully blends many of the forms of Black English with a complete control of “white standards” and traditional poetic forms, Jordan demonstrated the aesthetic potential of what Gwendolyn Brooks has called a “blackening” of the language. In His Own Where, Jordan attempted to capture the full range of possibility of Black English in an extended, frequently poetic, narrative written entirely in that form of discourse. Jordan faced the challenge of constructing a narrative that did not require a return to “standard” English to explain phrases and terminology that might be unfamiliar to readers. She also chose to avoid giving the media-fostered impression that Black English is composed primarily of profane street slang. Buddy Rivers is depicted through the emerging pattern of his thoughts, and as the characterization is defined, the logical system of his mind—which is easy to understand and to follow, operating according to familiar suppositions and assumptions—functions as the syntactical frame that provides the structure for his language. Within this structural arrangement, Jordan demonstrates the rich, poetic power of Black English, frequently employing devices with precedents in the traditional literature of Great Britain and the United States. For example, Angela is overwhelmed by her first impression of Buddy’s refuge in the cemetery. Jordan expresses her reaction in a line reminiscent of Dylan Thomas, describing Angela as “blinded by the light wiggles blinding in the silent waterfills her eyes.” When Buddy looks at the feast prepared for a holiday, the string of adjectives he uses recalls many poems of Allen Ginsberg, and the description of Buddy’s mother that builds on the conceit of her “hungering” as an emblem of need is not unlike poetic usages reaching back at least to the seventeenth century. Jordan makes the central focus of the book the enthusiasm and appreciation for life that both Buddy and Angela exhibit. The inadequacy of conventional institutions to appreciate or encourage this valuable trait is demonstrated conclusively by the stilted, cramped letter that Angela writes as she tries to work with the techniques she has been taught in school. It is so clearly unlike her that Buddy thinks she has been brain-damaged by her father’s blows or that it has been censored by the sisters at the shelter. A striking contrast is a poem she writes, one that is an explicit statement of linguistic facility and sensitivity. The dreams Buddy and Angela have near the end of the story, surrealistic projections of desire shaded by fears engendered by their tenuous situation, give full range to their capacity for imaginative thinking. Angela’s dream is a Whitmanesque vision of a pluralistic America in which people share a spirit of communal cooperation and mutual respect. This is the place, the ultimate “where,” of the title His Own Where, now also “her own” space. Buddy’s

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“where” ironically is situated in a cemetery, underlining the disparity between the aspirations of young African Americans and the reality of their lives in the twentieth century. Critical Context His Own Where was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972, but it has not been the subject of much critical attention, partly because of the hybrid nature of its form. Although described as a novel by its publishers, it is closer in length, at ninety pages, to a novella, and it resembles, in its structure, a poetic cycle or a series of poetic tableaus. Some uncertain librarians have placed it in the young adult section, possibly because of its consideration of teenage and premarital pregnancy. Jordan conceived of the book as a tribute to and an evocation of the spirit, resilience, and humanity of its young protagonists. She used all of her skills as a poet and her own experiences in urban settings to render the psychological mood of the generation of African Americans born after World War II. Reliance on the rhythms of popular music and the speech patterns and styles of the black community give the book an impressive authenticity. Although its audience has been somewhat limited, its poetic power remains undiminished, and it has in no way become dated by social changes since its publication. Bibliography Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1985. Discusses Jordan in the context of other contemporary African American female writers. Jordan, June. Civil Wars. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981. Jordan’s first collection of personal and political essays, one of the first such books written by an African American woman in the United States. Kinloch, Valerie. June Jordan: Her Life and Letters. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006. Literary biography, using Jordan’s writing and correspondence alongside interviews with friends, family, and colleagues to present a portrait of the author’s life. Kinloch, Valerie, and Margret Grebowicz, eds. Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004. Collection of scholarly studies of Jordan’s work. The volume is interspersed with poems by Jordan herself. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1984. Conversations and interviews with many of Jordan’s peers and fellow artists. Provides a context for Jordan’s work. Leon Lewis

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HOME TO HARLEM Author: Claude McKay (1889-1948) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Immediately following World War I Locale: Harlem, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania First published: 1928 Principal characters: Jacob (Jake) Brown, a tall, brawny, black Army deserter Ray, a Haitian immigrant to the United States Felice, a high-priced Harlem prostitute Congo Rose, an entertainer at the Congo nightclub Agatha, a beauty-parlor assistant Zeddy Plummer, a compulsive gambler who threatens to report Jake as an Army deserter Billy Biasse, the operator of a longshoremen’s gambling parlor The Novel The title Home to Harlem suggests that the famous New York “Black Belt” is the place to which African Americans return when they want to find true comfort and harmony, when they want to be among their “family” and friends, even though, like most of the characters, they have migrated from elsewhere—from Haiti, from Virginia, from Maryland (as in the cases of Ray, Jake and Zeddy, and Agatha, respectively). The novel is essentially an account of life in Harlem as seen through the experiences of Jake, who (though not a native New Yorker) has come to regard Harlem as his hometown and is constantly comparing it with other places in his experience. Though the brief sojourn of Jake gives a linear development to the plot, Home to Harlem is actually a cyclical novel, for it is apparent that Jake has opened and closed one episode of his life in Petersburg, Virginia, another in Europe (with the Army), and a third in Harlem, before entering on yet another in Chicago with Felice. The story opens with Jake working as a stoker aboard a freighter en route from Cardiff, Wales, to New York. He had joined the Army with patriotic motives, but when he was assigned to carrying building materials for barracks, he became disillusioned, donned civilian clothes, and went to London, where he worked on the docks and lived in the East End. He was horrified by the race riots of 1919, so he shipped out for America, for Harlem, for brown lips “full and pouted for sweet kissing. Brown breasts throbbing with love.” His London mistress was now just “a creature of another race— of another world.” It is this antithesis of the white and black cultures that informs the whole novel: McKay emphasizes the difference between the controlled, puritanical

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behavior of white society and the free, spontaneous, libidinous life of the black ghetto, in which sex, drugs, alcohol, knives, guns, unemployment, and poverty are pervasive. The several chapters are essentially episodes in Jake’s life that describe his contacts with these aspects of Harlem life. Back in Harlem, Jake visits saloons, restaurants, and a cabaret, the Baltimore, where he meets Felice, a young prostitute, and he spends the night with her. As her name suggests, she is the personification of happiness—in herself and for Jake—and is instinctively warm and responsive. Jake also meets Zeddy Plummer, a “stocky, thick-shouldered, flat-footed” former Army buddy who knows that Jake deserted and advises him to be circumspect. Zeddy’s life is saved by Jake during a fight with a loan shark, but Zeddy later threatens to inform the police that Jake is an Army deserter, proving his contention that in Harlem friendships are often temporary and unreliable—a fact that the novel demonstrates amply. Searching for Felice (and, ultimately, for happiness itself), Jake visits the Congo, a popular nightclub, where he meets Congo Rose, who wants him as her “sweetman”— a role he deprecates, since he feels that men should not live off women. Nevertheless, he moves in with her, even though he feels no love, or even deep desire, for her; he agrees “simply because she had asked him when he was in a fever mood for a steady mate.” This sexual imperative is the basis of most of the relationships in Home to Harlem, though occasionally some are dictated by economic necessity. Signs that Rose has other sex partners, as well as her clear masochism, impel Jake to take a job on the Pennsylvania Railroad as a waiter. It is while working for the railroad that Jake meets Ray, a serious-minded Haitian immigrant who aspires to be a writer and who is intent on introducing his colleagues to literature, politics, and black achievements in the world. Ray is himself introduced to the black subculture of flophouses, drugs, and easy sex and becomes a close friend of Jake, through whom he meets Agatha. After a series of adventures in the nightlife of Harlem, Jake meets Felice again, and they decide to leave for Chicago, where, they believe, they will be free of the problems of Harlem and will be able to make a new life. The Characters As in almost all of his fiction, Claude McKay offers in Home to Harlem characters who represent the polarities that he attempted to bridge: the intellectual and the emotional, the potent and the impotent, the hardworking and the indolent, the caring and the carefree, the permanent and the transient. (All these were ultimately fused in Bita Plant, the protagonist of McKay’s 1933 novel Banana Bottom.) Jake, having been separated from black women for two years while in Europe, is keen to resume his physical contact with them upon his return to Harlem; however, he is not one of the unthinking, faceless men of the crowd. Rather, he is a hardworking man with leadership qualities (as demonstrated by his leading a longshoremen’s team), with a keen sense of duty (as he shows by enlisting in the Army), with a quick perception of being deceived (as he shows when he is made to lug lumber instead of

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being given front-line combat duty), with a sense of self-esteem (he is unwilling to be kept as a sweetman), and with a desire to improve his lot within the existing social and political system. That is, he is generally conservative yet ambitious; he is not a reactionary and not a progressive. He bonds well and readily with other African Americans, yet he is not dependent; he listens and learns and has confidence in being able to cope and to endure. In many ways, he is a most admirable character: He is resilient and resourceful, adaptable and yet not flaccid. Ray, on the other hand, is a lonely adventurer, and his principal trait is his inability to come to terms with the existing social situation. He is an intellectual, a reader (while stopping over in Pittsburgh, he buys and reads four regional black newspapers; he quotes William Wordsworth’s sonnet on Toussaint-Louverture verbatim; and he alludes to works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, Henri Barbusse, and other important writers, both contemporary and classic), and a cultured person (he frequently speaks in French). He is proud of the black cultural heritage and is eager to teach his railroad companions about their social and cultural background, although he is often regarded as somewhat eccentric, especially for someone in his line of work. Because Ray enters the novel so late and leaves Harlem (with its possibility of at least reasonable comfort in the company of Agatha, who is roughly his equivalent in respectability and achievement) for continued vagabondage in a lowly occupation, he does not become a character to be admired: His actions are less admirable than his ideas. While he has an interest in befriending other black men, it is a passing interest; and he is unable, it seems, to establish a true interest in women, whether from a physical or an intellectual motivation. In these respects, he is a true foil to Jake. Jake leaves Harlem with a goal (a new life with Felice); Ray leaves Harlem only to escape. Ray is, in fact, little more than a voice for McKay’s social and political opinions and a vehicle for displaying the author’s own intellectual interests. He is pessimistic: “Civilization is rotten,” he says on one occasion; on another, he tells Agatha, “The more I learn, the less I understand and love life.” As most critics have pointed out, Ray is fundamentally an authorial self-portrait. The other characters are representatives of the Harlem underworld. Zeddy Plummer, Jake’s razor-wielding Army buddy, is an informer, a sweetman, a strike-breaker, a gambler, a heavy drinker, and an inept hustler. Billy Biasse (whose name also serves to characterize him) is prejudiced and is interested in small-time racketeering, yet he is also a realist eking out an existence in a rough-and-tumble, dangerous environment. The many minor female characters are generally presented as admirable in the sense that they are hardworking (whether as beauty-parlor technicians or as prostitutes) and are prepared to be the breadwinners for their unemployed sweetmen; even if these women are exploited and preyed upon, they are able to survive rather well. Only Felice, however, seems capable of warm and instinctive responses; the other women have been deprived of true affection and simple love.

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Themes and Meanings Home to Harlem is essentially a story without a plot. There is no story line in the strict sense; Felice is lost for a time and then found by chance. Everything else in the novel is introduced to let readers know what life is like in Harlem, and this the book does with noteworthy verisimilitude. The story is not linear, because life in the Black Belt is not shown to proceed in a logical, cause-and-effect fashion; rather, it is depicted as serendipitous, often unfair, and certainly unpredictable and dangerous. Ray’s participation in the life of Jake is short-lived and fundamentally ineffective. In this, McKay seems to suggest that there is no possibility of amelioration from the outside and from would-be saviors who are transient and not from within the social structure. On the other hand, Jake, who is part of Harlem and who has become accustomed to its harshness and brutality, can see the possibility of finding love, affection, and even self-satisfaction and self-improvement by leaving it all behind. Prostitution, he seems to suggest, is nothing to hold against a woman if society has forced her into it for survival. McKay was a longtime resident of Harlem after he migrated from Jamaica (which he saw as Edenic), and he thought of Harlem as dehumanizing in the extreme. His attitude is reflected in Ray’s comment that if he married Agatha he soon “would become one of the contented hogs in the pigpen of Harlem, getting ready to litter little black piggies.” It is this image that McKay presents throughout the novel: Where people are overcrowded and treated like animals, they become animals. In this respect, Home to Harlem is a noteworthy piece of social realist fiction; it is hard to find a more detailed and reliable eyewitness account of this section of 1920’s New York. It is the pervasive contrast between Jake and Ray that gives Home to Harlem its principal thematic development. Jake is forthright, versatile, optimistic, and persevering; he comes in contact with Ray, who is deliberate, cynical, pessimistic, and unpredictable. Jake is impressed by the intellect and interests of Ray, yet he discerns that a person made “impotent by thought” is irrelevant to the lives of Harlem’s masses. Jake is principled: He will be unemployed rather than be a strikebreaker; he will live with a woman, but he will not be a kept man; he sees that the white world is one of materialism and opportunism, but he does not want to participate in it; he sees that the lives of the black folk are difficult, but he does not succumb to the blandishments of purported prophets and saviors. Nevertheless, he feels that he can survive and perhaps even succeed in life. The dialectic permeates the novel. The two nightclubs that are foregrounded in the novel are likewise of symbolic interest. The Congo is “an amusement place entirely for the unwashed of the Black Belt,” but the Baltimore, with which Jake and Felice identify, is more restrained and even polite—though not refined and sedate. The Congo is for sweetmen, the Baltimore for men. Whenever McKay is writing about the quick action of nightclubs, rent parties, and similar social entertainments, he uses a staccato style—short sentences, short words,

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parallel structures—and a close approximation to the dialects of Harlem. His narrative passages and transitions are more leisurely and even-paced, yet nowhere is the “purple passage” commonplace. Ellipses are frequent, but they serve to suggest tension and the hesitancy that is common in situations involving social inequalities, illegitimate propositions, and indecisiveness. Only occasionally does McKay allow his own political and social views to intrude explicitly. The black-white issue that absorbed him in his journalism is never directly introduced, though it can be discerned by implication. The authorial voice is to be seen in what both Jake and Ray say, for they represent the two sides of McKay himself: They represent the body and the mind. Critical Context The initial reception of Home to Harlem was extraordinary. The novel was praised by white critics and condemned by most black ones. It was the first book by an African American to receive the gold medal of the Institute of Arts and Sciences. It was praised by The New York Times for the verisimilitude of the speech of the characters and by The Bookman for the accurate transcription of Harlem slang and dialect, as well as for its evocation of the terror lingering in the streets and apartments of the Black Belt. The New York Herald-Tribune commended McKay for his stark realism, and for his ability to present sordid truths about black life in New York “with the same simplicity that a child tells his mother” of what has happened. Many readers, especially black ones, thought that McKay was merely trying to present the life of Harlem in a manner that would be of interest to white readers. The high-minded W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading voice of the black intelligentsia at the time (and a cultivated mulatto who spent his summers in Paris) attacked Home to Harlem in The Crisis, his influential magazine. In the June, 1928, issue, Du Bois wrote: “Home to Harlem for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath. . . . It looks as though McKay has set out to cater to that prurient demand on the part of the white folk for a portrayal in Negroes of that licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying.”

Alain Locke, perhaps the principal philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance and a protégé of Du Bois, also attacked McKay. Both Locke and Du Bois, however, were far removed from the life of the multitudes of Harlem and were keen to address themselves to the social advancement of the “Talented Tenth” that occupied much of Du Bois’s thought. Both Du Bois and Locke were eager to publicize the academic and cultural achievements of African Americans and had little in common with the unemployed, the exploited, the tenement dwellers who made up the bulk of the black community in the United States. Later, Richard A. Long questioned the reliability of McKay’s depiction of Harlem life, and Nigel Thomas argued that Home to Harlem should never have been published. Thomas suggested that too much of McKay’s ma-

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terial is presented in summary form, that scenes in the book are often lacking in artistic unity, that there are too many debates between Jake and Ray, and that the tone of the novel is too overwhelmingly brutal. By way of rejoinder to these objections—and specifically to those of Thomas— Hope McKay Virtue, the author’s only child, has made the point that the novel was the first of its kind and that it depicts a time and community with which its detractors have been unfamiliar. Historically, Home to Harlem is important as the first African American novel published by a white publisher in the United States to receive widespread critical attention and recognition. Moreover, the book helped to establish the tradition of social realism long favored by black writers, and it helped to pave the way for the politically significant writers of the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The success of Home to Harlem also allowed McKay to devote his time to writing fiction; without this apprentice piece, his much greater subsequent novel Banana Bottom might never have been written. Bibliography Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Argues that the Harlem School of novelists portrayed the distinctive culture of black America in a distinctive language, which included slang and dialect. Bone argues that Jake represents instinct, while Ray is the inhibited, overcivilized thinker, a figure for McKay himself. Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. This prizewinning study is the authoritative source of information on the writer’s life. Almost every article on McKay is considered, and the documentation is exhaustive. Giles, James R. Claude McKay. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Useful introduction to the life, poetry, fiction, and general prose; stresses McKay’s early life in relation to his later religious, social, and political beliefs. McKay’s Gingertown (1932) receives sustained analysis and evaluation. Gosciak, Josh. The Shadowed Country: Claude McKay and the Romance of the Victorians. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Reads McKay as writing in the context of English—Victorian and early modern—literary traditions, and emphasizes his discomfort with being associated primarily with the African American literary tradition and the Harlem Renaissance. Holcomb, Gary Edward. Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Argues that Home to Harlem is one of McKay’s works of queer black anarchism and Marxist ideology. Looks at the consequences of these ideologies for McKay’s work, for his literary reputation, and for his personal life. Pyne-Timothy, Helen. “Perception of the Black Woman in the Work of Claude McKay.” CLA Journal 19, no. 2 (December, 1975): 152-164. Asserts that the black woman in McKay’s works sustains the needs of the black man and defines the future of the race. These women manage to survive even though many are

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exploited and betrayed by the men they have attempted to help. Notes that McKay openly opposed marriage between black men and white women. Ramchand, Kenneth. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Faber, 1970. Notes that McKay was absorbed by the “Negro Question,” by vagabondage, and by the urge to be a famous writer. Ramchand argues that McKay’s characterization of the “primitive Nego” runs close to the white stereotype, that his polemics tend to weaken the imaginative vitality of his novels, and that his celebration of racial self-esteem acted to diminish the possibility of an integrated society in America. A. L. McLeod

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THE HOMEWOOD TRILOGY Author: John Edgar Wideman (1941) Type of work: Novels/short stories Type of plot: Social realism; psychological realism Time of plot: 1920’s-1980’s, with flashbacks to the nineteenth century Locale: The Homewood section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania First published: 1985: Damballah, 1981; Hiding Place, 1981; Sent for You Yesterday, 1983 Principal characters: John French, the patriarch of the central Homewood family Freeda Hollinger, his wife, the great-granddaughter of a slave, Sybela Owens, who fled north to found this family John, the persona of the author, a black writer Tommy, John’s brother, whose part in an attempted robbery and murder is central to several story lines Bess, the great-great-aunt of Tommy, representing history in the novel as the granddaughter of, and thus the direct link to, Sybela Owens Albert Wilkes, a piano player who disappears for seven years after killing a white policeman Carl French, the son of John French and source of many of the Homewood stories the Wideman persona learns in different works within the trilogy Brother Tate, Carl’s friend, a man who maintains silence for sixteen years Lucy Tate, Carl’s occasional lover for several decades Doot, at times a narrator, the nephew of Carl French who returns to Homewood and tries to understand the complex history of his community The Novels The three volumes of what is known as the Homewood trilogy were originally published as separate Avon paperbacks. The novel Hiding Place and the short-story collection Damballah were published in 1981, and the novel Sent for You Yesterday in 1983. Following the critical success of the three works—Sent for You Yesterday won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction—Avon Books reissued them in a paperback titled The Homewood Trilogy (1985). The University of Pittsburgh Press published a hardback edition of the three works in 1992 as The Homewood Books. In his preface to the 1992 edition, John Edgar Wideman explains the trilogy’s evolution—the three different works were written simultaneously, he says—and its significance:

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The three books offer a continuous investigation, from many angles, not so much of a physical location, Homewood, the actual African-American community in Pittsburgh where I was raised, but of a culture, a way of seeing and being seen. Homewood is an idea, a reflection of how its inhabitants act and think. The books, if successful, should mirror the characters’ inner lives, their sense of themselves as spiritual beings in a world where boundaries are not defined by racial stereotypes or socioeconomic statistics.

Wideman’s goal in the three volumes, he declares in this preface, “is to celebrate and affirm.” Damballah, the volume that opens the trilogy, is a collection of twelve stories that have a unity of place. The setting in nearly all the stories is Homewood, a predominantly black section of Pittsburgh. Wideman begins Damballah with three separate prefaces: an epigraph “to robby,” his brother, that begins “Stories are letters”; a passage called “damballah: good serpent of the sky,” from a book on Haitian voodoo; and “a begat chart” that lays out the family tree underpinning so many of these stories. The family tree begins with a slave, Sybela Owens, who fled north in the nineteenth century, and ends with John, the persona of the author, born in 1941. The three elements of many of Wideman’s stories are in these prefaces: distinctly biographical foundations, roots in African American folklore and myth, and communicative functions as personal “letters” to family, friends, and readers. The title story, “Damballah,” opens the collection. It is a brief narrative of a black slave named Orion who was killed in 1852. The story that closes the collection, “The Beginning of Homewood,” is the history of Sybela Owens. Between these two historical/biographical bookends are ten stories, many of them about Homewood, with recurring characters, incidents, and themes. Wideman’s stories in Damballah weave in and out of a lived neighborhood, and the best stories capture the texture and past of this place. Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday are novels that expand on the characters and situations touched on in the short stories of Damballah. Because the three works were written simultaneously, they can illuminate each other when read in the same way. Hiding Place, for example, extends the situation described in the short story “Tommy” in Damballah. Tommy, whose partner killed someone in a robbery attempt, escapes to the isolation of Bruston Hill, where his great-great-aunt Bess lives. In their thorny interaction of a few days, they help each other, although Tommy is killed by the police in the end. Bess tells the family history that underpins this community, reconnecting Tommy and herself to it: You Lizabeth’s son, Thomas. Your grandmother was my sister’s girl. You wasn’t even close to born when my sister Gert died. Freeda was her oldest. And some say the prettiest in her quiet way. John French your granddaddy. Strutting around in that big brown hat like he owned Homewood. Hmmph. Tell me I don’t know. Know you coming and going.

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Sent for You Yesterday is an even more complex and less linear fiction, a novel containing several stories. “The Return of Albert Wilkes” centers on that character’s reappearance in Homewood seven years after killing a white policeman. Wilkes is gunned down by the police as he sits playing the piano. In “The Courting of Lucy Tate,” the next generation—Carl, Lucy, and Brother Tate—enter the novel as friends, relatives, and lovers. The final section, “Brother,” concerns a recurring dream that Brother Tate has, but it ends with Carl, Lucy, and Doot—the Wideman persona in this work—eating and drinking together and sharing stories. These stories, concerning the death of Brother Tate’s son Junebug in a fire, Brother Tate’s own mysterious death some sixteen years later, his wife’s hospitalization, the legend of Albert Wilkes, and the love affair of Carl and Lucy, are parts of the myth of Homewood that Doot is learning. To describe the plots of the Homewood trilogy is to attempt to make linear what is decidedly recursive fiction. Even the short stories of Damballah carry Wideman’s distinctive fictional style. Much of the narration takes place inside the minds of Wideman’s characters, in their own personal language. Dialogue is equally difficult to follow, for Wideman never uses quotation marks and rarely identifies speakers in any traditional manner. The author cares less for story in the conventional sense than for the effect of character and place on each other. Like James Joyce and William Faulkner before him, Wideman depicts the consciousness of a people, in this case the African American consciousness of the twentieth century. In any one fictional work, he may mix several points of view and several different narrative voices. Similarly, there are often jumps between incidents and ideas that are not easy to follow, a narrative stream of consciousness that readers may find surreal. The difficulties in the Homewood trilogy are their own reward, however, for John Edgar Wideman renders twentieth century African American life in all of its linguistic richness and tragic fullness. The Characters Characters in the Homewood trilogy are three-dimensional with a vengeance, but readers may not always be able to fathom their depth. Because several central characters exist in each of the works, they can be comprehended from multiple perspectives. Wideman’s focus is on the interior life, the thoughts and feelings of characters struggling to get through their lives. Action and incident are incidental to the interior experiences of characters caught up in them. Tommy in Hiding Place, for example, is a man on the run, not only from the police but also from his responsibilities as husband and father. Much of the novel takes place in his head as he struggles with his past and tries to figure out a future. Likewise, Brother Tate in Sent for You Yesterday has been silent since the death of his son Junebug and remains so until his own violent death sixteen years later. He is rendered in multiple viewpoints through thought, memory, and dream. Throughout the trilogy, family members appear and disappear, shedding light on each other and themselves. As Doot muses about himself in Sent for You Yesterday, trying to get a handle on his own family history,

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Carl’s sister Lizabeth’s first child. John French’s first grandson. John French my first daddy because Lizabeth’s husband away in the war. By the time Carl and my father returned from the Pacific, I was big enough to empty the spittoon which sat beside Daddy John French’s chair.

The most problematic character, but the one who is the key to the rest, is the persona of the narrator, the multiple John Edgar Wideman character who appears at various times in the three works as Doot, John, and others. He is the writer brother of Tommy who—like Wideman himself—has fled the violent urban East for the relative security of Wyoming. In the course of the three works, he returns and discovers the values of his family and community. One of the central themes of the Homewood trilogy is this reconciliation of the John/Doot character with his family home. Themes and Meanings There is no simple meaning to the Homewood trilogy. On one hand, these are three separate works that have been put together because they are set in the same locale, but on the other hand each has its own individual subjects. Calling them a trilogy does not cancel out their differences as three individual works of literature. Still, they share certain meanings. On the most obvious level, the three volumes depict the life and history of one black neighborhood, a district that has all the dangers and all the potential strengths of any inner-city neighborhood. It is a geographical area of neighborhood bars, such as the Bucket of Blood and the Velvet Slipper, a neighborhood in which crime is common, drugs are taking over, and characters will be killed. It is an area with a history, but also an inner city where that history is slipping away. As Lucy says at the end of Sent for You Yesterday of characters like Brother Tate and John French, They made Homewood. Walking around, doing the things they had to do. Homewood wasn’t bricks and boards. Homewood was them singing and loving and getting where they needed to get. They made these streets. That’s why Homewood was real once. Cause they were real. . . . Just sad songs left. And whimpering. Nothing left to give the ones we supposed to be saving Homewood for. Nothing but empty hands and sad stories.

These stories obviously represent something vital to Wideman. The neighborhood provides myths and meanings that can be sustaining to his characters. Doot, in Sent for You Yesterday, is—like his persona in the other works—coming back to Homewood and only now beginning to understand its richness and meaning. The community, its history, its music, and its language, provide a cultural safety net for its residents. As Wideman writes in the epigraph to that last novel, Past lives live in us, through us. Each of us harbors the spirits of people who walked the earth before we did, and those spirits depend on us for continuing existence, just as we depend on their presence to live our lives to the fullest.

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The stories encapsulate this history and heritage, and they provide the friendship, family, and community that are the antidotes to the isolation and alienation of so much of twentieth century American urban life. The stories of Mother Bess, of Brother Tate, of Sybela Owens—these are part of a living past that Wideman wants his readers to acknowledge and celebrate. Critical Context The Homewood trilogy occupies several important places in black culture. It reveals a major African American writer wrestling with his own history. The story of the persona in the Homewood books is also the story of John Edgar Wideman, who grew up in this neighborhood but who left in more ways than one. The trilogy reveals his return and his rediscovery of the values and strengths that underpin this community’s past and the past of his family. Like Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), the Homewood books show African American writers a way back to their own heritage. The trilogy also represents the resolution of the conflict between black and white literary values. In Wideman’s first three novels before the Homewood trilogy, his method was clearly postmodernist, and even his style seemed closely modeled on T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. In the Homewood books, readers watch Wideman working out a way to use all that he has learned about aesthetics to render a black community, to forge, as it were, a black postmodernist discourse. He was successful, as the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction for Sent for You Yesterday demonstrates. His works have as much complexity and depth as those of any writer working in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Again and again in these three works, Wideman draws upon black history and folklife to find his motifs and meanings. Even his style, using such forms as call-and-response and the blues, reflects that search. Like Toni Morrison, Ernest J. Gaines, and other contemporary black writers, Wideman has bridged the literary and cultural chasms of the twentieth century and come up with complex and beautiful celebrations of African American life. Bibliography Bennion, John. “The Shape of Memory in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for You Yesterday.” Black American Literature Forum 20 (Spring/Summer, 1986): 143-150. Observes that the nontraditional form of this concluding volume in the Homewood trilogy involves “a structuring of reality which balances past and present, consciousness and subconsciousness, memory and actuality, life and death.” Berben, Jacqueline. “Beyond Discourse: The Unspoken Versus Words in the Fiction of John Edgar Wideman.” Callaloo 8 (Fall, 1985): 525-534. Critique of the complex structure of Hiding Place, a novel that juxtaposes “the harsh world of poverty with the realm of dreams and fantasies.” Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Explains how Wideman has used modernism and postmodernism to bring his characters out of their isola-

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tion and into contact with the needs, concerns, and traditions of black people. The volume includes a 1988 interview with Wideman. _______. “Going Back Home: The Literary Development of John Edgar Wideman.” CLA Journal 28 (March, 1985): 326-343. Finds in the Homewood trilogy the creation of a myth of family history and the history of the community that Coleman believes will sustain both Wideman and his characters. Rodriguez, Denise. “Homewood’s ‘Music of Invisibility’: John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for You Yesterday and the Black Urban Tradition.” In Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman, edited by Bonnie TuSmith and Keith E. Byerman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Reads the final book of the Homewood trilogy for its engagement with traditions shaping African American urban identity. Part of a collection of essays on Wideman’s life and work. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy.” Contemporary Literature 32 (Fall, 1991): 312-345. Detailed analysis of the process by which Wideman’s narrator in the Homewood trilogy achieves a “blues voice” that allows him to depict the complex interconnections among community, family, and the individual, particularly between brothers. David Peck

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THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS Author: Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: The Reconstruction era Locale: North Carolina and South Carolina First published: 1900 Principal characters: Rowena (Rena) Walden, the protagonist, a strikingly beautiful mulatto woman John (Walden) Warrick, Rena’s brother and a friend of her fiancé George Tryon, Rena’s white fiancé Molly Walden, the mother of John and Rena Frank Fowler, a dark-complexioned, honest, loyal man who adores Rena Jeff Wain, a lecherous and deceptive mulatto The Novel The House Behind the Cedars is a story about the efforts of two mulattoes to pass for white in the post-Civil War South. Through John and Rena Walden, Charles Chesnutt depicts both a successful and an unsuccessful attempt at “passing.” John’s adventure into the white world is successful. As a child, the light-skinned John decides that he is more white than black and, therefore, has the right to enjoy all of the privileges of a white man. After serving as an apprentice lawyer in Judge Straight’s office and after reviewing the laws regarding miscegenation in the South, he and Judge Straight decide that South Carolina is the best place in the South for John’s new identity. Thus, a few years before the Civil War, the eighteen-year-old John Walden gets money from his mother, Molly, kisses his little sister Rena goodbye, and leaves his hometown of Patesville, North Carolina, for Clarence, South Carolina. There, he takes the name John Warrick and begins his life as a white man. Because of his fair skin and patrician manners, John encounters little difficulty. He escapes serving in the Confederate Army; instead, he manages the plantation of a wealthy Southerner who has left his wife in order to fight for the Confederacy. When the plantation owner is killed, John marries his widow, who is the descendant of a wealthy South Carolina family. Hence, through his marriage, John is connected with one of the leading families of the region. He continues his upward mobility by becoming a well-established lawyer whose clientele consists of well-to-do whites. After ten years of living in the white world, John returns to Patesville to visit his mother and sister. Observing Rena’s beauty and intelligence, he persuades Molly to let Rena go back to South Carolina with him. He believes that by crossing the color line she, too,

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will enhance her social and economic opportunities. John is convinced that Rena, if she remains in Patesville, “must forever be a nobody.” Throughout the novel, John retains his stature as a well-to-do southern gentleman. Rena’s success at passing, unlike her brother’s, is short-lived. Although her sojourn in the white world is spectacular enough, she is eventually rejected. Having spent a year in a boarding school in Charleston, schooling that prepares her to be “a lady,” Rena is chosen Queen of Love and Beauty at a tournament reenacting chivalric scenes from Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe. This event is the town’s major social function; hence, Rena’s capture of the coveted title is proof of her successful debut in the white world. Her position as a white woman is strengthened by the attention that she receives from George Tryon, a young aristocrat who is chosen as the valiant knight of the tournament. Soon, the two become engaged, and a wedding date is set. Rena’s blissful state changes when she receives a letter from her mother informing her that she is ill. Leaving a note for George but omitting her destination, Rena hastens to her mother’s house in Patesville. Coincidentally, George travels to Patesville and discovers Rena’s true identity. Although the couple does not speak to each other during the discovery, Tryon’s facial expressions reveal his rejection of Rena: “When Rena’s eyes fell upon the young man in the buggy, she saw a face as pale as death, with staring eyes, in which love, which once had reigned there, had now given place to astonishment and horror.” Discerning no “love,” “sorrow,” or “regret” in Tryon’s visage, Rena is totally devastated. She faints in his presence, and afterward she despairs over her lost love. Rena’s reentry into the black world reveals both her commitment to her people and her innocence of the perils confronting her. After recuperating from Tryon’s rejection of her, Rena decides to remain among her own people and close to her mother. Consequently, she refuses her brother’s offer to return to South Carolina or to relocate in the North, where both of them are unknown. Eventually, persuaded by Jeff Wain, a visitor to Patesville, and her mother, Rena accepts a teaching position at a black school in another county. Rena becomes so absorbed in her teaching that she barely notices Jeff Wain’s attempts to seduce her. After several of his unwanted advances, she moves out of Wain’s boardinghouse into the home of a couple living near the school. In the meantime, Tryon learns that Rena’s school is only a short distance from his mother’s home, where he has been residing since the broken engagement. As a result of much inner conflict and self-deliberation, Tryon decides that he loves Rena and determines to see her again, even if it is against her will. Therefore, the climax of the story occurs when both Jeff Wain and George Tryon appear unexpectedly as Rena leaves school. Startled and confused but determined to avoid both men, Rena flees into the nearby woods. Elder Johnson, her landlord, discovers her, but the experience and the exposure to inclement weather damage Rena mentally and physically. One night while the Johnsons are asleep, Rena wanders back into the woods. This time she is discovered by Frank Fowler, who takes her home to her mother. Before her death, Rena calls

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Frank to her bedside and acknowledges his long, faithful friendship. “You loved me best of them all,” she tells him with her last breath. The story ends with George Tryon’s final effort to contact Rena. He decides to hasten to Patesville and declare his love to her. Unfortunately, he arrives just in time to observe a woman tying a funeral ribbon on the door of the house behind the cedars. He learns that the ribbon is for Rena. The Characters Rena Walden is an admirable character, despite her “tragic mulatto” trappings. Instead of bewailing her black blood, as do many biracial heroines in the fiction of the period, Chesnutt’s Rena has no strong desire to pass for white. She is thinking of becoming a teacher when her brother and mother decide that she should cross the color line. A kind heart, common sense, and high morals are Rena’s outstanding assets; her compassion and lack of snobbery are evident throughout the novel. Truly committed to her ailing mother and to her race, Rena demonstrates common sense and moral fortitude by refusing her brother’s offer to “pass” a second time and by rejecting both suitors, the dishonorable Jeff Wain and the well-intentioned George Tryon. Although Rena’s decision never to marry and her commitment to her people are traits common to many “tragic mulatto” characters, Chesnutt lays the groundwork for Rena’s transformation to take place naturally. She grows from a passive victim of other people’s decisions to a thinking woman of remarkable courage. John Walden is a rational and businesslike lawyer who makes no apologies for his decision to pass for white. To him, passing is not a moral issue but a sensible way for mulattoes, “the new people” of the South, to claim their inalienable rights. John functions as Rena’s guide and decisionmaker while she remains in the white world; therefore, he is crucial to the structure of the novel. When Rena decides not to pass, illustrating the ability to think independently, John is no longer essential to the plot; consequently, he remains a static character. On the other hand, George Tryon evolves from a narrow-minded youth hampered by traditional customs to an understanding man shaped by his own conscience. Realizing that he has fallen in love with a black woman, Tryon listens to custom first and his heart later. The narrator emphasizes his willingness to forgive any fault in Rena except her “racial impurity.” George is prepared to forgive illegitimacy or poverty, but he cannot bring himself to marry anyone with one drop of black blood. At first, even the thought of such an act is devastating to the aristocratic George. Nevertheless, the loss of Rena’s companionship causes the young man to review his thinking. He decides that he had been deceived not by Rena but rather by his own blindness. After all, he reasons, she had given him a clue to her racial identity when she compared herself to a black nurse; moreover, John had said that he and Rena were “new people” with no impressive ancestors. With this revelation and the belief that his love for Rena supersedes southern custom, Tryon resolves to seek Rena’s forgiveness. Tryon’s evolution from arrogance to humility represents Chesnutt’s faith in a new South, tolerant of racial differences.

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Other characters show the complicated social structure of the South and provide a backdrop for the action. Molly Walden is the perennial mulatto of the old South who believes in the sanctity of whiteness. Jeff Wain is the typically depraved biracial character depicted in much white plantation fiction; he is a liar, a brute, and a seducer. Although Frank Fowler is a foil to Jeff Wain, he does not rise above the stereotype of the childlike black who is loyal to his mistress. Judge Straight represents the few rational liberals in the white South, and Dr. Green exhibits the arch-conservatism found in the region. His views about African Americans and miscegenation suggest the reasons why passing becomes an attractive alternative to Rena and John. Themes and Meanings Chesnutt’s overriding theme in The House Behind the Cedars is the problem of passing and its effects on both African Americans and whites in the South. Because of the book’s emphasis on color and caste, separation, alienation, and lost and recovered identity are closely connected themes. If John Warrick, who is recognized among whites as a “big bug” and a gentleman, is to keep this identity, he must remain separate from his immediate family and alienated from both African Americans and whites. This point is illustrated by John’s return to Patesville at the beginning of the novel. Observing familiar landmarks in the old town, Warrick also recognizes an old woman who had befriended him during his childhood, but he does not reveal his identity. Warrick behaves similarly when his morning walk leads him to his mother’s house behind the cedars. Even though the object of the trip is to visit his mother, he must resist the temptation to stop there in broad daylight, since he would then be recognized by people who know him. The chapter’s title, “A Stranger from South Carolina,” is ironic, for John is familiar with the town and its residents; the title, however, suggests John’s estrangement from his people. In chapter 7, “Amid New Surroundings,” the narrator not only reveals Rena’s adjustment to her new home but also comments on John’s loneliness in and alienation from the white world: “There was a measure of relief in having about him one who knew his past, and yet whose knowledge, because of their common interest, would not jeopardize his future. For he had always been, in a figurative sense, a naturalized foreigner in the world of wide opportunity.” Chesnutt depicts the world of the mulatto as one filled with opportunity but plagued by secrets and insecurities as well. The theme of alienation is further revealed by both John’s and Rena’s predicament after her racial identity is discovered and her engagement is broken. John knows that “the structure of his own life has been weakened” by his sister’s plight. George’s knowledge of the secret is a threat to John’s career and ambitions. He must forgo his political dreams, because his private life cannot stand scrutiny. John must relegate himself to a life of obscurity and “spiritual estrangement.” Realizing his position, he suggests to Rena a solution that will separate them even further from family, friends, and region: The two will leave the South and begin yet another new life as white people. Rena’s denouncement of this plan for herself brings into sharp focus another moral issue raised by the practice of passing: Should a mulatto forsake dependent par-

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ents, siblings, and children to pursue personal ambitions? Obviously, Chesnutt’s answer to that question is no, for readers are encouraged to applaud Rena’s response of fidelity to her mother. Having learned the hard way about the perils of passing and the sacrifice of one’s true identity, Rena chooses family and race over a fraudulent lifestyle. Chesnutt reinforces his view of the fraudulent aspect of passing by beginning his novel with a discussion of time, which, he says, “touches all things with a destroying hand.” Although this passage applies directly to the physical setting of the novel, it symbolically foreshadows the discovery of Rena’s fake identity. Time related to passing is mentioned, specifically, during and after the ball at which the Queen of Love and Beauty is crowned. Rena is relieved when the ball is over. Believing that her good fortune is only a dream, Rena makes a direct reference to time and circumstance when she declares, after the ball, that “I am Cinderella before the clock struck.” Alluding to Cinderella conjures up all sorts of social imagery. Rena and readers realize that the protagonist is like the queen of the fairy tale who has to return to an abject state at midnight. Rena’s time as queen of the white aristocracy, symbolized by the ball, is limited. Chesnutt thus uses Rena to warn all “passers” that the idea of crossing the color line without consequences is a fairy tale. The author suggests that a passer’s make-believe identity, good only until its hour of discovery, can relegate the victim to alienation and despair. The tragic effect of passing is not confined to Chesnutt’s black characters. George Tryon, too, is a victim of Rena’s plight. He suffers as a result of their broken engagement but, like Rena, emerges from it with a better understanding of himself. Tryon concludes that southern custom demanding separation of the races is “tyranny,” and he decides to forsake the world and marry Rena. Rena dies before George reaches her; nevertheless, he has decided on an admirable course of action that would put him at odds with southern tradition, represented by Dr. Green. Critical Context By 1900, Charles W. Chesnutt had earned a considerable reputation as a writer of short stories with such collections as The Conjure Woman (1899). He hoped that The House Behind the Cedars would raise some commotion on the question of miscegenation, a controversial topic at the turn of the century. In 1890, Chesnutt wrote that he had conversed with a “well-bred gentleman” who “considered a mulatto an insult to nature, a kind of monster that he looked upon with infinite distaste.” Chesnutt feared that this attitude was widespread, and he therefore wished to write realistically about mulattoes and other African Americans, portraying them as humans proud of their race. Chesnutt also criticized the portrayal of African Americans in literature by popular white writers of the day, and The House Behind the Cedars represented an attempt to refute the character types such writers created. Modern critics value The House Behind the Cedars as the first novel to present objectively the pros and cons of passing. Rena and John possess a certain dignity not found in other mulatto characters of nineteenth century fiction; caught between two

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worlds, they react to their social environment sensibly, rather than sentimentally. Both characters are prototypes emulated in later works on the subject of passing. John anticipates the hero of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an ExColoured Man (1912), and Rena resembles the heroine of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). Despite its groundbreaking nature, however, The House Behind the Cedars did not sell well. Chesnutt published two subsequent novels, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905), and both dealt with controversial racerelated topics; when neither proved popular, Chesnutt largely abandoned his literary career. Bibliography Andrews, William L. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. The chapter on The House Behind the Cedars explores the genesis of the novel as it relates to Chesnutt’s literary ambitions. Examines the work according to its features of nineteenth century realism. Chesnutt, Helen K. Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952. A biography of Chesnutt by his daughter. The work contains letters pertaining to The House Behind the Cedars and other works by Chesnutt. Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. Includes a chapter on the figure of the “white negro” in Chesnutt and its relationship to the Gothic tradition in literature. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. The House Behind the Cedars is discussed in chapter 2. The study focuses on Rena and Molly Walden, and it notes that Chesnutt created them to plead the cause of the mulatto. Harris, Trudier. “Chesnutt’s Frank Fowler, A Failure of Purpose?” CLA Journal 23 (March, 1979): 215-228. Examines the role of Frank Fowler in The House Behind the Cedars with respect to Chesnutt’s stated literary goals. Fowler’s failure to rise above the plantation stereotype is attributed to Chesnutt’s own racial prejudice toward dark-skinned African Americans. Keller, Frances Richardson. An American Crusade. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978. The best biography of Chesnutt. Reviews his life and writings in a social context. Render, Sylvia Lyons. Charles W. Chesnutt. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A critical interpretation of Chesnutt’s fiction. Emphasizes Chesnutt’s handling of such elements as irony, imagery, theme, and point of view. Ernestine Pickens

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HOW STELLA GOT HER GROOVE BACK Author: Terry McMillan (1951) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Feminist Time of plot: 1990’s Locale: San Francisco Bay Area, California; Jamaica First published: 1996 Principal characters: Stella Payne, the novel’s protagonist and narrator Angela, Stella’s protective sister, who has opted for predictability Vanessa, Stella’s spendthrift sister, who has a seize-the-day attitude Quincy, Stella’s precocious eleven-year-old son Chantel, Vanessa’s daughter Winston Shakespeare, an innocent Jamaican youth who loves Stella and encourages her artistic development Delilah, Stella’s best friend, who has died of liver cancer Maisha, Stella’s school chum and an art gallery owner, who encourages Stella’s artistic side Walter Payne, Stella’s ex-husband Judas, a Senegalese man from Atlanta, who fails to seduce Stella in Jamaica The Novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back, a stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative of divorcée Stella Payne, examines Stella’s transformation from an uptight, materialistic business cog to a relaxed, self-confident, creative artist who trusts her instincts. Born in a Chicago ghetto, Stella grew up poor, but, pushed by first husband Walter Payne to exploit her University of Chicago M.B.A. degree, she has become a security analyst earning over $250,000 a year. She drives a BMW and a sporty truck, and she designs furniture for her home, a suburban mansion in a very wealthy neighborhood. Materialistic cravings drive Stella to go on endless shopping sprees: She defines herself by the products she uses and the styles and accessories she chooses. Her first impulse is to throw money and goods at those she loves. Stella, long divorced, has lost her “groove,” the fundamental sense of self that gives life rhythm and pleasure. She does not understand her own motives and needs, despite her economic success. While her son Quincy takes a mountain trip with Walter, Stella, on a whim encouraged by her sister, vacations at a Jamaican adult resort, seeking sexual adventure as a change from monotonous routine. At the resort, she suffers midlife insecurities amid younger vacationers, whose activities include participating in risqué pajama parties,

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visiting nude beaches, and playing sexual games. When Winston Shakespeare, an engaging twenty-year-old Jamaican, finds Stella sexually attractive and seems actually to fall in love with her, she questions his motives. The novel, in the romance fantasy tradition, focuses on the courtship and sexual encounters between Stella and Winston, but it also explores her insecurities and his employment obligations. The end of Stella’s vacation seems to mark the end of their romance. When she is fired, however, Stella reexamines her life and goals and finds herself relieved at her newfound freedom. Despite arguments that Winston is far too young to be interested in a forty-twoyear-old mother and might be cleverly exploiting her for financial gain or American citizenship, Stella returns to Jamaica to see him with her son and her niece Chantel in tow. Winston’s love seems genuine, but duty demands he work fourteen hours per day. When Stella returns to the United States, she sends Winston a plane ticket to California. While job obligations delay him a month, Stella struggles with Angela’s warnings (and those of a travel brochure about holiday “flings”), as well as her own concerns about private space. Winston’s visit overcomes Stella’s doubts, as he wins young Quincy’s admiration and actively supports her new ambitions. Stella wants to go into business selling artistic furniture and metallic designer clothing, exploiting her natural creativity and an M.F.A. from the Chicago Art Institute to turn her avocation into her vocation. Winston encourages her, and he assists her efforts by clearing her cluttered workroom and taking her shopping for materials for her new enterprise. Finally, Stella recognizes that her sisters are right about how much Winston has changed her for the better. He has helped her “get her groove back,” so when he asks her to marry him, she agrees, choosing love and artistic creativity over conformity and fear. The Characters As narrator, and a rather egocentric one at that, Stella Payne dominates a story characterized more by her thoughts than by her actions. She is the object of both reader sympathy and authorial irony, an educated woman with two master’s degrees from prestigious institutions who still tries to talk to her sisters and friends as if she were a girl from “the ’hood,” with obscenities, bad grammar, street slang, and parallel lists unconnected by commas. She is a morass of contradictions: wealthy but driven by images of impoverished slaves and ghetto life, successful but taking no pleasure in her success, attractive and athletic but undergoing a midlife crisis she denies. She sympathizes with the Jamaican poor, but her instinct is quickly to bury herself in icy designer water. Her sexual behavior is contradictory as well: She purchases skimpy bikinis and flimsy gowns and wears no panties to attract male attention on her vacation, but she flees the hotel pajama party when the other guests start stripping. All the novel’s other characters are seen through Stella’s eyes. Thus, her son is described as the best son in the world, knowing when to make an entrance or exit and accepting all that she does as the behavior of the best mom in the world. Winston, similarly, is the sexiest man in Jamaica, tall and handsome, with hot lips that burn for

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her; he is only ten years older than her son but has the desires and moves of what Stella calls a “real” man. In contrast, even drugs and alcohol could not make her onceattractive former husband interesting; yet, he is a good father and considerate exhusband. Stella sees her sisters as interfering busybodies, but Angela, heavily pregnant with twins, acts out of fear that Stella will get hurt, while Vanessa acts to help Stella return spice and sparkle to her life. They expect to be telephoned regularly and kept involved in her life, providing an excuse for Stella’s narration to convey more to readers about her inner feelings. The men who seek Stella’s attention (an elderly man issuing invitations to the nude beach, an African man from Senegal, and a sculptor from her own neighborhood) in the main are driven by lust and the desire for self-gratification. Winston is the exception. Despite Stella’s tirades analyzing his potential negatives, he is sweet and gentle, young yet manly, a perfect lover, considerate, and truly caring. Readers never gain access to Winston’s point of view, and the novel conveys little about his background beyond a quick introductory overview of island life, his Kingston studies, his career change from medicine to culinary arts, and his parents’ fears of his manipulation by a rich, foreign woman. Themes and Meanings Readers who mistake Stella’s narration for the novel’s authorial voice might think How Stella Got Her Groove Back is simply derivative of Harlequin romances, aiming to modify the romance formula to fit the fantasies of African American women in their thirties and forties. In fact, however, the novel employs the escapist boy-meetsgirl romance formula only initially, ultimately working against and even mocking that formula. The romance novel cliché of an exotic Caribbean setting with stunning beaches, gorgeous sunsets, and handsome local males is offset by the grim reality of Jamaican life for the impoverished natives, the absence of common amenities anywhere except the resort areas, the heroine’s determination not to marry and definitely not to have more children, her need to fulfill existing familial and personal responsibilities, and the fact that Stella’s final career decision receives more time and space at the end of the novel than does her romantic decision. The contrast between the United States and Jamaica is one of conspicuous consumption versus simplicity and poverty, of overriding competition and drive versus a more balanced attitude toward life and relationships, and of choices based on conformity and fear versus choices based on the heart. The novel’s final argument is that satisfying work makes satisfying relationships possible. Critical Context Initial reviewers dismissed Terry McMillan’s novel, saying it was written quickly to meet a publishing gap for an untapped readership of female African American fans. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called it a “fairy tale,” Kim Hubbard of People Weekly quoted McMillan’s comment that the story grew directly out of personal experience, and John Skow of Time called it “a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy that barely qualifies

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as beach literature” but that filled an industry need for African American pop fiction, regardless of quality. However, Paulette Richards in Terry McMillan argues that the novel is better than it might initially seem, following in the footsteps of Zora Neale Hurston’s work and building on powerful African American archetypes of older women learning from younger men how to regain the joy of living. Furthermore, Michael Korda points out that, in the twentieth century, except for Bill Cosby, Terry McMillan was the only African American author to have two best sellers, one of them this novel. Bibliography Frederick, Rhonda D. “What If You’re an ‘Incredibly Unattractive, Fat, PastrylikeFleshed Man’?: Teaching Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.” College Literature 30 (Summer, 2003): 1-18. Presents a strategy for teaching literary interpretation tested on How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Korda, Michael. “Black Authors Rarely Have Made the Best-Seller List.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 34 (Winter, 2001): 128-130. Examines why most African American authors never make the best-seller list but Bill Cosby and Terry McMillan have. Richards, Paulette. Terry McMillan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Examines McMillan’s life and novels, placing How Stella Got Her Groove Back in the context of African American storytelling, archetypal and universal concerns, and social criticism within a romance frame. “Terry McMillan.” The Writer 114 (August, 2001): 66. McMillan explains why, when, where, and how she writes, what kind of ideas inspire her, and how she handles writer’s block. Gina Macdonald

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HUNTING IN HARLEM Author: Mat Johnson (1970Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Satire Time of plot: Late 1990’s Locale: Harlem, New York First published: 2003

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Principal characters: Cyrus Marks, a short, heavy, African American former parole officer and former congressman who is the founder of Horizon Realty and its Second Chance program, which employs former convicts Lester Baines, an African American former convict and natty dresser who is always accompanied by his mangy mutt Wendell and is the manager of operations for Second Chance Robert M. (Bobby) Finley, a tall, skinny, chocolate-colored aspiring novelist and convicted arsonist from Maryland who is hired by Second Chance Cedric “Snowman” Snowden, a handsome African American from Philadelphia who as a teen was convicted of manslaughter for accidentally killing his father and who is employed by Second Chance Horus Manley, a muscular, thuggish African American from Chicago with a long record of violent criminal behavior who is the third former convict hired by Second Chance Piper Goines, a large, attractive, African American woman who is an investigative reporter for the New Holland Herald The Novel Part thriller, part social commentary, part morality study, Hunting in Harlem is at heart a hard-edged satirical and cautionary tale about the potential dangers of urban renewal and gentrification from an African American perspective. Under the aegis of former congressman and parole officer Cyrus Marks, three former convicts—Bobby, Snowden, and Horus—have been handpicked as interns for Second Chance, a program run by Horizon Realty. This competitive one-year program ostensibly helps rebuild men’s lives as they help restore the architecturally grand brownstones of Harlem, particularly those in the Mount Morris Historic District, to their former glory. The ultimate goal, the men are told, is to create a second cultural renaissance like that experienced in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when African American literature, art, and music flourished in Harlem. Toward this end, the former convicts are instructed to clean

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out vacated premises and assist new buyers in moving into renovated homes. The intern who most impresses management as a potential real estate agent will not only be given his own brownstone but also be chosen to oversee Second Chance in the future. As the three men go about their duties, Snowden notices a sinister aspect of the renaissance plan. A key component of the program is replacing “undesirables”— drug dealers, gang members, welfare recipients, pimps, pedophiles, and other such “lowlifes”—with upscale, professional people. Coincidentally, the lowlifes of Harlem seem to be falling victim to fatal accidents in numbers that defy actuarial tables. With a tragic plunge down a staircase or a hit-and-run accident, the resident of a choice property is suddenly eliminated, and the property becomes available for purchase, remodeling, and resale at enormous profits. Snowden mentions this strange phenomenon to reporter Piper Goines, with whom he has a brief affair after moving her into a new residence, and she writes an article about it for her local rag of a newspaper, though it initially receives little attention. Over time, the three former convicts are called upon to take a more active role in removing specific targets. How each Second Chance recruit reacts to this troubling development forms the core of Hunting in Harlem, giving the novel considerable depth, complexity, and resonance. The Characters While the major and minor characters in Hunting in Harlem are all well drawn, fully rounded, and believable, four in particular stand out. The primary protagonist and narrative filter is Snowden, the son of an abusive and militant civil rights advocate whom he killed in a fit of anger. Now grown into a nonconfrontational Everyman of few strong convictions beyond his own survival, Snowden believes in nothing and has no real moral center, so he is ripe for manipulation. When faced with tough choices, Snowden retreats into drink, sleeps, or takes refuge in a closet, justifying his inactivity while chain-smoking different brands of cigarettes: He has so little backbone, he cannot even decide which brand to favor. Cyrus Marks is emblematic of the fanatic so absorbed by the righteousness of his cause—in this case, the rejuvenation of a neighborhood that once symbolized African American potential—that the concept of ethics has lost all meaning for him. To Marks, the battle for civil rights is over, and, rather than white oppression or racism, the true enemies of contemporary African Americans are themselves. He and his henchman, Lester Baines, will resort to anything in their pursuit of an ideal community. Piper Goines represents feminism, sexuality, and intellectualism. She also provides a rational, skeptical base against which to measure the growing insanity of the Second Chance program. Originally attracted to Snowden, she is later captivated with Bobby and, as a fellow writer, is the only one to read and fully appreciate the budding novelist’s first published book, The Great Work. Perhaps the most interesting character in Hunting in Harlem is Bobby Finley. A sensitive writer who provides a stark contrast to the brutish Horus, Bobby perceives in

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Piper a kindred spirit, and he forgives the reporter for her liaison with Snowden. Though Bobby, too, acquiesces to Marks’s methods of eliminating undesirables from the neighborhood, he alone of all the principals exhibits a conscience. Themes and Meanings Many themes intertwine throughout Hunting in Harlem. One thread is the relative irrelevance of civil rights issues—class warfare seems more meaningful than racism in the contemporary, fragmented, multi-ethnic environment. Another matter is the myriad complications associated with the characters’ attempts at gentrification: Is it worth the effort, or in the context of the original Harlem Renaissance are such schemes cyclical and doomed to eventual failure? A third theme is the examination of individual African Americans not as racial exemplars but as mere humans subject to the typical flaws of the species. However, the most compelling theme concerns the basic nature of evil, especially as demonstrated through dark deeds that are done in the name of the greater good. In order to create a safer, more harmonious, more culturally rich community, Cyrus Marks is willing to use any means necessary to weed out the disruptive elements in Harlem. His initial belief in the project has devolved into fanatacism, and through this fanaticism, Johnson reveals that intangible beliefs can become a powerful driving force in human action. In the face of fanaticism, reason, ethics, and humanity can quickly disappear—and true believers do not always realize they have lost such qualities until it is too late. Critical Context Hunting in Harlem is Mat Johnson’s second novel, following the publication of his well-received debut, Drop, in 2000. The novel was inspired by the author’s sojourn in Harlem while attending the master of fine arts program at Columbia University. While there, Johnson studied the history of Harlem and witnessed at first hand both the deterioration of the area and efforts to revitalize it. The novel has experienced some backlash as a result of its unfavorable depictions of African Americans. A handful of critics have denigrated Hunting in Harlem as updated “ghetto” literature, also known as black pulp fiction. They assert that the novel glorifies urban violence and crime in the tradition of earlier writers such as Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck), and Donald Goines—the character Piper Goines is an homage to that late author. A few New York bookstores have removed Johnson’s work from their shelves, citing its negative influence upon rappers and hip-hop artists, who tend to focus on the brisk action of the stories at the expense of their underlying issues. Most critics, however, have praised Johnson’s keen wit, dark humor, insight into human psychology, and ear for realistic “street” dialogue. The book won the 2004 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction. Undeterred by criticism, Johnson followed the novel with other controversial works dealing with the African American experience, including a historical fiction novel, The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Murder and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-

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Century New York (2007), an issue of the comic book Hellblazer featuring the vengeful black character “Papa Midnite,” and a graphic mystery novel investigating lynching, Incognegro (2008). Recognized as a dynamic, talented, fresh voice in African American literature, Johnson works to influence a new generation of authors: He has taught creative writing at Bard College and at the University of Houston. Bibliography Bush, Vanessa. Review of Hunting in Harlem, by Mat Johnson. Booklist 99, no. 17 (May 1, 2003): 1579. This starred review praises the author for his keen insight into contemporary issues, for his realistic characters and tense plot, and for his sense of humor. Higgins, Nathan Irvin. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. This study of the original Harlem Renaissance provides a cultural backdrop and references many of the early figures mentioned in Johnson’s novel. Kirkus Reviews. Review of Hunting in Harlem, by Mat Johnson. 71, no. 4 (February 15, 2003): 257. Notes the author’s skillful use of Harlem history but criticizes an unfocused narrative and credulity-straining plot line. Scruggs, Charles. Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the African American Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Study of the black urban experience as a driving force behind the modern African American novel. Jack Ewing

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HURRY HOME Author: John Edgar Wideman (1941) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1964-1968 Locale: Chicago, Illinois; Spain; Paris, France; North Africa First published: 1970 Principal characters: Cecil Otis Braithwaite, the second African American to be graduated from the law school he attended Esther Brown, Cecil’s long-suffering wife Charles Webb, an expatriate American whom Cecil meets in Spain Albert, an itinerant expatriate from Southern California who latches onto Cecil at a kiosk in Spain and is searching for Webb’s son Estrella, a whore whom Cecil patronizes after meeting her through Albert Anna, the black woman who is the mother of Webb’s son; she does not appear in the novel except through her letters to Webb Uncle Otis, Cecil’s uncle The Novel The 180 pages of Hurry Home are divided into three sections. The point of view shifts frequently from third to first person, sometimes even taking notebook form. The jumpy narration, lacking transitions to aid readers, is extremely difficult to follow. Despite the clues tucked away casually at points throughout—dates and place names thrown in almost in passing—putting events in a logical and coherent order demands constant attention. This storytelling style, apparently meant to be in a high modernist mode, but an ineffective employment of it, combines with often-shaky prose and a spattering of merely decorative literary allusions to turn the story of the protagonist, Cecil Braithwaite, into a mere puzzle too much of the time. The ordeal of Cecil Braithwaite commands attention, for it presents an intelligent man striving for high achievement and succeeding against considerable odds. Cecil is only the third African American to have been admitted to his law school and is only the second to be graduated. Cecil has to cope with poverty, work, and the distress he suffers from his girlfriend Esther’s stillborn birth of the son they had already named Simon.

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The novel opens on November 14, 1968. November is the month in which bad things always happen to Cecil, the month that he can get through only by going to bed with a bottle. He had been graduated from law school and married Esther in 1964, spent three years abroad, and returned to Esther in 1967. In 1968, he is working as a janitor at the Banbury Street Arms, enduring life as best he can. Why he is not practicing law is not explained, but he apparently is in a state of spiritual sloth. Cecil’s state of mind is dramatized in the opening scene. As he cleans a stairwell, he picks up a tin can, crushes it, and drops it five stories to the basement. The echoing racket rises to the fifth floor, where a woman—red-haired S. Sherman, thirty-two years old—opens her door and asks him why he dropped the can. They have been aware of each other’s presence for a year. The result of their meaningful stares is that Cecil and S. Sherman expend in sex the tensions, hungers, and frustrations of their crippled lives. The scene switches abruptly to the laundry room at the Banbury Street Arms, where Esther toils. She is suffering from a severe headache, and her misery is evoked in two pages of naturalistic description. The brief interlude depicting the hopelessness of Esther’s life fades out as her Aunt Fanny comes to help her, only to be banished by the martyred Esther. Another narrative jump presents Cecil in a meditative mood on the night of both his commencement and, later in the day, his marriage. He arises from bed, dresses, and slips out the door, not to return for three years. Cecil appears next in an unknown city, dozing in its public library over a volume of the works of painter Hieronymus Bosch, in which he has been searching out black figures in the paintings. The remainder of the first section is a series of brief scenes: Cecil recollecting making love to S. Sherman while tormenting himself with thoughts of Simon, Cecil at the barbershop, Cecil in an altercation over paying for a shoe-shine. In all these scenes it is difficult to determine whether the narrative is in present time or flashback, but they apparently all are the recollections of Cecil after his flight from Esther’s bed. The second section opens with Cecil on an ocean liner headed to Europe. The scene shifts abruptly to a conversation Cecil has with Charles Webb in a café near the Alhambra in Spain. A significant topic of their talk is Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Adoration of The Magi, which impressed Cecil strongly. Notes from a visit to The Prado, the museum home to The Adoration, then follow. Vignettes substitute for any sustained narrative throughout the section: Cecil talking with Albert, the expatriate from California who forces himself on Cecil; Cecil with the whore Estrella; Cecil apparently recollecting a café brawl that lands him in a Spanish jail cell “with a bunch of gypsies.” He calls himself “El Moro”—the Moor, or black one—in the episode of the café brawl. This section concludes with a boat crossing to Ceuta, the small portion of Spain situated anomalously across the Strait of Gibraltar in North Africa. It has been a difficult exile for Cecil, but it ends with him throwing away his last half-empty bottle of Felipe Segundo, a Spanish rotgut, in a decisive act that precedes his hurrying home.

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The third section opens not with Cecil but with a ten-page excursus on her life with Cecil written by Esther on April 19, 1967. The passage turns out to be an answered prayer, as Cecil returns to her that same day. The rest of the section, culminating in Cecil’s homecoming, is a series of excerpts from Cecil’s diary, beginning with him in Paris making a vow that “Nothing will take me back to her [Esther’s] world, to the Banbury Arms.” The Characters The only fully developed character is Cecil, and even the picture of him is fragmented. What one can say directly of him is that he is a very intelligent and sensitive young African American who is troubled by his situation in a racist culture and haunted by the death of Simon. What readers do not know is why, four years after receiving his law degree and a year and a half after returning to his wife, Esther, he is still working as a janitor at the Banbury Street Arms when the novel opens. Several things are bothering him on November 14, 1968, when his story begins. November is a month that always brings him bad news: He is now plagued by hemorrhoids; his dead son, Simon, had been conceived in November; and Esther’s Aunt Fanny had come to live with them in November. There is no clue about what has happened to Cecil in the eighteen months since his return from his European exile. Certainly a man with a prestigious law degree would be expected to have a better job than one as janitor at the Banbury Street Arms. There are no clues to this mystery, and readers are left with a sense that Cecil has become an invisible man because of his skin color. When Cecil first appears, he is collecting trash in the Banbury Street Arms: “Five floors, fifteen apartments each left their bundles on the back stairs for Cecil to carry away.” He picks up an empty Carnation evaporated milk can, crushes it in his hand, and drops it five floors to the basement. The racket brings S. Sherman to her doorway, asking “Why did you do it?” What follows between these two people who have been aware of each other for months but have kept each other at length is a sexual coupling that raises several questions. Why does this red-haired, presumably white, woman offer herself spontaneously to this black janitor? Perhaps it is some fundamental hunger for the touch of another human being, a hunger fueled by her recognition in Cecil of a need, a disappointment in life, that matches her own. Their urgent copulation then spells out a kind of ancient rite in which sex becomes the best revenge on life, a direct and intense existential grappling to seek out and engage another self. During their brief respite from life, S. Sherman, thirty-two years old, rebukes Cecil for dropping the can and confesses that she has never done this sort of thing before. A scene ensues that is intended to be profoundly moving but may strike some readers as banal. As Cecil lies in postcoital repose with his head on S. Sherman’s breast, he stares through a triangle created by her uplifted thighs, joined at the knees by the calf of one leg, and imagines a series of common domestic intimacies with Simon at their center.

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While this erotic encounter plays itself out, Esther is coping with a headache and the laundry. This is all that readers are given of Cecil and Esther’s life after his return from Europe. What appears at first to be a scene from the middle of the action meant to introduce characters and setting turns out to be the end of Cecil and Esther’s story. Themes and Meanings It is hard to say what meaning is supposed to be derived from Cecil’s frenetic behavior. His grief over Simon is understandable, but does it, by itself, justify his actions— especially his callous treatment of Esther? It is difficult to admire Cecil in the novel’s introduction to him, as he couples meaninglessly with a stranger while Esther toils in the basement. He emerges no more sympathetically during his extended moratorium from life’s demands. His activities in Europe have no substance. The two expatriates with whom he temporarily takes up bring out nothing in him. Webb, the man looking for his son, becomes a useful guide to the art treasures of The Prado but does not prompt Cecil to assert himself in any way that reveals substantial character traits. Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings open up to Cecil the grim, lurking horror of human existence, but no defiant gesture against evil ensues. Whatever moral credit accrues from a fleeting aesthetic shiver is certainly too slight to build a sympathetic character. The overwhelming impression left by Cecil’s three-year absence is of an abandonment to debauchery. He may be anguishing over Simon or struggling with unresolved identity crises, but his actions suggest little more than self-pity. When he finally decides to return home to Esther, the stage is set for a happy ending, but that ending has already been undercut in the novel’s opening pages in the scene with S. Sherman. Apparently Esther is more of a burden to Cecil than a relief. He had been pleased to have Esther’s Aunt Fanny come to live with them because it gave him an excuse to move out. Cecil’s problem may be that of a man trapped in marriage out of a sense of responsibility, and this marital imprisonment may emblematize his situation as a black man in the United States. Cecil remains a puzzling figure and a difficult man with whom to sympathize, a victim of his own bad faith. The paintings by Bosch and others are useful in characterizing Cecil, but most of the literary allusions are mere decorations. Cecil thinks frequently of Ernest Dowson’s fin de siècle lyric poem in which the poet professes “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.” This may be intended as an apology to Esther for Cecil’s own “madder music” and “stronger wine,” and therefore has some thematic relevance. Several allusions to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and other allusions to Wallace Stevens, John Keats, Othello, Oedipus, and Alexander Pope only create a bogus “literary” style. The punning lines in the fashion of James Joyce (for example, “Pipers piping. Gloom pipes. Down from heel and hills pied piper and plague of worms. Bitches hide wombs. Batches fried grooms.”) will probably annoy readers and certainly contribute little to the history of modernism.

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Critical Context Hurry Home perhaps suffers from being Wideman’s second novel, a step in a writer’s career that often proves difficult. Scholars who have written on Wideman generally find little to say about Hurry Home and, even worse, betray uncertainty even about what is happening in the novel. The reservations about Hurry Home should be seen in the light of two facts. First, it is the work of a young man who has just enjoyed an intensely literary education (Wideman was a Rhodes scholar). Second, its author is still searching for his own voice and subject matter, both of which he found, very successfully, in The Homewood Trilogy (1985). It could be claimed that the techniques of the great modernists in which Wideman is so well versed were not appropriate for him but represented a phase that he had to work through until he had put these literary fathers behind him. That is why Hurry Home is so clearly an apprentice work, with bits and pieces of his education sticking out in the narrative without being assimilated. It is significant that his first novel, A Glance Away (1967), features a central character much like Eliot’s Prufrock, who is alluded to half a dozen times in Hurry Home, but that his third novel, The Lynchers (1973), is told more straightforwardly and with far less literary allusion. From then on, even though he reverts to stream-of-consciousness narrative in Hiding Place (1981), Wideman seems to have arrived at a mature style that serves his thematic purposes well. Bibliography Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Of the seven chapters in this book, one is devoted to Hurry Home and is subtitled “The Black Intellectual Uncertain and Confused.” The black intellectual’s alienation is stressed, and much is made—though not to much point—of the modernist narrative method. An interview recorded in 1988 makes an excellent appendix. _______. “John Edgar Wideman.” In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith. New York: Scribner’s, 1991. A useful survey of Wideman’s career, but only brief comments on Hurry Home. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy.” Contemporary Literature 32 (Fall, 1991): 312-345. No discussion of Hurry Home, but Rushdy’s detailed commentary on Wideman’s themes and subjects is excellent. Perhaps the most perceptive analysis of Wideman’s work. Excellent bibliography. Samuels, Wilfred D. “Going Home: A Conversation with John Edgar Wideman.” Callaloo 6 (February, 1983): 40-59. An interview that elicits some interesting insights from Wideman. Should be read along with Coleman’s interview. _______. “John Edgar Wideman.” In Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955. Vol. 33 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale, 1984. Although published seven years before the similar piece by Coleman listed above, this is still a useful introduction to Wideman’s career prior to the 1980’s.

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TuSmith, Bonnie, and Keith E. Byerman, eds. Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Collection of essays on a wide range of issues in Wideman’s work, including a piece on queer racial identity in Hurry Home and A Glance Away by Keith E. Byerman. Frank Day

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HUSH Author: Jacqueline Woodson (1963) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: Early twenty-first century Locale: Denver, Colorado, and another, unspecified city First published: 2002 Principal characters: Toswiah Green/Evie Thomas, a thirteen-year-old runner who enters the witness protection program with her family Cameron Green/Anna Thomas, Toswiah’s fifteen-year-old sister, a cheerleader who wishes to run away from her family’s turmoil to find peace Jonathan Green/Evan Thomas, Toswiah’s father, a police officer who witnesses an unjust police shooting and chooses to testify against his fellow officers Shirley Green/Mrs. Thomas, Toswiah’s mother, a schoolteacher who becomes a Jehovah’s Witness after the family is relocated The Novel Hush is narrated by Toswiah Green, a thirteen-year-old girl who was recently living happily in Denver, Colorado, with her father, mother, and sister, Cameron. When her police officer father witnessed an unjust shooting, the Green family entered the federal witness protection program. Officer Jonathan Green was on patrol with his two partners when they encountered an African American youth. The other officers, both white men, fired at the boy while he was standing still with his hands raised in surrender. After the boy died, members of the police department instructed Officer Green to lie about what he had seen and testify that the other officers were right to open fire. He faced significant pressure, including nasty phone calls and death threats. One night, someone drove by and fired three bullets into his house. Officer Green knew it was wrong to change his story, and he refused to lie about what he had seen, even though his choice put his family at risk. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) placed the Green family in protective custody. Agents escorted them from their home in the middle of the night, placed them in a windowless van, and drove them to a safe house. For three months, they lived in an undisclosed location, and their whereabouts were unknown even to them. After the trial ended, the Greens moved to a new city and assumed new identities. Toswiah Green became Evie Thomas, and her older sister Cameron became Anna. Evie narrates the novel from her family’s new location in the witness protection program. She never reveals the name of the city to which they have moved. Her pres-

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ent narration is intermixed with flashbacks that dramatize the events leading up to her current situation and vignettes that convey images from her past life. In their new life, everything is different. The “Thomas” family struggles with the abruptness and permanence of the changes they have experienced. Evie’s father can no longer be a police officer, so he sits all day by the window, too sad to look for another job. His depression casts a pall over the family. The FBI stalls processing Mrs. Thomas’s paperwork for teaching, so she is also unable to obtain a new job. Instead, she devotes her energy to her new faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. Anna applies and is accepted to Simon’s Rock, a college that will allow her to start attending before she even graduates from high school. Evie struggles to exist in her new school setting. She tells her classmates that her family is from San Francisco, but she misses her old friends and her grandmother terribly. She tries out for the track team, and she gradually begins making friends. Life at home is not easy. Her father’s depression overcomes him, and one morning in front of his family he tries to take his own life by cutting his wrist with a shard of glass. He is taken to a mental health facility, where he receives counseling and brings himself back together. Evie goes to visit him, striving to find in him the father she once knew. From his gentle reassurance, she gains hope that the worst is over. The family will go on. The Characters Toswiah/Evie is challenged by feelings of loss and grief for her old self and the people and places she loves. At her new school, she meets a girl also named Toswiah and struggles with the pain of seeing herself in a sort of mirror that does not truly reflect her. It takes time for her to understand that her name is not her identity. She gradually learns that the person she is at heart has not been taken from her, that identity can never be taken; it can only be given away by Evie herself. Her journey enables her to reclaim her identity, even though the need to protect the family’s secrets prevents her from telling her whole truth to the world. Evie struggles, too, with the pain of watching the other members of her family deal with the identity issue in their own divergent ways. Her mother turns to a new faith for guidance and comfort. Anna seeks a way out, believing that freedom and distance will help her put herself right. When she gains early acceptance to Simon’s Rock, Anna’s hope returns and she finds peace within their new world. Evie, though, wonders how she will manage her own struggle without her sister. The girls’ father struggles with deep depression after the move. He sits by the window day after day, wrestling with inner demons. Never does the family doubt his decision to testify, but still he struggles. Evie is pained to see her beloved father lost inside himself and unable to be the Daddy she has known. As the surface identity of each family member changes, Evie grieves, until she learns that beneath these surface changes, her family members remain who they have always been.

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Themes and Meanings Hush explores themes of identity: Who does a person become once all the pieces that make up her past have been stripped away, never to be spoken of again? On what foundation can she build a new life, with a new name? As Toswiah becomes Evie, she discovers that a clean slate is also an empty one until she fills it. Despite the presence of a supportive, united family, each member is forced to experience an evolution of identity on her or his own. Hush is also built upon an undercurrent theme of justice and courage, the sense of a moral imperative to speak truth and stand beside the fallen, even when it means sacrificing all stability, history, and meaning in one’s life. Beneath the turmoil of uprooted lives, that piece of the story stands rock solid—the family believes in the choice to testify because it was the right thing to do. Critical Context Reading about the federal witness protection program inspired Jacqueline Woodson to write Hush; she took her fascination with the idea of such an uprooting to the page and created this critically acclaimed novel. Publishers Weekly addressed the book’s powerful theme of identity in a starred review, saying that the story should comfort readers who might be dealing with identity crises of their own, for the novel addresses these challenging issues with hope and optimism. Hush also received a starred review from School Library Journal and was a National Book Award finalist in the young people’s literature category. It was a 2003 American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and received numerous additional honors. Hush takes its place among a growing body of books featuring African American characters in which race exists as an aspect of the characters’ lives but is not of central focus within the plot. Bibliography Bishop, Rudine Simms. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. History and analysis of the evolution of African American writing for children and young adults; begins with the oral culture of slave narratives and moves through the twentieth century to discuss contemporary African American writers for young audiences, including Jacqueline Woodson. Earley, Pete, and Gerald Shur. WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program. New York: Bantam, 2003. Discusses the witness protection program, including firsthand accounts of the psychological effects of identity change on families who enter the program. Woodson, Jacqueline. “Jacqueline Woodson: This Year’s Edwards Award-Winner Takes on Life’s Toughest Challenges—Poverty, Prejudice, Love and Loss.” Interview by Deborah Taylor. School Library Journal, June 1, 2006. Article and interview featuring Jacqueline Woodson upon her receipt of the Margaret A. Edwards Award honoring lifetime achievement in writing literature for young adults. Kekla Magoon

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I GET ON THE BUS Author: Reginald McKnight (1956Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1980’s Locale: Senegal First published: 1990

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Principal characters: Evan Norris, the protagonist and narrator, an alienated African American who has left the United States for two years to teach in Senegal for the Peace Corps Wanda Wright, Evan’s stateside girlfriend, with whom he persistently fails to communicate Aminata Gueye, a student, Evan’s Senegalese girlfriend Africa Mamadou Ford, a native of Oakland, California, and resident of Senegal Lamont Samb, Aminata’s Senegalese fiancé, a former teacher of French in Wales The Novel Building on some of the territory identified by the author in his first work of fiction, the prize-winning collection of stories Moustapha’s Eclipse (1988), and on his experiences as a teacher in West Africa, I Get on the Bus is a compelling meditation on the state of blackness in the closing years of the twentieth century. Given the novel’s background and the innumerable manifestations of Senegalese life, culture, language, and environment that it contains, it is tempting to regard the work in an autobiographical light. Although the work itself does not intentionally dismiss such an approach, its use of a first-person narrator paradoxically makes that approach unsustainable, since by virtue of the terms of reference of his narrative, the protagonist becomes a representative and problematic case and not a distinct, ego-centered “I.” Evan Norris is a condition rather than a person; or rather, because of the type of person he is, he becomes a condition. That condition issues from the involvement of Evan’s perceptive and alert intelligence with a culture that is articulated in unfamiliar and unassimilable terms. Evan’s intelligence, the critical character of which has been honed by his education, speaks essentially of the individual’s autonomy. His decision to leave the United States and a complicated but potentially rewarding situation with his girlfriend, Wanda Wright, confirms his individuality and autonomy. His individuality leads Evan to reject his position with the Peace Corps. It is not clear, however, that he rejects the Peace Corps as such, since to do so would place him in an analytical mode and thus undermine the peculiar forms of impotence that color his Senegal experience.

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By resigning his Peace Corps position, Evan in effect submits to a different order of experience, one that produces visceral rather than cerebral reactions. One of the ways in which he progresses through the world of the novel is by recounting a range of physical symptoms, most revealingly intense pains in his head. This order of experience intensifies some of the feelings of disorientation from which he has suffered, both in the United States and as a teacher supposedly identifying with a benevolent mission. This intensification is expressed in ways over which Evan has no control and which are manipulated, for their own inscrutable purposes, by the various other characters with whom he becomes involved. The forms of expression that make Senegalese experience distinct and impossible for Evan to fathom appeal to areas of himself with which he has little experience. His Senegalese world is one of spirits, some of which are disembodied forces while others are what might be termed reembodied. The reality and force of these unhuman entities, and of the means whereby they attain human agency, is undoubted by all but Evan. Understandably, he is at a loss to know what to make of the jinni and the demms who evidently hold his existence in thrall. It is this condition and his lack of command over it that constitute the disjointed but ultimately overwhelming plot line of I Get on the Bus. The obscure maneuvering of the plot, with a problematic basis in various versions and interpretations of events that predate Evan’s arrival in Senegal and in the painful physical and hallucinatory mental state to which he succumbs while there, seems ultimately to demonstrate how Evan, although ostensibly in a state of transition, is a prisoner with three options. The first and most compelling of these is represented by the joint forces of Aminata Gueye, his Senegalese girlfriend, and Lamont Samb, her fiancé. Were Evan to align himself with their forces, he would of necessity become the enemy of Africa Ford. Africa, however, represents a second condition that Evan might attain, that of an African American who assents to the spiritual and cultural code of the host nation while retaining enough of his Americanness to prosper as a vendor on the streets of Dakar, the Senegalese capital. The third possibility is to resist both of these options, which is what Evan, with his occidental orientation, wonders if he wants to do, particularly since that orientation has to be filtered through his relationship with Wanda Wright. The very assumption that such an orientation is feasible defines Evan’s troubling and troublesome condition. He finds himself prey to the various cultural structures of others, whose invitation to him to identify with those structures is both irresistible and essential to resist. Whether Evan succumbs is moot, since in either case he loses his integrity. The Characters The identification of Evan as a character at a crossroads in his life is emphasized by the fact that he encounters a confluence of external forces. Evan’s passivity, indecisiveness, and erratic judgment are brought home to him by his headaches, paranoid imaginings, and profound sense of cultural dislocation. These sufferings are not merely the fabrications of Evan’s own distressed state of mind. They have their

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sources and their power in the ways in which he is perceived by the characters who come into close contact with him. This quartet of characters consists of two Senegalese, Aminata and Lamont, and two Americans, Africa and Wanda. They establish the terms of the conflict that besets Evan, although to see the novel strictly in terms of the framework they provide is too schematic. The author is sufficiently attentive to the texture of the world he is creating to ensure that the scaffolding of imaginative logic that these four characters support is adequately concealed. In addition, many of the minor characters, both Senegalese and American, make distinctive contributions to the novel’s overall effects, even if the value of this contribution derives from the manner in which it augments the central issue of Evan’s psychological and cultural travail. The combination of Aminata and Lamont represents, at different but interrelated levels, the seductive power of Senegal. Their sleek appearance, the supple manner in which their minds work, and their ability to negotiate Anglophone and Eurocentric mind-sets while retaining an alert sense of their native culture give their presence a potency that Evan finds irresistible. Evan’s attraction to this formidable couple is the very thing that undoes him. Aminata’s curative and restorative powers, together with Evan’s strongly developed sense of her sexuality, provide him with a viable and willed attachment to his foreign surroundings. It is largely as a result of Aminata’s intervention that Evan is motivated not only to feel well but to discover what has been poisoning not only his body but also his consciousness. Assenting to Aminata as a source of revitalization, however, eventually leads Evan to Lamont. The latter embodies at an intellectual level the seductive promise of the rehabilitation that Aminata provided at the physical level. Once the connection with Lamont has been made, Evan finds it impossible not to become preoccupied with, and then implicated in, the plot that seems to be the joint property of Lamont and Aminata. Belief in this plot, and acceptance of its consequences, requires Evan to become a creature of the spirit of Senegal, with its mystery, jeopardy, and overtones of animism. Captured by this spirit, he will implicitly surrender the American component of his Africanness. On the other hand, this American component does not put Evan in his element. His attempt to dissociate himself from his Americanness, signified by flashbacks to some white, aging, hippie friends, is complicated by the fact that he has not been able to find an alternative to it. Wanda, with whom Evan is living and whom he will perhaps marry, is recalled a number of times, indicating that it is with the African ingredients of being an African American that Evan should identify. No model of how this might be accomplished is available, however, and Wanda herself is recollected as an embodiment of pragmatism and a self-improvement ethic that seems to underline the power of the dominant culture in the United States to condition even those who seem to reject it. Wanda argues for her rejection of Americanness along racial lines, a line of argument Evan finds unpersuasive on grounds that it does not describe the terms on which he desires to relate to the world, terms that would articulate the double burden of the African and the American experience.

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Something of what this burden entails and how it might be borne is suggested by Africa Ford. In a number of ways, however, his position is more a complement to Wanda’s than a model for Evan. Africa’s Senegalese experiences may be a prototype for Evan’s, even to his bewitched involvement with the Gueye family. Ford identifies with those experiences, internalizes them, processes them, adopts the terms upon which they have been conceived, and assimilates them into himself, with the aid of a marabou as powerful and as resourceful as Aminata’s father. None of these accomplishments prevents him from selling American T-shirts on the sidewalks of Dakar, as though he still retains not only his native country’s business ethic but also the class level at which he knows that such an ethic can work for him. Evan is not from the lower classes, nor does he think of himself as the “homeboy” that Africa calls him. There is no home for Evan, largely as a result of his declining to be anybody’s boy. Themes and Meanings The reiterated references to loss, disorientation, lack of understanding, selfdeception, disruption, and dislocation that stitch together the comparatively limited narrative material of I Get on the Bus seem to suggest that its themes are plainly stated and their meanings somewhat obvious. As suggested by the novel’s title and the present tense in which the narrative is told, there is no denying the protagonist’s unsettled and transitional state. The novel’s themes are not necessarily so straightforward, and its meanings not quite so forthcoming. Given the character of the novel’s grounding in the cultural anthropology of Senegal, its obvious interest in the status of folk religion as a complex map of the fears, longings, ambitions, and inhibitions to which everybody is susceptible, it is not surprising that readers may share some of Evan Norris’s perceptual uncertainty. At certain points in I Get on the Bus, such as when Evan imagines himself to be a woman, there is no doubt as to the hallucinatory character of the action. For the most part, however, such certainty is difficult to substantiate. Early in the novel, Evan thinks that he kills a crippled beggar. It is not until much later that he learns that his having done so is all but impossible. When, in introducing himself to readers, Evan says that he believes he is coming down with something, something that without a doubt is malaria, since he has not been taking his quinine tablets, there are no grounds to disbelieve him. Visceral as the accounts of his physical condition are, it is also quite possible that these disturbances are the function of his deranged and fretful consciousness. This frame of mind drives his inability either to accept what he is told by those he meets, whether Peace Corps colleagues, Senegalese, or Americans, or to find a reliable form whereby he can convey his own reading of what he encounters. The combination of his excessive visibility, by virtue of which he becomes, like any solitary foreigner, an object of intense scrutiny, and his incapacity to know where he stands in relation to the versions of himself that his foreignness engenders makes it tempting to regard I Get on the Bus as an intriguing revision of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man (1952). The restlessness and dislocation with which Evan becomes synonymous are eco-

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nomically represented by the novel’s title phrase. That phrase also has, like the rest of the work, a marked hallucinatory undertone, the presence of which makes I Get on the Bus resemble the Magical Realism of certain South American writers, notably Gabriel García Márquez, the difference here being that the magic is black. The title phrase, taken in conjunction with the heightened, dread-laden experiences that take place on board the bus, readily conjures up contemporary connotations of taking a trip. Evan’s nonnaturalistic endurance of a mundane social activity establishes the pattern of his reactions to all the social and personal transactions he undertakes. Evan not only is a free man but also acts in the name of that freedom by rejecting his life with Wanda, his Peace Corps position, life in Senegal on the terms proposed by Aminata and Lamont, and life in opposition to them as lived by Africa Ford. The freedom to which Evan is so firmly attached seems no more than an indecisive drift, lacking the counterbalance of any sense of responsibility. Evan thus resembles the existential heroes of postwar novels. Much more to the point, however, is that he identifies his malaise as part of the legacy of the post-civil rights generation of African Americans, a generation whose troubled voice and uncertain condition is clearly recorded in I Get on the Bus. Critical Context Cultural relations between Afro-America and Africa have a long history and have gone through a number of phases, seeking expression in a number of artistic and social forms. Despite the importance and significance of this area of African American culture, the transition from one environment to another and from one form of historical conditioning to another has given the intercontinental connections a limited, tentative, and frequently picturesque character. Not the least interesting aspect of I Get on the Bus is the manner in which it enacts some of the tensions in the connections. It recognizes within the disordered sensibility of Evan Norris the problems that even beginning to account for the consequences of the black diaspora must bring into being. Although the author has good and sufficient personal reasons for setting the novel in Senegal, the choice of country helps to crystallize some of the cultural and historical problems. As one of France’s African possessions, this country has had a cultural development somewhat different from that of the countries that were under British rule. One of the consequences of this difference can be seen in the fact that it was the Senegalese poet and political leader Leopold Senghor who was one of the creators of the term “negritude.” The word is not merely a term coined to emphasize the cultural and humanistic significance of blackness but is rather an ethic of difference. The cultural history of modern Senegal is excluded from I Get on the Bus, which is set in the less inspiring time of Senghor’s successor, David Diop. It is not difficult, however, to see the novel’s protagonist struggling to articulate his difference in an attempt to find a means of reconceptualizing his blackness that will provide him with a measure of self-respect and integrity at the same time. The crisis of consciousness Evan enacts, and which the novel shows penetrating every fiber of his being, is one that arises directly from his citizenship of the United

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States. Evan is a product of the upward social mobility experienced by the expanding African American middle classes after the Civil Rights movement—a movement in which buses were not unknown, as perhaps the author punningly wishes to remind readers—and the institutional advantages, notably educational, this mobility entailed. The result for him is a more than proportionate decline in authenticity. This dimension of I Get on the Bus provides the novel with a greater sense of urgency than the more distant and academic Senegal dimension can provide. Despite its color and interest, Senegal is effectively the medium of loss as Evan experiences it. His life in the United States, however, is the source of that loss. The urgency that arises from this state of affairs is related to the confusing, inconsistent, and typically one-dimensional images of black maleness disseminated in contemporary American culture. In its cogent and subtle representation of this issue, explicitly related to the influence of culture on psyche in the protagonist’s Senegal experiences, I Get on the Bus documents a critical context for the author’s generation. Bibliography Brailsford, Karen. “I Get on the Bus.” The New York Times Book Review, September 16, 1990, 22. A review of the novel, giving a sense of its main features. Giddings, Paula. “Reginald McKnight.” Essence 21 (March, 1991): 40. A profile of the author, providing relevant background information. Larson, Charles R. “Cultures in Collision.” Washington Post Book World, June 17, 1990, 1, 11. Review of I Get on the Bus, focusing on its treatment of the identity theme. McKnight, Reginald. Moustapha’s Eclipse. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988. The author’s prizewinning first book, a collection of stories that provide relevant introductory material to some of the themes, issues, and locales of I Get on the Bus. Ross, Eric S. Culture and Customs of Senegal. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008. Overview of Senegalese culture, including the nation’s literature, art, religion, history, customs, and academic institutions. Provides important background for McNight’s novel. Vaillant, Janet G. Black, French, and African: A Life of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. A biography of the Senegalese poet and politician whose work raised fundamental issues relating to interconnections between race, identity, and literature. I Get on the Bus should be evaluated in the context of these interconnections. Walters, Wendy W. “Writing the Diaspora in Black International Literature ‘with Wider Hope in Some More Benign Fluid . . .’: Diaspora Consciousness and Literary Expression.” In Diasporic Africa: A Reader, edited by Michael A. Gomez. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Helps situate I Get on the Bus in the context of Senegalese and black diasporic writing. George O’Brien

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS Author: Maya Angelou (Marguerite Annie Johnson, 1928) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1931-1945 Locale: Stamps, Arkansas; St. Louis, Missouri; San Francisco, California First published: 1970 Principal personages: Marguerite Johnson (Maya), the author, who becomes “Maya” in early childhood, when her brother calls her “Mya sister” Bailey Johnson, Jr., the author’s brother and beloved companion, one year older than she Annie Henderson, the author’s grandmother, who helps to rear Maya William Johnson, the author’s “Uncle Willie,” Annie Henderson’s older son Bailey Johnson, Sr., the author’s father, Annie Henderson’s younger son Vivian Baxter Johnson, the author’s mother, the daughter of an influential black St. Louis couple Mr. Freeman, the boyfriend of Maya’s mother Bertha Flowers, a black woman who brings Maya out of an emotional trauma by affectionately teaching her the beauty of the poetic use of her voice Form and Content In this first of five volumes of autobiography, Maya Angelou tells the story of her life from age three, when her divorcing parents sent her and her brother to live with their maternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, to age sixteen, when, reunited with her mother in San Francisco, she gave birth to her son. Thus her story begins with semi-orphanhood and ends with motherhood. Interpreting her quest for freedom and self-affirmation as representative of that of many African Americans and American women—especially black American women—she presents incidents from her life that illustrate conditions faced by many persons. In her case, these conditions result, after much struggle, in a moment and message of hope. Angelou begins her narrative with a painful incident that she does not date but that seems appropriate to age six or seven. In a church recitation, Maya cannot bring herself to remember the lines of an Easter poem beyond the first two, which seem to her to express her constant state of temporariness as a displaced orphan and humiliated outcast. Her dream of being beautiful, understood, and accepted—all of which she has imagined in terms of being white—is shattered, and her mind is occupied with thoughts of persecution, impending death, and imperative self-restraint. She feels

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about to burst; her means of release, the socially unacceptable one of urinating in her pants, merely reinforces her predicament. After this introduction, Angelou turns to her arrival in Stamps at age three and proceeds by chronicling her emotional development, with reflection upon the implications of her experiences for understanding racism, sexism, and the general human condition. Her story is divided into four parts that take place in three settings: in Stamps with her grandmother (whom she called “Momma”) and Uncle Willie, from age three through seven; in St. Louis with her mother and her mother’s parents, brothers, and boyfriend, while she was eight; back in Stamps from age nine to thirteen; and in California with her mother, to age sixteen. Her brother was her constant companion during all but the last year. The Johnsons in Stamps and the Baxters in St. Louis were relatively well-off black families, featuring strong and influential women. In Stamps, Momma owned properties that she rented to poor whites and owned and operated the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store, which served as a lay center for the black community. Her family attended the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. The sensitive, curious, and thoughtful Maya was in a position to observe a wide range of black experiences, roles, character types, and patterns of expression. She tells, for example, of bone-weary cotton pickers caught in economic enslavement within the general impoverishment of African Americans; a threat to Uncle Willie’s life by the Ku Klux Klan; the complete segregation in Stamps, with its resulting ignorance and prejudice on the part of both whites and African Americans; a confrontation between Momma and some racially insulting children of her tenants; and the antics of enthused parishioners during services, in contrast to Momma’s more reserved role and behavior. For Maya, all of this was happening in the context of protection by Momma’s loving and authoritative competence and Bailey’s loving companionship. Family life in the store included disciplined study of arithmetic; leisurely reading of novels, poetry, and Shakespeare; and lessons on deportment and avoidance of trouble with whites. Taken suddenly at age eight to live in St. Louis, Maya found her mother, whom she had known only as someone who had abandoned her and who probably was dead, to be a wonder of light-skinned beauty and hurricane energy, in constant social demand. Grandmother Baxter, whose features would not identify her as black, had connections with the St. Louis underworld, with the police, and with local politicians, and her uncles were the terror of the black community. Experiencing neglect by her mother, Maya fought against considering St. Louis her home but nevertheless suffered nightmares (Bailey developed a stutter). She felt sorry for Mr. Freeman, her mother’s boyfriend, who suffered similar neglect; when he began to abuse her sexually, an abuse at first accompanied by gestures of affection, she fantasized that at last she had found her real father. At his trial for rape, she denied any earlier contact; when Freeman, briefly out of jail, was kicked to death, she believed that her lie had caused his death and that her speaking might bring death to others. She stopped talking, except to Bailey, and when the Baxters could no longer tolerate what they took to be her impudence, they sent her and Bailey back to Stamps.

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Back in a community environment of quiet resignation, Maya could relax, but for a year she did not talk, and she suffered from memory loss and dulled senses. Then Momma introduced her to Bertha Flowers, a beautiful and educated black woman who brought Maya out of her cocoon by giving her special attention that focused on love of the human voice in the recitation of literature. By age ten, Maya had gained sufficient self-esteem not only to converse normally but also to work in a white woman’s home and, furthermore, to retaliate when that woman made a racist assault upon her name. Shortly thereafter, she met a girl like herself, with whom she was finally able to be girlish and to share speculations about romance. In Stamps, however, Maya and Bailey were again surrounded by racists. Even their religious experiences, in church, revival tent, and home, focused on the community’s and Momma’s teachings about inequality, persecution, and justice. As the children grew older, they increasingly came under attack. When Maya was graduated from the eighth grade, a white speaker made it clear that the graduates had no realistic intellectual ambitions. When Momma desperately took Maya to a white dentist to whom Momma had given a loan, he viciously turned them away. Then, when fourteen-yearold Bailey was ordered by a white man to help carry the corpse of a lynched man into the jail, Momma decided that the children must rejoin their mother, now living in San Francisco. In California, Maya found her mother just as beautiful and active, but more attentive; the man she had married made a good stepfather, and life in the city, with its fluidity and diversity, was exactly to Maya’s liking. She performed well in school and took evening classes in drama and dance. When, at age fifteen, she went to spend the summer with her father, several experiences quickened the pace of her maturation. With her drunken father asleep in the back seat, she commanded a bucking automobile down a mountain road out of Mexico. Then, after a fight with her father’s girlfriend, Maya ran away and lived for a month in an automobile junkyard with an interracial group of homeless children. By the time she returned to San Francisco, she had been initiated into self-reliance, social self-confidence, and human brotherhood; and there, after a determined campaign, she became the city’s first black female streetcar conductor. Her growing independence and awareness also precipitated a final crisis of her youth. When anxiety about her sexuality led her to experiment, she became pregnant. Angelou ends her story with the birth of her son, Guy, and her discovery, with her mother’s help, that she could trust herself to care for her child. Analysis Angelou’s title alludes to the poem “Sympathy” by the African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, in which a bird hurls itself repeatedly against the bars of its cage even as it sings its longing for freedom. The poem’s title implies that Dunbar himself understands the bird since he too felt trapped by the success of his dialect poems. Angelou’s title, a line repeated in the poem, establishes her tone of compassionate protest and provides her central theme and metaphor. It leads prospective readers to wonder what such an unnatural life as that of an imprisoned bird would be like for

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humans, what forms such a “cage” might take in human life, how such a life could produce song, whether freedom would be possible, and what Angelou can tell, from her experience and sympathetic imagination, about the answers to these questions. Angelou identifies the bars of the “cage” as racism, sexism, and the powerlessness of their victims, whose disabling responses of “fear, guilt, and self-revulsion” merely become additional bars. Whole communities and classes of humans are thus restricted from being fully themselves. Angelou shows how this imprisonment, exactly because it is so unnatural, also naturally produces the response of “song,” in the form of struggle, survival, self-affirmation, and at last freedom. Like Dunbar, Angelou suggests that, by nature, humans are freely expressive. However, she illustrates many restrictions that are placed on expressive selfhood by acts of injustice committed because of self-centeredness and prejudice. When these injustices are experienced during childhood, Angelou explains, persons internalize patterns of understanding that may last for life. For example, because African Americans in Stamps were “people whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction,” they lived lives of resignation (with occasional exceptions such as revival meetings, where the theme would be God’s system of justice). Angelou remarks on her own tendency, even as an adult, to feel rage, paranoia, and dread of futility. Using herself as illustration, Angelou shows how resignation and rage are produced by all-encompassing racist oppression, by omnipresent sexist stereotyping that diminishes the value of any female who does not meet its standards of feminine beauty, and by neglect or violence within families. Describing her sense of temporariness and homelessness (felt even in church, where the congregation often expressed the same feelings about themselves in this world), Angelou tells of having fantasized that her beauty in a white woman’s throwaway dress would evoke understanding and appreciation of her worth, thereby awakening her from her “black ugly dream”; instead, she experienced only frustration, humiliation, and fear that she would die. Her early chapters suggest the fairy tale of the ugly duckling; and although it seems that Maya intuited that she was a swan, she nevertheless suffered a crippling loss of selfesteem. Her frequent suspicions that she might be a changeling made her so emotively vulnerable that, for example, she at first thought that a sexual abuser might be her real father, because his attentions gave her a sense of having a real home. Though her dream became a nightmare, again she was misplaced and displaced, and again she was imprisoned in misunderstanding, fear of death, and guilt-ridden silence. Throughout her childhood, Angelou blamed herself for life’s injustices. If Angelou’s girlhood odyssey through deathlike psychological depths took her into an underworld (sometimes literal as well as figurative) of race, gender, and family disempowerment, it was in these same areas that she was empowered to seek selfaffirmation. The black community of Stamps, although oppressed, gave her a rich culture of language, story, song, religious vision, and faith and brought her together with individuals whose unselfishness and wisdom ensured her survival and growth. Although she was damaged by family experiences of abandonment, neglect, and violence, her family life with Momma, Uncle Willie, and Bailey in Stamps and with her

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mother in San Francisco also provided the love that sustained her quest. Although her mother and grandmothers sometimes acted in ways that reinforced Maya’s confusion and ambivalence toward life, these same women, and Bertha Flowers, provided not only daily support but also the role models of competent and effective womanhood that Angelou celebrated in her book and emulated in her life. Angelou’s effectiveness as a writer is based on her ability to tell stories well. The story of her girlhood is composed of many vignettes; her memory when writing them was so vivid and complete that she fills her reader’s imagination with sensory details, images, character sketches, poignant remarks, revealing conversations, typical gatherings and goings-on, and many people’s points of view (especially Bailey’s, with its special relation to her own). Meanwhile, readers may gather meaning from the double perspective of the child whose immediate survival is at stake and the adult who can interpret and evaluate with compassion, moral outrage, self-criticism, or humor because of her greater safety as well as greater wisdom. Because the adult’s viewpoint dominates, Angelou’s artistry graces her telling with a lyrical style that often transforms her prose into a song—whether sorrow song or praise song—of her faith in the beauty and resilience of the human spirit. Critical Context When at age forty, in response to the urging of literary friends, Maya Angelou wrote the story of her girlhood, she had achieved an international reputation as a singer, dancer, actor, journalist, civil rights activist, and lecturer. Her readers would know that they were reading about a girl who had triumphed, but only Angelou knew that the victory had been won against great odds. As an artist, she knew that she was joining a long line of African American women and men who had written within a major literary tradition of American autobiography, and an even longer line of anonymous black bards and storytellers within the oral tradition, whose poems and stories were becoming known by contemporary readers because of the interest in African American history and culture that had been generated by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. Contemporary black authors also were being widely read as a result of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Arts movement. Writing by African American women was still comparatively neglected, but by 1970, the women’s movement was generating interest in women’s lives and art generally. It is not surprising, then, that I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was quickly discovered by the public and by reviewers. Angelou’s very readable story has continued to move and enlighten readers because she has explained the struggle, offered hope of victory, and affirmed the dignity of individuals who live by a multiplicity of identity roles simultaneously. As the historical conditions of black American life have become generally known, scholars studying Angelou’s autobiography have turned their attention to the psychological dimensions of the life that she has recorded and to the artistic devices by which she presents them. The resulting understanding of her story has revealed an even more

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complex and more deeply human struggle and triumph than was seen by early readers, and this understanding has further enhanced her effectiveness as an artist, educator, and role model. Bibliography Angelou, Maya. “An Interview with Maya Angelou.” The Massachusetts Review 28 (Spring, 87): 286-292. Remarks on the art of autobiography, including the narrative voice, the selectivity of memory, and the effects of the writing process. Arensberg, Liliane K. “Death as Metaphor of Self in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” CLA Journal 20 (1976): 273-291. Asserts that Angelou’s narrative is empowered by tension between quest for a life-affirming identity and obsession with annihilation. In order to adapt to the threat of breakdown of identity, she developed a self-defense of mutability, of which the pervasive metaphor is death. The birth of her son brings Maya’s psychological rebirth into a woman who can trust herself to be life-giving, nourishing, and protecting. Bloom, Harold, ed. Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Collection of essays on thematic, social, and political aspects of Angelou’s autobiography. Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Argues that Angelou uses the child’s vision as a principle of selection and the protecting mother as a primary archetype, bringing to fruition certain themes of black female autobiography: the importance of family and of rearing one’s children, resistance to a hostile environment, sympathy, and self-definition. Kent, George E. “Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Black Autobiographical Tradition.” Kansas Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1975): 72-78. Kent asserts that Angelou presents an emerging self equipped with an imagination that can successfully engage intransigent institutions, perceive both the beauty and absurdity of life in black communities, and create its own coherence. MacKethan, Lucinda H. “Mother Wit: Humor in African-American Women’s Autobiography.” Studies in American Humor 4 (Spring/Summer, 1985): 51-61. Notes that empowerment through the acquisition of language and the development of verbal humor is a unifying theme in Angelou’s autobiography. McMurry, Myra K. “Role-Playing as Art in Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird.” South Atlantic Bulletin 41, no. 2 (1976): 106-111. Angelou shows that individuals and groups can artistically humanize static, institutionalized roles to facilitate interrelationships and affirm self. Tate, Claudia. “Maya Angelou.” In Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Angelou talks of the special need of black American women to make images of themselves and to have positive role models. Also discusses her responsibility as a writer and her writing process. Tom Koontz

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IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO Author: Chester Himes (1909-1984) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: World War II Locale: Southern California First published: 1945 Principal characters: Bob Jones, a young black man struggling with the second-class status afforded him by white America Alice Harrison, Bob’s well-to-do girlfriend Madge Perkins, a middle-aged white woman who becomes a focal point of Bob’s efforts to gain mastery over a hostile white world The Novel If He Hollers Let Him Go is an account of five days and nights in the life of Bob Jones, a bright young black man who has risen to a leadership position in the Atlas Shipyards during the height of World War II. As the book’s narrator, Bob gives an intense account of his anxieties, rage, love, and confusion as he deals with life in a country that proclaims freedom and equality but that practices racial discrimination. The novel opens with Bob having a series of anxiety dreams. Upon waking, he realizes that his position of authority (he is a crew leader at the shipyards) has heightened his sense of insecurity as a black man in a white-dominated world. Struggling to maintain his self-respect and confidence, he leaves for work; once there, he is criticized by his supervisor, Kelly. Madge Perkins, a middle-aged white woman who works at the plant, is assigned to work with Bob, but she refers to him with a racial slur; Bob, in turn, calls her a “slut.” Madge lodges a complaint, and Bob is demoted from his position as crew leader. Bob is later sucker punched by a white worker after he wins big at a lunchtime game of craps. Unconscious, Bob is robbed of his winnings. From this point on, Bob is obsessed with recovering his self-respect. His strategy is basically three-pronged. He plans to crash the color line at a posh restaurant with Alice Harrison, his upper-class, light-skinned black girlfriend. He also plans to avenge himself against his two white antagonists, sexually in the case of Madge, violently in the case of the white worker who punched him. None of these plans works out. Bob takes Alice to the restaurant, but the two of them run short of defiance and are unable to enjoy their meal in the hostile surroundings. Bob is able to threaten the worker who punched him, taking some satisfaction in the fear that comes into the man’s eyes, but he is unable to go through with the killing.

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Finally, he does seduce the powerfully ambivalent Madge; when she cries out for him to rape her, however, he is revulsed, and he leaves without completing the sexual act. On top of all this, Bob’s replacement, a boorish white man, wins over Bob’s crew by getting cushy assignments that Kelly had refused to give to Bob. Rebuffed on every front, Bob agrees to follow Alice’s advice that he make peace with the white world around him, accommodating himself to inequality rather than fighting it. He plans to marry Alice and attend college with the goal of becoming a lawyer. These plans are ruined when Madge falsely accuses Bob of having raped her, and he is beaten by white coworkers. Rape charges against Bob are dropped in return for his enlistment in the Army. Too exhausted to argue his innocence, Bob agrees. The novel ends as he goes off to defend a country in which he no longer believes. The Characters Bob is tormented by severe racial anxiety. When he is awake, he shares with readers his obsession with the treatment he receives at the hands of white people, ranging from his supervisors and policemen to coworkers and waiters. This narration presents a man at war with his society, wavering between uncontrollable fear and boundless rage. Bob is at war with himself as well, not knowing whether he wants to accommodate himself to the injustices of a discriminatory society or exist in a permanent, perhaps self-destructive, state of social rebellion. Bob’s dreams help to convey the psychological depth of his anxiety. In his dreams, he and other African Americans are constantly being tricked and trapped by diabolical whites, sometimes fighting back but never winning, never quite beating the system. These dreams express Bob’s anxiety in a series of haunting images and also indicate its inescapable nature. Even sleep provides no refuge. Together, Bob’s waking narrative and dreams portray a bright, ambitious, and confused young man. Although intelligent and articulate, Bob is ravaged by fear and indecision. He is made cynical by his very idealism and by the failure of his country to live up to its professed ideals. The other characters are conveyed through Bob’s eyes. Alice clearly recognizes Bob’s talent and spirit. Her love seems sincere, but she believes that Bob’s failure to accommodate himself to America’s racist (but improving) social order is a disastrous course. She wants no part of him if he insists on confronting the system. Himes’s portrayal of Alice is evenhanded; one can readily empathize with her. Madge is more difficult to fathom. Unlike Alice, she is inarticulate and vulgar. Himes makes it clear that she has been scarred by unpleasantries in her own life. With regard to Bob, she expresses, through physical gestures and limited dialogue, a combination of revulsion and sexual attraction. She clings to the fiction of her racial superiority, her badge of worth in an otherwise paltry existence. On the other hand, she is drawn to Bob sexually expressly because of his race. This manic reaction to Bob is hinted at, somewhat awkwardly, almost from the start of the novel. Madge comes across as real; she is Bob’s bane not because of diabolical intent but because of a perverse confluence of circumstances that she herself does not understand.

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The book’s minor characters are portrayed rather economically. Kelly, Bob’s supervisor, consistently keeps Bob waiting, once while he finishes telling a racial joke. Herbie Frieberg, Bob’s union shop steward, is an instantly recognizable Jewish character who responds to Bob’s demotion with annoying detachment. Overall, Himes does a good job of making characters recognizable, yet not quite stereotypical. One character, however, remains a mystery: Don, the apparently sympathetic white supervisor who assigns Madge to work with Bob and who later gives him her address. Don’s motivation is never quite made clear. Is he being helpful? Is he being a troublemaker? Bob wonders about these questions but does not come to an answer. Themes and Meanings If He Hollers Let Him Go is rife with themes. Most obvious is the theme of how different the American experience has been for black Americans. One part of Bob’s experience is accepted universally by his fellow black characters: the indignity, essential inequality, and hypocrisy of America’s treatment of black people. No black character in the book argues that America is fair. Even Alice, who disagrees radically with Bob’s solution to the problem, never disputes his diagnosis. Most of the book’s white characters, on the other hand, act to reinforce the subordinate status of black Americans. They are at best oblivious or mildly sympathetic to the plight of black people, at worst very pleased to remind Bob that he is black and therefore of a lower status. The theme of racial disparity is made particularly poignant by two subthemes. First, Bob’s peculiarly intense feelings of anger and despair are linked closely to his belief in the principles of American democracy. Bob supposes that these principles apply to black as well as white Americans; the reality he confronts, however, is that American ideals are expressed in universal terms but are applied selectively—and certainly not to black people, no matter how bright, hardworking, or ambitious they might be. A second subtheme increases the weight of this realization. The United States is at war, the ultimate test of ideals and allegiance. The situation is an uncomfortable one for Bob and many other black Americans, since they are asked to be patriotic in a country that has betrayed their hopes and dreams. The book’s conclusion, with Bob entering the military, thus presents a final, bitter irony. Related to the theme of racial alienation is the novel’s portrayal of class status within black America. The black men and women with whom Bob works come, for the most part, from modest socioeconomic backgrounds. Most are minimally educated. Alice, on the other hand, comes from a privileged background; her father is a doctor who travels in exclusive circles. She also has many white friends. Not unconnected with this is the fact that Alice is light-skinned enough so that she is tempted, at times, to pass for white. Unlike Bob, the black men and women from these two broad classes seem relatively well-adjusted to their situations. They have adopted different, but equally workable, strategies for coping with racial discrimination. Bob, however, is in be-

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tween classes. He identifies with his fellow workers but, unlike them, has elaborate ambitions for a formal education and career in the law. On the other hand, he does not want to escape his roots and make humiliating concessions, as Alice and her family have done. By far the most controversial themes raised by Himes deal with the perverse sexual by-products of American racism. The relationship between Bob and Madge is both frightening and sexually compelling. For Bob, Madge is a symbol of whiteness. To experience her sexually is a way for him to gain equality with or, temporarily, mastery over white America. To Madge, Bob is forbidden fruit, made more attractive by the taboo against interracial sex. Thus, she desires to be “raped” by Bob. In that way, Madge can experience the ecstasy of sex with Bob while maintaining her superior virtue. The result is a sexual dynamic that is psychologically and physically compelling and completely loveless. Certainly, Himes does not suggest that all interracial relationships operate along these lines; he simply makes clear that racial separation and domination have led to some unedifying psychosexual consequences. Finally, there is the theme of latent violence. While Bob suffers rather than perpetrates nearly all the violence in the novel (the one exception occurs when he loses his temper with a minor character who is black), he is constantly fantasizing about evening the score through violence. Though he never quite gives in to the urge, Bob is forced to deal with the fact that white America has truly put murder in his heart. Critical Context If He Hollers Let Him Go was a commercial failure and drew a mixed response from critics. The critical reception was in marked contrast to that given to Richard Wright’s Native Son, published only five years earlier. Though Native Son, too, was by a black author and explored sensitive racial themes, it drew a surprisingly large readership and was widely applauded. The reasons for the tepid response to Himes’s novel are unclear. To be sure, If He Hollers Let Him Go is far from flawless. The book seems contrived at times, and Himes sometimes repeats himself and belabors certain themes. On the other hand, Himes displays extraordinary narrative powers and clearly covers ground that Wright and other black authors had yet to explore. The explanation may lie in a combination of factors. Himes’s novel is more difficult to categorize than Wright’s; while Native Son is unabashedly violent and tragic, If He Hollers Let Him Go manages to end ambiguously—indeed, the ending is anticlimactic. Moreover, Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, is a kind of primitive innocent, highly identifiable by his dialect and lack of sophistication. Bob Jones, on the other hand, is very like the firstperson narrators of contemporary “hardboiled” literature by such white authors as Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. The timing of the novel’s publication may also have worked against Himes. In 1945, Americans were still locked in war with the Axis Powers. It may well be that a message such as Himes’s was less welcome in the midst of a unified effort against racist foes. This may explain why some critics dismissed If He Hollers Let Him Go as a

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mere “protest” novel. (In later paperback printings, the novel was sensationalized for its theme of interracial sex, helping to diminish its literary reputation.) Himes’s next few books also were commercially unsuccessful, though they did win him a critical following. In 1953, Himes emigrated to Europe, where the French reading public was far more appreciative of his work. It was a series of mystery-suspense novels featuring two Harlem police detectives, “Coffin” Ed Smith and “Gravedigger” Jones, that brought Himes to the attention of American readers. Originally written for a French publisher between 1958 and 1971, the Harlem detective novels have gone through several American printings and served as the basis for three films. This success, though, did not spark much interest in Himes’s earlier work. By the 1970’s, If He Hollers Let Him Go was out of print, and it remained so until 1986, when it was reissued along with Lonely Crusade (1947), Himes’s second novel. By that time, Himes’s more serious novels and his extraordinarily rich autobiography had begun to draw renewed attention. The result has been a growing awareness of Himes as an important pioneer, one whose work remains fresh and inspiring. Bibliography Himes, Chester. The Autobiography of Chester Himes. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972, 1976. These candid and detailed volumes are notable for their passionate objectivity. Himes is abundantly self-critical and frank about his shortcomings. The work reveals strong ties between Himes’s life and his books, helping to throw light on various themes as they developed over his career. Hughes, Carl Milton. The Negro Novelist: 1940-1950. 1953. Reprint. New York: Citadel Press, 1990. Explores Himes’s first two novels as part of a general discussion of black novelists from 1940 to 1950; other authors discussed include Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston. Describes the 1940’s as a breakthrough decade for black literature. Ikard, David. Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Includes a chapter presenting a black male feminist critique of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Littlejohn, David. Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Places Himes in the context of other prominent African American authors. Discusses a number of common themes, but also introduces readers to the uniqueness of Himes’s literary voice. Lundquist, James. Chester Himes. New York: Ungar Books, 1976. A standard biography. Covers Himes’s imprisonment for armed robbery, his early writing career and literary influences, his experiences in the defense industry in California during World War II (experiences that inspired If He Hollers Let Him Go), his expatriation to Europe, and his subsequent career. Margolies, Edward. “Race and Sex: The Novels of Chester Himes.” In Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth Century Negro American Authors. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968. Examines the sexual consequences of racial tension as they are played out in Himes’s novels. Sensibly argued and convincing.

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Milliken, Stephen. Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. A thorough, authoritative analysis of Himes’s life and work that does an excellent job of describing the raw power of Himes’s racial commentary. Also shows the continuity between different phases of Himes’s literary career. Yarborough, Richard. “The Quest for the American Dream in Three Afro-American Novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go, The Street, and Invisible Man.” MELUS 8 (Winter, 1981): 33-59. Focuses on the disparity between American ideals and the realistic expectations of African Americans at about the time that Himes wrote If He Hollers Let Him Go. Ira Smolensky

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IF YOU COME SOFTLY Author: Jacqueline Woodson (1963) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: Early twenty-first century Locale: New York and Brooklyn, New York First published: 1998 Principal characters: Elisha (Ellie) Eisen, a Jewish girl who recently transferred from her public high school to Manhattan’s prestigious Percy Academy Jeremiah (Miah) Roselind, a fifteen-year-old Brooklyn native and basketball star, who is the son of a famous filmmaker and a well-known writer and one of the few black students attending Percy Academy Marion Eisen, Ellie’s mother, who twice abandoned the family when Ellie was young only to return weeks later each time Nelia Roselind, Miah’s mother and the author of three successful novels, who is currently separated from Miah’s father Carlton, Miah’s best friend, who attends public high school and is the son of an interracial couple Nelson Roselind, Miah’s father and a famous filmmaker, who lives with his girlfriend across the street from Miah and Nelia Edward Eisen, Ellie’s father, who is a physician and is rarely available to his wife and family The Novel If You Come Softly is a love story. The novel tells of two young people, Miah and Ellie, who fall in love unexpectedly and are preparing themselves to accept all that their love will mean to them and to the world, when their moment of possibility is tragically stolen. Ellie is the novel’s first-person narrator, while Miah’s third-person voice offers his perspective in equal measure. Miah and Ellie meet at Percy Academy, where both are new transfer students. Miah, an African American basketball player from Brooklyn, wears his hair in dreadlocks and is skeptical about attending a school with so many white students. Ellie drops her books in the hallway, and Miah helps her pick them up. Curiosity sparks between them, and they think about each other constantly as they return to their regular lives. Ellie lives with her parents in a wealthy neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She has four much older siblings scattered around the country. When

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Ellie was young, her mother twice abandoned the family, so Ellie still feels anger and mistrust toward her mother, calling her by her first name. After meeting Miah, she wonders what her family will think about her interest in dating an African American student. When she floats the idea in a phone call to her sister, Anne, Anne’s response is not enthusiastic. Ellie becomes nervous about telling her parents about Miah. For the rest of the novel, she struggles with figuring out when and how to tell them. Miah is equally intrigued by Ellie, and he wonders how meeting her will affect his transition into a majority white school. He does not mention her to his parents at first, but he talks about her with his biracial friend, Carlton. At home, Miah struggles to accept his parents’ separation, which is particularly pronounced because they live across the street from each other and Miah shuttles back and forth between the two households. Miah’s father is a famous filmmaker and his mother a successful writer, and Miah keeps these facts secret from Ellie and others at his new school. He wants to appear to be just another “brother” from Brooklyn, but he fears that by this omission he is not being true to himself. Soon enough, Miah and Ellie meet again in class. They are drawn to each other, despite their nervousness about entering into an interracial relationship. They proceed with caution, noticing that their classmates and teachers watch them when they are together, and when they go out together they even get looks from strangers. Miah introduces Ellie to his mother, who welcomes her into their home. Ellie stalls about taking Miah home but ultimately decides she is ready to tell her parents. Ellie tells Miah that she will introduce him the next day, and they part at dusk, each feeling elated about their future. Miah takes his basketball into Central Park, where he runs and dribbles, losing himself in his happy, romantic thoughts. He does not hear the shouts of the police behind him, searching for a black crime suspect. Because he does not hear them, he does not stop running. He is shot and killed. Devastated, Ellie looks for comfort in knowing she had chosen to spend the time she could with Miah. The Characters Miah and Ellie are two young characters who must come to terms with their unexpected love for each other. Most of the novel’s plot conflicts are internal, as the two characters struggle with the perception that the people in their lives will react badly to their relationship. To readers, it is not certain that this negative reaction will ever actually occur, and when Miah and Ellie do give each other a chance, it seems their families and acquaintances are not upset with their choice, but simply curious. The book is about Miah and Ellie getting ready to face the challenges of interracial dating, but their chance is taken away before they ever have to face any significant opposition to their love. At the same time, Miah and Ellie each struggle with family issues. Miah’s parents are separated, which places a great strain upon him. He loves them, but he does not want to be defined by their successes and failures, so it is a difficult choice for him to admit to Ellie who his parents are. Ellie is still coming to terms with her mother’s abandonment, which has left her mistrustful of the people who should always be there

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for her: her parents. She finds in Miah a good confidant for her concerns. The home lives of the two teens inform their relationship experience, as Miah must overcome his fears about being black in a white world and Ellie must overcome her trust issues and her reluctance to be different from her peers by dating an African American. Themes and Meanings The theme at the core of the book is that when love presents itself, one should seize it, for one never knows how long it will last. Any challenges along the way will be best met and overcome together. The thoughtful, nervous way that Ellie and Miah approach each other speaks to the pervasive truth that society often cannot accept difference. By coming together, these characters prove that it is better to take the risk and brave the consequences than to squander a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Woodson chooses the potentially difficult relationship of a black teen and a white teen to address her universal assertion that passion should not be denied out of fear of what could go wrong. Ultimately, Miah’s death brings tragedy to their relationship, but it was not the expected complication. For the people in their lives, Miah and Ellie’s relationship proved less problematic than they had feared. Looking back, a reader can see that Ellie and Miah would have been wrong to stay apart, for it was the only chance they were ever going to have to be together. Miah and Ellie’s uncertainty during the course of the story emphasizes that relationships may not be easy or straightforward but that confronting the challenges they pose is a brave and fulfilling approach to life. When tragedy falls, it leaves in its wake beautiful memories rather than haunting regrets. The novel’s title refers to an Audre Lorde poem, “If You Come Softly,” which Woodson quotes in the text. The gently lyrical poem captures the mood of the novel perfectly, telling of quiet togetherness and deep sorrow. Critical Context If You Come Softly was inspired by Lorde’s poem. Woodson handles the familiar subject matter of race relations by exploring a unique situation and delving deeply into the minds and hearts of her main characters. Woodson describes the book as a modern Romeo and Juliet story, in which the lovers’ enemies are not within their families but within society at large: racial profiling, police brutality, ignorance, and racism. If You Come Softly received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. The book continues to be embraced by teachers and librarians as a good selection for young readers, as evidenced by its classification as an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and a Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book. Bibliography Bishop, Rudine Simms. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. History and analysis of the evolution of African American writing for children and young adults; begins with the oral culture of slave narratives and moves through the twen-

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tieth century to ultimately discuss contemporary African American writers for young audiences, including Jacqueline Woodson. Lorde, Audre. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. This complete collection of Audre Lorde’s poetry, including rare early works, contains the full text of the poem “If You Come Softly,” which inspired Woodson’s novel. Sullivan, Ed. “Race Matters.” School Library Journal, June 1, 2002. Discusses young adult books that deal with race issues, including interracial dating; covers If You Come Softly. Woodson, Jacqueline. “Jacqueline Woodson: This Year’s Edwards Award-Winner Takes on Life’s Toughest Challenges—Poverty, Prejudice, Love and Loss.” Interview by Deborah Taylor. School Library Journal, June 1, 2006. Article and interview featuring Jacqueline Woodson upon her receipt of the Margaret A. Edwards Award honoring lifetime achievement in writing literature for young adults. Includes discussion of reader reaction to If You Come Softly. Kekla Magoon

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IN THE BLOOD Author: Suzan-Lori Parks (1963) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Experimental; tragedy Time of plot: “Now” Locale: “Here” First produced: 1999, at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, New York, New York First published: 2000 Principal characters: Hester, La Negrita, the play’s protagonist Chilli, Hester’s soul mate Jabber, Hester’s oldest son Reverend D., a corrupt preacher Baby, Hester’s youngest son The Welfare Lady, a civil servant Bully, Hester’s oldest daughter The Doctor, a doctor Trouble, Hester’s middle son Amiga Gringa, Hester’s friend Beauty, Hester’s youngest daughter The Play In the Blood comprises nine scenes and a prologue, with an intermission between scenes 4 and 5. In the prologue, introducing the convention of the cast as Greek chorus, the group accosts the audience with accusations and epithets hurled at an unseen woman, as sounds of a difficult birthing are heard. As the chorus parts “like the Red Sea would,” Hester, La Negrita, is discovered, holding a newborn baby that she raises toward the sky, proclaiming it her treasure, as the group spits in contempt. In the prologue, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks sets the tone for the play that is to follow, a noholds-barred assault on the political, medical, capitalistic, and religious systems that define the American ideal. Scene 1, “Under the Bridge,” clarifies the nature of the world in which Hester and her five children live. It is two years after the prologue, and her children, Jabber, Bully, Trouble, Beauty, and Baby, clamor for her time and attention. She feeds her “treasures” soup, eating none herself. The word “Slut” has been scrawled by unknown vandals on the wall of a bridge the family calls home. Jabber, the one character who knows how to read, refuses to pronounce the word, choosing instead to erase it, making room on the wall for Hester to practice drawing the only letter she knows, an “A.” After eating and readying for bed, Hester tells the children a fairy tale of a prin-

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cess with five lovers, each of whom gives her a treasure, her five joys. In scene 2, “Street Practice”; scene 3, “The Reverend on his Soapbox”; and scene 4, “With the Welfare,” Hester’s bleak life is firmly defined when she first encounters the Doctor, an itinerant quack who carries his supplies on his back and his calling on a sandwich board. His solution to her dilemma, including her hunger-induced stomach pains, is to remove her reproductive organs, or, in his words, to “spay” her. Hester seeks out Reverend D., a preacher who uses whatever he can lay his hands on to enhance his personal well-being. Through five “confessionals,” moments of direct address during which the characters relate to the audience their personal encounters with Hester, it is revealed that the Doctor and Reverend D. have each fathered one of her children. Hester’s next confrontation comes through the political system in the form of the Welfare Lady, who, like all others before her, views Hester as a resource, taking advantage of her dire situation to find profit. Welfare does, however, offer Hester a way to secure financial assistance by naming the deadbeat fathers of her treasures, giving the government an opportunity to access their salaries and gain income for both herself and her children. Hester is unwilling to take this step, mainly because she does not wish to bring harm to Chilli, her soul mate, her first and only love, who is the father of her oldest child, Jabber. In scene 5, “Small Change and Sandwiches,” Hester’s friend, Amiga Gringa, brings an offer of work: performing pornographic acts on video and selling the tapes for profit. Hester finds this idea unacceptable; for her, the sex act is one of giving solace to others, not one to be used for personal gain. In scene 6, “The Reverend on the Rock,” Hester returns to Reverend D. for the money he had promised her earlier. Again he puts her off, indicating that he will take a special offering during Sunday’s service on her behalf. Chilli returns to Hester in scene 7, “My Song in the Street,” with a proposal of marriage that would make his son, Jabber, legitimate. He offers her hope, a wedding dress, and an engagement ring. However, Chilli, like others in Hester’s life, proves to be guided by selfishness. When he discovers that Hester is the mother of five, he is unable and unwilling to follow through with his intentions. Instead, he retrieves the dress and ring and squashes her hope for any improvement in her life. Desperate, Hester returns in scene 8, “The Hand of Fate,” to Reverend D. in search of his promised support. He has lied to her. When she states that she must identify him to the Welfare Lady as the father of her youngest, he is angered, orders her to leave and never return, and calls her “slut,” the word that had been scribbled on the wall of her home under the bridge. Jabber overhears Reverend D.’s word, and he remembers washing it from the wall. He tells his mother about the word and repeats it over and over. A desperate Hester demands that he be quiet, and when he persists, she attacks her “treasure” with the club that Trouble had stolen from a policeman in Scene 1. She beats him to death. In anguish over her compulsive deed, she kneels beside the boy’s body and draws the letter “A” on the ground, using his blood as ink. In her confession, Hester reveals that her five treasures were not enough; she should have had a hundred

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thousand babies: “Bad mannered Bad mouthed Bad Bad Bastards!/A whole army full I shoulda!” In the final scene, “The Prison Door,” the cast again crowds around Hester as it did in the prologue, completing the action of the chorus, repeating the same accusations heard at the beginning—“No skills/ Cept one.” Hester is left with blooddrenched hands, whimpering, “Big hand coming down on me. Big hand coming down on me….” Themes and Meanings Parks depicts the life of a desperate, African American, single-parent family living on the cusp of society. Unlike many of her other plays, In the Blood does not attempt to reflect life as it once was or even as it ought to be: It depicts a world that, for all its depravity, actually is. Hester is victimized by her gender, her naïveté, and her intense longing to be a good mother. Options are made available to aid her in “getting a leg up,” her self-described need. Her best friend, Amiga Gringa, is friendly only as long as Hester has something for her to take. The medical profession wants only to stop her from procreating, even as it takes advantage of her and her dire conditions. The government, through the Welfare Lady, has little time for Hester and offers her work for which she is unprepared. Formalized religion represents for her only another form of oppression and subjugation. Her true love cannot abide the burden that loving her brings. More isolating, Hester is illiterate, capable of forming and recognizing only one character, an “A.” That one piece of the alphabet reflects the only concrete connection she possesses to the civilization that has rejected her. It is not enough. Parks found inspiration in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). She creates in Hester, La Negrita, a reflection of Hawthorne’s original character Hester Prynne, the Puritan heroine who is branded for adultery by being forced to wear a scarlet “A” on her clothing after giving birth to a child out of wedlock. In Parks’s interpolation, however, there are five bastard children to tend, not one. Just as Hawthorne drew attention to the solemn realities of the world he knew, Parks accomplishes the same goal by providing her audience with images of America that are harsh, unrelenting, and impossible to deny. Of equal importance for Parks are the traditions of ancient Greek theater. The choral effects put to use at the beginning and ending of the play and the insightful but painful “confessions” are manifestations of this influence. Most important, the story of Medea, the Greek heroine who killed her children to spite her unfaithful husband, is echoed in the actions of Hester, La Negrita. Altogether, In the Blood functions as a modern Greek tragedy: What happens must happen—there is no escaping one’s birthright. Critical Context In 1963, Suzan-Lori Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky. As a result of her father’s military career, she moved quite often, spending her high school years as a foreign student in Germany. As an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College, she studied with James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write for the stage. Others who have

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had an influence on her style include Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. In the Blood received its premiere in November, 1999, at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, an award that Parks received two years later for Topdog/Underdog (pr., pb. 2001). In the Blood was published in the March, 2000, issue of American Theatre. Critics have lauded Parks as a voice of confidence during her career as a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. In addition to winning the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, Parks was recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called “genius” grant) in October, 2001. Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (pr. 1991-1992, pb. 1992-1993), has referred to Parks as the best contemporary American playwright. Bibliography Anderson, Lisa M. “Battling Images: Suzan-Lori Parks and Black Iconicity.” In Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Discusses Parks’s work as engaged in disrupting visual stereotypes of African Americans. Cole, Susan Letzler. Playwrights in Rehearsal: The Seduction of Company. New York: Routledge, 2001. Discusses the rehearsal process for the original production of In the Blood and its influence on the evolution of the play. Haring-Smith, Tori. “Dramaturging Non-realism: Creating a New Vocabulary.” Theatre Topics 13, no. 1 (2003): 45-54. Discusses the process of working with non-realistic theatrical elements in the plays of Parks and Caryl Churchill. Parks, Suzan-Lori, et al. “Where Do Plays Come From? A Conference of Women Playwrights.” In Women in American Theatre, edited by Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins. Rev. and expanded 3d ed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. Parks participates in a roundtable discussion with six other playwrights, including Emily Mann and Wendy Wasserstein. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr., and Alicia Smith-Howard. Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2007. Includes an article comparing the uses of the chorus in In the Blood and Venus (pr. 1996, pb. 1997), as well as a detailed study of the role of language in In the Blood. Kenneth Robbins

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IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN Author: George Lamming (1927) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: 1930’s-1940’s Locale: Creighton’s Village, Barbados First published: 1953 Principal characters: G., a young Barbadian who is nine years old when the novel opens and seventeen and on the verge of emigrating to Trinidad when it ends Trumper, a teenage friend of the narrator who emigrates to the United States and returns on the eve of the narrator’s own departure Bob, a friend of the narrator and Trumper Boy Blue, a friend of the narrator and Trumper G.’s mother, a strong, disciplinarian village woman Ma, an elderly woman in the village Pa, Ma’s husband Mr. Slime, a teacher in the village school at the beginning of the novel The Shoemaker, a villager who appears throughout the novel Mr. Foster, a villager who appears throughout the novel The Novel In the Castle of My Skin is an autobiographical novel by a young native of Barbados living in England. The novel’s plot covers the years from the time of a great flood when the narrator is nine years old to the eve of his departure for the larger island of Trinidad at the age of seventeen. The virtually unnamed narrator, G., clearly is a surrogate for the author, though Lamming’s narrative strategy of alternating first-person and third-person narrators has the effect of submerging G.’s identity beneath the larger collective identity and situation of the inhabitants of Creighton’s Village. The larger intended effect of the occasionally confusing alternation of narrators is that two mutually reinforcing stories are told within one narrative frame. The first is the story of the ostensible protagonist’s coming-of-age and the dawning of his political awareness. The second story concerns the great social upheavals that occur over the years, especially following the sale of the village by Mr. Creighton, the landlord, to a group of men including Mr. Slime, the populist leader who betrays the villagers’ trust. In the Castle of My Skin begins during a rainstorm on G.’s ninth birthday, a refer-

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ence to an actual flood that afflicted Barbados when Lamming was a child. The early scenes of G.’s disappointment and his mother’s response (she “put her head through the window to let the neighbour know that I was nine, and they flattered me with the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing”) effectively establish the setting as well as the sense of collective identity, awareness, and suffering that are crucial to the novel’s purpose. The first-person narrator makes this explicit as he describes his mother visiting with two neighbor women: Miss Foster. My mother. Bob’s mother. It seemed they were three pieces in a pattern which remained constant. The flow of its history was undisturbed by any difference in the pieces, nor was its evenness affected by any likeness. There was a difference and there was no difference.

In the domestic geography of the village, he conveys a naturalness and innocence that surely will not last to the book’s end: In the corner where one fence merged into another, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves made a limitless suffusion over the land, the pattern had arranged itself with absolute unawareness.

The important third chapter, written in the third person, achieves a skillful segue from a general depiction of a boy’s school and a Queen’s Birthday celebration to a subtly crucial plot element involving a potential scandal for a teacher, Mr. Slime, who resigns and later becomes a populist leader. The short fourth chapter features a discussion by Ma and Pa, an emblematic, chorus-like elderly couple, of Mr. Slime’s new projects, the Penny Bank and the Friendly Society. Referring to the migration of many West Indians early in the twentieth century to Panama to work building the canal there, Ma says: “’Tis a next Panama we need now for the young ones. I sit there sometimes an’ I wonder what’s goin’ to become o’ them, the young that comin’ up so fast to take the place o’ the old. ’Tis a next Panama we want, Pa, or there goin’ to be bad times comin’ this way.” Much of the heart of the novel is nearly plotless, though not purposeless. The narrator and his friends Trumper and Boy Blue engage in adolescent ruminations on the beach. Many of the ideas expressed by the three boys, about the sadness and loss of growing up, about sexual awakening, about their place in the village and their wonder at the opportunities of the outside world, are hardly specific to the Caribbean. These universal themes establish In the Castle of My Skin squarely in the tradition of the bildungsroman. The narrator goes off to the High School, establishing an unwanted distance between him and his friends. A riot—like the flood, the fictional counterpart of a historical event in Barbados—jars the villagers into an uneasy awareness that times are changing. Trumper emigrates to the United States. He returns just in time to tell the narrator about that country. The novel ends with the narrator on the verge of leaving

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for Trinidad and the community on the verge of ruin from the landlord’s sale of its land to a group including the apparently treacherous Mr. Slime. Mr. Slime’s complicity in the land sale is not narrated explicitly but can be supposed from strong hints. The Characters In the Castle of My Skin is a very oddly structured novel. Its alternation of first- and third-person narrators seems undisciplined (the author was, after all, only twentythree years old when he began writing it) but is, in fact, a bold and considered device for conveying a sense of the village’s communal identity while simultaneously narrating G.’s coming-of-age and his eventual, inevitable emigration. Lamming, using the first-person narrator, the ostensible protagonist, as his surrogate, intends the same effect in this novel as in his collection of autobiographical literary essays The Pleasures of Exile (1960). Critic Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s remark about The Pleasures of Exile could be said with equal justice about In the Castle of My Skin: “Autobiographical values are determined by the narrator’s acute and pervasive sense of participating in a great historical moment. His valuable life surrenders its meaning in a gesture of collectivity.” In the novel, then, as in the book of essays, the unusual, unexpected main character is the community at large. This fact establishes Lamming’s political and social values and sympathies. The tragedy of the land sale near the novel’s end is the community’s communal tragedy. At the same time, the individual protagonist, the first-person narrator G., is separating himself from the community by emigrating to Trinidad. Although he does not yet know it as he prepares to leave, his emigration is preparatory to the writing of the narrative. G. is not well prepared for the outside world. His academic achievements are modest and disappointing to his mother, who is tenacious and fiercely ambitious for him. “She would talk about pulling through; whatever happened she would come through, and ‘she’ meant her child.” At the same time, by virtue of his education at the High School, he no longer belongs in the village. He is caught between two worlds. Of his friends he writes: “Whether or not they wanted to they excluded me from their world just as my memory of them and the village excluded me from the world of the High School. . . . It was as though my roots had been snapped from the centre of what I knew best, while I remained impotent to wrest what my fortunes had forced me into.” Trumper, Bob, and Boy Blue, G.’s friends, serve to throw the narrator’s predicament into relief. Ma and Pa, the old couple, are wise, sad commentators on the changes taking place. Other characters, such as the Shoemaker, Mr. Foster, Miss Foster, and Bob’s mother, are given individual identities, though always carefully within a structure that limits their awareness of the world and their own roles to those of villagers. The outside world impinges on the novel through Trumper’s departure for and return from the United States and through the narrator’s later awareness, as he writes, of the political and historical significance of events such as the riot, the land sale, and his own emigration.

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Themes and Meanings Character, theme, and point of view are inextricable in In the Castle of My Skin. As already noted, the alternation of first- and third-person narrators is the author’s crucial device for conveying the communal identity of his protagonist and his concern with the fate of the community as a literary and moral question. The novel’s autobiographical framework is a strategy for narrating the larger story of the village’s demise. In the Castle of My Skin clearly is not merely an autobiographical novel or a standard bildungsroman. At the same time, the narrator’s awareness of the community’s plight, increased between the time of the events recounted and the time of writing, is a crucial element. As Sandra Pouchet Paquet writes about The Pleasures of Exile, though again her remarks apply equally well to the novel and to G. as its “author,” “His dissenting voice is personal and collective. As colonial subject, Lamming offers himself as a representative text to be read and as a privileged interpreter of his own historical moment.” That is, Lamming unabashedly uses his own subjective, autobiographical understanding of events and relationships to correct, in his view, earlier “imperialist” versions of his island’s and region’s history. Lamming allows his narrator to comment on the characters in such a way as to emphasize individuals’ importance as parts of the communal identity. Possibly because of his relative youth when he wrote the novel, he eschews subtlety in favor of explicit insistence which, nevertheless, is effective in its repetition. “Three, thirteen, thirty” is a phrase he uses several times in the first two chapters to refer to representative village women. He later expands the phrase’s use to refer to collectivity in general. Three, thirteen, thirty. It does not matter. They come and go to perpetuate the custom of this corner. Once a week, black pudding and souse. The pattern has absorbed them, and in the wood where the night is thickest it has embraced another two in intimate intercourse.

The middle chapters, in which the three boys ruminate on cosmic questions, serve as a bridge from G.’s childhood to the cataclysmic events at the novel’s end. In a symbolic scene, G. frets about having lost a pebble from the beach that he had arbitrarily decided he must not lose, and which he hid for safekeeping. It is a scene and a sentiment familiar to anyone who has gone through adolescence. It had become one of those things one can’t bear to see for the last time. . . . I selected the spot and placed the pebble under the leaf on the even slope. A day had passed. There was no change in the weather, and the waves were as quiet as ever on this side of the sea. . . . But the pebble had gone. The feeling sharpened. It had really started the evening before when I received the letters, and now the pebble had made it permanent. In the evening I had read the letters and it seemed there were several things, intimate and endearing which I was going to see for the last time.

In the Castle of My Skin is, classically, a novel about losing innocence and gaining self-awareness.

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Critical Context The important African American novelist Richard Wright wrote, in his introduction to the first American edition of In the Castle of My Skin, “One feels not so much alone when, from a distant witness, supporting evidence comes to buttress one’s own testimony.” Wright went on to refer to “Lamming’s quietly melodious prose.” This was high praise coming from a very distinguished voice very early in Lamming’s career. Sandra Pouchet Paquet writes that “The novel was very well received and has held its own as a classic of modern Black writing.” Having written five other novels and The Pleasures of Exile by 1993, Lamming achieved recognition as the most important novelist to have emerged from the English-speaking Caribbean, perhaps barring V. S. Naipaul. C. L. R. James, the patriarch of West Indian writers, said in 1972, “I do not know at the present time any country writing in English which is able to produce a trio of the literary capacity and effectiveness of Wilson Harris, George Lamming, and Vidia Naipaul.” James was prone to effusiveness and bold remarks, though not to irresponsible claims. Critic Daryl Cumber Dance asserts that in making such a sweeping assertion James “was guilty neither of exaggeration nor of nationalism.” Ian H. Munro, in a summary of Lamming’s career and the critical reception of his books, quotes novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o as calling In the Castle of My Skin “a study of colonial revolt” and “one of the great political novels in modern ‘colonial’ literature.” Munro notes that “Much of both the praise and the criticism of Lamming’s novels after Castle revolves around his obvious preoccupation with showing his characters and their actions as a product of historical forces outside their ken. Lamming’s works are all symbolic to some degree: his characters frequently embody themes and act out roles appropriate to their place in the symbolic scheme.” This tendency of Lamming is obvious in In the Castle of My Skin. As Munro also stated, “the political goals and issues of the novel ultimately bulk larger than the individual life of its characters.” Bibliography Buhle, Paul. “C. L. R. James, West Indian: George Lamming Interviewed by Paul Buhle.” In C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, edited by Paget Henry and Paul Buhle. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. An interview with Lamming by the biographer of C. L. R. James, the first important West Indian to publish abroad, and in later life an influence on radical activists and critics of society in Britain and the United States, as well as on younger Caribbean writers, including Lamming. The interview concerns the subject of James’s influence on Lamming. Dance, Daryl Cumber. Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers. Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press, 1993. A collection of interviews with West Indian writers, including Lamming. Other subjects include the Caribbean literary and political patriarch C. L. R. James, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, and the prominent female novelist Jamaica Kincaid. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

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1992. A collection of autobiographical, interrelated essays on the perspective and concerns of the postcolonial writer, specifically in the West Indian context. Lamming discusses his own fiction and poetry as well as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623) and C. L. R. James’s classic history of the Haitian revolution The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). The Ann Arbor Paperbacks edition includes a helpful, lucid foreword by Lamming scholar Sandra Pouchet Paquet of the University of Pennsylvania. Munro, Ian H. “George Lamming.” In Fifty Caribbean Writers, edited by Daryl Cumber Dance. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. A biographical and critical essay on Lamming and his work, with helpful citations of critical studies of In the Castle of My Skin and Lamming’s other books. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. Foreword to In the Castle of My Skin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. An excellent discussion of the novel, most fruitfully read after having read the novel. _______. The Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann, 1982. The first book-length study of Lamming’s work. Reiss, Timothy J., ed. Music, Writing, and Cultural Unity in the Caribbean. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 2005. The collection, which provides essential context for Lamming’s work by presenting essays on many Caribbean authors, includes the essay “Calypso Aesthetic in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin” by Margaret Diana Gill. Wright, Richard. Introduction to In the Castle of My Skin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954. An enthusiastic introduction to the novel’s first edition, by one of the most prominent African American novelists. Ethan Casey

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IN THE WINE TIME Author: Ed Bullins (1935) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Naturalism Time of plot: Early 1950’s Locale: A side street in a large, northern, industrial city First produced: 1968, at the New Lafayette Theatre, New York, New York First published: 1969 Principal characters: Cliff Dawson, an unemployed Navy veteran Lou Dawson, Cliff’s wife, who is three months pregnant Ray, Lou and Cliff’s nephew, a quiet, good-hearted, sensitive boy The Play The play begins with a moderately long prologue, which may be likened to a soliloquy, spoken years later by the adult Ray. This device provides a context that distances the action that follows, sets the urban scene, gives a wistful tone, introduces the special, inward, and sensitive personality of Ray, and establishes his experience and point of view as the focus of attention and meaning. In poetic prose, Ray shares his memory of what for him has turned out to be the most meaningful event of his last “wine time” summer, his daily, brief meetings with a mysterious girl with whom he fell in love. By the end of that summer, she had moved away, and he had turned sixteen and joined the Navy. The three acts of the play then take the form mainly of dialogue between family members and friends in a working-class neighborhood; the characters are entertaining themselves with large quantities of talk and wine after another trying day. Men and women talk to one another about their relationships, men talk with men about women, and women talk with women about men. The audience senses the hidden agendas in these conversations. Themes emerge, such as the ways in which lives are molded by the pressures of poverty and racism, the nature of true manhood and the ways in which it might involve women and family, and potential and loss. The action takes place mostly on the Dawson family’s stoop, but sometimes the stage lighting shifts the scene to “the Avenue,” where a mirroring subplot takes place. Act 1 tells the audience what it needs to know about Cliff and Lou Dawson and their adopted nephew, Ray, and presents some options that might be available for Ray. It also presents the conflicts between and within Cliff and Lou. These conflicts are echoed and aggravated by conflicts between these characters and various minor characters. In act 2, the option of “the girl” is presented along with the conflict within Ray, and the earlier established conflicts are heightened. In act 3, the conflicts and themes are quickly brought to a crisis that is just as quickly resolved by violence.

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The action all takes place on a single hot summer night. As usual, Cliff, Lou, and Ray are out on their stoop, talking and drinking cheap wine. From time to time, they are joined by friends and acquaintances. Their neighbors are also out on their stoops, frowning on Cliff, whom they consider loud and crude. Cliff is equally annoyed by his neighbors, whom he considers snobbish, pretentious, and small-minded. The Dawsons are comparatively new arrivals on Derby Street, and from the beginning of their time there, Cliff has felt rejected and insulted by his neighbors, who think it suspicious and disgraceful that Cliff is a college student, and unemployed, while Lou rears a teenage boy. In his bitterness, Cliff frequently entertains himself by making a nuisance of himself, shocking his neighbors by drunkenly shouting obscenities and insults. Lou somewhat shares his attitude toward their neighbors, but she is more understanding of their viewpoint and is uncomfortable with her husband’s displays, as well as with his roughness toward her. To some extent, she shares and enjoys his roughness; she feels proud of his strength and superior vitality, and she is proud of herself for having saved him from a worse fate in the Navy by marrying him. Cliff is not entirely satisfied with his landlocked domestic life. Although he knows that he has had his time of adventure and must put that behind, he still takes out his frustration in quarrels with his wife, sometimes with only partly mocked violence. He loves, respects, and even admires his wife for her sensitivity and high principles, which he has found to be rare. When Ray expresses his desire to join the Navy when he turns sixteen, in just a week, Cliff encourages him and promises to sign his enlistment papers. Lou, though, says that Ray is a year too young. While Lou is indoors washing her hair, Ray and Cliff talk about the opportunities for a more meaningful life that the Navy would offer Ray, especially regarding women. Cliff learns that Ray is more experienced sexually than he had thought, although he has known about Ray and his girlfriend, Bunny. In the context of these thoughts about women and Ray’s future, Ray mentions a new girl, beautiful and mysterious, probably somewhat older than he, whom he sees at a certain time every day on the Avenue. Each day she smiles at him and hums what has become their song. Cliff has not witnessed these trysts, but he immediately sees the threat that they present to the escape into a good life in the Navy that he has projected for Ray. He thus does what he can to disillusion Ray about the girl. On this night, meanwhile, Bunny has been up the Avenue with her girlfriend and two young men, one of whom, Red, is making an obvious play for her attentions. While Cliff and Ray are gone to buy more wine, Bunny, Red, and other friends and neighbors, with their jug of wine, gather at the Dawsons’ stoop. Tension rises, especially because of Red’s provocations; and after Cliff and Ray return with a new jug, which is already half empty, the mood grows steadily darker. Ray drinks himself into a near stupor, but he is able to understand when Bunny informs him that she is Red’s girl now. Red urinates into an empty jug and hands it to Ray. As Ray raises it to his lips, Bunny knocks it away, smashing it on the sidewalk. Ray punches her in the face, and Red jumps on Ray. Knives are drawn, and fighting swirls around the stoop and into the alley. Cliff runs out of the house and into the darkness. When he emerges, he announces that he has killed Red. A policeman arrives and places Cliff under arrest.

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Themes and Meanings “Wine time” is a summer evening in a black or mostly black neighborhood of a city. It begins approximately at the end of suppertime, when residents come out of their homes into the cooler but still-hot air, and lasts until bedtime, which may be far into the night. It is named for the large amount of cheap wine that is consumed by the people on the sidewalks and stoops that line the streets. In the context of this play, “wine time” suggests a social ritual, marked by conviviality, sexuality, intoxication, and relaxation, among the neighbors, young and old. At the same time, it suggests a lapse in social constraints, a fluidity of action, enhanced desire, and lowered inhibitions, with revelations of felt truths that are hidden during the day. It is a time-out, a break from the pressures of the day. There is a weariness to be rested; there is also a release and an excitement. Anything can suddenly happen, good or bad. Life is still hopeful and troublesome and must be lived, hour by hour; people fall into patterns, repeating their feelings, their talk, and their nightly acts. “Wine time” also suggests a time of youth, with its accompanying inexperience, ignorance, and uncertainty, but also with its potential for discovery, decision, and growth—or for mistake and a slip into oblivion. The term also suggests romance, actual or imaginary or something in between. These motifs are established, or hinted at, in the poetic, prose prologue to the play. In the mixture of comfort and discomfort, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, love and hate that Ray remembers, the audience begins to perceive that time is a series of passages, through momentary meetings to impossibility and separation, in a search that is never completed. As the action of the play unfolds, the characterizations of three couples— Ray and “the girl” (actually a young woman, at least several years older than he), Cliff and Lou, and Red and Bunny—present variations on the theme of the relationship between a man and a woman and, especially regarding the restless Cliff and the proudly competent Lou, the theme of true manhood and how it relates to family. The play does not offer a final word about manhood, but it suggests that manhood is often misunderstood by men as being a state of complete independence, freedom from responsibility, and exercise of control over women for the sake of self-gratification. The play also suggests that poverty and racism reinforce this misunderstanding. In the figure of Ray’s dream girl, who is mature, independent, self-possessed, loving, and wise—a fantasy, yet all too real for the youthfully naïve Ray—the play offers a glimpse of a possibility that a man might find himself at last and fulfill his life in a loving relationship. As the play proceeds, however, Ray increasingly adopts Cliff as his model, suggesting that Ray’s future is more likely to hold violence and unfulfillment. The play suggests that some black men do not want to grow out of their “wine time” or are too late in understanding that it must be left behind. Such a time and such failures are also universal themes. Critical Context In the Wine Time was the first of a cycle of twenty plays, with characters linked by kinship or association, projected by Bullins about the black American experience in

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the twentieth century. It was also his first full-length play. Before it was first produced in 1968, critics had acknowledged the talent Bullins had displayed in his one-act plays, but In the Wine Time was not widely noted in its first production; it has, however, come to be considered to be one of his most important plays. Along with Amiri Baraka, whom Bullins has said “created me,” Bullins led the black theater movement of the 1960’s. From the beginning, Bullins has been interested primarily in his plays’ reception not by critics but by black audiences. His purpose, he has suggested, is to provide black theatergoers with fresh insights as they consider the weight of their own lives. His passionate conviction is that black playwrights can and should contribute a vision for tomorrow, thereby building not only a new black theater but also a black nation and future. With this commitment and audience, Bullins has found it artistically possible to present anything he envisions for the judgment of that audience, free from the constraints of white publishers and critics. Furthermore, while the problem of racism is often present and meaningful in his plays, its presence need not be central or blatant, because he is not bringing it to the attention of white theatergoers or explaining it to them. Therefore, too, his plays can be free from ideology and political or revolutionary rhetoric. Still, Bullins writes for change. As the critic Don Evans has pointed out, the mirror that the plays hold up to the audience shows black people their ugliness. Indeed, Bullins’s early plays were rejected by some critics for their obscene language, unconventional style, and violent, unflattering pictures of black life. Bullins, however, has remarked that he was a conscious artist before he was a consciously revolutionary artist and that he is thus able to act as an agent for change in the black community. Bullins’s plays force black audiences to look at those parts of their communities that trouble themselves and to examine their own choices, dreams, evasions, and self-delusions. In the Wine Time suggests that persons may dream the right dreams of peace and union but may be too naïve, unimpassioned, or misled to realize them. The play also explores how persons may try vainly to bring dead dreams back to life or may dream the wrong dreams and make choices that restrict their own freedom. Whether the dream be the American Dream or an individual’s personal dream, it is ambiguous and fragile and may suddenly turn into a nightmare. Bullins has remarked that his characters are, like most persons, many dimensional and ever-changing in an ever-changing universe, like points in a dreamlike vision. This sense of the dreamlike quality of the universe and of persons’ lives and visions crosses with Bullins’s naturalistic dramatic techniques to influence the way he structures his plays. Some critics have faulted his plays for lack of conventional form and focused point of view; some have, upon greater reflection, discovered an unconventional form in the plays; some have found a free form that is vigorous and delightful, exhibiting artistic freedom and assurance; and others have explained that the plays are structured by an awareness of space and by quasi-ritualistic patterns that are recognized by black audiences as reflections of their own experiences and community patterns.

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Bibliography Anderson, Jervis. “Profiles.” The New Yorker 49 (June 16, 1973): 40-44. Presents the complexities of the artist in the context of his personal background, the Black Arts movement, and the New Lafayette Theatre. Andrews, W. D. E. “Theater of Black Reality: The Black Drama of Ed Bullins.” Southwest Review 65 (1980): 178-190. Asserts that, in contrast to Baraka’s “Messianic” theater, Bullins offers an “Orphic” descent into ghetto depths. Notes that the abstract sense of menace in his plays is like that found in the plays of Harold Pinter. Cook, William. “Mom, Dad, and God: Values in the Black Theatre.” In The Theater of Black Americans, edited by Errol Hill. Vol. 1. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1980. Compares Bullins’s portrayal of family members, especially the father figure, to Lorraine Hansberry’s and James Baldwin’s. Argues that Bullins’s characters do not fear sex or feel religious inhibitions; they celebrate the possibilities in ghetto street life, with a stoic acceptance of those few pleasures that life affords. Evans, Don. “The Theater of Confrontation: Ed Bullins Up Against the Wall.” Black World 23 (April, 1974): 14-18. Claims that Bullins is not pessimistic about the struggle of black men, but he must show the frustrating impotence that they feel. Hay, Samuel. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Study of the life and work of Ed Bullins and the effects of each upon the other. Sanders, Leslie. “Ed Bullins.” In American Playwrights Since 1945, edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. A survey of sources, information, and major ideas about Bullins’s work. Smitherman, Geneva. “Everybody Wants to Know Why I Sing the Blues.” Black World 23 (April, 1974): 4-13. Examines how, from the oral tradition of black literature, Bullins brings the trickster figure and the blues motif. Notes that as a bluesman, he reexamines black experience and moves to transcend its brutal aspects. Steele, Shelby. “White Port and Lemon Juices: Notes on Ritual in the New Black Theater.” Black World 22 (June, 1973): 4-13, 78-83. Argues that Bullins’s use of symbols, characterizations, themes, and language styles establishes a ritual pattern that is recognized by black audience members as reaffirming their values. Sternlicht, Sanford. A Reader’s Guide to Modern American Drama. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Comprehensive overview of American drama. Includes a section on Bullins, situating him in relation to the history of the theater in the United States. True, Warren R. “Ed Bullins, Anton Chekhov, and the ‘Drama Mood.’” CLA Journal 20 (June, 1977): 521-532. Compares Bullins to Chekhov with regard to their uses of naturalism of settings and passivity of characters who are trapped by social and environmental forces. Tom Koontz

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INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL Author: Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) Type of work: Slave narrative Time of work: 1818-1861 Locale: North Carolina; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York, New York First published: 1861 Principal personages: Linda Brent, a slave and the narrator; “Linda Brent” is a pseudonym for the author Aunt Martha, Linda’s grandmother Ellen and Benny, Linda’s two children William, Linda’s brother Dr. Flint, the pseudonym for Dr. James Norcom, Jacobs’s “master” and tormentor Mrs. Flint, a character representing Linda’s other “master,” Mary Matilda Hornblower Norcom Mr. Sands, a white man with whom Linda has her two children Mrs. Bruce (first), a white woman in New York who employs Linda Mrs. Bruce (second), who married Mr. Bruce following the death of his first wife Form and Content Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was long believed to be a fictional account of slavery. Through extensive research, however, scholars have documented its authenticity as an autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, and it is now considered one of the most important antebellum slave narratives. No doubt the author’s decision to use pseudonyms for herself and her characters and the “novelish” nature of the autobiography (with its plot, dialogue, and episodic chapters) led some literary critics and historians to question the historical authenticity of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Possibly, too, the relative lack of access to written modes of expression by black women of the early nineteenth century also inspired some of this skepticism. The issue of authenticity is, in fact, central to the whole tradition of African American slave narrative. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, like other narratives, was written as testimony on behalf of and documentation for the antislavery cause. As such, it represents a highly activist literature, one in which the express purpose was political. Jacobs participated in the abolitionist movement and was assisted in her literary efforts by other abolitionists. As was the case with many other slave narratives, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is accompanied by letters attesting its authenticity: the first by Amy Post, a white

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Quaker abolitionist, and the second by George Lowther, a free black man in Boston. This tradition of advocacy letters arose in response to early skepticism inside and outside the white abolitionist movement about the authenticity of slave narratives in general. Were these stories of the horrors of slavery really true? How could their authenticity be proven? In essence, the question became “Who will be allowed to speak?” and “In what terms?” Harriet Jacobs, like several other leading black abolitionists, had disagreements with white abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe over the best way to present her story. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was edited by white abolitionist editor Lydia Marie Child. The involvement of white antislavery activists in the publishing of some slave narratives has inspired some literary critics to wonder if the literary voice of slave narrative represents authentic black experience or instead has been cultivated according to the purposes and perspectives of white editors and readers. Other critics argue that black authors exercised definitive control over the form and content of their voices. This controversy illustrates the interesting and complex nature of slave narrative as a literary genre and invites a rigorous exploration of the complexity of American abolitionist history. Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography provides an important voice in that history. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl recounts the early childhood through middle adulthood of Linda, the pseudonym of author Harriet Jacobs. Born into slavery in North Carolina in approximately 1818, Linda loses both parents at an early age and forms a primary and essentially maternal bond with her grandmother, Aunt Martha, a free black. Linda’s life is controlled, however, by her master and mistress, Dr. and Mrs. Flint. In fact, Linda’s life story is structured as a response to Dr. Flint’s predatory sexual pursuit, which begins in her early adolescence and continues, in varied forms, until his death. In response to Flint’s constant harassment and Linda’s fear that he will eventually rape her, she chooses to bear two children with another white man in the community, Mr. Sands. She agonizes over this decision, believing that she has compromised her own morality. She also subsequently suffers her grandmother’s wrath and judgment in response to this decision, which threatens her emotional security. Linda’s hope is that Flint will see her relationship with Sands as a break from his influence and will abandon his pursuit. When this strategy fails, Linda decides to escape, hoping that in his exasperation over losing her Flint will sell her children to their father and thus allow them a measure of protection from the evils of slavery. Linda escapes but is unable to flee the area, and she is hidden in the homes of sympathetic neighbors until the risk in doing so becomes too great. She is then compelled to hide in a tiny space above her grandmother’s shed. Incredibly, Linda spends seven years cramped away in this room, watching the world and her children from a small peephole cut in the wood. Eventually, arrangements are made for her escape to the North, first to Philadelphia and then to New York. Still enraged at Linda’s refusal of his advances and obsessively unwilling to relinquish his legal authority over her, Flint pursues her, both through letters and expeditions north. Before her own escape, Linda had arranged for

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her young daughter, Ellen, to be sent north to live with her father’s family. Once in New York, she also sends for her son, Benny. Protected by her sympathetic white employer, Mrs. Bruce, Linda is able to elude capture for several years, even after the notorious Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 makes the North perilous for escaped slaves. Flint dies, and his heirs continue to pursue their “property.” In the closing chapter of the autobiography, the second Mrs. Bruce buys Linda’s freedom from Flint’s family. Although ambivalent about having to receive a purchased freedom, Jacobs closes her story with Linda’s celebration of her liberation from slavery. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is divided into forty-one short chapters, each recounting an episode from the story of Jacobs’s life. She constructs dialogue between her characters to allow a range of perspectives to appear in the story and occasionally uses chapters to address broader issues directly: “The Church and Slavery,” “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and “Prejudice Against Color,” for example. Analysis An intriguing question arises immediately when considering Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Why did Jacobs use pseudonyms for herself and other historical people? Why would she choose to distance herself in this way from her own autobiography, especially considering that slave narrative, as a genre, builds upon the authority of the speaker’s own experience to pose a direct political challenge to slavery? One obvious reason would be as a protective device. Jacobs, like other slavenarrative authors, may have chosen to mask the historical identity of her family in order to protect their privacy and the safety of those slaves still bound in her former community. Like other slave narratives, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl provides only sketchy details of its protagonist’s actual escape and refrains from naming many of her accomplices. This also, no doubt, stems from a desire to protect them. The fact that Jacobs does not name the actual Dr. Flint and his family can be understood as a tactic to prevent more violence or abuse by them toward members of her family or her former friends in Edenton, North Carolina, the actual community of her birth and the location of the early portions of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. There is another possible explanation for Jacobs’s decision to use pseudonyms, however, and this reason gets to some of the unique characteristics of the book as autobiography and as slave narrative. Harriet Jacobs directly confronts the sexual abuse that constantly confronted many female slaves. She offers herself as “evidence” in this sense, but she does so through her own voice and in her own terms. Her terms in this case include an apparent psychological and emotional ambivalence about her own actions in response to this abuse. Ultimately, she makes a clear claim for the legitimacy of her choices given the continued threat of rape by Flint. Jacobs challenges the moral absolutism of her readers, and perhaps of herself, by clearly presenting the context within which her seemingly immoral choice to have children with Sands is made. Lacking the legal options of marriage and the freedom to control her own life, she does her best to protect herself and her children. It seems entirely understandable, given this subject matter and the social realities of nineteenth century American soci-

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ety, that Jacobs would protect herself with a pseudonym as she made public such deeply traumatic and personal experiences. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl offers a critique of slavery rooted in female experience. In addition to exposing the vulnerability of female slaves to sexual exploitation, Jacobs focuses on her roles as mother, (grand)daughter, and seeker-of-home. She develops her attack on slavery from within an intricate network of family relations— not the solitary heroine here, but a woman so committed to her children that she spends seven years in a suffocating cubicle in order to protect them. In the broader context of the African American experience of slavery, children and family (and the ability to keep and develop those bonds) become symbols and actual expressions of liberation and freedom. This “family” framework, in addition to Jacobs’s portrayal of the special suffering of female slaves, adds important texture from black women’s experience to the body of slave-narrative literature. In addition, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl addresses themes that are common in other slave narratives. First, a deeply personal quest for freedom is also understood as representing the desires of the entire slave community. In other words, the quest is not only for individual freedom but for the end of slavery and the freedom of all enslaved African Americans as well. In the story, Linda crosses water to reach Philadelphia— a biblical metaphor for liberation—but her crossing represents liberation not only for herself but also, symbolically, for all slaves. After she reaches the North, her gaze is constantly back toward those she has left behind. Her autobiography thus uses one life as a symbol for the liberation of a whole people. Like many other slave narratives, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is infused with religious reference and poses a scriptural challenge to slavery. The role of religion in slave communities and in African American history is complex. There exists a range of opinion about the influence (or lack of it) of white slaveholding Christianity on the religious self-understanding of recently arrived African slaves as well as on later generations of African Americans. Religion is integral to most early nineteenth century black literature and oratory, and the role played by diverse religions in early black activism is rigorously debated by scholars. Harriet Jacobs constructs her story within an explicitly religious framework; she directly condemns slaveholding Christianity by claiming the validity of a more genuine Christianity. Her own religious views show some interesting internal conflicts that illustrate how difficult it was for enslaved Christians to embrace such traditional Protestant precepts as submission and self-denial. Unlike some authors of slave narratives, Jacobs does not dwell on her efforts to acquire literacy, which is often a metaphor for freedom in slave autobiography. The importance of her own literacy is expressed in two ways: Her ability to read the Bible helps keep her sane during her long confinement, and her literacy allows her to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. This literary independence gives her the power to control her story and to speak to a relatively broad audience in her own terms.

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Critical Context Harriet Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl herself just prior to the formal outbreak of the Civil War. Although initially reviewed by the abolitionist press and fairly well distributed, the book soon faded into obscurity, only to be resurrected with the mid-twentieth century revival of interest in African American women writers. Jacobs continued her abolitionist efforts during the war and wrote occasionally for the abolitionist press. After the war, she worked during Reconstruction in the South. Jacobs’s autobiography stands among thousands of other written and oral slave testimonies and shares with many of them the themes of bondage, suffering, selfdefinition, self-assertion, and escape to freedom. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs speaks her own life in her own voice. Prior to the appearance of slave narrative, the black abolitionist press, and the first black-authored fiction, African American experience was most often portrayed in literature as an objectified “problem” by white writers. In her autobiography, Jacobs takes the subjective stance of a black woman defining her own experience from a viewpoint deeply rooted in the black slave community. In doing so, she poses a sophisticated and fundamental challenge to white slaveholding American culture. Bibliography Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. A valuable exploration of African American autobiography and slave narrative. Includes a long section on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that places Jacobs’s work in relation to other African American autobiography. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. 2d ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. A useful history of the development of the slave-narrative genre. Harding, Vincent. There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. A passionate, scholarly, and detailed study of early African American history (to 1865). Excellent source for understanding Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the broader context of antebellum black activism. Includes an excellent bibliography and thorough documentation. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by L. Maria Child and Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. An excellent source for several reasons. Yellin provides a substantive historical and analytical introduction to the text, with an interesting feminist critique. She has extensively documented the historical facts, chronology, and personages in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and provides samples of Jacobs’s correspondence and photographs. Wearn, Mary McCartin. Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2008. Includes a chapter on the relationship between motherhood and gold in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

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Williams, Kenny J. They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 17871930. Nashville, Tenn.: Townsend Press, 1970. Chapter 3 discusses the structure of the slave narrative. Sharon Carson

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INFANTS OF THE SPRING Author: Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Satire Time of plot: Mid-1920’s Locale: Harlem, New York First published: 1932 Principal characters: Raymond Taylor, a young black writer Paul Arbian, a daring writer and painter Stephen Jorgenson, a student from Copenhagen, for a short while a roommate to Raymond Samuel Carter, another white character, a liberal missionary with a goal of “saving” black people Eustace Savoy, a would-be classical singer who disavows all interest in Negro spirituals Pelham Gaylord (George Jones), a would-be portrait artist Euphoria Blake, the owner of “Niggeratti Manor,” where many of the characters live Lucille, Raymond’s confidante and sometimes girlfriend The Novel Infants of the Spring is a satire of the temper and of the major and minor figures of the Harlem Renaissance. As such, the novel details a number of artists and their struggles to be faithful to their artistic visions, along with their knowledge that what they produce has consequences for African Americans as a group. Efforts to maintain artistic integrity while promoting social causes produce individuals who are often culturally confused and display divided loyalties. The characters who live at Niggeratti Manor, a fictional Harlem brownstone that has a real-life counterpart, are mainly younger artists trying to arrive on the literary, artistic, and music scenes. Many of them perceive a mission to produce a countermovement to the ideology advocated by the Harlem Renaissance’s more notable and older members. Raymond Taylor, the central consciousness, is one of the manor’s more talented writers and offers a running commentary on action at the manor. The plot of the novel moves forward when Raymond meets Stephen Jorgenson, a graduate student from Copenhagen, Denmark, who has come to New York to study for a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Raymond and Stephen become instant friends. When they become roommates, the two are constantly together, so that when Raymond comments on what is happening

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at the manor, he and Stephen spend long hours discussing it. Moreover, Stephen is initially fascinated with black people, their culture, and their struggles for racial equality and artistic integrity. Soon, though, Stephen’s Scandinavian upbringing, coupled with an interest in Raymond that he cannot explain, causes him to judge the residents of the manor. He tires of their drunken escapades, their attacks on the missionary Samuel Carter, and their inability to get anything done. His talks with Raymond become tinctured with a veiled acidity that sours their relationship. Before this rupture in their friendship, a number of events take place at the manor that move the plot forward and showcase the odd cast of residents. Paul Arbian constantly tries to shock people with overt discussion of his bisexual nature. He even brings to one of the parties a young man who, he promises, will disrobe for the crowd at a designated time. Eustace Savoy, in his failure to accept his black musical heritage of Negro spirituals, disgusts Raymond, Stephen, Paul, and others. Most believe that his hatred of his culture and his desire to express European classical music is a symptom of what is wrong with the ideology of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. Pelham Gaylord, who has little talent as a portrait artist, is arrested for raping a teenage girl who lives on the third floor of the manor with her mother. His arrest brings a certain amount of scandal to the manor that Dr. Parkes (Thurman’s satirical treatment of Alain Locke) thinks is detrimental to what the older generation of black leaders has been trying to accomplish. Dr. Parkes’s control over the Harlem Renaissance’s acceptable forms of creative expression is captured in a scene at the manor. Several recognized artists join the manor’s usual crew for a “distinguished salon,” with Dr. Parkes presiding. Dr. Parkes comments that African Americans’ future depends on what these artists create and how they carry themselves. Much dissenting discussion ensues. This and other similar events spell the demise of Niggeratti Manor, and it is not long before Euphoria Blake, the landlord, gives all the artists eviction notices. She concedes that her experiment has failed. At the novel’s end, most of the manor residents have retreated from their earlier lofty and unrealistic goals of creating art that makes a difference. Paul Arbian, in his final effort to both shock and to create something new, commits suicide, with the pages of an experimental novel he has written all around his body. Only Raymond seems destined to create the kind of work the others had wanted to. The Characters As a satirist, Thurman has some help in his creation of characters, for many of them follow closely the known traits of their real counterparts. This is especially true in his depiction of major players of the Harlem Renaissance who are only minor characters in Infants of the Spring. During the scene in which Dr. Parkes presides over his “distinguished salon,” numerous artists are presented, and each conveys a sense of the person on which he or she is modeled. Sweetie May Carr (Zora Neale Hurston) is a short-story writer who, the narrator

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records, is known more for her outrageous and ribald behavior than for any significant literary production. She is depicted as acting in the manner preferred by her patrons— she is primitive and agreeable, and she tells earthy “darky” stories as a way to dupe her patrons out of money. Tony Crews (Langston Hughes) is already a standout of the movement, having had two volumes of poetry published. White critics loved his work. Most black critics did not, because of his honest treatment of black urban life that included such subject matter as gambling, prostitution, and rent parties. He is quiet, always smiles, and maintains a sense of mystery. DeWitt Clinton (Countée Cullen), already praised by the older black leaders of the Harlem Renaissance as the poet to emulate, basically took black themes and used traditional Romantic poetic forms to express them. When he arrives at the salon, he is accompanied by his ever-faithful male companion. The major characters of the novel demonstrate Thurman’s ability, within satire, to create original fictional people. Most are highly individualized. Some, including Paul, had never appeared in African American literature before this novel. Raymond, as the novel’s protagonist and central consciousness, is the most fully realized of all the characters, and he, like other characters, shares an affinity with a real-life personage of the Harlem Renaissance, namely Wallace Thurman. Raymond develops as a character through Thurman’s use of the third-person omniscient point of view and through the abundance of dialogue that helps to sustain the novel’s structure. Quite simply, Thurman’s characters talk a lot. Raymond is variously portrayed as moody, impatient, a complainer, a literary snob (he thinks André Gide and Thomas Mann are the only living writers of any real merit), secretive, a first-class bohemian, and a conservative, a man not in control of his feelings but still deeply reserved. This duality extends to other areas of his life. He has yet to develop a satisfying heterosexual relationship with Lucille, his girlfriend. They talk, have dinner, and go to films, but they are not intimate with each other. He has made it clear to Lucille that he does not want their relationship to move to that level, yet he is jealous when she tires of his antics and begins to date Bull, a man who will treat her as a woman. When his friendship develops with Stephen, he is aware of how meaningful it is, but he does not consider an analysis of it that might suggest all the reasons why he and Stephen are so compatible. Stephen, however, has considered the possibility that he is in love with Raymond. Lack of encouragement from Raymond is as much a reason for his departure from the manor as is his discontent with the other residents. Raymond fares better in his analysis of the arts movement itself, with its rigid proscriptions for artists. Raymond is not sure if he can or should create art that is meant to improve the social conditions of African Americans. He is not sure if his art is to be political or aesthetic, and, like Thurman, he alternates between the two, perhaps favoring the “art for art’s sake” ideology. Paul, on the other hand, seems less concerned with what others might think of his paintings and drawings, even though he is always demanding an audience. Rather

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than spending much effort analyzing what he might do, Paul does. He is always working, even if he is drunk. He, more than any of the other characters, directly and consistently challenges Dr. Parkes’s way of thinking. Some of Paul’s characterization, and how he creates his art, relates to his sense of himself as the “other.” In acknowledging his bisexuality, Paul achieves a freedom that both assists him in his development as an artist and defeats him. His kind of freedom has few outlets in Harlem of the 1920’s. His need for attention and his final creation, his own death, capture his alienation and his uniqueness. Themes and Meanings Infants of the Spring is Thurman’s bold attempt to invigorate the Harlem Renaissance with new vision and new energy. As a satirist, his task is to make clear what needs to change and why it is wrong. In his creation of the artists who live at Niggeratti Manor, he presents their frustrations with the limits of the movement and criticizes their own lack of talent or vision to see alternatives. He creates characters and situations that demand recognition by the movement’s leaders. Dr. Parkes and Eustace Savoy personify what is wrong with the Harlem Renaissance. Dr. Parkes and his importance in securing patrons, publishing contracts, auditions, and exhibitions for the younger artists cannot be overlooked. He has made a career of guaranteeing to white people of affluence and influence that if they support black art, that art will not be inflammatory against them, will not disrupt the status quo, and will show that black artists can create in the genres peculiar to America’s European traditions. Those black artists who have made reputations for themselves have usually fulfilled Dr. Parkes’s expectations of them. Eustace Savoy is one artist who would like to follow in that tradition. He abhors anything black and thinks that Negro spirituals are beneath him. Instead, he wants to be a classical singer. When Raymond and Paul criticize him, they do so knowing that they also struggle to keep from selling out. Finding alternative visions is extremely difficult when there are no models. This idea is captured in Raymond’s struggle to write his novel. How can he create art, as a black man, when society as a whole, as announced by what the white patrons want from black artists and what black leaders want from black artists, has put him into a pigeonhole and tries with all its might to keep him there? His struggles to extricate himself from a cultural prison are seen in his relationship with Stephen, a friendship that transcends most societal scripts for black and white interaction, and in his discussions at the manor with other artists. What come from the discussions are new ways of envisioning artistic expression, but with those come the price the individual artist must pay for such expression. Even more important, Thurman suggests that only a great artist has a chance of overcoming cultural hegemony. This idea is presented through the large number of artists at the manor who, by the novel’s end, have been defeated in one way or another. Eustace is carted off to a mental hospital. Pelham is in jail. Bull has disappeared. Aline has opted to pass for white. Paul is dead.

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Only Raymond, who follows his artistic integrity and who has the talent to realize it, remains as a witness to the Niggeratti Manor experiment. Through his own writing, he can rectify, if only in a small way, the errors of those who charted the limited direction for the expression of black artists. With such an ending, Infants of the Spring is a harbinger of the demise of the Harlem Renaissance. Critical Context Thurman’s second novel, Infants of the Spring, is part of a body of African American literature, written during the Harlem Renaissance and after, that is as critical of black people as it is of the conditions that black people struggle against. Like his contemporaries Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes, for example, Thurman often turned his critical eye on black leaders and black middle-class society. Thurman’s attempts to offer alternatives for black artists, especially the younger ones who had something new to say, are contained in Fire!!, a literary journal he founded and edited, and Harlem, a more general and less bold periodical. Furthermore, in his first novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929), he castigated the black middleclass community for its negative treatment of darker-complexioned African Americans and its adherence to white middle-class values that often had little to recommend them. Thurman’s criticism of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance makes its most significant argument by exposing the ways in which the movement prevented younger artists from doing their work. He notes a contradiction when leaders such as Dr. Parkes (Alain Locke) insist that the movement intends to bring freedom and equality to black people but who then block the avenues through which artists might find access to an audience. Artists who challenge authority have little place to turn and no freedom to express creativity. This is disturbing to Thurman. His exposé of the temper of the cultural renaissance of the 1920’s is his resistance to cultural authority. Most initial reviewers of Infants of the Spring either liked it or hated it. Those who applauded it thought Thurman captured a reality that was lacking in other works of the period. Those who despised it thought it was wrong of him to present dissension among black artists and leaders to the general public. Infants of the Spring is a faithful account of one of the twentieth century’s most productive times for black artists and an account of the movement’s effects on some artists who wanted to be different. Bibliography De Jongh, James. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Examines major historical and literary events that made Harlem a culture capital. Suggests that Harlem as a cultural center is the main theme in Infants of the Spring. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976. General overview of the development of the Afri-

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can American novel. Sees Thurman as an important dissenter among writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Hutchinson, George, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Includes a chapter by J. Martin Favor comparing Thurman’s representation of the Harlem Renaissance to that of George Schuyler. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Good readable general discussion of the contexts and people that made the Harlem Renaissance so important to black culture. Significant discussion of Wallace Thurman. Perkins, Huel D. “Wallace Thurman, Renaissance ‘Renegade’?” Black World 25 (February, 1976): 29-35. Sees Thurman as an instigator of new thought and direction during the 1920’s. West, Dorothy. “Elephant’s Dance, a Memoir of Wallace Thurman.” Black World 20 (November, 1970): 77-85. A reflection on who Wallace Thurman was, by a woman who was a part of the Harlem Renaissance. Charles P. Toombs

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THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, OR GUSTAVUS VASSA, THE AFRICAN Author: Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) Type of work: Slave narrative Time of work: c. 1750-1789 Locale: West Africa; Virginia; the Atlantic Ocean First published: 1789 Principal personages: Olaudah Equiano, an African kidnapped into slavery Richard Baker, a fifteen-year-old American sailor Daniel Queen, a well-educated sailor about forty years of age Thomas Farmer, a benevolent English captain Form and Content The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African is considered the first major slave autobiography in English literature. It served as the prototype for the numerous fugitive slave narratives used in the fight against slavery by the abolitionist groups during the period prior to the Civil War. In the mid-1750’s in West Africa, the eleven-year-old Olaudah Equiano and his sister are kidnapped and sold into bondage. After serving for a short time as a slave in Africa and being separated from his sister, he is purchased by European slave dealers. Equiano undergoes the worst terrors of the Atlantic crossing known as the Middle Passage, an experience shared by countless Africans tightly packed in slave ships sailing to the New World and to a life of cruel servitude. The slave ship takes Equiano to Barbados, where he is put up for sale. He is not purchased there, however, and soon the frightened and bewildered youth is sent to Virginia. Eventually, a British Royal Navy captain purchases Equiano and puts him aboard a trading vessel. Equiano is called Gustavus Vassa, the name of a Swedish freedom fighter, and the young slave spends the next ten years working on various ships plying the Atlantic between England and the Americas. Thus, he is spared a crueler existence on a Caribbean or an American colonial plantation. He is befriended by two sailors, Richard Baker and Daniel Queen, who introduce him to religion and reading. Queen provides fatherly instruction and arouses Equiano’s desire for freedom. Of the several captains Equiano must serve, he becomes closest to Thomas Farmer, and it is Farmer who urges Equiano’s master to allow the young slave to purchase his freedom. Because of his enterprising activities, Equiano saves enough money to buy his liberty on July 10, 1766. Thereafter, he works as a free man on commercial vessels and at times sails on scientific expeditions to regions in the Arctic and in Central America. He also

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becomes a Christian convert and learns how to read and write. Finally, he settles in England, where he becomes involved in the controversial and disastrous plan to transport poor black men and women to the African colony of Sierra Leone. In the late 1780’s, the crusade to abolish the slave trade begins in Great Britain, and Equiano decides to write his two-volume autobiography, a harsh indictment of the institution of slavery. Analysis The long personal story of Olaudah Equiano established the slave-narrative genre in literature. Equiano takes the form of the spiritual autobiography that Saint Augustine used in his fifth century religious conversion work Confessiones (c. 400; Confessions) and adds to its pattern a new dimension—that of social protest. The spiritual conversion account follows a three-part structure in describing a life of sin, a conversion experience, and the emergence of a new religious identity. Equiano relates his spiritual undertaking in that manner, but he also parallels his battle to free himself from a life of sin with his struggle to escape from the physical bonds of slavery. The prose style of The Life of Olaudah Equiano alternates between a florid, lofty tone typical of many eighteenth century works and a plain and graphic manner of writing. The latter style is the one Equiano uses effectively to describe his personal experiences and dangerous adventures. Equiano presents himself in the early part of his narrative as a picaresque figure who is both fearful of and awe-stricken by the technical marvels of the white world. He allows himself to enter into the cultural life of the West, but he never becomes blind to the defects of that world. His personal experience with slavery and his fond, vivid memories of his African homeland impel him to reveal the truth about the evils of human bondage and to give an accurate account of the laws, religion, and customs of the African society. In a remarkable manner, Equiano also presents himself in his work as an enterprising and heroic character. He relates how he labors hard after his slave duties are done so that he can save funds to buy his freedom. This act, of course, is important to Equiano, and he shows this by including his manumission paper in the middle portion of his autobiography. From that point on, he writes about his life in a more exuberant and authoritative tone. He confidently describes how he takes on many different and challenging roles until he finds the one in which he feels he can do the most good— that of a fighter in the struggle against slavery. Much of Equiano’s autobiography is based on his extensive reading in the travel and antislavery literature of his day. He relies on the popular primitivistic works of the travel writers who paint edenic or idealistic pictures of remote areas of the globe. Equiano uses these descriptions of Africa and mixes them with his own recollections of the country of his youth. Despite his reliance on what he reads, he is always careful to present the true condition of the Africans, many of whom he sees as suffering under the corrupting influences of the white world’s technology and materialistic practices. Thus, he describes how Europeans introduce instruments of warfare on the African continent while they stir up animosities and greed to implement their trafficking in human cargo.

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Equiano’s work is the first slave narrative that details the horrors of the slave-ship crossing from Africa to the West Indies. This terrible ordeal is indelibly impressed upon the mind of the young slave, who witnesses men and women packed in the suffocating hold of the ship and experiencing filth, stench, disease, tortures, sexual abuse, and near-starvation. In a reversal of Western notions about native savages, Equiano views the white slave traders as cannibals and depicts his fears of being eaten by these strange-looking, long-haired, red-faced dealers in human flesh. As he writes his narrative, Equiano attempts to erase several misconceptions that his white readers possess about black men and women. The best way he believes he can accomplish this is by demonstrating through the account of his life that a black person is as much a human being as a white person. Thus, Equiano’s life achievements stand for the abilities of all blacks to fulfill themselves as members of the human race if they are allowed their physical and spiritual freedoms. He stresses through his own experiences that these dual freedoms are necessary for the attainment of a person’s proper role in life. Equiano shows that slavery degrades him but that his freedom permits him to succeed in many areas in which he can employ his talents and industrious habits. He strongly proves his point by depicting himself surmounting all types of obstacles, from his youthful slave days to his successful mature years, through much hard work and dedication. In this manner, he resembles his contemporary Benjamin Franklin, who climbed from rags to riches by means of the American free-enterprise spirit of self-reliance, diligent work, and frugal practice. Critical Context When Olaudah Equiano’s two-volume autobiography was published in 1789 in Great Britain, it was presented to members of Parliament and leaders of the antiabolitionist movement. The great founder of Methodism, John Wesley, had it read to him on his deathbed. Many of the important personages in England were listed as subscribers to the former slave’s work, which is believed to have played a major part in the eventual abolition of the British slave trade. The remarkable narrative was published in the United States in 1791 and soon became a popular autobiography on both sides of the Atlantic. It was translated into several European languages and ran through many editions until well into the nineteenth century. Equiano’s work is the prototype of the slave narrative, which became the chief instrument of the antislavery crusade. The former slave created a new literary genre when he combined the form of the spiritual autobiography with the story of the slave’s escape from bondage. This pattern can be observed in the fugitive-slave works of the nineteenth century. The most notable are Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and Harriet Ann Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Influences of the design also can be seen in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional slave book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and in many nonfiction and fiction works of twentieth century literature such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Critics see Equiano’s narrative as following not only a spiritual but also a secular

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pattern of autobiographical writing. The secular manner was popularized by Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791), in which the emphasis is on character development and material success. In like manner, Equiano is careful to make his point that a black person can develop and become materially successful through personal enterprise. Equiano, however, also stresses the fact that spiritual, personal, or material achievement can only be realized when a man or woman is given the freedom to accomplish all of this. Bibliography Andrews, William L. “Voices of the First Fifty Years, 1760-1810.” In To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Explains how Equiano’s unique slave experience permitted him to lead a bicultural life as a person who belonged to two worlds. Because Equiano understood the realities of both the Western and African ways of life, he was able to force readers to examine cultural values concerning race and morals. Costanzo, Angelo. “The Spiritual Autobiography and Slave Narrative of Olaudah Equiano.” In Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Analyzes the text’s position in the tradition of spiritual and secular autobiographical writing. Demonstrates how Equiano employs many of the literary devices that autobiographers use, such as the creation of a strong character type, the before-and-after contrast of an individual’s life, and the journey motif, which depicts a person undergoing experiences on the road from innocence to maturity. Edwards, Paul. “Three West African Writers of the 1780’s.” In The Slave’s Narrative, edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Discusses the importance and popularity of Equiano’s autobiography and explains the difficulties that the former slave encountered in his experiences with the white society. Describes how even a few members of the British abolitionist group revealed their racist attitudes toward Equiano when he assumed a significant position in the political struggle to end the slave trade. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. A useful study of the development of the slave-narrative genre. Langley, April C. E. The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Includes a chapter on the representation of memory and landscape in Equiano’s slave narrative. Williams, Kenny J. They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 17871930. Nashville, Tenn.: Townsend Press, 1970. A history of African American literature from Equiano’s time through the Harlem Renaissance. Angelo Costanzo

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THE INTERRUPTION OF EVERYTHING Author: Terry McMillan (1951Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: 2004 Locale: Oakland, California First published: 2005

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Principal characters: Marilyn Grimes, a forty-four-year-old African American woman confronting a series of life changes Leon Grimes, Marilyn’s husband, who also faces serious life changes Arthurine Grimes, Marilyn’s live-in mother-in-law and an important ally Paulette, one of Marilyn’s best friends, who is blissfully married for the second time Bunny, Marilyn’s other best friend, who has never married The Novel Like most of Terry McMillan’s novels, The Interruption of Everything is focused on a woman’s attempt to manage successfully her domestic and romantic relationships. Narrated from a first-person point of view, the novel is written in a conversational tone that invites readers to enter into the private world of a middle-class African American woman in the twenty-first century. The novel’s central tension arises from Marilyn’s realization that, in focusing so closely on the care and nurturing of her family, she has neglected to give herself the same quality of attention. When The Interruption of Everything opens, Marilyn is hiding in a bathroom stall at work, taking stock of her life, and trying to prepare for the reality of menopause. While she is hiding, she inadvertently overhears one of her coworkers discussing with another the infidelity of the worker’s husband. Readers are thus plunged from the outset into the social reality of many middle-aged women. Unbeknown to Marilyn, she, too, is about to become familiar with this particular social experience, as she will shortly discover that her husband, Leon, has also had an extramarital affair. In addition, Marilyn soon discovers that she is not only menopausal but also pregnant. In the midst of the upheaval caused by this discovery, one of Marilyn’s sons comes home from college to visit, her adult daughter announces her own pregnancy and imminent move to London, and her drug-addicted sister calls to let Marilyn know that their mother seems to be suffering from dementia. The ritual “Private Pity Parties” in which Marilyn and her girlfriends Paulette and Bunny indulge on a monthly basis are

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an insufficient antidote to this deluge of events, and Marilyn must find a way to take serious stock of her life. Marilyn kicks Leon out, sneaks away to a hotel for a weekend alone, changes her hairstyle, and fantasizes a reunion with her former husband, Gordon. All these courses of action fail to yield a resolution, and she realizes that she has been seeking the wrong resolution: Marilyn has been looking for a way to sever connections and distance herself from her family, but she finally recognizes that she cherishes these connections and has responsibilities as a mother, daughter, wife, and aunt that she cannot shirk. She also realizes that she has responsibilities to herself that require her to go back to school to pursue an M.F.A. and to communicate her needs and desires to her husband. The novel ends with Marilyn putting both of those plans into action. The Characters While Marilyn believes that her only role is as an emotional provider, McMillan constructs a nexus of characters in such a way that it becomes obvious that Marilyn enjoys the support of a large and varied female community across generational and class strata. In doing so, McMillan reveals Marilyn’s major flaw: an unwillingness to deal truthfully with herself and to expend the same best effort on her own behalf that she has expended for her family. Foremost in this supportive community is Marilyn’s mother-in-law, Arthurine. Though she is a source of much annoyance for Marilyn and a good deal of comic dialogue for readers, Arthurine is ultimately one of Marilyn’s greatest supporters. When the widowed Arthurine embarks on a late-life romance, she provides for Marilyn an example of how to pursue one’s own physical and emotional desires in the face of opposition. She is also instrumental in helping her son, Marilyn’s husband, recognize the ways in which his selfish behavior has harmed Marilyn in particular and the Grimes family as a whole. Marilyn’s friends Paulette and Bunny are also invaluable sources of support for Marilyn. They combine unwavering support for Marilyn during her emotional distress with sometimes brutal honesty. Paulette’s hot and heavy romance with her second husband at once belies the myth of one true love and demonstrates the resilience of the heart. Bunny’s refusal to commit exemplifies the possibility of contentment without partnering. Although Marilyn’s experience is solidly rooted in the middle class, it is not an insular experience, and working-class characters such as her sister, Joy, and the twin sisters Orange and Blue who braid her hair are instrumental in helping Marilyn identify her own fears and failures. The novel’s clear-eyed treatment of these characters neither romanticizes them nor dismisses their perspectives. In this way, it seeks to demonstrate the value of a rich and varied community. This valorization of community crosses lines of gender as well as age and class and may be seen in the characterization of Marilyn’s husband. Initially, it is easy to read Leon as a cipher for male middle-age crisis, and in fact a number of the female characters, intimates of Marilyn as well as strangers, assess him as such. However, the selfreflection and communication of emotion of which he ultimately proves capable

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invest him with a great deal of humanity and allows for an unequivocally happy ending—something remarkable in McMillan’s work. Themes and Meanings In its focus on the problems of a middle-aged African American woman, The Interruption of Everything reflects a common theme in contemporary African American women’s literature. Such literature often details African American women’s particular struggles to capitalize on newly available professional and economic opportunities while still maintaining their commitments to nuclear family, friends, and extended family. Women of all races have struggled with these sometimes conflicting goals. African American women, however, have a particular history of participation in the labor force and of confronting cultural attitudes regarding family that has heightened these tensions. Though African American women have always worked, they have not typically occupied well-paid professional positions. Even less frequently have they held such jobs at the same time as their husbands. The pressure then to make good on these opportunities when they do come along is increased. Given this social context, it easy to see why Marilyn’s sense of failure to follow through on the plans that she had as a young woman is magnified until she is almost crippled by it. Critical Context Like many novels by African American women aimed at a mass market, The Interruption of Everything has received little attention from academic critics. On the other hand, reviewers from the mass media have generally praised the novel’s consistency with McMillan’s oeuvre, the earlier works of which were instrumental in pioneering the genre known as “chick lit.” The popular success of McMillan’s fiction, though, has been both a boon and burden. While her work has sold well and her success has, possibly, made publication easier for other women, especially African Americans, her work has not been taken very seriously among critics of African American literature. This is in part because her novels relegate to the background those racial issues traditionally seen as proper to African American literature. Recent criticism, however, has begun to acknowledge the extent to which the central themes of community and the social roles of women link McMillan’s fiction to the work of those African American women writers who are perceived as more serious or literary. The questions raised in The Interruption of Everything regarding the extent to which a mother should sacrifice herself, and particularly her possibilities for creative expression, are consistent with the work of such African American women writers as Dorothy West (The Living Is Easy), Alice Walker (Meridian), and Tina Ansa (Ugly Ways). Bibliography Campbell, Bebe Moore. “Black Books Are Good for Business.” In Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the ’90’s, edited by Elizabeth Nunez and Brenda M. Greene. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Campbell’s essay, like the others collected in this book, was originally presented at the Fourth Annual National Black Writers

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Conference. In it, she discusses the important role of black women writers in dispelling the myth that black people don’t read or buy books. She also describes the multiple ways in which race can operate in black fiction. Ellerby, Janet. “Deposing the Man of the House: Terry McMillan Rewrites the Family.” MELUS 22, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 105-117. Argues that McMillan’s representations of family disrupt a patriarchal discourse of family values and expose the figure of the black matriarch as myth. Guerrero, Lisa. “‘Sistah’s Are Doin’ It for Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black and White.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 2006. Identifies crucial differences in the chick lit genre as practiced by black women and white women by comparing McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992) with Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996). Richards, Paulette. Terry McMillan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Situates McMillan’s work in the larger African American tradition and offers formal and thematic analyses of the author’s first four novels. Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Outlines the difficulties black women artists often face and acknowledges the courage women show in nurturing their artistry. Beauty Bragg

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INTIMATE APPAREL Author: Lynn Nottage (1964) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: 1905 Locale: Lower Manhattan, New York First produced: 2003, at Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland First published: 2004 Principal characters: Esther, a thirty-five-year-old African American seamstress Mrs. Dickson, Esther’s landlady Mrs. Van Buren, one of Esther’s clients Mr. Marks, a Jewish immigrant who is Esther’s fabric supplier Mayme, an African American prostitute George Armstrong, a Barbadian immigrant in his thirties The Play Playwright Lynn Nottage recommends sparse scenery for Intimate Apparel, a twoact play that flows from beginning to end with few blackouts or pauses. While the play employs realist narrative conventions, its locations shift quickly, sometimes within the same scene. The first scene depicts Esther, a seamstress, making a gown for a girl who is getting married downstairs. Mrs. Dickson, Esther’s landlady, enters and asks her to come down to the party. Esther, who has just turned thirty-five, lets slip her bitterness at seeing so many girls get married when she cannot find a man. Mrs. Dickson offers to set her up on a date, but Esther refuses. Mrs. Dickson gives her a letter from George Armstrong, a man unknown to either of them. The scene shifts to George dictating his letter, recounting his experience digging the Panama Canal and requesting permission to continue writing to Esther. In scene 2, Esther delivers a corset to Mrs. Van Buren, an upper-class white woman. Mrs. Van Buren discusses her discomfort at being asked why she does not have children, having been unable to conceive. She also believes that her husband has a mistress. Esther talks about her own lack of a husband and shows her client the letter from George. Mrs. Van Buren insists on helping Esther write a reply, and then George is shown talking about the difficulties with the canal and the comfort he received from Esther’s letter. Scene 3 opens with Esther visiting Mr. Marks, her fabric supplier. He tries to sell her some Japanese silk, and there is an obvious attraction between them. She grasps his hand, but he pulls it away, telling her about his betrothed in Romania, whom he has never met. Jewish law forbids him from touching any other woman. In scene 4, Esther delivers a corset to Mayme, a prostitute. Esther tells her about

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George and also about her dream of opening a beauty parlor with the money she has been hiding in the lining of her quilt. Esther lets Mayme read one of George’s letters, in which he has asked what she looks like. Mayme insists on helping Esther write the response. In another letter, George tells Esther that her letters are helping him fight off sin. Scene 5 starts in Esther’s bedroom, where Mrs. Dickson warns her that George writes too often and that she should not trust him. She tears up George’s most recent letter. The scene then shifts to Mr. Marks’s shop, where Esther asks why he always wears black clothing, and he explains his Jewish traditions. She touches his collar, and he does not pull back. The scene shifts again to Mrs. Van Buren’s bedroom. Mrs. Van Buren’s husband spat at her the night before for not being pregnant. Esther tells her of her encounter with Mr. Marks and helps adjust her corset. Mrs. Van Buren reveals her own attraction toward Esther. George is shown writing another letter, in which he acknowledges his fear of death and his dreams for the future. He asks Esther to marry him. In scene 6, Esther has accepted George’s proposal and is asking Mayme to be a witness. Mayme is wary of going into a church and refuses. Esther then goes to her room, where Mrs. Dickson helps her pack. She gives Esther advice about the wedding night and pleasing her husband, telling Esther not to let George hit her. George is seen writing a letter in Cuba on his way to New York City. Esther goes to Mr. Marks’s shop and looks for fabric for her wedding dress. Mr. Marks is clearly disappointed to hear that she is getting married, but he gives her the fabric free of charge. The scene shifts, as all the characters come out and perform some everyday business, until most of them exit, leaving Esther and George face to face for the first time, as they are married. Act 2 begins with George and Esther awkwardly talking in their bedroom after the wedding. She tries to divert his intentions by asking him about his family. She also gives him a smoking jacket that she has made out of Japanese silk. He tries it on but is uncomfortable in it. He grows tired of Esther’s diversions, and they consummate the marriage. As they are getting dressed afterward, Mayme appears and asks Esther how it was. In scene 2, Esther mends George’s shirt and tries to convince him to go to a church social at Mrs. Dickson’s. He has not found a job yet and wants to go get a drink instead. She gives him some money, but he asks her to give him all of the quilt money so that he can buy a stable. He also laughs at her plan to open a beauty shop. Esther goes to see Mr. Marks, who sells her some wool to make a suit, and they share a moment together. She reminds him of her marriage and says that she cannot come there anymore. In scene 3, Esther visits Mrs. Van Buren, who is happy to have her husband out of town. Mrs. Van Buren remarks that they have not written any letters lately. Esther becomes upset at her inability to read George’s notes and letters and worries that she might not love George. Mrs. Van Buren kisses Esther, who becomes upset and leaves. The scene shifts to George coming to see Mayme, while Esther sits alone. Scene 4 starts with Esther visiting Mayme, who is excited about a new man in her

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life. The man is married and has given her a nice gift: a smoking jacket made of Japanese silk. It is the one Esther gave George, and Esther becomes very uncomfortable. Esther asks Mayme what the wife must be feeling, but Mayme does not care. Back in her bedroom with George, Esther tries to become intimate with him, but he shrugs her off. She tells him to close his eyes and strips down to her intimate apparel, but he laughs at her. He becomes angry that she wants to sleep with him but will not give him the money for his stable. Thinking he will sleep with her if she gives him the money, she does so, but he decides to go out. They both reveal that they did not write the letters they sent each other. In scene 5, Esther confronts Mayme, telling her that George has left her and found another woman, and that woman is Mayme. Mayme is shocked and gives Esther back the jacket. She tells Esther that George came to the saloon and gambled away all of Esther’s beauty parlor money. George knocks on Mayme’s door, and Esther tries to convince Mayme not to open it. Scene 6 depicts Esther going to Mr. Marks and giving him the smoking jacket. She helps him try it on and smoothes out the wrinkles. He does not flinch. In the final scene, Esther goes to Mrs. Dickson, who is glad to have her back. As the lights fade, Esther indicates that she is pregnant. She begins to sew a new quilt. Themes and Meaning Intimate Apparel incorporates both feminist and racial commentary. Esther not only faces racial prejudice but also encounters obstacles presented by the gender roles into which her husband insists she must fit. Her dream of opening a beauty parlor is crushed when she accepts these gender roles, feeling that George needs the opportunity to make something of himself before she can. The ripping open of her quilt represents the destruction of her hopes. These gender roles also hinder other characters, including Mrs. Van Buren, who feels pressure from her husband to bear children, and Mayme, who feels she can do little else but work as a prostitute. Esther and Mr. Marks also face racial prejudice and cultural stereotypes and traditions that prevent them from acting on their mutual attraction. Critical Context Intimate Apparel was co-commissioned by Center Stage in Baltimore, Maryland, and South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. It opened in 2003, first in Baltimore then in Costa Mesa, before moving to New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company in 2004. It received mostly positive reviews and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, as well as several other prizes. It has since played as a favorite in regional theaters and smaller companies across the country, becoming Nottage’s most popular work. Critics have commented on its place in the African American theatrical tradition represented by August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry, who also represent African American history in their work.

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Bibliography Davis, Viola. “Corsets as Metaphor.” Interview by Simi Horwitz. Back Stage 45, no. 18 (April, 2004). Interview with the actress who played Esther in Intimate Apparel’s New York run. Gener, Randy. “Conjurer of Worlds.” American Theatre 22, no. 8 (October, 2005). Discusses Lynn Nottage’s use of history in her plays. Isherwood, Charles. “Intimate Apparel.” Review of Intimate Apparel, by Lynn Nottage. Variety 394, no. 10 (April, 2004). Review of the play’s Off-Broadway run. Lahr, John. “Unnatural History.” The New Yorker 80, no. 9. Psychological discussion of the characters in the play. Nottage, Lynn. “Out of East Africa.” American Theatre 22, no. 5 (May, 2005). Nottage’s account of a trip to Africa that influenced her view of the theater. David Coley

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THE INTUITIONIST Author: Colson Whitehead (1969) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Allegory; detective; fantasy; social criticism Time of plot: An alternate mid-twentieth century Locale: A large metropolitan city in the United States First published: 1999 Principal characters: Lila Mae Watson, a black female Intuitionist elevator inspector James Fulton, the originator of the Intuitionist theory of elevator inspection Pompey, the first black elevator inspector in the city and an Empiricist Raymond Coombs, a spy for Arbo Elevators who deceives Lila Mae by pretending to be Natchez, the nephew of James Fulton Ben Urich, a writer for Lift, the elevator magazine The Novel Set in the middle of the twentieth century in a large metropolis reminiscent of New York City, The Intuitionist is the story of the ordeals of an African American elevator inspector named Lila Mae Watson. Watson is already marginalized by her race and sex, and her adherence to the Intuitionist method of elevator inspecting causes her to be further ostracized by her fellow inspectors, who are Empiricists. Intuitionists like Lila Mae assess an elevator’s “health” by listening to it and feeling its vibrations. Once in contact with the elevator, an Intuitionist just knows whether or not it is “healthy.” In contrast, Empiricists inspect elevators by getting into their shafts and checking the mechanisms to see if they meet specifications. In spite of all her trials, Lila Mae is very dedicated to her work and has an outstanding inspection record that earns her the prestigious assignment of inspecting the elevators in the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building. Then, disaster strikes. Elevator number eleven of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building crashes in a free fall shortly after her inspection. It is an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Intuitionists and the Empiricists have both put forth candidates for the position of guild chair. Consequently, Lila Mae is convinced that the Empiricist candidate, Frank Chancre, who has known connections with powerful underworld figure Johnny Shush, has had the elevator sabotaged. Discrediting her, an Intuitionist, will cause the Intuitionist candidate, Orville Lever, to lose favor. Matters are complicated when the research papers of the deceased father of Intuitionism, James Fulton, are unearthed and Lila Mae’s name is found in the margin of one of the notebooks. Lila Mae becomes convinced that she must find Fulton’s blue-

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prints for the “black box,” a perfect next-generation elevator that will utterly change the landscape of the city. Her search for Fulton’s papers and her attempts to clear her name are fraught with deceptions, false leads, encounters with enforcers, and an everincreasing sense of danger. The novel concludes with a surprise ending: Lila Mae finds out that no one sabotaged elevator number eleven. She also discovers that Arbo Elevators is behind the ransacking of her apartment, that the company sent men to intimidate her, and that Natchez—the supposed nephew of James Fulton—is an Arbo employee named Raymond Coombs. Finally, Lila Mae learns that Arbo believed she had obtained Fulton’s writings about the black box. The floundering company sought these papers in order to save itself from bankruptcy. After a brief description of Fulton’s thoughts during his final days of work on his third and final theoretical volume, the novel concludes with Lila Mae alone in a room, working obsessively to finish Fulton’s work, to find the perfect elevator. The Characters The characters of Lila Mae Watson and James Fulton are central to developing the themes of the novel. Lila Mae’s father was an elevator operator in a department store. As a child, she was fascinated by her father’s uniform, which he brought home to show to her and her mother. The only African Americans allowed in the department store were those who worked there. Lila Mae is an obsessively determined individual; nothing deters her. She adjusts to her room, a converted janitor’s closet, at the elevator inspectors academy. She remains calm and focused when she finds thugs ransacking her apartment, when she is kidnapped by Chancre’s forces, and when she discovers Natchez’s deception. Even when she realizes that her life may be in danger, she perseveres to uncover the truth. She is unwavering in her efforts to be the best elevator inspector and to be acknowledged as such. Lila Mae has nothing in common with her only African American colleague, Pompey. He conforms and does what the “whites” want, because succeeding as an elevator inspector will enable him to provide the opportunity of a better life for his children. Lila Mae’s motivation, by contrast, is self-centered, and in this respect she resembles James Fulton, the father of Intuitionism. A light-skinned man, Fulton had been able to pass racially, but he had always known that his life was a lie: If his colleagues had discovered the truth, he would no longer have been accepted. Angered and wishing to get even, he created the concept of the black box as a joke. Lila Mae and Fulton are loners; both fight against a system that makes every effort to deny them the verticality (upward mobility) admired and sought by the society in which they live. Themes and Meanings Verticality and its adoration are at the center of the urban society in which the novel takes place, and elevators are both an instance and a symbol of that verticality.

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Everyone in this fictional society keeps up to date on elevators by reading Lift, the weekly magazine devoted to the elevator industry. The Department of Elevator Inspectors is one of the most important and powerful departments in the city. Progress, modernization, and improvement all depend upon advances in verticality, in being upwardly mobile. Thus, the novel, under the veil of allegory, addresses the issues of prejudice and equality: It portrays African Americans who are refused the right to move upward in terms of financial, educational, professional, and societal achievement. Colson Whitehead strengthens the impact of his allegory of discrimination and racial problems by setting it within a society that is technologically advanced to the point of futurism. This technologically enlightened society is in all other aspects decidedly unenlightened. Its citizens are mired in familiar problems such as political corruption, racial prejudice, and exploitive morality. Elements drawn from the detective novel—including mysterious meetings, mobsters, deserted warehouses, illegal entries, nocturnal investigations, and spying—all work to make Whitehead’s anachronistic society believable. The detective-novel ambiance also enables Whitehead to mislead both Lila Mae and his readers by offering them false clues. This technique serves to stress the difficulties of achieving upward mobility and acceptance in a racially prejudiced society. Critical Context The Intuitionist, Whitehead’s first novel, brought him immediate recognition as a talented writer. The novel earned the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award and was a finalist for an Ernest Hemingway/PEN Award. Whitehead says that he was first inspired to become a writer when he read the books of Stephen King; The Intuitionist evinces this influence with its eerie and often horrific world of elevators and elevator inspectors, where unexplained free falls are always possible and elevators seem to be living beings. The work has been acknowledged as breaking the traditional boundaries of fiction and eluding easy classification in one of the established genres of fiction. It contains elements of speculative fiction, of the detective novel, of allegory, and even of comedy. Whitehead feels that, within the canon of African American literature, his novel should be placed in the tradition of the intellectual black novel, represented by the works of Charles Wright and Clarence Majors. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Discusses the novels of Whitehead and others as embracing experimentation and abandoning the traditions and roots of the African American novel. Liggins, Saundra. “The Urban Gothic Vision of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999).” African American Review 40, no. 2 (Summer, 2006): 359-370. Places the novel in the gothic tradition because of its setting and the “horror” created by its allegorical treatment of the black struggle for upward mobility.

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Porter, Everette. “Writing Home.” Black Issues Book Review, May/June, 2002. Treats Whitehead’s obsession with place and its influence on his novels. Russell, Alison. “Recalibrating the Past: The Intuitionist.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 49, no. 1 (Fall, 2007): 46-60. Sees the work as an anti-detective novel. Discusses the functioning of textual authority in regard to race, identity, and history. Whitehead, Colson, and Walter Mosley. “Eavesdropping.” Book, May 1, 2001, p. 44. Whitehead discusses his goals in writing, the difficulties he encountered in publishing The Intuitionist, and his sense of himself as a black writer. Shawncey Webb

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INVISIBLE MAN Author: Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1940’s and early 1950’s Locale: The Deep South; New York, New York First published: 1952 Principal characters: The narrator, the canny, unnamed voice of the story Dr. A. Herbert Bledsoe, president of the college the narrator attends Mr. Norton, a New England financier and college benefactor Brother Jack, the leader of The Brotherhood, a revolutionary group Tod Clifton, a Harlem activist Ras, The Destroyer, a militant Rastafarian The Novel Having spoken in the prologue of his need to come out into the light, to surface from a building that has been “rented strictly to whites” and “shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century,” the narrator gives immediate notice that he is telling not a single but a typological, or multiple, story. Everything that has happened to him bears the shadow of prior African American history. He vows, however, that all past “hibernation,” all past “invisibility,” must now end. It falls to him to “illuminate”— that is, literally and figuratively to write into being—the history that has at once made both him and black America at large so “black and blue” but that has also represented a triumph of human survival and art. To that end, he steps back into Dixie and into a “Battle Royal,” a brawl in which a group of blindfolded black boys fight for the entertainment of whites. The scene gives a crucial point of departure for the novel. In fighting “blind,” the boys illustrate an ancestral divide-and-rule tactic of the white South; the boys’ reward is money from an electrified rug. Equally, when a sumptuous white stripper dances before the townsmen, an American flag tattooed between her thighs, the ultimate taboo looms temptingly yet impossibly before the black boys. Literally with blood in his throat, the narrator thanks his patrons and leaves, having received a scholarship to a Tuskegee-style college. He thinks, too, of his grandfather’s advice, that of a slavery-time veteran of black mimicry, who tells him to “overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction”—the words of the trickster as seeming “coon” or “good nigra” whose every act of servility in fact derides his white oppressors. Nor can the narrator be unmindful of a dream in which mountains of paper contain a single, recurrent message: “Keep this Nigger Boy Running.”

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At the college, he believes himself to be in a black version of an ideal Dixie. His life, however, undergoes a major reversal when he shows Norton, a white philanthropist, the incestuous “fieldnigger” family of the Truebloods, thus reawakening Norton’s own sexual hankerings after his recently deceased daughter. In order to find medical help for the overcome Norton, the pair moves on to The Golden Day, a black brothel for Army vets, and there, to his greatest discomfort, the narrator recognizes in the patients caricatures of the self-same black bourgeoisie he most aspires to join— doctors, teachers, lawyers, and businessmen. His resulting expulsion from the college, even so, produces more paper promises, in the form of supposed letters of recommendation to likely employers in New York. These letters, too, prove false, Bledsoe’s revenge on a disciple who has strayed from the appointed path. The son of the aptly named Mr. Emerson reveals the deception and guides the narrator to the Liberty Paints factory. Put to work making “Optic White,” he inadvertently adds “concentrated remover,” as if to insist upon his own blackness within the all-white grid of America. Moved on, he begins work in the factory’s paint-process section. The machinery explodes, however, and in the factory hospital he overhears himself being talked about as a likely candidate for lobotomy. Signing a release, he heads back to Harlem, taking part almost by chance in a spontaneous outcry at an eviction. Immediately, The Brotherhood draws him into its ranks, making him their Harlem spokesman and using him to organize black Manhattan into a political wedge against the ruling order. However, he also finds himself mythified into a sexual stud by one of the white “sisters.” Increasingly, too, he comes up against Ras’s fervid Black Nationalism. Most of all, he is held responsible for the disappearance of Tod Clifton, another activist; the narrator later sees Clifton on a street selling Sambo dolls and witnesses his death at the hands of the police. The narrator’s trial by The Brotherhood for conspiracy and “petty individualism” follows immediately, a species of witchhunt and “black comedy” culminating in the spectacle of Brother Jack’s eye falling out of its socket. The narrator takes to wearing dark glasses, with the result that a variety of Harlemites mistakenly think him to be Bliss Proteus Rinehart, a numbers man, lover, clergyman, and politician. However, the impersonation, which he comes to relish, proves inadequate when Harlem erupts. In the melee, he encounters a band of looters who plan to burn their tenement slum building; he then meets Ras himself, in the garb of a black Don Quixote, and finally runs into a pillaging, panic-driven crowd that chases him underground into a nearby manhole. There, he burns all his past “papers,” a briefcase full of false promises and impedimenta, prime among them his high school diploma, one of Clifton’s dolls, and the slip that contains his Brotherhood name. So “freed,” he endures a massive castration fantasy, and he resolves to abandon his assumed hibernation and to speak—to write down—this “nightmare.” If, indeed, his has been the one story, his own, it has throughout also been that of the African American community itself. He even suggests still wider human implications, and in such a spirit, “torturing myself to put it down,” he bows out by asking in the epilogue: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

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The Characters Foremost in the novel is the unnamed figure of the narrator. His is the voice through which the entire panorama of Invisible Man is reflected, a life begun in the Deep South and brought north to Harlem as America’s premier black city-within-a-city. In language full of richly oblique double-meanings and nuance, often bluesy and vernacular, he speaks of writing “confession,” of implying from within his specific case history that of an altogether wider, historic black America. He also serves as Ellison’s own surrogate, from start to finish cannily and reflexively aware of his literary “performance.” In both the prologue and the epilogue, and at each turning point in his career—the Battle Royal, the Trueblood “quarters,” the Golden Day, the Liberty Paints factory, The Brotherhood, his incarnation as Bliss Proteus Rinehart, the Riot, and his final “hibernation”—he functions as both the subject and the object of his own story, both the teller and, as it were, the tale. Few novels have created a subtler autobiographical self. The narrator’s encounter with Bledsoe, the president of the black college to which he wins his scholarship, introduces the first of a line of characters marked out by splits and self-division. In one guise, Bledsoe plays the perfect Uncle Tom, fawning and grateful, and dancing to the tune of Norton, the white philanthropist from Boston. In another, he plays the black despot, the college’s administrative tyrant known to the students as “Old Bucket-head.” Ellison so fashions him as a kind of harlequin, one self hidden within the other. Norton (“northern,” as his name implies) in turn acts out his double game. He can flatter himself that his “destiny” lies in helping black students to become dutiful mechanics and agricultural workers. However, when he encounters the incestuous Truebloods, impoverished black sharecroppers living in The Quarters, he reveals his own hitherto unacknowledged dark longings for his dead daughter. In the Golden Day brothel, Ellison has the veterans, ironically to a degree, associate him with a roll-call of other white would-be American messiahs, among them John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Jefferson. The narrator subsequently hears the sermon of the Reverend Homer Barbee on returning Norton to the college. This blind “Homer” preaches a truly parodic Emersonianism, a message of uplift at odds with the life actually led by black Americans within a fearful, racist white Dixie. On arrival in Harlem, the narrator meets one of the strong female presences in the novel, Mary Rambo. She takes him in, mothers him, and typifies a standard of black community care. He also meets in Brother Jack, the leader of The Brotherhood, another of Ellison’s deft caricatures. Patronizingly, Jack appoints the narrator “the new Booker T. Washington,” his personal apparatchik. He also speaks the language of “scientific terminology,” “materialism,” and other quasi-Marxist argot. When he leads a witchhunt against the narrator, only to have his “buttermilk” glass eye pop out, he grotesquely reveals himself for what he is, a half-seeing—or truly one-eyed— Jack. Tod Clifton, the Harlem youth leader, is the novel’s martyr figure. Pledged to fight

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black joblessness, the color line, and (at the outset) Black Nationalism, Tod is shown to move increasingly into a fascination with Ras’s Caribbean “Africanness.” That he ends up peddling Sambo dolls, then shot by a white policeman, and finally the name at the center of the Harlem riot that ensues, points to Ellison’s interest in the black activist as both individual and icon. In this, Tod links perfectly to Ras, The Destroyer, the militant Rastafarian whose politics recall the back-to-Africa nationalism of Marcus Garvey. However, if Ras derides The Brotherhood as a white-run fraud serviced by deluded black lackeys, he himself becomes a figure derided, an anachronistic Don Quixote replete with horse and shield. The novel thus returns in the aftermath of the riot to the narrator as once more the presiding “character” of Invisible Man, each figure he has put before readers part real, part mythic. Themes and Meanings Invisible Man tells an African American Pilgrim’s Progess, a modern black rite of passage. In part, its story could not be more literal, a South-to-North, Dixie-to-Harlem journey that recalls the movement of black Americans from the postbellum South to the northern cities. In equal part, however, the story operates as a kind of fantasia, a “dream” history, which serves as both the narrator’s past and that of most of his black American cocitizenry. As he looks back from his “border area” manhole, lit with 1,369 lightbulbs illegally running on electricity from a company named “Monopolated Light & Power,” he declares himself to be “coming out,” no longer either invisible or, as it were, uninscribed and wordless. In this respect, he offers himself as both an actual man and as a key figure from African American folklore, a “man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids” and a Jack-The-Bear whose time of “hibernation” has come to its appointed end. Dipping into blues and jazz, street talk and rap, he promises in the prologue to “irradiate”— that is, in every sense to seek to throw light upon—his own story and that of the larger American black-white encounter. Inevitably, the touchstones involve slavery, Reconstruction, the Jazz Age, the Depression, and interwar Harlem, with hints of the coming 1960’s Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man ranks as one of the most canny, daring characterizations in modern literature. Every action he takes, every transition in his life, almost everything he says, carries a double or emblematic implication without becoming simply or reductively allegorical. His role in the Battle Royal scene calls up the stereotype of the black male as pugilist, from slave fighter to Joe Louis. As a student, the narrator might well imagine himself as a would-be Booker T. Washington, but his goals are preset and accommodationist. In Trueblood and The Golden Day, he begins to see the “true” image white America holds of him and his community, that of either permanent inferior, sexual spectacle, or, at best, token professional. In the North, equally, he can work at Liberty Paints, but only in the basement, as a support figure for a white, one-color, America. In The Brotherhood, his party membership again rests less in his own gift than in his willingness to follow the

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committee’s dictates, the white-set political line. If he speaks on women’s rights, various of the white sisters fantasize him as a sex fiend, a stud. Even in his role as con man, he betrays his true inner self. Finally, forced by the riot to an “underground” self-reckoning, once again both literal and fantastical, he “sees” and in turn demands to be “seen” in a manner beyond myth or stereotype. His own black selfhood and that of his African American community at last, thereby, emerge on terms undetermined by others. This same doubling, or multiplication, applies to the other key presences in Invisible Man. Bledsoe incarnates a historic past gallery of “separate but equal” leaders, in one face “putt’n on ol’ massa” and in another acting the part of mean, self-serving authoritarian. Norton, likewise, imagines himself all good intention, but he is in fact the embodiment of condescending white liberal racism. In the North, Mr. Emerson proves less the reformer implied in his name than another white betrayer. Brother Jack, with his “political science,” proves as inadequate to the narrator’s needs as Ras, with his “Mama Africa” Rastafarian Black Nationalism. Tod Clifton, especially, moves from activist to figure of despair, as sad and ultimately self-destructive as the Sambo dolls he takes to peddling in the street. These and lesser figures—from Mary Rambo, a warm, transplanted black southern woman who befriends the narrator in Harlem, to Dupre, an arsonist-looter—in Ellison’s always inventive fashioning serve as both individuals and types, the one always in a teasing imaginative balance with the other. Undergirding the whole of Invisible Man lie Ellison’s organizing metaphors and tropes—invisibility and sight, vision and blindness, blackness and white, underground and above—a complex, supremely adroit creation of texture. If H. G. Wells’s science fiction classic The Invisible Man (1897) hovers behind the title, so, equally, do a host of other eclectic sources from Dante to T. S. Eliot. At the same time, and throughout, Ellison calls upon his intimacy with the treasury of African American music and folklore. Citing, typically, the old Louis Armstrong version of “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?,” the narrator, and Ellison behind him, answers with Invisible Man, storytelling with all the feints and improvisational riffs—and at the same time all the overall discipline—of a great jazz composition. Whether read as “confession” or as “history,” the book fuses its “high” references with those of black, vernacular culture, verbal and musical, its seriousness of purpose with a winning talent for humor and well-taken irony. Best of all, perhaps, it manages to transpose, brilliantly, inventively, the black and white of America’s racial makeup into the black and white of the written page. Critical Context Invisible Man quickly gained recognition as a landmark of African American, and American, literature on publication in 1952. Together with James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), it was taken to signal a black literary renaissance, a breakthrough from supposed “Negro protest fiction” such as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), or Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade (1947).

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Supported by writers such as Saul Bellow as well as by a host of fellow black writers, Ellison won, among other major prizes, the National Book Award for Invisible Man. There has long been agreement that the novel represents a pinnacle of African American literary achievement, with perhaps Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Native Son, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as matching companion pieces. Its rich, startling ventriloquy, command of image, and skillful use of vernacular ensure a rare feast of narration. Such qualities carried over into Ellison’s essay work, too, as collected in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). Occasionally, well-meant talk has arisen of a “School of Ellison,” composed, among others, of such writers as Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison, John Wideman, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, and James Alan McPherson. Ellison, however, remained resolutely his own man, and Invisible Man remains the upshot of a uniquely endowed imagination. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. “Myth, Legend, and Ritual in the Novel of the Fifties.” In The AfroAmerican Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Proposes that Invisible Man begins in medias res; moves simultaneously in linear, vertical, and circular directions; and offers, in its use of blues, jazz, wry humor, and a mythic death-and-rebirth motif, a “paradoxical affirmation and rejection of American values.” Bone, Robert. “Novels of Negro Life and Culture.” In The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. Argues that Ellison repudiates naturalism in favor of “postimpressionism.” The whole novel is angled to render “blackness visible,” a “laughing-to-keep-from-crying” blues, which depicts in its black narrator’s story the route out of illusion into understanding. Byerman, Keith E. “History Against History: A Dialectical Pattern in Invisible Man.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Sees Invisible Man as “a crucial text for contemporary black fictionists.” In each of the novel’s major phases, the college, the move to Harlem, and The Brotherhood, Ellison carefully undermines all fixed, cause-and-effect versions of history. Callahan, John F. “The Historical Frequencies of Ralph Waldo Ellison.” In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert S. Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Asserts that Invisible Man’s narrator learns the essential conditions of American life to be “diversity, fluidity, complexity, chaos, swiftness of change,” anything but one-dimensionality—be it racial or otherwise. History in Invisible Man thus means metamorphosis, “many idioms and styles” rather than the received writ of any one version. _______, ed. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. A collection of critical essays on Invisible Man written by a variety of scholars. Includes an Ellison lecture.

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Gayle, Addison, Jr. “Of Race and Rage.” In The Way of the New World. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. Suggests this “picturesque novel” to be a four-part history of the “black man’s trials and errors in America.” Argues that the book’s prologue and epilogue add up to a depiction of “soul,” “the richness and fullness” of black heritage. Argues that Invisible Man, however, is to be faulted for its final assimilationism, the flaw of believing in “the path of individualism instead of racial unity.” Ostendorf, Berndt. “Ralph Waldo Ellison: Anthropology, Modernism, and Jazz.” In New Essays on “Invisible Man,” edited by Robert O’Meally. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Interprets Invisible Man through three frames: as a series of ritual transformations, as a work of modernist tactics, and as a jazz improvisation. A. Robert Lee

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IOLA LEROY Or, Shadows Uplifted Author: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: The last months of the Civil War through early Reconstruction Locale: North Carolina; Mississippi; Georgia; northern United States First published: 1892 Principal characters: Iola Leroy, a mulatto who refuses to pass into white society Robert Johnson, Iola’s uncle Dr. Gresham, a white physician Dr. Frank Latimer, a black doctor from the South Tom Anderson, a heroic former slave Aunt Linda, a matriarch of the black community The Novel Iola Leroy: Or, Shadows Uplifted, a novel set at the close of the Civil War, is a tale of racial uplift loosely developed around the fortunes and misfortunes of the title character. The opening chapters focus on conversations among the slaves and highlight the masking in which they engage around whites to conceal their joy as they follow the progress of the Union Army. Robert Johnson, the most literate of the slaves, provides leadership and counsel as the Union Army approaches and the folk prepare for their lives of freedom. When the army arrives, Robert, Tom Anderson, and many others join in the fight for freedom. After Iola’s rescue from slavery, she is assigned to the field hospital as a nurse. Iola refuses Dr. Gresham’s proposal that she marry him and move to the North as his white wife. Harper follows these chapters with a flashback to nearly twenty years before the war. Iola is the daughter of Eugene Leroy, owner of a large plantation, and Marie Leroy, his former slave. When her father dies of yellow fever, Iola learns that she is black. She is sold into slavery along with her mother. After the war, Iola, in keeping with her sense of duty, opens a school for the freed, later destroyed by fire, and discovers that Robert Johnson is her uncle. They unite forces in their search for lost family members. During their search, they meet with the folk from the former plantations and learn that they are all thriving. Aunt Linda, a former cook, comments on the need for education, temperance, and moral training. All of Robert and Iola’s family members are eventually reunited, and with the exception of Iola’s brother Harry, who remains in Georgia, they move north to live with Robert. Harper uses their time in the North as an opportunity to comment on the racial prejudices existing there. Both Robert and Iola have difficulty finding places to stay, and

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Iola is fired from her job once it is learned that she is black. It is also in the North that the characters engage in a “conversazione,” a forum for presenting key areas of concern among black intellectuals: emigration, patriotism, education of women, and the moral progress of the race. The texts of some of Harper’s own speeches are incorporated into these discussions. Iola meets Frank Latimer, a black doctor from the South. They soon develop an attraction for each other and marry. A romance also develops between Harry Leroy and Lucille Delany, a schoolteacher from the South, who have both come north to visit. At the close of the novel, all the key characters return to the South and settle in the same area where many were once slaves. Dr. Latimer sets up a medical practice, and Iola becomes a Sunday school teacher. Harry and Lucille marry and return to Georgia to head a large school. Robert purchases a large plantation and resells it to his people as small homesteads. Thus, all the major characters devote their lives to the educating, healing, and training of the members of their race; they devote their lives to the “grand and noble purpose” of racial uplift. The Characters The protagonist, Iola Leroy, is light-skinned enough to pass as white, but she refuses to do so, choosing instead to devote her life to the improvement of conditions for all African Americans. Iola is the daughter of a Creole plantation owner and one of his former slaves. Iola is sent to school in the North, but when she returns to the family estate, she discovers that her father has died suddenly of yellow fever, that her sister Gracie is near death, and that she and her mother have been reduced to the status of slaves. Iola is rescued from slavery by Union soldiers and becomes a nurse at a field hospital. After the war, Iola and her uncle search for their lost family, which is eventually reunited and moves to the North. Her experiences with discrimination even in the North, however, heighten her awareness of the race problem, and after she marries Frank Latimer, she chooses to return to the South with him to continue the struggle for racial uplift. Her steadfast refusal to pass as white and her devotion to the causes of African Americans are clear indications of the strength of her character. Robert Johnson, Iola’s uncle, emerges as a leader in the novel’s first chapter, when, as one of the few literate slaves on the plantation, he provides information about the progress of the war. Robert joins the Union Army and becomes a lieutenant in a “colored company”; like his niece, he refuses to pass as white. Robert is an exceptionally admirable character; after the war, he sells his property and purchases a large North Carolina plantation, which he converts into a community of homesteads for the poor. Dr. Gresham, the white New England physician with whom Iola works in the field hospital, is a likeable character who helps to illuminate Iola’s integrity. He falls in love with Iola and proposes marriage to her on the grounds that she not reveal her race. She rejects the proposal, and when he encounters her again after the war, he accepts her final rejection lovingly and with respect for her fortitude. Dr. Frank Latimer, an African American doctor from the South who meets Iola in the North, succeeds where Gresham does not. Like Iola, Latimer is offered a life of

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ease (in his case, by a grandmother) if he will consent to pass for white. He refuses, giving many of the same reasons Iola gives to Gresham when she rejects his proposal. Their shared convictions make them a perfect match, and they marry and work together for the cause of racial uplift. Tom Anderson is among the first liberated slaves to join the Union Army, and he appeals to the post commander for the release of Iola. Although he lacks the literacy of Robert, Tom is well aware of the events unfolding around him and is eager to serve the cause of freedom. Tom dies as honorably as he has lived, saving a boat filled with Union soldiers by exposing himself to enemy fire. Aunt Linda, a former cook on the Johnson plantation, becomes the matriarchal leader of the local black community after the war. She furthers the idea of community among the newly freed, chastising those who sell their votes or drink excessively. Her entrepreneurship allows her to purchase property. As a successful woman, she introduces feminist ideas among the folk. Themes and Meanings Harper’s purpose in writing Iola Leroy, as expressed by the title character, was “to do something of lasting service for the race.” This purpose manifests itself in the novel’s prevailing theme: the imperative of placing racial uplift above all other goals, including passing for white or marrying solely for love or physical attraction. Four of the main characters in the novel are presented with the appealing option of bettering their fortunes by living as white persons, and all refuse to abandon their commitment to the race, voluntarily acknowledging their racial kinship. Iola decides to identify with her mother’s race in her rejection of Dr. Gresham’s proposal. She also rejects later opportunities to pass as white when she seeks employment and boarding in the North. Robert Johnson, Iola’s uncle, also makes this choice. When Robert escapes to the Union Army, a young officer suggests that he join the regiment as a white man, thereby improving his chances for promotion. Robert, without hesitation, rejects this idea, declaring his intention to remain in the black unit where his leadership is needed. His decision is based on duty rather than personal advantage. Harry Leroy, Iola’s brother, having spent part of his life as a white man, exhibits some reluctance to join ranks with his race. He learns of his racial connections and the demise of his family while attending school in Maine. When he declares his intention to enlist in the Union Army, the school principal suggests that he join the white regiment. Harry decides, as did Robert, to link his fortunes with the black race because of his desire to assist in its elevation and to find Iola and his mother. The last character faced with this decision is Frank Latimer, the grandson of a southern aristocrat, whose mother had been a slave. After he is graduated from medical school, his paternal grandmother offers to better his fortunes if he will forsake his racial heritage. He refuses her offer, explaining his decision later to Iola as one based on duty. Iola is also an early feminist, expressing the view that the woman who is able to support herself is stronger and happier and makes a better marriage companion than one who cannot. She herself seeks employment shortly after she moves north to live

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with Robert. This independence also is reflected in her determination to make a significant contribution to the cause of uplift by establishing a school and in her intention to write a book. The plight of the folk is another theme running through the novel, exemplified particularly through the character of Aunt Linda. Using dialect to signal their presence, Harper portrays the folk as intelligent, if not literate, and fully aware of what needs to be done to correct past ills, but they look to those who have the benefit of education for leadership. It is also primarily through conversations with the folk that readers learn of the prevalence of hypocritical religious practices. In addition to using the experiences of various characters to develop themes, Harper uses the narrative device of the “conversazione” and informal gatherings to air contrasting solutions to the “Negro problem”; these solutions range from emigration to moral progress. Commentary addressing these issues appears throughout the novel, establishing and reinforcing its didactic tone. Critical Context William Still, in his introduction to the first edition of Iola Leroy, admitted his initial concern that Harper would ruin her good reputation by writing on the subject of slavery, but he asserted that after reading the manuscript his fears were allayed. Iola Leroy, Harper’s first and only novel, was written when she was sixty-seven and had already enjoyed a distinguished career as a poet, essayist, and lecturer. Her decision to write a novel was based on her prevailing drive to do all she could in lasting service for her race. Originally conceived as a book to be used in black southern Sunday schools, the novel has much broader appeal as an extension of Harper’s rhetorical career. She spent much of her early life giving lectures on many of the same issues raised in the novel: abolition, temperance, education, women’s rights, and general racial uplift. Iola Leroy is important as one of the earliest attempts in African American literature to address this combination of issues in fictional form. One might claim that the novel is essentially a lecture dressed in a thin fictional garment. Harper’s purpose never changed, whether she was writing poetry, delivering speeches, or producing fiction. With such a strong didactic agenda, it should surprise no one that Iola Leroy’s primary purpose in the context of Harper’s life and the prevailing social exigencies was, in Harper’s own words, to “awaken in the hearts of our countrymen a stronger sense of justice and a more Christlike humanity in behalf of those whom the fortunes of war threw, homeless, ignorant and poor, upon the threshold of a new era.” Bibliography Carby, Hazel V. “‘Of Lasting Service for the Race’: The Work of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.” In Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Discusses Iola Leroy as a logical extension of Harper’s political activism rather than an aberration. The novel can be viewed as a continuation of Harper’s lifelong crusade against slavery, racism, and the suppression of black women. An examination of

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her speeches reveals that all the issues raised in Iola Leroy have already been addressed in her earlier speeches and poetry. Thus, the novel should not be evaluated in formal literary terms but in terms that locate it squarely within the political debates of Harper’s time. Christian, Barbara. “Shadows Uplifted.” In Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. Focuses on the contradiction between Harper’s public life as a lecturer and the concerns of the novel. After the war, Harper traveled extensively throughout the South, lecturing to and about impoverished black women, yet the novel centers on a refined and educated octoroon who advocates the right of women to work. For most black women, work was necessary for survival. This contradiction could be a consequence of the author’s attempt to write a novel that would help to break down the numerous stereotypes associated with black women. Foster, Frances Smith, ed. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: Feminist Press, 1990. Provides the literary, social, and biographical context out of which Iola Leroy and Harper’s other writing emerged. Harper’s literary canon begins with her poetry and extends to lectures, letters, essays, speeches, and finally a novel. By the end of her career as a writer, she was optimistic that, because of such intellectual activities, the race was experiencing progress. Schmidt, Peter. Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865-1920. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Includes a chapter on the cultural function of Iola Leroy. Places the novel within the context of a reading of southern fiction participating in and resisting the “colonization” of African Americans by white southerners. Washington, Mary Helen. “Uplifting the Women and the Race: The Forerunners— Harper and Hopkins.” In Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Focuses on the pressures under which black women at the turn of the century wrote, as they responded to the prevailing negative images of African Americans and women. The characters in the novel are given political rather than emotional or social roles. In all instances, their choices are based on the extent to which those choices enable them to articulate a political position. Watson, Carole McAlpine. “‘I Have Woven a Story . . .’: Uplift and Protest, 18911920.” In Prologue: The Novels of Black American Women, 1891-1965. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Identifies Iola Leroy as a novel with strong emphasis on the courage, intelligence, and morality of African Americans that exhorts readers to engage in activities designed to improve the conditions of black people. Sees Harper as offering numerous positive images of African Americans who unselfishly work for the betterment of their race. Shirley W. Logan

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JAZZ Author: Toni Morrison (1931) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1926, with flashbacks to pre-Civil War times Locale: Harlem, New York; Virginia First published: 1992 Principal characters: The narrator, never identified, she sees, hears, and knows everything Violet Trace, a woman born in rural Virginia, the third of five children whose mad mother drowned herself in a well and whose father visited the family occasionally Joe Trace, Violet’s husband Dorcas Manfred, Joe’s girlfriend, whom Joe shoots after he discovers that she has another boyfriend Alice Manfred, Dorcas’s aunt, who reared her Felice, Dorcas’s best friend, who becomes part of that “scandalizing threesome on Lenox Avenue” with Joe and Violet three months after Dorcas’s death The Novel Jazz is an account of both the personal and the historical. While focusing on the lives of Joe and Violet Trace, the novel also provides an account of African American life in the South from the mid-nineteenth century through the Great Migration that brought millions north beginning in the 1870’s and continuing in a steady stream into the twentieth century. The story of the Traces’ move in 1906 from Virginia to Harlem is part of the African American story. The novel opens and closes with the puzzling relationship of Joe, Violet, and Felice. The narrator, a strong and critical voice throughout the book, has access to the information readers will need to understand a fifty-year-old man who “fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going” and his wife, who cut the dead young girl’s face at her funeral. Like the Greek chorus, the neighborhood busybody, or perhaps more accurately the tribal storyteller who must get the story right because she is the only channel of truth and history, the narrator explains not just Joe and Violet, Dorcas, and Felice but the forces that brought them together in Harlem in 1926 and brings all African Americans together as a people. Although not presented in neat chronological order, the novel taken as a whole provides a fairly complete account of

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the characters’ and African Americans’ lives. As the narrator observes at the end of the novel, “Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say.” Joe and Violet are orphans seeking mothers and love, acceptance, and validation. Violet’s life is informed by the suicide of her mother, Rose Dear, after her husband left for a subversive fugitive political life and after her family was turned out by creditors. “Violet never forgot Rose Dear or the place she had thrown herself into—a place so narrow, so dark it was pure, breathing relief to see her stretched in a wooden box.” Violet’s youth is permeated with Grandmother True Belle’s stories of Baltimore and the beautiful blond child, Golden Gray, of her mistress, Miss Vera Louise Gray, and a local slave boy. When handsome Joe Trace falls out of the walnut tree under which she was sleeping and she chooses him, he is a substitute for that golden boy. Joe Trace is reared by the Williamses, a kind local couple who treated him just like one of their own six children. “That ‘like’ I guess it was made me ask her,” Joe says, “where my real parents were.” Mrs. Williams’s reply leads to Joe’s first remaking of himself: “O honey, they disappeared without a trace. The way I heard it I understood her to mean the ‘trace’ they disappeared without was me.” He thus chooses “Trace” as a surname. He changes again when selected “to be a man,” to be taught everything a man needs to survive in the woods and in the world by the best man in the county, the “Hunter’s Hunter,” Henry LesTroy. He learns well enough to track the elusive woman that Henry intimates is his mother and to track Dorcas across Harlem. Twenty years in “the City” find Violet silent and Joe longing to rediscover the feeling of young love. Although their circumstances have improved since stepping off the Southern Sky train that took them north in 1906, Joe moving from night-shift fish cleaner to hotel waiter to door-to-door cosmetics salesman and Violet progressing from domestic work to “unlicensed” beautician, their relationship disintegrates: “they were still a couple but barely speaking to each other.” Violet says, “Before I came North I made sense and so did the world.” The narrator warns that “the streets will confuse you, teach you or break your head” because the City “makes you do what it wants, go where the laid-out roads say to. . . . You can’t get off the track a City lays for you.” The track Violet finds herself on takes her at the age of forty to a “motherhunger” that makes her almost steal a child, hold dolls at night rather than her husband, and feel like such a divided self that one of those Violets cuts Dorcas’s dead face with a butcher knife hidden in a birdcage. The City leads Joe only one place, as the narrator notes: “you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses—young loving.” Having spotted Dorcas at the drugstore and again at her aunt’s apartment, Joe chooses her, an opportunity he has never had before. With her, he can talk about things—Vesper County, his mother, his changing selves—that he never told anyone. As the narrator notes, “That girl had been his necessary thing for three months of nights” until she left him for young men, dancing, jazz, and gin. He did not mean to kill her, but he needed to hold on to the “alive love” he felt for her. Such a love for Violet has faded and scabbed over. It is gone until Felice enters their apartment looking for the opal ring

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she had lent Dorcas the night of her murder. Her presence ironically renews the Traces’ marriage. As the narrator observes: “It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers,” when the “body is the vehicle, not the point.” Joe has killed Dorcas; Violet has killed those warring selves inside her, along with the image of Golden Gray that caused her so much self-hatred and disappointment. When Felice asks what remains, Violet responds, “Me.” Joe, Violet, and Felice are all at peace with themselves and comfortable once again in the City. The Characters Morrison chose to present the story of Joe, Violet, and the others through a narrator who is seemingly all-knowing though by no means objective. She is in everybody’s business not simply because she is nosy or wants to interfere but because she needs to understand people, their past, their circumstances, and their relationships. She tries to reveal the truth. She will also admit when she has had to imagine the truth, when she has fallen short in presenting it, and when she has failed. An individual’s truth is not easily discernible, and it is not apparent all at once. It also contradicts. Therefore, the narrator’s explanation of the events dominating the lives of a few people on Harlem’s Lenox Avenue during the first three months of 1926 requires an account of recent history, music, magazines, newspapers, and hairstyles. Although Joe Trace is a murderer, he is drawn sympathetically. The neighborhood women trust the door-to-door cosmetics salesman to come into their homes, to escort them home at night, and to warn the young ones of city dangers. He is their neighbor, their friend. Everyone knows that Joe killed Dorcas, but because no one saw him do it, because Dorcas’s aunt, Alice Manfred, knows the futility of calling white policemen to investigate a black girl’s murder, and because Joe has suffered so, he goes unprosecuted. Joe Trace does not conform to the violent urban stereotype. His strong back and keen knowledge of nature helped him survive in rural Virginia and gave him and his wife a poor but happy life. In coming to the City, Joe climbed the rungs of the ladder available to African American men. His desire to regain young loving and to fill the void left by his mother, who refused to touch his hand in the Vesper County woods, and by his silent wife, causes him to lose control of himself and his life. Understanding Violet is just as difficult. The fifty-year-old woman readers see at the novel’s beginning, one who drinks malteds laced with Dr. Dee’s Nerve and Flesh Builder in an attempt to regain her long-lost hips and who is called “Violent” for having cut a dead girl’s face, is fragile, fragmented, and silent. She is a woman who wonders what exactly Joe found in Dorcas and hopes to discover it by studying the girl’s photograph, placed prominently on the apartment mantelpiece. The narrator observes that Violet was not always “cracked” or divided. “I call them cracks because that is what they were. Not openings or breaks, but dark fissures in the globe light of the day” that led her to almost steal a child, to sit down in the middle of the street for no reason, and to say totally inappropriate things. She had once been strong enough to drive a team of horses, strong enough to claim Joe Trace when he fell out of a walnut tree. After Dorcas’s death and Joe’s sorrow, after she released her parrot that said “I love

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you,” and after “that Violet” had cut Dorcas’s face, she demands from Alice Manfred, “Tell me something real. Don’t say I’m grown and ought to know. I don’t. I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing.” Morrison provides glimpses of that orphaned girl haunted by her suicidal mother. She leaves readers with a woman who finds comfort under the covers with her husband of all those years, delighting in her new parakeet and the regular visits of a young girl. Dorcas, the murder victim, does not appear as victimized as one might expect. Although Violet wanted to love her, she proclaims her “ugly inside and out.” Felice denies that characterization but admits that “she used people. . . . Dorcas was cold.” Even the narrator, who can empathize with Dorcas’s need to explore, does not like her: “I always believed that girl was a pack of lies.” Dorcas loves an old man to appease her own sexual desires and leaves him for the same reason. She lets herself die with the feel of a young man’s arms around her, the taste of sweet liquor in her mouth, and the sound of jazz in her ears. Morrison’s narrator does not know everything. What she has not observed, she invents: the thoughts and feelings of characters, and events and people from their past. She is also self-corrective at times. When she thinks she has not portrayed Golden Gray as justly as she should, she admits it: “What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly?” Taking a deep breath, she begins again. “Now I have to think this through, carefully, even though I may be doomed to another misunderstanding. I have to do it and not break down.” What she produces, for all her self-censure, is a comprehensive portrait of intriguing people who surprise even her: “It never occurred to me that they were thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives together in ways I never dreamed of.” She gives the truth. Themes and Meanings For African Americans to survive, first, and then to thrive, Morrison insists, they must be at once creative and conforming, innovative and traditional. They must build upon what came before while imagining a new way. The jazz that emanates from the streets of Harlem and is the novel’s recurring motif embodies such qualities. Joe Trace, while wary of the rhythms he hears in doorways and from the rooftops, uncertain of what to make of the “sooty” guitar music played by the blind twins that could be contributing to Dorcas’s restlessness, knows what saved his forbears: “Those old people, they knew it all. . . . [B]ack then, back there, if you was or claimed to be colored, you had to be new and stay the same every day the sun rose and every night it dropped. And let me tell you, baby, in those days it was more than a state of mind.” Being new and remaining the same is exactly what jazz is about. The riffs are newly invented with each performer and performance, but the underlying beat can be traced way back and is the common force holding a culture together. Alice Manfred fears the power of such music. The drumbeat she hears on Fifth Avenue in 1917, as frozen black faces march past her and her young niece, draws her in, providing her with “a rope cast for rescue” from the alienation and distance from everyone that she has felt since her husband left her for another woman many years ago.

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That music, like that of the church, sustains, but jazz is dangerous, smells of flesh, and reminds her of “the life below the sash.” She believed the ministers and editorialists who claimed “it wasn’t real music—just colored folks’ stuff: harmful, certainly; embarrassing, of course; but not real, not serious.” Such music lures Dorcas to Joe Trace, nightclubs, parties, young men, and death. From such powerful forces, Alice eventually flees. The primary significance of jazz is the strength it provides and the positive force it represents. The narrator ends the novel with an affirmation of Joe and Violet Trace, insisting that “they are real. Sharply in focus and clicking.” This “clicking” can be heard in “the sound of snapping fingers under the sycamores lining the streets.” It is in the ankles and hips of young girls, in “the eyes of the old men who watch these girls, and the young ones who hold them up.” It is in response to the records playing on Victrolas. The characters in Morrison’s Jazz are all listening for that clicking. They sense an absence and try to fill it by searching for mothers, fathers, young love, love lost along the way, or children they thought they did not want. When some finally hear the clicking in a parade drumbeat or sitting in windowsills fingering horns, life does not change dramatically. It is simply real. A fifty-year-old couple shares dinner and a warm bed, entertaining a young girl as they all enjoy her latest jazz recording. A new parakeet will not sing until they take it to the roof “where the wind blew and so did the musicians in shirts billowing out behind them. From then on the bird was a pleasure to itself and to them.” Critical Context Jazz is Toni Morrison’s sixth novel. The Nation’s John Leonard has remarked, “Novel by novel, Toni Morrison reimagines the lost history of her people, their love and work and nightmare passage and redemptive music.” Having won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, Morrison was not content to repeat a successful formula; rather, she continued to take stylistic risks. Although some critics complained that Morrison’s experimentation in Jazz had resulted in characters who are more distant and less empathetic than those in her previous works, the book’s reception was broadly favorable. Morrison’s receipt of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature provided dramatic proof that her evolving approach was continuing to touch readers worldwide. Bibliography Gates, David. “American Means Black, Too.” Newsweek 119 (April 27, 1992): 66. A review of Jazz that maintains that the novel is not just about the story and characters but also about “the process of its own creation.” Leonard, John. “Her Soul’s High Song.” The Nation 254 (May 25, 1992): 706-714. A thorough critical examination of all of Morrison’s novels. Excellent short survey of her works, characters, and key themes. McDowell, Deborah A. “Harlem Nocturne.” The Women’s Review of Books 9 (June, 1992): 1, 3-4. Maintains that Morrison intends to animate “the dry and discon-

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nected bones of the black historical past.” Sees a direct connection between Jazz and Beloved, especially between characters. Miller, Jane. “New Romance.” London Review of Books, May 14, 1992, 12. Insists that “Jazz is a love story, indeed a romance” of older women and African American culture. O’Brien, Edna. “Jazz.” The New York Times Book Review, April 5, 1992, 1, 29-30. Admires the worlds of Harlem and the rural South evoked by Morrison but misses “the emotional nexus” provided by other writers such as William Faulkner and James Joyce in creating their own vivid worlds. Rubin, Merle. “Morrison’s Poignant Harlem Novel.” The Christian Science Monitor 84 (April 17, 1992): 13. Claims that the novel “demonstrates once again that [Morrison] is one of the most brilliant and inventive American novelists writing today.” Admires the novel’s musical quality and compelling characters. Tally, Justine. The Story of “Jazz”: Toni Morrison’s Dialogic Imagination. Hamburg, Germany: Lit, 2001. Extended, book-length study of the representation of character and culture through discourse in Morrison’s novel. _______, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. Collection of essays on Morrison’s work, including a study of Jazz and Paradise by Shirley Ann Stave. Laura Weiss Zlogar

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JELLY ROLL A Blues Author: Kevin Young (1970Type of work: Poetry First published: 2003

)

The Poems Kevin Young’s third book of poems, Jelly Roll: A Blues, is more a conceptual book of poems than a collection. Read in order from beginning to end, the poems tell the chronological story of a man falling in love with a woman named Rider, being painfully rejected by her, and reconciling himself to the loss. The book presents a three-part structure, and each part contains numerous poems that trace these events. Young presents the poems as “a blues,” a form of music first introduced to the United States by Africans during the slave trade. Young’s conception of the book as “a blues” is a literary conceit, an extended metaphor that serves to organize the work. Many of the poems’ titles are music terms from the blues genre, such as “Swing,” “Ragtime,” and “Ditty.” However, Young also reaches outside the genre for other titles: “Aubade,” “Cantata,” and “Bluegrass” are terms associated with other, very different styles of music. The poems comprise mostly unrhymed couplets of varied meter. The poetic style in Jelly Roll consists of short lines very economically expressed, producing a staccato effect with an occasional rhyme. An extreme example of this economy of style is found in “Zoot”: Speakeasy she. Am asunder. Are. She pluck herself, songing— I strum. Am.

Economical style such as this encourages varied interpretations of meaning. Another stylistic characteristic of the book is creative wordplay. For example, in “Song of Smoke” the speaker watches Rider: To watch you walk cross the room in your black corduroys is to see civilization start—

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859 the wishwhish-whisk of your strut is flint striking rock.

The compound word “wish-/ whish-whisk” playfully combines at least three ideas: the wishful yearning of the speaker for his beloved, the sensual onomatopoeic whishing of her corduroyed legs rubbing together as she struts, and the whisking or stirring of his blood at the sight of her. Perhaps a less effective use of wordplay is Young’s jumbling of familiar expressions to create new effects with language. “Errata” contains a number of words expressed in a dyslexic spelling, probably because the speaker’s love for Rider dizzies him. For example, “Baby, jive me gust/ one more bliss” and “you wake me meek/ in the needs.” Such wordplay pleases the eye and ear, but not every instance of Young’s wordplay is as pleasing: “Mill you larry me?” seems more silly than clever. Some readers may consider this wordplay excessive and uneven, even careless, but the degree to which wordplay appeals to a reader is subjective. The language and the tone of the poems derive from the vernacular language of American blues music, which was sung first by slaves and later adopted by sophisticated musicians. The music of blues has evolved considerably, but the essence of the music remains rooted mainly in feelings of loss and despair but also tenacity in the face of adversity. The poems of Jelly Roll, therefore, express the vernacular language and tone of the blues. Consider, for example, lines such as “She be the reason/ I am before you singing,” or you set yourself a spell and sing.

These lines exhibit familiar, perhaps even clichéd, characteristics of an African American dialect associated with the blues. They even adopt a musical cadence, as does the following: This town is twos— & tain’t nothing—without you.

Themes and Meanings Because the poems are presented as blues “music,” the themes and motifs borrow from those associated with the blues, especially loss of love. Every poem in Jelly Roll

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describes the effect of love, positive or negative, on the speaker. Several love-related themes recur throughout the book, including sexuality, love as a spell or affliction, love as a form of possession or domination, and an association between food and sex. These themes and many others typically associated with blues music are abundant in the poetry. Other recurring motifs associated with blues music include trains, fishing, stars and star-crossed love, and rural culture. The titles of the poems, mostly taken from musical terminology, often are keys to interpreting the poems. For example, the title of the poem “Calypso” is a musical term that refers to West Indian island songs, and this poem compares the speaker’s feelings as a rejected lover to an isolated castaway on an island: Why do you keep washing ashore here? bottled up words, abandoned unsaids

Other titles, likewise, suggest interpretations that derive from the definition of musical terms. Critical Context Kevin Young’s books of poems target themes associated with African American experience. His first book, Most Way Home (1995), portrayed African American experience in the Jim Crow South after World War II. His second, To Repel Ghosts (2001), was inspired by the paintings of the 1980’s New York City artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, an African American of Haitian and Puerto Rican ancestry. Jelly Roll, Young’s third book of poetry and a National Book Award finalist, also explores African American themes. In this book he follows a tradition of canonical poets, such as Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, and James Weldon Johnson, who experimented with the blues as an inspiration for their poetry. African American poets have been drawn to the blues as an inspiration, because the music is an original African American art form (though deriving from African music). The epigraphs included in Jelly Roll allude to this tradition connecting African American poetry to the blues. The opening epigraph consists of seven couplets from a song by Robert Johnson (1911-1938), a legendary blues songwriter and guitarist of the Mississippi Delta. Each of the book’s following three sections begins with an epigraph from a canonical African American poet: Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), and Jay Wright (b. 1934). Moreover, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks combined African American dialect and standard usage in their poems, opening the canon of poetry to new poetic language; Kevin Young continues in this tradition, especially in Jelly Roll.

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Bibliography Arnold, Robert. “About Kevin Young.” Ploughshares 32, no. 1 (Spring, 2006): 186190. Provides a biographical profile of Young, including information on his education, formative writing experiences, achievements, and awards; describes the scope of each of Young’s books and amply quotes Young on his artistic goals. Young is the guest editor of this issue of Ploughshares, so the issue as a whole is revealing of his personal aesthetic and his tastes in contemporary poetry and fiction. Jarmon, Mark. “A Life on the Page.” The Hudson Review 56, no. 2 (Summer, 2003): 359-368. Critiques five poets’ books, including Jelly Roll, praising Young’s clipped, improvisational style and his use of African American vernacular. Claims Young’s blending of vernacular and standard dialect connects this book culturally and stylistically to work by Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. Logan, William. “Satanic Mills.” The New Criterion 21, no. 10 (June, 2003): 68-75. Reviewing books by six poets, including Kevin Young’s Jelly Roll, the author praises Young’s creative wordplay but ultimately finds the book dispiriting, unable to capture the soul of blues music—meaning unbearable loss. Palattella, John. “Patrimony.” The Nation 280, no. 18 (May 9, 2005): 28-32. Reviewing five of Young’s books, the author describes Young’s method of approaching a book: He selects a genre or overarching theme and then steeps it in an African American cultural history. Most Way Home focuses on Jim Crow Deep South; To Repel Ghosts on the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat; Jelly Roll on American Blues music; and Black Maria on film noir. Palattella claims Jelly Roll and Black Maria are marred by weak puns and sloppy wordplay. Chris Benson

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JELLY’S LAST JAM Author: George C. Wolfe (1954); lyrics by Susan Birkenhead; music by Jelly Roll Morton and Luther Henderson Type of work: Play Type of plot: Fantasy Time of plot: 1885-1941 Locale: New Orleans, Louisiana; Chicago, Illinois; New York, New York; Los Angeles, California First produced: 1991, under the auspices of the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, California First published: 1993 Principal characters: Jelly Roll Morton, a legendary jazz composer Chimney Man, a combination of Saint Peter and Satan Gran Mimi, Morton’s grandmother Jack the Bear, Morton’s best friend Anita Johnson, Morton’s love interest The Play The first scene of Jelly’s Last Jam takes place in the afterlife, with Chimney Man serving as the conductor on the stage. The character of Chimney Man is a blend of Saint Peter and Satan, and his role is reminiscent of that performed by the ghosts in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). However, instead of a cold-hearted miser like Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge, Chimney Man’s responsibility is Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe Morton, known to his friends and jazz devotees as Jelly Roll. Jelly Roll has died, and in the afterlife he meets Chimney Man, who is accompanied by the Hunnies, a trio of comely backup singers who take on various roles and costumes as the play progresses. This musical, with a book written by George C. Wolfe and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, features the compositions of Jelly Roll Morton, the self-described “inventor of jazz.” Morton was a larger-than-life figure, a light-skinned Creole with a passion for fine clothes and fast women. He wore a diamond embedded in one of his front teeth, and his journey as one of the early high priests of jazz took him from his New Orleans roots to the stages of Chicago, New York, and finally Los Angeles. Before the era of bebop and big bands, Morton’s music served as a transition between the ragtime tunes of Scott Joplin and the more modern melodies of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. The play follows Morton’s career in flashback, introducing the audience to his early influences, including his serious-minded Creole ancestors. As Jelly Roll learns to play the harmonica, the trombone, and the piano in quick succession, his talent

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blooms, but his feet wander to the music joints across the tracks. He abandons the classical favorites in favor of jumping and jiving tunes, and he goes on to compose many “stomps.” He also takes to hustling pool, chasing women, and drinking all night. Gran Mimi, Morton’s grandmother and family disciplinarian, becomes a sobering influence in his life. She soon boots him out of the house, and Morton’s trek across America begins in earnest. Jelly Roll’s real sin, for which he must answer to Chimney Man, has nothing to do with wine, women, or song. It has to do with race. Jelly Roll is a light-skinned man, and he denies his heritage on more than one occasion. He puts on airs and abuses his best friend, Jack the Bear, a dark-skinned man. As Jelly Roll’s legend grows from jazz club to concert stage, Jack the Bear is right beside him, and his friendship and loyalty to Morton are unquestioned. A woman, however, comes between them. Sweet Anita is Jelly Roll’s equal, a beautiful, light-skinned, independent, and self-assured woman. She loves Morton, but she sees his nasty, cruel side, as he becomes wildly jealous of her attention to Jack the Bear. She toys with Jelly Roll, fanning his jealousy. Jack is just a friend to Anita, but she cannot tolerate Jelly Roll’s jealousy or his treatment of Jack. Themes and Meanings Jelly’s Last Jam was to represent the revival of the black musical, which would replace the sad, serious dramas that had dominated Broadway since the early 1970’s. Though it was entertaining, Wolfe’s book also touched two nerves with its audience in its frank exploration of both sex and race. The candid and open depiction of Jelly Roll and Anita’s physical relationship, along with foul language, caught audience members by surprise. W. A. Henry III, writing in Time magazine, observed: “The show takes a long time getting started, ends rather abruptly, and is needlessly vulgar along the way, including a prolonged bout of simulated sexual intercourse at center stage.” Wolfe’s intention was to portray black characters who lived openly and unapologetically, rather than as victims. His use of sexuality to achieve this goal, however, caused reviewers and audience members to shake their heads. While sex can be shocking, the play’s more controversial and thought-provoking theme was racial prejudice among African Americans. Going beyond the typical racism between whites and African Americans, Jelly’s Last Jam represents in its main character a black man at odds with his own race. A brilliant black musician from the South, Morton tries to pass himself off as white and belittles his own culture. This is the primary sin for which he is judged by Chimney Man. The idea that light-skinned African Americans could discriminate against dark-skinned African Americans and that the difference of a shade or two of coloring could be the basis for prejudice was thought-provoking. Critic Robert Brustein wrote in The New Republic, Intraracial class prejudice among blacks is sometimes related to shades of skin color. . . . But instead of dealing with issues of race or the resentments that blacks feel toward whites, Wolfe concentrates on how his hero’s loyalties and prejudices, if not his musical tastes, are determined by family background.

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Critical Context George C. Wolfe—a gay African American who was born and raised in Frankfort, Kentucky, and was educated at Pomona College—has earned many accolades during his impressive career as a writer, director, and producer. Wolfe was nominated for two Tony Awards for his production of Jelly’s Last Jam, recognizing his dual role as author and director. Wolfe’s earlier plays, including The Colored Museum (pr. 1986, pb. 1988) and Spunk: Three Tales (pr. 1990), heralded the arrival of an important voice. In 1994, he won a Tony Award for Best Director for his direction of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (pr. 1993). As artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Joseph Papp Public Theater, Wolfe has not shied away from controversy or creative license. Wolfe uses theater as a social and political tool. Jelly’s Last Jam moved from the West Coast to Broadway in 1992 with Gregory Hines in the lead role. In all, the production received six Drama Desk Awards and eleven Tony Award nominations. In a 1994 interview for American Theatre, Wolfe said, There is no purity in America. We’re all mutts, and we’re all informed by each other. I’m a composite, genetically, of a number of things—African, Indian, white—I found out a Polish gypsy is in my family. I’m a composite of those things, but fundamentally I’m an African American.

This message resonates in Jelly’s Last Jam, proclaiming that all men are the same beneath the skin and that trivial differences like class, race, or religious heritage are only excuses employed by the insecure to find an argument for artificial superiority. In a 1992 review for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote, The show at the Virginia Theater is not merely an impressionistic biography of the man who helped ignite the twentieth-century jazz revolution, but it is also a sophisticated attempt to tell the story of the birth of jazz in general and, through that story, the edgy drama of being black in the tumultuous modern America that percolated to jazz’s beat. And that’s not all: Jelly’s Last Jam, a show in part about what it means to be AfricanAmerican, is itself an attempt to remake the Broadway musical in a mythic, AfricanAmerican image. Mr. Wolfe wants nothing less than to do for popular theater what Morton and his peers once did for pop music.

Wolfe’s musical may not have fully realized its ambitions, but it did help transform Broadway’s preconceptions about what a musical should look like, paving the way for other African American playwrights to follow. Bibliography Brustein, Robert. “’Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That.” Review of Jelly’s Last Jam, by George C. Wolfe. The New Republic, June 8, 1992, 33-35. Sees Jelly’s Last Jam

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as marking a “genuine advance” in African American theater; praises both the dramatic and the musical aspects of the play. Henry, W. A., III. “Triple Threat.” Review of Jelly’s Last Jam, by George C. Wolfe. Time 139, no. 18 (May 4, 1992): 78. Negative review that notes Wolfe’s ambitions for the musical but finds the result “muddled.” Kinzer, Stephen. “Sixty Years After His Death, Jelly Roll Morton Gets Respect.” The New York Times, November 28, 2000, p. E1. Finds Wolfe’s portrayal of Morton unfair and questions whether it accurately reflects the musician’s racial attitudes. Kroll, J. “A Folk Hero’s Hot Odyssey.” Review of Jelly’s Last Jam, by George C. Wolfe. Newsweek 119, no. 8 (May 4, 1992): 66. Lauds Wolfe for theatrical innovation in the representation of African American experience. Nixon, Will. “George C. Wolfe Creates Visions of Black Culture.” American Visions 6, no. 2 (April, 1991): 50-52. Addresses Wolfe’s assessment of American and African American culture and the role of the latter in the former. Wolfe, George C. “Theatre and the Wolfe.” Interview by Ed Morales. American Theatre 11, no. 10 (December, 1994): 14. Wolfe talks about the nature of theatrical spectatorship and his humanistic aesthetic. Randy L. Abbott

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JITNEY Author: August Wilson (1945-2005) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Historical realism; social realism Time of plot: Early fall, 1977 Locale: A gypsy cab station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania First produced: 1982, at the Allegheny Repertory Theatre, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; 1996, in revised form, at the Pittsburgh Public Theater; 2000, further revised, at Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland First published: 2001 Principal characters: Darnell “Youngblood” Williams, a Vietnam War veteran and jitney driver in his mid- to late twenties Rena, Youngblood’s girlfriend and the mother of their young son Turnbo, a busybody older jitney driver Fielding, an alcoholic jitney driver and former tailor Doub, a Korean War veteran, pensioned railroad worker, and longtime jitney driver Shealy, a numbers taker Philmore, a hotel doorman and frequent jitney passenger Jim Becker, the respected head of the jitney station and a pensioned steel mill worker, who is in his sixties Clarence “Booster” Becker, the son of Jim Becker, who was recently released from prison and is in his early forties The Play Jitney is set inside a gypsy cab station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and takes place over several days in early fall, 1977. On the walls of the run-down room hang a pay telephone and a sign with owner Jim Becker’s rules, such as keeping one’s car clean, not overcharging, and not drinking. The play’s two acts are each divided into four scenes. The first act opens with Turnbo and Youngblood agitatedly playing a game of checkers. Fielding, noticing that his hidden gin bottle is empty, asks them for four dollars and is rejected. The phone rings, and Fielding answers it, agreeing to pick up a passenger. When Doub enters, Fielding tells him he needs four dollars for gas, and Doub loans it to him. Shealy enters, then Becker, and Shealy asks Becker if he can get his nephew a job at the mill. Becker says he will look into it. During this scene Becker, Fielding, and Doub all have occasion to criticize Turnbo for sticking his nose into other people’s business. The scene ends with Youngblood talking on the phone to a Mr. Harper about a closing date for a house he plans to buy. Youngblood learns his down payment does not cover a necessary title search on the property.

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In scene 2, Turnbo hits on Youngblood’s girlfriend Rena, telling her she needs a more mature man and that he has seen Youngblood running around with Rena’s sister. Later, Rena confronts Youngblood about his taking the grocery money and his running around with her sister. Meanwhile, Doub learns that the city plans to tear down the jitney station along with the rest of the block, and he confronts Becker about knowing this for two weeks without telling the drivers. Doub also criticizes Becker for letting the station go downhill, ignoring Fielding’s drinking and other drivers’ overcharging or their refusing to haul passengers’ belongings. Becker responds that he is tired of the business and thinking of quitting. The scene ends with Becker getting a call to tell him that his son is being released from prison the next day. In scene 3, Turnbo criticizes Youngblood for not giving Rena money to buy milk for their child and for, instead, running around with Rena’s sister. Youngblood hits Turnbo, who pulls out a gun. Becker breaks up the fight. Becker also tells Youngblood he cannot refuse to carry passengers’ luggage, and, when he sees Fielding drinking in the station, Becker fires him. Scene 4 takes place a half hour later, with Fielding and Turnbo talking to Becker’s son, Booster, who has come by the station to see his father. Becker returns and agrees to let Fielding come to work the next day if he is sober. Becker and Booster confront each other about the past. Booster received a death sentence (later reduced) for killing a white woman who falsely accused him of rape. Becker tells him that the sentence caused his mother to die of grief. Booster says that his trial wore his mother out and that Becker should have accompanied Booster’s mother to the trial, because she needed to lean on him. The scene ends with Becker disowning Booster. In act 2, Youngblood explains to Rena that he has been working night and day to earn money to buy a house for her and their son and that her sister has been helping him look at houses so he could surprise Rena. He took the grocery money so he would have enough to close the deal. They make up. On the phone, Becker talks to the personnel manager at the mill and convinces him to give Shealy’s nephew a temporary job. When Booster comes by, wanting to reconnect with his father, Becker ignores him and exits. Later, Becker calls a meeting of the drivers, saying they should hire a lawyer to fight city hall so they will not have to move out of the station until the city is actually ready to tear it down. He also gives the men a pep talk about keeping their cars clean and safe and being willing to haul passengers’ groceries and luggage. They provide a service to the community, he tells them, which is why they answer the phone saying “car service.” The next day finds the drivers reminiscing about Becker, who had gone to help at the mill and died in an accident when a bolt broke. Booster comes by looking for his father and punches Doub in the mouth when Doub tells him of his father’s death. Three days later, Booster enters the station to thank the men, who have just returned from Becker’s funeral, for all they have done. He tells them he is proud to be his father’s son. Starting to leave he stops to answer the phone with the moving last words of the play, “car service.”

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Themes and Meanings August Wilson’s ambition, which he fulfilled shortly before his death, was to write ten plays, each exploring African American life in a different decade of the twentieth century. Jitney, set in the 1970’s, presents a community threatened by urban renewal. Wilson told Sandra Shannon that it was important to him to show the jitney drivers surviving in jobs they created for themselves. The characters’ stories and conversations reveal their attitudes and values. Out of their interactions, especially those between Youngblood and Rena and between Becker and Booster, arise what Wilson considered to be the universal themes of love, honor, duty, and betrayal. Critical Context Wilson grew up in a house on Bedford Avenue in Pittsburgh. As a young man, he began frequenting a neighborhood establishment, Pat’s Place, to listen to the older men there and absorb the history and culture of the African American community reflected in their stories and conversations, much as it is reflected in the characters’ dialogue in Jitney. Such names as “Bedford” and “Pat’s Place” and the nickname “Youngblood,” which Wilson was given by the older men, find their way into Jitney, suggesting that the community of Wilson’s youth was an important influence on the play. Jitney was the first of what was to become Wilson’s ten-play cycle, and he revised it many years later, after he had written a number of the other plays. Jitney contains references to such characters as Bono, Pope, Philmore, and Memphis Lee, who are mentioned or appear in Wilson’s Fences (pr., pb. 1985) and Two Trains Running (pr. 1990, pb. 1992). So another important context for Jitney is the ten-play cycle of which it is a part. According to Joan Herrington, Wilson’s first version of the play was much shorter, and his revisions substantially developed the characters, especially the relationship between Becker and Booster. It is only in the final version, for example, that Becker decides he will fight city hall, and Booster answers the phone saying “car service,” suggesting he will pick up his father’s banner. Jitney and Wilson’s other plays have won numerous awards and are uniquely ambitious in American drama. They achieve Wilson’s stated goal: to put African American culture onstage and demonstrate its ability to offer sustenance. Bibliography Bryer, Jackson R., and Mary C. Hartig, eds. Conversations with August Wilson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Collection of seventeen reprinted interviews with Wilson. Wilson provides insights into his aim and technique in Jitney in his interviews with Sandra Shannon, Elisabeth Heard, and Herb Boyd. Elam, Harry J., Jr. The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Probing examination of Wilson’s plays, including Jitney, in a sociohistoric context; organized around key questions and themes that evolve throughout the cycle. Herrington, Joan. “Jitney: August Wilson’s Round Trip.” In “I ain’t sorry for nothin’

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I done”: August Wilson’s Process of Playwriting. New York: Limelite Editions, 1998. Illuminating discussion of differences between the original and the revised versions of Jitney. Argues that Wilson’s method of rewriting during the rehearsal process enabled him to make improvements inspired by the input of the director and actors. McClinton, Marion Isaac. Introduction to Jitney, by August Wilson. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2001. Moving account of the significance of Jitney and August Wilson to African Americans. Reed, Ishmael. Foreword to Jitney, by August Wilson. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007. Feisty discussion of Wilson’s play in an American racial and political context. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. August Wilson: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Provides an extensive chronology of Wilson’s life and works, 166 encyclopedic entries on such topics as the themes, characters, allusions, and events that occur in Jitney and Wilson’s other writings, and useful appendixes, such as a list of forty potential topics for writing projects. Jack Vincent Barbera

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JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE Author: August Wilson (1945-2005) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1911 Locale: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania First produced: 1986, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut First published: 1988 Principal characters: Seth Holly, the owner of the boardinghouse that is the play’s principal setting Bertha Holly, Seth’s wife, five years his junior Bynum Walker, a conjure man who claims the power to “bind” people one another Rutherford Selig, a peddler known for his ability to find missing people Herald Loomis, a man searching for a wife he has not seen for ten years The Play Many of the characters in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone are searching for something. This motif thus provides an important organizing principle for a play that does not aspire to tightness of structure. The story the play tells finds its center, however, in Herald Loomis’s search for Martha, the wife he has not seen in ten years. This search brings Loomis, with his eleven-year-old daughter Zonia, in the fall of 1911 to the boardinghouse in Pittsburgh owned by Seth Holly and his wife Bertha. Bynum Walker, one of the two boarders in residence, tells Loomis that the man to see if he wants to find his wife is Rutherford Selig, a peddler known as the “People Finder.” Loomis has just missed Selig, but he will be back next Saturday. Loomis resolves to wait. Bynum himself has asked Selig to find someone Bynum calls the “shiny man,” whom Bynum met only once, years before. The shiny man, as Bynum’s father explained to him, is the “One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way.” It was Bynum’s father who showed Bynum how to “find his song”; according to Bynum’s father, if Bynum ever sees a shiny man again, he will know that his song has been accepted and that he has made a mark on life. Bynum’s song is the Binding Song. Like glue, he sticks people together—but, he knows, “You can’t bind what don’t cling.” Mattie, a woman in her twenties, comes to Bynum for help. Her man, Jack Carper, has walked out on her, and Bynum is known as a rootworker, a conjure man, a man who can fix things. Will he use his powers to bring her man back? Jeremy, another

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boarder, not long from the country, offers to be Mattie’s man, at least for a while. Seth Holly’s watchful eye makes sure there is no carrying on in the boardinghouse, and his observations now tell him who Loomis’s wife is. Zonia bears a striking resemblance to a woman Seth and Bertha know as Martha Pentecost, a former resident of the boardinghouse. Seth, though, says nothing to Loomis, because he senses that there is something not quite right about him. Moreover, Seth, who runs the boardinghouse, makes pots and pans for Selig to peddle, and tries to get backing to set up a business, has enough on his mind without getting involved in other people’s affairs. By Sunday morning, Mattie has decided to move in with Jeremy. Before the day is over, another young woman, Molly Cunningham, has rented a room for a week, and Jeremy is immediately attracted to her. While waiting to hear from Selig, Loomis continues to act in ways that do not seem right to Seth. He goes too far, in Seth’s view, when he interrupts the juba dance that is a Sunday night ritual at the boardinghouse and collapses after uttering a vision involving bones walking on water. For Seth, this amounts to “carrying on,” and over Bertha’s objections, he tells Loomis that he will have to leave the following Saturday. Other residents will also be leaving soon. Jeremy has been fired, and he and Molly decide to travel together. That evening, Bynum sings “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” as he and Seth play dominoes. When Loomis insists that Bynum stop singing the song, Bynum replies that Loomis seems to him to be a man who has forgotten his song. Each person has a song, Bynum believes, and a man who forgets his searches for it until he realizes he has had it with him all along. Bynum has realized that Loomis is one of “Joe Turner’s niggers.” Provoked by Bynum, Loomis tells his story. In 1901, he was caught by Joe Turner, who hunts men as another might hunt possum, and was forced to serve seven years as an indentured servant. By the time he was free, his wife had gone. He has been searching for her ever since, sure that the sight of her face will give him the starting place he needs to begin the life that must take the place of the one taken from him by Joe Turner. What, Loomis asks, does Joe Turner want? He wants your song, Bynum explains. That is why, for seven years, Loomis could not let himself sing it. After all that time, he forgot how; but, says Bynum, Loomis’s song is still with him. “You one of them bones people,” Loomis says to Bynum. Bertha’s attempts to console Mattie after Jeremy’s defection are only partly successful, but Mattie does respond to Loomis when he asks her to be with him. She hesitates, though, because the power she senses in Loomis frightens her. “You’d use me up too fast,” she tells him. When Loomis tries to touch Mattie, he finds that he cannot. “I done forgot how to touch,” he says. On Saturday morning, Selig brings Martha to the boardinghouse. “I been looking for you,” she tells Loomis. She came to the North, she explains, because the trouble that black people were having in the South led her pastor to decide to move the church. Not knowing what might happen on the journey, Martha left Zonia with Mar-

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tha’s mother, who would keep her safe. She is, then, anything but a woman who simply walked away from her man and abandoned her child; she has been looking for them ever since she learned that Loomis had taken Zonia. During Loomis’s time away, however, she had to accept that he had died to her. She has mourned him and moved on. Loomis tells Martha that he has wanted to say his good-bye to her and to reunite her with her daughter. Loomis says he has done all he can for Zonia, who he says needs her mother. Loomis then angrily accuses Bynum of having bound him to the road. Drawing a knife, Loomis shouts that no one is going to bind him. Bynum says Loomis has it wrong; he did not bind Loomis to the road. “I bound the little girl to her mother,” he states. Concerned for Loomis, Martha urges him to have faith. Loomis replies that Jesus Christ is merely a white man “with a whip in one hand and a tote board in the other.” When Martha tells him that Jesus bled for him, Loomis replies that he can bleed for himself. Using the knife with which he threatened Bynum, he draws his own blood. With this act of self-assertion comes the realization that he is standing free on his own; he has found his song. Joe Turner has finally gone. Now Loomis can move on. Mattie follows him out the door. Looking after them, Bynum sees that Loomis is “shining like new money.” Themes and Meanings Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is set in Pittsburgh in the fall of 1911. Slavery is almost half a century in the past, but it lives vividly in the memory of African Americans. The end of slavery, moreover, has not meant the end of enslavement. There is still Joe Turner. In exploring such realities of history and memory, the play powerfully develops the themes of movement, stability, and permanence, especially as these engage the relation of the individual struggle for personal freedom and meaning to the promise of community and heritage. The enslavement of Herald Loomis by Joe Turner has both metaphorical and literal significance. As metaphor, Loomis’s enslavement refers to the African American experience of slavery. Loomis is torn arbitrarily from his family, as countless Africans were torn from their communities and forced into slavery and as many slaves were torn from their families. Loomis’s search for Martha recalls the quest for reunion that was the story of many African American families in the years following emancipation. At the literal level, Loomis’s experience underlines the limits to African American freedom in a society that had theoretically abolished slavery long before. He is a victim of an arbitrary power that can turn against any African American of his generation, especially, but certainly not exclusively, in the South. At both levels, Loomis’s story expresses the sense of rupture and disorientation arising from the experience of enslavement. The slaves at emancipation had been robbed of their African heritages; Loomis, three years after the end of his time as an

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indentured servant, or latter-day slave, still seeks a starting place. The boardinghouse to which his quest has brought him is not merely a neutral setting for the action. It is a rich, though unobtrusive, symbol. In addition to Loomis and Zonia, three other residents pass through in the course of the play. Others have come and gone before these, among them Martha Pentecost, the woman for whom Loomis is looking. The boardinghouse, then, suggests an image of people in transit, searching, restless, moving forward on hope. The boardinghouse itself suggests stability as well as movement. Certainly, it represents stability to Seth Holly. The son of free Northern parents, Seth has property and a sense of who he is and where he belongs. However, his attachment to his property and his obsessive accounting for time and money threaten, in spite of Bertha’s softening and humanizing influence, to harden into a posture of reaction and indifference. He is unable to see, for example, the limits on his own freedom imposed by the indifference, hostility, and contempt of the white men to whom he turns for loans. He does not seem to understand the full implications of his business association with Rutherford Selig, whose forebears were also “People Finders”—finders of runaway slaves for slave owners. Bynum’s situation is different still. His residency at the boardinghouse seems to be permanent, and it is perhaps permanence, rather than mere stability, that he represents. He is a conjure man, and, while Seth regards his activities as mere mumbo jumbo, Bynum stands for the survival of the African heritage that the slaveholders had thought to suppress. In one sense, at least, he is most certainly a binder, a binder of the present to the past. Thus it is fitting that Bynum leads the juba, one of the many rituals of ultimately African origin with which he is associated. It is also fitting that Bynum, through a pattern of call and response, leads Loomis through the enunciation of his vision. The vision of bones walking on water offers a complex recapitulation of the experience of being brought into slavery, a kind of memory that reaches back beyond the individual’s personal memory. When Loomis recognizes Bynum as one of the “bones people,” he is acknowledging in Bynum the incarnation both of the experience of slavery and of the triumph over that experience through the workings of the spirit. If Bynum represents a link between past and present in the African American community, he is also instrumental in Loomis’s finding again the song he has lost, enabling Loomis to affirm at last his personal freedom. As Loomis thus breaks the inner grip of slavery through his act of self-assertion, Bynum sees that Loomis is “shining.” As Bynum knows, Loomis’s shining implies the vindication and justification of Bynum’s life. Given what Loomis has been through, his shining also confirms the healing and creating power of the heritage to which Bynum gives flesh and blood presence. Critical Context When Joe Turner’s Come and Gone opened on Broadway in the spring of 1988, August Wilson’s play Fences (pr., pb. 1985) was still in its Broadway run, putting

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Wilson in the unusual position of having two plays running on Broadway at the same time. Both plays won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, as had Wilson’s earlier play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (pr. 1984, pb. 1985). Fences also won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. By the end of the decade, Wilson had clearly established himself as the most honored American playwright to emerge in the 1980’s. Set in 1911, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is one entry in Wilson’s ten-play cycle in which each play explores a different decade of African American struggle in the twentieth century. He wrote as a self-proclaimed Black Nationalist, but his mature plays are enthusiastically received by racially mixed, “mainstream” audiences. Indeed, Wilson’s nationalism does not manifest itself in overt denunciations of white racism, although an awareness of the history of the oppression and exploitation suffered by African Americans certainly plays a significant part in his work. In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the figure of Joe Turner unmistakably symbolizes the white oppressor, and Rutherford Selig engages in small-time exploitation of Seth and of those who use his services as a “People Finder.” Moreover, the white men who refuse to back Seth’s efforts to set up a business take their place in a pattern of white racism. Similarly, in Fences, the white baseball owners who have denied Troy Maxson and others their opportunity to play in the big leagues, and the sanitation department officials who reserve the preferred driving jobs for whites only, combine to impose limits on black aspirations. Ma Rainey and the other musicians are also victims of white exploitation in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Wilson, in a move of genuine artistic, ethical, and political affirmation, refuses to grant the oppressors and exploiters a place at the heart of African American life. Beyond question, they often define limiting external conditions on that life. Wilson, though, is concerned not with the surrounding conditions of African American life but with the life itself. The tensions, tragedies, and triumphs depicted in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and in Wilson’s other plays arise from within the African American community, out of the needs, hopes, and struggles of African American people. African Americans have, in Wilson’s eyes, their own identity, their own dignity, their own significance. They are not defined by their relation to the white world. Thus, Joe Turner can make a captive of Herald Loomis, but it is Herald Loomis, finding strength in reestablishing ties to his personal and racial past and to the African American community, who finally must set himself free. In his first successful play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wilson celebrated without sentimentality the genius of African American music. In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, he gave dramatic life to the belief that, in a cultural heritage ultimately African in inspiration, the African American can find an inexhaustible source of strength and renewal. Bibliography Bigsby, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collection of scholarly essays on Wilson’s plays, including studies of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and other individual

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works, as well as broader discussions of the playwright’s overall project. Brown, Chip. “The Light in August.” Esquire 111 (April, 1989): 116. Explains that Wilson has found a way to formulate his politics in his art; he emphasizes black life on its own terms, not in confrontation with the white system. Freedman, Samuel G. “A Voice from the Streets.” The New York Times Magazine 136 (March 15, 1987): 36. Notes that most of Wilson’s plays concern the conflict between those who embrace their African past and those who deny it. The plays reflect a positive sense of racial identity Wilson received from his mother. Harrison, Paul Carter. “August Wilson’s Blues Poetics.” In August Wilson, Three Plays. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. Discusses how Joe Turner’s Come and Gone operates outside the restraining logic of naturalism. Argues that Wilson has reclaimed the blues voice as the vehicle for black narratives and has reaffirmed the potency of the African continuum as a repository of values. Poinsett, Alec. “August Wilson: Hottest New Playwright.” Ebony 43 (November, 1987): 68. Poinsett examines how Wilson excavates much of his dramatic material from the blues. The song in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a metaphor for a cultural heritage African Americans should retain and celebrate. Reed, Ishmael. “August Wilson: The Dramatist as Bearer of Tradition.” In Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-seven Years of Boxing on Paper. New York: Atheneum, 1990. Reed asserts that Wilson is a “tradition bearer,” one who knows the old stories and reveres the styles in which they are rendered. Values such as self-reliance and family are among his major concerns. Wilson’s characters, Reed observes, are heirs to the disaster that occurred during the nineteenth century, when the gains of Reconstruction were forfeited. Reed also notes that more than Wilson’s earlier plays, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone contains elements of the supernatural. W. P. Kenney

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JOHN HENRY DAYS Author: Colson Whitehead (1969) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Experimental Time of plot: 1870’s, 1920’s, 1940’s, and 1996 Locale: Summers County, West Virginia; the South Side of Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; New York, New York First published: 2001 Principal characters: J. Sutter, an African American freelance journalist from Brooklyn whose “three-month junket jag” takes him to the John Henry Days festival in West Virginia John Henry, a hero of American folklore around whom the novel is framed Pamela Street, the Harlem-born daughter of a John Henry memorabilia collector, who attends the festival because of local interest in her father’s collection Alphonse Miggs, a railroad stamp collector from Silver Spring, Maryland, who attends the festival with ulterior motives Lucien Joyce, the president of a successful public relations firm and the creator of an infamous list of journalists who are willing to attend any public relations gathering Josie, the co-owner, with her husband Benny, of the Talcott Motor Lodge, who believes a ghost haunts the rooms and casts a pall over the festival Postal Employee #1 and #2, who serve as a chorus, commenting on the events in Talcott from the nation’s capital The Novel Loosely based on the printing of the John Henry Folk Hero stamp and the 1996 John Henry Days festival in Talcott, West Virginia, Colson Whitehead’s second novel comprises a prologue and five parts. The prologue consists of fourteen accounts proclaiming the pervasiveness of John Henry work songs and ballads and either claiming or disclaiming the actual existence of John Henry. Narrated in the third person, each of the novel’s five parts is composed of a series of vignettes, several focusing on John Henry himself. The rest focus either on a specific character who has an interest in or passion for the legend of John Henry or on the escapades of J. Sutter and other journalists in search of their next byline. The story line is layered and convoluted, and it unfolds incrementally. The legend of John Henry is interspersed throughout the novel. The feats of the

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“steel-drivin’ man,” who was instrumental in building the Big Bend Tunnel in 1872 for the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Railroad, are depicted in distinct contrast to “junketeer” journalist J. Sutter’s pursuit of “the Record,” as he attempts to surpass the mark for successive days spent attending publicity events. It is the launching of a Time Warner travel Web site and Sutter’s writing of an online article that brings him to Talcott. In order to piece together the series of vignettes and the novel’s five parts, a reader must determine how the panorama of characters relates to both J. and John Henry. Inevitably, the novel builds to a climax. True to the legend, John Henry accepts the challenge of racing the Burleigh steam drill, defeats it, and dies. J. helps Pamela Street bury her father’s ashes in an urn at an unkempt and uncared-for site near the tunnel where John Henry purportedly was buried. She has asked J. to return to New York with her before the festival ends. During the final event, Alphonse Miggs opens fire with a handgun he purchased in Maryland. Chaos ensues, and people are wounded, some fatally. While John Henry’s fate has become legend, J. Sutter’s future is unclear. The Characters The novel’s principal characters show growth and development only as they gain a greater understanding of John Henry. As a pulp journalist of the information age, J. Sutter serves as a modern-day antihero to John Henry, for whom “ballads, railroad hammers, spikes and bits, playbills from the Broadway production, statues of the man and speculative paintings” have been created and preserved. Through conversations with Pamela, who overcomes her hatred of a childhood sacrificed to her father’s obsession with John Henry, J. asks: “How long does it take to forget a hole in your self?” When J. and Pamela begin to recognize each other as more than festival-goers, they start to see beyond their egocentric selves. Conversely, Alphonse Miggs and Lucien Joyce never overcome their egotism. Miggs sees only an opportunity for his Alphonse Miggs Liberation Front. Joyce views the festival as a “slice of Americana,” worthy only of a public relations boon. Even Josie, whose premonition from the ghost is that some thing tragic will happen during the festival, remains at the hotel throughout, choosing instead to ingest combinations of pills left by her guests. The unnamed postal employees advance the plot, serve as vehicles for Whitehead’s experimental narrative technique, and show how contemporary society has become fearful and disengaged. Several minor characters are depicted to illustrate the broad historical and contemporary impact of John Henry in American culture. Among the panoply of supporting characters, Whitehead incorporates such historical figures as former postmaster general Marvin Runyon, who issued the John Henry stamp; sociologist Guy Johnson, who visited Talcott as part of the research for his book-length study of John Henry, published in 1929; and actor and social activist Paul Robson, who played the role of John Henry on Broadway in 1940. Noteworthy fictional characters include Jake Rose, who published a broadside of the John Henry ballad for Yellin Records in the 1920’s;

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J. Sutter’s mother, Jennifer, who as an adolescent purchased a copy of Rose’s ballad serendipitously from a Harlem music store in the 1940’s and learned to play the song against her mother’s wishes; and Moses, a blues musician from Mississippi who recorded a version of the song for Goodman’s Records in Chicago during the 1920’s. The novel also includes a series of vignettes devoted to J.’s fellow junketeers. Bobby Figgis, the holder of “the Record” J. is out to break, eventually “disappear[s] . . . devoured by pop.” Dave Brown survives and writes about the Rolling Stones’ 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He retells his experience as part of “junketeer lore,” which Whitehead parallels with the folklore surrounding John Henry. Only the journalist nicknamed “One Eye” is willing to risk everything to remove his name from “the List,” Joyce’s infamous list of journalists willing to attend any public relations gathering. Themes and Meanings Working in counterpoint, Whitehead structures the novel in such a way that the two main stories parallel each other. The “industrial age-information age” design shows how John Henry, J. Sutter, and other characters all attempt to overcome the challenge of humans against machines, so that this theme is played out in a variety of ways over the course of the novel. As a flesh-and-blood John Henry, the “steel-drivin’ man” accepts his fate, resigned to live out his destiny. He is both heroic and sacrificial, worthy of the stories, songs, artwork, and scholarship devoted to his existence and achievements, yet a former slave who becomes an “everyman” sacrificed to progress and industrialization. Meanwhile, the up-and-coming junketeer par excellence, J. refers to Lucien Joyce’s List as “a machine to keep the media-saturated society up and running.” As a temp working service-oriented jobs in New York before coming to Talcott, Pamela helped install a “data entry interface . . . called the Tool.” Once the Tool was in place, all the temps were asked to move on to other jobs. Even Moses, the blues musician, “wanted to beat the machine” at Goodman’s Records by singing his version of the “John Henry” ballad better at his next live performance. By depicting the human cost of the struggle against technology and mechanization, Whitehead exposes individual, racial, and cultural exploitation. Only J. Sutter and Pamela Street exhibit the potential to overcome such exploitation. Critical Context John Henry Days met with minimal critical analysis upon publication. What has been written about the novel focuses on Whitehead’s creative use of John Henry, his satirizing of advertising and the language of public relations, and his probing of the historical and contemporary conflicts between humans and machines. As a postmodern, urban writer, Whitehead is often compared to Don DeLillo. Within the African American literary tradition, John Henry Days can be read favorably in relation to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and Toni Morrison’s Jazz. The ongoing fascination with the legend of John Henry and its importance to

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American culture suggests that Whitehead’s novel will continue to be read, taught, and studied. Bibliography Cobb, William Jelani. “If I Had a Hammer.” Crisis 108, no. 4 (July/August, 2001): 66-67. Favorable review that emphasizes the novel’s satirical elements. Porter, Evette. “Writing Home.” Black Issues Book Review 4, no. 2 (May/June, 2002): 36-37. Explores Whitehead’s use of New York City in his novels, including John Henry Days. Thompson, Clifford. “Almost There.” Threepenny Review 23, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): 8-9. Argues that Whitehead’s first two novels show his promise as a writer, but his best is yet to be written. Whitehead, Colson. Interview by Suzan Sherman. Bomb 76 (Summer, 2001): 74-80. Interview conducted shortly after the publication of John Henry Days. Focuses on the novel’s theme of mechanization, the importance of the setting, and the author’s decision to use John Henry as a focal point. Wood, James. “Virtual Prose.” New Republic 225, no. 6 (August 6, 2001): 30-34. Compares John Henry Days with Don DeLillo’s Underworld, focusing on style, structure, theme, and characterization. Reads Whitehead’s novel allegorically. Kevin Eyster

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JOKER, JOKER, DEUCE Author: Paul Beatty (1962Type of work: Poetry First published: 1994

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The Poems Paul Beatty started his literary career as a performance poet, dazzling live audiences and readers alike. It is unsurprising, then, that each of the nineteen poems in Joker, Joker, Deuce showcases the extraordinary wit and verbal agility that often characterize the genre of performance poetry. Among other techniques, performance poetry often displays outrageous humor and compelling rhythm in an assault on traditional cultural attitudes. Many of Beatty’s poems do assail traditional culture, but they prove to be equally critical of the popular culture they seem to represent. The poem titled “Verbal Mugging,” which begins “this is a performance piece . . . ,” is representative in several ways of the volume and of performance poetry generally. As he usually does, Beatty omits capitalization and standard punctuation (“ancestors ive never even known”), as well as the final g in gerunds and gerundives (“lookin for vibrations”). His poetry also embodies multiple meanings, as in the title “Verbal Mugging.” “Mugging” can be either a strong-arm robbery or the act of clowning before a camera. Beatty’s poems are so full of surprise and stunning shifts of meaning that listeners and readers may well feel verbally “mugged,” though this poem’s lyricism keeps one from feeling attacked outright. The poem’s main focus, though, is on the other sense of “mugging”—cultural posturing. Beatty is unquestionably an angry young black man (thirty-two years old at the time of publication), poking fun at “North American Whitey.” He is also, however, savagely satirical about what he sees as ethnic cultural poses. “. . . i illustrate my words/ with some cheesy rip-off diana ross and four tops hand gestures.” The performer in the poem, relating the history of African Americans, progresses from slow solemnity to “a southern drawl,” then to “wallowing in the muddled dirt wrongs/ done to someone else . . . as i regale you with clichés and tales of ancestors ive never even known.” The poet, then, dislikes maudlin posturing in anyone, even himself. The selfmockery in “Verbal Mugging” is another trait representative of Beatty’s poems. In the end, he seeks genuineness, “lookin for vibrations that don’t stop with time.” This final line is about seeking a sense of rapport that is not confined to a few minutes’ performance. Beatty clearly finds cultural clichés to be personally limiting and burdensome. He deplores fakery and commercialism, preferring genuine feeling and thought. In one of the longest poems in Joker, Joker, Deuce, “About the Author” (a title drawn from dust-jacket blurbs in books), he skewers the use of once-inspiring artistic works— such as the Beatles’ Revolution 9—in support of consumerism:

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but everybody’s talkin’ about a revolution including four fab white guys in skinny ties whose music used to sell tennis shoes pre-spike . . .

“Pre-spike” alludes to a time before African American film director Spike Lee began to advertise Nike athletic shoes. Later in the poem, Beatty attacks the unreflective glorification of Martin Luther King, Jr.: this is mlk when i’m marching on Washington coolin my heels in a Birmingham jail backpedalin in Memphis running from german shepherds in selma cheatin on my wife in Hattiesburg [. . .] Heroes fall down and go boom

yes lord mmmmm hmmmmm yes suh

Elsewhere in “About the Author,” the narrator pokes fun at his own simplistic perception of racial injustice: we used to come home on college vacations pissed and miffed at the system open the fridge there aint no koolaid see mom how f**ked up sh*t is

The merciless satire displayed in these poems reaches its ultimate expression with the shortest piece in the book, “Why That Abbott and Costello Vaudeville Mess Never Worked with Black People.” The poem itself, shorter than the title, reads in its entirety: who’s on first? i don’t know, your mama

Joker, Joker, Deuce does not end on an optimistic note. The last poem, “Stall Me Out” (meaning to exclude one from the situation), has the narrator insulting and dismissing a poet: “no rhythm/ . . . constantly depressed clumsy no money/ . . . take your weak ass poems/ and go back to los angeles.” Themes and Meanings Beatty’s poetry contains an implicit ambivalence toward his own dazzling, satirical style and the antecedents of that style. “Look,” he once told an editor, “the base ico-

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nography of Earthbound blackness is the perception that it’s inherently lesser than . . . in an idiot savant-like manner.” Despite his satirical prowess, Beatty has also said that satire is like “the password to a speakeasy door,” behind which one can find both “the privileged and the servant class.” Thus, Beatty’s poems convey a profound uneasiness with cultural influences that engender a false sense of belonging. In “Verbal Mugging,” he considers how various periods of cultural history have all employed illusion and stage trickery to promote this false sense of belonging. He begins with nineteenth century dramatic narratives and moves to contemporary performance poetry: . . . wiping away the crocodile tears of happy endings in a make believe world where people speed listen and skim the poet goes round makin ends meet by beatin muthaf*ckas over the head with sounds bangin tuning forks on minds

The point of Beatty’s mockery is not to devalue African American culture per se. Rather, he strives to dispel sanctimoniousness, aware that a culture that takes itself too seriously is easily co-opted by the establishment. In “About the Author,” he spoofs the King legend not to tear down the civil rights leader but to debunk the popular compulsion to turn him from a flesh-and-blood creature into an empty icon who no longer inspires but becomes a target of petty-minded detraction. Beatty also employs savage humor to combat the simplistic notion that any cultural system can solve all existential problems. His poem “Tap Tap on Africa” concludes: so afro-centrism solves the problem by spray paintin the whole thing black

Joker, Joker, Deuce is a card game, a variant of the game known as Spades. “Spade” is also a derogatory slang term for an African American. Though Beatty has not publicly stated such an intent, a deliberate play on this word would be quite in character for this master of multiple connotations. Nor, perhaps, is it an accident that in the card game the jokers are the highest trump cards and that they outrank the ace of spades. There is abundant evidence that in Beatty’s work the comic sense outranks any sense of group identity. Critical Context Paul Beatty, though known as a performance poet, has also won a solid reputation in the academic community. Early reviews of Joker, Joker, Deuce, however, routinely

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labeled him a poet of the hip-hop generation. He bristles at that term, once calling the “generation” concept “a marketing niche passing itself off as identity. . . . They sell a dream and a version of inclusion to powerless and voiceless people.” Beatty lives on the edge of, and in deep distrust of, the avant-garde, especially when it refuses to laugh at itself. He cites Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) as an author who is solemnly revered but who herself indulged in lively raillery against the snobbery she sometimes encountered among her fellow African Americans. In the same vein, the cover of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor (2006), edited by Beatty, was illustrated with a watermelon rind positioned to resemble a smile. For this bit of satire, he paid a price in cancellations of interviews and denunciation by some other African American writers. On the other hand, some critics have suggested that Beatty’s explorations do not go far enough. Ishmael Reed noted that Beatty has been hailed as “the new Ralph Ellison,” because both writers railed at some of the same targets. In some works by Beatty, however, Reed has found the images to be hackneyed, thanks in part to the television culture that Beatty simultaneously celebrates and satirizes. “Paul Beatty has the talent and needs to explore new territory,” said Reed. “He could heed Chester Himes’s advice, ‘to think the unthinkable.’” Beatty’s poetic genre, performance, is often considered a recent phenomenon, but it dates from oral traditions predating written literature. Satire dates at least from the time of Aristophanes (c. 450 b.c.e.-c. 385 b.c.e.). Bitter as it may sound and ambivalent as its spirit may be, satire implies a hope that some ideal could one day be realized. Perhaps for Beatty that ideal is “vibrations that don’t stop with time.” In any case, he calls satire an effective force for social balance in all ages, “because nothing ever changes.” Paradoxically, this viewpoint, deeply rooted in history, makes him highly contemporary. Bibliography Amber, Jeannine. “Poetry Revival.” Essence 25, no. 5 (September, 1994). Beatty is the one a cappella poet among the artists Amber discusses in the context of café performance poetry. She emphasizes their multimedia collaborations and their vast difference from the “lofty verses” of William Shakespeare and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Daniels, Karu F. “Paul Beatty Talks to BV About His Latest Book, Hokum.” AOL Black Voices. January 5, 2006. Discussion of the humor anthology Hokum and its controversial “watermelon” cover gives Beatty the opportunity to expand on his theories of humor, satire, and the inherently limiting nature of contemporary ideas about race and culture. Hoagland, Tony. “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People.” The American Poetry Review, March/April, 2003. Hoagland celebrates poets of the past such as Juvenal, François Villon, and Jonathan Swift, for whom clearing the air of falsehood and sentiment was “a source of creative energy and pride.” He cites Beatty’s Joker, Joker, Deuce as a modern example of poetry in this vein.

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Peterson, V. R. “Word Star: Paul Beatty Writing to His Own Groove.” Essence 27, no. 4 (August, 1996). Peterson—one of the reviewers who refer to Beatty as “the premier bard of hip-hop”—discusses the outrageously plotted novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), in which Beatty satirizes racial stereotypes. Reed, Ishmael. “Hoodwinked: Paul Beatty’s Urban Nihilists.” Village Voice, April/ May, 2000. Reed enthusiastically praises Beatty’s talent and courage, comparing him with great African American authors such as Chester Himes, John O. Killens, and John A. Williams. Reed also warns about the pitfalls of “urban nihilism” in Beatty’s work and offers suggestions for Beatty’s ongoing literary development. Thomas Rankin

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JONAH’S GOURD VINE Author: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: The post-Civil War period through the early twentieth century Locale: Alabama and Florida First published: 1934 Principal characters: John Pearson, a minister and carpenter Lucy Potts Pearson, John’s first wife Judge Alf Pearson, a wealthy white landowner suspected of being John’s father Amy Crittenden, John Pearson’s mother Ned Crittenden, John’s stepfather Hattie Tyson, John Pearson’s second wife Sally Lovelace, John’s third wife The Novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine is a thinly disguised biography of Zora Neale Hurston’s parents, whose names she barely veils in the novel. The story focuses on John Pearson’s rise from a poor, illiterate Alabama sharecropper to the powerful, well-to-do moderator of the Florida Baptist Convention, to his subsequent fall from power and grace, to his painful resurrection and death. The narrative opens on a sharecropping farm near the Songahatchee River in Alabama several years after the emancipation. Amy and Ned Crittenden and their three sons, including John, whom Amy had before marrying Ned, live the typically dismal life of the southern black sharecropper—poor, perpetually in debt, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and generally hopeless. These difficulties, coupled with Ned’s heavy drinking and his near hatred of his wife’s mulatto son, make their domestic life a tragedy from which the sixteen-year-old John flees after he knocks Ned down for beating Amy. John finds employment and an entirely new way of life on the plantation of Judge Alf Pearson, who, readers soon realize, is John’s father. John is given considerable responsibility while in the judge’s employ; he is also given the opportunity to go to school. It is also while at Judge Pearson’s that John becomes involved in several of his many affairs with women. It is the fiery, petite Lucy Potts whom John vows to marry, which he does eventually, although his numerous extramarital affairs do not stop. During one of these affairs that has kept John away from home for several nights, Lucy’s brother, Bud, comes to collect a debt from John and, finding no money, takes the bed that Judge Pearson had given John and Lucy for a wedding present, dumping Lucy and her new-

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born baby on the floor in the process. When John does return, he whips Bud within an inch of his life and must flee to escape prosecution and possible lynching. Subsequent years find John and his family in Eatonville, an all-black town in central Florida, where John has prospered under Lucy’s careful direction. He has become a successful carpenter, a property owner, the popular pastor of neighboring Sanford’s Zion Hope Baptist Church, and the powerful moderator of the Florida Baptist Convention. Likewise, his weakness for other women has increased, and his sexual escapades threaten his security in the church, but Lucy is always there as a constant strength and defender. Lucy dies prematurely, however, from a body weakened by the ravages of tuberculosis, too many years of rapid childbirth, and increasing concern, worry, and aggravation over John’s philandering. Lucy’s death proves to be John’s undoing, as he soon marries the selfish, selfcentered Hattie Tyson, who destroys virtually everything John and Lucy have built together. John loses not only his children, his wife, and his congregation but also his power, his influence, and his dignity. Finally, John leaves the ministry and Eatonville, convinced that he is mostly misunderstood and that distance is the best cure for his social illness. The last leg of John Pearson’s journey finds him in Plant City, Florida, where, with the help of his third wife, the saintly Sally Lovelace, he puts his life back together: He regains a full measure of dignity and prosperity, and he accepts the call to become pastor of the Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, an even larger congregation than the one he left in Sanford. For a while all is tranquil, but during a visit to Sanford, John gives in to his sexual urges. In a guilt-laden stupor, John is struck and killed by a train as he rushes back to Sally in the new Cadillac she has bought for him. His death is mourned statewide, and in the end John Pearson is remembered for the good things he had done. The Characters In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston takes a stock figure from African American literature and lore, the folk preacher, and imbues him with real human characteristics in a successful effort to show the character as a human being, subject to the same strengths, weaknesses, and shortcomings of other human beings rather than as a godlike being who is unaffected by human frailties. Also, because Hurston relies heavily on details from her personal experience—Jonah’s Gourd Vine is loosely based on her parents’ biographies—the characters are all the more real and compelling. The characters are presented in a more or less straightforward narrative manner; there are few if any experimental techniques. The central characters, John Pearson and his wife Lucy, are presented as complex, wholly believable characters with tragic flaws that prove, especially in John’s case, to be their undoing. The plot is likewise developed in a linear fashion. Although the ending—with John’s death after he is struck by a locomotive—seems gratuitous and melodramatic, it is nevertheless believable within the context of the story. John Pearson is presented as a man with many conflicts; however, it is his uncheck-

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able tendency to be a “man amongst women” that is presented as so incompatible with his role as pastor of a Baptist congregation. His inability, perhaps his refusal, to control his sexual appetite leads to his downfall. Pearson has the makings of a successful man, however: He is physically strong, he is a talented carpenter, he possesses a superb singing voice, and he is an exceptionally powerful preacher of the gospel. These traits seem to suit Hurston’s narrative strategy quite well, as she explores the adage “the bigger they come, the harder they fall.” Similarly, Hurston’s portrayal of the petite Lucy Pearson is designed to contrast directly to John’s character. Lucy is physically small, yet she is a paragon of goodness and propriety. She, too, sings superbly, but she lives the life she sings about, and for that reason she emerges as a wholly sympathetic character who is victimized by her philandering, hypocritical husband. Hurston’s greatest strength is her depiction of her native Florida and most especially of the folk who populate the all-black town of Eatonville and its surroundings. Her characterizations in Jonah’s Gourd Vine are a tribute to her talent for portraying folk characters in a realistic, uncondescending manner. The dialect of the characters is superbly drawn, as are their appearances, habits, and even their naming processes. Several characters are true stereotypes—Hattie Tyson, the “bad woman,” is one example— but they nevertheless fit well in this archetypal examination of the fall of man. As such, Hurston presents a realistic and compassionate picture of black life in a small southern town. As in most of her fiction, whites appear only on the periphery; racial strife is mostly insignificant in Hurston’s world. Rather, she shows with great skill and consummate artistry the day-to-day struggles of black folk in this native setting. Themes and Meanings Much of Jonah’s Gourd Vine is focused on the character of John Pearson, perhaps the best portrayal of the black folk preacher in African American literature. John Pearson is depicted as a powerful preacher, called of God, but he is also shown in the human dimension, as a man subject to the same urges, weaknesses, and faults as ordinary men. It is this tension between the godlike qualities and the human elements around which the novel revolves. For example, readers are presented with the central question, “How can a man propose to lead a Christian congregation when he is guilty of the same sins he preaches against in others?” This question puzzles John’s wife, Lucy, members of John’s congregation, and even John himself. As John’s philandering continues, his relationships with his wife, church, and community deteriorate. John Pearson is a powerful preacher, however, and when he is in this element, he and his congregation can enjoy, together, the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit. With his powerful singing and preaching voice, John is able to swell the membership of Zion Hope Baptist Church from fewer than three hundred to nearly one thousand members and to become the moderator of the Florida Baptist Convention, a high religious post that carries with it many luxuries.

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John Pearson’s relationships with women are also central to the novel. For example, when he is in the presence of virtuous women—Lucy Potts and Sally Lovelace— John prospers. These women encourage him, and he strives; they motivate him, and he achieves; they design, and he builds; they support him, and he accomplishes. Conversely, in the absence of these women, John falters, as is clearly seen following Lucy’s death; he falls into a cycle of drinking, domestic violence, and social disintegration. Likewise, when John is separated from Sally toward the end of the novel, his weaknesses overtake and engulf him once again. Further, there are the nonvirtuous women who serve as vehicles for John’s destruction—Hattie Tyson chief among them. These women, as the author portrays them, are interested only in their own gain and are not concerned about others. In the case of Hattie Tyson, readers see her vindictiveness as well: She helps John’s detractors kick him when he is already wounded. Finally, John Pearson is like the biblical Jonah, who tried to run away from God and from his responsibilities. Early in the novel, John compromises himself by doing things that are expedient rather than right; this often entails flight from trouble or responsibility. John leaves home after a fight with his stepfather; he moves to another state to avoid prosecution after a fight with his brother-in-law; he goes to Tampa because he cannot bear to witness his young daughter’s life-threatening illness; he leaves his church when expulsion seems imminent; and when he is struck and killed by a train, he is running away from yet another affair. In short, John Pearson never learns to accept the responsibility for his actions, and this makes the various consequences all the more difficult for him to face. One important feature of Jonah’s Gourd Vine is Hurston’s presentation of life among the black folk that she knew, loved, and appreciated so much. The author gives glimpses of the social life, the domestic life, and the religious expression in all-black Eatonville. She does not concern herself very much with the relationships between whites and African Americans; rather, she examines the dynamics of the black community and how black people interact. The use of language is instructive in that Hurston writes not only in dialect but also in the folk idiom—what she often called “a Negro way of saying” things. The effect is a realistic picture of black people in their native setting. One of the most illustrative examples of the language and drama of black life is John’s final sermon at Zion Hope, “The Wounds of Jesus.” The sermon is full of the powerful drama, the sharp imagery, the overpowering delivery, and the unmistakable style and technique usually associated with black preaching. These aspects provide interest and depth to Hurston’s portrayal of Reverend Pearson; they also combine with other elements of John Pearson’s personality to create an astounding climax as he walks away from the pulpit, out of the church, and finally out of the town itself. Pearson’s sermon is the actual transcription of a sermon Hurston had heard in Eau Gallie, Florida, during one of her many folklore-collecting trips. Its authenticity further strengthens the realism Hurston wanted to establish in Jonah’s Gourd Vine.

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Critical Context Hurston published Jonah’s Gourd Vine in 1934, thirteen years after she had published her first short story, nearly a decade after she had become an award-winning writer, and several years after she had established herself as an important American folklorist whose specialty was black life of the American South and the Caribbean. Naturally, there was considerable interest in her first novel. Few were disappointed in her craft, although writers and critics with socialist leanings were disturbed that Hurston refrained from writing much protest fiction in favor of writing stories that celebrated the culture and values of black communities in the South. Jonah’s Gourd Vine was generally well received, and its publication was the beginning of Hurston’s most fruitful and rewarding period of writing that included Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and the award-winning Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942). With the revival of interest in Hurston’s canon that began in 1973 after two decades of general neglect, critics have looked favorably upon Jonah’s Gourd Vine as a novel important not only for its artistic value but also for its folkloric value. In addition, this first novel shows the development of its author as a craftsperson who had perfected the short story and then gone on to master the longer genre of the novel. Bibliography Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2002. Detailed biography of the author, discussing the effects of her life upon her work and the role of her writing in her own experience and American culture. Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977. The most complete study of Hurston’s life and works. Includes biography, textual analyses, and a general wealth of information suitable for any student of Hurston. Holloway, Karla F. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. An important study of Hurston’s use of language to delineate and differentiate character. The author provides a number of interesting readings and rereadings of Hurston’s characters. Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Doubleday, 2002. A collection of more than five hundred letters, annotated and arranged chronologically. Lupton, Mary Jane. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Survival of the Female.” Southern Literary Journal 15 (Fall, 1982): 45-54. Explores an all-important and allencompassing theme of Hurston’s work. While much of the focus is on Their Eyes Were Watching God, there is considerable information that is useful for the study of all Hurston’s work, including Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Miles, Diana. Women, Violence, and Testimony in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: P. Lang, 2003. Includes two full chapters on Jonah’s Gourd Vine, discussing intergenerational trauma and gender relations.

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Newson, Adele S. Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. A valuable resource for scholars of Hurston. This reference book catalogs all the Hurston criticism up to the time of the book’s publication. Walker, Alice. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. An interesting essay by one of Hurston’s leading champions. Warren J. Carson

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THE JOURNALS OF CHARLOTTE FORTEN GRIMKÉ Author: Charlotte L. Forten Grimké (1837-1914) Type of work: Diary Time of work: 1854-1892 Locale: Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; St. Helena Island, South Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida First published: 1988 (portions published in 1953 as The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten) Principal personages: Charlotte Forten Grimké, the bright, ambitious, but overly self-critical daughter of Robert Bridges Forten Robert Bridges Forten, Charlotte’s father, a dedicated abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, a celebrated poet, essayist, and abolitionist who was a friend of the Forten family William Lloyd Garrison, the renowned antislavery speaker, essayist, and editor of The Liberator Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a prominent white abolitionist from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who became the commanding officer of the First South Carolina Volunteers Seth Rogers, a physician who was also an active abolitionist Ellen Murray, a fellow teacher of freed slaves with Charlotte on St. Helena Island Francis Grimké, Charlotte Forten Grimké’s husband, whom she married in 1878 Form and Content Although Charlotte Lottie Forten Grimké was a teacher as well as a minor essayist, poet, and translator, it was her personal journal, which she started keeping at the age of sixteen, that proved to be her most lasting contribution to African American letters. She began her journal in May, 1854, beginning with a preface that explains her intention to use this journal to chart her own intellectual growth. The first dated entry, from May 24, is typical of her early diary in that it begins with her expressing disapproval that by awakening at 5:00 a.m., she let the sun rise several hours before she did; this, she declares, is an advantage she will not let the sun have over her again any time soon. She goes on to note that she has just begun reading Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and is certain that she will enjoy it. Her first entry, like many of the entries to follow, reveals her absolute drive that she must work incessantly to improve herself. Growing up at a time when slavery was still an active institution in southern states, and when inferiority of African Americans was assumed by many white Americans, including many of Charlotte’s fellow Northerners living in and around Phila-

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delphia and Salem, Charlotte was driven not only by the need to develop her own talents and abilities but also by the need to prove, through her example, the talents and abilities of black Americans. Born in Philadelphia on August 17, 1837, as the daughter of Robert Bridges Forten and Mary Virginia Woods Forten, Charlotte Lottie Forten grew up in one of the most active black antislavery families in Philadelphia at the time. In November of 1853, she was sent to Salem to continue her schooling. While there, she stayed with Charles Lenox Remond and his wife Amy Matilda, both black abolitionists and friends of the Forten family. They were well connected to the abolitionist movement in and around Salem. It was the intellectually and emotionally stimulating environment of being part of a movement dedicated to eliminating slavery and improving conditions for Northern free blacks that excited the intellectually thirsty Charlotte during her teenage years and that infuses the early entries of her diary. The second dated entry in Charlotte’s diary, from May 25, 1854, concerns the arrest of Anthony Burns, an escaped slave who was arrested off the streets of Boston for return to slavery in the South. In the days that followed, his case became celebrated as antislavery activists demanded his release. On June 2, Charlotte reports in her diary that he had been sent back to slavery. As disheartening as this news was to Charlotte, it was to have a more personal implication. Her father, tired of striving against the ever-present racism in Philadelphia and looking to relocate, decided because of this case that moving his family to Massachusetts, where his daughter already was, would be no improvement. Instead they moved to Canada in the autumn of 1855. A desire for her father’s approval was certainly one of Charlotte’s motivations for working so hard on the program of self-improvement recorded in her journal. In her early entries, there are repeated references to her hopes that her father and the rest of her family will join her eventually, and it was quite a disappointment for her when they did not. Her father’s financial support of her ceased during her final year as a student at the Salem Normal School, quite probably because of financial hardships of his own. She found herself forced to go into debt to her hostess, Amy Remond, to support herself. Upon graduation, Charlotte was offered a position at the Epes Grammar School in Salem. She accepted in the hope that this would ensure her ability both to support herself and to live among the active abolitionists of Massachusetts whom she found so stimulating. In her first term as a teacher, though, the health problems that were to hound Charlotte for the rest of her life forced her to miss several days of teaching. In June, 1857, again suffering ill-health, she retreated to Philadelphia for six weeks to recover from a respiratory ailment. Over the next few years, she was forced to resign several teaching posts for similar reasons. Against such pressing realities, Charlotte’s continued dedication to self-education (including studying French, German, and Latin) and to the abolitionist cause shows Charlotte’s spirit. Reading the works of great authors—her favorites included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom she refers to several times as “the priestess of poetry”; Harriet Beecher Stowe; John Greenleaf Whittier; and Ralph Waldo Emerson—was for her a worthy end in itself, but she was always particularly pleased when she read a

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writer such as Whittier or Stowe whose talent she respected and who dealt directly with her constant concerns of eliminating slavery and confronting racism. Although living in a free state, Charlotte was keenly aware of the prejudice directed at her as a black woman. Her September 12, 1855, entry deals with her happiness upon returning to school but immediately turns to her acknowledgment of being looked down upon by her classmates. “I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope,” she muses, and asks several rhetorical questions: “When, oh! when shall this cease?” “Is there no help?” “How long oh! how long must we continue to suffer—to endure?” Partly as a response to this alienation from her classmates, she persuades her one friend from school, Sarah Brown, to join the Female Anti-Slavery Society with her. It was an integrated group that sponsored antislavery lectures and talks, and it continued to help Charlotte focus her intellectual life around the abolitionist cause. Despite some early literary publications, including several poems in William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper The Liberator, Charlotte’s own high standards, as well as her frustrations at her ill-health, caused her to be overly critical of herself. Birthdays tend to be days on which she reflected on how little she had accomplished. Between May, 1859, and June, 1862, there is only one entry. Shortly after she returned to her daily journal keeping, John Greenleaf Whittier suggested that she (using him as a reference) apply for a post teaching on the South Carolina Sea Islands. After being rejected by the Boston Education Commission, the members of which tell her that they are not seeking female teachers, she moves back to Philadelphia, where another contingent of teachers is being organized. On October 21, 1862, she learns that she has been accepted and will ship out the next day. Charlotte’s students were to be the so-called “contraband” slaves of the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast, where the Union had established a military outpost. At the time, slaves from plantations under Union control were considered the contraband of war and thus under the direction of the Union. Because the Emancipation Proclamation officially freed all slaves living in Confederate States on January 1, 1863, Charlotte’s students all became officially free slightly more than two months after Charlotte arrived. The effort to provide a basic education to the newly freed slaves living on the Union-controlled South Carolina Sea Islands is sometimes referred to as the Port Royal Experiment. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase saw in this population of former slaves a chance to disabuse many of the common prejudices among white Americans that stated that African Americans were inherently inferior. A successful experiment, he recognized, would help serve as a model for programs that could be set up during the Reconstruction period. Because Charlotte’s students brought little educational background with them to her classroom, and because many of them spoke Gullah, a heavily African-influenced English dialect, Charlotte’s job was to give them basic instruction. She launched into the work with all the energy and enthusiasm she had, though not without some trepidation and not without recurring bouts of ill-health. On her first day of teaching there, November 5, 1862, she frankly records in her journal her dismay at how much work

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has to be done and how unprepared her students are for school. Her disappointment, however, is constantly tempered by her loving fascination with the people she is meeting, her sympathy for their plight, and, not least of all, her appreciation of the strange (to her) natural beauty of her surroundings. It is also in the South Carolina entries that she records what is evidently a romantic impulse toward a man, Dr. Seth Rogers, a married white surgeon who had treated her before the war and who volunteered as a surgeon for the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of black soldiers. Both are careful to keep their relationship within proper bounds, and though their attachment is to all appearances romantic, Charlotte does record that he asked her to think of him “as a brother.” During the summer of 1863, poor health and the heat impelled Charlotte to take a vacation from her teaching. She traveled north for the summer. Upon her return, she recorded several sporadic entries. Her fourth journal ends abruptly with a May 15, 1864, entry that mentions that the last few months have had some happy and some painful events. Among the painful ones, left unmentioned by her, was the death of her father on April 25, 1864, of typhoid fever scarcely six weeks after he had joined the Union forces as a sergeant-major. Her fifth journal is by far her shortest. It covers the period from November 15, 1885, to July, 1892. Entries are sporadic: Gaps of months or years between entries are not uncommon. Nevertheless, a composite picture emerges of Charlotte Forten Grimké as a mature married woman. She married the Reverend Francis Grimké on December 19, 1878, and remained married to him until her death in 1914. During these years, ill-health was a constant companion, not an occasional visitor. Nevertheless, she remained busy and committed to her literary pursuits as well as to the larger goal of equality. Her final entry, dated July, 1892, three years later than the previous one, briefly summarizes her life being busy but on the whole happy, with the greatest drawback being her constant poor health. Analysis When Ray Allen Billington first published Grimké’s journals in 1953, he omitted large sections covering the years 1854-1862 on the grounds that her musings on friends, family, and literature would not be of much interest to the general reader. The complete journals, published as part of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers and edited by Brenda Stevenson, restores these missing passages and also includes much of Charlotte Forten’s early poetry in the footnotes. The result is that a much fuller portrait of a young woman emerges. The entries reprinted by Billington from Charlotte’s teenage years show a young woman deeply committed to the abolitionist cause and widely interested in the great ideas of her day. The complete journals also show her to be a young woman who was a constant victim of deep self-doubts and who craved the community of support she found among her abolitionist friends in Salem. Further, in her recurrent careful considerations of literature, readers can see the development of a young writer trying to train herself for her lifelong pursuit of creating literature.

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The South Carolina entries, in Charlotte’s third and fourth journals, may be the section of the most enduring historical interest. As a writer, Forten becomes more mature and assured during this period, as well as more intimate in some ways. She frequently addresses her journal directly, calling it “A,” creating the impression that she is using the journal to replace the company of friends. The entries during this period are longer, and there is less of the self-criticism that marks her earlier journal entries. This section of her journals seems to be informed by the assurance that the work she is doing, helping to educate African Americans newly freed from slavery, is of lasting worth. The values and skills that she has carefully been developing, as shown in the earlier years of her journal, all contribute to her daily work. Because the opening pages of Grimké’s fifth journal are missing, it is impossible to determine if she intended it as a continuation of her earlier journal or if she had some other goal in mind. Whereas the earlier journal was begun as an attempt to track and encourage her intellectual development, the later journal is more a simple record of some events in her life. The demanding need for constant self-improvement, so evident in her earlier journal, is tempered by a mature acceptance of herself. Even the frustration at her constant ill-health is tempered by a level of acceptance. The later journal does make it clear that in her late middle age, as in her teenage years, Charlotte Forten Grimké continued to see her life as a project under construction. Critical Context A 1985 American Playhouse production, “Charlotte Forten’s Mission: Experiment in Freedom,” helped revive interest in Forten’s South Carolina experience. Until the publication of the complete The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké in 1988, Grimké was most widely known through the abbreviated diary edited by Ray Allen Billington, which emphasized her relationship to the abolitionist movement and her work with the Port Royal Experiment. Her journals were widely considered to be primarily of historical interest, providing one young woman’s account of important people and events before and during the Civil War. The publication in 1988 of both an essay by Joanne Braxton, “Charlotte Forten Grimké and the Search for a Public Voice,” and the complete journals helped to change that perception. Braxton argues that in the complete journals, a reader can see a young African American female writer who is trying to find literary models that will be useful to her as well as trying to make established European-American models meaningful to her own life and writing. In her own lifetime, Grimké received praise for her literary talents, most notably from William Wells Brown, the former slave and noted abolitionist, and John Greenleaf Whittier, both personal friends. The judgment of history on her literary production other than her journals has been rather cool. Her journals stand as her most significant literary work by far. As Ray Allen Billington said in his introduction to her journals, Grimké’s “bequest to humanity was a journal which could reveal to a later generation her undying belief in human decency and equality.”

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Bibliography Billington, Ray Allen. Introduction to The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten. Edited, with an introduction, by Ray Allen Billington. New York: Dryden Press, 1953. Reprint. New York: Norton, 1981. Billington’s introduction to his heavily edited edition of Forten’s journals remains an essential source for those interested in placing Forten’s work with the Port Royal Experiment in its historical context. This edition also contains helpful maps. Braxton, Joanne M. “Charlotte Forten Grimké and the Search for a Public Voice.” In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. An analysis of Grimké’s complete journals, based on Braxton’s archival research and personal appreciation of the journals. This article maintains that Charlotte, as a young woman, used her journal to try out different poetic voices. Brown, William Wells. “Charlotte L. Forten.” In The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements. New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863. An attempt by a leading abolitionist to publicly recognize Forten’s talents while she was still a young woman. Eldred, Janet Carey, and Peter Mortensen. Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Grimké’s journal is the primary example text in this study of early American women writers and rhetoric. Sherman, Joan R. “Charlotte L. Forten Grimké.” In Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. A consideration of Grimké’s poetry. Concludes that although she was a minor poet, her skills and sensitivity were above the ordinary. Stevenson, Brenda, ed. Introduction and notes to The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A thorough introduction to Grimké’s life and work. Includes a chronology of events in Grimké’s life as well as a key to persons mentioned in her journals. The complete journals themselves, as reprinted in this volume, have become the definitive text. Thomas Cassidy

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JUBILEE Author: Margaret Walker (1915-1998) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: 1840’s-1870 Locale: Abbeville, Troy, Luverne, and Greenville, in south-central Alabama; Dawson, Georgia First published: 1966 Principal characters: Vyry Brown, the daughter of a slave and her white owner Randall Ware, a free black man and a landowner who marries Vyry in a slave ceremony Innis Brown, a former field hand who befriends Vyry and her children during the Civil War and becomes her first legal husband John Morris Dutton, Vyry’s father, a rich Georgia planter Salina Dutton (Big Missy), John Dutton’s wife Ed Grimes, Dutton’s “slave driver” The Novel Jubilee tells a story of slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction period from the point of view of the black people who were often both victims and pawns in a struggle that convulsed an entire nation. Just as Gone with the Wind (1936) is the story not just of a period but of a woman, the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara, so the narrative power of Jubilee derives from its protagonist, the slave Vyry, modeled after Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, the author’s great-grandmother. The book was inspired by the stories told to Margaret Walker at bedtime during her childhood by her grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier, who is Vyry’s daughter Minna in the novel. Thus, as Walker points out in her book How I Wrote “Jubilee” (1972), the novel has a solid basis in oral tradition, which was later amplified with the extensive study of slave narratives. In her attempt to ensure the accuracy of her work, Walker invested a solid ten years in research, checking not only the historical background but also minute details of everyday life. Walker’s novel is divided into three sections, each of which represents a distinct historical period as well as a separate segment of Vyry’s life. The first, “Sis Hetta’s Child—The Ante-Bellum Years,” is the account of Vyry’s childhood as a slave. It begins when Vyry is two years old and her mother, Sis Hetta, is dying in childbirth. Although she is only twenty-nine years old, Sis Hetta has given birth to fifteen children, many of them the offspring of her white master, John Dutton. Although he does not acknowledge Vyry or his other slave children, his wife Salina Dutton, or “Big Missy,”

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is painfully aware of their existence. Because Vyry looks so much like her own daughter, Lillian Dutton, Salina vents her anger toward her husband by mistreating Vyry on every possible occasion. Vyry cannot expect any help from her father. When she asks permission to marry Randall Ware, Dutton refuses his permission, thus making it clear that, despite his facile promises, he has no intention of ever setting Vyry free, either during his life or after his death. The section ends with Vyry’s attempt to flee to freedom and to her husband, whom she married in a slave ceremony. Because she is encumbered by her two young children, Vyry is easily captured and then is punished by being given seventy-five lashes. Like her scars, the memory of this beating remains with her for life. In the section that follows, “‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’—The Civil War Years,” Vyry continues to act in keeping with her nobility of character. Even though she cannot share in her white family’s belief that theirs is the best of all possible worlds, she takes care of both the women who are left when the men march away and the wounded men who return to die. Even after she has been freed and, having given up hope of Ware’s return, has decided to leave the plantation with her new husband, Innis Brown, she delays her departure until she has found someone to care for Lillian, who has lost her mind. The last part of the novel, set in the turbulent period after the war, traces Vyry’s progress westward through Alabama as she and Innis Brown, along with their growing family, search for a place to make their home. Recalling the biblical story of the Hebrews, who escaped from slavery in Egypt only to wander in a hostile desert, Walker entitles this section “‘Forty Years in the Wilderness’—Reconstruction and Reaction.” Vyry’s wilderness is southern Alabama, where, Innis has been told, there is abundant land to which no one has title and that can therefore be claimed by the newly freed slaves. Unfortunately, the family is forced out of one place after another. Floods and fever drive them out of a fertile lowland. At their next stop, they unwillingly become tenants, virtual slaves to a dishonest landowner. Finally, in Troy, they are burned out by the Ku Klux Klan. After this last disaster, Vyry for the first time despairs. When the family reaches Greenville, she refuses to let Innis put up a house. Then providence seems to take a hand. As she is passing through a white neighborhood, Vyry hears cries for help and, reacting instinctively, she goes to the aid of a young woman in labor. The grateful family and their friends later promise Vyry their protection if she will stay in Greenville as a midwife. When she agrees, her white neighbors gather to build the Browns a house. The only problem that remains is that of Jim, Vyry’s son by Randall Ware. He loathes farmwork and as a result dislikes Innis Brown, who he thinks works him like a slave. Sometime after an eruption in which Innis beats Jim, again providence seems to come to Vyry’s aid. Randall Ware appears, and although Vyry can see that her own life is now tied to that of Innis, she is happy to send Jim with his father so that Jim can receive the education he desires. The novel ends with reconciliation, not only between whites and blacks but also among the members of Vyry’s own family.

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The Characters Margaret Walker’s preoccupation with crafting a story that, above all, tells the whole truth can be seen in her approach to characterization. In Jubilee, even the most oppressive whites are shown as individuals, with their own frustrations and their own griefs. The overseer Ed Grimes, for example, resents the fact that he must spend his days in the fields with the slaves while his wealthy employer indulges his own whims. Grimes’s sense of social inferiority and his fear of the slaves under his control help to explain his willingness to join with Big Missy in torture and murder. As for Salina herself, Margaret Walker once commented in an interview that those readers who called the woman a “monster” misunderstood the story. Given her upbringing as a young southern lady, an upbringing that denied her any knowledge of sex, Salina was conditioned to react as she did when confronted with the realities of marriage. Moreover, it is not surprising that Salina hates her husband’s offspring by another woman, slave or not. Unfortunately, the institution of slavery gives her the opportunity to vent her wrath upon the innocent child Vyry. Although Walker wants her readers to understand the motivations of her unsympathetic characters, she also believes that one can choose to rise above a corrupt society, as Vyry manages to do. Readers who find Jubilee to be one of the most memorable historical novels set in this period often point to the spiritual grandeur of its central character. Even if Walker had not so fully revealed her protagonist’s feelings, the facts of her story alone would have shown how consistently Vyry repays injury with forgiveness. Rejected by her father, tortured by his wife, and brutally beaten after her attempt to follow her husband to freedom, Vyry has every reason to hate the white race. On occasion after occasion, however, when white people meet adversity, she aids them. It is appropriate that at last Vyry is rewarded, that her family finds a permanent home as a result of one of her many acts of kindness. Although it is obvious that throughout the story Vyry is always motivated by her Christian faith, in How I Wrote “Jubilee” Walker also gives some credit to her character’s practical good sense, which shows her that hatred will hurt no one but herself. Walker shows Randall Ware, too, as both a product of his background and a person who thinks for himself. Because he was born free, Ware has not had Vyry’s long training in subservience, and normally he asserts his worth, no matter who questions it. He can also be practical. When he has no other choice, he gives up some of his property to predatory whites. When he is evicted from the legislature, he turns his attention to education, which he reasons must be a source of empowerment or whites would not be so anxious to deny it to blacks. Walker uses the privilege of an omniscient narrator to describe Randall Ware’s experiences when he is away from Vyry, but she does not penetrate Ware’s consciousness as fully as she does that of her heroine. Generally, the author simply relates Ware’s adventures, leaving readers to deduce what Ware is feeling. When he reveals his opinions in dialogue, as he does, for example, in the final chapters of the novel, it appears that he is important primarily as the spokesman for black militancy as an option for his people.

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Like Vyry and like Ware, Innis Brown is to some degree a product of his environment; therefore, his indifference to education and his anger with his stepson Jim are understandable. As a field hand, he had no glimpse of the kind of life with which house servants such as Vyry were familiar. In owning his own land and his own house, he has achieved all that he could ever hope for. One can only guess at the bewilderment that Innis felt when Vyry sided with Jim and at his apprehension when Ware suddenly appeared to reclaim his wife. In the dramatic final pages, it is Vyry’s feelings that Walker reports; both Ware and Brown are left to speak for themselves. The fact that Walker does not permit her readers a glimpse into the hearts and souls of characters so important and so sympathetic as Ware and Brown might be considered a defect in the novel. On the other hand, it may well have been a deliberate decision by the artist. By presenting everyone else somewhat hazily, Margaret Walker placed her noble heroine in a clearer focus. Themes and Meanings Among the themes that can be traced through Jubilee are the centrality of folklore, myth, and music in the black heritage; the roles of black women as preservers and transmitters of the cultural identity of their people; and the importance of black Christianity in the struggle for freedom. It is also rewarding to look at Jubilee as a book about illusion and reality. As Walker has pointed out, her perspective on history is not that of whites, either northern or southern, but that of African Americans. In the conversations among slave owners in her novel, and in their speeches to the slaves, it is evident that the white masters have deluded themselves into believing that their motives for keeping slaves are noble, that the slaves are well treated and happy, and that any hopes of freedom they might cherish are simply proof of their childlike ignorance. Because, as Walker shows, such justifications for the suppression of African Americans did not disappear with the Emancipation Proclamation, the discussions between Innis Brown, Vyry, and Randall Ware at the end of the book are all related to another major theme in the novel, that of the struggle for freedom. Given the blindness of whites, Walker seems to be asking, how can blacks progress beyond nominal freedom to full equality? Each of the three main characters has a different answer. Innis Brown takes a passive approach. Despite his experiences with oppression, both during slavery and since his emancipation, he thinks, or perhaps he wants to think, that if he works hard and stays away from whites, he and his family will be safe. His attitude is explained partly by the fact that by owning his own land, he has achieved his highest goal. Vyry, on the other hand, has had a glimpse of greater possibilities. She knows that her children have the capacity to move upward in society. She also realizes that if they are to do so, they must acquire education. Isolation on the farm is no answer, because even to get schools established, blacks will have to associate with whites. Vyry pins her hopes for change on persuasion, supplemented by prayer. Randall Ware represents a third point of view, that of the black separatists and mili-

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tants. He has already tried political action and been thrown out of the office to which he was elected. Convinced that whites will do everything they can to suppress blacks, he sees education as the major weapon giving blacks a chance in the inevitable conflict ahead. Although in this work Walker does not clearly commit herself to one position or another, it is obvious that any answer to the problems of blacks must depend on the destruction of the illusions so long held by whites. For this reason, the theme of freedom is intertwined with the theme of the pursuit of truth. Exploration of these themes must be perceived as one of the author’s major purposes in writing Jubilee. Critical Context From the standpoint of literary history, Jubilee is of importance as the first realistic novel about slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction period to be written by a black author. Although it was a popular success, the activists of the 1960’s considered the book too moderate and Vyry too forgiving. In other words, Walker’s novel was politically incorrect. Unlike her more militant poetry, Jubilee was largely ignored by critics until the late 1970’s, when it was discovered that many of the themes and motifs then being identified as of major importance in black literature and history had already been introduced in Jubilee. Moreover, Vyry was seen as one of those strong black women who, although powerless to change their society, had succeeded in preserving their culture. Walker is considered a writer of more than historical importance. Her reputation is based not only on her poetry, collected in This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989), but also on this novel, so long neglected by critics but assuming its rightful place as one of the masterpieces of historical fiction. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. “The Contemporary Afro-American Novel, 2: Modernism and Postmodernism.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. An excellent essay with detailed analysis of such matters as the importance of the epigraphs in the forward movement of the book. Although Bell admires the character of Vyry, he argues that because her interests are limited to the welfare of her own family she cannot be seen to represent black women of the present day. Carby, Hazel. “Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. An interesting comparison of Margaret Mitchell and Margaret Walker, emphasizing the different ways the two writers used the oral histories on which their works were based. Urges that Jubilee be given more critical attention. Goodman, Charlotte. “From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Vyry’s Kitchen: The Black Female Folk Tradition in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee.” In Tradition and the Talents of Women, edited by Florence Howe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Defends Jubilee against criticism that it is bogged down in detail, arguing that the ele-

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ments of everyday life mentioned by Walker are “signifiers” of the folk tradition that enabled black women to preserve a sense of community despite exile, slavery, and oppression. Graham, Maryemma, ed. Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. This collection of essays on Walker includes extensive coverage of Jubilee from a plethora of critical and historical perspectives. Pettis, Joyce. “Margaret Walker: Black Woman Writer of the South.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Walker’s concerns with contemporary issues justify her placement in “the new generation.” Jubilee is significant as the first realistic historical novel about slavery and the Civil War to be written by a black writer. Traylor, Eleanor. “Music as Theme: The Blues Mode in the Works of Margaret Walker.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Shows how Vyry’s songs not only “articulate progressive stages in her life” but also “amplify its meaning,” uniting her story with that of her people and her place and time. An illuminating study. Walker, Margaret. How I Wrote “Jubilee.” Chicago: Third World Press, 1972. A detailed description of the process through which Jubilee took shape. Invaluable. _______. Interview by John Griffin Jones. In Mississippi Writers Talking. Vol. 2. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983. An important interview. Walker refers explicitly to Jubilee in pointing out various responses of African Americans to racism. Also discusses why the battle against sexism has not been the same for black women as for white women. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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JUNETEENTH Author: Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Experimental Time of plot: Early to mid-twentieth century Locale: Washington, D.C. First published: 1999 Principal characters: Alonzo Hickman, a jazz musician and minister whose brother is lynched after a white woman falsely accuses him of rape Bliss/Sunraider, the child of the supposed rape, whom Hickman raises and who, as Sunraider, becomes a race-baiting U.S. senator The Novel Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth opens with the attempted assassination of Sunraider, a race-baiting, southern senator, on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Alonzo Hickman, an African American minister, has brought his congregation to Washington, D.C., to stop the assassination, claiming that he and his church members know Sunraider and know that he is in danger. No one pays Hickman or his parishioners any heed, until the gravely wounded senator is taken to the hospital and requests that Hickman be allowed to come to his hospital room. There, Hickman and the senator work together to reconstruct their past. Through their recollections, readers can piece together the events of their story. The novel’s narrative present takes place at the Senator’s bedside, where Sunraider and Hickman renew and reexamine not only their long-lapsed friendship but also their kinship. However, their dialogue recalling the past, which sometimes morphs into Sunraider’s semiconscious reveries and near-death hallucinations, is the essence of the novel. Through this narrative, Ellison explores the problems of race in America not only in the present but also in the context of the characters’ history together. Sunraider grew up as Alonzo Hickman’s adopted son. The progeny of a white woman and an unknown father, Sunraider was delivered and adopted by Hickman. Sunraider’s mother claimed that Hickman’s brother Robert had raped her, thereby fathering her child, and only after he was lynched for his alleged crime did she come to Hickman for help. Admitting that Hickman’s brother was innocent and that she had randomly chosen him to explain her pregnancy, she asked Hickman to deliver her baby and raise him. Only Hickman, she explained, had the compassion to care for a fatherless, presumably multiracial child. When the child’s mother came to him, Hickman was a jazz trombone player, and he did not follow church traditions as his brother had. Though at first he wished only to

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kill the woman who brought death and destruction to his family, he soon assumed the responsibility for not only bringing the child out of his mother’s womb but also raising him to adulthood. In order to do so, he first had to vanquish his own anger, which he did by becoming a minister, calling himself God’s Trombone. He named his adopted son Bliss, “because that’s what they say ignorance is.” Bliss became an important part of Hickman’s sermons, often participating in the call-and-response preaching that Hickman performed. Hickman had Bliss dress in a white suit and hid him in a coffin for the first part of his sermons. Then, when Hickman uttered the words, “Suffer the little children,” Deacon Wilhite would raise the coffin lid, and Bliss would sit up, look at the audience, and say “My God, my God why has thou forsaken me.” Eventually, after Bliss’s mother attempted to kidnap him during a church service, Bliss left Hickman to begin a strange journey of his own. After spending some time as a filmmaker, Bliss eventually become Sunraider, the most notorious race-baiting member of the U.S. Senate. When Hickman and his congregation hear Sunraider declaiming on the floor of the Senate just prior to his assassination, they recognize in his words the unmistakable character of the pulpit rhetoric he learned in the African American church. The final chapter of the novel is surreal, tying the senator’s final floor speech and the revelations about his origins to his delerium in the narrative present. Sunraider’s speech is a tour de force of bombastic, political demagoguery in which he proposes that the Cadillac be renamed “the Coon Cage Eight,” because it has now become such a common sight to see eight or more of our darker brethren crowded together enjoying its power, its beauty, its neo-pagan comfort, while weaving recklessly through the streets of our great cities and along our superhighways.

As Sunraider lapses into a near-death delirium, he dreams that in crossing a boulevard, he is followed by a long black car. When the three occupants of the car disembark, one of them asks him, “How’s this for a goongage?” The Senator suddenly realizes that the car that has followed him is “no Cadillac, no Lincoln, Oldsmobile or Buick.” Rather it is an “arbitrary assemblage” of parts, none of which has ever been part of a car (“a bastard creation of black bastards”). Despite that fact, it still runs. The three men explain to “Sunrobber” that their motto is “Down with the Coon Cawdge/Up WID DE JOE CAH!” They plan to “KICK HIM ASS!” Before that, they are going to give “his butt a little ride.” As Sunraider is ridden to hell in his dream by the black men he has disparaged, he hears “the sound of Hickman’s consoling voice, calling from somewhere above.” The Characters The main characters in Juneteenth are Alonzo Hickman, the jazz musician who transforms himself from a trombone player into a minister, and Bliss, his adopted white son, who later becomes Sunraider. Hickman’s role throughout the novel is to

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represent both the patience and the faith of that group of people to whom the novel is dedicated: “That Vanished Tribe into which I was born/ The American Negro.” Hickman’s patience and forbearance are demonstrated again and again in the novel, primarily through his willingness to raise the child that brought about his brother’s lynching. Hickman hopes that Bliss will become the one who brings whites and African Americans together through the power of the rhetoric he learns from his adoptive father. Instead, Bliss becomes the very opposite of what Hickman hoped he would be. The transformation of Bliss to Sunraider is brought about by a number of factors. At one point, the senator explains to Hickman that the power of rhetoric he learned in the church was too much for him: “What could I do with such power? . . . I could bring a man to tears. I could topple him to his knees. Make him shout, crack him up with the ease with which shrill whistles crack icebergs.” The narrative also provides evidence that Sunraider was drawn to the white world by his mother’s attempt to kidnap him from a church service. Calling him Goodhugh Cudworth, she literally grabs for him and is only foiled by the heroic and comic actions of Sister Bearmasher. Bliss later thinks that he sees his mother in a movie and longs for her and for the world she represents. Themes and Meanings Allegorically, the relationship between Hickman and Sunraider represents the relationship between white and black America on the cusp of a great change taking place in the nation, the change brought into being first by the Civil Rights movement and later by the Black Power movement. Hickman accepts and loves the son of the woman who brought about the destruction of his family, much as African Americans live peacefully in a country to which they were brought as slaves. As they re-create the life they lived together, Hickman and Bliss give readers a glimpse of the genius of African American folklore and oratory, particularly pulpit oratory. The sermons they remember and reproclaim embody both an African American rendering of American history and the long tradition of folklore and call-andresponse oratory that helped African Americans survive slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination. It is no wonder that Bliss is overwhelmed by the power of the cultural traditions he discovers. The tragedy is that he does what Americans have done for years to African Americans and their culture: He uses those traditions for his own selfish ends without acknowledging the gift they represent. The title of the novel comes from a little-known celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation that takes place on June 19. In 1863, slaves in Texas did not hear about Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation freeing them. They learned of it only when Union troops landed in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. “June nineteenth” eventually came to be referred to as “Juneteenth,” and annual celebrations of emancipation were held on that date. Ellison’s point seems to be that true liberation will come to all Americans only when white Americans recognize that their freedom is tied to freeing those who have lived “unfree” in their midst.

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Critical Context When Ralph Ellison died in 1994 at the age of eighty, his second novel was a threethousand-page manuscript that he had been working on and revising since shortly after the publication of Invisible Man in 1952. Fanny Ellison, Ellison’s wife, asked John Callahan to be her husband’s literary executor and to see what could be done to publish the unfinished novel. Callahan found in the manuscript a many-layered story that could not be published as one novel. Juneteenth is an extract from that manuscript. Callahan selected sections of the manuscript that could stand alone as a novel, but he did not revise or change the words contained in those sections. Callahan continued to edit the manuscript, planning eventually to publish it in its entirety. As with most posthumous works, Juneteenth has met with some criticism. Some critics have argued that the manuscript should not have been tampered with in any way. Others complain that the novel is dated and shows the uneven nature of Ellison’s unfinished project. Still others see in the work the vestiges of an American epic, some even seeing in the novel the defining literary statement on the issues of race that have so long divided the United States. Bibliography Callahan, John. Introduction to Juneteenth, by Ralph Ellison. New York: Vintage, 1999. Provides a comprehensive discussion of both the basic themes of the novel and the process of working with the Ellison manuscripts. _______. “‘Some Cord of Kinship Stronger and Deeper than Blood’: An Interview with John F. Callahan, Editor of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.” Interview by Christopher C. De Santis. African American Review 34 (2000): 601-620. Callahan discusses his long friendship with Ellison, his work with the manuscript, and the themes of the novel. Engerman, Thomas S. “Invisible Man and Juneteenth: Ralph Ellison’s Literary Pursuit of Racial Justice.” In Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to “Invisible Man,” edited by Lucas E. Morel. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Morel’s book, a collection of essays, is an important look at the political context of Ellison’s Invisible Man. Engerman’s article ties together the politics of Juneteenth and Invisible Man. Johnson, Loretta. “History in Ellison’s Juneteenth.” Studies in American Fiction 32, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 81-99. Looks at the African American oral tradition and the way in which it conveys history, particularly as relates to the sermons in Juneteenth. Rice, H. William. Ralph Ellison and the Politics of the Novel. Boston: Lexington, 2003. Rice reads both Invisible Man and Juneteenth in the context of the politics of novel writing and Ellison’s view of the novel. An entire chapter of the book is devoted to Juneteenth. H. William Rice

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JUST ABOVE MY HEAD Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Approximately 1950-1978 Locale: New York, New York; the Deep South; Paris, France; London, England First published: 1979 Principal characters: Hall Montana, the narrator, a middle-aged African American who has been successful in many different business enterprises, including advertising and publishing Arthur Montana, Hall’s younger brother, a gifted gospel singer who becomes an international celebrity Julia Miller, a beautiful black girl who first appears as an elevenyear-old child prodigy achieving spectacular success as an evangelist; she later becomes a prostitute and a fashion model Joel Miller, Julia’s father, a selfish man who is happy to exploit his daughter for his own financial gain Jimmy Miller, Julia’s brother, two years her junior Alexander “Peanut” Theophilus Brown, a close friend of both the Miller and Montana families Crunch Hogan, another close friend of both the Miller and Montana families The Novel Just Above My Head is narrated by Hall Montana and deals with his memories of his beloved brother Arthur as well as of friends and other relatives. There is a deliberate contrast between the lifestyles and attitudes of the older generation of African Americans, consisting of the parents of Hall and Arthur Montana and Julia and Jimmy Miller, and those of the younger generation. Though still stigmatized by racial prejudice, the young people have better opportunities to achieve financial success and selfrealization. Hall’s memoirs mainly concern the struggles of Arthur, Julia, and himself to survive and grow in a white-dominated society. The story begins two years after Arthur’s death but immediately flashes back to the days of his and Hall’s childhood, at the beginning of the Korean War. All the young men in the story live under the shadow of the draft. Hall is eventually drafted and loses touch with the other characters while he is serving in Korea. One of the most important people in the lives of Arthur and Hall is Julia Miller, who at the age of eleven is inspired by the Holy Ghost and is in constant demand as a preacher at black fundamentalist churches. The book is flavored with many excerpts

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from Julia’s sermons as well as abundant quotations from traditional gospel hymns. Baldwin attempts to give his work the feeling of a musical composition, thereby suggesting that music has played a large part in the survival of African Americans in a hostile environment. Arthur sings in churches and soon becomes recognized for his outstanding voice and impassioned delivery. Throughout the novel, Arthur’s fame increases. He is an international celebrity by the time of his death. When the “Freedom Movement” begins in the South, Arthur and his young colleagues are asked to appear at political rallies, most of which are held at churches because these are the only relatively safe places to hold such meetings. Many pages of the book are devoted to descriptions of the religious-political meetings in rural churches surrounded by hostile white mobs and law-enforcement officials who are indifferent at best. On one of these tours, Arthur’s friend Peanut mysteriously disappears. He is never heard from again; he has probably been abducted and murdered in some isolated field in the dead of night. At the age of fourteen, Julia is brutally raped by her father and thereafter forced to live in incest. These incidents occur at a time when she has lost her religious faith and no longer desires to preach. With the help of Crunch Hogan, she breaks away from her father. Later, she has a love affair with Hall. Her beauty and personality enable her to succeed as a fashion model in the competitive milieu of Manhattan. She is chronically dissatisfied, however, and goes to North Africa for an extended period to try to find herself through tracing her roots. Arthur’s career skyrockets when he begins a love affair with Julia’s brother Jimmy, illustrating one of Baldwin’s key ideas, that people find themselves or destroy themselves through love. Arthur and Jimmy travel the world together and live together for many years. Arthur’s guilt about his homosexual tendencies is responsible for his heavy drinking. The hard itinerant life he leads as a musician causes him to die prematurely of a heart attack in a London pub. The Characters At least four of the characters in Just Above My Head are projections of the author himself. Hall Montana is Baldwin the novelist. Hall is a conservative heterosexual who works at conventional jobs and becomes a devoted father to two children. At one time in his life, Baldwin seriously considered getting married and trying to overcome his homosexual tendencies through leading a conventional life involving marriage and a steady job. He decided that such a course would be unfair to himself and to any woman he married. He could not continue to deny his homosexuality, and he could not indenture himself to the routine job and financial responsibilities that marriage would entail. Instead, he moved to Paris and led a precarious existence for many years as a freelance writer. Arthur Montana, the gospel singer, is Baldwin the homosexual artist and has Baldwin’s middle name as his first name. Like Baldwin, Arthur is an acknowledged homosexual who has no intention of leading a conventional heterosexual life. Like

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Baldwin, Arthur goes to Europe and finds himself happier and more creative in the artistic world of Paris. Baldwin moved to Europe early in his career because the stigma of being black in the United States made him so angry and humiliated that he felt unable to be creative. He lived in France for most of his life and eventually was honored by being appointed a member of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor that can be given an artist in France. Julia Miller, the most intriguing character in the book, is Baldwin the preacher. As a child, Baldwin acquired considerable fame in Harlem as a child evangelist. He suffered exactly the same loss of religious faith at approximately the same age as does Julia. The fact that Julia is a girl does not really make her different from Baldwin himself, because he had pronounced feminine tendencies from early childhood, when he served as a substitute mother to his younger brothers and sisters. He saw himself in some ways as a woman and wished he had been born a woman. Like Julia, Baldwin turned to carnal love when he became disillusioned with the spiritual love he had preached as a child. Julia’s abusive father, Joel Miller, was modeled after Baldwin’s own stepfather, who was subject to violent rages and would beat young Baldwin sadistically. The character of Jimmy Miller has been given Baldwin’s own first name. Like Baldwin, Jimmy has a loving nature and considerable social charm. Jimmy represents the loving, dependent side of Baldwin’s nature. Jimmy wants to find a strong man who will love and protect him; he finds that person in Arthur Montana to whom he remains devoted for many years. Jimmy and Arthur are both talented musicians, and in this respect they are also projections of Baldwin, who was a lifelong music lover and at one time had considered a career as a jazz pianist. It is a sign of Baldwin’s genius that he was able to project himself into so many different characters. Many novelists create characters who are alter egos, but the typical novel contains only one such character, who is the hero and viewpoint character. Baldwin has displayed his versatility by projecting himself into Hall, Arthur, Julia, and Jimmy as well as by modeling other characters after his own friends and relatives. Just Above My Head is Baldwin’s autobiography in disguise. Much of the characterization is effected through Hall Montana’s narration. He has strong feelings about all these characters and writes about them with extreme sensitivity. Through the character of Hall, Baldwin is able to express his own opinions and feelings without being that most annoying type of novelist, the “intrusive author” who violates the verisimilitude of his fictitious creation by interjecting his own comments. Themes and Meanings The most important theme in Just Above My Head concerns homosexuality. Baldwin was plagued throughout his life by guilt about his openly acknowledged homosexual nature. One of the reasons he moved to Paris was that Europeans were much more tolerant of such proclivities at a time when homosexuals were treated like vicious criminals in the United States. Through the character of Arthur, Baldwin attempts to show that homosexuals deserve understanding because they can be valuable contributors to society. In several places in his novel, Baldwin provides lengthy

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and detailed descriptions of sexual behavior between two males, including sodomy, fellatio, and mutual masturbation. Some readers might find these descriptions offensive; Baldwin, however, believed that genuine love between two individuals of the same sex was just as beautiful as heterosexual love. The meaning of the title Just Above My Head does not become clear until the end of the book. Baldwin’s description of Arthur’s death contains the following sentence: He starts down the steps, and the steps rise up, striking him in the chest again, pounding between his shoulder blades, throwing him down on his back, staring down at him from the ceiling, just above his head.

Just Above My Head was the last important work Baldwin penned, and he died eight years after it was published. Throughout the novel he implies that the shadow of death is hovering over his own head and that, furthermore, it hovers over all of us. As fellow mortals, we should be tolerant of one another’s faults and differences. This admonition also applies to the views on race relations described in the novel: People should be tolerant of racial differences as well as all other kinds of differences that exist between one human being and another. Baldwin was fervently religious as a youth and never got over his instinctively religious perception of the world, even though he gave up being an evangelist at the age of fourteen. Baldwin came to see sexual love as equivalent to the spiritual love preached by Christianity, provided that the sexual love was genuine. His novel implicitly teaches that the solution to America’s racial problem lies in love. This is reinforced by his descriptions of homosexual love between white and black men. Baldwin thought he had conquered racial prejudice; many of his friends and lovers were white. He disapproved of black protest literature and in his novels attempted to show that differences between whites and African Americans were purely illusory. The successful professional careers of the three most important characters—Hall Montana, Arthur Montana, and Julia Miller—are intended to symbolize changing times. African Americans still had an uphill battle to fight but had won important victories through such activities as the Freedom Movement. They could succeed in any field of endeavor if they refused to allow themselves to be psychologically crippled by the disease of racism. Baldwin also felt guilty because he was so successful and because he lived a comfortable, bohemian existence in Europe rather than being in the midst of the civil rights struggle in the United States. These feelings are projected onto Arthur Montana. He attempts to show that Arthur’s success does not compensate him for his unhappy itinerant existence. Critical Context Just Above My Head was on the best-seller list of The Washington Post for thirtyseven weeks but did not make the best-seller list of The New York Times. The novel received widespread critical attention because Baldwin was one of the most famous

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writers of his day. Most reviewers were respectful but unenthusiastic. Darryl Pinckney, for example, wrote a long review of the book for The New York Review of Books, calling it “flat and didactic” but acknowledging that Baldwin was, as always, effective in describing “the maddening halfway house that the black man finds himself in late-twentieth-century America.” The consensus seemed to be that the book did not fulfill its ambitious design. It was too long, but it did not seem complete. One of the major problems frequently pointed out concerned its complex structure. The whole story is supposedly told from the point of view of Hall Montana, the narrator, yet he frequently describes events at which he was not present, including the most intimate sexual encounters between a man and a woman or between two men. How is Hall supposed to know what other people had been thinking and feeling in such situations? In several places Baldwin tried to explain away this obvious flaw by having Hall say that he was only imagining what went on, but if he was only imagining what went on in some situations, how are readers to know when his narration is reliable and when it is not? The importance of Just Above My Head is that it serves black authors as a model for a kind of novel different from that often associated with black novelists. Baldwin’s novel might be called a “black protest novel against black protest novels.” He believed that there were too many novels written in the spirit of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Baldwin wanted to demonstrate that black novelists could, and should, have more to say than that African Americans were victimized by white Americans. It was Baldwin who, more than any other black novelist, tried to forge a new kind of fiction in which African Americans were shown as unique individuals rather than as sullen, stereotyped victims of white oppression. Through dialogue, narrative, and example, Baldwin emphasized one of his most ardent beliefs, that racism is a double-edged sword that injures white Americans every bit as much as it does black Americans. Bibliography Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991. A well-written biography that focuses on how Baldwin was influenced by the world and how he influenced that world. Discusses his relations with contemporary authors such as Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, and William Styron. Carson, Warren J. “Manhood, Musicality, and Male Bonding in Just Above My Head.” In Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen, edited by D. Quentin Miller. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Study of Baldwin’s representation of men bonding through music. Clark, Kenneth B. The Negro Protest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Consists of interviews with three of the most prominent black leaders of the period: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Clark gets them to talk about one another and then discusses the differences and similarities among these three dynamic individuals who shaped American history.

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Kollhofer, Jakob J., ed. James Baldwin: His Place in American Literary History and His Reception in Europe. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 1991. A collection of essays, by American, French, and German experts, evaluating Baldwin’s contribution to literature. Especially interesting in revealing the extent of Baldwin’s reputation in Europe and the European viewpoint on race relations in the United States. Stanley, Fred L., and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Contains essays on Baldwin’s works in general as well as on his fiction, his nonfiction, and his plays. An essay by Eleanor W. Traylor focuses on Just Above My Head. Many other references to that novel throughout the book are listed in the index. Troupe, Quincy, ed. James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Produced in commemoration of Baldwin’s death in 1987, this book is a collection of interviews and memoirs. It is illustrated with many photographs of Baldwin at various stages of his life and contains a valuable bibliography. Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald Fine, 1989. An entertaining and illuminating biography based on conversations and interviews with more than one hundred people who knew Baldwin at different stages of his life. Weatherby himself was personally acquainted with Baldwin for more than twenty-eight years. Bill Delaney

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KINDRED Author: Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Fantasy Time of plot: 1976 and the early 1800’s Locale: Los Angeles, California; Maryland First published: 1979 Principal characters: Dana Franklin, a twenty-six-year-old African American writer Rufus Weylin, the son of a slave owner Kevin Franklin, Dana’s white husband, a writer in his mid-thirties Alice Greenwood, the Weylins’ slave and Dana’s ancestor The Novel Kindred traces the emotional and physical dilemmas Dana Franklin faces as a twentieth century African American woman periodically transported back to the antebellum South. In portraying the experiences of a 1976 woman who must readjust to life during the slavery era, Butler dramatizes important themes: the continuing relevance of the past to the present; the horrors of slavery, which have lost their reality for many, including Dana and her white husband, Kevin; and the ways in which the development of racist attitudes and behavior are a product of societal conditioning. Dana’s time-travel experiences begin, ironically, in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, a celebration of American freedom and independence. Dana’s fantastic experiences begin on an ordinary day: While Dana and Kevin are unpacking cartons in their new home in Los Angeles, she is overcome by nausea and dizziness. She then finds herself at a riverbank at which she hears the cries of a drowning white child. After reviving him by giving him artificial respiration, she is attacked by the boy’s mother, who thinks she has tried to kill him. As a man points a gun at Dana, she once again feels sick and faints. Dana immediately finds herself back at home in Los Angeles, yet she is covered with the mud of the riverbank. This episode contains elements that recur when Dana is transported to the past and then back to the present: She is sent back to the past when the life of Rufus Weylin, the son of a slave owner, is in danger, and she is transported back to the present when her own life is in danger. As a result of her second trip to the past, Dana learns more about the significance of the past to her own life. She learns that Rufus is an ancestor of hers who must live long enough to father a child named Hagar with a slave named Alice. Without the birth of Hagar, who initiates Dana’s family line, Dana will not exist. Dana must, therefore, ensure the survival of Rufus, who has a tendency to find himself in life-threatening situations, in order to ensure her own existence. In addition, Dana takes an emotional

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interest in Rufus: From her second meeting with him, she wants to try to prevent him from accepting and practicing the racism that is a part both of his family and of the antebellum South. Thus, Dana feels that she needs to protect Rufus on both physical and psychological levels. Dana is transported back to the past by any danger to Rufus’s life, ensuring his physical survival. Her ability to ensure his moral survival, however, is undermined by the dual time level of the past and the present. During Dana’s trips to the past, only a few minutes or hours go by in 1976; yet these short time spans can equal months in the alternative time of the antebellum South. The result is that when Dana returns to her life in the present for even a short time, years go by for Rufus. Consequently, Dana is gone from Rufus’s life for too long for her to have a lasting influence on his racist attitudes. Another central element of the plot arises as Dana’s husband, Kevin, is transported back to the plantation with her after he holds her as she is called back to the past. The initial gap between Kevin’s and Dana’s perceptions of the antebellum South is central. At first, Kevin does not realize how badly slaves are treated. Also, he initially thinks that the nineteenth century would be a fascinating era during which to live. However, after Kevin and Dana become separated and he spends five years in the antebellum South, Kevin’s involvement in the lives of slaves makes the antebellum South appear as cruel and unjust to him as it does to Dana. Meanwhile, Dana becomes more involved in the lives of the Weylin slaves and especially of Alice, to whom Rufus becomes more and more attracted as the years go by. Dana points out that Rufus’s attitudes toward Alice make it obvious that she has failed to prevent Rufus from becoming an abusive bigot. Rufus’s assertion to Dana that he will have no qualms about raping Alice if she does not willingly become involved with him brings home to Dana that Rufus has internalized the racist and sexist attitudes of his family and of white society. His decision to rape and impregnate Alice both affirms his power and, ironically, ensures the birth of Hagar, who will initiate Dana’s family line and ensure Dana’s existence. The climax of the action of the book comes when Dana is called back to the past on July 4, 1976, the day of the American Bicentennial. Dana finds that Alice has killed herself as a result of Rufus’s threat to sell their children (a threat he makes to force Alice to stay with him). Moreover, Rufus makes clear his intention to rape Dana. Consequently, both Dana and Rufus are in danger, which reminds readers that danger to Rufus makes Dana stay in the past and that danger to Dana transports her back to the present. Thus, the result of Dana’s stabbing Rufus as he attacks her has an appropriate, though disfiguring, complication: She loses her left arm—it is literally lost in the past as Rufus clings to her—as she is transported for the final time to the present. The epilogue affirms that Dana and Kevin, reunited permanently in the present, can be free of Rufus. However, they will always retain the knowledge of the personal meaning of the past to their lives.

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The Characters The book is told from the first-person point of view of the heroine, Dana. Consequently, readers are exposed firsthand to Dana’s reactions to being transported to the antebellum South; to Dana’s evaluations of the nature of her white ancestor, Rufus; to her feelings about the initial naïveté of her husband concerning the oppression of black people and American Indians in the nineteenth century; and to her growing understanding of the perils and strengths of black people in general and slaves in particular. Since the novel is told from Dana’s point of view, readers can empathize with her reactions both to her extraordinary experiences and to the brutality of the slavery era. One can readily identify with Dana’s feelings of powerlessness, since she must return to the antebellum South whenever Rufus’s life is endangered. Dana’s resultant inability to live normally in the present—her inability to drive a car, for example—becomes a vivid alteration in her life. Similarly, Dana’s first-person narration makes vivid for readers the cruelty and hardships black people faced in the antebellum South. Seeing slaves beaten, for example, makes Dana (and readers) aware that the beatings and abuse slaves suffered were much more shocking in reality than they seem through presentations on television and in films. Thus, Butler’s use of Dana as narrator enlivens the book’s subject matter. Other characters are also brought vividly to life. Rufus develops from a boy who bonds with Dana into a complete racist who tries to rape her. Dana’s desire to protect Rufus from such a decline may disappoint readers, as he becomes the racist his society molds him to be. Another character whose development is enlivened by Dana’s reactions is Kevin. For example, Kevin’s naïve assumption that the nineteenth century would be a great time in which to live seems especially ridiculous in the light of Dana’s observations about the oppression of slaves and Indians. The growth in Kevin’s character is shown in a later conversation with Dana in which he tells her of his risking his safety to help slaves escape after he is separated from Dana and is left behind in the past. Butler uses Dana’s conversations and experiences with other characters to show the dynamic nature of those characters. Butler’s use of Dana as the first-person narrator, therefore, does not create a myopic narrative style that makes everyone but the narrator seem static and flawed. Instead, Dana’s narration highlights the development and complexity both of Dana and of Kindred’s other characters. Themes and Meanings Butler’s portrayal of the two main characters, Dana and Rufus, conveys many of the novel’s complex themes. The depth of the characterizations is contingent upon the narrative technique: By making Dana the first-person narrator, Butler makes readers not only understand but also empathize with her psychological and physical dilemmas as she lives in the slavery era. Moreover, the empathy that Dana has for the slaves marks her narration, enhancing readers’ knowledge of the brutality they suffered. One of Kindred’s central themes is the role of environment in shaping people’s atti-

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tudes and personalities. Moreover, Butler makes clear her belief that environment and training shape one’s self-image and, thus, one’s feelings toward one’s own and others’ power or powerlessness. Butler’s principal concern regarding these themes is the development and acceptance of racism. Similar to the main plot of Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), these themes are enacted in Rufus’s development, for Dana realizes that from childhood Rufus is being steadily trained to assume both his position as master and the related racist attitudes and behaviors. Kevin sums up this theme when he discusses Dana’s hopes to prevent Rufus from becoming more racist as he grows up: After all, his environment will be influencing him every day you’re gone. And from what I’ve heard, it’s common in this time for the master’s children to be on nearly equal terms with the slaves. But maturity is supposed to put both in their “places.”

Another central theme is the relation of both race and gender roles to privilege and power. This theme is especially striking when one compares Rufus’s and Kevin’s experiences with Dana’s and Alice’s. Rufus asserts more and more boldly that racial superiority and abuse of African Americans, including his sexual abuse of Alice, are a part of his power and privilege as a white man. In comparison, Kevin’s initial belief that it would be fun to live during the slavery era shows the racial naïveté and insensitivity afforded by his position as a white man who has lived free from oppression. In contrast, Butler portrays the sexism, sexual exploitation, and abuse that are symbolized especially by Alice’s treatment at the hands of Rufus. Factors of race and gender are central to the oppression and exploitation Dana experiences, again mostly at the hands of Rufus. Thus, while Butler does not underestimate mistreatment and exploitation of African American males, Dana’s experiences in the antebellum South particularly make clear that the gender and racial privilege enjoyed by such vastly different white men as Rufus and Kevin negatively affects both the characters of these men and the lives of African American women. Critical Context Kindred, especially on its initial publication, was seen as a significant departure from the science-fiction Patternist series, of which Butler’s first three novels, Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), and Survivor (1978) are a part. As the body of criticism on Butler has grown, critics have analyzed Kindred as embodying several of the important themes of the Patternist novels, particularly emphasizing the themes of power and of oppression as unifying topics. In addition, Kindred, as a result of its creative use of elements of the slave narrative, earned Butler increasing attention as an innovative interpreter of important themes of the history and literature of slavery in a genre not used by many African American writers. Thus the book has proved important to scholars who specialize in science fiction as well as to those who concentrate on African American literature. Moreover, Butler’s emphasis on Dana’s strength and

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survival skills has resulted in an appreciation by critics who value the feminist aspects of the novel. Consequently, the feminist, science-fiction, and African American themes in Kindred have attracted a widening number of diverse readers and scholars. Bibliography Butler, Octavia. “Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: Interview with Octavia Butler.” Interview by Frances M. Beal. Black Scholar 17 (March/April, 1986): 14-18. An interview that gives insights into Butler’s beliefs as a sciencefiction writer and her thoughts on the relevance of the genre to the African American experience. Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1984): 82-87. Identifies and compares recurring themes in Butler’s novels, emphasizing power as a central topic in Butler’s work. In addition, Govan discusses how power affects male-female relationships in Butler’s fiction. Govan also discusses how Butler’s characters endure hardship by using coping mechanisms and adaptability. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001. An examination of novels set in modern times that attempt to deal with the “family secret”—slave owner as ancestor. Salvaggio, Ruth. “Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine.” Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1984): 78-81. Though this essay focuses on Butler’s Patternist heroines, it identifies many themes and feminist characteristics that are also central to Kindred. Also discussed are the heroines’ assertions of independence and power as they confront racism and sexism. Spaulding, A. Timothy. Re-forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Study of supernatural, antirealist representations of slavery. Includes a chapter on the representation of time in Flight to Canada (1976) and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred. Washington, Mary Helen. “Meditations on History: The Slave Woman’s Voice.” In Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. Analyzes the ways in which African American women recounted their experiences as slaves. Gives readers insights on the literary representation of female slaves’ lives. Weixlmann, Joe. “An Octavia Butler Bibliography.” Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1984): 88-89. Presents a thorough bibliography on Butler’s works. Jane Davis

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KING HEDLEY II Author: August Wilson (1945-2005) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: 1985 Locale: The backyards of three houses in the Hill District, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania First produced: 1999, at Pittsburgh Public Theater, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania First published: 2005 Principal characters: King Hedley II, an African American man in his thirties Ruby, King’s mother Mister, King’s friend Elmore, Ruby’s lover Tonya, King’s wife Stool Pigeon, King’s next-door neighbor The Play King Hedley II takes place in the backyards of the title character and of Stool Pigeon and in the vacant lot between the two houses. The play consists of two acts. A prologue starts the play, with Stool Pigeon entering to give some ham to a cat. He talks to the cat about a fish market as a means of discussing the broken state of the world. He prophesies that God will make things right, and everyone must play their part in the divine plan. He also mentions Aunt Ester, a woman who is 366 years old. Scene 1 presents King Hedley II going into his yard to plant some seeds. He is having financial problems, because his boss did not get the contract for which he was bidding. King’s mother, Ruby, enters and argues about King’s need to get money and restore their phone service. She informs him that one of her former lovers, Elmore, is coming to visit. King becomes angry at Ruby for living in his house, as he was raised by her sister Louise. Ruby has been left the house by Louise, who died of leukemia, and Ruby is waiting for the city to buy it from her. Mister arrives to get the brochure that he and King use to sell stolen refrigerators. King talks about a dream he had in which he wore a halo around his head. He is waiting for Tonya to get ready so they can go to have their anniversary picture taken. Mister tells King that Pernell’s cousin is in town; he wants to kill King, because King killed Pernell. Tonya enters and Mister compliments her appearance. Tonya reads out loud a letter that Elmore wrote, asking Ruby to forgive him. King gets a gun to keep him safe in case he runs into Pernell’s cousin. As King and Tonya are about to leave, Stool Pigeon enters to tell them that Aunt Ester has died. Scene 2 opens with Stool Pigeon coming to see King. They both mourn Ester’s passing, and King shows Stool Pigeon a key ring that she gave him. Stool Pigeon tells

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him to find the key to the promised land. Mister arrives and discusses with King their plans to open a video store. Elmore arrives and tries to start a crap game with King and Mister, but they end up discussing refrigerators, and Elmore offers to sell some. Tonya exits the house visibly upset, and King confronts her. She is pregnant, and she does not want to have the baby. She does not want to raise a child in such a violent world, knowing that King could be sent to jail at any time. King tries to follow her back into the house, but Ruby warns him not to push Tonya away. King leaves, and Ruby tells Tonya about how Aunt Ester convinced her to have her baby when she was pregnant with King. Scene 3 begins as Ruby is making breakfast and Elmore is cleaning his gun. They discuss their past, establishing that Elmore has always loved her even though he left her, King’s father was not Hedley but Leroy, and Elmore wants to marry Ruby. Mister enters, and Elmore sells him a gun after much haggling. King enters, having gone to pick up the anniversary pictures from Sears. The store lost the pictures and would not accept his receipt. King got indignant, and the police were called, but he was not arrested. He says that the world is moving forward while he is moving backward. Elmore tells him that he has to make his own rules and steps on one of King’s seedlings. King smoothes the ground over, saying that if anyone messes with him he will start World War III. Scene 1 of the second act starts with Stool Pigeon trying to bury Aunt Ester’s dead cat next to the seeds. He tells Tonya he will perform an incantation to raise it from the dead, but he will need blood. King arrives in a bad mood, but Stool Pigeon presents him with the machete that Hedley used to kill Floyd Barton. Stool Pigeon tells King that he has given him the key to the mountain. Mister arrives, and he and King prepare to rob a jewelry store, departing nervously. In scene 2, King and Mister return from their robbery, having stolen $3,160, as well as a ring for Tonya. Stool Pigeon enters, talking about being robbed and having his newspapers burnt. He also makes cryptic comments about Aunt Ester’s return. Mister and King split the money, and Mister leaves to spend it. Elmore arrives and buys a refrigerator from King for Ruby. The two men discuss their time in prison, and King describes how Pernell gave him the large scar on his face. Ruby and Elmore decide to go out, and King tries to give Tonya some money. She fears that it is stolen and refuses it. Scene 3 presents Tonya and Ruby discussing the men. Mister arrives looking for King, and he ends up giving his gun to Ruby. Stool Pigeon enters to lay flowers on the cat’s grave. King arrives, saying that his boss finally got the contract so he can go back to work. He talks privately with Tonya, telling her that he needs her to have her baby, because he is trying to persevere and succeed in the harsh world, like the flowers. She says that she does not need him to achieve financial success, she just needs him to stay alive. In scene 4, King is polishing his machete. Elmore and Ruby enter, announcing their plans to marry. Elmore buys the stolen ring from King and gives it to Ruby. Ruby and Elmore dance a waltz, and Ruby tries to teach it to King. At a mention from Ruby about Leroy, Elmore becomes angry and talks about how he murdered Leroy over

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fifty dollars. At the end of this story, Elmore ends up revealing to King that Leroy was his father. King grabs his machete and exits. Scene 5 opens with Tonya, Ruby, and Mister talking about King’s need to avenge the death of his father. King enters, looking for Elmore. Elmore enters, and King pays him the fifty dollars that Leroy owed him then challenges him to a crap game. He stomps on his seeds to make a space to play. They shoot craps for a while then start to fight. King throws Elmore to the ground, holding the machete at his throat. He spares his life, but Elmore pulls a gun on him. Elmore cannot kill King either, and he shoots at the ground. Ruby, who has fled into the house in fear, hears the gunshot and comes out with her gun and shoots King, whom she has mistaken for Elmore. As the play ends, King lies bleeding, while the rest panic. Stool Pigeon is excited that there is now blood on the cat’s grave. Themes and Meanings The play concerns the African American struggle for prosperity and security in a tenuous social climate. King’s desire to make his own source of income and achieve a kind of nobility is akin to that of many characters in Wilson’s plays. The yard is a source of hope and potential for King, who believes in its ability to grow the seeds that he has planted, although others think it is infertile. Family bonds and relationships are tested in the midst of the struggle for social stability, and the past plays an active role in the present. Indeed, the plot shifts on a revelation of parentage, and the question of whether to have children is a source of crisis for King and Tonya. Stool Pigeon’s mystical ramblings provide the most spiritual portions of the play, including references to a coming apocalypse and to the mysterious Aunt Ester’s connection to the characters and community. Stool Pigeon chooses to relay each character’s history through metaphor and prophecy. Critical Context King Hedley II opened on Broadway to mixed but largely favorable reviews. Most critics enjoyed the production but agreed that it was not one of Wilson’s best plays, citing its lack of a solid through line and its rushed ending. Hedley was the ninth play written in Wilson’s twentieth century cycle of ten plays—one depicting African American struggle in each decade of the century. It takes place in 1985, making it the ninth chronologically as well as the ninth to be produced. The play is one of the few to share characters with other plays, as Ruby and Stool Pigeon also appear in Seven Guitars (pr. 1995, pb. 1996), set in 1948, in which Stool Pigeon is called Canewell. Also, Aunt Ester is featured in Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (pr. 2003, pb. 2006). Bibliography Bogumil, Mary L. Understanding August Wilson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. An in-depth look at six other plays in Wilson’s ten-play cycle.

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Elam, Harry J. The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Analyzes recurring elements in Wilson’s plays. Whitaker, Charles. “Is August Wilson America’s Greatest Playwright?” Ebony 56, no. 11 (September, 2001). Includes both a profile and an interview with Wilson. Wilson, August. The Ground on Which I Stand. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001. Wilson’s 1996 speech to the Theatre Communication Group. _______. “The Light in August.” Interview by Suzan-Lori Parks. American Theatre 22, no. 9 (November, 2005). Interview conducted hours after Wilson announced that he was terminally ill. David Coley

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THE KNOWN WORLD Author: Edward P. Jones (1950) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism; Magical Realism; social criticism Time of plot: 1830-1861 Locale: Virginia First published: 2003 Principal characters: Henry Townsend, a former slave who has risen to become a slave owner himself Augustus and Mildred Townsend, Henry’s parents, who are also freed slaves William Robbins, a white plantation owner and Henry’s mentor Moses, Henry’s favorite slave and the foreman of the Townsend farm John Skiffington, a county sheriff Counsel Skiffington, the sheriff’s cousin Elias and Celeste Freeman, a married couple who are slaves of Henry Townsend. Stamford Crow Blueberry, one of Henry Townsend’s slaves Alice Night, another of Henry Townsend’s slaves Fern Elston, a light-skinned black schoolteacher The Novel Edward P. Jones’s The Known World moves back and forth between different times and locales to tell the varied stories of many characters, both white and black. A number of these stories center on the lives of people who have crossed the path of Henry Townsend, an African American man who was once a slave and is now a slave owner. Henry is certain that he will be a better master than the white slaveholders he has known, but once he becomes a slave owner, he does none of the good he had intended to do and becomes indistinguishable from the white slave owners in the county. William Robbins, a white plantation owner, helps the hardworking Henry acquire his own land and his own slaves. He also keeps a beloved black mistress by whom he has two children. A similar figure, Fern Elston, is a freed slave who could pass for white but who makes her living as a teacher of the local black children. Also a slave owner, she too forms an erotic bond with a slave, but, as with Robbins, her status as a slave owner makes a mockery of the possibility of real love, friendship, or family. Henry’s achievements as a slave owner begin to unravel at his death. His father, Augustus, a freed slave, dies after being sold back into slavery through the complicity of the county sheriff’s poor white deputies. Henry’s death brings not only vulnerabil-

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ity to Augustus but also a sense of opportunity for his favorite slave, Moses, who hopes to marry Henry’s widow. Disdaining association with the other slaves, including his son and his son’s mother, Moses nevertheless finds no white mentor and no success as a suitor to the wife of his former master; he ends ignominiously as a sooncaptured runaway slave. Although he is in principle against slavery, Sheriff John Skiffington tracks the runaway Moses to the house of Henry’s mother, Mildred, who, like her husband, is a freed slave. Frustrated and bedeviled by a toothache, Skiffington becomes indistinguishable from his vicious deputies, gunning Mildred down after insulting her with racial epithets. He shocks his more morally dubious cousin, Counsel Skiffington, who has just returned from a journey. Counsel’s odyssey outside his home county became a series of investigations into human corruptibility, and he returns home only to witness the moral downfall of the sheriff as well. Sensing an opportunity for profit in his cousin’s death, Counsel promptly murders him, staging the crime scene to look as if it were the fallen Mildred who had shot the sheriff. Moses, intimidated by Counsel into silence, is soon maimed as a disobedient slave. The sad fate of Moses, however, is contrasted to a growing sense that freedom is in the air. Ultimately, all the slaves on the Townsend farm will find liberation from what had previously been the only world they had ever known. The Characters The novel portrays slave owners such as Robbins and Townsend as conflicted and morally compromised characters, but it is the white sheriff, John Skiffington, who is perhaps the most complex character within the prevailing power structure. The sheriff is a decent man who declines to own slaves. When he and his wife are given a little black girl as a wedding present, they raise her instead as their daughter. Influenced by the prevailing attitudes of Manchester County, however, their unthinking, proprietary attitude toward the girl eventually alienates her. Similarly, the well-meaning Skiffington’s duties as sherriff of the county lead him into a horrific situation in which he ruthlessly murders a freed slave. Skiffington’s situation is represented by an old map that hangs on the wall of his jailhouse with the title “The Known World.” This outdated map, like the social consensus of the country Skiffington serves, is incomplete and mistaken, providing only limited knowledge of the actual world. Possibly the most significant character in this novel, however, is not a slaveholder but Moses, Henry’s first and favored slave, whose ruthless ambition drains him of his initial generosity and humanity. Trying as Henry did to rise in the world, Moses instead is permanently maimed by a deputy, living out his days demoralized and dependent on the goodness of the similarly crippled Celeste. A fellow slave, Celeste retains a caring nature despite everything; she and her kindhearted husband, Elias Freeman, weather the bad times on the Townsend farm and, after the Civil War, found a family line that thrives and prospers. Another inspiring character is the raffish slave Stamford Crow Blueberry, whose spiritual conversion during a rainstorm leads to his

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founding of a home for orphans after the war. Alice Night is an even more significant character: a slave who, while appearing demented, emerges as a canny and visionary artist, using her eccentric wanderings to find a route of escape. Safe up North, Alice creates a tapestry she titles “The Known World,” a God’s-eye view of her former home in the South that replicates the novel itself, a novel whose godlike viewpoint brings a timeless and transcendent sense of perspective to its specific historical setting. Themes and Meanings One of the novel’s major themes is indicated by its two images of “the known world.” Skiffington’s map is a limited representation based only on one particular historical moment; Alice Night’s tapestry, on the other hand, spans past, present, and future in a way that encompasses knowledge beyond one moment in time. This perspective suggests that, in the fullness of time, more will be known than one present moment could possibly reveal. The tapestry’s perspective informs the entire novel, so readers are always aware of the limitations of what passed for unquestioned verities at the time. These limitations are heightened by the novel’s setting on the brink of the Civil War, emphasizing that in a very short while the society it depicts will cease to exist. The narrative deploys an important level of dramatic irony in its depiction of this society, which, while unable to envision the end of the slavery on which its economy is predicated, is nevertheless headed for just that crisis. Slavery itself consitutes another important theme of The Known World. In this regard, the issue is a matter not only of color but also of power, its corruptions and contradictions. While most of the victims of slavery in the novel are black, Jones includes some minor stories involving white slaves, as well as major stories of black slave owners, to bring this point home. By centering his novel on a black man who owns black slaves in the antebellum South, Jones also reflects on the devil’s pact involved when a previously oppressed power holder takes advantage of an opportunity to succeed in the very system that continues to subjugate the vast majority of his own people. Critical Context Reviewers of The Known World particularly noted its masterful intertwining of numerous narratives and its reflective, meditative perspective, which gathers into itself a number of different ways of looking at the world. Critics praised the novel for its convincing historical detail. They lauded as well its inventive and adventurous inclusion of stories suggestive of Magical Realism and stories that speak beyond their specific historical situation to issues still relevant to contemporary life. Virtually unanimously greeted by critics as a major modern novel, The Known World was a National Book Award finalist, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2004, and in 2005 was awarded the prestigious International IMPAC Literary Award.

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Bibliography Herbert, Marilyn. Bookclub-in-a-Box Discusses the Novel “The Known World,” by Edward P. Jones. Toronto: Bookclub-in-a-Box, 2007. Provides author information and discusses the novel’s themes and symbols, writing style, and use of historical detail. Jones, Edward P. Interview by ZZ Packer. In The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008. African American writer ZZ Packer interviews Jones; part of a collection of conversations between writers and their mentors. King, Richard H. Review of The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. Rethinking History 9, nos. 2/3 (June, 2005): 355-380. Important review that discusses the way in which the novel fits into the post-1960’s genre of the slave novel, as well as what the novel teaches readers about slavery as a historical institution. Maslin, Janet. “His Brother’s Keeper in Antebellum Virginia.” Review of The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. The New York Times, August 14, 2003, p. E1. Praising Jones for his wisdom, effective understatement, and wide range of perspective. Mason, Wyatt. “Ballad for Americans: The Stories of Edward P. Jones.” Harpers Magazine, September, 2006, pp. 87-92. Thoughtful, thorough, and appreciative analysis of a number of Jones’s stories, including those in The Known World. Pinckney, Darryl. “Gone with the Wind.” Review of The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. New York Review of Books, October 21, 2004, pp. 14-18. Insightful review of The Known World as a new and intimate kind of historical novel. Saunders, James Robert. “A World of Irony in the Fiction of Edward P. Jones.” Hollins Critic, February, 2007, pp. 1-10. Featured article discusses Jones’s body of work, including The Known World, with regard to its deployment of irony, dramatic and otherwise. Margaret Boe Birns

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KRIK? KRAK! Author: Edwidge Danticat (1969) Type of work: Short stories Type of plot: Fable; Magical Realism; domestic realism Time of plot: 1930’s-1980’s Locale: Ville Rose, Haiti; New York, New York First published: 1995 Principal characters: Josephine, a young woman who visits her mother in prison Défilé, Josephine’s mother, who is imprisoned for witchcraft Guy, a young father who flies a hot air balloon to prove his value Marie, Josephine’s daughter, who finds a dead baby and keeps it with her Gracina Azile, a young woman who was born in Haiti but who grew up in New York Caroline, Gracina’s younger, American-born sister The Stories The title of Edwidge Danticat’s collection of nine stories, mostly about young women growing up under an oppressive regime in Haiti and trying to create a new home in America, comes from an African storytelling call-and-response tradition recounted in the first story, “Children of the Sea.” In this tradition, someone asks, “Krik?” inquiring whether the audience wishes to hear a story, and the listeners emphatically answer, “Krak!” which means “yes.” Several stories in the collection focus on the relationship between mothers and their children. In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” a young woman visits her mother, who has been imprisoned for being a witch. “Night Women” is a brief, lyrical piece from the point of view of a young prostitute. The protagonist tells her son stories of the ghost women in Ville Rose and her own magical ability to make herself a goddess. To keep her son from being frightened when she has customers at night, she tells him the men are angels. In “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” a servant finds the body of a dead baby on a street curb. Because she has lost several children in childbirth, she picks it up and calls it “Little Rose,” caring for the child as if it were alive until its odor become so strong that she must bury it in the garden. The Dominican gardener catches her and accuses her of killing the child and keeping it to perform black magic. In “A Wall of Fire Rising,” the only story in the collection featuring a male protagonist, a young boy acting in a school play is asked to play the role of one of the fathers of Haitian independence from French rule in the early nineteenth century. His father, proud of his son but ashamed of his own failures to support his family, becomes fasci-

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nated with a hot air balloon that belongs to the owners of the sugar mill. Boasting that he can make the balloon fly, he dreams of taking it to a place with a plot of land where he can build his own house and keep his own garden. When he does take the balloon up, he jumps out and crashes near where his wife and son are standing. Two stories in the collection focus on Haitian women who have immigrated to America. “New York Day Women” is a counterpoint story in which a young woman who works in a New York advertising office intersperses her comments about her mother with comments by the mother herself, who cares for the children of wealthy women who go jogging in the park. “Caroline’s Wedding,” the longest story in the collection and the most novelistic, focuses on Gracina Azile, a young Haitian woman who gets her naturalization certificate and applies for a U.S. passport. Her younger sister Caroline, who was born without her left forearm, is engaged to a man from the Bahamas. Their mother believes that Caroline’s deformity is the result of her being given a drug after being arrested in a sweatshop raid while she was pregnant. The narrator gets her passport, but she feels that her whole family has paid dearly for it. The Characters Although strength of character is a central focus in Danticat’s stories, because the stories are often told in the oral style of folktale, the stories rather than individualized characters are central. The women in the stories are not realistically differentiated but rather represent basic types. These include the young Haitian woman struggling between the narrow choices of being a “night woman,” that is, a prostitute, or a “day woman,” that is, a servant. Another prominent type is the Haitian mother who has already suffered persecution and tries to protect her daughters. Only in the novelistic final story are characters developed realistically. Themes and Meanings Danticat was separated from her mother for several years while her parents tried to earn money to bring her to America. In an interview in which she reflected on the relationship of her stories to her own experience, the author has said that separation and reunion between mothers and daughters is a powerful theme for Haitian women her age. Her stories often explore the difficulties of becoming a woman experienced by daughters whose mothers have been present in only a fragmentary way. Krik? Krak! also focuses on storytelling as a way to heal past psychic injuries and to create a sense of community. The refugees on the boat in “Children of the Sea” tell stories to help them cope with the possibility of imminent death, and the townspeople in “Wall of Fire Rising” sit around a blank television screen after the authorities have turned off the state-sponsored newscasts and tell stories. The mother tells her son stories in “Night Women” to help him deal with his fear and her prostitution. Danticat has expressed the hope that the female storytellers she grew up with will tell their stories through her. “Epilogue: Women Like Us” is a meditation about women and writing. In the world she came from, the narrator says, women who write were called lying whores and then raped and killed. Writers were politicians who

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were sent to prison, covered in hot tar, and forced to eat their own waste. She concludes that her book is a testament to the way that these women lived and died and lived again. Other prominent themes in the stories include the endurance of, and rebellion against, repressive governments and governmental use of superstition and fear of the supernatural to control the populace. Critical Context After earning enough money by driving a taxi and working as a laborer, Edwidge Danticat’s parents brought her to the United States when she was twelve. Her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, a novel about four generations of Haitian women, was published in 1994. She was twenty-five years old and had earned an undergraduate degree at Barnard College and a Master of Fine Arts degree at Brown University. Her debut novel was widely praised, and it was picked by Oprah Winfrey’s book club and stayed on the best-seller lists for a short time. Krik? Krak! was nominated for the National Book Award in 1995. Danticat became a leading literary spokesperson for the million Haitians who, either voluntarily or involuntarily, have left their native country. In 1996, Granta magazine named her one of its “20 Best Young American Novelists,” and Time Magazine named her one of “30 under 30” creative people to watch in 1995. Her novel The Farming of Bones (1999), about the 1937 slaughter of thousands of Haitian sugarcane workers in the Dominican Republic by dictator Rafael Trujillo, won an American Book Award. Danticat is often praised for her political activism in support of Haitian immigrants. Bibliography Braziel, Jana Evans. “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti, Nanchon, and Dyaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 2 (Fall, 2004): 103-122. Analyzes Danticat’s preoccupation with maternity as an emblem of Haiti and diaspora. Also discusses Danticat’s feminist re-visioning of Haiti’s history through two heroic maternal figures from the colonial and the revolutionary periods of Haiti’s history. Danticat, Edwidge. “The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat: An Interview.” Interview by Renee H. Shea. Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 382-389. In this extensive interview, Danticat talks about the importance of mother/daughter relationships, the strength of women, and the theme of death in her stories. Davis, Rocio G. “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer, 2001): 67-82. Argues that ethnic writers such as Danticat are drawn to the short-story cycle because of its link to oral narrative and thus its ability to develop identity and create community. Traces recurring images that create a body of mystical unity between the characters of the stories. Houston, Robert. “Expecting Angels.” The New York Times, April 23, 1995, Section 7, p. 22. Says that the best of Danticat’s stories humanize and particularize the

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lives of people whom many have seen as faceless representations of misery and brutality. Notes that because some of the stories were written when Danticat was an undergraduate, their level of sophistication varies greatly. Wucker, Michele. “Edwidge Danticat: A Voice for the Voiceless.” Americas 52, no. 3 (May/June, 2000): 40-46. Recounts Danticat’s extensive activities in support of Haitian rights, both in her homeland and in the United States. Asserts that Danticat examines the human spirit under duress and gives a voice to the voiceless people who appear in news photos of Haiti. Charles E. May

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KWAKU Or, The Man Who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut Author: Roy A. K. Heath (1926) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Tragedy Time of plot: Second half of the twentieth century Locale: Guyana First published: 1982 Principal characters: Kwaku Cholmondeley, the protagonist, an orphan who has been reared by his uncle Blossom Dean, Kwaku’s “lifelong friend and conscience,” the village bookworm Miss Gwendoline, Kwaku’s wife through an arranged marriage Mr. Barzey, Kwaku’s neighbor, a faith healer Kwaku’s uncle, who rears him after his mother dies and his father disappears, and who has little affection for his nephew Philomena, Kwaku’s favorite daughter, who grows up to be a flirtatious teenager Rona, Miss Gwendoline’s favorite daughter The Novel Kwaku focuses on the life of its protagonist, who, despite the fact that he is orphaned, bowlegged, and seemingly incapable of staying out of trouble, manages to rise from being a humble shoemaker in C village to becoming a famous healer in New Amsterdam, a large Guyanese city. A series of events, including an ill-advised promise he makes, plunges him and his family into poverty, alcoholism, and violence. Even when he is a child, Kwaku’s desires for glory and fame lead him into a series of comic misadventures. He is not malicious: “The only flaw in himself was a weakness for letting his tongue run away with him.” The boasts he makes and the stories he invents render him an outsider in his own village, where he is generally viewed as being unreliable. The low opinion that others generally hold of him does not prevent him from having high expectations for himself, however, so that when he wishes to marry, he feels entitled to give his matchmaking uncle a long list of specifications for his bride, including profession, height, degree of literacy, and even style of table manners. His arranged marriage to Gwendoline, a woman from far outside the village who is unaware of his bad reputation, transforms Kwaku into a reliable member of the community. He works hard as a shoemaker’s apprentice, and as his family grows, he stays devoted to his wife. When his vanity drives him to seek the assistance of his next-door neighbor, the one-toothed Mr. Barzey, in ridding himself of gray hairs, he begins to develop artistic yearnings. Mr. Barzey’s photographs offer Kwaku a win-

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dow into a larger world, and he becomes “lost in a dream of far-away places.” Kwaku’s tenuous hold on respectability, and his livelihood itself, is threatened when a plague of locusts attacks C village and destroys the coconut palms on which many of the villagers depend, directly or indirectly. The poverty that all but the government employees suffer affects his family, forcing him to send two of his children away to be cared for by relatives. An offer of help from Blossom Dean, Kwaku’s lifelong friend, inflames Gwendoline’s jealousy. The situation is worsened when Kwaku manages to breach the village conservancy and flood the cultivated fields. Although he is given temporary asylum by Blossom and her boyfriend Wilfred, he is eventually captured by the police, only to be released when Mr. Barzey confesses to the crime. The hunger of his children convinces Kwaku that it is time for him to seek his fortunes in the wider world. Upon his arrival in New Amsterdam, Kwaku, after some initial difficulty, manages to apprentice himself to a shoemaker. After curing a neighbor’s heart condition with garlic, he acquires a reputation as a healer and is able for the first time in his life to dress well, to send ample money home to his family, and to rise in the world. His fame as a healer grows and, with it, “some unquenchable urge to be rich.” Although he recognizes that this is not natural to him, he is driven by it. When he returns to C village for a visit, “the man who could not keep his mouth shut” once again gets himself into trouble with his tongue. His promise to a local fisherman that he can get his wayward daughter to return through his healing powers goes unfulfilled. In revenge, the fisherman places an obeah curse on Gwendoline to strike her blind. As Kwaku works in New Amsterdam to support his family for the next two years, she gradually loses control over her family. In order to reestablish order, Kwaku returns to his village, but he is unable to find any clients for his healing practice. By the time he finally returns to New Amsterdam with his family, he finds that he has been supplanted by another healer. He and his family gradually slip into poverty. At the close of the book, he and his family have been evicted from their home and are once again living with the shoemaker to whom he was apprenticed during his early days in the city. His twins have become brutal and wild, to the point where they beat up their father. Gwendoline has become an alcoholic, and Kwaku is reduced to digging through trash cans to find scraps to sell for pig fodder. Philomena, his favorite daughter, has given birth to an illegitimate child, and his sons are spending all of their time in a Rastafarian commune. The novel ends as Kwaku dances in a rum shop for pennies to buy cheap liquor and Gwendoline dreams of the village in which she was reared. The Characters Kwaku Cholmondeley fits into the tradition of the comic hero. He is resourceful, absurd, and full of dreams of glory. He is, however, more than a lovable idiot bumbling his way through a series of adventures. His loyalty to his family makes him a deeper, richer character, and the contrast between his dreams and the harsher reality that he experiences lends a poignancy to the work. The two strongest female characters in the book, Miss Gwendoline and Blossom,

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are jealous of each other and are similar in their relationships to Kwaku. Both are strong allies of his, each bears at least one of his children, and both attempt to moderate his ambitions and keep him grounded in the world in which he lives. Both women struggle with their jealousy of each other. Neither is simply a killjoy, attempting only to tame a rebellious male spirit; each is a complex character in her own right. Some of the most painful scenes in the book occur as Gwendoline, once a vibrant, competent, intelligent woman, becomes increasingly isolated after losing her sight and finds her relationships with her beloved children fraying. Mr. Barzey is one of the most complicated characters in the book, in that he embodies conflicts between tradition and technological advancement and between family and the desire to break free. His artistic endeavors set him apart from other characters, yet the art form that he has chosen, photography, is a means of capturing a world that may soon be lost. Although photography is an art form requiring modern equipment, his original purpose in taking photographs was to capture on film the spirits he saw as a child. His family is unsympathetic to his ambitions: His daughter-in-law uses his darkroom sink to wash dishes. These conflicts finally make life impossible for him, but before his death, he passes on his precious album of photographs to Kwaku, the man who is perhaps closest to him. It is the myriad secondary characters, both villagers and residents of New Amsterdam, who provide the novel’s texture. Practitioners of obeah, humorless members of Guyana’s ruling party, lascivious women, uncomprehending bosses, and sarcastic village farmers all contribute to a varied portrayal of Guyanese life. Themes and Meanings There are several interconnected themes in Kwaku, among them the struggle for individual expression in a communal society, the conflict between the desire to live in a fictive world and the desire to live honorably and loyally, and the pull of modernity in a traditional culture. Throughout the novel, characters find their lives deeply affected by traditional methods of healing, even when that healing proves ineffective. Kwaku’s relationship with Mr. Barzey develops in the context of the older man’s futile attempts to treat his graying hair yet ends up by centering on the modern art of photography. Later on, Kwaku makes his fortune as a traditional healer. He loses that fortune when the exigencies of the marketplace—the appearance of a rival healer— force him out of the business. Emphasizing the traditional nature of these characters’ lives is the language, sprinkled with Guyanese patois, Heath uses to narrate his story. Against the backdrop of these traditional beliefs, Heath subtly invokes the economic difficulties created by the modern Guyanese state. Although the novel is not overtly political, there are references to the difficulties of living with an omnipresent ruling party in a country that seems to be on the verge of collapse. Kwaku’s own gradual collapse seems to mirror that of his country, which, like him, is gradually sinking under the weight of its debt. There are rumors that spare parts and cars will no longer be imported into the country. There are people whose traditional occupations have been destroyed by new regulations, such as Kwaku’s dead uncle, a cooper, who was put out of business

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by the introduction of the Pure Water Supply Scheme. A chance remark that Kwaku makes leads to his being paid a visit by two government officials, who sternly admonish him against disparaging the ruling party. Within this context, in which rumors abound, the truth is hard to determine, and the struggle for survival requires a great deal of ingenuity, storytelling becomes an important means of constructing an identity. In Kwaku, truth is a commodity with fluctuating value. At times, lying can be a noble act, as when Mr. Barzey incriminates himself to protect Kwaku. At other times, lies provide the novel with a vehicle for comic relief. Kwaku is not the only liar in the book, but he is certainly the most active one. His lies are rarely designed to harm others; rather, they are his means of preserving hope in a world that sometimes offers him few opportunities for optimism. For example, when he first moves to New Amsterdam, he writes letters home describing his life in glowing terms, although he is in fact eking out an existence as a shoemaker’s apprentice. He sees his lies as “additions to the dull fare of day-to-day living, like casreep to pepper-pot, or coconut to cook-up rice.” Some of his lies get him into comic predicaments, such as his childhood boast of having witnessed an accident that he in fact never saw. That boast lands him in court to testify, a task that turns out to be time-consuming and troublesome. Although much of the novel’s comic force is derived from the contrast between Kwaku’s lies and the truth, by the novel’s end Kwaku’s lies have taken on tragic overtones. Rather than being jokes that readers can enjoy, Kwaku’s glowing accounts of his terrible existence come to seem both pathetic and brave: pathetic because transparent, and brave because imagination is ultimately the only means he has of exerting any kind of control over his life. A reader’s paradoxical experience of Kwaku as being both a brave and a foolish figure is reinforced by the narrative distance Heath maintains from his character. Kwaku’s actions are often described at an almost sociological remove. Heath’s clinical descriptions of his character’s comic failures are interspersed with passages in which readers are allowed a sympathetic entrée into Kwaku’s mind and allowed to experience fully his pains and joys. Critical Context Like Heath’s five novels preceding it, Kwaku was reviewed favorably in British and American periodicals. Reviewers applauded the novel’s verve, comic spirit, rich use of the vernacular, and undercurrent of tragedy. A Guyanese-born writer living in England, Roy Heath has had his work compared to that of V. S. Naipaul. Unlike Naipaul, Heath has not yet attracted a great deal of serious academic attention, perhaps because, as Charles R. Larson notes, he has “abandoned the overt element of protest so common in the works of so many third world writers.” Despite its emphasis on issues of family, home, and village, however, Kwaku is deeply concerned with the political issues of its time. As Heath has noted, Guyana’s declaration of independence in 1966 was a formative event for him in his quest to be a writer. The political chaos of Guyana forms a powerful backdrop to the events of the novel. Perhaps even more important to the novel, however, are the Guyanese stories and folktales that Heath recalls having heard as a child. Although these stories have

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found their way into all of his fiction, they are particularly important in shaping the narrative of Kwaku, in which myths, fables, and storytelling itself take on great importance. Kwaku both survives and, often, embroils himself in improbably difficult situations through his love of storytelling, and this provides the novel with much of its comic energy. Equally important, however, and perhaps more moving are the scenes in which Kwaku, the loving father and husband, regales his family with folktales, stories that bring them together not only as a family but also as members of a larger community. Ultimately, readers join this community, a fellowship based on a love of language and of narrative. Bibliography Akãooma, Chiji. Folklore in New World Black Fiction: Writing and the Oral Traditional Aesthetics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Includes a chapter on Heath analyzing the function of “Guyanese anxiety lore” in his work. Bold, Alan. “The Good Shoemaker Schweik.” The Times Literary Supplement, November 12, 1982, p. 1243. Views Kwaku as belonging to the comic tradition of Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik (1921-1923), the protagonist of which is also a “village idiot” who survives through creative stupidity. Booklist. Review of Kwaku: Or, The Man Who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut, by Roy A. K. Heath. 80 (October 1, 1983): 223. Sees Kwaku, despite its comic surface, as a tragic metaphor for the hopelessness and desperation of contemporary Guyanese life. Larson, Charles R. “Metamorphoses and Other Shenanigans.” The New York Times Book Review 89 (January 15, 1984): 11. Praises Heath’s vivid portrayal of Guyanese village life, his sense of the irreverent, and his innovative language as well as the way he, in making a sudden shift from a comic to a tragic tone, challenges reader expectations that Kwaku will remain a lovable buffoon. McWatt, Mark A. “Tragic Irony—The Hero as Victim: Three Novels of Roy A. K. Heath.” In Critical Issues in West Indian Literature, edited by Erika Smilowitz and Roberta Q. Knowles. Parkersburg, Iowa: Caribbean Books, 1984. Provides a general discussion of Heath’s literary technique, which McWatt identifies as a distancing from the terrible events he narrates. Sees this conjunction of the tragic and the ironic, and the position in which Heath’s characters are thus placed, as an important commentary on the condition of West Indian people. _______. “Wives and Other Victims: Women in the Novels of Roy A. K. Heath.” In Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990. Views all Roy Heath characters as victims of larger forces, with women being especially oppressed by their circumstances. Sees the domestic settings of Heath’s novels functioning as re-creations of the slavery under which previous generations of Guyanese were forced to exist. Laura Browder

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LADY SINGS THE BLUES Author: Billie Holiday (Eleanor Fagan Holiday, 1915-1959), with William Dufty (1916-2002) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1915-1956 Locale: United States First published: 1956 Principal personages: Billie Holiday, one of the greatest jazz and blues singers of all time Sadie Fagan, Holiday’s mother, a powerful influence in her life Clarence Fagan, Holiday’s father, a traveling jazz musician who taught her to love music Louis McKay, Holiday’s domineering and sometimes abusive husband, to whom she was slavishly devoted Lester “Prez” Young, Holiday’s close friend and frequent accompanist, one of the greatest jazz saxophonists Count Basie, a famous African American bandleader who featured Holiday for many years Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, a famous African American jazz trumpeter and bandleader who influenced Holiday’s style Benny Goodman, a famous white bandleader of the 1930’s and 1940’s who helped Holiday in her early career Artie Shaw, another famous white bandleader of the same era who was instrumental in advancing Holiday’s career Form and Content Lady Sings the Blues is a very loosely constructed autobiography arranged in chronological order but leaving many gaps. It is based on Billie Holiday’s reminiscences as told to collaborator William Dufty, and as such is largely anecdotal. Holiday had a highly sociable, extroverted nature, and all her reminiscences are about the people she knew. Although her anecdotes are about other people, they reveal her own affectionate, generous, emotional personality. She did not relate to people in an impersonal manner: She either loved or hated them. Although she is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential jazz artists of all time, she devotes little attention to discussing technical aspects of her own music or that of her contemporaries. She is not a critic but an artist. The book is divided into twenty-four short chapters, many of which bear the titles of popular songs. Readers familiar with Holiday’s beautiful renditions of such songs as “Good Morning, Heartache,” “Travelin’ Light,” “I Must Have That Man,” and

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“God Bless the Child” can imagine her inimitable voice singing a background accompaniment to the text. The early chapters deal with Holiday’s impoverished childhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother was a housemaid and her father, who was seldom at home, was a musician. Her great-great-grandmother had been a slave and had borne sixteen children by her white master, so Holiday was one-eighth white. Holiday’s introduction to sex was early and traumatic. She was raped at the age of ten, and by the age of thirteen she was working as a prostitute. Her attitude toward prostitution was pragmatic: She preferred it to the alternative of hard, underpaid domestic labor. She had acquired a love for music from her talented father, but she did not realize that she had musical talent until someone asked her to sing at a nightclub. Although her vocal range was limited, she put her heart and soul into everything she sang. She had unerring timing, a sensual voice, and a unique ability to improvise variations on melodies the way a jazz musician would. Musicians respected Holiday as much more than a vocalist. She truly understood music and could communicate back and forth with musicians while they were performing. She became famous as a New York City cabaret entertainer and soon attracted the notice of such influential white bandleaders as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, racial segregation was so rigorous that there was little social contact between African Americans and whites except in nightclubs. Holiday went on the road with Artie Shaw. Her main impressions of that period were of the prejudice she encountered everywhere she went. It was considered revolutionary for a black singer to appear with a white band. Throughout her book, Holiday describes how black musicians suffered financially from racial prejudice. Jazz, blues, and swing were all primarily black inventions, but white musicians were capitalizing on them because it was nearly impossible for black bands to get engagements in nightclubs, hotels, and theaters that paid good wages. Holiday’s career is connected with most of the greatest popular musicians and vocalists of her time, and she mentions many of them in her book. The names include Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, and many others who shaped jazz into an art form of international prominence. Her best friend in the music world was the gifted saxophonist Lester Young, with whom she made many records. Holiday flatly denied rumors about their supposed ongoing sexual relationship. Holiday had started smoking marijuana before the age of thirteen. She quickly acquired other bad habits. She was a heavy drinker and claims that at one time she smoked nearly a carton of cigarettes a day, regardless of the effect they might have on her delicate voice. Eventually she had her first introduction to hard drugs such as opium and heroin. Like many other jazz musicians, Holiday soon became a heroin addict. In 1937, she was arrested and sent to prison. Lesbianism was common in the women’s prison where she served her sentence; she evidently had some experience with female lovers, although she does not go into detail. She was haunted by rumors of her lesbian tendencies, rumors she stoutly denied, for the rest of her life.

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The truth about Holiday, which can be read between the lines, is that her early traumatic experiences with sex left her apathetic toward physical sex. What she wanted was real love and affection, and these seemed impossible for her to find. She began making as much as $2,000 a week, but she could never keep money because she allowed both men and women to exploit her. Her craving for cigarettes, liquor, and drugs reflected a craving for affection. She became involved with men who had vicious reputations. She appeared to like being brutalized by strong, ruthless men, perhaps because she felt guilty for going against the moral indoctrination she had received from her mother. Holiday describes several of her trips to Europe, where she was widely acclaimed because of her recordings. Like many other black jazz performers, she found that Europeans gave her more respect as an artist and as a human being than she received at home. Europeans also exhibited a much more civilized attitude toward narcotics addiction, treating it as an illness rather than as a crime. In the United States, law enforcement officials continued to hound her, possibly because they disapproved of the example she set as a role model. She describes an arrest for drug possession on February 23, 1956. Her book ends abruptly with her heading back to New York City on a bus without even enough money to buy anything to eat. After making a fortune as an entertainer and achieving international fame, she was as poor as when she scrubbed steps in Baltimore as a teenage girl. The last three years of Holiday’s tragic life are not recorded in Lady Sings the Blues. They were a downhill spiral because she had ruined her delicate voice with hard living and had also lost her perfect timing. She lived on her reputation, making appearances in second-rate nightclubs accompanied by second-rate musicians. She died of heart failure, cirrhosis of the liver, and kidney infection on July 17, 1959. Any complete study of Holiday must include listening to her records. Anyone who listens to the jazz recordings of her youth and then turns to the blues recordings she made at the end of her career can hear her whole story in her voice. Fortunately, many albums are readily available at record stores and libraries. She is better known after her death, and is known to a wider international audience, than she was during her tempestuous, tragic lifetime. Analysis Lady Sings the Blues is a patchwork quilt of anecdotes with no consistent thesis holding it together. One of the major themes has to do with the difficulties of being a black jazz artist in America. White musicians such as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, as well as a host of others, were able to capitalize on an art form invented by African Americans and with roots in Africa. Black musicians were barred from many clubs and theaters because of racial prejudice. They found it nearly impossible to tour the United States, and in the 1930’s and 1940’s, touring the country was a prerequisite to financial success. Holiday describes this phenomenon with ironic humor rather than the bitterness that was expressed by many black jazz musicians in the 1960’s and later decades.

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Another important theme concerns drugs. Few people have had more experience with illicit drugs than Holiday, and she presents drug addiction as the worst form of hell on earth. The tragedy of this great artist is that her career was cut short by drugs, and the strongest moral to be drawn from her life is that using drugs is equivalent to committing suicide. She says explicitly: If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing. The only thing that can happen to you is sooner or later you’ll get busted, and once that happens, you’ll never live it down. Just look at me.

She also believed that the American government’s policy toward drug addicts was medieval: Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day.

That was written in 1956, when the drug problem was minuscule compared to what it has since become. Many people came to advocate the decriminalization of narcotics as the only feasible solution to a problem that threatens to destroy society. Many of the anecdotes in the book concern jails and law enforcement officers. Holiday’s descriptions make it appear that the justice system in the United States was bigoted and corrupt. She claims that she was framed on at least two occasions by overzealous officers who planted incriminating evidence. Holiday also talks at considerable length about the pleasures she had in life. Her life was not all suffering and tragedy; she enjoyed life to the fullest. She talks about the interesting people she was able to meet because of her fame as an entertainer. Her greatest pleasure, of course, was music. She learned to love music as a child and was absorbed in music all of her life. In connection with various performances of famous songs such as Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” she describes her approach to singing: She had to believe in the words she was singing or else it was impossible for her to sing at all. She was understandably proud of her rags-to-riches success. Throughout her autobiography, she brags about the big money she made as a performer and all the celebrities she met. The reader senses that she had to keep reassuring herself, that the whole thing was not a dream that might melt away. This theme of emotional insecurity runs like a thread throughout the book and sheds light on her substance abuse. She mixed

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liquor, tobacco, barbiturates, marijuana, and heroin for much of her life. It is hardly surprising that she died at the age of forty-four. As the title suggests, another major theme of Lady Sings the Blues is the blues form itself. The blues are a means of turning grief into joy, pain into pleasure, ugliness into beauty—of conquering despair. That seems to have been the overriding purpose of Billie Holiday’s life and art. Her best records are as beautiful and as meaningful as when they were first created with many of the legendary accompanists of the jazz world. Critical Context Lady Sings the Blues sold many copies in the United States and abroad because of Billie Holiday’s fame as a singer. The book received mixed reviews. Gilbert Millstein’s review in The New York Times, for example, was extremely favorable. Millstein said that the personality of Billie Holiday emerged whole—“colloquial, bitter, generous, loving, foolish and tragic.” On the other hand, Ralph J. Gleason was extremely unsympathetic and even antagonistic in his 1956 review of the book in the San Francisco Chronicle. Holiday had recently received much adverse publicity in that city following a drug arrest. According to Gleason, Lady Sings the Blues is “a story packed with self-pity and biased by Miss Holiday’s view that she was blameless in everything that happened to her and was the unending victim of prejudice.” It is unfortunately true that few great artists are fully appreciated until after their deaths, and Holiday’s autobiography was published while she still had three painful years left to live. Since her death, biographers and musicologists have tended to treat her book with respect, although they generally concur that it glosses over many unpleasant facts and usually tries to present the singer in the best possible light. The anecdotes about sexual promiscuity and drug use were shocking at the time. The New Yorker called the book “as bitter and uncompromising an autobiography as has been published in a long time,” and Time said that “Lady Sings the Blues has the tone of truth.” The truth that many people did not wish to hear was that racial prejudice was rampant in the United States and that poverty, crime, prostitution, and substance abuse among African Americans were induced in part by the economic and psychological affliction of being black in a predominantly white society. Billie Holiday’s book, published only a few years before the first Civil Rights Act and the revolutionary 1960’s, was particularly effective in drawing public attention to the race problem because she was not only well known but also widely admired and even loved. The book helped to make African Americans aware of the economic exploitation that was a principal motivation behind racial prejudice. Black jazz musicians began in the 1960’s to develop a more ethnocentric attitude toward their art. No longer were they content to see their music “ripped off” by white bandleaders, orchestrators, and performers who could capitalize on it while the black musicians themselves were confined largely to ghetto nightclubs or were forced to work for starvation wages. Holiday’s feisty, forthright attitude, expressed in her daily life and in the

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pages of her autobiography, was an inspiration to black entertainers in particular and to African Americans in general. Lady Sings the Blues is a short work of only 229 pages. It skips over many years— even whole decades—of Holiday’s life. Collaborator William Dufty toned down much of Holiday’s profanity and invective because the book was to be published by a major white New York publisher and was intended to appeal to a large and predominantly white audience. Language in the book that was considered shocking in 1956 is now heard every night on television sitcoms. Many facts about Holiday’s sex life and substance abuse were deliberately suppressed or considerably softened. Nevertheless, the book had a powerful impact because of the singer’s reputation. Like The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), whose militant subject was strongly affected by Holiday’s memoirs of her life experiences, it was one of the earliest autobiographies to attempt to change public awareness by telling the bitter, angry, shocking truth about the condition of African Americans at the time. Bibliography Bratcher, Melanie E. Words and Songs of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone: Sound Motion, Blues Spirit, and African Memory. New York: Routledge, 2007. Rare scholarly work treating the cultural work done by Holiday and two other blues singers. Important for evaluating Holiday’s work as an artist and as an autobiographer. Chilton, John. Billie’s Blues: Billie Holiday Story, 1933-1959. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. The focus of this biography is on Holiday’s development as an artist. The author personally interviewed or communicated with dozens of people and examined much of the material available in magazine and newspaper files. An excellent source of periodical references containing four chapters discussing her many recordings. De Veaux, Alexis. Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. A fictional biography of Holiday that parallels the events described in Lady Sings the Blues. The entire story is told in poetic black English. It highlights the origin of the song “Don’t Explain,” which was created by Holiday while she was grieving over a faithless lover. Kliment, Bud. Billie Holiday: Singer. New York: Chelsea House, 1990. This biography is part of the “Black Americans of Achievement” series. Kliment emphasizes the negative effects of racism on Holiday’s life but also candidly discusses her self-destructive tendencies. Contains many excellent photographs. Mezzrow, Milton. Really the Blues. New York: Random House, 1946. This highly entertaining book is a minor classic written by a musician who was active in the jazz world during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Mezzrow vividly describes the precarious lives of jazz musicians and discusses in knowledgeable terms the many different types of blues. O’Meally, Robert. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. New York: Arcade, 1991. This biography focuses on Holiday’s development as a creative artist.

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Richly illustrated with photographs of Holiday from childhood to just before her death as well as photographs of all the people who were important in her life. White, John. Billie Holiday: Her Life and Times. New York: Universe Books, 1987. This biography, first published in England, presents a different perspective by focusing on Holiday’s early years in Baltimore and her pioneering role as the first black woman to sing with an all-white orchestra in segregated regions. The last chapter contains an illuminating evaluation of all of her recordings. Bill Delaney

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THE LAND Author: Mildred D. Taylor (1943) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism; bildungsroman Time of plot: 1880’s Locale: Mississippi First published: 2001 Principal characters: Paul-Edward Logan, the multiracial protagonist and narrator, who suffers great injustices because of his race but seeks fulfillment through independent work and the possession of land Mitchell Thomas, a boyhood tormentor but adult friend of Paul who meets with tragedy due to social inequities Caroline Perry, Mitchell’s African American wife, who falls in love with Paul George and Hammond Logan, Paul’s older white brothers Robert Logan, another older white brother of Paul, whom Robert betrays Edward Logan, the white father of the Logan family Cassie Logan, the multiracial daughter of Edward and sister of Paul Deborah Logan, Edward’s African American mistress and Cassie and Paul’s mother Luke Sawyer, a white landowner, rancher, and furniture maker who hires Paul and treats him with fairness and equity Digger Wallace, a bigoted white man who envies Paul and brings tragedy to the narrator’s life Nathan Perry, Caroline’s younger brother, who assists in clearing land under contract Filmore Granger, a seemingly forthright white landowner who cheats Paul and Mitchell J. T. Hollenbeck, a white businessman who owns the prime piece of land Paul wishes to purchase The Novel The Land, which chronicles the coming-of-age of Paul-Edward Logan, is a prequel to Mildred D. Taylor’s award-winning novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976). Paul narrates his own story, which unfolds not only as an indictment of race relations in post-Civil War Mississippi but also as an inspiring tale of the search for identity

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and human validation through the struggle to own “the land.” The land (a choice piece of meadowland that is dear to the narrator’s heart) comes to represent much more than mere earth and farm—it becomes a metaphor for Paul’s metamorphosis into a man, an equal, and a self-realized human being who has come to terms with the reality of his life but who remains undaunted by it. From the beginning, Paul must grapple with the nature of his birth: He is the son of Edward Logan, a former slaveholder who fathered two multiracial children. Moreover, Paul’s mother, Deborah, loves Edward and willingly stays with him. Logan treats his children by Deborah as equitably as his social standing will allow, but Paul bristles at the partiality Edward shows to his white sons when the presence of white society warrants it. In a hard-learned lesson, Paul is heartlessly humiliated by his father, who whips him for speaking back to white neighbors. Betrayed by his beloved white brother Robert and cheated out of his pay by a white man, Paul decides to run away to make his own way in the world. He is accompanied by the adventurous and somewhat volatile Mitchell Thomas in a daring escape after Mitchell punches the white man and takes the money owed to Paul. The two are aided and abetted by two white women in an exciting episode of clever intrigue. After stints together training horses, logging, and clearing land, the two friends separate. Paul, who earlier apprenticed in furniture making, hires himself out to Luke Sawyer as both a horseman and a craftsman. As time goes by, Paul cannot forget the land he fell in love with, and he sets about to own it. A series of intense events and double-dealing complications almost unravels his dream to obtain the land, but through several surprising twists and turns and Paul’s constant tenacity, the land becomes his. The Characters Paul-Edward Logan is the controlling voice in the novel, but paradoxically, as the narrator he often communicates through “silence.” Numerous times in the novel, Paul states that “I said nothing” or he refuses to respond to insults, probing questions, and gratuitous advice. Through his silence, Paul maintains his power and his privacy. Even with his eventual wife Caroline, he seems to communicate with understanding nods. This refusal to reveal himself creates the character that is Paul. Readers feel and know his pain most when he describes his silence or inability to speak. The novel seems to promote a reality that is comprehended through silence, compassion, and understanding. There are no impassioned speeches in the novel. There is action, and there is silence. Caroline Perry acts as an independent and defiant counterpart to Paul. From his first observance of her—when she berates some white boys for taunting a little black boy—to his falling in love with her no-nonsense demeanor, Paul has met his match. The foil character to Paul is Mitchell Thomas, who through his temper and unguarded license with words brings about his own downfall. Mitchell acts as a contrast to Paul, who utilizes his self-control, his silence, and his mental powers to thwart and outsmart white characters. Edward Logan represents the paradox of the Reconstruction period in the United

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States. A white man who tries to “protect” his illicit black children while training them to live and survive in a white man’s world, Logan is at once a seer and a limited man. He is understandably shackled by the social strictures of his day, yet he does not have the inner fortitude to truly defy them for the sake of his children. Perhaps Taylor is indicating a sad and sorry truth about the nature of race in late nineteenth century America. Themes and Meanings In a secondary story line that dovetails with the main narrative, Paul in childhood is repeatedly beaten by the young Mitchell Thomas, the African American son of a horseman who works for Edward Logan. The motif of being “beaten” begins here and continues throughout the novel, as Paul is repeatedly cheated by white men who cannot rise above the racism of their time. Paul receives physical beatings not only from his black peers but also from his father. Subsequently, he experiences metaphorical “beatings” that include his betrayal by several white figures. Interestingly, Mitchell allies himself with Paul because of the latter’s generosity despite the beatings and because Mitchell himself has been repeatedly beaten by an abusive father. These literal and symbolic beatings link the themes of the novel. Injustice is like a beating and must be accepted as pain but also be patiently fought. Irrational reactions to it only bring tragedy, as the contrapuntal fates of Mitchell and Paul demonstrate. Mitchell fails to resolve his knee-jerk response to the injustices of white society, while Paul (guided by his white father) find safer and more effective means of responding. However, the actions of white men who “beat down” the other race are still represented as evil, self-serving, and destructive. Two white men cheat Paul out of his rightful monetary due, one murders his friend and destroys his property, and others fail righteously to protest when such evils come to light. Thematically, Taylor indicates the subtle idea that people allow a wrong idea (white superiority) to create rationalizations for evil, intolerance, and inaction. Such rationalizations become like masks—and as narrator, Paul unmasks these rationalizations by enduring and judiciously fighting against them. Taylor, however, also depicts good, well-meaning whites, both men and women, who aid Paul but never really support or “rescue” him. Sawyer’s offer to loan Paul money at the close of the novel is a significant exception. Through his judicious “fight,” Paul defines himself on his own terms, demonstrating a self-reliance that resonates not only with American individualism but also with human wisdom. Because Paul submits to his “beatings” instead of taking revenge or defying the cheating white men, he avoids the deadly consequences of such defiance and ultimately succeeds in attaining self-determination. With persistence, hard work, and control over his emotions, Paul is able to “beat” the system that seeks to continue the oppression that the Civil War seemingly abolished. Paul, who is literally between two worlds—the white and the black—is able to supersede both. This was the horrifically hard lesson he learned from his father’s whipping, and it served him well. However, Taylor leaves open the possibility of goodness. In the end, Paul succeeds because Cassie sends him money obtained from a

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mixed inheritance, money representing his mother’s hard work on ten acres of land and the largess of his white father who purchases back the land. White and black coalesce to help Paul bring his struggle to fruition and attain his dream of owning the land he so loves. Critical Content The Land was received as a worthy addition to the Logan saga. Most critics viewed it as a substantial addition to the multigenerational story and as a novel that stands in its own right. The novel received the Scott O’Dell Historical Award in 2002. Taylor began writing in response to her feeling that school texts neglected the “true” story of African American struggles. She relied on her own family’s stories, which related the actual history of personal racial struggles in a country still adjusting to the end of slavery, to desegregation, and to the Civil Rights movement. The Land is based on the experience both of Taylor’s great-grandfather and of the author herself. Each engaged in monumental struggles to obtain land and, through it, independence. Taylor also has indicated that she hopes her books present a real and valid picture of African American history for both races. She believes that African Americans cannot hide from the past and must realize that “black people were second-class citizens in the past and had to react in a certain way just to survive.” Bibliography Bontempo, Barbara. “Exploring Prejudice in Young Adult Literature Through Drama and Role Play.” ALAN Review, Spring, 1995. Discusses strategies for teaching books such as The Land to adolescents, using role playing to understand issues of prejudice. Crowe, Chris. Presenting Mildred D. Taylor. New York: Twayne, 1999. Based on interviews with the author, this study delves into Taylor’s life and its relationship to her work, including the saga of the Logan family continued in The Land. Rochman, Hazel. “Working the Land.” Review of The Land, by Mildred D. Taylor. Booklist 97, no. 22 (August, 2001): 2108. Discusses Taylor’s novel and its place in her Logan family series. Taylor, Mildred. “The Booklist Interview.” Interview by Hazel Rochman. Booklist 98, no. 2 (September 15, 2001): 221. Taylor discusses the publication of The Land and the characters featured therein. Sherry L. Morton-Mollo

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LAWD TODAY Author: Richard Wright (1908-1960) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Naturalism Time of plot: February 12, 1936 Locale: The South Side of Chicago First published: 1963 Principal characters: Jake Jackson, the protagonist, a narrow, frustrated, and prejudiced postal worker Lil, Jake’s long-suffering but stubborn wife Albert “Al” Johnson, a fellow postal worker and friend of Jake Robert “Bob” Madison, a divorced postal worker and friend of Jake Nathan “Slim” Williams, the third of Jake’s friends from the post office “Doc” Higgins, an older man who owns a barbershop Duke, an idealistic young man Blanche, a seductive, light-skinned prostitute Blue Juice, a pimp The Novel Lawd Today is the story of one day in the life of Jake Jackson, detailing his daily routine from dawn into the early hours of the next morning. The story is cyclical, opening and closing in the Jackson apartment with conflict between husband and wife. Jake’s day is periodically interrupted by radio broadcasts celebrating the annual holiday for the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, February 12. The story is divided into three sections of descending length. The first and longest section, “Commonplace,” describes Jake’s morning from his waking until he goes to work. Angry at being awakened by the radio from a dream involving the climbing of an endless stairway, Jake picks a fight with his wife Lil over her chatting with the milkman and her doctor bills. After he beats Lil into submission, Jake dresses himself and reads the paper, making bigoted comments on contemporary world events. Jake admires the power of Adolf Hitler and of gangsters, empathizes with the misfortunes of millionaires, and criticizes communists, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Albert Einstein. Leaving the house, Jake begins his busy morning by sorting through the mail, showing his interest in farfetched money-making schemes and patent medicines. He loses two dollars playing a popular lottery game at the Black Gold Policy Wheel when he bets three “sure win” symbols from his dream. Then, after admiring a picture of a

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blonde girl on an adventure film poster, he goes for a haircut and heart-to-heart at Doc Higgins’s Tonsorial Palace. Doc listens to Jake’s marital troubles and agrees to help him if Lil lodges another complaint at the post office about his wasting money and beating her. Meeting Bob, Slim, and Al for a game of bridge, Jake enjoys some goodnatured kidding with his friends. Later, they all admire the knowledge of the patent medicine man and the pomp of the “generals” of the “Supreme Imperial War Council” in the Back-to-Africa parade. The second section, “Squirrel Cage,” deals with Jake’s eight-hour shift at the main Chicago post office. Before his shift begins, Jake tries to get a loan from the paymaster, Jones. Jones refuses him and advises him to see the Board of Review about the status of his employment. They are prepared to fire Jake, since Lil has filed a third complaint, but through the timely intervention of Doc Higgins, Jake is able to keep his job, after which he is able to borrow a hundred dollars at high interest from Jones. The eight-hour shift is a seemingly endless series of tedious, repetitive tasks involved in sorting and processing mail, all performed under close supervision to ensure maximum efficiency of the workers. While hand-stamping mail after lunch, Jake and his three friends have a long conversation that ranges over topics that include sex, how to dominate women, the benefits of the National Guard, and a cynical analysis of race relations. The third and shortest section, “Rats’ Alley,” describes the leisure activities of Jake and his friends, which begin after work and continue well past midnight. After being seduced and set up by Blanche, being robbed of his borrowed money, and getting beaten up by Blue Juice at a nightclub, Jake staggers home drunk. There, he has a final fight with Lil, and she knocks him out with a piece of a broken mirror. He collapses in a pool of his own blood. The Characters Jake is a frustrated member of the black lower-middle class who has become a bigot and a domestic tyrant. Jake is a living stereotype and a negative reflection of white, working-class prejudices. A stock character who does not develop, Jake has not learned either to deal with the limitations of his world or to imagine an alternative. When his ambition is frustrated in his dull, dead-end job, Jake puts his faith in unrealistic ways to change his life such as get-rich-quick schemes and gambling. He sees Lil as one of the forces arrayed against his success, and he feels that he must dominate her in order to affirm his own value. Disappointed with his family life, he seeks male companionship, excitement in drinking, and sexual satisfaction from prostitutes. The closest Jake comes to self-affirmation is the drunken realization that, even though he has been beaten and robbed, at least he has no one to blame for his troubles but himself. Stumbling home from “Rats’ Alley,” Jake yells, “BUT WHEN I WAS FLYING I WAS A FLYING FOOL!” Lil Jackson is an embattled housewife, terrorized and dominated by her husband, who must fight for dignity and financial support. Having previously been fooled by Jake into having an unnecessary abortion that has left her with a tumor requiring re-

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peated treatments and operations, Lil must rely on him to pay her recurring doctor bills. When she is not trying to get money for medical and household expenses, threatening to complain of Jake’s violence to the post office, or fending off physical attacks, Lil turns for comfort to religious magazines. Jake prefers the easy camaraderie of male companionship to the responsibility represented by Lil. Despite Al Johnson’s high blood pressure and heart condition, Jake envies his swaggering good cheer and National Guard membership and even agrees to join the Guard after Al’s sales pitch. Jake and Al constantly compete for dominance in the world of the four friends. Bob Madison and Nathan “Slim” Williams are sickly counterparts to Jake and Al whose bad health shows the consequences of fast living in the ghetto. Jake’s friendship is of doubtful benefit for these two. Jake practically pours whiskey down Bob’s throat, even though it will aggravate Bob’s inflammation, while Slim’s tubercular coughing disgusts and frightens Jake more than its fills him with sympathy. Doc Higgins is a hypocrite who hides his own self-interested behavior under an appearance of helping his community. A small-business owner who preaches a philosophy of self-help, Doc relies on his political connections to help him get ahead. Rejecting any politics of change, he believes that “we colored folks ought to stick with the rich white folks.” While seeming to be Jake’s friend and helping him out of a difficult situation, Doc takes advantage of Jake’s trouble with the post office for his own monetary gain. After the Review Board agrees not to fire Jake, Doc charges him $150 for his assistance, double the amount upon which they had agreed. Blanche represents the seduction and danger of unmarried, free women. She is the unattainable object of desire for Jake. Blue Juice is a powerful black man who, like Doc Higgins, is better able to control his environment than Jake is and who takes advantage of Jake’s naïveté. Themes and Meanings Unlike other African American works that depict the power of racism and the squalid life of the urban ghetto, Lawd Today focuses on a black villain-hero who is largely responsible for his own condition. The narrative presents Jake naturalistically, through description and through his own speech and actions, without making any explicit criticism. His fate as a prisoner of his own prejudices against various groups and his unrealistic beliefs about how to improve his life become clear in the failure of all of his attempts at personal liberation. Jake is an example of how black men from the South are left without moral guidance when rural folk ties begin to erode in northern cities. Without benefit of family and tradition to validate and affirm black identity against the forces of racist society, men such as Jake have no alternative to the bigotry of the media and the cheapness of consumer culture. While Jake’s situation is particular to a black man, it also shares some of the problems of the American workingman in general. Because he believes what he reads in the papers and hears on the radio, Jake accepts the common bigotry of the unenlight-

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ened. His commentary on the newspaper headlines demonstrates that he accepts the worst prejudices of white society against Jews, foreigners, communists, and reform in general. For this reason, he can imagine no alternative to materialism and the pursuit of status based on money and power—what Wright elsewhere called American society’s pursuit of trash. An alternative to everyday life that Jake admires but does not pursue is African American nationalism. While the Back-to-Africa movement seems to offer some hope of racial pride to dispirited urban African Americans, its promise of liberation is false. The proud, uniformed generals of the fictional African empire represent how the movement has borrowed the worst aspect of white imperialism, the love of power and its trappings, despite all of its claims about promoting the “Brotherhood of Man, Sisterhood of Woman and the Fatherhood of God.” Juxtaposed to the story of Jake’s day is the periodic radio chatter about Lincoln’s birthday. The platitudes about the glory of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves contrast with the country’s failure to reach the goals of racial equality more than seventy years later. This failure is represented by conditions in Chicago’s segregated ghetto and by the failure of all of Jake’s attempts to better his condition and affirm his identity as a black man. In Lawd Today, the only way for men to define themselves as independent beings is against black women. Men such as Jake see only two kinds of women, mothers and whores, and each type exerts a different kind of control over black men. Mothers represent rural, folk, Christian, and family values. Having left his own rural family milieu to achieve personal independence, Jake tricks Lil into the abortion to prevent her from playing the full mother role, and he beats her to assert his authority. Blanche, the prostitute, offers the promise of an escape from drab everyday life. She uses her sexual power over Jake to trick him out of his money and deprives him of his masculine power. Critical Context Since Lawd Today was finally published in 1963, critics have debated its merits. Some have argued that the book is a flawed early novel and cite Wright’s inability to publish it during his lifetime as evidence of its shortcomings. Wright wrote, revised, and sent out the novel several times from 1931 to 1937, but it was uniformly rejected by publishers. Published after Wright’s death, Lawd Today has never received the critical attention accorded Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy (1945) or his other novel about the Chicago ghetto, Native Son (1940). Lawd Today has been criticized as an apprentice novel far inferior to Wright’s later work and as an unoriginal text that relies too heavily on borrowings from John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, and other white writers. Critics have rejected it as dull, unimaginative, and full of unconnected, hackneyed episodes that fail to come together in a compelling plot. Some critics have asserted that the novel is offensive because it relies on so many negative black stereotypes. Nevertheless, Lawd Today has been praised for anticipating Wright’s later work.

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The unlucky antihero Jake Jackson seems to be a model for the more tragic Bigger Thomas. Some have argued that Lawd Today even surpasses Wright’s later stories and novels in its skillful use of satire and humor free from sensational incidents. Wright’s first novel has been praised for its structure and balance and for the coherence of its imagery as well as for its use of experimental writing techniques. The radio broadcasts of Lincoln’s birthday in the background contrast the emancipation of the slaves with Jake’s failed attempts at emancipation, and the melting together of the voices of Jake, Al, Bob, and Slim during the post office dialogue produces a nameless and typical workingman’s voice, trapped in unoriginal thought. The relationship between Lawd Today and Wright’s activity in the Communist Party during the Depression is complex. The novel echoes communist criticism of capitalist society in its focus on corruption, racism, and the dullness of repetitive, supervised labor. However, Lawd Today does not offer an alternative to Jake’s existence, and its spokesman for the communist position, Duke, is restricted to a few statements that are rejected by Doc Higgins and Jake at the barbershop. Bibliography Burrison, William. “Another Look at Lawd Today: Richard Wright’s Tricky Apprenticeship.” CLA Journal 29 (June, 1986): 424-441. Both positive and negative assessments of Lawd Today have failed to present a detailed, comprehensive analysis of the text itself. The novel is organized according to the comic pattern of the fool/trickster tale; Jake is a version of the tragic fool. The irony of Jake’s position is expressed through complex patterns of colors and numbers and through the use of Lincoln’s birthday as background for Jake’s unlucky day. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. 2d ed. Translated by Isabel Barzun. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. The standard biography of Wright. Details his childhood in the South, his role in the literary scenes of Chicago and New York, his relationship with the Communist Party, and his final years among American writers in Paris. Includes interpretation of his novels and summaries of their reception. Fabre explains how Lawd Today is autobiographical, since the story of Jake is based on Wright’s own experience working in the main Chicago post office during the Depression. Felgar, Robert. Student Companion to Richard Wright. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Guide for students to Wright’s body of work, including detailed discussion of Lawd Today and its place within both that body and the larger body of African American and American literature. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Richard Wright’s Experiment in Naturalism and Satire: Lawd Today.” Studies in American Fiction 14, no. 2 (Autumn, 1986): 165-178. Neither simply naturalism nor satire alone, Wright’s novel is an experiment at combining the two types of plot to suggest that the foibles of Jake are those of human nature. Leary, Lewis. “Lawd Today: Notes on Richard Wright’s First/Last Novel.” In Critical Essays on Richard Wright, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Though Lawd Today is an apprentice novel, showing the influence of such

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writers as John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and James T. Farrell, Wright’s creation of Jake as a caricature of the white world is original. Margolies, Edward. “Foreshadowings: Lawd Today.” In The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Because of its subtle indirect social criticism, Lawd Today is in some ways more sophisticated than his most famous work, Native Son. Themes of the black man as both villain and hero, Black Nationalism, the erosion of folk ties in northern cities, and the similarity of the hero’s failed strivings to the absurdity of the existentialist hero anticipate major themes of Wright’s later work. Mootry, Maria K. “Bitches, Whores, and Woman Haters: Archetypes and Typologies in the Art of Richard Wright.” In Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Richard Macksey and Frank E. Moorer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1984. Argues that Jake’s quest in Lawd Today is the quest of all Wright’s heroes: the pursuit of freedom and manhood against the barriers of racism and the power of black women. Erik D. Curren

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THE LEARNING TREE Author: Gordon Parks, Sr. (1912-2006) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: Mid-1920’s Locale: Cherokee Flats, a small town in Kansas First published: 1963 Principal characters: Newton Buchanan Winger, the protagonist, a young boy Sarah Winger, Newt’s mother, the keystone of the Winger family Jack Winger, Sarah’s husband and Newt’s father, willing to do whatever work is necessary to keep his family together Arcella Jefferson, Newt’s first love Jefferson Cavanaugh, a white judge, the pillar of the community of Cherokee Flats Marcus Savage, a slightly older contemporary of Newt The Novel The Learning Tree relates two crucial years in the life of Newt Winger. It opens with a terrible tornado that causes death and destruction in the small Kansas town of Cherokee Flats and leads to Newt’s sexual awakening as he is comforted during the storm by Big Mabel. The novel concludes with the deaths of Newt’s mother, Sarah, and of Marcus Savage, whose last act before his own death is his attempt to murder Newt in revenge for Newt’s testimony against Marcus’s father. Although death plays an ever-present role, The Learning Tree is also about growing up in small-town America in the early part of the twentieth century. Cherokee Flats, with a population of six thousand, is home to both African Americans and whites. Although African Americans cannot compete with whites in athletic events or eat in the same ice cream parlor, black and white children often play together. The high school is integrated, but the lower grades are not. Some experiences transcend racial boundaries. The rural nature of Cherokee Flats gives Newt and his companions the opportunity to hunt, swim, and experience the joys and sorrows that befall all children. Like most mothers, Sarah encourages Newt’s academic pursuits. She dreams that he will eventually find a better life. She expresses her faith that the next generation of African Americans will make a new world for themselves, a world different from that of their parents. Sarah, a strongly religious woman, impresses upon Newt that good people and bad people come in all colors, and that all, regardless of color, have the possibility of experiencing redemption, even Marcus Savage, who was sentenced to reform school for beating up a local white farmer, and even Clint, her drunken son-in-law, who constantly threatens to kill his

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wife. Although Sarah hopes that Newt will eventually get away, she notes that the town is like a fruit tree, with good fruit and bad fruit, and “you can learn just as much here about people and things as you can learn any place else. . . . No matter if you go or stay, think of Cherokee Flats . . . till the day you die—let it be your learnin’ tree.” Newt’s first love is Arcella Jefferson, and she is to be the only love of his life. Arcella, however, turns from Newt to Chauncey Cavanaugh, an older white boy whose father is Judge Cavanaugh, an important figure in the community. Arcella never explains her decision, but Newt ruminates that it might have been Chauncey’s money or his automobile. Perhaps she might even have liked Chauncey. Whatever the reason for her change of affections, the “only thing wrong with her for Chauncey was her color.” Chauncey gets her pregnant. Rural Kansas is not the Deep South, but racial differences still matter. Newt fears death and worries that interracial violence might destroy the black community. His fear culminates in the murder of Jake Kiner, a white farmer, by Booker Savage, Marcus’s father, who then places the murder weapon in the hands of a drunken white man, Silas Newall. Newt, who had been working for Kiner, secretly observes the killing, but he remains silent, concerned about what might happen if he reveals that a black man had murdered a white in Cherokee Flats. His conscience compels him to confide in his mother. At Silas Newall’s trial, Newt courageously relates what he witnessed. Booker, in the courtroom at the time, attempts to flee. Some whites threaten to lynch Booker, who commits suicide rather than surrender. Marcus, Booker’s son, blames Newt for his father’s death and vows revenge. Sarah, who had been in failing health for some time, dies first. Her last action is to calm her drunken son-in-law Clint, who had threatened to shoot his wife and anyone else who got in his way. Before she dies, Sarah gives her blessing to Newt, who is to move to Minnesota to live with one of his older sisters. His mother’s last words to Newt are to make a man of himself and do the right thing. On her deathbed, Sarah sees Minnesota as Newt’s promised land. In the novel’s conclusion, Marcus Savage steals a gun and attempts to kill Newt in revenge for Newt’s testimony. In the resulting fight, Newt, who is winning, lets Marcus flee as the police close in. Newt secretly hopes that Marcus will escape, but there is no escape. The novel begins with death in a tornado and ends with Marcus’s death in a fall down a cliff. Newt considers hunting for Marcus’s body but instead heads for home and a new life in Minnesota. The Characters The Learning Tree is written in the third person, but the tale is related primarily through the eyes of Newt Winger. It is Newt’s life that readers experience, and it is through Newt that the world of Cherokee Flats comes alive. Gordon Parks, a famous photographer, has the literary ability to allow readers to “see” that world through his words. Newt is both typical and atypical. With his young friends Beansie, Jappy, Skunk, and Earl, he loves to hike, to hunt, to swim, and even to steal fruit from a local farmer’s peach trees.

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Newt is more reflective than any of the other characters. Possibly this is because it is Newt’s story, told mainly through his experiences. Hunting, swimming, and even stealing peaches were part of many boys’ experiences in the small towns of early twentieth century America, but other aspects of Newt’s character are unique. One of his ambitions is to go to college, an unusual goal for an African American in the 1920’s. Chosen to make the graduation speech at his all-black grade school, Newt asserts that “We are proud to be black. . . . Our class does not expect life to be easy. We only expect it to be better, and we are determined to help make it so by contributing something to it ourselves.” It is not easy to be an African American in Cherokee Flats. Once, while Newt is selling brooms door to door with his blind uncle, who populates his unseen world with people of all different colors, a white boy refers to Newt as “nigger.” When Newt hits him in retaliation, the boy’s mother cries to Newt, “You are a nigger! . . . Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” On another occasion, a circus comes to town and the promoter puts on a round-robin fight featuring Newt, several of his friends, Marcus Savage, and two Mexicans. The audience is largely white, and during the fight Newt hears taunts about “niggers,” “greasers,” and “Sambos,” even from small children. There is no escaping the significance of color. Most of the other characters are not so well developed and are more stereotypical. Marcus Savage is so offended by the white world that when visited in reform school by an African American minister, Marcus cries, “You and your white God, git the hell out’a here!” There is little redeeming in Marcus’s character other than his wish to avenge his father’s death. Newt’s father, Jack, is something of a stock figure, never understanding his talented son, always in awe of his wife’s ability to handle crises, but nevertheless a noble and solid citizen. Even Sarah, Newt’s mother, while more developed as a character, is also predictable. She is the strong African American woman who is the engine that drives the family onward and upward. In Newt’s world, Sarah is the deus ex machina, the earth mother who will solve the problems besetting her world by comforting and motivating Newt, disarming her drunken son-in-law, and preventing the segregation of the high school. Her almost self-sacrificing death allows Newt to leave Cherokee Flats for Minnesota, a land Sarah and he hope offers greater opportunity. The characters portrayed in The Learning Tree are not complicated. They are predictable, and in their predictability they reflect the perception of a young boy such as Newt. Parks’s novel, even with its many adult aspects, is an adolescent boy’s story. Themes and Meanings Gordon Parks, born in Fort Scott, Kansas, was one of the twentieth century’s true Renaissance men. He was not only a novelist and writer but also a photographer, filmmaker, and musical composer. Born in 1912, Parks would have been about Newt’s age at the time at which the novel is set. Parks’s mother died when he was sixteen, and he moved to Minnesota. The Learning Tree is thus broadly autobiographical. One major theme in the novel is that of the adolescent boy discovering his world, dreaming his dreams, playing with friends, and exploring love and sex. Newt’s story

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is very much in a long tradition of American fiction featuring small-town boys and the joys and pains of growing up. Parks treats that boy’s world with obvious nostalgia. It was his own life he was recapitulating, and there were many idyllic moments. The theme of death is also at the heart of the novel. It is sometimes said that adolescents believe themselves to be immortal, but this was not true of Newt. He experienced death, and feared it. The tornado that opens the novel causes the death of a neighbor. Later, Newt is traumatized when forced to view a dead body in the local mortuary. A number of the characters die in the course of the story. Big Mabel, Newt’s first sexual partner, dies in an auto accident, Jake Kiner is murdered by Booker Savage, Booker commits suicide, and Booker’s son Marcus falls down a cliff attempting to escape from the police. Sarah’s long decline lay like a shadow over Newt and the rest of the Winger family. It is only after Sarah’s death that Newt is able to escape his fears. The night before Sarah’s burial, Newt forces himself to lie on the floor in the room with the casket, and in time he is able to fall asleep. Death no longer has the same sting. The Learning Tree is also the story of an African American in a predominantly white world. The violence endemic to the novel is largely racial in origin. If Judge Cavanaugh is the honorable white man, perhaps because he had lived with the Wingers as a child, the local policeman, Kirky, personifies the redneck white authority figure. Although he is not an inherently evil man, Kirky’s racial prejudices invariably determine his actions. Sarah, because of her strong moral and religious beliefs, has some influence in Cherokee Flats, even on Kirky, but ultimately the white judge, the white policeman, and the white superintendent of schools have the power. Sarah tells Newt that Cherokee Flats should be his learning tree, and he learns that color matters in that world. In his graduation speech, he notes that “Our race is not the best liked in the world.” That belief is reinforced immediately, when he and Arcella are unable to sit down and eat their ice cream in Sampson’s drugstore. Only whites have that right. Cherokee Flats might be suitable as a learning tree, but one must move on, must escape. A railroad running through town is a symbol both of prison and of freedom. Hall, the high-school principal, a white man who sympathized with Newt’s college dreams, told him the story of Curtis Mathews, an African American who was the valedictorian when Hall graduated from college. Years later, Hall came across Mathews working as a redcap porter in a railroad station. Mathews’s talents had been insufficient to overcome society’s bigotry. The railroad through Cherokee Flats also went to Chicago, Seattle, and New York, lands of dreams and opportunity. Newt’s brother-inlaw, Clint, dreamed about escape, but his dreams never materialized. They remained firmly lodged in his bottles of alcohol. One day Newt and one of his friends, Earl, are riding in an automobile. Earl, the driver, races an onrushing train to a crossing, and in the resulting crash he loses his foot. Earl stays in Cherokee Flats. At the end it is Newt who will leave on the train.

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Critical Context The reviews of The Learning Tree were supportive but not enthusiastic. Whitney Balliett called it an old-fashioned melodrama, but with an African American rather than a white hero. Comparing it to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Balliett complained about excessive “blood, blood, blood.” David Dempsey also noted the melodramatic nature of the novel. Arguing that it was too much an adventure story, Dempsey disapproved of the plot. He found the significance of The Learning Tree in its portrayal of a time when African Americans were more concerned with their personal problems than with racial justice. Another reviewer, Nat Hentoff, called it a book for boys, not adults. Placing it in the literary tradition of works about small-town life by such writers as Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Thomas Wolfe, he noted the moralistic nature of the work and its characters, contrasting that with the moral ambiguities portrayed by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. The reviewers reflected their own time. When the book was published in 1963, the Civil Rights movement was fighting racism on many fronts. Parks’s portrayal of African Americans in the different world of the 1920’s did not strike a familiar chord with the literary and social critics of a later time. The author writes of a society and a family in which traditional religious and moral values were accepted without question. By the 1960’s, much had changed. The Learning Tree has had little impact upon later African American writers, and later critical commentaries rarely discussed its significance as a work of art. Nevertheless, it has remained in print almost continuously since it was first published, and in 1969 it was made into a successful film directed by Gordon Parks, who became the first African American to direct a major Hollywood film. If not widely praised by critics, then or since, the novel has been read avidly by more than one generation of Americans. Bibliography Balliett, Whitney. Review of The Learning Tree, by Gordon Parks. The New Yorker 39 (November 2, 1963): 209. Calling Parks’s novel an old-fashioned melodrama, Balliett wishes that it had focused more on the Wingers’ home life rather than on the violent incidents that too often confronted young Newt. Dempsey, David. “Witness to a Killing.” The New York Times Book Review, September 15, 1963, 4. Dempsey’s review of The Learning Tree was the most negative of the major reviews. His comments reflect the militant idealism of the Civil Rights movement, and he implies that art should serve politics. Parks was found lacking in this respect. Hentoff, Nat. “‘Sorta Like Fruit.’” New York Herald Tribune, August 25, 1963, p. 6. Hentoff believed that boys would get more from the novel than would adults. He urged that The Learning Tree be placed on high-school reading lists, claiming that white children could learn much from Newt Winger’s story and that black youths could identify with it more than with some other required literary works.

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Moore, Deedee. “Shooting Straight: The Many Worlds of Gordon Parks.” Smithsonian 20 (April, 1989): 66-77. A general article about Parks and his many accomplishments, written shortly after Parks was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan, an award that suggests the magnitude of the changes that took place during Parks’s lifetime. Parks, Gordon. Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography. New York: Harlem Moon, 2005. Parks’s extensive account of his life and work provides essential context for The Learning Tree. Yoder, Edwin M., Jr. “No Catch for the Hawk.” Saturday Review 49 (February 12, 1966): 40. Yoder favorably reviews Parks’s A Choice of Weapons (1966). Not disguised as fiction, this work tells of the barriers Parks faced after leaving Kansas. The reviewer called it an excellent introduction to what it meant to be black, poor, and ambitious in the years between the two world wars. Eugene Larson

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A LESSON BEFORE DYING Author: Ernest J. Gaines (1933Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: 1948 Locale: Southern Louisiana First published: 1993

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Principal characters: Jefferson, a barely literate twenty-one-year-old black man Grant Wiggins, a university-educated schoolteacher, the reluctant choice to teach Jefferson the lesson he must learn before dying Miss Emma, Jefferson’s godmother Tante Lou, Miss Emma’s friend and Grant’s aunt The Novel In the year 1948, in rural southern Louisiana, Jefferson, a barely literate black man of twenty-one, has been sentenced to death because he had the misfortune to be a bystander at a shooting that resulted in the death of a white man. The action of the novel covers the period between sentencing and execution. That the sentence will be carried out is never in serious doubt. The question the novel explores is the terms on which Jefferson will confront his own death. The issue that organizes the novel arises from the plea a desperate defense attorney made to the jury at Jefferson’s trial. Recognizing that an acquittal was impossible, he made it his goal to save Jefferson from the electric chair. A man, argued the attorney, can and should be held accountable for his actions. But when you look at Jefferson, he asked, do you see a man? To execute someone so simple, he concluded, would be like putting a hog in the electric chair. The strategy did not work, but its effects are still felt, not by the jurors, but by Jefferson and those who care about him. His aged godmother, Miss Emma, accepts that Jefferson must die, but he must not die in the belief that he is no better than a hog. Before he dies, Jefferson must learn the lesson of his own dignity and humanity. For this lesson, a teacher is required. Miss Emma, with the cooperation of her friend Lou, turns to Lou’s nephew, Grant Wiggins. A product, like Jefferson himself, of the black quarter, Grant is a university graduate who now teaches the children of the quarter between the months of October and April, when the children are not working in the fields. At first, Grant resists the call. He has plenty on his mind, including the complexities of his relationship with Vivian, a schoolteacher in the nearby town of Bayonne who is in the process of getting divorced from her husband. Moreover, Grant is a man whose allotment of hope is just about used up. He cannot bring himself to believe that his work with the children can possibly make a positive difference in

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their lives. What, then, can he do for Jefferson? Who am I, Grant wants to know, to say what a man is, or how a man should die? It is hard enough to figure out how a man should live. Even with Grant’s reluctant participation, other obstacles remain, notably that represented by the local white power structure. Miss Emma can claim a right to special consideration because of the services she has rendered to powerful white families over the years. Her claim is acknowledged by the white people she has to convince, yet they remain dubious. For one thing, it is hard for a member of the white community, in this time and this place, to understand a project the purpose of which is to affirm the humanity of a black man, especially one under sentence of death. They want the execution to go smoothly and quietly. They are afraid that what Miss Emma proposes may stir up trouble, especially as it involves this educated black man, Grant, whose correct grammar strikes some of them as a provocation. For Emma’s sake, they give their grudging consent to the undertaking. Grant is not the only one involved in the attempt to do something for Jefferson. Grant and the Reverend Ambrose, the preacher from the quarter, often find themselves at cross purposes. For the Reverend Ambrose, what matters is not whether Jefferson affirms his human dignity but whether he finds salvation. Tensions between the Reverend Ambrose and Grant threaten to break out into conflict at any time. The most challenging obstacle to the success of the project is Jefferson himself. He heard what his attorney said, he understood what he heard, and he is tempted to accept it. He has known few possibilities in his life, he has had very few choices, and now a freakish combination of circumstances has determined that he must die. Is this what it is to be a man? At one point, he even goes down on all fours and, hog-fashion, pushes his snout into his food dish. At first, Jefferson resists all of Grant’s efforts, and Grant, who was never enthusiastic about the project, is prepared to admit defeat. Miss Emma and Tante Lou, however, expect him to try—even more, they expect him to succeed—and Vivian adds her voice to theirs. In a situation he would never have chosen to become involved in, Grant must commit himself to the effort. The struggle begins to pay off when Jefferson agrees that he does not want to cause further pain to his godmother. In thus concerning himself with another, in the shadow of his own death, Jefferson begins to sense his place in the human family. He is touched by a gift from the schoolchildren, and he is grateful for the radio Grant brings to him. As he lets himself know these emotions, he begins to recognize that he is indeed a man. Grant himself is by no means untouched by what is happening. In the commitment he found it so difficult to make, and in thus opening himself to the pain of sharing Jefferson’s agony, he has begun to move toward a new realization of his own humanity. The law takes its course. At the time designated by the state, Jefferson dies in the electric chair. Paul, a white jailer who has treated Jefferson and Grant with sympathy and respect, is able to tell Grant that Jefferson was the bravest man in the room. He also brings the diary that Jefferson has been keeping at Grant’s suggestion. Capitalization is erratic, the spelling is weak, the punctuation is uncertain, and the style is in-

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elegant, but the message of Jefferson’s diary is clear: “tell them im a man.” Paul and Grant, white man and black man, realize that Jefferson has indeed taught them a lesson before dying. The Characters The strong will of two women provides the energy that sets the action of A Lesson Before Dying in motion. The tension between two men who both have something to learn about what it is to be a man provides the central structural principle of the novel. Miss Emma and Tante Lou are old women in 1948, the year in which the action of the novel takes place. Both were born not long after emancipation, and both have been servants in the homes of white people. They have learned the practice of humility, as required by their position in a racially ordered society, and they also know the deeper humility that is part of their Christian faith. They also know their own worth, and they know how important that knowledge is. That is, in part, what motivates their determination that Jefferson will not go to his death thinking himself less than a man. They know what they can claim for themselves within the place society has defined for them. They employ this knowledge when they present their project to Henri Pichot, whose influence in the region makes his approval a necessity. He must acknowledge that Miss Emma has a right to ask for special consideration, for even this insane social system has its rules, but the women must in turn ask in the tones required by their position within the system. Fortunately, Miss Emma, Tante Lou, and Henri Pichot know how the game is played. Grant and Jefferson form at first glance an obvious contrast. Grant is an educated man who has known the world beyond the quarter, while Jefferson may seem to represent Grant’s worst fears of what the quarter may normally be expected to produce. The design of the novel demands that these two touch each other at a very deep level, and that can happen convincingly only if it becomes evident that the two men share some quality that will permit that touching to occur. What both men need, as gradually becomes clear, is a recognition and acceptance of their own humanity. The circumstances of Jefferson’s life and of his impending death make this immediately evident in his case. Grant, however, lives in a psychological prison. He is helpless to bring about a satisfactory resolution to his relationship with Vivian, and he is convinced that his efforts to educate the children of the quarter are an exercise in futility. That he is required by social convention to conceal the signs of his own education when talking to white people intensifies his sense of hopelessness. He lives therefore from moment to moment, in a constant, barely repressed awareness of his impotence. What he does not at first recognize is that his call to teach Jefferson will allow him to find his own dignity and humanity. Thus, he and Jefferson share a lesson, the lesson, perhaps, all people must learn before dying. The interaction among these principal characters is enriched by an abundance of sharply drawn minor characters, both black and white. As is customary in Gaines’s work, there are no stereotypes or caricatures to be found in this novel. He treats all

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of his characters, even those of whose conduct he must disapprove, with imaginative sympathy and generosity. Themes and Meanings Given the dramatic situation at its center, it is inevitable that a major theme of A Lesson Before Dying must be that announced by the questions that trouble Grant: What is a man? How must a man live? How must a man die? The word “man” here must be understood in two senses. One of these is the inclusive sense, according to which “man” is synonymous with “human being.” This usage has become suspect as sexism in language has become an issue. In this case, in a novel in which this issue arises in an especially poignant way for a male character, the word “man” obviously speaks to the human condition as such. At the same time, “man” is also to be understood in its gender-specific sense. Certain of the issues raised in the novel touch on what is specifically expected of a male human being in a particular context, the context of southern Louisiana in 1948. It would be too much to expect that a single novel could provide final answers to questions that go as deep as these. What readers can expect is that a novel that raises such questions as insistently as this one does will at least illuminate some aspects of what the answers might be. The possibility of change, and of positive change, has been a frequent theme of Gaines’s fiction. That possibility propels the action of his two best-known novels, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983). That theme is present here as well. It is the possibility of change, of development, of transcendence that comes from within, from an awareness of self, that defines the humanity of both Jefferson and Grant. The inner action of the novel can be described as the gradual coming to recognition of this possibility in both characters. The way to this recognition may vary, but for both Jefferson and Grant it seems to involve openness to others and acceptance of the responsibilities that this openness entails. Jefferson accepts that he may be responsible for Miss Emma’s pain and becomes resolute through that acceptance. Grant accepts as his own the responsibility initially imposed on him by Miss Emma and Tante Lou and thereby becomes capable of moving beyond his earlier acquiescence in futility. Jefferson must stand for the possibilities and potentials that Grant previously has been unable to see in his pupils. The meaning of the novel rests as well on the psychological truth of its observations. For all the novel’s emphasis on transcendence, it also shows, especially in most of the white characters, the strength that can be embodied in the struggle against change, whether individual or social. Henri Pichot seems related to characters found elsewhere in Gaines’s work: white men (they usually are men) who are aware at some level of the inevitability of change but who refuse to be the agents of change. The transcendence that occurs in Jefferson and in Grant comes in tiny increments; there is for neither man a privileged moment of awakening. The possibility of transcendence found in the individual human being may point to possibilities for the human community as well. Much of the interaction of black and

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white characters in this novel is based on conventions established over generations; the power of the past is strongly felt. The relationship of Paul to Jefferson and Grant suggests that the past may be transcended, a suggestion consistent with the thematic emphases of Gaines’s earlier novels. In its attention to social interaction, to the casual injustices of the period, and to the nuances of interaction, A Lesson Before Dying manifests the concerns associated with social realism. Social realism, however, tends to define character as a social product: We are what society makes us. In depicting characters who transcend social determinism, the novel moves on to the psychological, or, as some might say, to the spiritual. Critical Context Because critics had waited ten years for a new novel by Ernest J. Gaines, it is not surprising that interest in A Lesson Before Dying was high. Widely reviewed, the novel has been received very favorably by most critics, some of whom regard it as Gaines’s finest work. Critics have especially called attention to those features of the novel most characteristic of Gaines’s work in general: the absence of melodrama in treating a situation that might lend itself to melodramatic excess; the consistent avoidance of the propagandistic; and, more positively, the broad and generous humanity felt everywhere in the novel. Other forms of recognition include a nomination for the Southern Book Award for 1993. In June of 1993, it was announced that Ernest Gaines was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Grant, sometimes called the “genius grant,” in recognition of his work over the years. In A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines is true to the concerns and qualities manifested in his fiction throughout his career. He has always been a reflective, rather than an “angry,” writer, and he has always been sensitive, as he is here, to the nuances of behavior, especially in the social interaction between different races and different generations. This attention to nuance has led some critics to find his fiction too gentle, too forgiving in its portrayal of characters who might easily be seen as villains. It is nevertheless impossible to question the integrity and moral consistency that characterize his work. Few critics have failed to note the quiet assurance of his art. Readers familiar with the masterworks of African American fiction may be tempted to find in A Lesson Before Dying an intriguing relationship to Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940). Most African American fiction writers to emerge since World War II have been aware of Wright’s shadow, and some, such as James Baldwin, have apparently found it necessary to attempt to topple this giant as they struggle for their place in the sun. Gaines has rejected Wright as an influence, finding Native Son too urban to serve as a model for his own fiction. There is an interesting parallel between A Lesson Before Dying and the last section of Native Son. Both involve a character awaiting execution and the attempt of another character to establish some kind of communication with the condemned man. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of Wright’s masterpiece, but the communication, or communion, that occurs between Grant and Jefferson might be read as Gaines’s humanistic answer to the majestic bleakness of Richard Wright’s vision.

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Bibliography Babb, Valerie Melissa. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Although completed too early to contain a discussion of A Lesson Before Dying, this remains a useful general study of the author and his work. One of Babb’s main themes is that Gaines’s writing, while true to the African American experience, ultimately transcends that experience to voice the concerns of humanity. Gaudet, Marcia, and Carl Wooton. “Looking Ahead.” In Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer’s Craft. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. In an interview, Gaines discusses A Lesson Before Dying as a work in progress. Comparisons of his comments and the finished work provide valuable insights into the processes of creation and revision. Larson, Charles R. “End as a Man.” Chicago Tribune Books, May 9, 1993, 5. More than any other novel of African American life, A Lesson Before Dying is about being a man in the face of adversity and about the morality of connectedness, of each individual’s responsibility to his community. Lewis, Tabitha, ed. African American Life and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Salem, Oreg.: Willamette University Press, 2006. Includes a chapter by Lewis analyzing the representation of masculinity in A Lesson Before Dying. Shepard, R. Z. “An A-Plus in Humanity.” Time 141 (March 29, 1993): 65-66. The novel reflects Gaines’s dramatic instinct for conveying the malevolence of racism and injustice without the usual accompanying self-righteousness. Yardley, Jonathan. “Nothing but a Man.” The Washington Post Book World 23 (March 28, 1993): 3. Gaines reflects the breadth and depth of mind to understand that generalizations are always suspect, that one must look at individual human beings instead of stereotypes if there is to be any hope of understanding. The real lesson in the novel is learned not by Jefferson but by others. W. P. Kenney

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LET ME BREATHE THUNDER Author: William Attaway (1911-1986) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Naturalism Time of plot: 1930’s Locale: Northwestern United States First published: 1939 Principal characters: Ed, a young, white migrant worker in his twenties Step, a young white man in his twenties Hi Boy, a nine-year-old Mexican boy abandoned by his family Sampson, the owner of Four Mile Farm, an apple and sheep ranch Anna Sampson, a blonde teenage girl who likes film magazines; she falls in love with Step Mag, a fifty-three-year-old black woman, a former prostitute who owns a brothel Cooper, Mag’s companion The Novel Let Me Breathe Thunder is a terse tale of three hobos in the western United States during the Great Depression. William Attaway’s novel quickly builds to its tragic climax of racial brutality by depicting the social and economic desperation of the times. Step, Ed, and Hi Boy ride the rails looking for work and adventure. They sleep outdoors, travel both by day and by night, and eat when and where they can. They are at the mercy of the elements, the train “bulls,” and the town police, who harass migrant workers. Step and Ed have traveled the Southwest and West for years. Like thousands of other unemployed men during the Depression, they know no other life. A week before the novel starts, they meet up with Hi Boy, a Mexican boy who has ten dollars and does not speak English. Step takes the money. They travel to Seattle, where Step gets drunk, fights with a bartender over a woman, and knocks the man out. They flee from the town, buying tickets with the last of Hi Boy’s money. Uncomfortable in the train, Step insults the conductor and other passengers. They eat in the dining car but cannot pay for the meal. As they are about to jump from the train to avoid their bill, a stranger pays for their food. The stranger, Sampson, offers them a job on his farm in Yakima. Step laughs at first at the job offer, but they follow the farmer after Step flips his lucky dog tail to decide whether to accept it. They travel in a boxcar with three other hard-luck drifters with no jobs or homes, two of them white and one black. The hobos talk of wandering desperately in search of work and discuss their inability to settle down. Whites and African Americans suf-

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fer the same indignities and poverty of the unemployed. Step gets angry at Hi Boy for complaining about the rain and cold, since such complaints violate the “code of toughness.” In Yakima, they visit Step’s old friends, the black couple Mag and Cooper. Hi Boy gets a gun and punctures his hand with a fork to prove his courage to Step. At Sampson’s farm, they get jobs and a place to sleep. Anna, Sampson’s young daughter, likes Step, but Step sees all women as trouble. Ed warns Anna away from Step, but she pays no attention. The farm sits in the cool clear air of the mountain desert. A family of rattlesnakes lives under the front porch, and wild pheasants feed with the chickens. Mount Rainier towers over the landscape, and thunder cracks on its snowy head even in clear weather. According to Indian legend, a trapped wandering spirit breathes thunder at its loss of freedom. Step and Ed castrate lambs and cultivate apples, but apples are left to rot on the trees because there are no buyers for them. Sampson begins to think of guns and revolution. His four sons died in World War I, and his wife died from her grief over their deaths. Ed hints to Step about staying on the farm, but Step, afraid of growing soft, makes fun of him. Ed fears Step’s control over Anna and forces Step to promise not to touch her. After Hi Boy’s hand becomes infected, they go into town to see the doctor. The climax of the novel occurs rapidly as Step, Anna, Ed, and a girl he picks up get drunk at Mag’s house. Step sleeps with Anna, who is destroyed by the loss of her virginity. Ed wants to run, but Step brings Anna home and lies to Sampson. They decide to stay until payday. Sampson wants Hi Boy to remain. Step and Ed prepare to leave Hi Boy, and they try to evade Anna. Anna sneaks into town to say goodbye to Step. At Mag’s house, she is attacked by Cooper and mistakenly shot in the arm by Mag. Anna is rescued by the white townspeople, who return to lynch Cooper. Cooper flees on the same train as Ed, Step, and Hi Boy. Ed saves Cooper from Step’s wrath. They ride in an open boxcar at night in the freezing rain. Hi Boy’s infection gets worse; he passes into a coma and dies. Ed and Step hide the body in a train heading for the Southwest. Lost in darkness, not sure where to go next, Ed and Step watch the train’s lights disappear over the horizon. The Characters The characters in Let Me Breathe Thunder are described in simple, direct language. The hard-nosed Step fights his desires and often acts kindly. His affection for Ed and Hi Boy is subtle, in contrast to his tough exterior. He keeps an old dog tail for good luck. Step wants to be good, but his basic desires and economic conditions prove his undoing. With no past and no future, Step lives for the moment. Ed is the narrator and principal character. He tells his tale in plain, everyday English. He does not reveal his age, background, or family history. Ed and Step live for the road. As traveling buddies, they share a past of trains and jobs and an affection stronger than any in the novel. At one time they had a dog named Butch that was killed by a train. They are irresponsible and happy until they run into Hi Boy, a Mexi-

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can boy whose family has been arrested for breaking into a train to steal food. Hi Boy tries to fit into their wandering life, but Step thinks the boy is not tough enough to make it on the road. Ed, Step, and Hi Boy go to Sampson’s farm and confront the issues of family, work, and responsibility they had neglected for so long. Sampson’s loneliness is relieved by the presence of the boys, and Step and Ed fall into a routine. Anna falls for Step and shatters the calm. Step is torn between sexual desire and fear of commitment to Anna. Ed gets Step to promise to leave Anna alone, but Step breaks his promise. After sleeping with Anna, Step wants to flee immediately but stays to get his paycheck and meet his fate. Anna sneaks away from the house and runs to Mag’s to meet Step. Ed fears that the wandering life will destroy him, the way it destroyed the three hobos they met in the dark rail car. The fact that one of the hobos is black and that Mag and Cooper, old friends of Step, are black does not register negatively on either Ed or Step. Step had saved Mag from being run out of town by outraged whites years before. Mag claims that the West is more tolerant than the South. Until the final racial incident, Ed and Step seem remarkably free of prejudice for white men of this period. Step has told Ed about Mag but never mentioned that she was black. This integrated balance is shattered when everyone thinks Cooper raped Anna. Ed is attracted to Mag. He respects her strength, her independence, and the fact that at the age of fifty-three she still wants a man. He is impressed by her business sense and her property. Even though Mag and Cooper’s life is far from easy, it offers the prospect of a settled existence. Mag is the strongest character in the novel because she does not live a life of illusion. Her generosity and deep understanding of human needs represent the power of folk people. The union of Mag and Cooper is destroyed when dormant racial hatred shatters the peaceful town. Even Step succumbs to insane racial rage against his old friends. Sampson tries to maintain order, but all of his good luck symbols are destroyed. The high mountain breathes thunder into the clear sky, implying the coming forces of fate. None of the characters can change behavior soon enough to avert disaster. Cooper pretends to be attracted to Anna to make Mag jealous. He does not hurt or rape her, but Mag overreacts and shoots at Cooper, wounding Anna. Townspeople believe that there has been a rape, and Mag’s carefully balanced existence is destroyed. Step and Ed rip Hi Boy out of the only home he might have. Everyone acts against his or her best interests, caught in a tragic vise of social, economic, and biological conditions. Themes and Meanings Let Me Breathe Thunder is a simply told story of migrant workers on the road caught in a predetermined universe of tragic proportions. Naturalistic in style and execution, the novel emphasizes a psychological connection between the characters and their environment. The deceptively naïve qualities of the text mask complicated symbols of forces beyond the characters’ control. Economics, class, race, and biology determine their fates. Thus Hi Boy’s tragic death and the burden of his character are

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implied by the name of the town, Las Cruces (the crosses), where Ed and Step find him. The towering mountain represents an unforgiving natural environment. Naturalism suggests that human beings are driven by the sexual, social, and economic structures that dictate their fates. Migrant workers with no money and ranchers who let fruit rot on the ground are both products of larger economic forces. The inexorable machine of war eats up Sampson’s four children, and the economic depression destroys his farm. Sampson believes in elemental human kindness and tries to appeal to Ed and Step’s better side, but characters such as Step and Ed have been created in the forge of inhumane social conditions. Civilized feelings are brutally damaged by the sexual and economic powers that control them. Step and Ed’s lack of personal history suggests disintegrated families. They have only each other and Hi Boy. They are restless, driven by cultural dislocation and economic deprivation, unable to take control of their lives. Underneath their toughness, they are kindhearted, but each of their attempts to find happiness ends in failure because they have no power. First-person narration reveals the conflicts complicating their lives. Step’s flirtation with Anna threatens the stability of Ed and Step’s relationship. Ed feels responsible for Anna because of her father’s kindness. Perpetual movement and lack of commitment are pitted against the inherent human need for community and stability. This sense of community is offered by the Sampsons, but Step and Ed are more drawn to the black life-style of Mag and Cooper. These two worlds are segregated in Yakima, but Step and Ed bridge the gap. Mag is kind and friendly to everyone. Her folk skills save Anna, who runs to Mag’s house to try and find Step. Until the final confrontation, racial prejudice is cleverly hidden. Once Cooper attacks Anna, racial hatred erupts in all of its absurd fury and reveals itself as a powerful social determinant. The human frailty of the characters is overshadowed by the two great monoliths of the novel. The Great Depression is an economic and social entity driving lives in unseen ways, and the towering Mount Rainier represents the power of the natural order that controls the vicissitudes of human existence. The inevitable cycle of social and biological determinism results in destruction. The tragedy of human existence cannot be assuaged through symbolic offerings and good luck charms. Caught in the terrible grip of determinism, the characters play out their tragic fates against the backdrop of an unfeeling universe. Critical Context William Attaway is best known for his novel Blood on the Forge (1941), a novel with black characters about migration to the industrial North. Let Me Breathe Thunder shares many of the themes of proletarian struggle and economic determinism demonstrated in his later work. Most critics comment on the oddity of a black author writing what some call a derivative novel with white characters. Certainly, the influence of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) can be seen in the work. Let Me Breathe Thunder contains three African Americans and one Mexican, who share a

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merciless fate with the poor white characters. Attaway demonstrates an understanding of both white and black consciousness and shows through the final climax the power and destruction of racial hatred. Written from the viewpoint of a white character, the book shows how white prejudice lies waiting to attack. The central theme of social and biological determinism applied to a novel about migrant workers establishes a democracy of the lost driven by race, class, and economic dysfunction. Let Me Breathe Thunder belongs to the proletarian novel tradition exemplified by such novels as Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933) and Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935). Let Me Breathe Thunder is a novel that can stand on its own. As a first novel, it successfully produces a compelling tension between characters both black and white, and environment. Its hard-bitten style is suggestive of the work of Ernest Hemingway and of the popular hard-boiled detective genre. Its blend of psychological and symbolic detail creates a moving depiction of characters swept up in forces beyond their control. The despair of characters locked in dark cattle cars hurtling through the night to nowhere resonates as an apt metaphor for Depression-era angst. The motivations of and scenes between characters, both black and white, show an acute sense of human behavior. The plot structure tends toward the melodramatic, but the bleak tragedy of the characters’ existence provides a sweeping indictment of America’s cultural and economic state during the Great Depression. The novel shows a powerful authorial voice with an understanding of the complicated interactions of America’s class and racial systems. Black critics of the period such as Ralph Ellison and Ulysses Lee urged the author to apply this understanding to a novel addressing African American themes. Attaway responded with Blood on the Forge, one of the most powerful novels about black migration and black working conditions ever written. Unfortunately, Attaway’s achievement was overshadowed by the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940. Attaway was a member of the Federal Writers Workshop, which aided unemployed writers in the 1930’s. He went on to write for film, radio, and television and published important work on black music from Barbados. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Complete history of the African American novel and its practitioners. Places Attaway in the context of the “peaks and valleys” experienced by the form between 1853 and 1962. _______. “Richard Wright and the Triumph of Naturalism.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bell illuminates the naturalist tradition in terms of black writing and analyzes Attaway’s writing closely in terms of class and race consciousness. Sees the roots of Attaway’s work in the interplay between Freudian psychology and Marxist social analysis. Stresses the biological and socioeconomic conditions that control

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Attaway’s naturalistic style and theme. Bell also outlines the historical and political themes of the early part of the twentieth century, including the Great Migration, the Depression, Communism, and the Chicago School of Sociology. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. Examines Attaway’s connection to the Federal Writers Workshop. Sees the novel as unoriginal and too closely based on Steinbeck, making no new contribution to the proletarian novel of the 1930’s. Gives Attaway only a small place in the annals of black writing during the Depression. Margolies, Edward. Introduction to Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway. New York: Collier Books, 1970. Critical and biographical survey of William Attaway, concentrating on Attaway’s second and last novel. Provides valuable information about the black migration from the South to northern urban areas that began in the 1890’s. Traces the influence of World War I and its need for war armaments and munitions in giving work to many African Americans, who fled from the repressive South only to end up entrapped in another kind of living hell. Sketches Attaway’s life and demonstrates that the author’s own hobo existence provided much background for his novels. Yarborough, Richard. Afterword to Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987. Biographical and critical essay on William Attaway, with a generous review of Let Me Breathe Thunder that places it in its literary and historical context. The statistical analysis of the Great Migration and the black working class helps to orient readers to Attaway’s underlying themes. The first novel seems a likely start for a writer with Attaway’s history of work on ships and his wanderings as a migrant worker and hobo. Young, James O. Black Writers of the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. Describes the novel as a picaresque proletarian novel that is naïve and sentimental in its search for universalities among the alienated working class. Attaway has a firm position in the ranks of black writers of the period because of his understanding of African American themes in relation to race, class, and working-class conditions. Stephen F. Soitos

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LET THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN Author: Mildred D. Taylor (1943) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1930’s, during the Great Depression Locale: Rural Mississippi First published: 1981 Principal characters: Cassie, one of four children in the Logan family Papa (David Logan), Cassie’s father Harlan Granger, a powerful white landowner T. J. Avery, a young black friend of the Logans Wade Jamison, T. J.’s white attorney Suzella Rankin, the Logans’ second cousin Stacey, the Logans’ eldest son Mama, Cassie’s mother The Novel Let the Circle Be Unbroken recounts one family’s struggle against prejudice and poverty as seen through the eyes and experiences of Cassie, the main character. The Logans battle the Great Depression, powerful, greedy, white landowners of rural Mississippi, segregation, and domestic tragedies that threaten to destroy the family at every turn. They maintain their dignity, pride, and faith, however, and keep the family together. The novel begins with friends and neighbors preoccupied with the tragedy that has struck T. J., Joe Avery’s son, and the effects of the Depression on rural Mississippi. T. J. and his two white friends, R. W. and Melvin Simms, had broken into Barnett’s Mercantile and stolen a gun. In their scuffle to escape, Melvin fatally had shot the owner, Jim Lee Barnett; Papa Logan had set his field ablaze to prevent a white vigilante group from lynching T. J. for the murder. T. J.’s arrest and impending execution greatly distress the Logans, who have no faith in the white judicial system and view the trial as only a legal way to lynch a black boy. In fact, the prosecution, the judge, and the all-white jury are so eager to hang the “nigger” that neither Justice Overton’s testimony linking R. W. and Melvin to the murder nor the holes that the defense bores into Mrs. Barnett’s testimony that she saw “niggers” murder her husband is enough to forestall the jury’s guilty verdict. Cassie and her brothers, Christopher-John and Little Man (who steal away to the courthouse to observe the trial), witness firsthand racism and segregation at work in legal garb and must fight to maintain their self-esteem. Back on the farm, Papa and Mr. Morrison, a friend, repair tools and broken fences in preparation for crop time, which ends the short school year by drawing everyone to

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the fields. They are wary of the crop-reduction officer, Mr. Handsworth, but must also resist Harlan Granger, who wants to forge Papa Logan’s subsidy check—which the AAA has given him in return for destroying his cotton crop—and run him off his duly purchased property. Only a few blocks away, Moe Turner’s family, friends of the Logans who, like many other poor farmers, have been sharecropping on the Montier plantation since the mid-1880’s, are threatened with starvation through persistent poverty. Concurrently, Miz Lee Annie Lees, a sixty-year-old neighbor hard hit by segregation and the Depression, memorizes large sections of the Mississippi constitution and dreams of improving conditions for African Americans through the ballot before she dies. The scene changes as Cassie and her brothers learn that their family’s tradition has been violated by Cousin Bud, who has married a white woman from New York. The family’s resentment over his action runs very deep, so he must leave prematurely after promising to take his daughter to visit with the family. However, this is only one of Cassie’s worries, because conditions have worsened on the farm, and Papa must leave home in search of work. Cousin Bud returns with Suzella, his mulatto daughter, who also antagonizes the Logans by considering herself white. Cassie’s turbulent relationship with Suzella reaches a breaking point when Suzella attempts to befriend white boys in the neighborhood. While the family feud goes on, the local farmers’ union is busted by big planters who continue to prey on the poor sharecroppers, more neighbors are forced off the land, and Stacey and Moe run away to Louisiana. With Stacey and Moe’s departure, T. J.’s execution, Papa’s working far away from home, and the Depression taking its toll on family relations, Cassie loses control and vents her frustration on her classmates. Christmas morning arrives, however, and family members greet one another warmly. They gather in a circle around the fire to sing a song, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Afterward, they all go to church. This brings Cassie and her younger brothers a feeling of warmth but does not eliminate the pain they feel, for Cousin Bud has returned to take Suzella (now their friend) back to New York. When Cassie tries to escort them as far as a friend’s place, Suzella is assaulted by three white boys, who earlier had wanted to date her but then discovered that her father was black. Stripping Cousin Bud in the presence of Suzella and Cassie, they attempt to lynch him for marrying a white woman, but Mr. Morrison intervenes. Cassie and Suzella are horrified. Cassie, who has become interested in reading the Mississippi constitution, gets yet another lesson in segregation at the registrar’s office when she goes to see Miz Lee Annie register to vote, but she is subjected to insults and called a foolish nigger meddling in white business. At the same time, Mama and Papa Logan, who accompanied Cassie to Strawberry, find themselves surrounded by a large demonstration by poor union farmers, and Harlan Granger exploits their presence for his own ends. This tragic episode ends in a comedy of errors, as Wade Jamison assists the Logans in securing the release of Stacey and Moe from police custody, and the family rejoices. The circle remains unbroken, and Cassie, Stacey, Christopher-John, and Little Man have reason to look to the future with optimism.

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The Characters Cassie is old enough to understand segregation and the realities of African American life in 1930’s Mississippi. She is bright and curious, characteristics reflected in her desire to learn about the Mississippi constitution. Proud of her race, she despises her mulatto cousin who thinks of herself as white. However, the execution of her friend T.J., her brother’s running away from home, the racial hostility she experiences, and the problems of the Depression take an emotional toll on her. Her parents’ nurturing of her pride and self-respect and her close family ties, however, give her the strength she needs. Papa, Cassie’s father, is an old-fashioned disciplinarian but also a hardworking and considerate father. He tries to support his family by working on their small farm, but he is faced with a constant struggle against poverty. He is forced to take out-of-town work, but he manages to stay two steps ahead of Harlan Granger, who is determined to annex the Logan property through deception. Mama, Cassie’s mother, is the daughter of a sharecropper who was once a schoolteacher. She lost her teaching job because she supported a boycott against the Wallaces, who ran the store on the Granger plantation. Mama assists students with evening lessons, works hard to help sustain the family, and runs the farm in Papa’s absence. Stacey, the Logans’ eldest son, is devastated by T.J.’s execution; his father’s departure from home further depresses him. Stacey is not able to deal with his emotional problems as effectively as his sister does, and he runs away, leaving his family to undertake a long search for him. Harlan Granger, the Logan family’s chief antagonist, is the most powerful of the four major white landowners in the county. He thrives in an environment of segregation and prejudice, gets special treatment from the sheriff, and is hated by the poor people of the county. He is envious of the Logans’ property, and he makes repeated, dishonest attempts to annex it to his own much larger estate. Themes and Meanings As a sequel to the Newbery Medal-winning Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), Let the Circle Be Unbroken shows the work of a careful craftswoman mastering the art form of the African American story in fiction. With vividness, persuasion, and wit, Taylor demonstrates that pride, independence, and determination can sustain a family against segregation and economic disaster. Through Cassie, her lead character, Taylor wants younger Americans to understand the level of discrimination, disfranchisement, and hard times that two earlier generations fought under segregation. High on Taylor’s list of concerns is what she sees as an unjust judicial system designed for whites only and supported by a vicious vigilantism against which African Americans are defenseless. The child T. J., for example, is found guilty of murder only because of the color of his skin; his friends, Stacey and Moe, are arrested and detained only because they are black; Dube Cross, an impoverished sharecropper, is singled out in a racially mixed union action for severe punishment because he is a

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“nigger.” Additionally, African Americans who attempt to register to vote can still be lynched or lose their property. R. W. and Melvin Simms are allowed to bear witness against a black friend for a crime that they themselves committed, Mrs. Barnett does not have to see the color of a criminal to know that he is black, and an attorney cannot prevail in a Mississippi court of law defending a black person against whites. All whites are not set against African Americans, however; Jamison gives the Logans sound advice, and white sharecroppers join with African Americans to fight the injustice of big planters. The novel mirrors the miserable conditions under which post-Reconstruction sharecroppers lived in the South and the genesis of their displacement from rural areas to poor urban centers. During the Depression, neighborhoods were destroyed by powerful, greedy landowners who forced thousands of poor, landless sharecroppers to live at their mercy or flee the plantations. The scene with the Crosses and the Turners is very moving. The former is fatherless and reduced to mendicancy, but that is too degrading for proud Dube Cross, the teenage breadwinner, so he joins the union to fight for change. Moe Turner is optimistic that each year his family will escape the vicious cycle of poverty and indebtedness to the plantation, but they are wiped out by the Depression, so Moe runs away in search of work. Propertied African Americans also walk a treacherous road under segregation. Their dogged determination to be self-supporting contradicts their status as defined in a segregated economy: black, poor, landless, dependent, and ignorant. Only the black church provides a source of strength and hope, and family moral values and tradition keep African Americans from total deprivation. At every turn of the novel, Taylor exposes her readers to the psychology and degradation of segregation, especially through the feelings of the children. The Suzella episode underscores the fact that a light complexion could earn a girl automatic acceptance among whites until a taint of blackness was found in her. Cassie and her brothers must be subservient to their white counterparts, and vigilantes lynch African Americans for marrying whites. Just as degrading is the fact that Papa and Mama are required to bow to whites and address them as “sir” and “madam,” even when those whites are young enough to be their grandchildren, while whites call them “boy” or “nigger” and treat them as subhuman. This well-crafted demonstration of the impact of segregation and the Depression on a black family seems almost biographical. Taylor gives readers invaluable insights into the crisis of existence for African Americans under segregation. She does this with such savoir faire and controlled power that it takes a perceptive reader to suspect that Taylor’s own family, two post-Reconstruction generations, is ensconced behind some of her fictitious characters. Perhaps only Cassie’s tender age, given her vocabulary, raises doubts about this biographical hypothesis. Behind the fiction is personal experience in Jackson, Mississippi (Taylor’s hometown), and a knowledge of black history that make her work authentic and powerful. With great skill, Taylor takes an otherwise dull and dolorous subject and brings it to life through compelling characterization.

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Critical Context When it first appeared in 1981, Let the Circle Be Unbroken found a receptive audience and an established literary tradition. Mildred D. Taylor’s first book portraying the Logan family, Song of the Trees (1975), was awarded the Council on Interracial Books Award in the African American literature category and hailed as the outstanding book of the year by The New York Times. Her second novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, won the Newbery Medal and laid the critical foundation for Let the Circle Be Unbroken. Together, they received the Coretta Scott King Award in 1982 as an authentic interpretation of aspects of the African American experience during the Depression. Let the Circle Be Unbroken received a positive review in The Times of London, in 1982, and by 1989 had already gone through its ninth printing, having fetched good ratings from The Horn Book Magazine, Publishers Weekly, The Christian Science Monitor, and other distinguished publications. Having published also The Golden Cadillac (1987), Taylor has established herself as a prolific writer and an engaging interpreter of twentieth century African American history. Bibliography Cobb, Cicely Denean. “‘If You Give a Nigger an Inch, They Will Take an Ell’: The Role of Education in Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and Let the Circle be Unbroken.” In Exploring Culturally Diverse Literature for Children and Adolescents: Learning to Listen in New Ways, edited by Darwin L. Henderson and Jill P. May. Boston: Pearson Allyn and Bacon, 2005. Compares the representation of education in Let the Circle Be Unbroken with that in Taylor’s earlier novel. Discusses the importance of representing childhood education in literature for children. Fogelman, Phyllis J. “Mildred D. Taylor.” The Horn Book Magazine 53 (August, 1977): 410-414. Gives a brief account of Taylor’s early life and discusses the influences on her first two books. Harper, Mary Turner. “Merger and Metamorphosis in the Fiction of Mildred D. Taylor.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Summer, 1988): 7580. Analyzes the communal oral tradition in Taylor’s novels. Describes Taylor’s work as “an imaginative blending of history, cultural traditions and practices.” Rees, David. “The Color of Skin: Mildred Taylor.” In The Marble in the Water: Essays on Contemporary Writers of Fiction for Children and Young Adults. Boston: The Horn Book, 1980. A comparative study that recognizes that Taylor “comes closer than anyone else to giving us a really good novel about racial prejudice.” Taylor, Mildred D. “Newbery Award Acceptance: Address.” The Horn Book Magazine 53 (August, 1977): 401-409. Taylor describes the origins of her prize-winning novel, which she says is “about human pride and survival in a cruelly racist society.” _______. Song of the Trees. New York: Dial Press, 1975. Taylor’s first novel about the Logan family. Selected by The New York Times as one of the outstanding books of 1975. Followed by the Newbery Medal-winning Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. N. Samuel Murrell

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LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD Author: Randall Kenan (1963) Type of work: Short stories Time of plot: Twentieth century Locale: Tims Creek, North Carolina First published: 1992 Principal characters: Clarence Pickett, a young boy who passes on advice from dead residents of the town to living residents John Edgar Stokes, an old black man who has a showdown with local white bigots Henrietta Williams, an older black woman who, after her grandson’s death, invites her grandson’s male lover to stay with her for a few days Aaron Streeter, a spoiled and very self-conscious man Mabel Pearsall, a spiritually and physically tired schoolteacher Booker T. Washington, a fictionalized version of the influential black educator Dean Williams, a white homosexual man hired to seduce and help blackmail a wealthy black man Lena Walker, a recently widowed middle-aged black woman Reverend Barden, a minister who delivers a eulogy for a dead young woman with whom he had a sexual affair Ida Perry, the widow of a judge; she is haunted by the spirit of a young black man beaten to death by her husband Reginald Kain, the imaginary editor of the title story Pharaoh (Menes), the leader of a possibly apocryphal slave revolt The Stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead is a series of loosely related short stories all set in Tims Creek, North Carolina, the fictional predominantly black rural town Randall Kenan first explored in his novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989). Besides being linked by a setting, the characters in these stories are also linked by a vague search for meaning, particularly in spiritual beliefs and, not infrequently, in sexual desire. Because many of these characters have lived lives that have forced them to suppress any personal search for spiritual or sexual understanding or fulfillment, they are often surprised to the point of near total disorientation when they find themselves forced to attain some new level of understanding in either realm. The short stories in this volume are perfectly comfortable with what has often been called magical realism. There are important apparently supernatural elements in these

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stories, but the stories themselves do not give themselves over to the realm of fantasy. Although the magical elements are always meaningful and sometimes astonishing, the meaning of them is by no means always clear, certainly not to the characters in the stories. Furthermore, sexual desire is presented as an element that is in almost every way magical. It too is meaningful, and it can be spiritually redemptive, but it also can be lost or misinterpreted easily. The lead story, “Clarence and the Dead,” one of the most refreshingly original stories in the collection as well as one of the best, shows how surprising the link between the spiritual and the sexual realms can be. Clarence Pickett is a preschoolage boy who suddenly gains the ability to serve as a medium for the dead residents of the community in speaking to their living loved ones. The town responds by ostracizing Clarence, especially as his spirit talk is increasingly shown to be reliable. Ellsworth Batts, however, a man who has never recovered from his wife’s death years earlier in a fire, sees the possibility of redemption when Clarence begins talking in the voice of Ellsworth’s dead wife, Mildred. He forms an attachment to Clarence that quickly becomes viewed by the town as an “unnatural affection” between a man and a boy, especially when he begins to apparently court Clarence and later tries to sneak into Clarence’s room at night. Ellsworth dies when the town, revolted by his behavior, tries to run him out of town, and Clarence dies shortly thereafter. “Clarence and the Dead” serves as a wonderful introductory story to this volume not only because it introduces many of the main themes but also because it demonstrates the connection between sexual desire and spiritual fulfillment as sometimes necessary but ambiguous and possibly dangerous as well. Sexual desires that are socially forbidden or at least problematic play a key role in a number of the stories. “Cornsilk” focuses on a young man remembering an incestuous affair he had with his stepsister. “The Strange and Tragic Ballad of Mabel Pearsall” tells of a schoolteacher who becomes obsessed with the idea that her husband fathered an infant she sometimes babysits. “What Are Days?” tells of a middle-aged widow, Lena Walker, who learns both to grieve and to live through an affair with a teenager who mysteriously disappears after they spend a passionate weekend together. “Ragnorak! The Day the Gods Die,” one of the most powerful stories in the collection, tells of the Reverend Barden saying a eulogy over the dead body of a young woman with whom he had an affair. Her death forces him to face the emptiness of his own life. Several of the stories focus specifically on the social unacceptability of male homosexual love, including “The Foundations of the Earth,” in which a grandmother tries to come to terms with her dead grandson’s male lover, and “Run, Mourner, Run,” in which a young white man who had been hired to seduce and help blackmail a wealthy black man finds himself falling in love with the man who was supposed to be his mark. Among the recurring themes that Kenan explores in these stories is the dialectical paradox of personal desire; that is, desire can seem to transcend the public sphere altogether and create a personal sphere which, for a while, seems complete. Ultimately, though, that personal sphere must answer to the public one, sometimes to be

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crushed by it. Kenan’s stories examine how that can happen, and what happens next. The final story, “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,” is close to a novella in length and serves as a coda to the entire volume, in that it picks up most of the thematic strands of the other stories. Presented as a folk history assembled by James Malachi Greene (one of the central characters in A Visitation of Spirits) and edited by Reginald Kain (who shares Kenan’s initials) in the year 2000, the story takes the form of an oral history interspersed with letters and diary entries. It even includes extensive pseudoscholarly footnotes, including one that mentions a supposed 1996 publication by Randall Kenan, Go Curse Your God, Boy, and Die: Stories. A conversation between Ruth and Ezekiel Cross—James Greene’s grandaunt and granduncle—and assorted letter and diary fragments tell the story of the founding of Tims Creek, North Carolina. The town was first called Tearshirt and was founded by escaped slaves led by a black man known as Pharaoh to Ezekiel Cross but referred to as Menes in the written records of Rebecca Cross and her son, Phineas Cross. In her diary, Rebecca Cross wonders if her husband, Owen Cross, has a homosexual attachment to this slave. The account that Ezekiel Cross gives of the slave/master relationship also suggests this possibility. Three years after Menes escapes with eighteen other slaves, Phineas Cross encounters their hidden settlement on land owned by Owen Cross, an encounter Phineas describes in great detail in a letter to his male lover living in England. Although most aspects of Ezekiel’s story are rebutted either by the editor or by Ruth Cross, Phineas’s letter does help to establish the reality of a community of escaped slaves led by one who had been a favorite of Owen Cross. The portion of Ezekiel’s tale that gives the short story its title, though, is more fabulous. After the Civil War, and after Pharaoh’s death, a preacher comes into town who calls the dead back to life to attack the living people of Tearshirt. Although the people are saved by a miraculous reappearance by Pharaoh, Pharaoh himself, in his disgust, calls fire down on Tearshirt. The few survivors, who rebuild the town, rename it Tims Creek. Ezekiel Cross makes no claims of absolute truth for his story; he simply claims that it is the story he heard. Read allegorically, this story of a rebellion of the dead and the destruction of the town in flames might be a folkloric version of an attack by the Ku Klux Klan on this town, or more generally of the failure of the post-Reconstruction era to make good on the promises of equality. None of the various storytellers, however, presents evidence to support an allegorical reading. Instead, readers are left with the fact that this story is told about the town’s history because it is a good story, and having a good story is reason enough to tell it. Further, being a story about storytelling but also about rebirth, the story seems to imply both that storytelling is fundamentally about spiritual rebirth and that rebirth can be frightening but can make for awfully good stories. Themes and Meanings More than in many short-story collections, the stories in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead are unified by several common themes and ideas. In many of these stories, there is an implicit acceptance of the supernatural world as a real one that sometimes

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affects the world of everyday reality. This supernatural world is often linked to sexual passion, to spiritual searching and spiritual passion, and to storytelling itself. All these forces are presented as being possibly transformational but also unreliable and disruptive. The story “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead” begins with several quotations including one by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin from The Dialogic Imagination (1981) that identifies the fantastic in folklore as a “realistic fantastic” that Bakhtin associates with “those eternal demands” of men. This quotation is followed by a shorter one from Zora Neale Hurston: “Now you are going to hear lies above suspicion.” The implication is that the fantastic is used in a similar way by Kenan in his own stories, and that a reader should not worry too much about what could “realistically” have happened but instead should ask how the fantastic is used in the stories. In the story “Things of This World,” John Edgar Stokes encounters a Chinese man named Chi, whose name in an African tongue means “personal god” and who seems literally to have fallen from the sky. After facing down some local white bigots, Stokes says to Chi, “I could die right now—content.” With that, he dies and Chi disappears. Chi seems to be an earthly manifestation of Stokes’s personal god. Chi, however, does nothing fantastic; as the title implies, he only helps Stokes move on to the next world content, after wrapping up the things of this world. In this story, the fantastic serves to highlight the everyday world. Although spiritual searching is an important element in a number of stories, it emerges as a main theme in “The Foundations of the Earth” and “Ragnorak! The Day the Gods Die.” In both stories it is brought into apparent conflict with sexual passion. In “The Foundations of the Earth,” Henrietta Williams invites Gabriel, the male lover of her deceased grandson, Edward, to Tims Creek for a visit. For her, the visit is a process of learning to accept that her grandson was a homosexual. When members of her church are outraged that a neighbor, on a Sunday, is plowing fields on land he leases from Henrietta, she slowly comes to believe that perhaps there is no split between the transcendent spiritual world and the everyday world. She advises the farmer to do what he has to do. Implicitly, she can now begin to accept that her grandson’s sexuality was not unholy. “Ragnorak! The Day the Gods Die” goes inside the mind of the Reverend Barden, a recurring character in these stories who is also present in A Visitation of Spirits. He says a eulogy over the body of Sarah Tate, a woman with whom he had an affair. While she was alive, he had been satisfied to see their lovemaking as something of almost holy worth; with her death, he must face the spiritual emptiness of his life. That sexual passion can have a spiritual force is a theme running through many of these stories. Aaron Streeter, the young man in “Cornsilk,” makes his memory of a sexual relationship with his half sister, Jamonica, an obsessional focus in his life. This is in part a way of forestalling the true implications of his own spiritual laziness, which he shows an awareness of in the self-reflection in which he glibly engages. Sexual passion, because it can make one person care about another, seems to work as a spiritually redemptive force in Dean Williams’s life. He falls in love with Ray

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Brown, the wealthy black man he has been hired to seduce and betray. By itself, it is not enough. Because Dean achieves no spiritual clarity, he ignores his impulses not to betray Ray. In “What Are Days?” however, being passionately, sexually loved by a teenager who then mysteriously disappears serves as an intermediate step for a widow, Lena Walker, not only to begin loving herself again but also to grieve for the dead husband toward whom she still has some unresolved anger. In all the other stories that focus on sexual passion, such desire is presented as something that can transform one morally and spiritually but is not by itself a sufficient guide. The first and last stories, “Clarence and the Dead” and “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,” are the two in which elements of the supernatural are most prominent. In both, the supernatural is part of a more general folkloric context. Both stories are also finally about the importance of a community having a story to tell. “Clarence and the Dead” is told from a first-person-plural point of view, by a narrator who seems to represent the town itself. The narrator is careful to note that this story is pieced together from accounts that people in the town reported to each other, often long after the events, making it clear that there has been plenty of time for this story of a young boy who speaks in the voices of the dead to grow in the retelling. The narrator, however, is rather unconcerned by the possibility that these fantastic events may have been exaggerated, or for that matter that they may not have been real. The narrator’s main concern is that this story—which is not much spoken of any more—should be known. By contrast, “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead” is a story that revels in all the distorting effects of folklore. By placing Ezekiel Cross’s account of Pharaoh’s slave revolt and of the later revolt of the dead side by side with contrasting and supporting evidence, this story calls attention to the distortion that takes place in all stories. A point the story makes is that stories cannot be judged by their fidelity to “reality.” Ezekiel Cross’s tale might transform the story of the founding of Tims Creek into an apocalypse of biblical proportions, but it keeps the tale lively and interesting. Stories, too, prove to be potentially transformational, but not accurate, guides to absolute truth. Critical Context In his short stories, Randall Kenan shows himself to be not only a fine writer but also an active student of literature. Let the Dead Bury Their Dead shows the influence of a wide variety of writers but does not let these influences interfere with the enjoyment of the text. In the best tradition of artistic influence, Randall Kenan has borrowed ideas and techniques both broadly and widely to fashion a series of short stories that are highly original. Using a series of interconnected short stories to tell the story of a town is a form pioneered by Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life (1919) and developed by Anderson’s African American protégé, Jean Toomer, in Cane (1923). Like both Toomer and Anderson, Kenan uses the form to reveal the hidden and half-hidden passions of members of the town. Kenan’s stories,

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however, are much fuller than the short sketches in Winesburg, Ohio or Cane. Although he is sometimes satisfied with presenting only a fleeting glimpse, he tends to make his reader look long and hard at each person. In his interest in history, his playfulness, and his deep concern with ideas that are of spiritual importance to people, Kenan also shows a definite affinity to a more contemporary writer, Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage (1990) and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986), among other works. Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, had a plot similar to the title story of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; in both stories a young black man calls on magical powers that he is then unable to control. Among the ideas that Kenan shares with Johnson is the conviction that ideas themselves are important to people and thus should be important to fiction; therefore, one finds in both of these writers an interest and willingness to ruminate over ideas. Additionally, both writers are willing to present magic in their writing as it is presented in folklore—that is, as something that sometimes works and can affect people’s lives but is only a small part of a larger reality. The two most apparent influences on Kenan’s work are James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Kenan shares in common with Baldwin a willingness to explore the importance people place on sexual desire in all of its manifestations and an understanding that sexual desire can be charged with a spiritual fervor. With Morrison, Kenan seems to share some of his recurring moral vision. Morrison has written extensively on the importance in African American literature of both the community and ancestor figures in the community. One of the changes in direction that is evident between Kenan’s first book and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead is that a reader gets much more exploration of Tims Creek in the later book. Further, although A Visitation of Spirits certainly was concerned about the role of community elders, the stories in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead—especially the title story, but also “Ragnorak! The Day the Gods Die” and “Cornsilk”—explore more richly the problematic interaction between younger members of the community and their elders. Bibliography Guinn, Matthew. “Signifyin(g) in the South: Randall Kenan.” In After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Discussion of Kenan’s fiction as literally “postmodern,” that is, as following after and responding to modernism. Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. A major statement on black writing by a writer whose influence on Kenan is noticeable. Of particular importance to a reader of Kenan are Johnson’s comments on Jean Toomer and Henry Dumas. Kenan, Randall, and Brent Wade. New Southerners. Research Triangle Park, N.C.: National Humanities Center, [1995?]. Sound recording in which Kenan both discusses and reads from Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Invaluable resource for understanding the texture and meaning of the novel. Miner, Valerie. “Carolina Dreamin’.” The Nation 255 (July 6, 1992): 28-29. A review

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by a female novelist of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Focuses largely on Kenan’s treatment of women and finds much to praise. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Discusses the role of the dead in shaping the identities of the living. _______. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter, 1989): 1-34. Though not about Randall Kenan, these two articles by Toni Morrison do give a good overview of recurring themes and values in African American literature. The importance of the community and of ancestor figures in African American literature are particularly relevant to Randall Kenan. Mosher, Howard Frank. “The Ghosts on Main Street.” The New York Times Book Review 97 (June 14, 1992): 12-13. An early but quite enlightening and very favorable review of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Thomas Cassidy

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LIFE ON THE COLOR LINE The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black Author: Gregory Howard Williams (1943) Type of work: Memoir Time of work: 1950’s-1960’s Locale: Fort Belvoir, Virginia; Louisville, Kentucky; Muncie, Indiana First published: 1995 Principal personages: Gregory Howard Williams, the author, who traces his rise from poverty in Muncie, Indiana, to academic achievement and personal success Mike Williams, the author’s younger brother James “Buster” Williams, the author’s alcoholic father Mary Williams, the author’s mother, who abandons her family Grandma Sallie, the author’s paternal grandmother Miss Dora, the good-willed woman who cares for Williams and his brother Sara, the author’s girlfriend, who eventually becomes his wife Form and Content Gregory Howard Williams’s memoir, Life on the Color Line, begins with the sudden transformation of the author’s life at the age of ten. Williams, whom the family calls “Billy,” has been brought up in a life of comfort as a white child in Virginia. After his father falls victim to alcoholism and his mother abandons him and his younger brother, he learns that he is biracial. These events catapult him into a life of poverty. Early in his childhood, Williams’s father, who passes as an “Italian,” owns a raucous beer joint outside Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The extremely bright senior Williams, a man with the Midas touch, drives a Cadillac and finds numerous ways, legal and otherwise, to make money. Williams’s white mother helps run the bar and cares for Billy and his three younger siblings. In time, the family leaves their home in the back of the bar and moves to a wealthy neighborhood. Unfortunately, as the family’s wealth increases, so does the father’s drinking. He spirals out of control, and the family finally loses everything. Billy’s father physically abuses his mother, until she runs away, taking her two youngest children with her. She leaves behind Billy and his younger brother, Mike. Their father takes them by bus to his hometown, Muncie, Indiana. Desperately missing their mother, the traumatized children are literally starving. They are happy, though, to be in Muncie, because they have spent happy summers there with their maternal grandparents. However, their father, who is known in Mun-

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cie simply as “Buster,” explains that their lives in Indiana will be very different, because in Muncie they will no longer be white. The incredulous Billy, whose name at this point changes to Greg, is deeply disturbed. After all, his whole identity is based on the proposition that he is white. The boys do not have much time to assimilate the revelation of their racial identity, because they are instantly thrown into survival mode. Since their new home does not have indoor plumbing, the young Gregory is forced to face a vicious rooster in order to get to the outhouse. This is only the first of numerous battles. Other problems quickly appear: hunger, violence, oppression, discrimination, and intolerance. Throughout his childhood, Williams is attacked by poor white boys for being black and by poor black boys for being white. After a basketball game, a group of boys from the opposing school throws garbage at him and his team. In high school, a particularly caring teacher informs him that he is to receive an academic prize for outstanding achievement. However, he is passed over and subsequently devastated when the issue of his color comes to light. He and his brother are passed from their Aunt Bessie to their scowling, alcoholic Grandma Sallie, who, it turns out, once had to pose as the family’s maid in Virginia. Despite numerous attempts to stop, their father continues to drink, and he gambles away what little money he earns. Williams’s memoir, however, is not all darkness and shadow. At times, light shines upon the dark Muncie streets. Eventually, a neighbor named Miss Dora provides a home for the forlorn youngsters. Although her resources are scarce, she manages to feed Greg and Mike, and her love and devotion make up for the lost love of their mother. At the end of the book, Mary Williams returns to Muncie naively to claim her boys and return them to the white world, as if the ten years since her abandonment had never passed. However, as the deeply emotional Williams realizes, it is simply too late, and Miss Dora, whom he calls his “truly mother,” is the only mother he will ever need. Ultimately, what saves Williams is his strong sense of self-worth and his work ethic. Moreover, while Williams the author does not hold back in depicting his father’s major character flaws, he does give credit where credit is due. Somehow, between bouts of drunkenness, womanizing, and petty crime, Buster Williams managed to impart to his son the idea that Gregory could become the person Buster dreamed of becoming himself. In time, Gregory claws his way through the racist Muncie schools and gains admittance to Ball State University, where he flourishes academically and personally in spite of long, grueling hours spent working menial jobs to pay his way. There is no financial assistance. In time, he becomes a much-admired police officer, a lawyer, a professor, the dean of the Ohio State University College of Law, and the president of City College, New York. Analysis By the end of Life on the Color Line, a reader may come to believe that ideas of race are social inventions. While growing up, Williams lives in two worlds: the white

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one, where he is highly regarded, and the black one, where he is severely oppressed. He is the same person in each, however. The only differences are his perception and treatment by others. Initially, when his teachers and coaches in elementary school and high school view Gregory as white, they assume he is a bright youngster with a prestigious college and a brilliant career looming ahead. However, when they see his racist school record, where the W for white is crossed out and a C for colored is written in, they fail—with the exception of one or two good souls—to provide any opportunities for him whatsoever. Indeed, Williams is never approached by a guidance counselor during his entire four years of high school. While he is admired for his athletic prowess, he is scorned for even looking at the sister of a white teammate. He is also excoriated for dating a girl with darker skin than his. He is almost literally torn in two. Williams does not provide sociological constructs or analysis to deliver his message concerning racial identity in America. His powerful memoir utilizes everyday people living everyday American lives to illustrate how deeply racial bias is ingrained into the American psyche. Critical Context Williams’s memoir confirms the idea that love, forgiveness, and determination can overcome social limitations. Without anger, blame, resentment, or a call for retribution, Life on the Color Line manages to convey how deeply racism, intolerance, and discrimination are etched into the American psyche. The memoir form and Williams’s matter-of-fact voice imbue the work with absolute authority. It is the author’s truth and thus cannot be challenged. In addition to forcing readers to examine their own perconceptions about racial identity, the book conveys the divisive racial climate in the United States during the 1950’s and the 1960’s at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement: Individuals were judged primarily by their skin color, which determined whether they were provided with or denied the opportunity to achieve greatness. Williams never asks for pity. Indeed, his is a celebratory chronicle that inspires readers to strive themselves to accomplish great things. He claims that through education, perseverance, and hard work, obstacles of any sort can be overcome. He furthermore decries self-pity, asserting that it merely interferes with the work and perseverance necessary for success. At one point, Williams acknowledges that he had a choice to dream or despair. Fortunately, he chose to dream. Bibliography Arenson, Karen. “Ohio Law School Dean Is Named as New President of City College.” The New York Times, March 27, 2001. This article, which praises Williams for his many achievements, draws material from Life on the Color Line. Broyard, Bliss. One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets. New York: Little, Brown, 2007. Like Williams, Broyard was raised as white then discovered that her father, the writer and critic Anatole Broyard, was biracial.

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Katz, Ilan. The Construction of Racial Identity in Children of Mixed Parentage: Mixed Metaphors. London: Jessica Kingsley, 1996. Utilizes in-depth interviews with interracial families such as Williams’s to illustrate the social and psychological development of racial identity and difference. Neale, Gay. Review of Life on the Color Line, by Gregory Howard Williams. Inquiry 1 (Fall, 1998): 80-81. Remarks that Williams’s tone of detachment is central to the success of the book. Newman, David M., and Elizabeth Grauerholz. Sociology of Families. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2002. Utilizes Life on the Color Line to illustrate the sociological impact upon families of being multiracial. M. Casey Diana

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LIKE ONE OF THE FAMILY Conversations from a Domestic’s Life Author: Alice Childress (1916-1994) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Early 1950’s Locale: New York, New York First published: 1956 Principal characters: Mildred Johnson, a thirty-two-year-old domestic worker Marge, Mildred’s best friend Mrs. M., a well-meaning but obtuse employer Mrs. C., an employer who tells her guests that Mildred is “like one of the family” Mrs. L., Mildred’s favorite employer The Novel Although it is classified as a novel, Like One of the Family does not have either the movement of plot or the change in character usually associated with that genre. Instead, Alice Childress’s work is a series of monologues, each of which is independent, even though all involve the same speaker and the same listener. This format can be explained by the fact that these monologues originally appeared separately, some of them in the newspaper Freedom, where they were called “Conversations from Life,” and others in the Baltimore Afro-American, under the heading “Here’s Mildred.” Sixty-two of the monologues were assembled for publication in book form, but there seems to have been no principle governing the order in which they were printed, other than an effort to vary the subject of discussion from one chapter to the next. While it is not structured conventionally, Like One of the Family has its own kind of unity, achieved primarily through the use of a single voice. In each chapter, Mildred Johnson relates her experiences to Marge, her downstairs neighbor in a Harlem apartment building. Almost all these conversations take place either in Mildred’s threeroom apartment or in Marge’s. Whatever the location, the pattern is almost always the same. One of the women stops in at the end of the workday or in the evening, and the two sit down, usually in the kitchen, make a pot of coffee, and visit. In the chapter “All About My Job,” Mildred explains why this friendship is so important to her. She is black and she is a domestic worker. These two facts alone, Mildred says, “ought to be enough reason for anybody to need a friend.” She continues, “I do believe I’d lose my mind if I had to come home after a day of hard work, rasslin’ ‘round in other folks’ kitchens if I did not have a friend to talk to when I got here.” Because the two friends are the same age and do the same job, and because both

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were reared in the South, Marge can understand what Mildred is talking about. With Marge, Mildred can be her own person, as she can never be with her white employers. Even when she rebukes them, Mildred maintains a logical, restrained manner, in sharp contrast to the passion and anger she feels free to reveal to Marge. Although she occasionally annoys her friend and although she sometimes has to apologize for her more extravagant comments, Mildred does not feel the need to watch her words when she talks to Marge. With a white employer, Mildred must be aware of the fact that if she shows the extent of her anger, she will certainly be dismissed. Thus the action of the novel concerns not merely the incidents that Mildred describes but also the ebb and flow of Mildred’s emotional life, which follows a pattern of repression and release. At the end of Like One of the Family, Mildred’s character and her situation are the same as they were at the beginning of the book. She is still working by the day, because in that way she can be more independent; when she investigates a weekly position with a single employer, she discovers that such a job would be little better than slavery. She still hopes that the civil rights battle will soon be won; however, she does not expect her own life to become very different as a result. The one change Mildred anticipates is a personal one. Throughout the novel, she has been analyzing the men she meets. In the final chapter, Mildred tells Marge that she has decided to marry Eddie, a salesman whose paychecks are uncertain but whose kindness and decency make him, in her eyes, a much better husband than many so-called good catches. The Characters Like One of the Family is dominated by the character of Mildred Johnson, not just because she is the only person whose thoughts are presented firsthand but, more important, because of the quality of her mind. It is this which produces the suspense in a book that has no real plot; one is drawn from paragraph to paragraph, page to page, simply to find out what Mildred will say next. For example, in one of the few chapters set outside of the apartment building, “Ridin’ the Bus,” Mildred surprises Marge by insisting on riding in the back of the bus, as African Americans had so often been forced to do. In the observations that follow, Mildred produces a brilliant discussion of freedom as the principle that enables both African Americans and whites to ride where they like. She then gives a definition of an ideal society as one in which people not only sit where they like but also choose their seats without even noticing the race of others. In every chapter, there are similar illustrations of Mildred’s intellectual abilities, her skill in analyzing and synthesizing, her genius at seeing the profound implications of the simplest action. Mildred’s friend Marge is also essential to the novel. It is Marge, the accepting and trustworthy listener, who permits Mildred to speak with perfect freedom, whether she is indulging in fantasy, such as her dream of a Christmas of real peace, or exploring controversial subjects, such as the idea of a union for domestic workers, complete with demands, strikes, and pickets. Moreover, although she is never quoted, Marge does come to life through Mildred’s comments and reactions. For example, readers

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learn that Marge is plump but has beautiful hands, that she gets depressed after an exhausting day of domestic work, that she throws herself enthusiastically into cooking meals and planning outings, and that she frequently dissolves in laughter, especially when Mildred is acting out one of her adventures. The other characters in Like One of the Family are all presented in a straightforward fashion, with Mildred serving as omniscient author, reporting their words and their gestures, while delivering her own perceptive analyses of their underlying motives. In “More Blessed to Give . . .,” for example, she describes how a child attending a party was reluctant to accept a box of candy and then, when it was pressed upon her, insisted on presenting it to one of the hostesses. Mildred explains the child’s conduct to the other adult visitors, and later to Marge, by stating that everyone has a need to give, as well as to receive. Because Childress has established Mildred as a reliable authority, such character analyses are clearly meant to be taken at face value. Throughout the novel, then, it is Mildred who functions as the authorial voice, defining and evaluating character. Themes and Meanings For the themes of Like One of the Family, one need look no further than the explicit statements of Mildred Johnson. A compulsive educator, Mildred is bent on pointing out deficiencies in society and in individuals to everyone with whom she comes in contact. Mildred’s intention may be simply to inform her listeners, as when she explains the facts of black history to young children, or to reform them, as when she lectures her minister or one of her employers. Whatever the audience, whatever the situation, Mildred’s lessons are based on the three principles she values above all: integrity, respect for oneself and for others, and the need to work for a better future. Mildred loathes dishonesty, hypocrisy, and pretension. It is this that so annoys her when Mrs. C. tells her visitors that Mildred is “like one of the family”; it is this which she finds offensive at Mrs. H.’s cocktail party, where the guests prove their sophistication by calling everything “wonderful” or “amusin’.” However, it is not only white employers whose superficial values draw Mildred’s fire; she is equally annoyed with the snobbery of prosperous African Americans who boast about their wealth and their material possessions. Because Mildred’s values are not superficial, she can be proud of who and what she is. Therefore, when she goes to a church function where only the supposedly prestigious occupations are praised, Mildred points out the value of her own job. Behind the doctors and lawyers, she says, are people like herself, whose hard work at low wages makes it possible for their children to rise in the world. The same ideas are stressed in “The ‘Many Others’ in History” when, at a meeting honoring famous African American leaders, Mildred pays tribute to the hardworking but unknown heroes and heroines in her own family. On the other hand, she is appalled that black children know so little about the leaders of whom they should be proud; in “All About Miss Tubman,” Mildred gathers the children in her apartment building for a badly needed lesson. She comments that “you youngsters are starved in more ways than one.”

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It is this sense of her own worth that enables Mildred to stand up to her employers. As a professional, Mildred refuses to put up with demeaning comments such as Mrs. C.’s or with the personal questions that Mrs. M. thinks it her right to ask. She is offended when one employer clutches her pocketbook all the time that Mildred is in the house, displaying a lack of trust, or when another asks for a health card, implying that Mildred may be carrying diseases. It is also this insistence on being given respect that impels Mildred to go on a picnic, although she knows she and her friends may be attacked by whites, and to encourage a friend’s son to go to the South and work for civil rights, even though she realizes he may be jailed or killed. Despite experiences that could well have turned her bitter, Mildred remains an optimist. Her dream is not a dream of black power but of a color-blind society in which people will live in peace. Such ideas cause her to reproach some of her fellow African Americans, who are forming a “benevolent club” that will exclude everyone who is not black. In “A New Kind of Prayer,” Mildred points out that the main function of churches seems to be to pray to overcome someone else. Instead, in what another African American calls a “dangerous prayer,” Mildred asks for “Peace, Love and Plenty” and vows to work for those goals—not just for her people, but for all people, as long as she lives. Critical Context Until recently, Alice Childress’s reputation depended primarily on her achievements in the theater. With Gold Through the Trees (pr. 1952) and Trouble in Mind (pr. 1955), Childress became the first black woman to be recognized as a major American playwright. Therefore, critical discussions concentrated on those plays and on later works such as Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne (pr. 1987). Comments about her fiction often were limited to discussion of A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), which has even been mistakenly referred to as Childress’s first novel; by the 1970’s, Like One of the Family had long been out of print and was difficult to obtain. It was not until the reissue of Like One of the Family in 1986 that this novel, originally published thirty years before, began to receive the attention it deserved. Like One of the Family is now seen by critics as a work of inherent value and of historical importance. In Mildred, critics have noted, Childress created a kind of independent, assertive African American woman who in the 1950’s was new to fiction. Moreover, by drawing upon her own experiences as a domestic worker, in Like One of the Family Childress presented the first accurate description of the lives of a large group of women who had long been ignored. Admittedly, Like One of the Family has flaws, such as the sermon-like quality of the less dramatic chapters and the lack of a structural plan for the book as a whole. It has also been argued that Mildred’s high success rate in converting her employers is implausible and that the novel is thus somewhat less realistic than it might have been. Despite such minor shortcomings, however, Like One of the Family is now considered an outstanding work. Despite the book’s often comic tone, Childress’s opinions,

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delivered through Mildred, have a solid philosophical foundation. Furthermore, Mildred herself is more than merely an interesting and sympathetic character; she represents the “many others,” the heroic black women, unnamed in history books, who have for centuries transmitted a sense of self-worth to later generations. Bibliography Austin, Gayle. “Alice Childress: Black Woman Playwright as Feminist Critic.” Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1987): 52-62. Sees elements of feminist criticism in Childress’s dramatic work—for example, in her refusal to accept traditional polarities, her insistence on the need for social justice, and her refutation of the stereotypical images of black women in literature written by men. Childress, Alice. “Alice Childress: A Pioneering Spirit.” Interview by Elizabeth BrownGuillory. SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 4 (Spring, 1987): 66-68. Childress discusses the childhood influences that directed her toward a literary career, particularly those of her grandmother and one of her teachers. Also traces her theatrical career. _______. “Knowing the Human Condition.” In Black American Literature and Humanism, edited by R. Baxter Miller. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. A paper delivered by Childress at a 1978 conference. Argues that much criticism of film, drama, and fiction is deficient because the critics themselves do not understand “the human condition.” For African American writers, Childress argues, this problem is particularly troubling, since white critics typically look not for realism but for what they consider appropriate images. Collins, Patricia Hill. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2006. Analysis of African American identity that includes a chapter on the issues of race and domestic labor that Childress examines in Like One of the Family. Gibbs, Sandra E. “Black Novels Reissued.” New Directions for Women 16 (July, 1987): 17. A review written after Like One of the Family was reissued, expressing delight that the work would once again be available. Finds Mildred’s comments as applicable in the 1980’s as they were in the 1950’s. States that Mildred represents those real people in the black community who are “common-sense” advisers and who transmit “a strong sense of self and Black American history.” Harris, Trudier. From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. A thorough, well-written book that places Like One of the Family and other novels in a sociological and literary context. Two introductory chapters provide an excellent background for later discussions of specific works. In “Beyond the Uniform,” Mildred is seen as rejecting the limitations generally placed on black domestic workers and, similarly, as challenging the assumptions inherent in stereotypical language. Concludes that Mildred represents a bridge between maids “who espouse freedom of mind” and “the revolutionary maids who exhibit freedom of action.” _______. “I Wish I Was a Poet’: The Character as Artist in Alice Childress’s Like One

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of the Family.” Black American Literature Forum 14 (Spring, 1980): 24-30. Argues that Childress combines traditional literary devices with “audience attention, participation, and response” from the black oral tradition. Notes that Mildred is a skilled artist, always conscious not only of Marge but also of the black domestic servants who are responding to her words. Jennings, La Vinia Delois. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne, 1995. Monograph examining Childress’s life, work, and place in African American literary and dramatic history. Killens, John O. “The Literary Genius of Alice Childress.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Observes that throughout her works, Childress uses humor and satire to expose hypocrisy and notes that she is dedicated to the causes of African Americans. Killens admires Childress for maintaining her artistic integrity despite pressures from “the white racist publishing establishment.” Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: Pandora, 2002. Chronological study of African American women’s literature; includes a chapter on urban realism featuring Childress alongside five other female African American realist authors of the 1930’s to the 1960’s. Troutman-Robinson, Denise. “The Elements of Call and Response in Alice Childress’ Like One of the Family.” MAWA Review 4 (June, 1989): 18-21. Discusses parallels between Childress’s book and the collaborative relationship between preacher and congregation in black evangelical churches. Concludes that, like so many other African American writers, Childress has been strongly influenced by the oral tradition. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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LINDEN HILLS Author: Gloria Naylor (1950) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: Early 1980’s Locale: A suburb of a northern American city First published: 1985 Principal characters: Willie Mason, an idealistic young African American poet Lester Tilson, a poet and dropout Luther Nedeed, a wealthy fifth-generation mortician Willa Prescott Nedeed, Luther’s wife The Novel Two journeys are at the heart of Linden Hills. The first is that of Willie Mason, living from hand to mouth, who fears becoming a forty-year-old grocery-bagger. He wonders whether he has made a mistake and should follow the dream of material success. He welcomes a suggestion that he and Lester Tilson seek holiday jobs in Linden Hills, even though an ominous cry from the Hills chills him. What he finds there convinces him that he is doing the right thing, that in the Hills the wrong dream is followed. At Lester’s home, Willie learns that Mrs. Tilson’s desire for money drove her husband to work two jobs until he died from a heart attack. Willie perceives the ill feeling within the Tilson home and recognizes Lester’s hypocrisy when he mocks his sister. The next day, they find work at the wedding reception of Winston Alcott, who marries a woman he does not love because marriage is what Luther Nedeed and Linden Hills expect. Only Willie recognizes that Winston’s best man is also his former lover. Later, Willie stares at a centerfold of a black nude and is appalled because he sees exploitation, not sex, in the chains against which she struggles. Another man calls this photo an example of progress for African Americans: “Today Penthouse . . . tomorrow the world.” At the home of a nervous widower, Willie and Lester are spirited upstairs to prepare the dead wife’s room for a new bride; at the same time, a wake is held downstairs at which the guests discuss the danger of a proposed low-income housing development too close to Linden Hills. Only Willie seems to understand the ghastly funeral dinner, at which guests devour “brown and bloody meat” that seems to represent the lives of the less fortunate. Hired to deliver supplies to the church where the dead woman will be buried, Willie realizes that the Reverend Hollis, a man whom he has admired for years, is an alcoholic and a liar. After the funeral, Willie senses something unclean in the way Nedeed caresses the lid of the woman’s coffin. Willie is the one who runs to the body of Laurel

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Dumont, who had dreamed of being the first African American Olympic swimmer but who instead commits suicide by diving into her empty pool. When Willie turns her over, she is faceless. Plagued by nightmares that are a direct result of these encounters, Willie struggles to put his experiences into perspective. Finally, at Nedeed’s home, where he and Lester are to trim the tree on Christmas Eve, Willie instinctively recognizes the missing Willa as she emerges from the basement carrying her dead child. When an accidental fire engulfs the house and its inhabitants, the people of Linden Hills stand at their windows to watch, but in spite of Willie’s pleas they refuse to help. Willie resolves to leave and never return. Willie’s physical journey parallels Willa Nedeed’s psychological journey. She begins as a woman with no name or face, imprisoned without food or available water in a basement that was once a mortuary, her dead son in her arms. It is her cry of grief that Willie has heard. Ultimately, she looks for something with which to wrap her child’s body. Rummaging through a trunk, she finds a faded wedding veil to shroud the child, and she also finds the Bible of Luwana Packerville, the slave wife of the first Luther Nedeed. From Luwana’s writing on the blank pages, Willa discovers that this woman, who had been purchased by her husband, had remained a slave even after their two-year-old son had been freed. Willa identifies with Luwana’s loneliness and anguish as she reads about how Luwana’s child had been taught to abandon her. Willa discovers the recipe books of Evelyn Creton Nedeed, so frustrated by her husband’s coldness that she had mixed aphrodisiacs into his food, purged herself with laxatives, and committed suicide on Christmas Eve by eating vanilla ice cream laced with roach poison. Willa identifies with her emptiness as well. She finds Priscilla McGuire Nedeed’s photo album and notes how the shadow of her young son gradually had grown to eclipse her face, until Priscilla’s face in the photos had become only a blurred spot. Willa feels her own face and is surprised to find it there. She looks in a pan of water and sees herself mirrored. No longer a faceless Nedeed wife, Willa remembers her name. She realizes that she willingly walked down the basement steps and that she can walk back up. She reclaims herself as the homemaker and mother she is, tidies the basement, still holding her child, and then goes purposefully up the stairs. Willa has rediscovered herself, just as Willie has validated himself. The Characters Although Naylor uses an omniscient point of view, much of the novel is presented through the alternating characters of Willie and Willa. Willa’s perceptions and experiences are separated visually from those of Willie and the others by the use of a different typeface. This device works particularly well to signal the dream linkages and unconscious bond between Willa, locked in the basement with her dead son, and Willie in the world above ground. Each character serves to reinforce the other. The distinctive typeface disappears only when Willa emerges from the Nedeed basement to confront her husband in the final chapter.

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Naylor deliberately invests her characters with allegorical traits in order to parallel figures in the works of Dante. The characters are sometimes wrenched in order to fit Dante’s mold, however, and their allegorical qualities make it more difficult to view them realistically. Although both Willie and Lester are made unlikely poets so that they can represent Dante and Vergil touring the Hell of Linden Hills, their characters are two-dimensional, and their dialogue often seems forced. Luther Nedeed is a perverse and powerful figure who is reincarnated through five generations. What the Nedeeds do is to destroy people’s sense of the past and history: “A magician’s supreme art is not in transformation but in making things disappear.” Everything begins with the present in Linden Hills, which is corrupted by materialism. Even so, Nedeed’s cruelty to Willa and his son is not entirely credible. Nothing really justifies his murder of the child by starvation except the fact that the Nedeeds represent evil; however, pure, unregenerate evil does not translate well into human form. The allegorical symbolism is sometimes labored, as when Nedeed leaves triangular footprints in the snow. The allegorical requirements can also interfere with character motivation. Laurel Dumont, the would-be champion swimmer, is supposedly stripped of her identity and lease when her husband files for divorce, but her suicide is not adequately motivated; she simply inhabits the level of Hell where those who commit violence against themselves dwell. Real energy is found in Naylor’s minor characters. Luwana Packerville Nedeed is sympathetically revealed through the notations in her Bible, although the number of times she speaks in one year, recorded by 665 scratches on her body, seems forced. Another wife, Priscilla McGuire Nedeed, possesses a social life of her own and an intelligence, and she is known by her first name until her face is eclipsed by the shadow of her son. On the other hand lie the strength and powerful love of Laurel’s southern grandmother, Roberta Johnson, or Lester’s Grandma Tilson, one of the very few who are not afraid to stand up to Nedeed. Another clearly drawn minor character is the Reverend Michael T. Hollis, alcoholic and heretic. Beyond his symbolic significance, he is a real man who was once inspired to choose a religious vocation, although it was the power emanating from the pulpit that attracted him, not religious devotion. Even Maxwell Smyth, climbing the corporate ladder, becomes a bitterly comic character in his anal-retentive denial of his blackness. Themes and Meanings Some critics have praised Naylor for avoiding stereotypes and didacticism in this novel; others have argued that she attempts to draw too many characters who cannot be fully explored, and that Willie and Lester, who are central to the novel, are her weakest characters. Nevertheless, they have agreed that Naylor draws vivid, unforgettable minor characters. Her strongest characterizations are of Willa and the vague Nedeed wives, who gradually come into focus through tangible reminders of their lives.

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Naylor’s characters struggle with skin color and history. Many people in the Hills seem to deny their own blackness by attempting to erase or mask it, and Naylor suggests that this ambivalence is part of their spiritual sickness. Lester’s sister, who idolizes Eleanor Roosevelt and Diana Ross, “paid her dues to the Civil Rights Movement by wearing an Afro for six months and enrolling in black history courses in college,” but now she employs bleaching cream and hair relaxer and wants a “good” marriage in Linden Hills. The Reverend Hollis, leading a conservative Baptist church, has lost the power flowing from congregation to pulpit that first attracted him to the ministry in the storefront churches of his youth. Maxwell Smyth, in his management job at General Motors, has achieved perfect physical control of himself and his environment. With rigid self-discipline, he never sweats or is cold, needs only three hours of sleep each night, and spends “every waking moment trying to be no color at all.” Swimmer Laurel Dumont has dived into a corporate career and neglected the roots that could nourish her, symbolized by her grandmother and the blues of Bessie Smith. The earlier Nedeed wives, chosen for their pale skin and lack of African features, are doomed to unhappiness: Luwana rejects the white god who has left her with nothing; Evelyn tries first to lighten her already pale skin, then to darken it in an attempt to attract her husband. These women are not mad, but they are beaten; only Willa finds strength by learning their histories, their pasts. Even the dead child Sinclair Nedeed, with his African features and white skin, is denied his rightful place. The Nedeed men, in looking ahead, negate their own past. Luther’s great-grandfather recognized that “the future of Wayne County . . . was going to be white.” Luther himself sees Linden Hills as successful, not as black. The Nedeeds’ fatal mistake is to try to emulate white materialistic society. They buy into the dream too well. It is important to recognize the novel’s intentional parallels with the work of Dante. Linden Hills, like Dante’s Hell, is an inverted cone, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, with each of its eight circular drives representing a circle of Hell. Luther Nedeed (whose name is a play on “Lucifer de Eden”), self-styled ruler of this false paradise, has built his house at the bottom of the hills at 999 Tupelo Drive, the ninth and deepest circle of Hell. Because “up means down in the Hills,” Nedeed’s house number is really 666, the biblical mark of the beast. Thus, Willie and Lester’s journey through Linden Hills is a symbolic descent into the Inferno like that of Dante and his guide Vergil. Just as Dante discovers sinners on his journey, a lost soul is found on each circular drive, beginning with the Tilsons in Limbo, or the first circle (First Crescent Drive), and moving down to the Nedeeds in the ninth circle of betrayers, where, as in Dante’s work, the cold is bitter and accompanied by ice and snow. Naylor’s Hell, however, is not theological but is a death of the soul; the false success of white materialism is the trap that destroys these African Americans, who have given up their identity for status. Other themes include invisibility or facelessness, a recurring topic in African American literature. Willa’s absence is noted and even “tasted” by Willie long before he knows who she is. The dead Laurel Dumont is faceless, like the Nedeed wives (especially Priscilla McGuire, whose photographs become faceless), and Willie dreams

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that he has no face. Mirror imagery also appears frequently. Willie and Willa can be seen as alter egos, or opposing selves, mirroring each other. This becomes particularly evident when Willie dreams of something that Willa is experiencing; the words “Will he eat it?” that Willa reads in a recipe book become, in Willie’s nightmare, “Willie, eat it.” In a number of key scenes, the characters view their own images, as when the Reverend Hollis dresses before his mirror. In a sense, Willie and Lester mirror each other as well. Critical Context Naylor has said that her subject is always the lives of African American women, and in The Women of Brewster Place (1983), which received the American Book Award for best first novel, and Mama Day (1989), she reaffirms the importance of female bonding. Linden Hills comments indirectly on the lack of and need for sisterhood by examining an upper-middle-class African American suburb in which women are largely exploited or invisible and in which men have, in the course of upward mobility, sacrificed their racial identity and their essence. Willie, the sensitive protagonist, expresses Naylor’s belief that people do have choices in life and that those choices matter. Naylor has skillfully employed a classical European framework for her modern Inferno and has given it the richness of many characters and backgrounds. She continues to reject the concept of “the” African American experience, as if there were only one; this novel, like her others, presents the multiple experiences of her men and women. Critics agree that Naylor, like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker before her, brings a strong new voice to African American literature. Bibliography Andrews, Larry R. “Black Sisterhood in Gloria Naylor’s Novels.” CL A Journal 33, no. 1 (September, 1989): 1-25. Explores the bonds between female characters in Naylor’s first three novels. The upper-middle-class women of Linden Hills seem most isolated, having modeled their lives too closely on the dominant view of success—to marry “well.” Although two older characters are intuitive and compassionate, communication and support between and within generations seem to fail until Willa, through her identification with the Nedeed wives, finally gains choice and the power to leave the basement. Christian, Barbara. New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000. Edited by Gloria Bowles, M. Giulia Fabi, and Arlene R. Keize. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. This final collection from a renowned African American feminist scholar includes an essay on the functioning of patriarchy, class, and community in Linden Hills and The Women of Brewster Place. Collins, Grace E. “Narrative Structure in Linden Hills.” CLA Journal 34, no. 3 (March, 1991): 290-300. Focuses on the parallel journeys from ignorance to knowledge taken by alter egos Willie and Willa. Willie’s physical journey through Linden Hills and Willie’s psychological journey into the past are “hell-journeys”

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that mirror each other in plot and theme and illustrate the need to reclaim or verify one’s self in the materialistic culture of the American Dream. Gomez, Jewelle. “Naylor’s Inferno.” The Women’s Review of Books 2, no. 11 (August, 1985): 7-8. Argues that Linden Hills too often seems like a literary exercise. Although Gomez praises Naylor’s talent, she is critical of her treatment of characters and emphasis on skin color, charging that Naylor has merely accepted the traditional symbolism of blackness (the dark-skinned Nedeeds) as evil rather than challenging it. Jones, Robert. “A Place in the Suburbs.” Commonweal, May 3, 1985, 283-285. Centers on the universal loss of innocence and grace. Naylor rejects nihilism because memory offers the hope of salvation: “Self-knowledge is made possible only by memory. . . . Memory sets you free.” Jones examines from a Christian perspective the lives of those characters who have reached for the American dream of success and found themselves bitterly disappointed. Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison. “A Conversation.” Southern Review 21, no. 3 (July, 1985): 567-593. Naylor’s philosophy of writing; early influences, especially Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970); and her interaction with characters in Linden Hills. She confirms that a study of Dante triggered the form that she chose for the novel. Ward, Catherine C. “Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills: A Modern Inferno.” Contemporary Literature 28, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 67-81. A detailed and excellent reading of Dantean symbolism that links the circular drives of Linden Hills with the corresponding circles of Hell. Ward admires the risks Naylor takes in writing “an allegory about moral accountability” with a mythic scope that embraces African American and European sensibilities, the oppression of women, and the importance of cultural history. The novel demonstrates a faith in the power of individual choice and self-recognition illustrated by Willa and Willie. Joanne McCarthy

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LOCAL HISTORY Author: Erica Hunt (1955Type of work: Poetry First published: 1993

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The Poetry In Local History, Erica Hunt engages the problem of gender and number in language by deploying the first person singular and plural in indeterminate linguistic contexts. The photograph on the book’s back cover, positioned right beneath blurbs from “language writing” poets Harryette Mullen, Charles Bernstein, and Ann Lauterbach, identifies Erica Hunt as a black woman. Still, given the multiple lineages of this work, it is difficult to find or surmise a referent for the “we” in the opening section entitled “Preface.” In fact, each permutation of the “we” appears to refer to different constituencies: a couple, friends, women, experimental writers, black people in general, and so on. One might respond that, while such indeterminacy might hold for the multiple “we’s” in “Preface,” such is not the case for the “I” that opens the poem and the book: “I was thinking that if the ceiling were mirrored we would have to watch what we say about what we feel.” Regardless of how one interprets this playful but serious commentary on the indicative and the subjunctive, on the relations between standard and colloquial expressions, the “I” appears normative in its self-referential function. In fact, it is normative, a function reinforced in the other syntactical contexts in which it appears in “Preface.” However, since this same grammatical function appears in the next two poems, “Voice I” and “Second Voice,” it may be that this “I” has merely a narrative or generic function that cannot be “reduced” to a human referent. That is Hunt’s point: Sometimes, the “I” may indeed refer to the human being named Erica Hunt; sometimes, it may not. So it is for all the other single-number pronouns in this book—she, you, and he: They may or may not refer to an “Erica Hunt.” Thus, structure and form themselves take on political and cultural functions in Local History. In this respect, Hunt closely follows language writing procedures, although as critic Aldon Nielsen has said, form was inextricable from politics for the Beats as well as for the poets of the Black Arts movement. For Hunt, this relationship between the literary and the political also applies to the relationship between the private and public spheres of existence. Thus, Local History is divided into three sections titled “Local History,” “Correspondence,” and “Surplus,” and it is not unreasonable to see this division as analogous to the function of pronouns in Hunt’s work: Sometimes, the sections correspond to the author or known “others;” sometimes, they correspond to an unknown other or others. The structure of the book might indicate that its pronouns are to be read as simultaneously corresponding to the author Erica Hunt and to unnamed others, except that simultaneity, a fixture of New Criticism, tends to occlude the temporality of reading. It

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is better, perhaps, to say that “I” corresponds first to the author and then to others, first to the local and then to what exceeds the local. Were one to begin reading in the middle, the “we” or “she” might first correspond to unnamed others before the “I” that might or might not correspond to the author. Indeed, one might say that Hunt’s three books, Local History, Arcade (1996), and Piece Logic (2002), operate according to the same logic in terms of poetic procedures. Themes and Meanings Erica Hunt’s book explores the relationship between domestic life and a social world, between a putative “self” and an “other,” all in the context of the various layers of “history.” As the title, Local History, suggests, Hunt is interested in reminding her readers that there have always been multiple histories and that these histories overlap and intersect one another. Thus, the first section of the book, “Local History,” hints at not only the daily events and thoughts of a narrator negotiating her way through a personal life but also delineates what this narrator thinks about the United States, homelessness, war, and other public issues. The second section, “Correspondence Theory,” is constructed of a series of subsections alternating between “Dear” and “Dear Dear.” It uses the normally intimate epistolary form to explore issues of sociality, labor, unemployment, and politics. At the same time, Hunt does not neglect apparently personal issues related to one-on-one relationships, though she notes in passing that “in English there are more words referring to external objects than there are words to refer to internal ones. . . .” The last section, “Surplus,” whose opening, eponymous poem lays out all the problems of binarism (such as self versus other and self-awareness versus socialization), relates these oppositions to the unknown, what lies “between” or “outside” concepts of a knowable self and a “blank” other: “Surplus equals the bystander beside her own accumulated memory.” She writes in the very first sentence of this poem, “Equals the difference between beginning to wake up and beginning the day.” That is to say, what remains beneath or beyond consciousness, what cannot be recalled, is for Hunt precisely what orients “normal” daily life (several of the “Dear” and “Dear Dear” poems in the second section deal with forgetting, memory lapses, on so forth). In some sense, then, Hunt is faithful to traditional psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the significance of the unconscious in the formation of identity and social life. Critical Context Hunt’s use of indeterminate singular pronouns is not unique to her. The language writing movement used similar procedures to critique the notion of the integrity of the self, specifically its conflation with the first-person singular pronoun. A similar strategy can also be found in the work of Zora Neale Hurston; her particular mode of stream of consciousness, often called “free indirect discourse,” operates to meld what is often the delimited knowledge of third-person (singular or plural) narratees with the unlimited knowledge of a narrator posited as numberless. Hurston makes explicit what is already implicit in the general representation of omniscient, objective narra-

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tors: No such nominally objective representation can operate without implicitly, if not explicitly, taking a position, taking sides. Hunt’s experimental poetry differentiates her from the more mainstream branch of African American poetic practice. Insofar as a great deal of contemporary mainstream African American poetry by women functions within the norms of a putative “black” cultural tradition, Hunt’s engagement with the experimental tradition of language writing can be read as pre-African American in relation to a relatively young generation of women poets such as Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey and as non-black in relation to an older generation of poets such as Lucille Clifton and Rita Dove. The work of these poets from two different generations deploys similar, normative poetic procedures in which Hunt does not participate. (The terms “black” and “African American” name both generations and modes of poetic production.) However, insofar as Hunt’s writing recalls and engages the “experimental” wing of the Black Arts movement (for example, the early work of Sonia Sanchez), it cannot be severed from a black literary tradition. Inasmuch as it engages, as well, the Symbolist and Surrealist predecessors of and tendencies within the language writing school, Hunt’s poetry also cannot be severed from an important sector of international post-romantic poetics. Bibliography Cummings, Alison. “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen.” Frontiers 26, no. 2 (2005): 3-36. Analyzes the trajectory of African American women poets’ writing, from the traditional narratives and lyrics of Brooks to the avant-garde strategies of Mullen. Sees Hunt as a link between the two, rendering her virtually invisible to critics. Also attributes this invisibility to the paucity of Hunt’s output and her mixture of “speculative” (abstract and innovative) and “liberatory” (political and linear) writing. Hunt, Erica. “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics.” In The Politics of Poetic Form, edited by Charles Bernstein. New York: Roof Books, 1990. Hunt discusses the construction of what she calls “oppositional cultures” as defensive survival strategies in relation to predominant cultures. She then draws an analogy between this relationship and that which obtains between traditional and innovative writing practices, but she notes that the deployment of traditional narratives by marginalized cultures cannot be sacrificed in the name of the avant-garde alone, since it too participates, in part, in cultural dominance. She concludes the essay with two “test” cases: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. _______. “The World Is Not Precisely Round: Piecing Commotion (on Writing and Motherhood).” In The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, edited by Patricia Diensfrey and Brenda Hillman. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Hunt examines the multifaceted selves that comprise her identity, using motherhood and writing to refute the binary opposition often presumed between the domestic and public realms of experience. Kinnahan, Linda A. “‘Our Visible Selves’: Visual-Verbal Collaborations in Erica Hunt, Alison Saar, and M. Nourbese Phillip.” In Lyric Interventions: Feminism,

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Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Focusing largely on the art-book collaboration between artist Alison Saar and poet Erica Hunt, Kinnahan emphasizes the problematic centrality of the African American body in their prose, poems, and woodcuts. Kinnahan demonstrates how both Saar and Hunt work to displace received ideas concerning the “reading” or interpretation of the body in public and private realms, a theme that resonates with Hunt’s work in general. Mullen, Harryette. “Books: Poetry Collections.” Antioch Review 56, no. 2 (Spring, 1998): 44-45. Includes a brief review of the Alison Saar-Erica Hunt collaboration. Mullen notes the importance of the body for both Saar and Hunt. Tyrone Williams

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THE LONELY LONDONERS Author: Samuel Selvon (1923-1994) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Early 1950’s Locale: London, England First published: 1956 Principal characters: Moses Aleotta, a Trinidadian immigrant to England; a factory worker who is a father figure to younger West Indian immigrants Henry Oliver, a Trinidadian immigrant nicknamed Sir Galahad, a factory worker befriended by Moses Captain, a Nigerian immigrant nicknamed Cap, a close acquaintance of the West Indian characters Tolroy, a Jamaican immigrant, a factory worker who has to settle his newly arrived family Tanty, a Jamaican immigrant, Tolroy’s aunt The Novel Although it depicts in realistic terms the lives of West Indian immigrants newly arrived in England, the terms in which it does so are so lyrical in language and lighthearted in attitude that The Lonely Londoners seems less a conventional novel than a cavalcade of humors and manners, a Mardi Gras of misadventure or, to use one of the novel’s own terms, a “fete.” Its structure is episodic, possibly a result of the author’s well-known ability as a short-story writer and radio dramatist. This structure has the effect of making the work’s sense of time seasonal rather than social. The characters do not have the space in which to develop. In addition, the novel is written for the most part in the English of the author’s native Trinidad, reverting to standard usage only at points when some conceptual dimension needs to be invoked in order to clarify a character’s state of mind. Instead of limiting the work’s appeal, however, these features subtly convey the implications of the title. Even the unfamiliar constructions of the author’s English are rich in cultural undertones of various kinds, while remaining for the uninitiated reader quite easy to understand. The attempt to preserve the character of the uncertainty, vitality, and foreignness that the immigrants bring, along with the addictive attractions and possibilities of London life, fuels The Lonely Londoners, making it more a fascinating document with strong ethnographic tendencies than a well-made novel in the conventional mode. Despite the author’s clear understanding of the economic, racial, and political com-

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ponents of his characters’ social existence, the sense of the social that emerges is that which derives from leisure activities and the pursuit of happiness, particularly the variety that, it is believed, the female form embodies. This emphasis does not overlook other, more pressing, areas of immigrant experience. Subjection to prejudice by employers, labor unions, landlords, and various other social structures is deftly but inescapably sketched. The immigrants’ bemused incomprehension of England and the English is constantly close to the surface of their experiences. Even the English climate seems prejudicial. As the novel’s title suggests, the immigrants’ lives embody an economic and social dead end. Nevertheless, despite their less than modest status, options, and future, and despite a variety of attitudes on the part of individuals, they are seldom demoralized and dwell only fleetingly on the vicissitudes of their situation. Their faith in life, their articulation of liberty, and their pursuit of happiness, or at any rate, a good time, is relentless, spirited, and essentially optimistic. Such orientations are expressed through a fondness for fashionable and, relative to the wearers’ economic wherewithal, expensive clothing; trips to the cinema and restaurants in the West End, preferably with white girls on their arms; and organizing a fete, a dance featuring traditional music provided by a traditional steel band. Much of the time, however, the characters are found with time on their hands. This too is expressive of the quality of life of the immigrants, as opposed to being a documentary record of a given set of actual immigrants’ lives. The amount of time spent “coasting a lime,” the American equivalent to which is “hanging out,” forms a sober contrast to the images of themselves as lovers and fashion models that constitute their conception of successful participation in the society of what they call, with ambivalent affection, “the old Brit’n.” The novel’s episodic structure reflects the lack of structure in the characters’ social existence, a lack underlined by their working the night shift, this being the form of employment they can obtain with any degree of regularity and ease. Even the episodes that occur outside their single rooms and hostels, episodes in such well-known London venues as Piccadilly Circus and Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, show the immigrants to be marginal, detached, and engaged in activities that, though very human, are essentially inconclusive. The manner in which the immigrants abbreviate the names of the West London locales in which they settle—“the Water” for Bayswater, “the Gate” for Notting Hill Gate, “the Grove” for Ladbroke Grove—represents their desire to familiarize themselves with their surroundings. This desire, also expressed in reference to “the Circus” and “the Arch,” the latter referring to Marble Arch, remains at the level of intention. Nothing in The Lonely Londoners indicates that the immigrants will be able to relieve the loneliness or become Londoners in the fully accepted sense of the term. This state of affairs makes all the more noteworthy the spiritedness that the characters bring, naïvely perhaps, to their various adventures, amatory and other. Were it not naïve, that spirit might not be so persistent. The author’s identification and recapitulation of his characters’ energies by means of their patois is an act of loyalty and fond, if slightly ironic, homage that lends them a viability and distinctiveness not otherwise accorded to their presence or to the social status upon which that presence is based.

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The Characters Unlike the conventional novel, The Lonely Londoners has no protagonist. Moses Aleotta, to whom readers are initially introduced, has a certain status, but this derives not from his social position, his special resources, or his extraordinary experiences. It derives instead from the length of time he has been in London. Seniority gives Moses an authority and significance in the eyes of the group that has formed around him. In the eyes of newcomers, Moses is a vital mentor, guide, and informant. Such a view makes Moses increasingly conscious of the human cost of his immigrant status, as revealed in his rather embittered and nostalgic conversation with the younger, fresher Galahad toward the end of the novel. Although none of the characters is immune from the loneliness of the novel’s title, it is Moses who is the most complete embodiment of unsensational, unsentimental isolation. Galahad, on the contrary, makes a much more obvious effort to enter English society in his pursuit of white women. His date with Dolly, however, is not exactly what either partner expects; Galahad is somewhat disappointed by the girl’s grade of culture, while she is unaccustomed to his standard of hospitality. The conflicts that are gently implied in this episode are repeated in various ways throughout the novel. They are most obviously in evidence in the area of sexual relations, but they also exist between West Indian family members, as in the case of Tolroy’s brother and sister-inlaw, and between members of the West Indian community generally, as the pretentious behavior of the impresario Harris demonstrates. These remain conflicts without issue. Dolly appears and disappears. What she is thought to represent remains poorly defined, elusive, unsettling, and symptomatic of being unsettled. Cap, however, seems to be the exception required to prove the rule. His unpredictable and vaguely anarchistic way of life, driven by his opportunistic momentum, represents in extreme form the unorthodoxy of the immigrant presence. Cap’s ways of dealing with money, with women, and with lodgings are fraught with irregularity and improvisation. The fact that he proceeds unscathed by his experience seems to render him invulnerable to the loneliness that informs West Indian lives. Cap’s experience also places him beyond the fringe of society, giving his behavior an egotistical vehemence entirely lacking from the ambitions and adventures of Moses and fellow countrymen. On the contrary, what characterizes the experience of the vast majority of the characters in The Lonely Londoners is its harmlessness. It would be too facile to say that the journey that Tanty makes from the Harrow Road to Great Portland Street, from her restricted domicile to the world of work and white people, is symptomatic in its straightforwardness and potential trauma of the passage from home to England that is a continual source of reflection in the novel. Nevertheless, the singularity of Tanty’s trip is a reminder of West Indian guilelessness, as represented by the author. It is true that the Barbadian nicknamed, on account of the darkness of his complexion, Five Past Twelve, does smoke marijuana at the fete. Another of the novel’s numerous minor characters bets on the football pools, a form of legalized gambling on the results of soccer games. This is the extent of their vices. Unlike other members of immigrant groups, these characters do very little drinking, and

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in only one case is sporting expensive cigarettes part of a character’s style. In this way, and also by the text’s consistent emphasis on the characters’ desire for gainful employment both as an economic matter and as a matter of dignity, the author tactfully but explicitly calls attention to his people’s fitness for full citizenship and counteracts the stereotypes frequently imposed on immigrants, on black people, and on black immigrants. It may be that readers encountering The Lonely Londoners long after it was first published may find themselves impatient with the simplicity of the characters and the general lightheartedness that informs their lives. Part of the function of such strategies of representation, however, is disarming, intended to render an assimilable depiction of the immigrants that neither belittles them nor threatens the host society. Themes and Meanings There is no protagonist in The Lonely Londoners. Although some characters are more engaging than others, are more sharply drawn than others, or are given to more outrageous behavior, none is superior. For the most part, they share very similar backgrounds, and their situations are uniform in all important respects. Their futures also have a sameness. The author is careful to arrange the text so that no character’s stories take precedence over another’s. By this means, the organization of the material in The Lonely Londoners is a facsimile of the fragile community that its characters constitute, a fellowship held together by memories of the past, various experiences of rejection in the present, and some elementary forms of male bonding whereby they attempt to project a future for themselves. The communitarian ethic that underlies the novel’s lack of a protagonist reveals the condition the immigrants share to be essentially a holding operation. They find themselves with no alternative but to live for the day, and they are prepared to live that way with a will. The lack of a protagonist also means the absence of a plot. This absence is not necessarily to be regretted, since The Lonely Londoners is a novel shaped by the spirit of its material rather than by the letter of precedent and the tradition of the English novel. The absence of plot, however, expresses the absence of a particular scheme of action, with the promise of productive activity, instructive encounters, and a specific outcome. None of these possibilities is pertinent to the lives of Samuel Selvon’s characters. The nonexistence of two of conventional fiction’s most fundamental structuring elements is an indication of how a sense of loss permeates The Lonely Londoners. The attachment that the characters have for one another arises out of a need for protection, a need to adhere to representatives of a known world. There is no indication that once the attachment has been formed it can be used in an activist manner, either to redress or at least protest against discriminatory practices, or more modestly to allow the immigrants to be recruited for or join a cricket team, an area of experience in which West Indian expertise has been universally acknowledged, even in England. The reason these options are not available is that it is the ordinariness of his immigrants that the author wants to stress—the fact that they have no particular qualifications or aptitudes

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and possess, as the various references to clothing and Galahad’s first appearance suggest, only what they stand up in. They exist in the cultural nakedness of their mere blackness. Their education offers them no protection, they have no special skills to give them the illusion of indispensability, and they are not sufficiently talented to avail themselves of the spurious assimilation of a career in show business. They are as devoid of religious feeling as they are of criminal tendencies. In view of such lacunae, the characters are deprived of access to the world at large, the world of cultural codes and sublimated energies. As in the case of the novel’s ostensible structural deficiencies, these deprivations and omissions instruct readers as to the author’s inescapable emphasis. The sense that he conveys of his characters is that of their insistent and inescapable physical presence, a presence conveyed by their blackness, by their capacity for laboring work, by the affectation of fashionable wardrobes, and by their unrepressed sexuality. The undeniability of the characters’ maleness, and their understandable incapacity to forgo it, is not introduced solely for prurient reasons. On the contrary, it crystallizes the cultural conflicts that underlie the immigrants’ experience and that have no issue in The Lonely Londoners. The abortive, inconclusive, and anticlimactic pursuit of white women is less a trope of sexuality than, as its provocative potential indicates, a cultural trope. To date a white woman is regarded as an obvious proof of the existence of a color bar and of the immigrant’s ability to cross it. Although recognition of this ability is culturally conditioned and couched in clichés of display and other elements of machismo, nevertheless it articulates a fundamental component of humanity. By emphasizing the human needs and aspirations of his characters, Selvon reinstalls what society at large has tended to deface. Critical Context Conditions in England in the immediate postwar period were conducive to substantial immigration from the colonies. The amount of rebuilding that needed to be carried out, the shortage of workers caused by the war, and various other complicated demographic and social factors led to the tapping of a large pool of black labor from the West Indies. Neither party to this arrangement was quite prepared for the effects that it would have. In particular, English society, proverbially private, insular, and elaborately stratified, was ill-equipped at both the structural and cultural levels to consider the new workers as equal partners in the rehabilitation of the social fabric. Inevitably, the immigrants found themselves in a variety of economic, social, and cultural ghettos. These were all the more palpable since they did not have an explicit geographical equivalent. Although it is true that the Brixton section of South London became synonymous with West Indian immigrant families, The Lonely Londoners is a telling account of the first wave of immigrants, which consisted largely of single men. The single rooms in which they lived were to a considerable extent confined to the area of West London delimited in the novel. This area did not, however, constitute a ghetto in the sociological sense, with the result that there was continual problematic interaction between white and black residents. These conditions culminated in the

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first serious postwar English race riot, at Notting Hill in 1956. This context conditions the sense of conflict, alienation, foreignness, and taboo that forms the understated subtext of The Lonely Londoners and that gives a particularly complex set of connotations to the ordinary humanity of the term “lonely.” Public recognition of this immigrant influx, in cultural terms, did not occur immediately. Because of this lack, authors such as Samuel Selvon performed an invaluable service both to their countrymen and to their hosts by considering immigrants’ conditions and experiences as subjects appropriate for literature. Despite the popular success of novels by white authors dealing with the immigrant situation such as Colin MacInnes’s City of Spades (1957), were it not for Selvon’s novels The Lonely Londoners and The Housing Lark (1965), and his collection of stories Ways of Sunlight (1957), the vivid lives and hard times of the first West Indian immigrants to England might not have been given their due, and one of the migrations symptomatic of postwar relations between the developed and developing worlds might well have had its human component go unrecorded. Bibliography Dawson, Ashley. Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Includes a chapter on the interrelationship of migration, gender, and identity in The Lonely Londoners. Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Using contemporary literary and cultural theory, this work examines the destiny of Caribbean literature in the light of the modernist movement and postcolonial political reality. Selvon’s sense of displacement as a central element of West Indian experience is evaluated. Ramchand, Kenneth. “Sam Selvon Talking.” Canadian Literature 95 (Winter, 1982): 56-64. An informative overview of the author’s career and artistic outlook, containing much that is relevant to establishing a context for The Lonely Londoners. _______. “Song of Innocence, Song of Experience: Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners as a Literary Work.” World Literature Written in English 21 (Autumn, 1982): 644-654. An article that details the artistic elements of The Lonely Londoners and sees it in the context of Selvon’s other fiction. _______. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. 2d ed. London: Heinemann, 1983. Provides an introduction to the world of West Indian fiction, with particular emphasis on its socioeconomic and linguistic aspects, the latter crucial to any study of Selvon. Contains an extensive bibliography. Ramjaj, Victor. “Selvon’s Londoners: From the Centre to the Periphery.” In Language and Literature in Multicultural Context, edited by Satendra Nandan. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, 1983. Establishes a cultural context in which Selvon’s literature of immigration can be appreciated. Includes material on The Lonely Londoners. George O’Brien

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THE LONG DREAM Author: Richard Wright (1908-1960) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Naturalism Time of plot: 1940’s-1950’s Locale: Clintonville, Mississippi First published: 1958 Principal characters: Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker, the son of a prominent black Clintonville undertaker Tyree Tucker, Fishbelly’s father, a leader in the black community Emma Tucker, Fishbelly’s mother, the long-suffering wife of Tyree Tucker Tony Jenkins, Zeke Jordan, and Sam Davis, three friends of Fishbelly Gloria Mason, Tyree Tucker’s light-skinned mistress Gerald Cantley, the sheriff of Clintonville and head of a criminal syndicate Harvey McWilliams, the town’s white liberal lawyer and sworn enemy of Gerald Cantley The Novel The Long Dream is a combination of naturalistic writing and the bildungsroman, or novel of initiation, concerned with the childhood and adolescence of Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker. Fishbelly is born into a life of comparative privilege and respectability but soon discovers that his father’s cooperation with the white authorities cannot protect him from the realities of the Jim Crow, or segregated, South. In a series of dramatic and psychologically revealing episodes, Wright illustrates, through Tyree Tucker and Fishbelly, his thesis that the life of a black man is “a long dream.” The novel begins with a number of experiences from Fishbelly’s childhood, the most memorable of which is the lynching of his older friend and sometime mentor Chris Sims. Chris commits the crime of being caught in a hotel room with a white girl. After he is discovered, killed, and mutilated by a white mob, his body is taken to Tyree’s funeral home for burial. In a moment of revelation for the young Fishbelly, his father takes him to the funeral home to display to him the badly beaten face of Chris Sims, as a warning and a demonstration of the power the white world has over the black. Fishbelly grows up to be a respected member of the middle-class black community of Clintonville. After a brief encounter with the police while trespassing on a white

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property owner’s land, Fishbelly manages to avoid any contact with the white world until his sixteenth year. In that year, two things happen: Fishbelly drops out of school, and he later becomes enamored of the near-white girl Gladys, emulating the behavior of his father, whose light-skinned mistress Gloria Mason is the envy of the Black Belt of Clintonville. All of this comes to an abrupt end, however, when the Grove, the bar at which Gladys works, burns during a Fourth of July celebration, resulting in more than forty deaths. When it is revealed that Tyree is a co-owner of the bar, which was in violation of several fire codes, the truce arranged between Tyree and the whites comes to an end. The remainder of the novel is an object lesson for the embryonic Civil Rights movement. Tyree, though an extortionist and a pimp, maintains some dignity by demanding from Sheriff Gerald Cantley and the whites in authority that they either live up to their business commitments or provide him with a black jury at an upcoming trial. Cantley predictably denies Tyree’s request, at which point Tyree decides that he should seek a more socially responsible form of justice. He contacts the town’s liberal white lawyer, Harvey McWilliams, and gives him the evidence necessary to convict Cantley. Things fall apart, however, when the evidence is stolen from McWilliams and when Tyree is murdered by Cantley and his operatives. Fishbelly, heir to the Tucker fortune, is now in a position either to take up his father’s role as ally of the white power structure or to break free to experience a new mode of life. He first pursues the former, only to find that Cantley intends to treat him in the same manner as he treated his father. Fishbelly is subsequently set up in a false charge of sexual assault against a white woman. Cantley keeps Fishbelly in jail for more than a year, hoping to convince Fishbelly to relinquish any evidence that he may have against the sheriff, before McWilliams is able to get him free. Upon his release, Fishbelly decides to leave Mississippi for Paris. When he arrives in France, he writes to McWilliams and reveals to him the location of the missing evidence concerning Cantley. The Characters Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker is a character whose personality is developed according to the rules both of naturalism and of psychoanalysis. His early life is revealed through a series of episodes that focus on significant moments of what Sigmund Freud called “infantile experience”; these episodes are then shown as having significant effects on his later life. In one example, Fishbelly finds a discarded condom in a vacant lot, and he and his friends naturally turn it into a plaything. They are then told by an older neighbor, Chris Sims, that the thing is dirty and that they should not be seen with it. The boys are shocked to hear from Chris the purpose of the thing and to find out where it had been. This experience has a significant effect on the development of sexual attitudes in each of the young men. When Chris is later lynched for having been found in a hotel room with a white woman, Fishbelly’s attraction to and repulsion from sexual behavior become even more pronounced. Tyree Tucker, Fishbelly’s father, also contributes to young Fishbelly’s anxiety.

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Tyree is perhaps the most complex character in the novel; he reveals depth of character unexpected in a seemingly conformist resident of Clintonville’s Black Belt. Tyree leads a double life. By day, he is the most respected black undertaker in town; at night he oversees a variety of operations, from slum housing to brothels to juke joints. Wright portrays his character objectively in the first half of the novel but makes Tyree more sympathetic as he comes into conflict with his white “business” partners. Tyree finally decides that he must side with the progressive elements of society and demands a black jury when he is brought up on charges of violating the town’s fire codes. He also shows great bravery when facing the entire power structure of the town by threatening to expose the corrupt business practices of the white establishment. The minor characters in the novel all help to fill in the panorama of small-town Mississippi life. Tony Jenkins, Zeke Jordan, and Sam Davis, Fishbelly’s running mates, experience much of the same psychological confusion. They each seek a separate escape or compensation for their problems, ranging from alcohol to promiscuous and possibly dangerous sexual behavior. Gloria Mason, Tyree’s mistress, who is light-skinned enough to pass for white, serves as an emblem of the fascination that white society holds for the Tucker family. Tyree comes as close to breaking the sexual taboo as he can, but he does not dare to declare war on southern customs, benefiting as he does from their preservation. The two main white characters in the book, Sheriff Gerald Cantley and attorney Harvey McWilliams, represent respectively the forces of reaction and progress in the white community. Cantley extorts half of the profits from Tyree Tucker’s illegal operations and provides “protection” for Tyree as long as Tyree plays according to the rules of segregated society. He is the stereotypical southern sheriff who is interested not in justice but only in preserving the status quo. McWilliams is likewise a common figure in southern fiction from William Faulkner on. The most developed form of this figure can be seen in the character of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). More militant than Finch, McWilliams vows to keep up the fight until he exposes the corruption in the town. Themes and Meanings Richard Wright, in his famous essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” described the psychological as well as the physical restrictions of growing up in the segregated South. The Long Dream is a fictionalized version of that essay. Wright uses the combined techniques of naturalism and psychoanalytic theory to develop the insights sketched in the essay. Although placed in a classic naturalistic environment in which the pressure of society threatens to destroy him, Fishbelly Tucker manages to escape, as a result of his traits of psychological resilience, developed during his Jim Crow upbringing. Fishbelly’s psychological development is illustrated through a series of dreams that fit Sigmund Freud’s theories introduced in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud explains that dreams are composed of two elements, “infantile experience” and “the day’s residues.” Fishbelly’s dreams, particularly those that occur in the early

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chapters, are syntheses of traumatic experiences and foreshadow concerns that will be important in the plot. Fishbelly’s “locomotive” dream at the end of chapter 3 is a combination of his statement to his father, whose sexual encounter he interrupted, that he sounded like a locomotive, and of Fishbelly’s own awakening sexuality. It is also a foreshadowing of Fishbelly’s mode of escape from Mississippi: The train takes him to Memphis, from which he leaves the United States for Paris. Likewise, the locomotive again appears in his dream after his older friend Chris Sims is lynched for being caught in a hotel room with a white girl. This time, however, Fishbelly does not remember any of the details of the nightmare; “instinct” told him that “he had to learn how to live with these images of horror.” Linked to the psychological analysis of the dream is the sociological analysis, for which Wright is justly celebrated. The life of the African American male is a long dream, as stated in one passage, a never-ending struggle of learning how to deal with the horrors of segregation, prejudice, and oppression. This second part of the dream is the concern of the majority of the novel, which traces the effects of that oppression through all levels of Black Belt society. Fishbelly encounters the entire range of responses to be found in the Black Belt, which, to paraphrase the narrator, range from alcohol to religion to sex. He and his friends run the entire range of these experiences during their adolescence: one friend, Zeke Jordan, tricks young women into sexual encounters by saying that he is sterile or by using condoms that he intentionally damages; another, Sam Davis, finds a substitute religion by repeating the Black Nationalist rhetoric of his father, a tenant in one of Tyree Tucker’s slum buildings. These scenes contribute to the tension that builds until the truce between black and white arranged by Tyree Tucker is broken. The last section of the novel, “The Waking Dream,” concerns Fishbelly and his escape from the Clintonville society that claimed his father’s life. Much like Wright himself, Fishbelly realizes that he has no future in the segregated South. As he wakes from a dream, he sees that his only hope for survival is to leave the United States altogether. He spends more than a year in nightmarish circumstances in the Clintonville jail, charged with sexual assault against a woman who does not appear at any of the hearings. After his release, he immediately leaves for Paris to join his friends. He does not, however, completely abandon the dream for those who remain behind in Mississippi. He writes to his attorney and reveals to him the location of documents that implicate the white power structure in corruption. Although his decision to leave Clintonville can be viewed as an escape, it is also Fishbelly’s only means of keeping the dream alive. Critical Context First published in 1958, The Long Dream was a financial failure for Wright, though the reviews of the novel were mixed. Wright was criticized both for being out of touch with black life in the United States after his eleven years of exile in Paris and for underestimating the quality of resistance found in black communities throughout the United States, particularly those in the South. Despite positive reviews of the

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novel from The Nation and Time magazines, an aura of failure surrounded the novel and Wright late in his career. An unsuccessful stage adaptation of the novel added to that aura. The renewal of interest in Wright’s work in the 1980’s led to a reexamination of Wright’s novels of exile, of which The Long Dream is the most important. Interest in Wright as a southern writer brought about a reappraisal of the work as a commentary on his Mississippi childhood. The novel follows closely much of Wright’s early naturalistic writing, especially Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of works set in Mississippi that includes the short story “Bright and Morning Star” and the essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” In these stories, Wright includes a range of southern African Americans who resist the ideology of segregation and who are either ground down by the system, like Tyree Tucker, or who manage to escape, like Fishbelly and Big Boy of the story “Big Boy Leaves Home.” The novel is perhaps most important as a continuation of the themes presented in Wright’s autobiographical work Black Boy (1945). Although the second volume of Wright’s autobiography, American Hunger, was suppressed until 1977, Black Boy enjoyed a wide readership and influence. In it Wright graphically depicts the initiation of a young boy into the nightmare world of segregation and racial violence. In The Long Dream, Wright gives readers both the sketch of the dream and its interpretation. Bibliography Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated by Isabel Barzun. New York: William Morrow, 1973. A thoroughly researched biography of Wright by a French scholar. Unlike many of the early reviewers of The Long Dream, Fabre admires the book for the strength of its narrative, comparing it favorably to Native Son. Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Twayne, 1980. An introduction to the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of Richard Wright. Felgar considers The Long Dream to be primarily a derivative work, repeating but not improving upon material introduced early in Wright’s career. Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980. An analysis of Wright’s career as a writer and his troubled relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, using many released government documents as source material. Gayle associates Wright with Tyree Tucker and not with Fishbelly, as many other critics have. JanMohamed, Abdul R. The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Analyzes the relationship between fatherhood and death in The Long Dream. Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. An early but extremely thorough analysis of Wright’s work. There is an extended essay on The Long Dream, despite the author’s feeling that the book is a disappointment.

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Moore, Jack B. “The View from the Broom Closet of the Regency Hyatt: Richard Wright as a Southern Writer.” In Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930’s, edited by Ralph F. Bogardus and Fred Hobson. University: University of Alabama Press, 1982. Concentrates on Wright’s southern background and on his adaptation of the conventions of naturalism to southern writing. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner Books, 1988. A combination of memoir and literary analysis by the well-known African American author, a close friend of Wright. Special emphasis is given to Wright’s early years in Chicago, where the two met. Walker considers The Long Dream to be a failure but concludes her book with a quote from the novel. Jeff Cupp

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A LONG WAY GONE Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Author: Ishmael Beah (1980Type of work: Memoir Time of work: 1992-1998 Locale: Sierra Leone First published: 2007

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Principal personages: Ishmael Beah, an adolescent soldier in Sierra Leone, Africa Junior, Ishmael’s older brother Esther, a nurse in a rehabilitation center Form and Content A Long Way Gone records the harrowing experiences of Ishmael Beah as he journeys with his brother and friends through his homeland of Sierra Leone during the civil war that took place in that African nation from 1991 through 2002. Beah becomes an unwilling boy soldier in that conflict after being separated from his parents and hometown of Mogbwemo in southern Sierra Leone. The author’s journey begins innocently enough. Twelve-year-old Beah, his older brother Junior, and a friend leave Mogbwemo on foot and head for Mattru Jong, sixteen miles away, to participate in a talent show. The boys intend to perform rap music in the show, and they embark on their journey wearing baggy pants and carrying backpacks filled with notebooks of rap lyrics and rap cassettes. This innocent journey, however, commences against the backdrop of a violent civil war that has already exploded in Sierra Leone. President Joseph Saidu Momoh has been ousted in a military coup, and his replacement, the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), is, according to Beah, corrupt. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) has been sacking villages in an attempt to create chaos and prove that the NPRC is ineffective. On their journey to Mattru Jong, Beah and his party see refugees on the road, leaving villages attacked by the RUF and telling stories of harrowing violence and human suffering. While Beah and his brother and friend are in Mattru Jong, they learn that rebels have attacked Mogbwemo. They realize that it is unsafe to return home and that they are likely to be separated from their families for a long time. When rebels move toward Mattru Jong, the boys flee and begin wandering toward the seacoast in search of some safe haven, but they encounter instead the brutal violence and gruesome debris of civil war—ransacked villages, an imam burned alive, a traveling companion shot and killed. Exposed to such violence, Beah begins to experience nightmares, headaches, and other symptoms of psychological stress. He wonders whether his journey

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will ever end and whether he will ever be reunited with his parents. While Beah is in the village of Kamator, he becomes separated from Junior during a rebel attack. Ishmael never sees his brother again. After departing Kamator, Beah journeys along the southern coast of Sierra Leone and settles for a time in Yele, which appears to be relatively safe. One day, government soldiers arrive in town. Their commander warns Yele’s residents of impending RUF attacks and displays the bodies of villagers brutally killed by rebels. At that point, Ishmael, age thirteen, is conscripted into the NRPC army, given an AK-47 attack rifle, and trained to kill rebels. In his first skirmish, Beah kills several rebels, including a boy wearing a Tupac Shakur T-shirt. During his time as a boy soldier, Beah loses his childhood and his humanity. Numbed by the use of cocaine and other narcotics, he becomes a killing machine, and he ceases to see the choices he makes in moral terms. At one point, Beah and three other boy soldiers are ordered to execute captured rebels by slitting the men’s throats with bayonets. The boy whose prisoner dies first will be awarded a promotion in rank. Feeling nothing for his captive, Beah coolly slits the man’s throat and watches him bleed to death. He wins the promotion. Beah remains a soldier through age fifteen. In January, 1996, he is removed from the army by a UNICEF representative and sent to a rehabilitation center, where he is given schooling and treatment to prepare him for a return to normal life. His adjustment to a life without violence and drugs is difficult. The boy soldiers at the rehabilitation center are addicted to both drugs and violence, and they are often violent and unruly. They experience nightmares and exhibit paranoia. Eventually, a nurse named Esther befriends Beah and coaxes him to discuss his traumatic experiences as well as his prewar life. Her gentleness and her interest in Beah’s music form the basis of a relationship of mutual trust and respect. Beah learns that he possesses the resiliency to outlive his past and commence a new, normal life. Beah’s stay at the rehabilitation center ends when his uncle adopts him and brings him to Freetown. There, he hears of an opportunity to go to New York and speak at the United Nations on the issue of child soldiers. He does so; shortly after Beah returns to Sierra Leone, his uncle dies, and the nation’s government is overthrown. To avoid the resulting violence, Beah flees from Sierra Leone and travels to Guinea. In 1998, at age eighteen, he emigrates to New York to continue his education. Analysis Like many stories of initiation, both fictional and nonfictional, Beah’s narrative is built around a journey. Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Beah leaves home as an adolescent and experiences the world at its worst. Like Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Beah journeys into the jungles of Africa and encounters an uncivilized world filled with unspeakable human horrors. Unlike Marlow, however, Beah is unable to distance himself from the violence and merely report what he sees; he becomes an active participant in the horrific civil war that tore through Sierra Leone during the 1990’s.

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Beah’s initiation is gradual. At home in Mogbwemo, Beah lives the life of a typical African adolescent. He attends school and fantasizes with friends about becoming a rap musician. Beah is gradually exposed to and ultimately lured into the violent civil war engulfing his homeland. First, he hears stories of violence from refugees fleeing attacked villages. After he commences his journey from home, he sees the bodies of murder victims in an automobile. Then, he encounters a man who has had his fingers removed and “RUF” carved into his chest with a hot bayonet. Later, the violence hits closer, as two of his traveling companions are killed by gunfire. Eventually, Beah is conscripted into the army and begins to commit the kind of acts that fuel the civil war. When Beah loses his conscience, feeling no remorse for his own violent actions, his initiation is complete. His journey has taken him outside of human civilization; he has become part of the horror. Beah’s narrative has much in common with other captivity narratives, such as slave narratives and Holocaust narratives. In such narratives, unspeakable horrors are reported in graphic detail by the narrator. The narrator often loses his or her sense of identity. The slave becomes a beast of burden; the concentration camp inmate becomes a number. But through perseverance and good fortune, the narrator somehow survives; he or she is liberated or escapes from captivity and becomes human again. The telling of one’s story of captivity and the writing of the narrative are key elements of the redemptive process. When Beah addresses the United Nations on the issue of child soldiers, and when he publishes his story in book form, he signals an understanding of his ordeal and a willingness to rejoin the human community as a functioning human being. Critical Context In its postcolonial era, Africa has been besieged by civil wars and political and social unrest. African writers such as Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Chinua Achebe, and J. M. Coetzee have chronicled the political upheavals that have scarred their continent. Beah adds his voice to this chorus, and his narrative shines light upon a new atrocity in African civil wars: the use of children as soldiers. Reviewers have compared Beah’s book to David Eggers’s What Is the What (2006), a novel about one of the “lost boys” of Sudan. Beah’s book is an African story, and he is an American only by migration. Nonetheless, A Long Way Gone can be read in the context of other African American autobiographies, particularly slave narratives. Just as antebellum slaves crossed the MasonDixon Line or the Ohio River to escape slavery and find freedom in the North, Beah crosses the Atlantic Ocean to escape the violence and chaos of his war-torn homeland. Like Richard Wright in Black Boy, Beah leaves oppressive native grounds to find freedom and his writer’s voice in a new land. Bibliography Abbas, Fatin. “The New Face of War.” The Nation 284 (May 28, 2007): 38-44. Review essay discussing Beah’s A Long Way Gone, P. W. Singer’s Children at

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War, and Jimmie Briggs’s Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War. Beah, Ishmael. “Interview with Ishmael Beah.” Kennedy School Review 7 (2007): 1-5. Beah discusses his book, his life since leaving Sierra Leone, and his efforts to enact international laws against the use of child soldiers. Luscombe, Belinda. “Pop Culture Finds Lost Boys.” Time 169 (February 12, 2007): 62-64. Predicts rock-star status for Ishmael Beah based on his book, his engaging personality, and his eloquence as a public speaker. Mengestu, Dinaw. “Children of War.” New Statesman 136 (June 18, 2007): 60-61. Discusses A Long Way Gone and two other books about boy soldiers—David Eggers’s What Is the What and Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy (2007). Pham, John-Peter. The Sierra Leonean Tragedy: History and Global Dimensions. New York: Nova Science, 2006. Comprehensive history of the 1990’s civil war in Sierra Leone. James Tackach

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LOST IN THE CITY Author: Edward P. Jones (1950) Type of work: Short stories Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: 1950’s-1980’s Locale: African American communities in Washington, D.C. First published: 1992 Principal characters: Betsy Ann Morgan, a young girl who keeps pigeons Cassandra G. Lewis, a high school student Woodrow L. Cunningham, a man whose daughter disappears from home Caesar Matthews, a young hoodlum Penelope Jenkins, a grocery store owner who accidentally kills a young girl Marvella Watkins, a single mother who is attracted to a young man with dreadlocks Marie Delaveaux, an elderly woman frustrated with the Social Security bureaucracy Lydia Walsh, a young woman whose mother has just died Joyce Moses, a woman who must cope with her son’s drug dealing Madeleine Williams, a woman whose father killed her mother when she was four Vivian L. Slater, a woman whose husband is dying of cancer The Stories The fourteen stories in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City are patterned loosely after James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). They concern people of various ages who face the challenges of growing up, surviving, and succeeding in African American neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. The collection begins with two young girls dealing with death. In the first story, a girl whose mother died in childbirth wants to raise pigeons on the roof. Although her father tries to protect her from knowledge of death by checking on the pigeons each morning before she gets up to see if any have died, one morning he finds many of them have been killed by rats, and he must wring the necks of the wounded ones. The second story, “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” focuses on Cassandra Lewis, a high school girl whom boys call “the tank” because she is so large. The title character, a friend of Cassandra, is supposed to sign a contract with a record company on the day the story takes place, but she is shot by the father of her baby.

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Some of Jones’s stories are brief, lyrical pieces in which characters face loneliness and loss. For example, in “Lost in the City,” Lydia Walsh, while at a hotel with a man, receives a call that her mother has died in the hospital. She snorts a line of cocaine and calls a cab, telling the driver to get her lost in the city so she can postpone accepting her mother’s death. In “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” a young, single mother with three children meets a man with dreadlocks on the train who is kind to her. In her loneliness, she is attracted to him, but after a time she no longer sees him. “A Butterfly on F Street” deals with a chance encounter in which Mildred Harper runs into the woman for whom her husband left her after twenty-seven years of marriage. The result is a shared sense of loss. In “Gospel,” a woman whose husband is dying of cancer is disillusioned when she sees her best friend kissing another man. Parents facing conflicts with their children are the focus of two stories. In “His Mother’s House,” Santiago Moses, a drug dealer, buys his mother, Joyce Moses, a house. When one of Santiago’s childhood friends owes him money, Santiago kills him. After Joyce slaps Santiago, he points a gun at her head, but later that night, she unlocks all the windows in her house so Santiago can get in. In “A New Man,” Woodrow L. Cunningham comes home one day and finds his fifteen-year-old daughter with two boys. After he chases the boys off and threatens to punish his daughter, she runs away and gets “lost in the city.” He spends the rest of the story unsuccessfully searching for her. Characters Strength of character in the face of disappointment and disillusionment is the motivating force of Jones’s stories. Typical of Jones’s proud and capable characters is the young mother in “The First Day,” a brief, lyrical piece about a woman taking her daughter to her first day of school. The story is told in the first person by the child, who is learning things about her mother. For example, she finds that the higher up on the scale of respectability someone is, the less her mother will let them push her around. Contrast in character is the focus of two stories: In “Young Lions,” the thug Caesar Matthews seems to have no redeeming qualities. In “The Store,” the twenty-year-old nameless narrator becomes an independent man by befriending his boss and taking over for her when she has a tragic accident. The strongest character in Jones’s collection is the eighty-six-year-old Marie Delaveaux, living alone on Social Security. When she is condescended to and ignored by a young employee at the Social Security office, she slaps the girl. Two weeks later, a young university student interviews Marie for an oral history project. When he sends her copies of the tapes, she plays them once then puts them away, saying she will never listen to them again, even though they recount a history of hardship and courage. Themes and Meanings The central themes of Jones’s stories are dependent on the trials, challenges, and triumphs of his characters. When Lost in the City was first published, many critics no-

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ticed immediately that, although all the characters were African American, the stories did not focus directly on racial prejudice or adversity resulting directly from white oppression. In fact, there are very few references to color in any of the stories. Instead of being about characters suffering as a result of their race, the stories are about characters who just happen to be black, facing the problems of living with very little money in small neighborhoods in a large American city. This does not mean that the situations the characters confront have nothing to do with their color. It does mean, however, that Jones writes stories that are not narrowly limited to issues of race. If there is a central theme, it comes from a warning that an old man tells his five-year-old grandson: “Don’t get lost in the city.” This is repeated in a variation in another story, when a father warns, “Never get lost in white folks’ neighborhood,” and echoed when the young woman in the title story tells a cab driver to get her “lost in the city.” Finding one’s way in the city by identifying with one’s neighborhood is the driving force of many of Jones’s stories. Critical Context Convinced that most readers had only a narrow idea of what Washington, D.C., was like, because they were familiar with it only through novels that dealt with downtown power and politics, Jones wanted to create a collection of stories that focused on ordinary people in various African American D.C. neighborhoods, as James Joyce’s Dubliners had focused on denizens of the Irish capital. Lost in the City, published in 1992, was short-listed for the National Book Award and won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Jones has said that after publishing Lost in the City, he spent the next ten years thinking about a story of black ex-slaves who became slaveholders themselves. The result was The Known World, his first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and the Lannan Literary Award. The following year, Jones was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius award.” All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a second collection of short stories, several of which featured characters introduced in Lost in the City, was published in 2006 and was short-listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Widely praised by reviewers and critics, Jones represents a new wave of African American writers who write about individuals rather than about race and about the personal rather than the political. Bibliography Jones, Edward P. “An Interview with Edward P. Jones.” Interview by Lawrence P. Jackson. African American Review 34, no. 1 (Spring, 2000): 95-104. Jones talks about the writers who influenced and taught him, the development of the stories in Lost in the City, and his creation of the cultural world of African American neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Kennedy, J. Gerald, and Robert Beuka. “Imperiled Communities in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City and Dagoberto Gilb’s The Magic of Blood.” The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 10-23. Argues that Lost in the City constructs from

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disparate stories a unified narrative about the loneliness and isolation of the African American community. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Dignity Survives amid Grimness of an Inner City.” Review of Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones. The New York Times, June 11, 1992, section C, p. 18. In this influential appreciative review, Lehmann-Haupt says that Jones consistently dignifies his characters, presenting as proud and without self-pity people who are down and out, but who lead rich and varied lives. Mason, Myatt. “Ballad for Americans.” Harper’s Magazine 313, no. 1876 (September, 2006): 87-92. Compares Jones’s stories to those of James Joyce because of their meticulous style, but argues that whereas Joyce is unforgiving of his characters’ limitations, Jones demands readers’ compassion. Yardley, Jonathan. “On the Streets Where We Live.” The Washington Post, June 21, 1992, p. X3. Argues that although Jones writes about African Americans, it is more accurate to say that he writes about people who merely happen to be African American. Charles E. May

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LOVE Author: Toni Morrison (1931) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism; social criticism Time of plot: 1930’s-1990’s Locale: The fictional town of Silk, on the East Coast of the United States First published: 2003 Principal characters: Bill Cosey, a charismatic African American entrepreneur who ran a successful beach resort on Sooker Bay during the 1940’s and 1950’s, died in 1971, and continues to influence his widow and granddaughter Heed the Night Cosey, Bill’s bride, who swaps the poverty of her childhood for a different class of life at the resort, although her illiteracy makes her defensive Christine Cosey, Bill’s granddaughter, who was best friends with Heed until the latter married Bill Junior Viviane, a gorgeous, sassy delinquent who talks her way into Heed’s employment and lives with the elderly women, Heed and Christine L, a ghost who narrates several sections of the novel, was a cook at the Cosey resort, and holds the key to several mysteries Sandler Gibbons, an astute, working-class man who knew Bill and whose grandson Romen does odd jobs and gardening for Heed The Novel Love is a carefully structured novel with a prologue and nine chapters devoted to the characters’ stories and their different, often contradictory, perceptions of Bill Cosey. Together, these chapters span a sixty-year period and represent the way racial segregation and the process of desegregation shape the lives of the Cosey family. To the local African American community, Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, catering exclusively to African Americans with its procession of famous jazz musicians and wealthy guests, offered a fairytale image of success during the Jim Crow period. While Bill himself was a role model of African American achievement to his guests and the locals, the different chapters in the novel suggest the tensions, bitter resentments, and misunderstandings brewing in Bill’s immediate family, and they question Bill’s roles as a husband, father, grandfather, friend, and benefactor. Alhough he died over twenty years earlier, Bill’s influence upon Christine and Heed is still palpable in the 1990’s. They may have loved each other as children, but

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now they are enemies. Bill’s will, a note scribbled on a menu from 1958, is not specific enough; it leaves everything to that “sweet Cosey child,” and both Cosey women have a claim to that title: Christine is Bill’s granddaughter, while Heed was his child bride and called him “Papa.” Heed employs Junior to find a later will, and Christine visits a lawyer after pilfering the housekeeping money. The two women live at war in their Monarch Street house, while Junior establishes a sexual relationship with Romen, who is fourteen. Behind the novel’s tight focus on the personal history of the Cosey family lies the public history of U.S. segregation and the movement toward desegregation. Working under the Jim Crow laws that separated African Americans and white people in public places such as schools, trains and buses, theaters, and resorts, Bill necessarily made some concessions to the white power structure to keep his establishment open and thriving. His friendship with the local sheriff, Chief Buddy Silk, resulted in morally dubious deep-sea fishing excursions and eventually in the sheriff developing and naming a town after himself. The novel incorporates historical events of the 1950’s and 1960’s, including the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) outlawing segregation in public schools, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, sit-ins, the murder of fourteen-year-old African American Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the Freedom Riders who fought the segregation of buses in the South. These events shake the security of the Cosey family, as white people in the South react violently to the quest for African American equality. After race riots and the death of a mixed-race couple at the resort, May Cosey, Bill’s daughter-in-law, is terrified that the hotel will be closed and someone will be lynched. Once African Americans achieve legal equality in the 1960’s, the resort begins to allow local African Americans to visit it, as its more wealthy patrons from other regions have acquired a wider variety of potential vacation spots. Heed must pay the sheriff’s son, Boss Silk, more protection money and finally resort to blackmail in order to keep the business afloat, until it finally closes in the 1980’s. The Characters Characters in the present time frame of the novel range in age from the fourteenyear-old Romen; to Junior Viviane, who is in her late teens; to the middle-aged Sandler and Vida Gibbons; to Christine and Heed, who are in their early seventies. There are obvious generational differences among the characters and their environments, but human nature does not change. Some characters have similar backgrounds despite being separated in age. These similarities aid readers’ interpretations, as individual stories mirror one another in part. Heed and Junior share similarly deprived and unloving childhoods, which they react to in the present. Heed and L think of Celestial, Bill’s mistress, when they look at Junior. Bill and Romen have similar attitudes toward what connotes masculinity, but Romen has a sensible grandfather in Sandler to give him advice. Christine, Heed, and Junior all feel unloved and unwanted despite their differences in class and education. Bill and Junior take

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lovers who are very young, with Junior thinking of Romen as a gift or toy. Through various points of view the novel reveals that during the 1940’s and 1950’s, Cosey’s Hotel and Resort was an exciting, exclusive gathering place. Bill was its figurehead, while May, L, and later Heed took on the daily practicalities of running a successful business. Relationships between characters are fraught with tensions that are due to jealousy and misunderstandings, despite or because of the resort’s success. Themes and Meanings Love is ostensibly absent from this novel until its final pages, though its presence is suggested by some characters’ actions. Love masquerades as lust, possession, infatuation, envy, delusion, self-interest, romance, and even hatred. Christine mistakenly believes that her mother sent her away to school at the age of thirteen because Bill wanted her gone. In fact, the predatory sheriff noticed the beautiful girl, and Bill sent her away for her own safety. Heed, meanwhile, concocts a romantic fantasy around her relationship with Bill. Each woman mistakenly believes that by proving herself to be the true beneficiary of Bill’s will, she will prove that he loved her best. In the novel’s denouement, they both recognize that they have always loved each other. Masculine power and sexuality are also themes in Love, in scenes of gang rape, sexual activity on Bill’s fishing boat, and racially motivated rape during the Civil Rights movement. Romen’s initial willingness to participate in a gang rape designed to prove the teenage boys’ masculinity turns to compassion for the victim, as he rescues the victim and is ridiculed by his peers. Something similar happens on the fishing boat trips, as women, and white and African American men play at role reversals, creating a counterfeit world that reinforces masculinity and white power in the real world. Critical Context The critical reception of Love was mixed. Darryl Pinckney in The New York Review of Books admired Toni Morrison’s “effortless” ability to “merge the threads of her story” and her rich but accessible prose, while another reviewer criticized the use of certain metaphors as “garnishes” and found the historical background gratuitous. Laura Miller of The New York Times linked the female friendship in Sula (1973) to that between Heed and Christine, as did others. Miller argued that Morrison writes best about “bad people,” as in Love. Other reviewers admired the mystery plot, snappy dialogue, and use of language generally, although a few found the interwoven stories difficult to follow. Many reviewers noted that Morrison continued to focus on love as paradox, as she had in Beloved (1987), in which maternal love during slavery results in infanticide. Bibliography Morrison, Toni. Remember: The Journey to School Integration. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. In her foreword to this pictorial history covering the years from 1954 through the 1990’s, Morrison refers to “a time in American life where there

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was as much hate as there was love; as much anger as there was hope; as many heroes as cowards.” Pinckney, Darryl. “Hate.” Review of Love, by Toni Morrison. The New York Review of Books 50, no. 19 (December 4, 2003). Outlines the novel’s plot and points to Morrison’s “straightforward” but rich prose, her warring characters, and her evocation of African American history. Roynon, Tessa. “A New ‘Romen’ Empire: Toni Morrison’s Love and the Classics.” Journal of American Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 31-47. Links the representation of rape in literature and history to classical works from Greece and Rome and classic American texts. Argues that the representation of rape in Love reveals and critiques the representation of traditional heroic masculine acts in literature and history as empowering colonization. Rymer, Russ. American Beach: How “Progress” Robbed a Black Town—and Nation—of History, Wealth, and Power. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000. Provides a history of one of the many African American resorts that, like Morrison’s fictional one, flourished prior to integration and collapsed when schools and vacation spots were desegregated. Wardi, Anissa Jane. “A Laying on of Hands: Toni Morrison and the Materiality of Love.” MELUS 30, no. 3 (Fall, 2005): 201-218. Analyzes the abstract concept of love as practical, healing action in the novel, focusing particularly on the materiality of touch, compassion, healing, and nurturing. Christine Ferrari

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LUCY Author: Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter Richardson, 1949Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Late 1960’s Locale: An unnamed city in the United States First published: 1990

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Principal characters: Lucy Josephine Potter, a young woman who has left her home in the West Indies to work as a live-in child-care provider Mariah, Lucy’s employer, an attractive, wealthy white woman Lewis, Mariah’s husband, a wealthy lawyer who falls in love with his wife’s best friend, Dinah Dinah, Mariah’s envious best friend and Lewis’s lover Peggy, Lucy’s best friend, a woman of Irish extraction who lives with her parents and works at the motor vehicle registry Hugh, Dinah’s twenty-two-year-old brother, who has traveled to Africa and Asia; he becomes Lucy’s lover Paul, an artist with whom Lucy has an affair Maude Quick, one of Lucy’s prudish, mean-spirited relatives Timothy Simon, a photographer who aspires to greatness in his field but who photographs food for the cooking sections of magazines in order to make a living Lucy’s mother, who appears only in Lucy’s memories but continues to influence Lucy’s thoughts and behavior The Novel Lucy tells about a year in the life of a nineteen-year-old girl from the Caribbean who has just arrived in the United States. When the novel opens, Lucy is experiencing the shock of adapting to a new culture. Even the weather is deceiving: Although the January sun is shining, Lucy shivers in her thin clothing. She likes her new employers, Mariah and Lewis, and their children, for whom she cares, but she is somewhat homesick. This emotion confuses her because she was so eager to leave her home and begin a new life. Interspersed with the day-to-day happenings of her life are her memories of home, which revolve around her sexual awakening and her love-hate relationship with her mother. Mariah wants Lucy to see the world through her eyes and love the things that she loves. For example, Mariah loves daffodils and tells Lucy all about them. Mariah’s words trigger in Lucy the unhappy memory of being forced to memorize poetry about daffodils at the Queen Victoria School for Girls when she was ten years old. Her anger about daffodils is explained when she finally sees a daffodil and re-

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marks that she had to wait nine years to see a flower that never grew on her island but that she was forced to revere under British rule. Mariah, although well-meaning, often upsets Lucy by her attitude toward life. Lucy cannot understand how Mariah can be always cheerful and always kindhearted but also always blind to the injustices done to people of color. During a train ride planned by Mariah for the sole purpose of providing a new experience for Lucy, Lucy notices that the other passengers all look like Mariah’s relatives and the waiters all look like Lucy’s relatives. Lucy eventually makes friends with Peggy, with whom she has little in common except their thirst for shared experiences. Peggy and Lucy spend their free time together and talk frequently on the telephone. Both dream of living on their own. Mariah disapproves of Peggy because she smokes, uses slang, and generally meets the criteria of “a bad example.” She bars Peggy from the house. Otherwise, she does not interfere because she realizes that Lucy needs a friend of her own age. After about six months, Lucy has become acclimated to American culture and is looking forward to spending the summer at Mariah’s family home near one of the Great Lakes. There Lucy meets Hugh, the brother of Dinah, who is Mariah’s best friend. Lucy and Hugh become lovers, but neither is looking for commitment. They part in September without regrets. All the time Lucy has been in the United States, she has been thinking of her life back on the island. She finally admits that she does not read her mother’s letters because she knows they will only increase the longing she has for her mother and for her former home. Lucy does not talk of her mother to anyone. Peggy introduces Lucy to Paul, an artist. Lucy and Paul immediately become lovers, though Peggy tries to discourage Lucy from this course. Peggy and Lucy begin to discuss sharing an apartment, while Mariah and Lewis begin to argue constantly. Mariah’s eyes are usually red from weeping. Lewis moves out, but not before Lucy has seen him in a passionate embrace with Dinah. Lucy continues to live with Mariah. Maude Quick, one of Lucy’s relatives, arrives with the news of Lucy’s father’s death. Lucy then opens the letter from her mother and learns that her father died a pauper. Lucy sends her mother all the money she has, and Mariah contributes twice Lucy’s share. Only then does Lucy reveal the reason she feels hatred for her mother. Until the age of nine, Lucy was an only child; her parents then had three sons in the space of five years. Both parents dreamed of their sons’ futures, talking about how proud they would be when their sons were graduated from British universities and became important men. Lucy had expected her mother to dream similar dreams for her only daughter, and she was deeply hurt when her mother could only suggest nursing school. Lucy writes one last letter to her mother, giving her a false address. After leaving Mariah’s employ, Lucy moves into an apartment with Peggy and begins working for photographer Timothy Simon in his office. She suspects Peggy and Paul of having an affair, but she really does not care if they are. The novel ends with Lucy’s search for identity unfinished.

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The Characters As the narrator, Lucy reveals her personality through her thoughts, dreams, and memories, as well as through her interactions with other characters in the novel. A sensual young woman, she does not love any of the men with whom she involves herself. That her mother is the only person she has ever loved becomes clear as the novel progresses. Lucy sees herself as identical to her mother and works hard to free herself and to find her own sense of self. Lucy describes and comments on the actions and personalities of the people she meets in the United States. Most suffer from her analysis. For example, although superficially Mariah and Lewis have a perfect marriage, Lucy notices its flaws long before either of the pair notices them. An astute judge of character, Lucy knows that Dinah envies Mariah, that Lewis and Dinah are lovers, and that Lewis is manipulating Mariah so it will seem as though Mariah initiates their divorce. A genuinely caring person, Mariah tries to understand Lucy’s anger and resentment toward her mother and toward British rule of her former home, but her lack of depth makes this an impossible task. The episode in which Mariah attempts to explain to Lucy the beauty of daffodils underscores both Lucy’s anger and Mariah’s lack of understanding. Mariah’s inability to see the world as it is contributes to her downfall. A woman for whom everything has always come easily, she views her life and the lives of the people surrounding her as sunny and cheerful. This view causes her to miss many of the danger signs that appear in her marriage and leaves her extremely vulnerable when her relationship with Lewis falls apart. Mariah’s identity, which is directly connected to being Lewis’s wife, dissolves under pressure, leaving her a broken and unhappy shell of her former self. The men in Lucy’s life seem almost interchangeable. None has a lasting effect on her, perhaps because Lucy’s quest for selfhood does not include finding a husband. Long before leaving her island, Lucy learned that power lies within oneself, that it cannot be transferred from a man to a woman. Her recollections of her father, with his many children born to various women, remind her of the transience of most relationships. She therefore is not shocked at Lewis’s behavior; rather, her shock is reserved for women such as Mariah. Lucy cannot understand why Mariah is hurt and baffled by Lewis’s behavior. Although she appears only in Lucy’s memories, Lucy’s mother continues to play a crucial role in Lucy’s life. In many ways, Lucy’s mother necessitates the search for independence Lucy undertakes. A strong-willed woman who never doubts that she is always right, Lucy’s mother proves to be a formidable obstacle. Lucy has strained against her mother’s rules for as long as she can remember. Lucy’s name demonstrates the conflict between the two. Lucy recalls asking her mother why she chose to name her as she did. Her mother replied that Lucy is a shortened form of Lucifer, adding that Lucy had always been troublesome. Kincaid has remarked that remembering how Lucy received her name is a key to understanding the novel.

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Themes and Meanings Lucy tells her story in a practical, matter-of-fact way, juxtaposing everyday episodes with anecdotes from the past that illuminate the major themes of the novel. Lucy’s alienation from the cultures of the West Indies, Great Britain, and the United States permeates the book. Lucy wishes to block out the past and attempts to do so by not opening the letters she receives from home. So many small details of life in the United States trigger memories of her past that she is unable to free herself completely from it. The major theme in the novel is Lucy’s conflicting feelings about her mother and about her surrogate mother, Mariah. At the end, Lucy tries to break off all communications between these women and herself, but their relationships are clearly unresolved. Lucy’s search for identity is an outgrowth of her alienation and of her conflict with her mother and with Mariah. As Kincaid develops this theme, Lucy rejects every female role model offered to her: her mother, Mariah, Dinah, Peggy, and Maude Quick. One of her greatest fears is that she will become like one of these women, none of whom has chosen a life course that appeals to her. The novel is written in rather short, simple sentences, and its language resembles that of a fairy tale. Such use of language, along with the somewhat abrupt beginnings and endings of chapters, helps convey the overall sense of the novel and provides insight into the central theme of Lucy’s conflict with her mother. The theme of independence occurs in every relationship Lucy has with a man. She does not want to fall in love because that would involve dependency. She has just escaped the possessive love of her mother, and she recoils from any attempt at possession by a man. Even her relationship with Mariah is affected. After Mariah’s marriage disintegrates and Mariah becomes possessive, Lucy moves out. An underlying theme that parallels Lucy’s search for independence is that of the difficulties experienced by former colonies that must learn to govern themselves. The theme of the clash of diverse cultures appears early in the novel, when Lucy recounts a dream. The dream involves Lewis and Mariah, who immediately give it a psychoanalytic reading. Lucy excitedly tells them of the dream only to show them that they have become a part of her life. Knowing nothing of Sigmund Freud’s work on interpreting dreams, Lucy misses the point Lewis and Mariah try to make. They, of course, lack the cultural background to understand the compliment Lucy believes she is paying them. Lucy’s desire to have the same career options as her brothers demonstrates the theme of inequality between the sexes. Even though Lucy is bright and aspires to a profession, all her family can suggest is that she might become a nurse. No one suggests that she could have a university education and become a doctor or a lawyer. Lucy sees unfairness in such a categorization of women’s role in society, and she rebels.

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Critical Context Lucy is the third of Jamaica Kincaid’s books of fiction, following At the Bottom of the River (1983), a collection of short stories, and Annie John (1985), a critically acclaimed novel that was one of three finalists for the 1985 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. At the Bottom of the River won the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters’ Morton Dauwen Zabel Award. Both Annie John and Lucy were published in installments in The New Yorker, but they did not receive critical attention until their publication as books. Kincaid’s style has changed dramatically from that used in At the Bottom of the River, which gave little attention to setting, character development, or chronological sequencing of events. Her two novels provide a much more solid foundation in all three of those areas, making them more easily understood. Both Annie John and Lucy are fictionalized accounts of the author’s own life. Annie John is a coming-of-age novel ending with the title character’s departure from the West Indies. Although not a sequel, Lucy details the life of the title character at the ages of nineteen and twenty. Many of the incidents in it happened to the author during her first few years in the United States. Most critics agree that the author has made a strong contribution to African American literature. The renowned African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has commented on Kincaid’s work: She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it’s a distinct departure that she’s making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way she does. So that we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about.

All three books, along with a much-anthologized short piece entitled “Girl,” written in 1978 and appearing in At the Bottom of the River, have found favor among critics and scholars. In general, Jamaica Kincaid’s novels speak to the common desire to break away from the past and become a new person, one who is strong and independent. The difficulty inherent in such a project is clearly represented in these autobiographical works. Bibliography Braxton, Joanne, and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin, eds. Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Discusses the contributions of African American women writers, identifying Jamaica Kincaid as a leader in the field of contemporary Caribbean writers. Cudjoe, Selwyn R. “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview.” Callaloo 12 (Spring, 1989): 396-411. Cudjoe, the author of Resistance and Carib-

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bean Literature (1980), interviewed Kincaid in 1987. The interview focuses on Kincaid’s background, her earlier work, and her affinity with modernism, which she views as much like her own version of reality. Of particular interest are the comments Kincaid makes about her mother and her mother’s influence on her career. Lang-Peralta, Linda, ed. Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006. This volume of essays establishing critical relationships between Kincaid’s works to those of other writers includes two studies of Lucy, one on the novel and Kincaid’s own My Garden (Book) (2004) and one on the novel and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). McDowell, Deborah. “Reading Family Matters.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. McDowell traces the debate about the role of the African American male in the works of contemporary African American women writers. Mendelsohn, Jane. “Leaving Home: Jamaica Kincaid’s Voyage Round Her Mother.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 89 (October, 1990): 21. This positive review of Lucy notes the influence of Kincaid’s West Indian upbringing on her novels. Discusses the changes Kincaid’s writing has undergone since the 1970’s. Also gives a brief overview of her life and compares important incidents with their fictionalized counterparts. Contends that although Lucy was probably meant to stand alone, it will undoubtedly be read as a sequel to Annie John. Vorda, Allan. “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” Mississippi Review 20 (1991): 7-26. Kincaid discusses her childhood in Antigua, her relationship with her mother, and her writing career. Focusing on Lucy, she remarks on the autobiographical elements of the work. She explains that Lucy would always identify with the oppressed, rather than the oppressor. Wall, Cheryl. Introduction to Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Provides a helpful overview of the reception the work of contemporary African American women writers has received. Commenting on the rising interest of both the general public and literary scholars, Wall pays particular attention to writing of the 1970’s and later periods. Cheri Louise Ross

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M. C. HIGGINS, THE GREAT Author: Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: 1970’s Locale: Cumberland Mountains, near Harenton, Ohio First published: 1974 Principal characters: Mayo Cornelius (M. C.) Higgins, a black teenager Banina Higgins, M. C.’s mother, a beautiful and talented woman Jones Higgins, M. C.’s father, a day laborer Ben Killburn, M. C.’s best friend The Novel In M. C. Higgins, the Great, the title character, a tall, athletic, thoughtful black teenager who lives in the Cumberland Mountains, must come to terms with conflicting allegiances, to his father and the traditions of his family, on one hand, and to his mother and the younger children in the family, on the other. Faced with a threat to the family that is beyond his control, M. C. learns that being an adult means doing one’s limited best in an imperfect world. Although M. C. Higgins, the Great moves chronologically, the author also moves backward and forward in time by tracing the thoughts of her characters. Thus the first chapter introduces the protagonist, M. C. Higgins, who has wakened to watch the sun rise over the mountains where he lives. There is great joy in his communion with nature; there is great pleasure in anticipating the future, when, according to his father, M. C. will own Sarah’s Mountain, where the family has lived for generations, where they have died and been laid to rest. As he looks around him, M. C. feels the same sense of attachment to the past that impels his father, Jones Higgins, to insist on remaining where his roots are. Yet, unlike his father, M. C. can face the possibility of a different life, far away from Sarah’s Mountain. M. C. cannot help wondering what the outside world is like. More immediately, he is afraid that the unstable spoil heap located higher on their mountain, which was left by irresponsible strip miners, will slide down and bury the Higgins home, perhaps killing the family in the process. The first chapter of the book takes M. C. through what begins as a typical day. He checks the traps that he sets for rabbits, game for the family table. He seeks out his best friend, Ben Killburn, a slight, gentle boy who must meet with M. C. secretly because the Killburns are distrusted and feared for their “witchy” powers. Together, the boys roam through the woods, swinging from vines and branches, taking joy in their natural surroundings. Later, M. C. sits on the pole his father had erected for him as a prize after he swam the nearby Ohio River. From his perch on the bicycle seat at-

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tached to the top of the pole, M. C. watches out for the younger children, for whom he is responsible when their parents are at work. Sometimes he does dizzying acrobatics, pedaling like a madman; at other times, he sits still, like the king of the mountain, observing everything that is happening in his world. That world, however, is not as permanent as it appears to be. The strip miners have already intruded, scarring the landscape and poisoning the water. A more innocent intruder is the stranger with a tape recorder, James K. Lewis, who has been wandering through the hills to capture the music of the local people before it is lost or becomes tainted by outside influences. M. C. is watching for him, because he knows that his mother, Banina Higgins, has the most beautiful voice in the mountains, and he thinks that if she could just get a recording contract, the family could afford to flee the mountain before the spoil heap descends. From his pole, M. C. also spots another intruder, Lurhetta Outlaw, who later in the story shares an adventure with him and threatens his friendship with Ben. The events in this novel fall into two categories: those which, as part of an established pattern, give the mountain people their sense of security, and those which interrupt the pattern, demanding a response or effecting a change, for better or for worse. The Higgins children, for example, can plan on seeing their father pedaling home for a hasty lunch with them and on hearing their mother’s distant yodel, then her soaring songs, as she trudges toward them at evening. As M. C. discovers, the Killburns, too, have their rituals, their work in the garden while the children play above them in elaborate safety nets, their careful system of preserving and serving vegetarian foods, and their acts of healing, which even include the laying of hands onto the wounds of the ravished mountainsides. The most obvious interruption of these patterns has come from strip mining. Because of it, M. C. intends to leave the mountains, if he can just get Lewis to make his mother a recording star. That scheme is blocked, however, first by the fact that Lewis’s activities are not commercial in nature, and second by Banina’s conviction that if she were singing for money, instead of for love, her music would lose its worth. Some of the changes, however, are more subtle. When the wrestling match between M. C. and Jones becomes not play but a serious test of strength in which the father and the son attack each other, it is clear that the two must work out a new relationship. Other breaks in the pattern force M. C. to rethink what he has been taught, much of it by his own father. For example, when he visits the Killburns, he encounters a different moral code, which brands the hunting and trapping that he considers perfectly natural as inherently evil activities. Although Jones has taught M. C. respect for nature, he has not prepared him for such a difference of opinion. Similarly, he could not prepare his son for his first encounter with sexual attraction, which causes M. C. to risk Lurhetta’s life and his own in a foolish daredevil venture, nor for the onset of jealousy when she appears to prefer Ben to him. When the novel ends, M. C. has learned a great deal about life and about himself. His lessons, however, have taken the form of questions, not of answers, of compromises, not of easy solutions. He is still uncertain about the future. He no longer plans

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to leave the mountain, however. Instead, he will work on a retaining wall, which may or may not save his home. The Characters Virginia Hamilton’s handling of characterization is skillful and subtle. The book title itself is used to show the complexity of the title character. Sometimes M. C. thinks in objective terms, as when he states his name, and sometimes in subjective terms, as when he adds the words “the Great.” When he is swaying back and forth on his pole, M. C. can call himself “the Great,” but when he is diminished by his father, either physically or emotionally, M. C. can no longer use those words. As she transmits M. C.’s thoughts, Hamilton moves so quickly back and forth between the objective and the subjective that one is often not aware of the changes, but it is this alternation that gives a true picture of the world M. C. sees and of his feelings about that world. Since M. C. is both the protagonist and the consciousness through which the story is told, the other characters in the novel are seen through his eyes. M. C. reports their actions and comments about what they do and say. This is particularly significant in the case of Jones, M. C.’s father. Although one may have the impression that the author has recorded Jones’s own thoughts and feelings, a careful reading shows that, in fact, M. C. is constantly quoting Jones, often out of context, or ascribing ideas to his father on the basis of his facial expressions. Thus Hamilton uses limited omniscience not to characterize Jones but to characterize M. C. and to define his attitude toward his father, whom he has cast as his antagonist. At the end of the novel, Banina becomes a more trustworthy interpreter of her husband’s character, explaining his true motivations and proving to M. C. that he has misjudged his father. Although M. C. does not exhibit the hostility toward the other characters that he does toward his father, his assumptions can be just as inaccurate. For example, when he describes Lewis’s confused progress along the mountain paths and his final exhausted appearance, M. C. suggests that the “dude” is a fool. When Lewis begins to talk about his music project, however, it is clear that in his own area of expertise he is intelligent and perceptive. M. C. learns that though he can mock Lewis’s mountain skills, he himself is as ignorant about that other world that Lewis represents as Lewis is about M. C.’s world. Because Ben and M. C. have so much in common, including their age, M. C. comes closer to giving an accurate evaluation of his friend. When he visits Ben’s family, however, M. C. again becomes aware of his own misjudgments. He sees that Ben’s peculiar habits, such as his vegetarian diet and his refusal to hunt, have a basis in principle. Like his father, like Lewis, Ben is unchanged; M. C., on the other hand, has learned to distrust his own self-centered assumptions about the nature of other people. By thus illustrating the possibility of error in one person’s perception of another, Hamilton relates the process of characterization to one of her major themes, that of alienation, which can be overcome only by understanding.

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Themes and Meanings The central conflict in M. C. Higgins, the Great is not between people who appreciate nature and those who ravage it, but between M. C. and Jones. On the surface, this conflict is merely a disagreement about whether or not to leave the mountain. Even more basically, however, it is a struggle between a father who wishes to remain fully in control of his family and a boy who is in the process of becoming a man and making his own judgments. Thus while Hamilton obviously wishes her readers to see the disastrous effects of strip mining, her major emphasis is on the themes of alienation and reconciliation through the growth of understanding. M. C. already knows that his parents are good people. Triumphing over poverty, they are giving their children a rich life. Banina is teaching them to be gentle, to appreciate beauty, whether in the form of a blossoming tree or of a red carpet, and to love music, which they will undoubtedly always associate with their love for her. Jones is teaching them all of his outdoor skills, along with the virtue of hard work, respect for tradition, and a sense of obligation toward the environment and toward the family. Jones, however, is now facing the adolescence of his eldest son, and he is having difficulty letting go of him. That son, in turn, is troubled about his discovery that his father is not always right, which suggests that perhaps Jones may not be as great as M. C. has always thought. Fortunately, there is enough common ground so that M. C. and his father can grow into a new relationship. Above all, however, Hamilton is a realist, and she does not pretend that Jones will change from an intensely private man into one who verbalizes his emotions. At the end of the book, when Jones comes to M. C.’s aid in building the retaining wall, when for just a moment he drops his guard and lets his pride in his son show clearly, he has probably come as close to communicating with M. C. as he ever will. It is M. C. who has changed. He has had to forgive his father for being human and fallible. Moreover, he has had to develop the kind of sensitivity that Banina has, which enables one to recognize love and pride even when they are expressed without words. As he learns to understand Ben, Lurhetta, Banina, and, above all, his father, M. C. also develops a new definition of greatness. It is not swimming the Ohio River; it is not ruling the world from a pole high above it; it is not being a famous recording star; it is not being chosen by a particular girl; it is not being either powerful or infallible. Instead, it is staying the course, doing what has to be done, and accepting the limitations of the world, of others, and of one’s own nature. Critical Context Virginia Hamilton was considered one of the finest writers of fiction for young adult readers. Although she began winning awards with The House of Dies Drear (1968), and continued to build her reputation with The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), which was a National Book Award finalist and a Newbery Honor Book and received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, it was M. C. Higgins, the Great that brought her both the coveted Newbery Medal and the National Book Award.

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Although some critics find her literary style too complex for many young readers, Hamilton’s work is admired for her originality and for her skill in characterization. While her themes are universal, African Americans note especially her emphasis on their struggle for freedom and her use of the rich traditions of her people, including black myths and folklore. Bibliography Giovanni, Nikki. Review of M. C. Higgins, the Great. The New York Times Book Review, September 22, 1974, 8. Summarizes the plot in a breezy style and then settles down to an analysis of Hamilton’s appeal, which the reviewer attributes to her realism, her characterization, and her uniting “the forces of hope with the forces of dreams.” A brief but perceptive article. Hamilton, Virginia. “The Mind of a Novel: The Heart of the Book.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 8 (Winter, 1983): 10-14. Discusses novels published after M. C. Higgins, the Great, emphasizing persistent themes in all of Hamilton’s works, such as the importance of place and family. Explains her use of language, nonverbal communication, and dialect. A lengthy section on the importance of Africa in her thought and fiction is especially valuable. _______. “Writing the Source: In Other Words.” The Horn Book Magazine 14 (December, 1978): 609-619. Comments on the genesis of her works, emphasizing the importance of the revision process, where Hamilton believes she is at her most creative. Also discusses the various genres that appeal to her, and makes some interesting observations about her works’ relationship to black literature in general. Scholl, Kathleen. “Black Traditions in M. C. Higgins, the Great.” Language Arts 17 (April, 1980): 420-424. Drawing on scholarly sources, this essay traces in detail the use of folklore, song, and myth in Hamilton’s novel. The author’s explanation of the setting in which folklore is shared and transmitted is particularly enlightening. Story-Huffman, Ru. Newbery on the Net: Reading and Internet Activities. 2d ed. Ft. Atkinson, Wis.: Upstart Books, 2002. Provides resources for children interested in M. C. Higgins, the Great designed to encourage them to read and think about the book using online resources. Vassallo, Carol. “A Miscellany: M. C. Higgins, the Great.” Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Seminar on Children’s Literature and the Children’s Literature Association 4 (1975): 194-195. Points out many excellences in the novel. Argues that the pole has several symbolic uses, including, in its swaying, a movement through time into the past, which is consistent with the fact that its base is sunk into the family graves. An interesting analysis. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM Author: August Wilson (1945-2005) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1927 Locale: The South Side of Chicago First produced: 1984, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut First published: 1985 Principal characters: Ma Rainey, popularly called “Mother of the Blues,” a recording star in the rural, southern, black folk tradition Sturdyvant, a producer of pop music recordings Irvin, Ma Rainey’s agent, like Sturdyvant a white man who derives his income from black music Cutler, a guitar and trombone player, the leader of Ma Rainey’s backup band Toledo, a piano player, the only band member who can read Slow Drag, a bass player Levee, a trumpeter who is twenty years younger than the other band members The Play This two-act play takes place in a recording studio and its adjoining band room. The action opens with a tense conversation between the producer, Sturdyvant, and Ma Rainey’s agent, Irvin, two white men anxious because of past experiences with the imperious and unpredictable Ma Rainey. She is late, and no one knows why. Cutler, the leader of Ma’s accompaniment band, and two other members, Toledo and Slow Drag, arrive on time and go down to the band room. They are in their midfifties, know each other well, and have played for many years in the South. They too express concern about avoiding the troubles of past recording sessions. Levee, another band member, arrives somewhat late, wearing a new pair of shoes. He is twenty years younger than the other musicians, and although he spent the first ten years of his life in the South, he has since lived, and learned his music, in the North. For most of the first third of the play, largely because Levee does not want to bother with rehearsing, the four men carry on a conversation, partly for practical purposes but mostly for entertainment while waiting for Ma Rainey. Their talk rambles by free association from topic to topic, but it grows increasingly tense as a pattern emerges of conflict between the older men and Levee. Piano player Toledo and trumpeter Levee are of very different temperaments and viewpoints about life, and they frequently annoy each other. It appears to Levee that Toledo picks on him and that no one shows

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him the respect that he deserves, so he responds in kind. Toledo writes songs in the new style, which he believes will lift him above the authority of Sturdyvant, Ma Rainey, and musicians of the old style. When Ma Rainey arrives, she brings immediate and potential tension in the form of her nephew, Sylvester, a young woman named Dussie Mae, and a policeman. On the way to the studio, Ma has been involved in a minor automobile accident and an altercation with a taxi driver. She immediately displays the sweep of her power in such circumstances, but it is also clear that the white men respect only each other and are humoring her. After Irvin has paid the policeman, the band continues to converse. Tension between the men continues to build until, at the end of act 1, Levee recounts an experience from his childhood that he knows was crucial in forming his personality and outlook on life. At the age of eight, he saw a gang of white men sexually assault his mother because his father owned a piece of good farmland. He tried to defend his mother with a knife but suffered a near-fatal wound. His father moved the family and sold the land to one of those white men, smiling all the while. Soon he returned, killing four of the men before he was captured and lynched. Levee warns the other band members that he knows how hard life is, that he is determined to get what he wants, that he knows how to handle white men like Irvin and Sturdyvant, and that Cutler, Slow Drag, and Toledo had better leave him alone. As the recording session is about to begin, Levee gets in trouble with Ma, who has already decided not to take him on her upcoming tour through Georgia. He risks more trouble for himself by complaining about Sylvester and coming on to Dussie Mae. During a break in the session, blamed on Levee, the men in the band continue their talk, beginning with the subject of Levee and Dussie Mae. The conflict is mostly between Levee and Toledo, who tries to teach Levee something about the role of women in a man’s life. When the subject turns to the value of life, especially in the light of the history of African Americans, Levee declares that death is more real and impressive than is life, and more powerful than God, who hates black people and will not help them. Cutler feels so offended by such blasphemy that he jumps up and punches Levee. In response, Levee pulls a knife and circles Cutler, all the while challenging God to protect Cutler, concluding with the assertion that God is impotent. The recording session goes well enough, but Ma, after arguing with Levee about his playing, fires him. Levee then suffers another blow to his self-esteem and his plans. Sturdyvant informs him that the songs that he wrote will not be recorded, although Sturdyvant, who had requested the songs, will be kind enough to buy them, and any future songs, for a very small amount of money. As the band members, alone in the band room, are packing to leave, Toledo steps on one of Levee’s new shoes. To Levee, this gesture seems to sum up the frustration and disrespect with which the world has burdened him. He rushes at Toledo and plunges the knife into his back.

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Themes and Meanings This play presents a representative incident that illustrates and interprets a crucial episode in the history of the African American people: the migration from the southern farms of their origin to the northern industrial cities; their emergence into modern life, with resulting transformation and spiritual crisis. It is a story of old ways and new ways, with themes of racism and human suffering. The action of the play takes place on the threshold between old and new, and it is appropriately charged with tension and conflict. The conflicts are not resolved during the play, and the play does not end hopefully. The conflicts include those between old and new, white and black people, northern urban innovation and southern tradition, young persons and old, ownership and labor, book learning (print) and folk wisdom (oral), backwoods stomp dance parties and electronic mass media, and community cohesion and individualism. At stake are survival, wisdom, and the opportunity for a good life. Even the setting of the play reflects dualism and threshold in its division of playing space into a ground-level room for the recording session and a basement room for rehearsal. The audience sees only one room at any time. No white character enters the band room. The contrasts and conflicts show up in the interactions between characters, notably between Ma Rainey and Sturdyvant and between Toledo and Levee. Sturdyvant, representing the interests of sales and new capital, feels no respect for Ma Rainey, her music, or her musicians. He values them only if he can use them for profit. His control over them is limited only by the extent to which he must placate Ma until she has signed release papers. Ma resists by refusing to cooperate unless he accedes to her wishes and recognizes her stardom. Blues music is the fulcrum upon which the polarized forces balance. It provides the play with a title, a focus for the dramatic situation, and a vehicle for the themes. It is the glue that binds the characters together and the knife that slices them apart. The audience not only hears talk about this music but also hears the music itself, in fragments or in full song, in conflicting thematic styles, sung and played in spontaneous expression of individual and communal agony and wisdom or performed for impersonal mass distribution, traditional songs or songs in the very process of being composed. In life and in the play, the evolution of this music participates in, parallels, and expresses the pattern of African American history. Ma Rainey is known as “Mother of the Blues” because she gave it birth as a universally recognized African American art form. She knows, however, that the blues existed before her. She knows, as her white contemporaries do not, that the blues carry so much power of meaning because they are “life’s way of talking.” She explains to Cutler that “you don’t sing because you feel better. You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life.” Cutler adds that with such understanding you have “a grip on life to where you can hold your head up and go on to see what else life got to offer.” The two agree that with her singing Ma fills an empty world with something that people cannot do without. Ma’s style of singing expresses the viewpoint and values of the black South, in the oral culture of its rural folk tradition: efficacious talk; storytelling; music and dance

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that feature adherence to a comparatively simple, passed-down performance style; a tightly knit community that provides the basis for hierarchy and clear understanding of where each individual fits; reverence for fertility and harvest; and a just and merciful God who knows the value of the rich, black, river-bottom land that He created and who cares for His black people, who are on the bottom of the American socioeconomic scale. The blues of the time stood on the threshold of becoming jazz. Jazz represents a somewhat different way of living and of understanding life, playing old songs in a new way and even composing new songs for the new way. In the fluid world of the North, Levee knows no authority but himself and the potential popularity of his music. He has seen the authority of the white man, having witnessed the brute force on which it is based, but he cannot respect it and believes that he can successfully resist and manipulate it. Cutting himself off from traditional community, he tries to make a virtue of being himself. He does not want to waste time in rehearsal. Caring only about himself, he is willing to sell his soul to the devil in return for success. The older men, doing their best to make their own adjustments to changing times and believing Levee to be an upstart fool, pressure him to return to the old ways of music, communal identity, and religious belief. They cajole him and order him to conform to what they see as reality. Toledo in particular tries to teach Levee by sharing ideas that he has gleaned from his reading about African culture and the need for African Americans to know the historical forces that determine their position in American society. The men appeal to Levee indirectly, in the African and African American way of talking around a subject, with verbal sparring, wit, snatches of blues lyrics, and rich, exemplifying stories. Outside the artistry of his music, Levee understands and respects only the most literal of possible meanings in what he hears or sees. It is as if the knife that slashed across his eight-year-old breast shone a light into his mind that blinded him to all but the most straightforward but superficial of meanings. He intends to take what life owes him, what death and the devil have promised, at whatever the cost. He believes himself to be the wave of the future, “the New Negro” of the 1920’s. As he puts it, “I’ve got time coming to me.” He is not completely wrong. Ma Rainey, after all, “listens to her heart . . . listens to the voice inside her,” and Levee plays the music the way he feels it. When his musical expression is taken from him, his confused feelings overwhelm him, and he betrays his own. His striking out at Toledo is akin to stabbing his people and himself in the back. Critical Context Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was August Wilson’s first play to reach Broadway. It was an immediate critical success and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the 1984-1985 season. It was the second play completed of a cycle of ten about the African American experience. Taken together, the plays present a synthesis of the modern history of African Americans. Wilson explained that his approach was to write about one important question confronting African Americans in

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each decade. In connection with this play, he mentioned the problem of missed possibilities, especially in regard to Levee. Critics have focused on the problem of how African Americans can keep their cultural identity while benefiting from the marketability of its forms. The immediate and continuing success of this play, among white as well as black audiences, is an illustration of that marketability. Although the play exposes racism—some critics see this as the play’s subject—Wilson wrote it not so much in the manner of social protest literature, epitomized by Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), as in the universalizing manner of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952). It seems, furthermore, that the audience that Wilson keeps most in mind is black America, particularly workingclass people similar to his characters. Responding to novelist James Baldwin’s call for “profound articulation of the black tradition,” Wilson attempts to present images of strong—though fallible—black individuals and families, so as to show African Americans that their experiences, feelings, and values are instances of the common human condition. He demonstrates the ability of African American culture to provide sustaining strength for black people and suggests some directions for the future. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom differs from many plays by black authors in the 1960’s that influenced Wilson’s political and artistic consciousness as a beginning writer by being less polemical. It is like other plays of the era in featuring working-class black characters in everyday situations in which they do battle against prejudiced whites and with each other. Wilson has been praised for his compassion and respect for life as well as for the effectiveness of both the humor and the prophetic wisdom of his plays. He described himself as writing from the zestful part of life. Critics have praised his vivid characterization, lively and authentic dialogue, and poetic qualities of language that result from his passionate attention to the speech of black people. Bibliography Bigsby, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collection of scholarly essays on Wilson’s plays, including studies of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and other individual works, as well as broader discussions of the playwright’s overall project. Ching, Mei-Ling. “Wrestling Against History.” Theatre 19 (Summer/Fall, 1988): 7071. The play goes beyond rigid realism by blending Christian and African cosmology in order to explain how problems and obsessions from the past must be exorcised by transforming mundane actions into allegorical rituals. Freedman, Samuel G. “A Voice from the Streets.” The New York Times Magazine, March 15, 1987: 36, 40, 49, 70. Sketches Wilson’s life, with comments by Wilson, revealing some sources of Wilson’s artistic attitudes and themes. Glover, Margaret E. “Two Notes on August Wilson: The Songs of a Marked Man.” Theatre 19 (Summer/Fall, 1988): 69-70. Explores the meaning of blues music, as seen in its function in the lives of characters in Wilson’s plays, within contexts of black community and white exploitation.

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Smith, Philip E. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Playing the Blues as Equipment for Living.” In Within the Dramatic Spectrum, edited by Karelisa V. Hartigan. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986. Examines ways in which the play is itself a blues composition of music, repartee, and story. The play provides an understanding of persons living at a time of “failure to understand the relationship of self to history and culture.” Wilson, August. “How to Write a Play Like August Wilson.” The New York Times, March 10, 1991, section 2, pp. 5, 17. Wilson presents his purposes in writing plays that articulate black history and its contribution to the scheme of common human values. Tom Koontz

MASTERPLOTS II African American Literature, Revised Edition

MASTERPLOTS II African American Literature, Revised Edition

3 Mag–Poe

Edited by

Tyrone Williams Xavier University

Salem Press Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Editorial Director: Christina J. Moose Development Editor: Tracy Irons-Georges Project Editor: Andy Perry Editorial Assistant: Dana Garey Research Supervisor: Jeffry Jensen

Research Assistant: Keli Trousdale Acquisitions Editor: Mark Rehn Production Editor: Andrea E. Miller Design and Graphics: James Hutson Layout: Mary Overell

Cover photo: Revival, 1934. Julia Eckel. (The Granger Collection, New York)

Copyright © 1994, 2009, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or in the copying of images deemed to be freely licensed or in the public domain. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Some of these essays, which have been updated, originally appeared in Masterplots II: African American Literature Series (1994). New material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Masterplots II: African American literature / edited by Tyrone Williams. — Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-1-58765-438-1 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-439-8 (v. 1: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-440-4 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-441-1 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-442-8 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. American literature—African American authors—Stories, plots, etc. 2. African Americans —Intellectual life. 3. African Americans in literature. I. Williams, Tyrone. II. Title: Masterplots 2. III. Title: Masterplots two. PS153.N5M2645 2008 810.9′896073—dc22 2008036694 First Printing

printed in the united states of america

LIST OF TITLES IN VOLUME

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Complete List of Titles in All Volumes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lix The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins — Pauline Hopkins Maker of Saints — Thulani Davis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mama — Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mama Day — Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Man Who Cried I Am — John A. Williams . . . . . . . . Manchild in the Promised Land — Claude Brown . . . . . . . Marked by Fire — Joyce Carol Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . Maud Martha — Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Measure of Time — Rosa Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meridian — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Messenger — Charles Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Middle Passage — Charles Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minty Alley — C. L. R. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miracle’s Boys — Jacqueline Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . Monster — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Montgomery’s Children — Richard Perry . . . . . . . . . . . Moses, Man of the Mountain — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . The Motion of Light in Water — Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . Mumbo Jumbo — Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Amputations — Clarence Major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Brother — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. — Coretta Scott King . .

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A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave in the State of Delaware, North America — Solomon Bayley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — Frederick Douglass . . A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black — John Marrant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man — Briton Hammon . . . . . . . . The Narrows — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Guard — Natasha Trethewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Son — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natives of My Person — George Lamming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lv

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The New Negro — Alain Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1210 1959 — Thulani Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1216 Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1222 Once upon a Time When We Were Colored — Clifton L. Taulbert One More River to Cross — Keith Boykin . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Nig — Harriet E. Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Outsider — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oxherding Tale — Charles Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Painted Turtle — Clarence Major. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents — Octavia E. Butler . . . Paradise — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Passing — Nella Larsen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Patternist Series — Octavia E. Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philadelphia Fire — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Photograph — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Piano Lesson — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Platitudes — Trey Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plum Bun — Jessie Redmon Fauset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral — Phillis Wheatley. . . The Poetry of Ai — Ai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Maya Angelou — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Amiri Baraka — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Edward Kamau Brathwaite — Edward Kamau Brathwaite . The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks — Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Sterling Brown — Sterling A. Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Lucille Clifton — Lucille Clifton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Wanda Coleman — Wanda Coleman . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Jayne Cortez — Jayne Cortez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Countée Cullen — Countée Cullen . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Owen Dodson — Owen Dodson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Rita Dove — Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar — Paul Laurence Dunbar. . . . . . The Poetry of Mari Evans — Mari Evans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni — Nikki Giovanni. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Michael S. Harper — Michael S. Harper . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Robert Hayden — Robert Hayden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of George Moses Horton — George Moses Horton . . . . . . The Poetry of Langston Hughes — Langston Hughes . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of June Jordan — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Etheridge Knight — Etheridge Knight. . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa — Yusef Komunyakaa . . . . . . . . .

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LIST OF TITLES IN VOLUME

The Poetry of Audre Lorde — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Claude McKay — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Haki R. Madhubuti — Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . The Poetry of Thylias Moss — Thylias Moss . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Dudley Randall — Dudley Randall . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Carolyn M. Rodgers — Carolyn M. Rodgers . . . The Poetry of Sonia Sanchez — Sonia Sanchez . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Melvin B. Tolson — Melvin B. Tolson . . . . . . The Poetry of Derek Walcott — Derek Walcott . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Alice Walker — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Sherley Anne Williams — Sherley Anne Williams The Poetry of Jay Wright — Jay Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Al Young — Al Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES Volume 1 page

Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Contributing Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Afrocentricity — Molefi K. Asante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Ain’t I a Woman — Bell Hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 All-Bright Court — Connie Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The American Evasion of Philosophy — Cornel West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Anancy’s Score — Andrew Salkey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Angela Davis — Angela Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Annie John — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Another Country — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Appalachee Red — Raymond Andrews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 The Artificial White Man — Stanley Crouch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 At the Bottom of the River — Jamaica Kincaid. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 The Autobiographical Writings of William Wells Brown — William Wells Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The Autobiography of a Jukebox — Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man — James Weldon Johnson . . . . . 77 The Autobiography of Chester Himes — Chester Himes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . 96 Autobiography of My Dead Brother — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . 102 The Autobiography of My Mother — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois — W. E. B. Du Bois . . . . . . . . . . 110 Babel-17 — Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baby of the Family — Tina McElroy Ansa. . . . . . . . . . . Bailey’s Café — Gloria Naylor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Banana Bottom — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Battle of Jericho — Sharon M. Draper . . . . . . . . . . Beetlecreek — William Demby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beloved — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Betsey Brown — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander — Langston Hughes . lix

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Bird at My Window — Rosa Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Betty — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Boy and American Hunger — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . Black Ice — Lorene Cary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman — Michele Wallace Black Men — Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Black Muslims in America — C. Eric Lincoln . . . . . . . . . Black No More — George S. Schuyler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Thunder — Arna Bontemps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Blacker the Berry — Wallace Thurman . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Blue Meridian” — Jean Toomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blues for Mister Charlie — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bondwoman’s Narrative — Hannah Crafts . . . . . . . . . . . Breath, Eyes, Memory — Edwidge Danticat. . . . . . . . . . . . . Bright Shadow — Joyce Carol Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brighter Sun — Samuel Selvon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronx Masquerade — Nikki Grimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronzeville Boys and Girls — Gwendolyn Brooks. . . . . . . . . . Brothers and Keepers — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . Brothers and Sisters — Bebe Moore Campbell. . . . . . . . . . . . Brown Girl, Brownstones — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . Brutal Imagination — Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bucking the Sarge — Christopher Paul Curtis. . . . . . . . . . . .

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Cambridge — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cancer Journals — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . . Cane — Jean Toomer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Captain Blackman — John A. Williams . . . . . . . . . . Captivity — Toi Derricotte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Catherine Carmier — Ernest J. Gaines. . . . . . . . . . . Ceremonies in Dark Old Men — Lonne Elder III . . . . . The Chaneysville Incident — David Bradley . . . . . . . The Chinaberry Tree — Jessie Redmon Fauset . . . . . . A Chocolate Soldier — Cyrus Colter. . . . . . . . . . . . The Chosen Place, the Timeless People — Paule Marshall Clifford’s Blues — John A. Williams. . . . . . . . . . . . Clotel — William Wells Brown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Color of Water — James McBride . . . . . . . . . . The Color Purple — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Colored Museum — George C. Wolfe . . . . . . . . . Coming of Age in Mississippi — Anne Moody . . . . . .

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

Coming Up Down Home — Cecil Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered — Martin Robison Delany The Conjure-Man Dies — Rudolph Fisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Conjure Woman — Charles Waddell Chesnutt . . . . . . . . . . . . Contending Forces — Pauline Hopkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Content of Our Character — Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Corregidora — Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Country Place — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cranial Guitar — Bob Kaufman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual — Harold Cruse . . . . . . . . . . . Crossing the River — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Culture of Bruising — Gerald Early . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Curse of Caste — Julia C. Collins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Daddy Was a Number Runner — Louise Meriwether . . . . . . The Dahomean — Frank Yerby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daughters — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World — Suzan-Lori Parks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dem — William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dessa Rose — Sherley Anne Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Devil in a Blue Dress — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Different Drummer — William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . . . . Disappearing Acts — Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Distant Shore — Caryl Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dragon Can’t Dance — Earl Lovelace . . . . . . . . . . . A Dream Deferred — Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dream on Monkey Mountain — Derek Walcott . . . . . . . . .

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393 399 405 410 417 422 428 434 438 442 446 451

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471 475 482 488 494 500 506 510 516 520

Volume 2 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere — ZZ Packer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 Dust Tracks on a Road — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529 Dutchman — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533 Erasure — Percival Everett. . . . . . . . . . . . The Essays of Amiri Baraka — Amiri Baraka . . The Essays of Ralph Ellison — Ralph Ellison . . The Essays of C. L. R. James — C. L. R. James . The Essays of Ishmael Reed — Ishmael Reed . . lxi

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539 543 551 557 564

MASTERPLOTS II page

The Ethics of Identity — Kwame Anthony Appiah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571 Eva’s Man — Gayl Jones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 Faith and the Good Thing — Charles Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . Fallen Angels — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family — J. California Cooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Farming of Bones — Edwidge Danticat. . . . . . . . . . . . Fatheralong — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fences — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Part Last and Heaven — Angela Johnson . . . . . . . . The Fisher King — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun — Geoffrey Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . The Flagellants — Carlene Hatcher Polite. . . . . . . . . . . . . Flight to Canada — Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Free Enterprise — Michelle Cliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Slavery to Freedom — John Hope Franklin . . . . . . . . . Funnyhouse of a Negro — Adrienne Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . .

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581 587 591 597 601 605 611 618 622 626 630 636

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A Gathering of Old Men — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . Gemini — Nikki Giovanni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . Give Us Each Day — Alice Dunbar-Nelson . . . . . . Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin . . . . . God Bless the Child — Kristin Hunter . . . . . . . . . The Great Wells of Democracy — Manning Marable . The Guyana Quartet — Wilson Harris . . . . . . . . .

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663 669 675 681 688 694 700 704

Having Our Say — Sarah Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Healing — Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Heart of a Woman — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich — Alice Childress . . High Cotton — Darryl Pinckney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His Own Where — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Home to Harlem — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Homewood Trilogy — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . The House Behind the Cedars — Charles Waddell Chesnutt How Stella Got Her Groove Back — Terry McMillan . . . . Hunting in Harlem — Mat Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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710 714 718 722 728 734 739 746 752 758 762

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

Hurry Home — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 766 Hush — Jacqueline Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 772 I Get on the Bus — Reginald McKnight . . . . . . . . . . I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou . . . If He Hollers Let Him Go — Chester Himes . . . . . . . . If You Come Softly — Jacqueline Woodson. . . . . . . . In the Blood — Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Castle of My Skin — George Lamming . . . . . . . In the Wine Time — Ed Bullins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl — Harriet Jacobs . . Infants of the Spring — Wallace Thurman . . . . . . . . . The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African — Olaudah Equiano . . The Interruption of Everything — Terry McMillan . . . . Intimate Apparel — Lynn Nottage . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Intuitionist — Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iola Leroy — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper . . . . . . .

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775 781 787 793 797 801 807 812 818

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Jazz — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelly Roll — Kevin Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelly’s Last Jam — George C. Wolfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jitney — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joe Turner’s Come and Gone — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Henry Days — Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joker, Joker, Deuce — Paul Beatty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonah’s Gourd Vine — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké — Charlotte L. Forten Grimké . Jubilee — Margaret Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juneteenth — Ralph Ellison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Just Above My Head — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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852 858 862 866 870 876 880 885 891 897 903 907

Kindred — Octavia E. Butler. . . . . . King Hedley II — August Wilson . . . The Known World — Edward P. Jones Krik? Krak! — Edwidge Danticat . . . Kwaku — Roy A. K. Heath . . . . . . .

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Lady Sings the Blues — Billie Holiday, with William Dufty. . . . . . . . . . . 935 The Land — Mildred D. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 942 Lawd Today — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 946 lxiii

MASTERPLOTS II page

The Learning Tree — Gordon Parks, Sr.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 952 A Lesson Before Dying — Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 958 Let Me Breathe Thunder — William Attaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 964 Let the Circle Be Unbroken — Mildred D. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 970 Let the Dead Bury Their Dead — Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 975 Life on the Color Line — Gregory Howard Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 982 Like One of the Family — Alice Childress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 986 Linden Hills — Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 992 Local History — Erica Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 998 The Lonely Londoners — Samuel Selvon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1002 The Long Dream — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1008 A Long Way Gone — Ishmael Beah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1014 Lost in the City — Edward P. Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1018 Love — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1022 Lucy — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1026 M. C. Higgins, the Great — Virginia Hamilton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1032 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1037

Volume 3 The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins — Pauline Hopkins Maker of Saints — Thulani Davis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mama — Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mama Day — Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Man Who Cried I Am — John A. Williams . . . . . . . . Manchild in the Promised Land — Claude Brown . . . . . . . Marked by Fire — Joyce Carol Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . Maud Martha — Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Measure of Time — Rosa Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meridian — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Messenger — Charles Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Middle Passage — Charles Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minty Alley — C. L. R. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miracle’s Boys — Jacqueline Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . Monster — Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Montgomery’s Children — Richard Perry . . . . . . . . . . . Moses, Man of the Mountain — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . The Motion of Light in Water — Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . Mumbo Jumbo — Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Amputations — Clarence Major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lxiv

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1043 1050 1054 1060 1066 1072 1078 1084 1090 1096 1102 1107 1113 1119 1123 1127 1133 1139 1145 1152

COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

My Brother — Jamaica Kincaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1158 My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. — Coretta Scott King . . . . . . . . . . 1162 A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave in the State of Delaware, North America — Solomon Bayley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — Frederick Douglass . . A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black — John Marrant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man — Briton Hammon . . . . . . . . The Narrows — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Guard — Natasha Trethewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Son — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natives of My Person — George Lamming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New Negro — Alain Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1959 — Thulani Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1183 1188 1194 1198 1204 1210 1216 1222

Once upon a Time When We Were Colored — Clifton L. Taulbert One More River to Cross — Keith Boykin . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Nig — Harriet E. Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Outsider — Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oxherding Tale — Charles Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1228 1232 1236 1242 1249

Painted Turtle — Clarence Major. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents — Octavia E. Butler . . . Paradise — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Passing — Nella Larsen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Patternist Series — Octavia E. Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philadelphia Fire — John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Photograph — Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Piano Lesson — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Platitudes — Trey Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plum Bun — Jessie Redmon Fauset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral — Phillis Wheatley. . . The Poetry of Ai — Ai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Maya Angelou — Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Amiri Baraka — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Edward Kamau Brathwaite — Edward Kamau Brathwaite . The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks — Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Sterling Brown — Sterling A. Brown . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1255 1260 1264 1270 1276 1281 1287 1293 1298 1304 1310 1316 1322 1328 1335 1345 1351

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MASTERPLOTS II page

The Poetry of Lucille Clifton — Lucille Clifton . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Wanda Coleman — Wanda Coleman . . . . . . . The Poetry of Jayne Cortez — Jayne Cortez . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Countée Cullen — Countée Cullen . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Owen Dodson — Owen Dodson . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Rita Dove — Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar — Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Poetry of Mari Evans — Mari Evans. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni — Nikki Giovanni. . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Michael S. Harper — Michael S. Harper . . . . . The Poetry of Robert Hayden — Robert Hayden . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of George Moses Horton — George Moses Horton . The Poetry of Langston Hughes — Langston Hughes . . . . . . The Poetry of June Jordan — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Etheridge Knight — Etheridge Knight. . . . . . . The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa — Yusef Komunyakaa . . . . The Poetry of Audre Lorde — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Claude McKay — Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Haki R. Madhubuti — Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . The Poetry of Thylias Moss — Thylias Moss . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Dudley Randall — Dudley Randall . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Carolyn M. Rodgers — Carolyn M. Rodgers . . . The Poetry of Sonia Sanchez — Sonia Sanchez . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Melvin B. Tolson — Melvin B. Tolson . . . . . . The Poetry of Derek Walcott — Derek Walcott . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Alice Walker — Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Sherley Anne Williams — Sherley Anne Williams The Poetry of Jay Wright — Jay Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetry of Al Young — Al Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1356 1362 1371 1378 1385 1391 1400 1407 1413 1419 1427 1433 1440 1445 1452 1457 1465 1470 1477 1484 1492 1498 1504 1512 1518 1527 1535 1541 1548

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1557 1563 1569 1573

Volume 4 Possessing the Secret of Joy — Alice Walker . . . . . Praisesong for the Widow — Paule Marshall . . . . The President’s Daughter — Barbara Chase-Riboud. Purlie Victorious — Ossie Davis . . . . . . . . . . .

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Quicksand — Nella Larsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1578 Race Matters — Cornel West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1584 A Raisin in the Sun — Lorraine Hansberry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1588 lxvi

COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

A Rat’s Mass — Adrienne Kennedy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reckless Eyeballing — Ishmael Reed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflex and Bone Structure — Clarence Major . . . . . . . . . Right Here, Right Now — Trey Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The River Niger — Joseph A. Walker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rivers of Eros — Cyrus Colter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RL’s Dream — Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry — Mildred D. Taylor. . . . . . Roots — Alex Haley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Runner Mack — Barry Beckham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom — William Craft and Ellen Craft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sally Hemings — Barbara Chase-Riboud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Salt Eaters — Toni Cade Bambara. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Phillips — Andrea Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scenes from a Sistah — Lolita Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Season of Adventure — George Lamming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seduction by Light — Al Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seraph on the Suwanee — Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . . . . Seven Guitars — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Shadow Bride — Roy A. K. Heath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window — Lorraine Hansberry . . . The Signifying Monkey — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. . . . . . . . . . Singing in the Comeback Choir — Bebe Moore Campbell . . . . . . Slavery and Social Death — Orlando Patterson . . . . . . . . . . . Sleeping with the Dictionary — Harryette Mullen . . . . . . . . . . A Soldier’s Play — Charles Fuller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soledad Brother — George Jackson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Some People, Some Other Place — J. California Cooper . . . . . . Some Soul to Keep — J. California Cooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soul Clap Hands and Sing — Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . Soul on Ice — Eldridge Cleaver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. — Martin Luther King, Jr. The Speeches of Malcolm X — Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spook Who Sat by the Door — Sam Greenlee . . . . . . . . . . The Sport of the Gods — Paul Laurence Dunbar . . . . . . . . . . The Spyglass Tree — Albert Murray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Squabble, and Other Stories — John Holman . . . . . . . . . . . . Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand — Samuel R. Delany . . . . lxvii

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The Stories of Toni Cade Bambara — Toni Cade Bambara . . . . The Stories of Henry Dumas — Henry Dumas . . . . . . . . . . . The Stories of Langston Hughes — Langston Hughes . . . . . . . The Stories of James Alan McPherson — James Alan McPherson. The Street — Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Suder — Percival Everett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sula — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush — Virginia Hamilton . . . . . . . The System of Dante’s Hell — Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Taking of Miss Janie — Ed Bullins . . . . . . . . . Tar Baby — Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Technical Difficulties — June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston . There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden — Leon Forrest The Third Life of Grange Copeland — Alice Walker . . . This Child’s Gonna Live — Sarah E. Wright. . . . . . . Those Bones Are Not My Child — Toni Cade Bambara . Through the Ivory Gate — Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . Topdog/Underdog — Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . Train Whistle Guitar — Albert Murray . . . . . . . . . . Trouble in Mind — Alice Childress . . . . . . . . . . . . The Truly Disadvantaged — William Julius Wilson . . . Two Trains Running — August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . Two Wings to Veil My Face — Leon Forrest . . . . . .

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COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN ALL VOLUMES page

Yearning — Bell Hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1995 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down — Ishmael Reed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2001 Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine — Bebe Moore Campbell . . . . . . . . . . . . 2007 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name — Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2013 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2017 Electronic Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2024 Chronological List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2031 Type of Work Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2043 Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2050 Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2057

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MASTERPLOTS II African American Literature, Revised Edition

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THE MAGAZINE NOVELS OF PAULINE HOPKINS Author: Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) Type of work: Novels Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: The latter half of the nineteenth century Locale: Eastern United States First published: 1988: Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice, 1901-1902; Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, 1902; Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self, 1902-1903 Principal characters: Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice Hagar, a beautiful woman first married to Ellis Enson, then to John Bowen Jewel, the protagonist, Hagar’s daughter Ellis Enson, a southern aristocrat who marries Hagar and is attacked and left for dead St. Clair Enson, the major villain who masterminds a scheme to get rich by marrying Jewel Cuthbert Sumner, a northern aristocrat framed for the murder of Elise Bradford Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest Winona, the daughter of White Eagle and a runaway slave Judah, a strong, handsome African American who loves Winona White Eagle, an English aristocrat who is falsely convicted of murder Colonel Titus, the indirect heir to an estate; he kills White Eagle and kidnaps Winona and Judah, forcing them to work as slaves Warren Maxwell, a handsome, unprejudiced, twenty-eight-yearold English lawyer John Brown, the historical personage known for his abolitionist actions Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self Reuel Briggs, a medical student who keeps his African American heritage a secret Aubrey Livingston, the false friend of Briggs Dianthe Lusk, a beautiful, talented singer with the Fisk University choir who marries Briggs Ai, a high priest of the lost civilization of Telassar

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The Novels In Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice, Hagar marries Ellis Enson, and they have a child. Shortly after that, St. Clair Enson, Ellis’s cruel, dissolute brother, appears with a slave trader, Walker, to prove that Hagar is of mixed blood. Hagar does not know of her heritage and has been reared as white. After much soul searching, Ellis decides to ignore Hagar’s race and to take her and the child to Europe. Upon learning of this plan, St. Clair beats Ellis severely and leaves him for dead. Hagar and her daughter then become the property of St. Clair, who sells them at a slave market. Believing Ellis to be dead and herself to be beyond help, Hagar jumps into the Potomac, carrying her daughter along with her. Twenty years later, in Washington, D.C., Cuthbert Sumner is charged with the murder of Elise Bradford. Summer’s fiancée, Jewel Bower, marries him as he awaits trial. Her father dies. At Sumner’s trial, the identities of various characters are revealed. St. Clair Enson, using the name General Benson, and Walker, using the name Madison, have attempted to bilk the Bowen family out of its fortune. St. Clair, who fathered Bradford’s child, murders her to keep her from interfering with his plan to marry Jewel and gain control of her money. Sumner is framed in order to remove him from Jewel’s life. Henson, a detective, admits that he is Ellis Enson, and Mrs. Bowen identifies herself as Hagar. Sumner is acquitted, and St. Clair and Walker are arrested. Ellis and Hagar are reunited, and soon Hagar finds evidence proving that Jewel is their daughter. Sumner rejects her. He overcomes his prejudice too late and learns that she is dead. In Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, the title character and Judah live with White Eagle, an English aristocrat who is murdered by Colonel Titus. Warren Maxwell, in search of the heir to a fortune, meets Winona and Judah and hopes to take them to England, but Bill Thomson claims he is their owner and takes them to Missouri. Maxwell finds Winona and Judah working as slaves on Titus’s plantation after learning that Titus is the indirect heir to the fortune. When Winona and Judah are about to be sold, Maxwell helps them to escape to abolitionist John Brown’s camp. Soon thereafter, Maxwell is shot by Thomson and narrowly avoids being burned at the stake by a proslavery mob. Titus stops the mob but arrests Maxwell, who, after a mockery of a trial, is condemned to death. While awaiting execution in prison, Maxwell falls ill and is tended by Allen Pinks, who is actually Winona in disguise. After he recovers, she helps him to escape. In a battle, Judah causes Thomson to fall off a cliff. Before dying, Thomson reveals that White Eagle is the missing heir to the fortune. Winona, Maxwell, and Judah go to England, where Winona marries Maxwell and Judah is knighted. In Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, Reuel Briggs, passing as white, goes to a Halloween party, where he sees the supernatural image of Dianthe Lusk. Soon after, Dianthe is involved in an accident and is declared dead. The extraordinary skill of Briggs, a medical student, revives her. She has lost her memory, and he lets her believe that she is white. They fall in love, but Aubrey Livingston, a false friend of Briggs who knows his secret, blocks all professional opportunities for Briggs, except

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for one that will take him to Africa. Dianthe and Briggs get married the night before he leaves. Briggs leaves Dianthe in Livingston’s care. Livingston, lusting after Dianthe, drowns his own fiancée and withholds Briggs’s letters to Dianthe. Briggs never receives her letters. Livingston blackmails Dianthe into marrying him by telling her of her heritage and threatening to tell Briggs. In Africa, Briggs is part of an expedition looking for treasure hidden in a lost city. Briggs finds the city, Telassar, which turns out to be inhabited. He learns that he is King Ergamenes, whom the civilization has awaited. A birthmark that all members of the royal family have proves this identity. Briggs also learns that Africa was the cradle of civilization. The hidden people of Telassar are highly advanced. Through their technology, he learns the depths of Livingston’s depravity. He returns to the United States in time to hold Dianthe for a moment before she succumbs to the poison she had prepared for Livingston but that he had forced her to drink. Aunt Hannah, an old former slave, explains that Briggs, Livingston, and Dianthe are brothers and sister, all born to her daughter Mira. Hannah had switched Mira’s son Aubrey with the dead infant of the master. Under hypnotic suggestion, Livingston kills himself. Briggs returns to Telassar to rule with Queen Candace. The Characters In Hagar’s Daughter, the major female characters all pass for white for part of their lifetimes. Hagar and Jewel do it unknowingly and are at first appalled when they learn of their African American blood. Both are portrayed as the epitome of gracious womanhood, both before and after they become aware of their backgrounds. Submissive, pious, pure, and domestic, they represent the nineteenth century values of true womanhood and femininity. Aurelia Madison, the sexually vibrant and manipulative daughter of the slave trader Walker and a slave, has none of the above qualities. Although she is an adventuress, the author seems to approve of her actions—she is never punished for her part in the scheme to defraud the Bowens. The central male characters do not always fare well in Hagar’s Daughter. Walker and St. Clair Enson are villains, representing greed and inhumanity. The white men who espouse abolitionism, the young Ellis Enson and Cuthbert Sumner, demonstrate the limitations of their liberalism when each initially disavows his wife upon learning of her African American heritage. They do eventually reject their racist views. Because Winona contains so many adventures and life-and-death struggles, its characters are delineated more by their actions and speech than by particular stylistic devices. Winona, of mixed heritage, evinces personality traits associated with nineteenth century concepts of both masculine and feminine roles. Courageous and determined, she risks her life to care for the imprisoned Maxwell. She also fondly remembers the happiness she experienced in her childhood home and dreams of becoming Maxwell’s wife. Judah, Winona’s childhood companion, embodies strength, intelligence, and vengefulness. Through his forebearance, however, the identity of the missing heir is uncov-

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ered. Winona’s eventual husband, Maxwell, is characterized as a principled man whose English birth accounts for his lack of racial prejudice. The villains, Colonel Titus and Bill Thomson, display no redeeming traits. All the major characters in Of One Blood pass for white at some point in their lives. Briggs keeps his African American heritage a secret; Dianthe, after losing her memory, believes she is white until Livingston tells her; and Livingston believes he is white until near the end of the novel, when he learns that Briggs and Dianthe are his brother and sister. Briggs, the scientific genius, trusts Livingston, who is in truth a villain. Livingston’s evil character is hidden behind a mask of kindness and geniality. Briggs only learns of Livingston’s cruel and murderous behavior by using the technology at Telassar. All the characters from the United States suffer from racial prejudice. Only in Africa is the value of African American heritage recognized. In all three of Hopkins’s novels, most of the characters are not who they seem to be. Use of outward disguises, along with the practice of passing for white, enables the author to build complex characters. Themes and Meanings All three of Hopkins’s magazine novels were first published in serial form in Colored American Magazine. Each episode was preceded by a synopsis, and each episode ended at a suspenseful point in the narrative. In this volume, the synopses have been omitted; only a line stating that the narrative will be continued demonstrates the original episodic format of these novels. The first novel, Hagar’s Daughter, written under the pen name Sarah A. Allen, includes many of the narrative elements used in Winona and Of One Blood. Complex plotting, adventure, suspense, action, and use of disguises, along with multiple and faked identities, appear in all three novels. The main action of each of the novels occurs within white rather than African American society. In order for Hopkins to situate these novels in white society and create strong African American characters who fit into society as members of the upper classes, she relies heavily on the theme of passing for white. All three novels deal with relationships between white and African American characters, relationships that challenged the prevailing views of society, focusing on oftenunrecognized close blood ties between the races. The issues of heritage and inheritance shape these works. One of the major themes in these novels is the improbability of racial purity. So many generations mixed blood that there is little likelihood of anyone being purely white or having only black heritage. Mistaken, false, and multiple identities appear not only as themes but also as plot devices. Some characters are ignorant of their true identities for most of their lives, including Hagar, Jewel, Winona, Dianthe, and Livingston. Others take on false identities to escape punishment, including White Eagle, St. Clair Enson, Walker, and Colonel Titus. At times, characters assume new identities in order to help those in need. For example, Winona changes her name and pretends to be a boy in order to nurse

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Maxwell back to health while he is in prison. Cuthbert Sumner in Hagar’s Daughter and Judah in Winona are the only major characters who have only one name and one identity. The theme of passing informs both Hagar’s Daughter and Of One Blood. In the first novel, Hagar and Aurelia pass for white, and in the second, Briggs knowingly assumes a white identity for part of the novel. Winona, the only novel of the three set entirely before the Civil War, involves the quest for freedom. The Underground Railroad provides an important backdrop for the actions of the main characters. Revenge, another important theme, appears in Winona, acting as a motivation for Judah. Forced to bear the horrors of slavery, he emerges as a strong hero whose desire for vengeance against his former masters causes the truth of Winona’s parentage and inheritance to be revealed. Of One Blood adds a new theme, that of Pan-Africanism. Through Briggs’s discoveries on the archaeological mission, Hopkins makes a case for Africa as the source of civilization and as the place that contains both the history and the future opportunities of African Americans. Critical Context These three magazine novels fit into African American literature among the work of the novelist William Wells Brown; Victoria Earle Matthews, who wrote for the story papers in the 1890’s; and detective novelist Chester Himes. Hazel V. Carby, a noted scholar of African American literature, views the writings of those three authors and Hopkins as providing the foundation of African American popular fiction in the United States. As a high school student, Hopkins won a prize for her essay “Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy” in a contest sponsored by William Wells Brown and the Congregational Publishing Society of Boston. Later, she wrote musical dramas including Colored Aristocracy (1877) and Slaves Escape: Or, The Underground Railroad (1879), which were performed on stage. She published her first novel, the historical romance Contending Forces, in 1900. Between March, 1901, and November, 1903, she published the magazine novels in Colored American Magazine, for which she also served as a strong voice in editorial decisions. The purpose of Colored American Magazine was clearly to attempt the creation of an African American renaissance in Boston. It provided an outlet for poetry, fiction, and art, along with expository prose. Although the magazine fell short of its aims, it prefigured the Harlem Renaissance of two decades later. Hopkins believed that fiction could change people’s lives, particularly if the fiction were published in a mass circulation magazine. In a society that condoned lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and general oppression of African Americans, Hopkins hoped to inform her contemporary readers about their heritage and help them learn to value themselves. Hopkins’s work is highly political, and some noted African Americans disapproved of her political stance. When the management of Colored American Magazine changed, her fiction lost its outlet. At the turn of the twentieth century in the

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United States, it was nearly impossible for African American authors to get their work published on their own. Without the backing of Colored American Magazine, Hopkins’s voice was doomed to silence. Long out of print, the magazine novels have been collected and published in one volume. This volume has had an important effect on African American studies and on Hopkins’s reputation as well, bringing scholarly attention to a long-neglected author. Bibliography Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Discusses all three of Hopkins’s serialized novels, demonstrating that the author became more experimental with each. Concentrating on Of One Blood, Ammons makes the point that the novel centers on the figure of the black female artist. Compares Hopkins’s use of the supernatural with that of Toni Morrison. Baker, Houston A. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Situates the work of Pauline Hopkins within the tradition of African American women’s writing. Although concentrating on Contending Forces, Baker’s comments also illuminate the texts of the three magazine novels. Braxton, Joanne. “Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance.” In Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, edited by Joanne Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Discusses the contribution Hopkins made to twentieth century African American literature. Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. Extended study of Hopkins’s representations of enslaved and free African American bodies. Carby, Hazel V. Introduction to The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Provides a brief biographical sketch, focusing on her contributions to Colored American Magazine. Also examines Hopkins’s three magazine novels, emphasizing their political content. _______. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. This work provides context for the writings of Hopkins. Also discusses her major fiction. Concludes that panAfricanism informed her later work, particularly Of One Blood. Otten, Thomas. “Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race.” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 59 (1992): 227-256. Deals with Of One Blood and discusses psychological theories prevalent at the time Hopkins wrote the novel. Often posits that Hopkins adopted William James’s view, that the hidden self was both conscious and personal, in order to link mysticism to long-held African American ideas concerning the mind. Tate, Claudia. “Allegories of Black Female Desire: Or, Rereading NineteenthCentury Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority.” In Changing Our

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Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Discusses nineteenth century African American attitudes toward marriage and freedom. Concludes that Hopkins’s texts are liberating. Cheri Louise Ross

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MAKER OF SAINTS Author: Thulani Davis (1948) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Mystery; psychological realism Time of plot: Summer, 1989 Locale: New York, New York; Woods Hole and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts First published: 1996 Principal characters: Cynthia “Bird” Kincaid, a former artist who is now a radio sound engineer Alexandra “Alex” Decatur, a provocative Surinamese performance artist and friend of Bird, who falls eight stories to her death Frank Burton, Alex’s lover, an acerbic art critic, who Bird suspects is responsible for Alex’s death Charles Marshall, a wealthy married investment broker whose affair with Bird is instrumental in her emotional recovery The Novel In Thulani Davis’s Maker of Saints, Alex Decatur, a performance artist and sculptor known for works that draw on exotic religious imagery, falls to her death from the window of her Manhattan apartment house. Her neighbor and friend, a former artist named Bird Kincaid, is certain that Alex did not commit suicide as the investigators conclude. Rather, she is convinced that Alex’s controlling lover, an influential art critic named Frank Burton, is responsible for her death. For some time, Alex had heard the sounds of violent arguments coming from their apartment. Much earlier, Burton had written a disparaging review of Bird’s first solo show, a review so scathing that it caused Bird to stop painting. She works now as a sound engineer for public radio documentaries. Her obsession with proving Burton responsible for the crime energizes her. As Bird begins to catalog Alex’s effects left in her apartment, she comes across boxes of videotapes containing Alex’s experimental performance pieces. Bird is certain that Alex, fearing for her life, used the tapes to leave clues behind in case anything happened to her. Bird becomes intrigued by the tapes, which reveal aspects of her friend that she had never suspected and which shed light on the psychologically twisted relationship Alex maintained with Burton. When Bird herself is brutally attacked in her apartment house by a man wearing a ski mask, she feels suddenly vulnerable. She seeks the help of Charles Marshall, a successful broker, ten years her junior, who is articulate, artistic, handsome, athletic—and married. Determined to help her recover, he drives her to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where she begins to feel the first liberating return of emotion— specifically, a hunger to be with him. They make love.

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Bird returns to New York determined to compel Burton to confess. She is sure that Burton has been in her apartment in her absence: The tapes she had begun to catalog have been rearranged. Bird believes that Burton is searching for a tape in which Alex speaks indirectly but emphatically about the threat of violence. She decides to create a trap to catch Burton when he returns to the apartment. Inspired into artistic fury, she constructs an elaborate art piece in Alex’s apartment, a stunning multimedia creation that involves carnival masks, clay figurines of demons, dozens of Bird’s self-portraits (many of them nudes), and a full-length mirror. The centerpiece is a grisly altar, actually the television, strewn with mannequin parts. On it runs a tape of Alex, her voice part of the display. The artwork constitutes an allegorical environment intended to intensify Burton’s feelings of guilt. When Burton arrives, he is disconcerted but refuses to admit his guilt even when confronted by Bird wearing a jaguar mask. A brutal fight ensues, during which Bird realizes that her earlier attacker was in fact Burton. The police, called earlier by Bird, break up the fight, and Burton is charged with stalking and assault. Bird gloriously returns to her art, keeping in her studio a Mexican figurine from Alex’s collection. The figurine, a woman giving birth to another fully grown woman, represents the maker of saints. It symbolizes for Bird Alex’s part in Bird’s rejuvenation. The Characters In a novel that plays with images of ghosts and metaphors of detection, Alex Decatur, whose absence in death makes her a ghostly presence, figures as the novel’s central mystery. The complexity of Alex’s identity is represented to readers in recollections, in conversations, and most eerily in the tapes Bird watches. The more Bird learns, the less certain she is. Bird had suspected that Alex’s relationship with Burton was tempestuous, but she discovers that Alex and Burton were locked in a sadomasochistic relationship. Plagued by low self-esteem, Burton—the product of a workingclass Brooklyn background and never at ease with his prestige as a critic in the elite world of New York’s art scene—was tormented by insecurities. He was possessive and suspicions that Alex was unfaithful. As a way to forestall any violence, Alex played on Burton’s insecurities with stories she made up or took from her friend Bird’s promiscuous past. Alex exploited Burton’s masochistic need for humiliation. On one tape, Alex explains her strategy indirectly by refering to Scheherazade, the narrator of Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708; also known as The Thousand and One Nights), who forestalled her death each night by telling the cruel sultan enthralling stories. Alex’s mind games apparently succeeded for a time, until Burton came across undated love letters that Bird believes finally pushed him over the edge. Her discovery of the psychological warfare between Alex and Burton stuns Bird and is integral to her recovery as an artist. Bird, who as a promising artist in the early 1980’s had indulged her passions simply, with an array of stunning men, comes to realize the complicated ambiguity of passion. Bird’s own affair with Charles Marshall, who is very much in love with his wife, confirms this complexity. In a narrative that

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borrows from Christianity, Bird must experience the “fortunate fall” into awareness (indeed, the narrative plays with imagery of falling drawn from Bird’s haunted dreams of Alex hurtling to her death, forever falling). The demons that Bird must exorcise, then, are not only the profound anger that she harbors for abandoning painting and her regrets over not helping her friend sooner but also her own naïve, unexamined assumptions about love. Themes and Meanings The central theme of Maker of Saints is Davis’s emerging definition of the artist in a tumultuous world of sudden, complicated violence. Indeed, Bird watches television news coverage of natural disasters, terrorism, and war. The artist within such a world cannot be content with simplifications and certainties. Davis divides the narrative into three sections: “Static,” “Color Bars,” and “Image.” The titles evoke the progression of a television screen from noise to a meaningful picture. For a contemporary artist, however, clarity of vision involves acknowledging the murkiness of behavior; insight is not the same as clear sight. It is this epiphany that finally frees Bird to return to her art. The novel draws on many religious systems—Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Judaism, and Voodoo. Davis, not endorsing the doctrine of any single faith, uses this multiplicity of belief systems to compel readers to acknowledge the human capacity to be stunned into mystery, to accept a world that defies rather than concedes explanation. The closing chapter, similarly, provides a harrowing account of Alex’s last moments, but one entirely conjured by Bird’s rejuvenated imagination without definitive proof. By skewering the conventions of detective fiction and leaving the question of the murderer’s identity subject to conjecture, Davis makes ironic the need for solution. It is the risk of simplification that Davis, as artist, disparages. Bird recalls her twenties, when she saw the world as a carnival palace full of dazzling surprises. In the wake of her abandoned career and the death of Alex, however, the world has become more like Edgar Allan Poe’s castle in “The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy” (1842; better known as “The Masque of the Red Death,” 1845). Bird must reject both of these models of the world as simplifications. The world is neither magical nor doomed; rather, it is an intricate mix of both. Critical Context Davis’s fictions draw on history (her first novel tells the story of the segregation of a Virginia high school through the eyes of young black student who meets Martin Luther King, Jr.). That context is part of Maker of Saints as well, as it draws on two sensational trials. Most obvious, Davis draws on the 1985 death of Cuban performance artist Ana Mendieta, who fell from her apartment. Her sculptor husband was tried for the crime but was acquitted despite much circumstantial evidence. More subtly, Davis draws on the acquittal of O. J. Simpson after a nearly two-year-long trial in the early 1990’s—although in the novel, the accused killer is white and the victim is a woman of color. In both cases, the legal system, as the expression of Enlightenment

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science and the faith in absolutes, appears ironic, compelling a troubled culture to accept mystery and the stubborn resistance to revelation as itself a revelation. In her determination to explore rather than clarify the heart, Davis, as an African American woman, sets her complex psychological narrative squarely against the rise during the early 1990’s of so-called soul sister narratives, in which black women characters, often stuck in midlife doldrums, rediscover their identity and retap the energy of being alive through the discovery of an uncomplicated romance. Bibliography Blocker, Jane. Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Analyzes the artist Davis used as model for Alex. Investigates the implications of performance art as a way to achieve identity. Davis, Thulani. “In Our Own Terms.” In Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the Nineties, edited by Elizabeth Nunez and Brenda M. Greene. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Davis’s statement on contemporary African American literature, her own writing, and the place of the latter within the former. Davis, Thulani, Greg Tate, Portia Maultsby, Clyde Taylor, and Ishmael Reed. “Ain’t We Still Got Soul?” In Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure, edited by Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Transcript of a roundtable discussion between Davis and four other important African American writers on the state of contemporary African American literature and culture. Farrington, Lisa E. Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004. Chronicles the era of performance art and the implications of such engaging pieces as cultural and social metaphors for women of color. Goldberg, Rosalee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Standard volume that defines the cultural climate upon which Davis draws—the lively and often shocking world of performance art in the 1980’s. Helpful for understanding Davis’ use of art as a vehicle for an artist’s private redemption. “Thulani Davis.” In Contemporary Authors. Vol. 182. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Biographical information and bibliography of early reviews. Joseph Dewey

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MAMA Author: Terry McMillan (1951) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: 1964-1984 Locale: Point Haven, Michigan; Los Angeles, California; New York, New York First published: 1987 Principal characters: Mildred Peacock, a black mother of five Freda, Mildred’s oldest daughter Curly Mae, Mildred’s sister-in-law and best friend The Novel Mama presents the social, communal, psychological, and individual story of Mildred Peacock and her struggles to achieve a satisfying life for herself and her children. Mildred is a resident of Point Haven, Michigan, an industrial town about ninety miles from Detroit. The novel details Mildred’s financial, romantic, and parental problems as she rears five children to adulthood. Though titled Mama, the novel is more concerned with showing one woman trying to be the best mother she can be while also trying to be the best person she can be. The opposition of these roles (mother and individual) fuels much of the tension, conflict, humor, and character development that make Mama such a success. Set when the Civil Rights, Black Power, student protest, anti-Vietnam War, and feminist movements made their most significant cultural gains, Mama positions its protagonist’s struggle within the larger context of a rapidly changing America. Everybody is a little off balance. The setting emphasizes the turbulence and chaos that mark Mildred’s life. Mildred’s children are relatively young during the beginning of the novel, and this period is dominated by Mildred’s finding ways to keep a roof over their heads, put food on the table, and keep utilities from being disconnected. Being sole breadwinner is difficult. She works at various times during the 1960’s as a waitress, domestic, unskilled laborer, and, with reluctance, briefly as a prostitute. Eventually, she goes on welfare. Motherhood consumes much energy, and Mildred needs diversions; although Mildred is a mother, McMillan insists that she is also an individual, an individual who needs sexual expression and romantic love. Mildred has several sexual affairs. She even marries two more times, but her heart is never quite with the men she marries, so she divorces them. The 1970’s find Mildred living in Los Angeles, where she is able, because of a new government program, to buy a house in the San Fernando Valley. Her daughters continue to do well in school and in their personal lives. Her son Money still uses drugs

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and returns to Point Haven, where he is arrested and is in and out of jail for a few years. Mildred likes her house with its pool, but she is largely unhappy, continues to drink too much, and has relationships with men that are only temporarily fulfilling. Her financial troubles—the mortgage, the utilities, money for her daughter’s wedding—continue to plague her, and, in a remarkable sense, she is no better off than when she lived in Point Haven. Her move to Los Angeles on a personal level is a failure, but on a maternal level it is a good one: Angel and Doll go to college and develop into intelligent, independent, and productive young women. It is only when Los Angeles overwhelms her that Mildred decides to return to Point Haven for good. She reasons that who she is and what she wants out of life have little to do with geographical location. In the 1980’s, with her children grown and apparently successful (she does not know the mess Freda has made of her life), Mildred has more than enough time to reflect on her life, her choices, and the many problems she has had to face, often alone. She is disturbed by physical changes: her sagging breasts, her weak health. The alcohol and cigarettes diminish her health so much that she has little choice but to give them up. While recovering her health, she rediscovers her self. Most important, Mildred discovers that she has worked exceptionally well within the limits of the role of mother, and she decides that, though she is older (forty-eight at novel’s end), her life is not over. She makes plans to enter a community college and make a career for herself, for she knows that, having reared her children into successful adults under sometimes horrible conditions, she can do other equally satisfying tasks as well. The Characters McMillan ties her development and articulation of major characters in the novel to her protagonist, Mildred Peacock. Mildred’s personality, conflicts, defeats, and triumphs influence her children and Curly Mae and announce as well as advance the novel’s most significant themes and issues. In this regard, McMillan treats character development as an outgrowth of Mildred’s pervasive presence in the novel. As a mother, Mildred is both conventional and a rebel. Her conventional mothering is seen in her struggles to provide the necessities for her children. Mildred provides for her children in conventional ways when she is married to Crook. Though her husband is abusive and has extramarital relationships, Mildred is usually home making sure that her children eat well, are clothed properly, and do their homework. Although Mildred drinks and goes out to nightclubs, she is usually available to her children. When, however, Mildred divorces Crook, she begins to provide for her children in less conventional ways. She works inside the system at first. She works at an automobile factory until she is laid off, works as a waitress, and, for a brief period, works as a prostitute. She even, with reluctance, goes on welfare. In Mildred’s struggle to keep a roof over her children’s heads and to find some space for herself, McMillan shows Mildred’s willingness to make even more daring choices, such as taking in male boarders who have risky or unknown pasts or marrying men she does not love to have financial security. Mildred often rationalizes that,

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since she has little access to power or even a decent job, it is acceptable for her to operate outside the system to secure her children’s comforts. McMillan makes clear that being poor and a single mother is difficult. Mildred often escapes her financial struggle by excessive drinking and smoking; she is not always aware of what is really happening to her children. The irony in McMillan’s presentation of Mildred’s unfolding character is clear: The mother who struggles to do so much for her children neglects them in more important ways. It is Mildred’s unintentional neglect that helps McMillan to define and shape the portrayals of Mildred’s children. As the oldest child, Freda is more sensitive to her mother’s struggles and feels the pain that Mildred is experiencing. At the same time, she does not approve of the ways in which Mildred chooses to meet the family’s financial problems. Mildred, for example, has too many barely known adult men coming and going in her house. One of these men almost rapes the teenaged Freda, a fact Freda does not tell her mother. A child who understands her mother’s struggle and pain, Freda is also a child who needs her mother’s love and does not always feel that she has it. As a consequence of Mildred’s struggles to make ends meet, Freda becomes determined to live differently. As soon as she gets the chance, she leaves her hometown in search of a career and love in Los Angeles and, later, New York. Mildred’s other children also have scars from their mother’s unintended neglect. Once Crook leaves, Money, as the only boy, feels it is his responsibility to help his mother alleviate her financial woes. He begins stealing, then smoking, drinking, and eventually using heroin. Like Mildred, he lives and operates outside the system, and his illegal activities land him in jail. He tells his sisters that he has always felt alone in the family, which he believes centers around the girls. Bootsey, like Freda, silently disapproves of Mildred’s parenting. She rebels against her mother’s choices by becoming extremely conventional. She marries right out of high school to a stable man who works at the local Ford plant, and she begins a life that is financially secure but boring. She spends her time acquiring the right clothes, the right house, and the right appliances for her house. Angel and Doll, the two youngest daughters, also create lifestyles that oppose their mother’s. They go to college, marry successful men, and essentially live the suburban experience. As much as Mildred’s daughters deliberately try to live life differently from Mildred, they all have a number of relationships with men that are similar to many of Mildred’s. As they grow older and begin having children of their own, moreover, Mildred’s daughters come to understand that their mother did the best she could with the little her environment offered. Themes and Meanings Brought up in the school of hard knocks, Mildred Peacock has developed a style all her own that either attracts or disgusts most people. She is one of the most original and humorous characters to appear in African American fiction. McMillan creates and sustains Mildred’s style primarily through urban black speech patterns, but what she

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does with that language is all hers. She will say what is on her mind, cursing, shouting, and telling people where to go. Coupled with Mildred’s verbal expressiveness are her actions. She is always planning and taking actions to make her living condition better, to keep the eviction notice from going up and the electricity from being turned off. Her actions often pit her against the value system of her community, and in these conflicts her true individuality surfaces. Mildred considers many members of the black community to be hypocrites, for they disdain behavior by others that they readily condone for themselves. Mildred will have none of that; her essential presentation of self is unvarnished. McMillan’s characters are real, funny, sad, sometimes pitiful, prepared to live fully. As the oldest, Freda wants to do something to ease her mother’s pain and suffering. She understands the toll the bills take on Mildred, and she knows, too, that Crook and the other men do not appreciate her mother. Freda wants to help her mother, and she wants to help herself. She begins planning early for ways to escape the confines of Point Haven. She experiments with smoking and drinking when she is a child, and this behavior foreshadows Freda’s adult problems. A number of themes provide direction for Mama. McMillan emphasizes through Mildred’s life and her children’s that positive change is possible; black people need not be confined or thwarted by race or class limitations. In telling the complicated but ultimately life-affirming story of Mildred’s almost never-ending battle, McMillan insists that one’s actions do count for something, that effort and hard work can pay off. Life must be more than struggle. For black women, motherhood is important, but it is not everything. In detailing the life of African Americans who hover in or near the underclass in American society, McMillan shows that hope is precious, as long as it is tinged with real effort. Mildred’s story is not a fairy tale, is not a rags-to-riches story. Instead, her story is laced with real struggles and obstacles that face African Americans born into poverty. Equally important, Mama gives expression to the communal nature of African American family life. Most actions that Mildred or her children take have something to do with assisting one another. For McMillan, family is most important and is the key unit capable of withstanding social, economic, and psychological forces. From beginning to end, Mama records the inside story of an African American family at the crossroads of an American society ripe for change. Because McMillan does not gloss over the pain and suffering her characters experience, their limited triumphs are believable. Critical Context Mama fits into two major African American literary traditions: social realism and black women’s writing. One hallmark of African American literature is its attention to portrayals of real African American life. Often social, political, and economic institutions that oppress African Americans are scrutinized, and how African Americans respond to oppressive conditions can be the focus of a literary work or a major part of the work’s backdrop. McMillan presents with sensitivity and knowledge the hard-

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ships that a number of African Americans experienced during the 1960’s and 1970’s, a time when America promised much for African Americans but offered little. Mama shows one family’s attempts to better itself while adapting to social change. The Peacock family learns that, regardless of what oppressions lurk outside the home, the family is the point of reference. McMillan’s ability to capture the full scope of African American life—the pain, the humor, the triumphs, the earthy and poetic language—dominated initial responses to the novel. Mama, in giving expression to a number of women characters, articulates and extends the literary tradition of black women. McMillan details Mildred’s inside and outside story, the private self and the public self. In this sense, Mama looks back to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and its theme of a woman’s journey of self-discovery and self-definition in a world that does not value black women. This theme of a black woman searching for self while trying to fulfill some other role, such as mother or wife, also informs McMillan’s Disappearing Acts (1989). McMillan’s first two novels reveal the beautiful and complex stories of those who live in urban black America. Bibliography Chapin, Andrea, and Sally Wofford-Girand, eds. The Honeymoon’s Over: True Stories of Love, Marriage, and Divorce. Includes McMillan’s nonfiction narrative, “One Hundred Questions I Meant to Ask Him,” which provides insight into experiences that have shaped her fiction. Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Emphasizes how black female subjectivity helps to structure many texts in the black women’s literary tradition. Sees Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a paradigm for other black women writers. Hirsch, Marianne. “Maternal Narratives: ‘Cruel Enough to Stop Blood.’” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Argues that the presentation of black mothers in contemporary black women’s fiction is best understood by analyzing the interactions of daughters in relation to a complicated maternal history. McMillan, Terry. “Terry McMillan: The Novelist Explores African American Life from the Point of View of a New Generation.” Interview by Wendy Smith. Publishers Weekly 239 (May 11, 1992): 50-51. McMillan discusses Mama, her other fiction, and her place in the publishing industry. Richards, Paulette. Terry McMillan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Part of the Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers series, this study of McMillan includes interpretation and analysis of Mama and places it in the context of the writer’s other works. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. A collection of interviews with African American women writers.

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Wade-Gayles, Gloria. No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984. Chapter 4, “The Halo and the Hardships: Black Women as Mothers and Sometimes as Wives,” discusses black women writers’ creation of mothers. Pays attention to the contrary impulses or allegiances that dominate black mothers’ lives: allegiances to family and to self. An acceptance of one may mean the other suffers or is neglected. Charles P. Toombs

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MAMA DAY Author: Gloria Naylor (1950) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1799-1980’s Locale: Willow Springs, a fictitious island off the coast of South Carolina; New York, New York First published: 1988 Principal characters: Ophelia (Cocoa) Day, the protagonist and one of the narrators in the novel Miranda (Mama) Day, elderly matriarch of the Day clan and unofficial ruler of Willow Springs Abigail Day, Miranda’s sister and soul mate, grandmother to Ophelia George Andrews, a successful engineer with heart trouble Sapphira Wade, a distant ancestor of Miranda and a famous conjure woman Ruby, Miranda’s adversary, a jealous, murderous woman Bernice Duvall, a woman desperate to have a child Ambush, Bernice’s husband Dr. Buzzard, a bootlegger, gambler, and herbalist with pretensions of possessing magic Mrs. Jackson, an administrator at a shelter for boys Dr. Smithfield, a local physician The Novel Mama Day proceeds, for the most part, in linear fashion and covers the period from Ophelia’s meeting with George in New York to the events occurring prior to and during the storm at the end of the novel. The novel’s present is tied to the past, so much so that Naylor provides her readers with a family tree dating back to 1799, when Sapphira Wade was born. Much of the narration is in the form of a conversation between Ophelia and George, who, although dead, communicates with his wife. Their sections involve their feelings, values, dreams, and responses to the events they experience. In addition to the first-person narratives, Naylor uses Miranda as the character through whom the third-person-limited point of view is revealed. From Miranda’s perspective, readers learn about superstition, magic, family history, and dreams. Before the novel’s action begins (Naylor has divided the book into two parts, one focusing on New York and the events leading to George’s visit to the island, and one concerning the events that occur during his stay), Naylor provides her readers with a

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first-person prologue in which Miranda discusses the legend of Sapphira Wade, the history of the island, and a young college boy whose studies prevent him from understanding his past. The point of the prologue is to establish the importance of listening with a mind open to a reality at odds with facts and reason. Part 1 concerns events in both Willow Springs and New York City, two different worlds associated with two different people, Ophelia and George, who have been shaped by their backgrounds. Although Ophelia believes that “those were awful times for a single woman in that city of yours,” she learns, with George’s help, to see the city as distinct communities and to acknowledge and overcome her own prejudices. Significantly, they are brought together by a letter that Miranda “doctored” with a powder, though George could not allow himself to believe in such things. As they become more intimate, developments unfold in Willow Springs that lead to the conflict in part 2. Bernice’s efforts to have a baby result in her near death and Miranda’s intervention. The episode establishes Miranda as a midwife/physician capable of performing a gynecological examination, as a herbalist/pharmacist whose drugs come from a chokecherry tree, and as a conjure woman whose rituals guarantee Bernice’s fertility. Ruby’s “credentials” are also revealed. She has, according to Miranda, murdered her first husband and is responsible for the death of Frances, who was married to Junior Lee, who becomes Ruby’s second husband. Naylor writes that “Junior Lee is getting more than a woman, he’s marrying himself an event.” At the end of part 1, a jealous Ruby suspects that Junior Lee has designs on Ophelia. Of course, Miranda anticipates the impending trouble. In part 2, Ophelia brings George to Willow Springs, which he describes as a “paradise”; but despite Miranda’s warning, Ruby, after seeing Junior Lee talking to Ophelia, afflicts Ophelia with nightshade and a spell. By unbraiding Ophelia’s hair, which contains the nightshade, Miranda solves half of Ophelia’s problem. To counteract the spell, however, “It’s going to take a man to bring her peace.” George, whom they consider a boy, proves to be the man. After putting a spell on Ruby’s home, which is subsequently destroyed by lighting, Miranda goes to the “other place,” associated with Sapphira. A terrible storm has washed away the bridge to the mainland, and George, who sees modern medicine as Ophelia’s only hope, devotes his energies to rebuilding the bridge. George is eventually persuaded to go to the “other place” to meet Miranda, who has been communing with the spirit of Sapphira. Miranda instructs George to return to the chicken coop at her home. Though he does go to the chicken coop, he suffers a heart attack and dies beside Ophelia, who is healed by his actions. After George’s death, which Miranda had foreseen, Ophelia slowly recovers; in the fourteen years that separate his death from the telling of the story, Ophelia marries again and has two sons, one of whom she names George. She still communicates with George, and she continues to retrace their steps and reevaluate the story as time passes. Miranda, however, has the last word in the novel. In August, she finds Ophelia again, and it is clear that she will succeed Miranda: “A face ready to go in search of answers, so at last there ain’t no need for words as they lock eyes over the distance.”

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The Characters Mama Day is a novel about women, about a historical sisterhood that spans generations. The novel begins with Sapphira’s bill of sale from 1819 and with Miranda’s various versions of the legend that establishes Sapphira as the first conjure woman. The title of the novel suggests that its protagonist is Mama (Miranda) Day, a literal descendant of Sapphira and her spiritual reincarnation, but Ophelia, Miranda’s successor, is the real protagonist of the novel. All three women are related through legend (Ophelia’s story itself assumes legendary status), dreams, roles, and appearance. Early in the novel, Miranda sees the likeness between Ophelia and Sapphira and notes that Ophelia “brings back the great, grand Mother.” Ophelia reveals herself through her narrations to George as a bright young woman who has left Willow Springs for Atlanta and New York but remains “at home” in Willow Springs. She retains her hometown values and beliefs (for example, that the way a man chews his food indicates the kind of lover he will be), but she is ambivalent about superstition and magic—she does not accept the potency of Miranda’s powder on the letter she mails to George, for example. From Miranda’s perspective, however, Ophelia is Sapphira’s spiritual descendant, a woman who, unlike George, will ultimately believe in the efficacy of Ruby’s spell. Although Ophelia is an adult in New York, she continues to be called “Baby Girl” and, later, “Cocoa.” It is not until she has matured and is ready to listen that she becomes Ophelia. Her dreams about drowning call to mind her mother’s drowning and brings to mind the fate of William Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet (c. 1600). After she survives her experience at Ruby’s hands and recovers, she is ready to take her place as a teller and reteller of stories and to fulfill the promise Miranda saw in her. George also develops in the course of the novel. Though his is a disciplined life, he is more open than Ophelia in New York; but his urban background, Columbia education, and middle-class trappings do not prepare him for Willow Springs. He sees the surface paradise but cannot see or listen in order to understand. He is, in Abigail and Miranda’s words, a “boy,” a term Dr. Buzzard also applies to him. Dr. Buzzard tells George that Ophelia’s salvation is in Willow Springs, not on the mainland, but George asks, “What do you do when someone starts telling you something that you just cannot believe?” While George and Ophelia speak conversationally, the sections narrated from Miranda’s perspective are quite different. They contain dialogue, but the essence of the material is in Miranda’s thoughts, dreams, and memories. In effect, Miranda seems both of this world, in which she is midwife, adviser, and guide, and beyond this world, which she can control to some extent. Bernice even brings a dead child named Little Caesar to Miranda in hopes of effecting a resurrection. Naylor presents Miranda’s control ambiguously and comically, noting of her that “when she’s tied up the twentieth century, she’ll take a little peek into the other side—for pure devilment and curiosity.” Unlike Naylor’s two earlier novels, Mama Day contains some positively portrayed African American males. George is unique among Naylor’s male characters. Even

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Ophelia’s unnamed second husband wins Miranda’s accolade of a “good secondbest.” In Ambush, readers encounter another positive male figure: Bernice’s husband is faithful, supportive, and sensitive, so much so that Ophelia uses him as a point of comparison for George. On the other hand, readers encounter stereotypical male characters such as Junior Lee and Dr. Buzzard; Naylor may have altered her portraits of males, but she remains more interested in her women characters. Themes and Meanings Much of the world of Mama Day is fictitious, even mythical, in a manner reminiscent of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Naylor even provides her readers with a map of the offshore island between Georgia and South Carolina, but the island, connected to the mainland by a tenuous bridge, seems otherworldly, a matriarchal paradise. The bridge becomes a passage to a mainland world, which Willow Springs residents distrust: “And we done learned that anything coming from beyond the bridge gotta be viewed real, real careful.” The mainland is the source of real estate developers and education that distances students from reality and truth. Miranda cites the example of “Reema’s boy,” the African American anthropologist whose university education has rendered him unable to listen and to understand. Naylor’s readers face a similar task; they read a story that defies logic and are asked to listen and believe, just like George and Ophelia. Despite the family tree, the bill of sale, and the map, the story of George and Ophelia changes, not for readers so much as for the tellers; as Ophelia says, “there are just too many sides to the whole story.” As Miranda tells about Sapphira Wade, she includes different versions about the death of Sapphira’s husband, Bascombe Wade—Sapphira either poisoned him or stabbed him. However, there is a core of meaning, just as there is a core of meaning in Mama Day, and Naylor invites her readers’ acceptance of truths that do not derive from “mainland” history, reason, and facts. The best storytellers and listeners in the novel are women, the Day women especially. Despite Miranda’s belief that “we ain’t had much luck with the girls in this family,” the strain that passes from Sapphira to Miranda to Ophelia produces strong, nurturing women, as well as storytellers (at the end of the novel Ophelia is telling “myths” to her son George). Ophelia believes that, together, Miranda and Abigail were “the perfect mother.” Miranda, the midwife, is known as “Mama” Day, and Bernice’s problems having and rearing a child keep the idea of nurturing before the readers. Mothers nurture so that their children will seek and learn, and the novel suggests that people “gotta go away to come back to that kind of knowledge,” knowledge about “the beginning of the Days.” Religious imagery pervades the novel, and the reference to “Days” suggests the beginning of time, Creation. The knowledge that Sapphira and Miranda had and that which is promised Ophelia transcends this world and makes of this woman something akin to the conjure woman, the seer, the prophet, and the deliverer of truth.

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Critical Context In Mama Day, Naylor has developed some settings, characters, and themes from her earlier novels, The Women of Brewster Place (1983) and Linden Hills (1985). In each of those novels, she created a fictional world, in the first book an urban and narrowly circumscribed one, in the second, a suburban and more extensive one. Both worlds, however, are consciously created: Brewster Place is the child of developers and politicians, and Linden Hills is created by an African American. Willow Springs, another fictional world, is created by a woman. In fact, Naylor’s worlds tend to be matriarchies in which sisterhood is a recurrent theme. Although it is rare for her women of the same age to be “sisters” (Etta and Mattie in Brewster Place present a significant exception), “sisterhood” seems more common among women from different generations, as is the case with Miranda and Ophelia. While Naylor’s female characters have remained fairly consistent, there appears to be a softening in her depiction of male African Americans. In The Women of Brewster Place, men are portrayed, with few exceptions, as weak, ineffectual drunks, violent fathers and lovers, or brutal rapists. In Mama Day, George and Ambush are devoted, sensitive men who are committed to their views. Since Naylor has acknowledged and bemoaned the fact that the men in the first novel were not favorably depicted, her Mama Day male characters seem the result of a conscious effort to avoid the male-bashing that some critics have noted in contemporary fiction written by African American women. Memory and dreams play a large role in Naylor’s fiction. In Mama Day, Ophelia and George have the same dream about her drowning and his reaching out to her; the dream proves accurate on a symbolic level, because she is floundering and needs his touch to recover. Memory, too, is important because of its role in storytelling, a central concern in Mama Day. In the same way that Miranda remembers stories about Sapphira, she remembers and tells readers about Ophelia’s legend. Ophelia herself has recast her own story, changing it each time as she remembers a slightly different past. In fact, Mama Day seems to be as much about narration as it is about character, which may be another way of recognizing the effect of narration on character. Bibliography Andrews, Larry R. “Black Sisterhood in Gloria Naylor’s Novels.” CLA Journal 33 (September, 1989):1-25. Analyzes the development of sisterhood in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills. Discusses how female power and wisdom are passed from Sapphira Wade to Miranda to Ophelia. Strength of the essay lies in Andrews’s linking of the three novels in setting, character, and theme. Christian, Barbara. “Gloria Naylor’s Geography: Community, Class, and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist, edited by Henry L. Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian Books, 1990. Though Christian does not discuss Mama Day, she does comment at length on several subjects that appear in all of Naylor’s novels: the geographical fictional world, the nurturing sisterhood of women, and the effects of patriarchy. She also provides a helpful comparison of Naylor and Toni Morrison.

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Hudson-Weems, Clenora, ed. Contemporary Africana Theory, Thought, and Action: A Guide to Africana Studies. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2007. Includes an “African womanist reading” of Mama Day by Adele S. Newson-Horst. Pearlman, Mickey. “An Interview with Gloria Naylor.” High Plains Literary Review 5 (Spring, 1990): 98-107. Suggests that Mama Day, like the two earlier novels, concerns space and memory, the created world of Willow Spring and the ties to the past. Sees the relationship between Miranda and Ophelia as one between a mother and daughter. Saunders, James Robert. “The Ornamentation of Old Ideas: Gloria Naylor’s First Three Novels.” The Hollins Critic 27 (April, 1990): 1-11. Relates the three novels to one another. Focuses on legend and myth, calls attention to the tie between Ophelia and her namesake in Hamlet, and notes the symbolic function of names in Naylor’s fiction. Sees the power of love transcending the improbable narrative format, which involves two speakers, one of whom (George) is dead. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Quilting in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 18 (November, 1988): 6-7. Argues that Ophelia’s request that Miranda and Abigail make her a quilt is a central episode in the novel. Concludes that the quilt, made with pieces of material from all the women in the family, incorporates the lives of all the women, good and bad. Ophelia must deal with choices and decide how to handle her family inheritance. Thomas L. Erskine

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THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM Author: John A. Williams (1925Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: May, 1964 Locale: The Netherlands First published: 1967

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Principal characters: Max Reddick, the protagonist, a black American novelist and journalist Margrit Reddick, the protagonist’s estranged Dutch wife Harry Ames, a famous black American novelist and expatriate in Paris who has died unexpectedly Lillian Patch, a black middle-class woman who was deeply loved by Max but feared a life of poverty if she married him Moses Boatwright, a brilliant, Harvard-educated black man whom Max interviewed in prison Bernard Zutkin, an honest, fiercely independent literary critic Marion Dawes, a younger black American novelist who openly competes with Harry Ames Alphonse Edwards, a black government agent posing as a writer Roger Wilkinson, a black government agent posing as a writer The Reverend Paul Durrell, a black leader who preaches nonviolence Minister Q, a black leader who preaches self-defense The Novel Reading as a picaresque novel of its protagonist’s adventures on three continents, a spy novel, and a historical novel, The Man Who Cried I Am is a political novel in the large sense of exploring the causes and effects of the actions of persons, organizations, and governments in their relationships with each other. Its plot is woven of the inner and outer aspects of the life of its protagonist, Max Reddick, whose personal history illustrates developments in American race relations between the mid-1930’s and the mid-1960’s. The story is narrated from the omniscient third-person point of view, but in a voice that often features the dying Max Reddick’s reflections upon his present circumstances or his memories that are stimulated by the funeral in Paris of his dear friend and fellow black novelist, Harry Ames, and his meeting in Amsterdam with his estranged wife, Margrit. The novel’s opening and closing scenes take place in an outdoor café in Amsterdam. In the opening scene, Max Reddick sits waiting for Margrit to walk by, on her

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way home. The day before, after Harry Ames’s funeral, Harry’s mistress had asked Max to meet her soon about papers that Harry left for him. Now he muses about sexual attraction, the role of black artists as entertainers for the Dutch, the role of the Dutch in making the first sale of African slaves bound for North America, his rectal bleeding and pain, his impending death, and his feelings about Margrit. When finally he sees and calls to Margrit, he confuses her with Lillian, his first great love and loss, and he feels an unanticipated rush of love for his estranged wife. He hides his illness from her, as he hides it from everyone until nearly the end of the novel. After making a dinner date with Margrit, he goes to his hotel, where he catches a glimpse of Alphonse Edwards, a black man who will be one of his assassins and who was present at Harry’s death. Thus the novel’s first few pages introduce its plot situation, main characters and motifs, and narrative technique. During the subsequent three hundred pages, extended memory flashbacks present, with Max’s analysis, his development as a black writer; his friendship with Harry Ames and his many lesser friendships and acquaintanceships in the literary world; government, including the White House; journalism; his adventures with women; and his heartfelt, wrenching relationships with Lillian and Margrit. Historical episodes that he experienced or observed as a journalist include the cultural scene in New York City during the 1930’s, combat by a black division in World War II, the expatriate scene in Paris after that war, school desegregation, the Civil Rights movement and the influence of Malcolm X, and the beginning of black African independence. All these elements from three decades have combined in one of the “vicious cycles” that history forms for persons and civilizations, bringing Max to his present location, personal relationships, emotional and physical condition, racial knowledge and position, political entanglements, and approaching death. Meanwhile, as the “plot” unfolds over the next twenty-four hours, Max and Margrit agree to meet again at the café, and Max goes to see Harry’s mistress in Leiden. There he finds that Harry’s papers reveal the work of a group of nations, including the United States, calling themselves the Alliance Blanc, or White Alliance. Considering themselves to be threatened by the possibility of a powerful, united black Africa, these nations have secretly taken steps to prevent that unification. Beyond that, the United States government, with collusion among its branches and major agencies, has drawn up the King Alfred Plan for the detention of millions of black Americans in concentration camps in the event of coordinated and continuing rebellion. In spite of Harry’s warning that possession of this information will bring death, Max chooses to try to make it public. On his way back to Amsterdam, he is killed. In the final scene, Margrit sits waiting for him at the outdoor café. The Characters Max Reddick’s cry of “I am” echoes those of many characters in American literature, but as a black, male victim of racism, Max most notably echoes Richard Wright’s protagonists, Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon, and Ralph Ellison’s nameless protagonist of Invisible Man (1952). Like the last of those, Max is kept running,

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by racists and by his pride, but he runs on three continents. After decades of struggle and of growing success as a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, he sees, with his acute eye for the history that he hates, that his successes have been used by racists and have led him away from himself and to his destruction. In choosing his mode of destruction, however, he is finally able to be true to himself and to strike a blow against the enemies of his blackness and his selfhood. Sitting at the café at the opening of the novel, he knows that he exists because he hurts, physically and emotionally. At the end, on his way back to the café (but actually to his death), he is reminded by Saminone, a trickster figure but the voice of his honest if humbling historical black identity, that he is real. Another device for characterization that Williams uses to make much the same point is Max’s love and loss of two women, one black and one white. In loving Lillian, rather than a white woman, Max affirmed his blackness and his freedom from the symbolic power of stereotyped white womanhood, but he also evaded the problems that would accompany interracial marriage in a racist society. Lillian, however, was more concerned about class. Later, in loving Margrit, at first Max worried that she was a “bleached” substitute for Lillian, or that he was marrying her because she was white. Nevertheless, he made a statement against racism by marrying her. Ironically, then, it was he who damaged their marriage because of racial pressures, while color was not a factor in her love for him. On the way to his death, he finally knows that he loves her for herself, and as himself. Another device for characterization is Max’s friendship, as well as his rivalry, with Harry Ames. Again the ambiguities and ambivalences of selfhood and blackness come into play. Harry is an ambitious and defensive individual who, Max says, packages racial anger as a best-selling commodity. He teaches Max the only valid identity for a black writer in racist America: “I’m the way I am, the kind of writer I am . . . because I’m a black man; therefore, we’re in rebellion; we’ve got to be.” In his choice of deaths, Max fulfills Harry’s imperative and becomes an integrated and heroic self. Because one of Williams’s purposes in this novel is to offer his observations, from experience, of important facts and cause-and-effect patterns in modern American history, another of his techniques for characterization is to model many of his characters partly upon actual persons. Thus, for example, there are similarities between Max Reddick and both novelist Chester Himes and Williams himself, between Harry Ames and Richard Wright, between the Reverend Paul Durrell and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and between Minister Q and Malcolm X. Themes and Meanings To Williams, life appears to be filled with ambiguity and ambivalence, and time has the last word. History is cyclical; each ending is therefore a beginning. Max Reddick’s cry that he exists might be history’s apocalyptic proclamation to American racists that the wheel is turning and black is on its way back up, or it might be Max’s personal assertion that an individual life beats death by choosing a death that affirms the superior value of life as enacted in private passion. History and Max’s dedication

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as a writer, black man, and lover stand toe to toe in dialectic tension, but only time will tell what the new synthesis will bring. History has its ambiguity, and Max has his ambivalence, until a rare moment of clarity when history chooses Max and Max chooses history. For Max, the clarity comes in answer to the question posed throughout the novel: Why is black life so difficult? On the historical level, the answer finally is that racist whites are in so many positions of power that they control any black life that comes to their attention. On the personal level, the answer is that Max is a man who cares and is driven to write. He must know, and to know is to die. Racism has attacked his life like a cancer, and he has helped it along, with his anal retentive analysis, until finally it has brought him to a loosening of his grasp on life. It then presents him with a heroic way of dying. It has thwarted him as a writer until finally, because he is a writer, he is at a time and place to strike back. It has thwarted him as a lover until finally, because he loves, he knows the value of the blow to be struck. The value of the blow that Max strikes—by informing the government that he knows of the King Alfred Plan and then secretly destroying the papers so that the government can never know who has them and might suddenly make them public—is its message to racists in the government that individuals will be willing to die in resistance to implementation of a “final solution.” The King Alfred Plan is more than a metaphor for the extremes of racist damage to Americans. It is a living memory of historical fact. The first concentration camps were used by the United States Army to contain the Plains Indians. Camps were used again in the American colonization of the Philippines, where German military observers studied the plans. Extreme acts of violence are not beyond the imagination of racists in America. As a political statement by a black writer, The Man Who Cried I Am has the power to engage in dialogue with history and with individual readers. Critical Context Williams’s fourth novel brought him international acclaim for the power of his social thought and his artistry. It is a militant novel that was published during a decade of militancy and urgent questioning of the direction that should be taken by the movement for black liberation. Malcolm X, who represented the position that black Americans should defend and free themselves “by any means necessary,” had recently been assassinated by black gunmen who might have been directed by the federal government. Martin Luther King, Jr., who represented nonviolent mass action for redress of grievances, had achieved remarkable early successes but appeared to be losing effectiveness as the backlash by white supremacists gathered momentum. In this context, Williams offered a double perspective on the pervasive effects of centuries-old patterns of American racism. Through his story of the discovery of the King Alfred Plan, Williams dramatized the secretiveness and desperation of racist collaboration and the necessity of unmasking and unveiling the agents and organizations of racism. He warned of the potentially disastrous extent of the racist threat to black Americans and to democracy. Through his protagonist’s life and death, Wil-

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liams illustrated the perversion by racial prejudice and discrimination of every aspect of private and public life, from individual self-concept and romantic love to presidential politics and international intrigue. He also illustrated the terrible price paid by black individuals for racist behavior by whites. Through his protagonist’s attitudes and actions, he espoused the position that black Americans must meet force with appropriate counterforce. Within its literary context, this novel conducts a dialogue with two African American novels that have received major critical attention: Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright and Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison. At the end of Wright’s novel (on pages that James Baldwin dismissed in his 1951 essay “Many Thousands Gone”), Bigger Thomas, in prison and facing execution but no longer blind to his own humanity or to his oneness with all humans, cries out to his lawyer, Boris Max: “But when I think of why all the killing was, I begin to feel what I wanted, what I am. . . . I didn’t want to kill. . . . But what I killed for, I am! . . . I’m all right. For real. I am.” Ellison’s unnamed protagonist, after half-consciously foiling an attempt by fascist racists to erase his black identity, wolfs down three yams on a street in Harlem and affirms his thought of “I am what I am” by remarking: “They’re my birthmark. . . . I am what I yam!” The end of his last yam, however, has been bitten by frost (cold and white), and he is kept running, in vicious cycles, by racists and by his pride and denial, through the remaining half of the novel. At the end, he is neither in prison nor dead, but he is in a hole. He has become a novelist as an act of resistance, and he says that he will soon emerge to take further action. In the 1960’s, many young, militant black writers and readers took sides, pitting what they saw as Wright’s realistic, streetwise, violent solution against Ellison’s assimilationist, ivory-tower counsel of patience. Williams, by making his protagonist an insider who eventually learns better and steps outside, and by giving his protagonist not only sexual virility without violence but two experiences of committed love, is able to both criticize and affirm both Wright’s and Ellison’s perspectives on issues such as the value of historical black identity, the damage done by racism, the role of violence in resistance, the common humanity of African Americans and whites, democracy, and the possibility of America being a home. Bibliography Bryant, Jerry H. “John A. Williams: The Political Use of the Novel.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 16, no. 3 (1975): 81-100. Williams uses the novel to communicate an accurate picture of racism in America, showing whites the extent of the damage done by discrimination and suggesting how African Americans might overcome it. He also uses the novel to show individual struggle for awareness, clear perspective, and self-knowledge in a world in which the truth is ambiguous, motivations are impure, and feelings are mixed. He draws readers into moments of revelation and ambivalence. Burke, William M. “The Resistance of John A. Williams: The Man Who Cried I Am.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 15, no. 3 (1973): 5-14. Max Reddick knows

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the full horror of cyclical human history. His responses to positive experiences in his personal life and his choice of deaths illustrate Williams’s theme of affirmation and dignity achieved through resistance. Cash, Earl A. John A. Williams: The Evolution of a Black Writer. New York: Third Press, 1975. Presents autobiographical elements, historical parallels, and Williams’s ongoing themes. An appendix includes informative interviews with Williams. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. Max Reddick achieves manhood and self-worth by choosing black and human solidarity when he decides to reveal the existence of the King Alfred Plan. Henderson, David. “The Man Who Cried I Am: A Critique.” In Black Expression: Essays by and About Black Americans in the Creative Arts, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969. Presents the historical context for the relevance of Williams’s Alliance Blanc and King Alfred Plan. Muller, Gilbert H. John A. Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Williams devised a form of narration that moves concurrently within two frames, the events and the reveries of Max Reddick’s last hours, to dramatize the lives of individuals caught in the cycle of history. Pettersson, Eva Zetterberg. The Old World Journey: National Identity in Four American Novels from 1960 to 1973. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala universitet, 2005. Compares The Man Who Cried I Am and its representation of national identity to texts by William Styron, Mary McCarthy, and Erica Jong. Starke, Catherine Juanita. Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters, Archetypes, and Individuals. New York: Basic Books, 1971. Summarizes Max Reddick’s development from a token black man who has received social rewards toward being a black avenger figure. Williams, John A., and John O’Brien. “John A. Williams.” In Interviews with Black Writers, edited by John O’Brien. New York: Liveright, 1973. Williams talks of the innovations made in the form of the novel by African American writers because of the impossibility of evading social and political issues, the need to write as a way of maintaining one’s sense of being a real person, the importance of having a humane concern for people’s lives, and the themes of love, guilt felt by black Americans who go to college, and the healing effects of time. Tom Koontz

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MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND Author: Claude Brown (1937-2002) Type of work: Autobiography/novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of work: 1940’s-1960 Locale: Harlem, New York First published: 1965 Principal characters: Sonny, the first-person narrator, a young black man Mr. Papenek, the first adult to recognize potential in Sonny Sugar, a young black girl who grows up with Sonny Pimp, Sonny’s younger brother Danny, Sonny’s friend and mentor in the streets The Novel Manchild in the Promised Land is the odyssey of a young black man through the treacherous streets of Harlem and beyond. In the person of Sonny, the book’s narrator, Claude Brown tells his own story of growth and survival against all odds. Though some of the book is fiction, this autobiographical novel remains an authentic account of Brown’s evolution from tough, hardened streetfighter to a young man on the brink of becoming one of the most powerful writers of the urban African American experience. By the time he is eleven, Sonny is already a member of a street gang called the Buccaneers; the gang’s main objective is to steal as much and as often as possible. After he is arrested for stealing, Sonny is sent to the Wiltwyck School for emotionally and socially maladjusted boys. He joins many of his friends who, like Sonny, have been arrested as minors. He also meets Mr. Papenek, the school’s administrator, who plays an important role in influencing Sonny’s life. Papenek, though physically unimpressive, commands Sonny’s respect through his knowledge, polished demeanor, and overall kindness. For the first time in his young life, Sonny realizes that power can be derived from sources other than the gun, fist, or gang; it can be found within the intelligent, educated mind. Though much time passes before Sonny is strong enough to act on the example Papenek sets for him, he never forgets the faith the older gentleman placed in him. Brown dedicates Manchild in the Promised Land “to the late Eleanor Roosevelt, who founded the Wiltwyck School for Boys. And to the Wiltwyck School, which is still finding Claude Browns.” Returned to his home, where his father physically and verbally abuses him while his mother stands by, sympathetic but powerless, Sonny soon gets into trouble again on the streets, dealing drugs and stealing. At thirteen, he is shot while trying to steal sheets from a neighbor’s backyard clothesline. After he recovers, he is sent to War-

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wick Reform School, thus beginning a cycle of crime and reformatory life that lasts for most of his teen years. Sonny is not stupid, however; he learns from his experiences, and he realizes that his crimes will land him in a real jail with a permanent record. This awareness, combined with his growing fear of becoming another Harlem statistic who falls victim to the plague of heroin addiction, forces Sonny into the decision to move out of Harlem and away from his unhealthy home environment and the streets that seduce him with false promises of wealth and escape. Out of Harlem, Sonny takes on various menial jobs to pay for the classes in which he enrolls. He meets a variety of people who represent to him various alternatives to his former lifestyle, including a white girl with whom he falls in love for the first time. Though her parents soon send her away, Sonny learns not only that he has the capacity for love but also that color lines have lost most of their meaning for him. At the same time, Sonny becomes aware of jazz music and its reflection of African American culture. He begins to explore his roots tentatively through art, first by acquainting himself with various musicians who are passionate about their African heritage and successful in separating art from indulgence, specifically drugs. Sonny learns that when life has meaning, drugs are unnecessary. He then begins to experiment with various spiritual movements. When he hears of the Coptic faith from one of his Harlem friends, Sonny becomes intrigued, not so much by the faith itself as by its insistence on fidelity to African culture and language. His religious involvement gives Sonny a desire to see Africa, although he has never before considered doing anything outside New York. Though his interest in the Coptic faith wears off as he becomes more interested in formal education, Sonny sees the experience as a significant contribution to his growing awareness of self. A turning point in Sonny’s life occurs on one of his visits back to Harlem. While walking down a street one day, Sonny notices a small boy approaching him. The child looks up at him and asks, “What do you do?” Sonny has no answer but asks the child why he wants to know. The boy replies, “I want to be like you.” Sonny then decides that he will indeed do something, become something, so that he will have an answer the next time a child looks up to him. As Sonny is making his decision to return to school and leave Harlem street life behind him forever, his younger brother Pimp is entering the Harlem trap of drugs and crime. Sonny is torn between returning to Harlem in an effort to save his brother and walking away and saving himself. The decision is made for him when he realizes that Pimp can no longer be helped. When Pimp is arrested for armed robbery at the same time one of Sonny’s oldest friends dies of an overdose, Sonny’s last ties to Harlem are broken, and he leaves New York to attend college. The Characters Sonny tells his own story, using a mostly limited point of view that mirrors his attitude at a particular age. For example, young Sonny’s explanation to his little brother Pimp of how to recognize a Jew or a “cracker” shows that he really does not know but will not admit it: “That’s easy. Just ask me. I’ll tell you what they is.” Later, when he

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is sent to Wiltwyck School, Sonny asks to see the director but is shuttled to an assistant instead. “I knew he couldn’t help me,” Sonny thinks. “He was colored. What could he do for anybody?” Sonny views his parents with chagrin as backward Southerners. His mother has only a fifth-grade education, his father one year less. Both mistrust words, play the numbers, and believe in the importance of a steady job over dreams. Both, moreover, become meek in the presence of white authority, a fact that Sonny hates. His mother cannot understand her sons or the street life that Sonny prefers, and she fears for them. Religion offers her some consolation; when Sonny is shot in the stomach, she prays at his bedside. On the other hand, Sonny’s father is either violent or indifferent, and on weekends he disappears entirely to seek refuge in alcohol and women. Before Sonny is sent to Wiltwyck, his father plays a shell game with him, warning, “That’s jis what you been doin’ all your life, lookin’ for a pea that ain’t there.” It is the only bit of fatherly advice that Sonny remembers. Eventually, they do not talk at all. The book is episodic, a vast canvas as diverse and richly peopled as the Harlem of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Brown builds his characters by accretion of details, beginning with a brief sketch or an anecdote. As their names consistently reappear, these young and futile lives deepen and become real. Eventually Sonny’s friends blend into one another by virtue of their sheer numbers—countless youths in juvenile facilities and prison, girls routinely turning tricks at thirteen or fourteen. Brown’s tone here is matter-of-fact and nonjudgmental. This is simply the way it is; this is what happens to real people. As one of his friends says, “Man, Sonny, they ain’t got no kids in Harlem. . . . nobody has time for a childhood.” One of Brown’s real strengths is dialogue. His keen ear catches the blunt street slang and Harlem dialect as he distinguishes between the accents of his characters. Near the end of the book, long conversations between Sonny and his friends offer insight into their behaviors. Danny talks about the lure of heroin and how he finally has been able to give it up. Sugar tells Sonny what has brought her to the streets. Two others try to convert him to the anger and rising power of the Black Muslims. The book is, in a way, a lament for “the Harlem of my youth. . . . happy Harlem, Harlem before the plague” of drugs that changed it so markedly, and also a tribute to those who have endured its trials. Heroin cuts a wide swath through the lives of most of the characters. When Sonny buys heroin for Sugar, who is suffering from withdrawal, he “watched the syringe as the blood came up into the drugs. . . . I thought, This is our childhood. Our childhood had been covered with blood, as the drugs had been.” Only a few of Harlem’s children seem to escape permanent damage. Sonny is finally attending college. Danny, the addict who taught Sonny how to play hookey, is drug-free, married, and rearing two children. Turk, who was with Sonny when he was shot, goes into the Air Force, learns to box, and becomes a successful light heavyweight. He and Sonny agree they are alive only by luck. “We softened to life,” Turk says. “We started becoming people. . . . I guess that’s what this maturity thing is

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about, growing up and being able to face being what you are.” Sonny’s triumph is that he is able to look at himself and his life without flinching and carry on from there. Themes and Meanings Brown ends his introduction to Manchild in the Promised Land with the question, “Where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?” The question summarizes the novel’s themes of displacement and dreams forsaken. Brown’s premise is that since the black man never belonged in the white man’s promised land, the promises the land offers must be forfeited for other dreams and expectations. Sonny’s Harlem, after all, looks very little like any promised land; it is a forsaken hell in which men, women, and children are devoured by their own vices. The escapes of drugs and crime are merely entrances into a lower level of Brown’s inferno, and the white man’s promised land shines like tinsel somewhere “out there” in America, the land of opportunity and equality. Manchild in the Promised Land is the story of one young man’s struggle, yet Brown wants his readers to see a certain universality in Sonny and the book’s other main characters. The Harlem environment itself is a metaphor for the struggle of an entire race; Harlem is united to the black community as a whole by the empathetic struggle for identity, respect, and basic survival. Sonny’s parents represent a defeated generation of African Americans who believed it was best to keep one’s place, grateful to be allowed to live and work in a place like Harlem. Inside this generation, however, is a seething anger that shows itself both in displaced anger toward the coming generation (Sonny’s father beats him out of frustration and confusion) and in the attitude of their offspring. Sonny and his contemporaries are many things—angry, degenerate, self-destructive—but they are not beaten. They do not know where they are headed, but they are moving away from the complacency and decay of their parents into an age that, at the very least, will remember their rage. Sonny and his friends show their rage in various ways: drugs, crime, gang violence. By the time Sonny realizes what most of his friends will tragically miss—that their fast and furious lives burn quickly and uselessly—he has already left behind his youth. This would be a tragedy in any other context, but Brown makes it clear that childhood is no premium in Harlem. Rather, it is a period of time to be endured, a rite of passage, a harrowing ritual of fear and corruption. Sonny survives a shooting, a terrifying experience with heroin, gang fights, and midnight robberies, only to see his hands empty and his road closed. Sonny is boosted over the wall of the Harlem prison by both his acute (and healthy) fear of what he sees around him and his ability to hope for more. Mr. Papenek feeds this hope by recognizing Sonny’s intelligence and potential, and he also shows Sonny the way out, though it will be years before Sonny finally acts upon Papenek’s directions. Education, Papenek demonstrates to Sonny, is real power: Unlike fighting ability, drugs, or pimping money, it can never be taken away. Perhaps the book’s central theme is the tension between autonomy and social restraint. Sonny knows that his only hope of escaping Harlem is to take control of his life. For a young, uneducated black man, however, such control is a fantasy: His skin

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color seems to control his destiny, and poverty keeps him down. When Sonny finally risks the only life and identity he has known to face the social barricades that stand in the way of his search for education and equality, he does so only after realizing that his Harlem, the childlike vision of the dangerous playground, has vanished for all time, leaving behind the ugly realities of urban waste and human misery. Brown depends heavily on the use of dialect and naturalistic description to paint Sonny’s world. He draws Harlem as he remembers it, filled with drugs, crime, and violence, but he also portrays the human hope and warmth that somehow survives. Such tenacity of the human spirit makes it difficult for readers to turn away from Sonny and his world, even when it is painful to look. Perhaps this is Brown’s major accomplishment: to make readers see the black man’s promised land, his America. Critical Context When Manchild in the Promised Land appeared in 1965, it was hailed as a continuation of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s. Its bold use of black dialect, realistic portrayal of the ghetto experience, and searing social criticism attracted critics and readers who were ready for a close look at some of the racial issues that were heating up the political scene of 1960’s America. In this regard, Brown’s voice had found its proper time. A few critics pointed out that the novel did not offer a didactic scheme for black salvation; the book did not, in effect, provide the road map out of the ghetto. Brown responded to this observation by stating that it was never his purpose to illustrate the exact source of Sonny’s salvation, which, perhaps, remained a mystery to the author himself. Manchild in the Promised Land has remained Brown’s strongest and most widely read work. His second novel, The Children of Ham (1976), was generally poorly received by critics, who noted its sensationalism and an absence of the warmth and humanity so central to the earlier novel. Manchild in the Promised Land, however, continues to hold its place in the African American literary canon as one of the first works to portray accurately and honestly the black struggle against a hostile environment and social system. Bibliography Brown, Claude. The Children of Ham. New York: Stein & Day, 1976. The author’s nonfiction account of the life of African American children in New York’s ghettos. Davis, Charles T. Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981. Edited by Henry L. Gates, Jr. New York: Garland, 1982. Davis contrasts the use of sexuality in novels by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, using Claude Brown’s work as part of his analysis. Davis contends that Brown, when compared to other black writers of his time, may appear as a “raving sensualist” because of his graphic and frequent allusions to the sexual aspect of black culture. Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Karl discusses Brown’s

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work in the context of the “journalistic fiction” of the latter part of the twentieth century. He also examines Brown’s motives for working with the first-person narrative and using the author as subject. Ostendorf, Berndt. Black Literature in White America. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1982. In an essay entitled “Contemporary Afro-American Culture: The Sixties and Seventies,” Ostendorf quotes from Brown in regard to the black literary movement in those two decades, which Ostendorf contends saw an explosive exposure for African American culture. He argues that Brown and others, from musicians such as Otis Redding and Ray Charles to writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, fed the fire. Petesch, Donald A. A Spy in the Enemy’s Country. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. Petesch traces the evolution of self and personality in black literature from Frederick Douglass to modern writers. Manchild in the Promised Land is included in a discussion of the question of “disappearing selves” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and other representative works. Petesch’s argument is that the main characters in these works, Brown’s included, do not surrender self but rather continue to survive and fight. Sánchez, Marta E. “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture, 19651995. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Explores connections between Manchild in the Promised Land, the African American literary canon, and the literary canons of Hispanic immigrants to the United States. Penelope A. LeFew

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MARKED BY FIRE Author: Joyce Carol Thomas (1938) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: September, 1951, to February, 1971 Locale: Ponca City, Oklahoma First published: 1982 Principal characters: Abyssinia (Abby) Jackson, a black girl with an indomitable spirit Patience Jackson, Abby’s mother, a queenly, loyal, patient, and religious woman Strong Jackson, Abby’s father, a gifted storyteller and owner of a barbershop Mother Barker, a medicine woman Trembling Sally, a deranged woman who trembles and shakes Lily Norene Washington, Abby’s best friend Brother Jacobs, a church deacon The Novel A heavily pregnant woman named Patience looks up from picking cotton and sees a tornado bearing down on the cotton field. Mother Barker, one row over, begins to pray. The tornado picks up speed, destroys cotton in a circle around the workers, and then lifts harmlessly into the sky. That night, Mother Barker brings food to the exhausted Patience, who is alone in her cabin. Her husband, Strong, has not accompanied her to the cotton fields because he can make more money in his Ponca City barbershop. On the following day, Patience has a baby girl, Abyssinia, while she is working in the field. The birth takes place on cotton sacks between the foreman’s fire and the weighing-in bin. A spark flies out of the fire and falls on the baby’s cheek, leaving a scar in the shape of a cotton blossom. While still a baby, Abby begins to hum when the congregation sings at church. She grows up playing with the other children of Ponca City and searching for roots with Mother Barker. In her father’s Better Way Barbershop, she hears yarns spun by his male customers. She makes ice cream and plays games with her best friend, Lily Norene. When Abby is ten years old, she is about to be given an award for reading the most books of anyone in her grade when another tornado strikes. During the storm, the children are safe in the school’s basement. When they come out, they see that everything has been leveled. Abby and Lily Norene find a neighbor woman named Miss Sally hiding behind a tree. Her mind seems to be gone, and she trembles constantly. Abby’s

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father, who has lost his barbershop, sits motionless on the vacant lot where it used to stand. Ten days later, he leaves town on a bus. Abby is devastated by the loss of her father. Not long after his disappearance, she returns some empty milk buckets to a deacon in her church, and he rapes her in his barn. She becomes mute and develops pneumonia while recovering from her injuries. While she is still in bed, Trembling Sally comes into the room and accuses Abby of just pretending to be sick. A few days later, Sally throws a shovelful of wasps at Abby. As they sting her, she regains her speaking voice. Months later, Lily Norene asks Abby to tell her about the rape. “I felt like I was being spit on by God,” Abby replies. With their breadwinner gone, the Jacksons need financial assistance, but when a social worker calls Abby a “dirty nigger,” they refuse help and manage to survive by eating wild greens. Every day, they have a different type of potherb as their main dish. At a lunch break during cotton harvest when Abby is fifteen, she tells the workers a story about a girl named Lubelle who never cleaned her room. Lubelle loved a snake, which she kept in her closet. When Lubelle’s mother scrubbed out the dirt and killed the snake, the girl sickened and died. They buried her next to where she had buried the snake, and a blackberry vine sprang up on the spot. The girl became the plant’s berries and the snake its thorns. On her way home after work that day, Abby goes swimming in a river. Trembling Sally pushes her under the water three times trying to drown her, but Strong Jackson arrives back home just in time to pull Abby out and force the water from her lungs. After her parents are reunited, Abby feels whole again. She begins to learn the secret arts of healing with roots and herbs from Mother Barker, who, in anticipation of her coming death, asks Abby to sing “Deep River” at her funeral. When Abby says that she cannot sing, Mother Barker assures her that she has not lost her voice, and that the music is still there. Abby believes her and is able to sing beautifully when the time comes. By 1970, Lily Norene is married to an abusive man and has five children. She is broken both in body and in spirit. Abby tries to heal her, but fails. When Lily Norene discovers that her husband has taken some of their canned goods to another woman, she has a stroke and dies. While Abby is caring for three of Lily Norene’s motherless children, Trembling Sally sets their house on fire. Abby and the children escape, but Sally is burned to death. Abby takes the children to Healing House, the Barker home, which is now hers. Women come with food and stay to stitch bedcovers. They agree with Abby when she says, “The holy water of women can mock the fires of hell.” She is twenty and ready to try her wings. The Characters In Marked by Fire’s people-centered society, characters speak in dialect. They use double comparisons such as “more deeper” to get across a point. Older women rehash the day while rocking on porches in the evening. Men do their gossiping at the barber-

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shop, but people of both sexes seem to know everything there is to know about everyone else. Women help with birth and are involved in the care and discipline of children. The heroine, Abyssinia Jackson, stands as a symbol of the universality of black experience. Long ago an African kingdom called Abyssinia became known as Ethiopia, a name derived from a root meaning “burned faces.” As a newborn baby, Abby was burned by a tiny ember which left a permanent scar on her face. In conjunction with the book’s title, her name suggests that all black people carry this mark of fire, even though the scar may not be visible. Abby is a highly intelligent, musically talented daredevil who often gets into trouble. She watches films and soap operas on television and retells the folktales heard from her elders. Her physical description is somewhat sketchy. She has tiny hands and feet. She is neat, wears French braids in six separate plaits, and is skinny. Her parents are seen mostly through the eyes of others, and her father takes center stage, even though he disappears for a good part of the story. Patience, Abby’s mother, can pick two hundred pounds of cotton in a day, is an immaculate housekeeper, and is so organized that she hangs related items together on the clothesline to dry. She likes pretty clothes and is a warm, loving person who is sometimes capable of meanness. Toward the end of the novel, her hair is turning gray. She is a perfect wife for Strong, who is a natty dresser with expressive eyes that are often used to flirt with other women. He is the life of any party because he has a sense of humor and is a good talker. He has a rich, deep laugh and is ambitious, but he abandons his family when tragedy strikes. When he returns to them, all is forgiven, even though they have been destitute in his absence. Mother Barker is a saintly character, aptly named because she is glib and loud when she talks. She might be called Abby’s godmother. Lily Norene, Abby’s best friend, has yellow skin, a broad nose, and soft Cupid’s bow lips. She is a complainer and a follower. Both Abby and Lily Norene are victimized by brutal men, but Abby has the strength of character and the support system to enable her to overcome the trauma. Evil is personified in three characters: Brother Jacobs, the rapist; Trembling Sally, a deranged woman; and an unnamed female social worker. The social worker and Brother Jacobs are really minor characters, but Jacobs becomes major because of his effect on the heroine. He is a flat character with no personality who is described as a farmer with nappy orange hair. The social worker is a stereotype. She is hard-hearted. Her eyes are rock blue. She is machinelike, and her smile is automatic; her cheeks are described as pale and pasty. Another stereotype is the school principal. He is ugly, bald-headed, and short. He frowns perpetually and talks as if he has marbles in his mouth. Themes and Meanings Abyssinia is a special child. Marked by fire at her birth, she arises from the ashes like the legendary phoenix. Reborn in youthful freshness, she seems untarnished by childhood traumas.

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Women of her community are a support system for her, bringing to mind the chorus of classical Greek drama as they comment on, elaborate, and explain the action. Their responses, however, are African American, rather than Greek, in style. The comments come in a rhythmic flow that may sometimes rise to a pinnacle of emotion. The story’s women work through love and through food, which is another language for love. It is this love that enables the characters to surmount obstacles. Names help to delineate character. The name Abyssinia, with its biblical allusions to ancient Africa, represents the victory of all black persons over force, oppression, and evil—the Deacon Jacobses and Trembling Sallys of the world. Patience and Strong are descriptive names, not only of the protagonist’s parents, but also of the race as a whole. Mother Barker’s name indicates that she is Abby’s second mother. She is also a guide of sorts, as she teaches Abby about herbs, cooking, and healing. Lily’s name suggests her light color, her purity, and her fragility. She is Abby’s foil, her opposite. Abby is strong, and because of that strength she survives. Lily Norene is too weak and soft to endure what life has parceled out to her; she has a stroke and dies. Characters frequently emerge through dialogue. For example, Strong tells a story in his barbershop about how he got away from his wife to go to a dance one evening after their baby was born. The story reveals that Patience is queenly and is the color of creamed coffee, but it also gives details about Strong: what he wears, his sense of humor, and his feelings toward his family. Sometimes a character is rounded out by implied comparisons. Trembling Sally is like a bag lady as she raids garbage cans and puts their contents into a sack. She is compared to a tornado that has no control over its actions as it wreaks its destruction. Several times, her eyes are described as “coals of fire.” Evil ghosts of southern folklore have such eyes. Sally’s clothes make her look like a scarecrow. This simile foreshadows that Abby will prevail in their confrontations, because scarecrows may be fearful, but they are essentially harmless. Tornadic fury and healing roots are oppositions of a sacred, primitive earth. Abby, the main character, is born outdoors, close to the earth. The most important symbols of the work are fire, which both cleanses and destroys; water, which heals and is holy; and the tornado, which is evil because of its terrible destruction. The eye of a tornado is described as being full of red pepper. Eyes of people are important in the book; eyes are depicted as windows into the soul. Eyes “turn funny” when a person contemplates evil. They collect the sun and pass its healing power on to the sick through stares. Moonstones sparkle in Abby’s dark, black eyes when she is a toddler, foreshadowing trouble to come; moonstones are bad luck. Major strengths of the novel are its character development and its lyrical language, which seems to have been inspired by biblical psalms. The tone is uplifting, and the work is sprinkled liberally with metaphors. Abby is a modern heroine who does not achieve recognition through her relationship to a man but becomes a leader and healer in her community through her own efforts. During her rape, even though the sky is clear, she hears thunder. In African super-

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stition, thunder means that God is angry, so Abby is certain that the rape is a punishment for something she has done. Dreams serve to foretell events and to promote healing. Water is also a healing agent. In Abby’s first dream after the rape, she swallows the blue sky. Mother Barker has told her earlier that blue is the color of the will of God. In her dream, Abby accepts God’s will, so that the stinging wasps are the only stimulus she needs to make her able to talk again. In Marked by Fire, water is holy and can heal. When a flood comes, Abby can walk again. She still cannot sing, because her voice is a gift from God that she does not want to accept. In her mind, each gift must be paid for by a punishment. At this stage of her recovery, she is able to function, but she is not able to participate fully in life. When Trembling Sally tries to drown her, another cleansing of her spirit occurs. She absorbs the meaning of the story about Lubelle and the snake; the story is a metaphor for rebirth. It says to those who listen that sweetness and thorns go together in life just as they do on a blackberry vine. The rape, one of the thorns in Abby’s life, will not completely block her access to joy unless she allows it to do so. She has a second dream that adds to her wisdom. In it, she is told by a tornado, personified as a black woman, that storms, like people, are children of God. They have no choice but to be the way they are. Since Trembling Sally has been compared to a tornado, Abby begins to understand that the poor woman, like the specter of her dream, cannot help herself. Until this moment, Abby has believed Sally to be meting out harsh, but deserved, penalties for some imagined wickedness. Now, Abby sees Sally’s actions for what they really are, the rancorous behavior of a lunatic, and she can take charge of the situation. Before Sally’s third attempt on her life, Abby hears an owl prophesying death. That night, she dreams about running through fire, and she hears Mother Barker shout out her name. When she awakens, she finds Trembling Sally setting fire to Lily Norene’s house. This time, Abby does not need her father. She saves herself and the orphaned children with whom she is sleeping. Sally is the one who dies. Strong’s return home is the catalyst for Abby’s healing process. With her last dream, in which she stands under a rushing waterfall and hears a child sing, recovery is complete. Marked by Fire is written in short chapters that are dated to give the effect of a diary. Epigraphs precede sections composed of from one to four of these chapters. The setting is rural and old-fashioned. Everyone washes on the same day, keeps chickens, and tends a vegetable garden in the backyard. The book’s themes concern the movement from innocence to maturity and the process of rebirth after adversity. Critical Context Joyce Carol Thomas was the author of five books of poetry and five plays when she published Marked by Fire, her first novel, in 1982. That year, it won the American Book Award for children’s fiction in paperback. It was also named a best book of the year by the American Library Association and by The New York Times. It was made

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into a musical called Abyssinia (1987) by Ted Kociolek and played Off-Broadway with an all-black cast. Bright Shadow (1983), a sequel, takes Abyssinia into college and a romance. The story continues in Water Girl (1986), which takes place in California. Its heroine is Abyssinia’s daughter, Amber, who has been adopted by another family. Thomas has also published two other novels, The Golden Pasture (1986) and Journey (1988). Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Complete history of the African American novel and its practitioners. Places Marked by Fire in its proper literary context. Childress, Alice. Review of Marked by Fire, by Joyce Carol Thomas. The New York Times Book Review, April 18, 1982, 38. A laudatory early review by a noted novelist and playwright. Childress praises Thomas for finding “a marvelous fairy tale quality in everyday happenings.” Earhart, Amy E. “Joyce Carol Thomas.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Includes biography of Thomas, critical overview of her works, and bibliography of those works and of secondary sources. Randall-Tsuruta, Dorothy. Review of Marked by Fire. The Black Scholar 13, nos. 4-5 (Summer, 1982): 48. Praises Thomas’s “poetic tone” and “fine regard and control of dialogue.” Rollock, Barbara. Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Garland, 1988. Gives a useful factual summary of Thomas’s career. Discusses her editorship of Ambrosia, a newsletter for black women, and her lecturing in Africa, Haiti, and the United States. Thomas, Joyce Carol. Bright Shadow. New York: Avon Books, 1983. The sequel to Marked by Fire follows Abby into college. Winner of the Coretta Scott King Award as an outstanding contribution to literature for African American children. Yalom, Marilyn, ed. Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1983. Discusses the central role of women in Thomas’s fiction and explores the real-life sources of her characters. Josephine Raburn

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MAUD MARTHA Author: Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Early 1920’s-1940’s Locale: The South Side of Chicago First published: 1953 Principal characters: Maud Martha Brown, the novel’s protagonist Helen, Maud Martha’s sister Papa, Maud Martha’s father, a janitor Mama, Maud Martha’s mother Paul Phillips, Maud Martha’s husband The Novel Maud Martha does not have a conventional plot; the thirty-four brief chapters relate a series of fragmentary incidents in Maud Martha’s life. Brooks, using the thirdperson-limited point of view, constructs an episodic story of an ordinary African American woman’s life, beginning with Maud Martha at the age of seven and ending with her second pregnancy. Historical events (the Great Depression of the 1930’s and World War II) affect Maud Martha’s life but are not a major theme. The novel focuses on the title character’s domestic life, first as a child and later as a wife and mother. Maud Martha’s relationship to her family is affected both by the black residents of Chicago’s South Side and by the larger world of white people. Although the life of a black family is of central interest, white people enter the narrative in several incidents. The reader is always aware of the white world as a controlling political and social presence in the lives of these African Americans. Young Maud Martha is revealed as shy and studious with a strong need to be “cherished.” Her home life is portrayed as loving and secure, with a poetic description of her schoolmates, the recounting of a frightening dream about a gorilla, and her sadness and wonderment at her first experience of death, that of her grandmother. Underlying the benign surface of these childhood events is a darker theme. Maud Martha is insecure over the impending visit of a white schoolmate who, she fears, will find her house bad-smelling and shabby. She also understands, but forgives, her father and mother for preferring her light-skinned sister, Helen. While Maud Martha has a strong feeling of self-worth, she nevertheless expects to be judged less lovable because of her dark coloring and nappy hair. Although she dreams of living someday in New York, Maud Martha chooses marriage with Paul Phillips. She imagines that he will always be cramped in this marriage, desiring the love of pretty, light-skinned women, but she believes that he will

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love her for her goodness and sweetness. It is clear that Maud Martha has adopted the standards of beauty of the white world. Maud Martha gradually becomes disillusioned with the “grayness” of her married life. Instead of her dream apartment, she must settle for two rooms on the third floor of a run-down building. Within these thin walls, she learns to live with the sounds and smells of the other tenants as well as with the roaches that defeat her constant scrubbing. Although Brooks’s description of married life is subtle, even elliptical, it is evident that Maud Martha and Paul are sexually incompatible. Moreover, Paul cannot appreciate her artist’s sensibility. He covets membership in the Foxy Cats Club, representing the high life in black society, but he is not accepted. With the birth of her first child, Maud Martha contemplates the meaning of marriage and attempts to establish the family traditions she had known at home, but Paul’s lifestyle and friends defeat her. Maud Martha’s life, however, is not dismal. Her poetic view of the details of everyday life and her appreciation for the resilience of poor African Americans in the South Side Chicago neighborhood show her instinctive love of life and her qualities as a survivor. The final episode describes the end of the war and the optimistic announcement of her second pregnancy. The Characters Maud Martha Brown is the book’s only fully developed character, and it is through her consciousness that the story is told. The third-person narration allows the author the flexibility to enter Maud Martha’s mind, to record the dialogue with little comment, and to make ironic observations through the narrator. Since the novel focuses on Maud Martha’s inner life and the effect of external events on her development, other characters are described only briefly. The author, however, gives many of these characters depth and substance through the poetic economy of her description. Occasionally, as in the case of two white women who insult Maud Martha, these characters border on stereotypes. Maud Martha’s immediate family includes Papa, a janitor, a comforting father who offers the family security. Nevertheless, Maud Martha perceives that Papa loves her older sister Helen more because she is attractive and lovable. Mama is outwardly loving but unable to help Maud Martha at one of the crucial moments of her life—the birth of her first child. Helen, two years older than Maud Martha, makes only brief appearances in the novel. As a teenager, Helen attracts boys and scolds Maud Martha for losing herself in her books. Helen eventually marries an older man, a doctor. Through the impersonal narration of the conversation between Maud Martha and her mother, readers understand that the mother disapproves of Maud Martha’s marriage but admires Helen’s choice of a husband who will offer his wife material comforts. At the beginning of the novel, Maud Martha is a child of seven; in the final scene, she is a housewife with a husband and daughter and a second child on the way. In portraying her central character, Brooks concentrates on the precise description of people and objects that characterizes her poetry. As a child, Maud Martha compares herself

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to dandelions, flowers like “yellow jewels for everyday.” Shy and book-loving, she does not want to become famous or have people notice her. Because of her dark coloring and nappy hair, she does not consider herself beautiful. Maud Martha’s dream at the age of eighteen is to have an exciting life in New York City, but she settles instead for marriage to Paul Phillips, a grocery clerk. Paul has lighter coloring than Maud Martha, and, as the events in the novel reveal, has adopted the beauty standards of the white world, desiring light-skinned women. Their first apartment is a crowded, roach-infested building that cramps Maud Martha’s spirit but does not defeat her optimism. By revealing Maud Martha’s interior life and by reporting the narrator’s view of events, the author creates a portrait of an incompatible marriage. Paul lacks the sensitivity and imagination to share his wife’s interest in music and theater, even though he goes along with her to make her happy. Maud Martha, however, like Brooks herself, sees life with the eyes of the artist. Her spirit soars above the dreariness and defeats of her daily life. Although the story is episodic, with little dramatic action or plot, Maud Martha emerges as a complex, fully developed character. Limited by her environment and her natural reticence, Maud Martha nevertheless surprises both readers and herself. As a black woman of her time, she has been trained not to create a disturbance or call attention to herself. However, she responds with maternal fierceness when a white department-store Santa Claus tries to ignore her daughter. She also has a secure sense of self-worth, despite her fear of rejection for her dark coloring. When her white employer threatens her integrity, she reacts with quiet courage and dignity in refusing to accept the insult. In the person of Maud Martha, Brooks succeeds in creating both an ordinary young African American woman of her time and a complex, unfinished individual who views her life with hopefulness. Themes and Meanings Maud Martha is an incisive portrayal of a young black woman in the white world of the 1930’s and 1940’s. The novel also expresses a number of themes that Brooks would continue to explore in her poetry. Underlying the surface events of Maud Martha, for example, is the theme of “double-consciousness” first defined by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois believed that African Americans played a double role in life as individuals seeking their own identities and as outcast members of a racist society that forced them to act deceptively as a condition of their survival. In Du Bois’s view, the black artist was especially torn by this conflict, which could not be resolved until African Americans were accepted as fully participating members of society. Several incidents in the novel reveal this conflict. When Paul and Maud Martha go downtown to a theater, they must buy their tickets from an usher instead of daring to enter the lobby. Maud Martha enjoys the film for its music and scenes of beautiful places, so unlike her gray apartment. When the film is over, Paul and Maud Martha hope the white people will not notice them. In a beauty shop, a white woman selling

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lipsticks for black women casually says the word “nigger,” apparently unaware of her rudeness. Maud Martha is deeply disturbed that neither she nor the owner of the shop is willing to confront the white woman about the insult. When Paul is laid off, Maud Martha takes a job as a servant for Mrs. Burns-Cooper, who treats her as a child and is condescending about what she imagines to be Maud Martha’s home life. In enduring the insult, Maud Martha understands for the first time how her husband (and, by extension, all black men) feels about the treatment he receives in the working world. Neither Mrs. Burns-Cooper nor Maud Martha quite understands why Maud Martha quits at the end of the day. Brooks herself had worked briefly as a domestic; the incident is a portrayal of the hypocritical relationships between African Americans and whites. Maud Martha’s deepest outrage occurs when she takes her young daughter to visit a department-store Santa Claus. The white Santa makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with the black child. In explaining the incident to her daughter, Maud Martha is enraged as she identifies with the pain of her child. In portraying the lives of black people in Chicago in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Brooks makes readers aware that the harshness of their lives is the result of the racism of whites who will not share the good things of life and who restrict African Americans to their narrow world of poverty. Brooks also explores the theme of prejudice among African Americans, particularly the preference of African American men for light-skinned women. Maud Martha is dark, with “bad” hair, and feels this prejudice with intense pain. Her father and her male playmates comment about her dark skin and find her less than lovable. Her constant awareness of Paul’s preference for light-skinned women is a source of pain and insecurity. In one incident at the Foxy Cats Club dance, Maud Martha, pregnant with her first child, feels a hateful jealousy as Paul dances with a beautiful red-haired woman and leaves her sitting alone. In Maud Martha, Brooks departed from the protest themes characteristic of such authors of the 1940’s and early 1950’s as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison. Brooks’s novel contains no violence or preaching against racism. Moreover, she avoided the earlier fictional stereotypes of black women: the tragic mulatto (the light-skinned woman who comes to a bad end), the nurturing “mammy” figure, or the exotic creature of Harlem high life. Instead, Brooks portrays, with the vivid poetic imagery that is her hallmark, the vibrant strength of a woman who will fight to find a way to fulfill her potential as an individual with a gift to give to the world. (Brooks intended to write a sequel to Maud Martha in which her heroine’s husband dies and she goes on to a more fulfilling life without him; one chapter of this projected novel was published in 1955.) Maud Martha avoids the trap that Du Bois describes of regarding herself only as the white world sees her. As several feminist critics point out, Maud Martha is a black woman with inner strength and resilience who can keep her sense of self-worth even as she suffers the racism of the white world and of the men of her own race. In Maud Martha, Brooks created a portrait of black life that went beyond the stereotypes of the

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protest tradition. Maud Martha and the people of the South Side are oppressed, often outraged, but they are not tragic victims. The characters Brooks creates, like those who people her best poetry, represent the strength and vibrancy of African American urban life. Critical Context Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. As she was regarded primarily as a poet, Maud Martha, her only novel, received little serious attention from the public or from literary critics and was considered a minor work. Black reviewers were generous but often missed the importance of the novel in the African American tradition. White reviewers emphasized the lyrical quality of the writing as an example of Brooks’s poetic gifts and praised its optimistic courage in the face of hardship. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, however, scholars began to examine more closely the place of Maud Martha in the tradition of writing by African Americans. Some critics view the novel as equal to Brooks’s best work in poetry, while others focus on the psychological dilemma of a black woman facing prejudice within a race that adopts a white standard of beauty. Feminist critics, however, see Brooks’s heroine as a classic example of a woman repressing rage at the neglect of her individuality and creativity and oppressed by both whites and African Americans. In this view, the novel is a direct link between the earlier work of Zora Neale Hurston, most notably Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and the novels of such black woman writers as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Bibliography Bell, Bernard. “Myth, Legend, and Ritual in the Novel of the Fifties.” In The AfroAmerican Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Views Brooks’s work as a link between the poetic realism of Jean Toomer in the 1920’s and the fiction of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972. Autobiography describing events from Brooks’s childhood and the lives of her own children. Includes a report of her visit to Africa, photographs of family and friends, and three interviews about her work. Reveals the origin of characters and events in Maud Martha. Bryant, Jacqueline, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Maud Martha”: A Critical Collection. Chicago: Third World Press, 2002. Collection of scholarly essays on Maud Martha that read the text from a wide variety of critical perspectives. Christian, Barbara. “Nuance and the Novella: A Study of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha.” In Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985. A reevaluation of the novel from a feminist perspective as a work of social criticism revealing sexism and racism. With its attention to the uniqueness of the ordinary black woman, Maud Martha is not a typical black protest novel.

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Davis, Arthur P. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” In From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers (1900 to 1960). Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Traces Brooks’s development from her beginning as a mainstream poet to her involvement with the Black Arts movement. Pays tribute to her brilliant craftsmanship in poetry and recognizes Maud Martha as one of her best works. Floreani, Tracy. “Maud Martha vs. I Love Lucy: Taking on the Postwar Consumer Fantasy.” In Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts, edited by David S. Goldstein and Audrey B. Thacker. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. This unlikely juxtaposition of Maud Martha with a classic television situation comedy brings out both Brooks’s intervention in mainstream American mythology and the essentially hybrid nature of all American texts. Hull, Gloria T., and P. Gallagher. “Update on Part One: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks.” CLA Journal 21 (September, 1977): 19-40. Brooks discusses a projected sequel in which Maud Martha’s husband is killed and she goes on to live an independent life. Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Valuable information about the autobiographical content of the novel and the negotiations between Brooks and her editor about the possibility of offending white readers. Shaw, Harry B. “Maud Martha.” In Gwendolyn Brooks. Twayne, 1980. Analyzes Brooks’s poetry and prose as an expression of social themes that depict the black experience in America. Sees Maud Martha as a sociological novel but not as a political statement of the kind expressed in Brooks’s later poetry. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Brooks discusses her identification with black readers, the need to support black publishing houses, and her indifference toward critics and biographers. Washington, Mary Helen. “Taming All That Anger Down: Rage and Silence in the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks.” In Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1987. Sees Brooks’s novel as an expression of the anger caused by a society (both black and white) that has repressed the creative instinct of black women. Marjorie Podolsky

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A MEASURE OF TIME Author: Rosa Guy (1928) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: 1920’s-1950’s Locale: Montgomery, Alabama; Cleveland, Ohio; New York, New York First published: 1983 Principal characters: Dorine Davis, a saucy, free-spirited, hardheaded woman Sonny, a natural hustler and Dorine’s great love Big H, a “bookish” club owner and numbers racketeer Harry Brisbane, a failed West Indian restaurateur The Novel A Measure of Time chronicles the “education” of the main character, Dorine Davis, against a historical backdrop of race relations in the North and South over four decades. It is a sprawling, episodic narrative blending fictional and real characters and events. The novel is divided into four books. Book 1 begins with Dorine’s introduction to New York in the 1920’s, especially the glittering black community of Harlem. Although she hopes to begin a new life with Sonny, Dorine learns that he has spent on himself the money she gave him to find a place of their own in the city. This realization ushers in the novel’s first flashback to Dorine’s childhood in Alabama and her earliest experiences with money and men; thus, book 1 alternates between Dorine’s Harlem present and her past in Montgomery and Cleveland. Sonny continues to try to exploit Dorine, who is torn between her sexual attraction toward him and her need to keep her money for her own survival. Sonny “punishes” her by disappearing for long periods of time, but Dorine always hunts him down. Finally, he concocts a scheme to free himself from what he sees as her possessiveness, and he arranges for her to entertain one of his clients, an undercover policeman. Book 2 begins after Tom Rumley, a small-time criminal, has posted Dorine’s bail and convinced her that she needs to move on with her life. He teaches her the art of “boosting,” or shoplifting, and introduces her to his six-member gang. Using Harlem as her base of operations, the nineteen-year-old Dorine travels the country with this group of professional shoplifters. This life is interrupted by the death of her sister and Dorine’s return to Montgomery. Feeling momentarily guilty for having sent her family money but given them nothing of her time, Dorine eventually asserts her independence by hiring a surrogate mother to take care of her sister’s children and her own son; she also promises to finance her brother’s higher education.

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Back again in New York, Dorine becomes the kept woman of Big H, until, bored by inactivity and frustrated by her lover’s inability to satisfy her sexually, she rejoins Tom in a scam involving “selling” the Brooklyn Bridge. Partially because of the success of this operation and Dorine’s inability to be discreet about her own contributions, Dutch Schultz and his Bronx gangsters learn of the money to be made in Harlem; they kidnap Big H, who is eventually freed, but this act marks the end of the nonviolent black criminal class in Harlem and the beginning of lethal white mobsterism in the area. Book 3 takes readers through the Great Depression. Dorine returns to Alabama because her brother-in-law has had a stroke. While in Montgomery, she and her “booster” friend Ann get caught outside during a night of white vigilantism caused by the Scottsboro Boys incident. Her political consciousness is raised, and she toys with the idea of joining the Communists who have rallied in defense of the “boys,” but her need for money prevails, and she continues her shoplifting ways. Dorine seduces Harry Brisbane and moves him and his two daughters into her Harlem apartment. For two years, they live a life punctuated by her road trips and anxiety over Harry’s growing instability. They eventually separate. At one point, Dorine goes to Tennessee to see her brother’s graduation from medical school, only to learn that he cannot legally practice medicine in Alabama. Her brother’s unconcern about this situation infuriates her, and she once again asserts that the rest of her family are dreaming of a better day while she is out in the real world making money and supporting everyone. Book 4 opens as the thirty-six-year-old Dorine is released from a five-year term in prison. Although she still has money in the bank and things in storage, her world has changed since her imprisonment. Harlem is seedier; crime is bigger business. At first aimless, Dorine spends time tending to her natural family in Alabama and her extended family of erstwhile “boosters.” She helps her brother get out of Montgomery in the trunk of her car after he angers whites by trying to organize sharecroppers, and she handles the final affairs of two members of her former shoplifting gang. Back in New York, Dorine invests in Sonny’s new bar, with the stipulation that she will get the bar if her loan is not repaid in two years. Reunited with her son, who is ignorant of his true parentage, Dorine hopes to give him a future managing her business ventures. Her son, however, wants to return to the South now that the Civil Rights movement has begun to energize its people. Tom calls to tell her of Sonny’s fatal heart attack, and Dorine is left lamenting the deterioration of Harlem and wondering about the identity of someone called Martin Luther King, whose cause her brother has just joined. The Characters Some reviewers have argued that the novel has essentially only one real character, Dorine Davis, and that the book’s other characters serve merely as foils designed to underscore by contrast her unconquerable vitality and resilience. This, however, is not a weakness but rather a strength. In Dorine Davis, Rosa Guy has created a forceful

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portrait of a woman pulled between the competing demands of love and personal autonomy. On one hand, there is her need to be physically close to a man, a longing tempered by distrust. Her first sexual experience is not a positive one. She is raped by her white employer, Master Norton. Her subsequent relationship with Sonny also brings more pain than happiness. No matter how hard she tries to make a home for the two of them, Sonny will not be tied down. These early experiences may account for her sexual aggressiveness in later life. She fears lack of control. It is she who stalks Big H and arouses his interest by performing a seductive dance; it is she who seduces Harry Brisbane in Central Park in a wooded area that she has chosen in advance for the occasion. At times both complementary and antithetical to her quest for male companionship is Dorine’s desire for some control over her own life. This longing is objectified in her approach to personal finances. Even as an eight-year-old girl compelled to work in white people’s kitchens, Dorine coerces her grandmother into allowing her to retain ten cents of the quarter she earns per week. That dime gives her self-respect and independence. Even as an adult, she never relinquishes the purse strings, not even for the men in her life. Dorine always keeps an eye on her money. In this regard, Miss Fanny, Master Norton’s wife and the richest white woman of Dorine’s acquaintance, serves as a negative role model. To preserve her marriage, Miss Fanny turns a blind eye to her husband’s philandering. “With all her money and a town respecting her,” Dorine observes in amazement and disgust, “she still had to stand and take whatever this man had to give.” Even though she herself experiences moments of surrender to male dominance, Dorine returns again and again to her own personal strengths for her survival. This may account for the fact that she develops an abiding kinship with her adopted family of shoplifters, a group that comes to mean almost as much to her as her natural family in Alabama. While her blood relations seem to her to be little better than “dreamers” in a somnolent South, her fellow “boosters” are out making things happen. They are “doers.” Through sheer bravado at times, they take charge of a situation and snatch fortune from the jaws of fate. Tom Rumley asserts: “Our risks is double, triple that of white boosters. That’s why we don’t try to fade into no background. We in the acting business. We calls attention to our black selves. We look rich, big time.” This mastery of the moment, even if it is little more than role-playing at times, appeals to Dorine’s sense of personal drama, her view of her life as essentially the struggle of one woman against the world. Even Dorine has her contemplative moments; there are points, especially near the end of the novel, when time in its measured, relentless passage seems to stop her seemingly inexhaustible flow of energy. On her last visit to Alabama, for example, she stops in her car to rest. Upon awakening, Dorine notices what she calls “ivy” on the giant pine trees by the side of the road, “miles and miles of leaves, curtains— delicate green, beautiful to the eyes—deliberately hiding the fact that they were hell-

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bent on squeezing the life out of those once magnificent pines!” Thus, the parasitic kudzu vine comes to symbolize all those forces of life and nature that tend to slow a person down. For Dorine, it has been her fondness for men, her sense of responsibility to family and friends, the exigencies of her lifestyle, including her term in prison. It is, however, time itself that takes the greatest toll. At forty-two, Dorine is left at the novel’s end living more in the past than in the present, measuring time spent rather than time to spend. Themes and Meanings In permitting Dorine Davis herself to tell the story of her own life, Rosa Guy has created a compelling fictional voice, revelatory of stubborn pride and indomitable energy. Dorine pursues her goals of acquiring money and the things that money can buy. Her material needs, however, are counterbalanced by her obligation to her family in Alabama; “bad luck dogs a feller who turns his back on family,” she asserts. These are the two competing inclinations of her character: the urge to keep moving and the longing to make a home, the impetus to personal freedom and the recognition of family and maternal responsibilities. Dorine’s options for earning the money to finance her personal lifestyle and still send funds home to her siblings are limited. In her time, she is told, a black woman has only three ways to make money: clean house, become a prostitute, or steal. Dorine tries all three. As the title indicates, her choices are a “measure” of her time. In essence, the novel is a measurement of Dorine’s personal progress through four decades. She is left largely untouched by the political and social forces affecting the larger black population, whom she divides into two categories: the poor and the “sporting,” or criminal, class. Dorine allies herself firmly with the latter. At times, however, the greater world intrudes. When she first arrives in New York, for example, the followers of Marcus Garvey shock her into an uneasy recognition of her African roots; the flight of Charles Lindbergh points out how white people, not burdened by the pressing, daily need to secure subsistence, have the luxury of going after personal glory. “Education comes in drips and drops to a feller who never went to school,” Dorine tells readers. Even though the narrative is full of references to influential historical figures, Dorine’s education takes place on an individual level. Illiterate until her life with Harry Brisbane, Dorine learns from people including her grandmother, a brothel owner in Cleveland, her fellow shoplifters, and the various men in her life. Her own vision of Harlem, from the brilliant black renaissance of the 1920’s to the drug-haunted seediness of the 1950’s, is colored by Dorine’s own passage through life. In her youth, she extols “the gay times. The wild times. . . . And for me, laughing, becoming the best of the best and being young.” In her middle age, there remain only “memories slinking around the slums, gliding in and out of broken-down buildings, floating over the fallen bodies of junkies, winos.” The image of the city, in Dorine’s eyes, is a “measure of time.” Indeed, the whole novel is, for Dorine, an extended lesson in social and moral ge-

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ography. The Alabama sections of the book, for example, slow the pace of the narrative; until the activist period of the 1950’s, the South is viewed by Dorine as a “region of quiet and inertia.” Dorine is drawn to the North, where the social mobility complements her restless spirit and quiets her impatience with the social and economic constraints imposed on the lives of southern African Americans. In Harlem, she is free to be “her own black self.” This regional contrast is dramatized most effectively in one pivotal, characterdefining episode. On her first trip South since establishing her life in Harlem, Dorine takes the train to Montgomery to visit her sick sister. In the stretch from New York to Washington, she is addressed as “Madam Davis,” and she eats in her mink coat in the dining car. Once she changes trains in Washington, however, Dorine is forced into a sooty “Jim Crow” car and left to share an old man’s fried chicken from a greasy paper bag. She is alternately stupefied and enraged. Earlier in the novel, Dorine comments that the Statue of Liberty has been mislocated; it should have been in Penn Station to welcome black refugees from the segregated South. Thus, setting is also measured by time. Another thematic variation on the book’s title can be traced to Dorine’s belated recognition that “kids ain’t as much a measure of their folks as they the measure of their own time.” Certainly, this is a novel about generational differences. It ends with a sharp contrast between mother and son: Dorine’s lifelong willingness to work outside the system to achieve her goals differs from her son’s political commitment to change the system from within. Dorine’s statement that she “did the hustling (while) other folks did the dreaming” offers an ironic commentary on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, famous “I Have a Dream” speech. It is a measure of Dorine’s time that hustling equaled empowerment; the measure of her son’s time is the promise of political activism. Critical Context Rosa Guy’s critical reputation rests on her prizewinning works for adolescent readers, novels that treat candidly the subject of black-on-black prejudice, especially the troubled relationship between African Americans and African West Indians. For Rosa Guy, A Measure of Time is a departure in that it is only her second adult novel after Bird at My Window (1966). Reviews of A Measure of Time in the popular press have been consistently good, but Rosa Guy has not received the careful scholarly attention that she deserves. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Argues for the placement of Guy’s work within the context of traditional realism and particularly of what Bell calls “Afro-American neorealism,” which asserts that no discussion of character can occur outside a social and historical framework. Brown, Beth. Review of A Measure of Time, by Rosa Guy. Black Scholar 16 (January, 1985): 54-55. Acknowledges that Guy has not achieved the recognition that

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she deserves. Guy’s emphasis on the education derived from life on the streets draws comparison to the works of James Baldwin and Chester Hines. By her focus on Dorine’s overbearing pride and her refusal to forgive, according to the reviewer, Rosa Guy gives form to the instinctive force of the ordinary black female. McHenry, Susan. Review of A Measure of Time, by Rosa Guy. Ms. 12 (July, 1983): 21. Applauds Guy’s novel as an immense, engrossing book that offers readers a sympathetic view of black American life. Dorine Davis’s personality is an engaging blend of healthy assurance and restive pride, of common sense and an unfortunate fondness for attractive men. Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973. Emphasizes Guy’s skill in depicting the psychological damage that can be caused by racial discrimination. Westmoreland, Guy T., Jr. West Indian Americans: A Research Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Includes information on Guy herself, as well as the culture that has informed her writing and to which her novels contribute. Wilson, Judith. “Rosa Guy: Writing with a Bold Vision.” Essence 10 (October, 1979): 14-20. Provides a profile of the artist with special attention to biographical detail that has a bearing on her later composition of A Measure of Time. Guy’s Alabama stepmother, her West Indian father, her parents’ involvement in the Marcus Garvey movement, her growing up in Harlem, and her reluctance to showcase only the positive, middle-class black experience are discussed. S. Thomas Mack

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MERIDIAN Author: Alice Walker (1944) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1960’s Locale: Georgia; Alabama; Mississippi; New York, New York First published: 1976 Principal characters: Meridian Hill, a black revolutionary and civil rights worker Truman Held, a would-be black revolutionary; a civil rights worker, artist, and sometime lover of Meridian Lynne Rabinowitz, a white exchange student and civil rights worker who marries Truman Held Anne-Marion Coles, Meridian’s friend in college Mrs. Hill, Meridian’s mother, frustrated and angry most of the time Mr. Hill, Meridian’s father The Novel Meridian explores a number of cultural legacies important to African Americans. The primary legacy is the meaning of the Civil Rights movement, both to those who were its major players and to future generations. In exploring these ideas, Walker uses characters filled with the spirit of the movement rather than its actual leaders. A novel ostensibly about the Civil Rights movement becomes one that uses the entire African American cultural and historical experience as both background and foreground. This idea becomes clear upon examination of the structural pattern of the novel. The novel begins after many of the major events of the 1960’s have occurred. President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy are dead. Many of the major leaders and players of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements have opted for other agendas, some having little to do with improving black people’s lives. Meridian Hill is still around, trying to do her part to help her people. The novel’s opening scene chronicles Meridian’s attempts to keep the spirit of the movement alive as she challenges a Jim Crow practice of allowing black people to see a carnival sideshow only on one particular day. Thrust into this scene is Truman Held’s return to the South to seek Meridian. After establishing in a brief scene what is left of the Civil Rights movement, which is no longer in vogue, Walker begins a process of weaving bits and pieces of information together to account for why Meridian is the way she is and why Truman and other characters are the way they are. This is not an easy story to tell, requiring the piecing together of many parts of recent and distant African American cultural history to create the “crazy quilt” that is the novel’s major structure.

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The story moves around in time, allowing readers to see what Meridian was like as a girl, how her family helped to make her the kind of person she is, how as a child she saw herself as an outsider in her own family, and how she observed a number of actions of black people in her community that were not always helpful to black children. Meridian’s childhood was problematic for a number of reasons. She always believed that her mother did not love or want her. She remarks that it seemed as if her mother showed affection only in ironing her children’s clothes. Meridian also thought that her mother and other adults in the community did not give children, especially girls, information that might ensure passage through the teen years without getting pregnant. Because real sex education was not provided, a number of girls became pregnant, including Meridian. From her father, Meridian begins to understand the importance of family history and heritage, particularly the American Indian heritage she gets from him. Meridian is upset with her father, however, for spending so much time in the past that he silently allows Mrs. Hill’s kind of parenting to prevail. As Walker weaves the bits of information that are Meridian’s married life, her pregnancy, and her decision to give up her child, she exposes problems in the black community. Meridian’s husband, Eddie, is childish, and he shows disrespect for Meridian by having affairs with other women. More important, when Meridian’s child is born, she discovers that she cannot love him the way she knows mothers are supposed to love their children. When her marriage finally deteriorates, she offers her child to Mrs. Hill, but Mrs. Hill wants no part of her grandchild’s life. The decision to give up her child is the most significant one Meridian has made up to this point in her life. She gives him up because she loves him and knows she cannot be the kind of mother he needs. Once Meridian is by herself, she begins to think about what she is going to do with her life. She is granted a scholarship to Saxon College in Atlanta and enters another major period in her life. In college, she becomes more active in the emerging Civil Rights movement. She encourages black people to register to vote and is arrested for doing so. She discovers that Saxon College, a historically black school, is like her hometown community in that it does things to decrease black people’s chances for living healthy lives while trying to help them. The school wanted little to do with the Civil Rights movement and did not want its students to help the poor people of the surrounding black community. Its goal was to produce young ladies with an orientation to the middle class. Meridian challenges the school’s philosophy when she befriends a pregnant thirteen-year-old girl known as The Wild Child. She brings the unruly and uncivilized girl to her dormitory for a bath and dinner. When giving her a bath, she contemplates who might have raped the girl and why the surrounding black community did nothing to help. This experience shows Meridian that there is a type of mothering that she can give. When The Wild Child is killed by a car, Meridian arranges for Saxon students to be the coffin bearers. She is determined that The Wild Child’s life mean something. At Saxon, Meridian learns the significance of a large magnolia tree, the Sojourner,

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and the story of a slave woman, Louvinie, associated with it. Louvinie, a gifted storyteller, had her tongue cut out because her scary stories led to the death of her master’s son. In paying homage to Louvinie, Meridian begins to appreciate, learn from, and depend on a heritage of black women. Meridian even remembers her own maternal history and the sacrifices made by women for their families. Meridian’s dilemma is how can she measure up to this great historical tradition of motherhood while maintaining some sense of self. Her active participation in the Civil Rights movement becomes a way for her to mother her people and yet not be restricted and frustrated, as her mother was. It is a balancing act, however, that takes its toll on her body, mind, and spirit. Through patching the fragments of her life to those of her culture, Meridian eventually finds the means to a satisfying life. The Characters Meridian is a richly drawn and fully developed character whose creation announced a major shift in black characters in African American literature. Walker created a woman who is part human and part saint and brought the two sides together in such a way that Meridian is always believable. At times, Meridian almost seems possessed in her determination to help black people. She makes a number of sacrifices of self and body as she devotes more time and energy to “her cause.” The first indication that Meridian’s physical and spiritual sides are at war comes when she begins fainting after a grueling day of civil rights work, during which she is often beaten and arrested. She also begins to have episodes of loss of consciousness. The more she works for her people, the less she is concerned about earthly or material things. Meridian travels to New York City, where she encounters friends in the Black Power movement. Their rhetoric disturbs her. Anne-Marion, for example, asks Meridian, “Can you kill for the revolution?” Meridian returns to the South to be among the common folk, and once there she continues to help in any way needed. After her return, she begins to stop caring about personal hygiene and even about eating. She does not cook, but she gladly accepts the food the rural folks bring to her. If a part of Walker’s intent in the novel is to show the toll that the Civil Rights movement took on some people, she achieves that intent most clearly in her creation of Meridian Hill. Meridian is real and immediate. She gets pregnant a second time, after the only time in the novel she has sex with Truman. She has an abortion because Truman does not love her, and she has her tubes tied so that she will never be a traditional mother. Furthermore, Meridian deals with jealousy aimed at the white female exchange students and with sexual exploitation, both issues that she confronts realistically. It is Walker’s portrayal of the process of her confrontations that gives readers the final version of Meridian, one that is succinctly delineated as a believable character. Walker’s skill in character development is also demonstrated in her creation of Lynne Rabinowitz. Lynne grows from a northern white liberal out to do good for black folks to a woman who suffers the loss of her child, Camara, a rape by her hus-

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band’s best friend, and rejection by her husband in favor of a younger and thinner white woman. Equally significant, Lynne grows and learns to appreciate who black people are and what makes up the contours of their lives. An understanding of shared pain, mutual suffering, and shared respect for black people’s essential culture allows Lynne and Meridian to forgive each other. A part of their forgiveness comes from their recognition that Truman is not worthy of either of them. Truman learns that the type of love he had to offer Meridian was not enough and never would be, because Meridian was authentic in ways that he was not. The novel is peopled with a variety of black characters who are the legacy of a history that Meridian learns to appreciate and who are the contemporary rural black folks Meridian serves. The red-eyed man who annually comes to a church service to honor his martyred son and Miss Margaret Treasure, a seventy-two-year-old who thinks she is pregnant, are examples of the unique secondary characters. Themes and Meanings “For it is the song of the people, transformed by the experiences of each generation, that holds them together, and if any part of it is lost the people suffer and are without soul. If I can only do that, my role will not have been a useless one after all.” Meridian’s final understanding of her role in life is one of the most important themes of the novel. In Meridian, Alice Walker documents one woman’s struggle to gain a sense of self and to define her relationship to African Americans. In her struggle, Meridian rejects the popular political rhetoric of would-be black revolutionaries, such as AnneMarion, who spout epithets tinged with hate, in favor of a philosophy predicated on love and on actions that directly help black people in their everyday lives. Meridian, moreover, rejects the many constraints that have, in the United States, attached themselves to black motherhood, the principal route by which women express kinship to the tribe. Meridian’s story shows that there are many ways to be a mother. By returning to the past—understanding her maternal history—and by doing so much of real value for the rural people of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, Meridian becomes a mother who quite simply loves her black people. The scene in the novel that showcases Meridian’s growth as a new kind of mother is contained in “Camara.” In this scene, which occurs in a Baptist church, the focus is on a child, a young man who gave his life for the civil rights struggle, and his father, who lost his mind when his son died. The church service to commemorate the son’s death provides answers to questions Meridian has been toiling over for a decade. She realizes that human life is more precious than anything and dedicates her life to preserving black people’s life and culture. Meridian thus comes to understand that if black people value each other, they will change the social order that oppresses them.

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Critical Context Meridian is considered by many literary critics to be one of Alice Walker’s finest novels, moving in its depiction of the people and events that made up the struggle for civil rights in the 1960’s. Important in establishing the social and political contexts of the 1960’s is her attention to presenting the story from the perspective of a black woman. The novel fills in the empty space where the black woman should be in many fictional and nonfictional representations of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The novel is a seminal one in bringing critical attention to the black woman’s story, which figures prominently in the works of a group of black women writers whose careers were launched in the early and middle 1970’s. These writers define a significant part of the African American woman’s literary tradition. Walker joins such writers as Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Cade Bambara, Mari Evans, and Sherley Anne Williams, whose works extend the African American story. Walker’s novel of a young woman who struggles to define herself and to discover what role she will play for her people is significant in African American literature, for Walker ties Meridian’s development to her understanding of her past. In the novel, Walker describes black people’s culture and history in some detail. The novel comments on the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which insisted that black artists use their historical past in the creation of their works, by showing how this critical advice might be accomplished. Bibliography Banks, Erma, and Keith Byerman. Alice Walker: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Press, 1989. Collects the major and minor material written on Alice Walker from 1968 to 1986. Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. New ed. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007. Major critics discuss the majority of Walker’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Includes two studies of Meridian. Christian, Barbara T. “Meridian: The Quest for Wholeness.” In Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. Argues that Meridian’s growth into a complete and functioning self is tied to her understanding of what black people and their culture mean. When Meridian discovers the connection between self and the tribe, she also realizes that significant social and political change can occur. Cooke, Michael G. “The Achievement of Intimacy.” In Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. Focuses on the African American kinship as the most important part of black people’s lives and sees Meridian’s final understanding of how she is a part of her people, past and present, as the novel’s main theme. Harris, Norman. “Meridian: Answers in the Black Church.” In Connecting Times: The Sixties in Afro-American Fiction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,

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1988. Meridian is discussed as being a revolutionary novel because of its depiction of alternative ways of struggling for civil rights. Emphasizes Meridian’s understanding of the black church in her personal and racial development. Nadel, Alan. “Reading the Body: Alice Walker’s Meridian and the Archeology of Self.” Modern Fiction Studies 34 (Spring, 1988): 55-68. A structuralist examination of Meridian’s relationship to black culture. Charles P. Toombs

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THE MESSENGER Author: Charles Wright (1932) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Late 1950’s and early 1960’s Locale: New York, New York First published: 1963 Principal characters: Charlie Stevenson, the protagonist, an introspective, twenty-nineyear-old African American veteran of the Korean War Shirley, the woman Charlie once hoped to marry Troy Lamb, one of Charlie’s oldest friends in Manhattan Maxine, a precocious seven-year-old who lives in the same tenement as Charlie Claudia (The Grand Duchess), a “drag queen,” the most prominent of an outrageous cast of characters that populates this novel Ruby Stonewall, Charlie’s cousin, a promising blues singer in Missouri before she lost her singing voice Grandma, the maternal grandmother who reared Charlie in a small Missouri town in the 1940’s and 1950’s The Novel The Messenger is the autobiographical first-person narrative of Charlie, a lonely man. The novel is episodic. Each of its forty short, loosely connected chapters recalls an incident from Charlie’s past or describes in graphic detail his current situation as a promising writer who makes a meager living as a messenger for Wall Street brokers. In a style that is at times spare and reportorial, and at other times highly lyrical and expressionistic, Charles Wright portrays this young man’s slide toward an increasing sense of hopelessness and despair in the segregated borough of Manhattan in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. “I grow old in the terrible heart of America,” Charlie writes. “I am dying the American-money death.” A number of chapters are devoted to memories of Charlie’s childhood in Sedalia, a small Missouri town where he was cared for, primarily, by his maternal grandmother. Other chapters are devoted to memories of his quest for greater experiences in the big cities of the Midwest and California, and to memories of his visit to his hometown in 1958, the year his maternal grandmother died. The majority of the novel, however, is devoted to Charlie’s descriptions of his travels through the underbelly of Manhattan, where he encounters gay men, drug addicts, transvestites, prostitutes, and con artists. Many of the New York City chapters present accounts of Charlie’s often-humiliating experiences of cruising bars and Wall Street offices trying to find his own sexual

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pleasure with men or women, or to offer sex in exchange for money to supplement his meager income. His day job as a messenger allows him entrance into worlds from which his skin color might otherwise exclude him. His “tricks” include a wealthy white woman who takes Charlie back to her home in Long Island, a male Wall Street stockbroker who telephones his wife before taking Charlie to an abandoned office, and a male Ivy League student with a clubfoot who wants Charlie to “hurt [him] a little” in order to achieve sexual pleasure. Charlie’s experiences with alcohol, pills, and loveless sex among strangers cause him to feel despondent, sometimes to the point of madness. He attempts to transcend the pain of his life in a number of ways. Charlie finds some comfort by remembering aspects of a more idyllic past, when he lived with his grandparents in Missouri. He also recovers buried religious feelings when he hears gospel singing at The Holiness Sundown Church. “Somewhere there was such a thing as peace of mind and goodness,” he thinks. Charlie finds his main comfort from visiting friends such as Claudia, a male transvestite whose energy and optimism lift Charlie out of his despair, and Maxine, a little girl whose artistic impulses Charlie encourages. Charlie also is able to make sense out of his life by reading great literature. He compares his situation to Quentin Compson’s in The Sound and the Fury (1929), a novel by William Faulkner. Like Faulkner’s character, Charlie considers himself to be at the end of a family line. Charlie also finds pleasure through an appreciation of art and music, particularly through listening to jazz and to the blues singing of Billie Holiday. Charlie’s aesthetic sensibility and his keen use of poetic language and metaphor allow him, in a number of beautifully written chapters, to describe even the drab streets of New York City on a lonely Sunday morning as possessing a quiet power that touches on his religious impulses: Toward the east a ballet of soft, white clouds. The rising sun breaks through shafts of gold. It was as if God had suddenly opened His powerful hand on the world. My heart bows its head in the presence of this force. I am suddenly at peace in this early morning. The sun comforts me; I am swaddled in the folds of those wonderful clouds. Let the rays of the sun touch your body and you will be made holy.

Although the decadence of life in the city has become a part of him, Charlie dreams of an escape from New York. In the last short vignette, Charlie, who has been evicted from his tenement apartment, hocks many of his belongings so that he can buy a ticket to Mexico. This destination promises, at least, further experience and adventure, and, at best, the chance for a new start. The novel ends, however, with Charlie’s skepticism about the future: “There was horror in the knowledge that nothing was going to happen to me.” The Characters Without a traditional plot or an extensive dramatic thread to carry readers through the novel’s many scenes of urban despair, The Messenger attains its meaning primar-

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ily through Wright’s portrayal of the insights and recollections of Charlie, the novelist’s autobiographical protagonist and first-person narrator. Although the novel presents a collection of other characters, these characters tend to exist in relation to Charlie. They are significant to the degree that they shed light on aspects of Charlie’s personality or experience. The artistic impulses of the little girl, Maxine, and the hopefulness of Charlie’s girlfriend, Shirley, for example, present points of contrast to Charlie’s life of poverty, hopelessness, and loneliness. His white friend Troy is similarly important to the novel primarily as an illustration of how difficult even the most well-intentioned relationships can be between members of different races in a society not comfortable with integration. Wright uses the reportorial style often associated with American novelist and short-story writer Ernest Hemingway to depict how Charlie’s feelings have become numbed by his exposure to scenes of pain and humiliation. Charlie responds in an almost frozen way to scenes of intensely painful content and heavy emotion. The juxtaposition of this objective style with the scenes of terror being depicted is Wright’s method of conveying to readers Charlie’s alienation from the emotional content of his own experience. On one of his journeys as a messenger, for example, Charlie comes to the household of a Puerto Rican woman whose baby’s body remains in her apartment after it was brutally murdered by her drunken husband. Charlie describes the scene but erases the devastating emotional content of what he records: I went over and examined the bundle. Inside lay a dead PR baby about a month old. He was naked and his head was turned on his left side. A circle of blood had dried and was caked around his mouth, and his little chubby hands were high above his head. There was a blue-black mark on his right cheek, as if he had fallen against something or had been hit or kicked.

Charlie is not always able to distance himself from an emotional response to his experience through objective reportage. Part of what makes Charlie a sympathetic and well-rounded character is his ability to shape poetry out of his dreary surroundings. His personal integrity is far greater than indicated by the series of one-night stands, failed relationships, and addictions that make up his life. “I look out at the wonders of the sky’s black face. A sharp, autumnal breeze circles through this stone Hades, this island on the Hudson,” he writes. The differences between this lyrical passage of natural beauty found among the squalor of bums and garbage and the cool tones of the description of the murdered baby exemplify a conflict within Charlie’s character. Throughout the novel, Charlie oscillates between exuberance and despair about his life and his future. Themes and Meanings Charlie Stevenson is a messenger both in occupation and in the metaphorical sense of someone who carries a warning to members of a society who refuse to attend to the needs of all citizens. He lives as an outcast in a culture unwilling to accept racial dif-

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ferences or differences of sexual orientation. His sense of being an outsider is especially acute because he is marginalized from mainstream society in many different ways. Charlie is a light-skinned African American. His racial identity is, therefore, often in question. “What are you, Puerto Rican or Filipino?” Charlie is asked by a man who picks him up while hitchhiking. “Neither,” Charlie answers. “I’m colored.” Charlie’s sexual orientation adds to his sense of being an outsider. His sexual practices are ambivalent. At times he is pulled toward Shirley, a woman who wants a love relationship and, possibly, a marriage with him, but he also performs “tricks” with both men and women and with both white clients and African Americans. Because the novel is set before the sexual revolution of the late 1960’s, Charlie’s sexual practices deepen the theme of alienation from mainstream culture. His story is representative of those persons who do not act in a way that is considered to be normal by the majority group. A member of the working poor, Charlie is an outsider in a society that often equates wealth with social standing. Although he is in a position to witness the luxurious lives of those who manage the country’s economic affairs at the New York Stock Exchange, Charlie is employed in the low-paying, low-prestige job of messenger. He watches huge sums of money change hands, but he is not a beneficiary of a wealthy society. His disillusionment with class distinctions becomes severe when he witnesses the hypocrisy of those who pretend to traditional middle-class lives while indulging in extramarital affairs with him. Although he is known to many persons in positions of economic power, his poverty and despair seem unimportant to those who are willing to take advantage of his body. African American novelist and essayist James Baldwin has written that Wright’s story of an outsider whose unusual life and impoverished situation forbid him from entering into mainstream American culture as a peer is representative of the anguish and alienation felt by many others who survive in the anonymity of what Baldwin calls “that awful half-light in which so many people are struggling to live.” Critical Context Wright’s first novel, The Messenger, was warmly received by reviewers, sold quite well, and developed a following for Wright. Lucy Freeman called it “a poignant portrait of a young man without a country or even a city.” Kay Boyle believed it to be among the most significant of a number of contemporaneous novels presenting “ruthlessly honest” portrayals of “the lonely horror of the junkie and homosexual world of New York.” James Baldwin considered the book to be a “happening” that should serve as a warning to “city fathers” that “this is New York, this is the way we live now.” Although these critics endorsed the candor of subject matter and admired the fine writing, some critics found it difficult to distinguish between what was fact and what was fiction in The Messenger. This blurring of the boundaries between genres led some reviewers to think the work was wrongly identified as “imaginative writing.” In spite of the fact that Wright drew heavily on his own experiences—he supported himself as a messenger while composing it—the novel, according to Jerome Klinkowitz,

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deserves its place in the canon of African American literature for shattering old conventions and presenting the usual “‘search for meaning’ theme in a radical new form: imaginative literature, and ultimately fantasy.” Joe Weixlmann has said that the direction open to African American writing in the 1960’s and beyond depends less on prescribed forms and more on the writer’s willingness to mix genres such as realism and fantasy in order to create new hybrid forms of expression. The Messenger stands as an influential example of a novel written with the force and energy of what Charlie calls “the fears, confusion, and pain of being alive.” Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. In chapter 8, “The Contemporary Afro-American Novel,” Bell places Wright among writers of “fabulation and satire,” in that Wright draws on his sense of the ironies and absurdity of the 1960’s and 1970’s in order to spread his tragicomic vision of the times. Byerman, Keith E. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Byerman places Wright within the generation of Ishmael Reed and the early Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) as a leading experimental writer who has redefined what is possible in African American fiction by tending to emphasize the telling more than the tale. Giannelli, Adam, ed. High Lonesome: On the Poetry of Charles Wright. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 2006. While focused on Wright’s poetry, this study provides crucial insights into the writer’s aesthetic investments and his relationship to language that are crucial to understanding The Messenger. Klinkowitz, Jerome. Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. This collection of essays by an important spokesman for avant-garde American writing argues in a chapter devoted to Wright that Wright is important in the tradition of the African American novel for creating a radical new form and for shattering old conventions of the “quest” narrative. O’Brien, John. “Charles Wright.” In Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. A 1971 interview that discusses the influence of the southern writer Katherine Anne Porter on Wright’s sensibility, his estranged relationship to New York City, the role of fantasy in his work, and other subjects. Schulz, Max F. “The Aesthetics of Anxiety” and “The Conformist Heroes of Bruce Jay Friedman and Charles Wright.” In Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973. Part of a larger study that places Wright within the multiethnic 1960’s movement of “black humor” that included writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon. Daniel Charles Morris

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MIDDLE PASSAGE Author: Charles Johnson (1948) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: 1830 Locale: A slave ship in the Atlantic Ocean First published: 1990 Principal character: Rutherford Calhoun, the novel’s first-person narrator, a welleducated and pleasure-seeking freed slave The Novel Middle Passage is Rutherford Calhoun’s account of the last voyage of an illegal American slave ship, the Republic, and of his personal quest for knowledge of the meaning of his life. When the novel begins, Calhoun is a twenty-one-year-old freed slave from Illinois who supports his life of pleasure in New Orleans by theft and lying. To escape a forced marriage to Boston schoolteacher Isadora Bailey and debts owed black underground leader Papa Zeringue, Calhoun stows away on the slave ship Republic, where he meets even greater dangers than he faced on land. As a slave he received a classical education, and since his captain requests that Calhoun write the ship’s log, he both records the ship’s adventures and ponders their philosophical implications. Calhoun makes the journey with strange mates. Captain Ebenezer Falcon, a fearsome dwarf, wants fame as a world conqueror. First mate Peter Cringle is a New England gentleman with a “core of aloneness.” A failed captain of industry, he makes the journey to fulfill his father’s wish that he become a captain of commerce. Nathaniel Meadows, a parson-type who looks “Biblically meek,” sails the seas to escape punishment for the murder of his whole family. Squibb, the cook to whom Calhoun is made assistant, drinks continually. Indeed, all forty crew members are loners traveling in search of a new frontier, Calhoun decides. When the ship reaches the Gulf of Guinea, Calhoun’s philosophical mooring—in a dualism that accepts the oppression of the weak by the strong and a hierarchy that elevates captain over crew and white over black—loosens. So does his faith in selfcentered individualism. First, Calhoun breaks into Captain Falcon’s cabin and discovers a collection of African cultural artifacts, stolen along with slaves. Falcon catches Calhoun and makes him swear a loyalty oath. Next, Calhoun sees the African slave market in action and observes the captain and crew’s cruelty to their cargo of black captives, the Allmuseri. Also, Falcon brings on board a mysterious crate that intensifies the crew’s fear of their captain’s evil designs. From Ngonyama, an Allmuseri appointed shipboard overseer of the captives, Calhoun hears about Allmuseri culture’s ethical basis in sharing and healing. Calhoun is attracted to the Allmuseri. Even as he stands in awe

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of their aura of mystery, he wonders if these primitive Africans are perhaps the original people, the forebears of humanity. During the return journey, a storm’s wind, like a trickster, turns the ship around, sweeping women and children overboard. Heightened chaos and fear cause some crew members to plan a mutiny. When they ask Calhoun to join them, he seals his loyalty to them. However, when next he meets Falcon, Calhoun betrays these crew members and again pledges loyalty to the captain. While Falcon is telling Calhoun that his secret crate holds the god of the Allmuseri, Calhoun steals the key to the Allmuseri captives’ chains. Thus Calhoun, true to his value of protecting his self-interest, aligns himself with all the possible winners. At the same time, he is drawn by the Allmuseri, who represent all humanity. Calhoun’s confusion grows. When he tells Squibb about the hatred he feels toward his own brother, Squibb replies that Calhoun needs love. Then, helping dispose of a dead Allmuseri captive, Calhoun sees himself in the youth’s corpse. At the same time, the Allmuseri, in their brief contact with Americans, are losing something of their African mystery. When the Allmuseri take over the Republic, they are as violent and oppressive as the crew had been; they even make the crew into slaves. Finally, Calhoun learns that powerful American capitalists, including Papa Zeringue, own him, the ship, and its cargo. As the ship goes around in circles, Calhoun seeks meaning in chaos. In the midst of the dire illness afflicting all the survivors, Calhoun offers healing and comfort. Taking his turn to feed the Allmuseri god, he spends three days with it, meeting therein his long-lost father and himself. Now white-haired and almost unconscious, Calhoun envisions humanity united and compassionate. When he is rescued from the sea by a ship carrying Papa Zeringue and Isadora Bailey, Calhoun’s vision is sealed. Calhoun marries Isadora and sets off for home and reconciliation with his brother. The Characters Rutherford Calhoun, the first-person narrator of Middle Passage, is a complex protagonist. He is by education a philosopher and by inclination a trickster. Once a slave, he is now free. His roots are in rural Illinois, but he loves the excitement of New Orleans big-city life. When his gambling debts and Isadora, a woman determined to marry him, force him to escape New Orleans and stow away on the Republic, a slave ship, he adapts quickly to the vicissitudes of a sailor’s life. Calhoun is a survivor because he always puts his own interests first. Calhoun chooses the words in which he narrates his story from some widely diverse word hoards: formal discourse, African American dialect, lyric poetry, nautical jargon, and slang. This rich voice, in combination with his many masks, is Calhoun’s weapon of empowerment in the midst of many adventures, which range from ridiculous to truly life-threatening. The narrator and his voice combine comic and serious tones and speed through language shifts, historical allusions, and zany anachronisms to hold and entertain readers. With this wonderful voice, Calhoun invites readers into his adventures. For exam-

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ple, the Republic’s dwarfed, pedophiliac, tyrannic, and paranoid Captain Falcon threatens Calhoun with dire punishment for stowing away. In a short while, however, Calhoun is the captain’s best friend, and several times during the voyage the two discuss the meaning of life and the nature of God. The trickster stowaway becomes the source of wisdom. Of course, Calhoun also agrees to inform the captain of the crew’s misbehavior; just as easily, Calhoun signs on to two factions of the crew, the mutineers and the loyal sailors. Thus Calhoun’s wonderfully mixed vocabulary records in the ship’s log his comical and yet life-threatening days and nights. For all his wondrous vocabulary, it seems that Calhoun lives on the surface of his life. Nothing affects him deeply, nothing changes him. Then he meets the Allmuseri, an ancient African tribe whose members become slave cargo on the ship. As he observes them, reflects on their strange god (a prisoner in the ship’s hold), and converses with their leader, Ngonyama, Calhoun faces mystery for the first time. When he is in this presence, and in the presence of the suffering of the slaves, something deep within him is affected. It is then that Calhoun’s voice and his character change. This happens as he listens to the African voice of the Allmuseri. Until then, all of Calhoun is American: out for the individual, looking for material success. Now, however, he journeys from these values, from his goals of individual survival and materialistic pleasures, and from a worldview of winner or loser, master or slave, captain or crew, white or black. Calhoun makes his own “middle passage.” As the ship undergoes mutiny, Calhoun sees first the Allmuseri and then his shipmates as his brothers and sisters. He finds himself reaching out to others to heal them and love them. What he finds when he first hears the African voice is a part of himself that he did not know he had. The protagonist Calhoun who left behind his rural past, and his brother, to make his way up in the world on his own, using others when convenient, discarding them when he was done, comes full circle. He ends his journey back where he began, in his rural home, with an American wife and an African child he has learned to love on his journey. Now he is more than a survivor. He has made meaning out of his life. Themes and Meanings Rutherford Calhoun’s first-person narrative voice in Middle Passage is the key to both the protagonist’s character and the novel’s integrity. The protagonist is many persons: learned African American former slave, practiced thief and liar, agrarian turned urbanite turned sailor. His voice blends many levels of language: philosophical discourse, nautical terminology, lyrical images of field and ocean, witty slang and worn cliché. In this voice, Rutherford Calhoun narrates his adventures in the underworld of New Orleans and the society aboard the slave ship. Because Rutherford Calhoun is a freewheeling young man who unexpectedly finds himself on a dangerous sea adventure, and because his first words are the humorous announcement that he, like most men who go to sea, is escaping a woman, his character recalls the naïve and comic Ishmael, first-person narrator of Herman Melville’s

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Moby Dick (1851). There are other elements in Middle Passage that suggest Melville’s narrative as source: a character named Peleg, the mad Captain Falcon, and a cabin boy who loses his mind. Though there are similarities, however, there are differences. Melville’s narrator Ishmael is at first a comic character with matching voice, but as the plot changes from youthful adventure to romantic quest, the narrator’s voice changes to that of a reflective philosopher. Charles Johnson’s narrator Calhoun, on the other hand, maintains consistently a voice that combines comic and serious tones from the beginning to the end of his journal and journey. This multiregistered voice and its speed hold readers gripped securely throughout the book’s language shifts, historical allusions, altered clichés, and zany anachronisms. The narrative voice safely immerses readers in the plot elements: the young narrator’s moves in and out of trouble; the violent storms and shipboard explosions; the slapstick dialogue and philosophical debates in which Calhoun engages the other characters. So, though indebted in some ways to Herman Melville’s young white American narrator in Moby Dick, Charles Johnson’s young ex-slave narrator Calhoun is both trickster and philosopher throughout his African American experience of coming of age. The ship named the Republic suggests Plato’s utopia of philosophical truth, and indeed Calhoun makes the ship a scene of philosophical debate. The ship, however, resembles more the American Republic, for most of the text’s historical and literary allusions parody America’s mythic illusions and pseudoheroes. Thus Rutherford Calhoun’s name recalls two American political leaders, Rutherford Hayes, a president who ended Reconstruction in 1876, and John Calhoun, an ardent defender of American slavery, actions mocked when their perpetrators’ names are worn by a former slave. Also, though Captain Ebenezer Falcon might recall the romantic Captain Ahab, Melville’s larger-than-life hero-conqueror of the metaphysical gods of evil and death, Captain Falcon is a dwarf-sized entrepreneur whose goal is mere fame. Johnson’s use of historical and literary types might have yielded superficial or wooden characters in a different narrative style. Rendered in all the registers of Calhoun’s learned-trickster voice, though, the characters take on fullness. Thus Calhoun describes these characters’ appearance and setting, telling for example that Falcon, who sounds like a “genie in a jug,” decorates his high-poster-style bed with “valances and knotted dirty sheets.” In addition, the narrator’s talent for lock picking opens up secrets: Falcon protects himself with booby traps and sits naked while he writes the ship’s log. More serious, Falcon sleeps with the cabin boy and, when his dream of fame fails, commits suicide. Finally, because Calhoun loves to philosophize, he talks with his captain, and all his mates, about the nature of humanity and the existence of God. Falcon is thus both parodied type and complex individual, basically venal but somehow even likable. First Mate Peter Cringle is an aloof New Englander, a well-bred Brahmin and a loner of the Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson type. He protects the weak, such as the cabin boy, Tommy, but only because he himself is weak. Ironically, it is Cringle who leads the crew in an attempt at mutiny. Just as every character does at some point in the text, Cringle tells Calhoun his heart’s deepest secret, his failure to live his fa-

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ther’s dream and become a captain of industry, a captain of anything. In Cringle’s last act, killing himself so that others may eat his flesh and survive, the mate might be fool or saint. Whichever, through Calhoun’s imaginative narrative voice, he lives. Most significant is the African Ngonyama, for he is a key in Calhoun’s own quest for the meaning of life. When Ngonyama speaks, Calhoun hears the one voice in himself that has been silenced, that part of himself that is the same as Ngonyama: African and Allmuseri. Here the tribal name becomes important. It is, perhaps “All” of them and “us” inserted in “A . . . meri[ca].” Plot reveals a similar theme. Calhoun begins his journey on the traditional American individualistic and linear path to fulfill his dream. When Calhoun leaves Illinois, he is on a one-way, linear journey away from a past he rejects and toward a future of his own, individual making. He is, he thinks, breaking all connection with his past. Likewise, when he departs New Orleans to escape the danger Isadora Bailey presents to his self-centered lifestyle, Calhoun joins a captain and crew all on a one-way path to a new frontier, a new world, with each one taking care of himself. Through his adventures, Calhoun makes his own “middle passage”—into the gray area between whiteness and blackness, Americans and Africans, enemies and friends, individual freedom and social concern. In the chaos of Calhoun’s literal and figurative middle passage, all these opposites, this dualistic worldview, collapse. Calhoun accrues to his American identity and experience his African cultural origins, his African brothers and sisters, and all humanity. This is seen in his adoption of an Allmuseri orphan child, Baleka. When the ship’s travails reduce everyone to illness except Calhoun, he finds that he both cares for and wants to serve the others. He begins to think anew of Isadora Bailey’s love and his brother’s rejection of wealth. Finally, when Calhoun, Baleka, and Squibb are rescued from the sea by the same Isadora Bailey and Papa Zeringue from whom he fled, Calhoun’s journey and the plot’s structure come full circle. So Calhoun rejects the linear, dualistic definition of life and human relations for a holistic one. With Isadora and Baleka, he sets out for rural Illinois, his beginning, not alone but in the company of a family. The novel’s protagonist, who began as a lone male adventurer, finds his life’s meaning in interdependence. The Republic has sunk. The reader wonders what might rise from its watery grave. Critical Context Although Middle Passage is only Charles Johnson’s third published novel, it is a powerfully mature exploration of themes that Johnson has touched on in his previous works. Rutherford Calhoun’s metaphysical odyssey from selfish individualism to unselfish concern for the welfare of others resembles the quests for self-revelation undertaken by the protagonists of Johnson’s previous novels, Faith and the Good Thing (1974) and Oxherding Tale (1982). Middle Passage is also an allegory that incorporates elements of the supernatural, mysticism, and folk wisdom through the inclusion of the Allmuseri, an African tribe introduced by Johnson in Oxherding Tale as well as in two short stories that appeared in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986).

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By using the framing device of the ship’s log to record the events of Calhoun’s voyage of discovery, Johnson also draws upon the tradition of the slave narrative and the dramatic impact of its eyewitness revelations of brutality and betrayal. At another level, Johnson’s philosophical fiction draws upon and wrestles with the rich literary past from which it springs—such literary predecessors as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and “Benito Cereno” (1855), and John Gardner’s novella The King’s Indian (1974). Given the diverse elements it incorporates, it is not unusual that reviewers have found Middle Passage difficult to categorize. They have praised the power of the novel’s language, the novel’s inventive narration and many allusions, and the force of the imagination that drives the plot. Johnson’s dedication to his craft was amply rewarded when Middle Passage received the National Book Award for fiction in 1990. Bibliography Davis, Charles T. Introduction to The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Discusses the writings of slaves and freed slaves as literature and the influence of these narratives on African American fiction. Provides a useful context for Johnson’s novel. Gleason, William. “The Liberation of Perception: Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale.” Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 705-728. Analyzes Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) in the context of his theory that African American fiction should not take as its focus American racism and its impact but rather find a new vision, liberate its perception, and focus on moral and philosophical goals. Harris, Norman. “The Black Universe in Contemporary Afro-American Fiction.” CLA Journal 30 (1986): 1-13. Argues that Johnson’s novels, like those of Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, move beyond the realism and naturalism of earlier African American fiction. Thus Johnson’s protagonists live inside the race’s mythic history rather than on the site of racial conflict. Johnson, Charles. “Being and Fiction.” In Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Presents Johnson’s theory of fiction, useful background material for reading Middle Passage. Johnson urges African American writers to build their fictions in ways that reach toward meaning beyond everyday experience. _______. “Reflections on Fiction, Philosophy, and Film: An Interview with Charles Johnson.” Callaloo 4 (October, 1978): 118-128. A provocative and wide-ranging discussion of the author’s varied fields of interest. King, Lovalerie. Race, Theft, and Ethics: Property Matters in African American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Compares Middle Passage to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Delves into the representation of theft and love in each novel. Francine Dempsey

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MINTY ALLEY Author: C. L. R. James (1901-1989) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: Late 1920’s and early 1930’s Locale: A barrack yard in Trinidad First published: 1936 Principal characters: Haynes, the protagonist, a twenty-year-old educated middle-class black man Mrs. Rouse, a devout Catholic landlady who also believes in “obeah” Benoit, the live-in partner of Mrs. Rouse for eighteen years; he plays the role of the highly sexed and irresistible lover of 2 Minty Alley Nurse Jackson, a thin and very light-skinned woman of mixed blood in her late thirties who works as a private nurse to the rich town people, from whom she steals Maisie, Mrs. Rouse’s very pretty but rebellious seventeen-yearold niece Philomen, Mrs. Rouse’s honest, energetic, and hardworking Indian servant The Novel Minty Alley is the story of Haynes, a young black educated middle-class man who observes and becomes involved in the daily life of the “ordinary people” of 2 Minty Alley, a barrack yard in Trinidad. Life in the yard is presented from the perspective of Haynes, who is himself transformed in the process of observing and participating in that life. Beset by financial problems and wanting to escape his sheltered, “monotonous,” and “empty” life, Haynes decides, after the death of his overprotective mother, to take up lodging among the working people at 2 Minty Alley. Encouraged by the affable landlady, Mrs. Rouse, he ignores his servant’s advice about not living among those who are “not [his] class of people.” Shortly thereafter, he begins to regret his decision, until a crack in a board in his room affords him the opportunity to play the voyeur and eavesdrop on the sexual activities of the inhabitants of the yard. Changing his mind, he decides to stay so he can witness the “terrific human drama” unfolding at 2 Minty Alley. Haynes’s observer status is quickly changed into one of participant as he becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the yard occupants. In fact, everyone begins to

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confide in him, and he is forced to use all of his skills and resources to keep the peace among them. Even though from time to time he announces that he will leave, something always comes up to prolong his stay. Consequently, he is drawn into every conflict. His involvement begins when the son of Nurse Jackson runs into Haynes’s room to escape his mother’s brutal beating. Haynes intercedes on behalf of the child and fails. The precedent of going to seek his help has already been set. Subsequently, Haynes is drawn into a romantic sexual triangle involving Mrs. Rouse, Nurse Jackson, and Benoit. Mrs. Rouse asks Haynes to speak to Benoit, assuming that Benoit “will respect what you say” since “you are a gentlemen and you have education.” Shortly thereafter, Benoit too confides in Haynes, placing him in an awkward position of having divided loyalties. Haynes’s involvement grows even deeper when Benoit deserts Mrs. Rouse and marries Nurse Jackson, effectively curtailing his assistance to Mrs. Rouse. These tasks are taken over by Haynes, who looks after her business so diligently that she comes to admit that he is “of far more help to her than Benoit had ever been in his life.” By this time, he is already considered as “one of the family,” “one of them,” sharing in their “joys and troubles.” Haynes’s involvement reaches its apex when he establishes an intimate relationship with Maisie, Mrs. Rouse’s seventeen-year-old niece, who takes on the task of his social education. She removes his timidity toward women and his employer. He becomes more self-confident and self-assertive. Maisie herself has to acknowledge that “when you first come here you couldn’t say boo to a goose.” The relationship between these two, representing two different social classes, is not destined to last. Maisie, unable to tolerate Mrs. Rouse and unwilling to go along with the social expectations of her role, ultimately leaves on a ship bound for the United States. Thereafter, the end of Haynes’s class experiment is in sight, since “he knew that without Maisie No. 2 was no place for him.” The end comes quickly, in a succession of events. Benoit dies, Mrs. Rouse makes arrangements to sell the house, and Haynes, having sent for Ella, his servant, retreats to his dull middle-class existence. Even 2 Minty Alley seems to lose its working-class character as it is occupied by a nuclear family, one of whose members can be seen “sitting at the piano playing a familiar tune from Henry’s music book.” The Characters Like most of the other characters in the novel, Haynes is presented as a type. He is a reflection of the educated black middle class, alienated from the masses but seeking to bridge the gap through involvement in their lives. This involvement has the effect of transforming Haynes and allowing him to develop. He arrives at 2 Minty Alley shy, naïve, and a little timid. By the time he leaves, his experiences, particularly with Maisie, have turned him into an assertive and world-wise gentleman. Even though Haynes returns to his middle-class existence, readers are left with the impression that life will never be quite the same for him. He has tasted the joys of friendship, and his sexuality has been awakened.

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Haynes’s credibility as a character is open to question. In the Trinidadian society of the 1930’s it is a bit far-fetched to imagine him as a member of the middle class electing to live among and become involved in the lives of the people of a barrack yard. All the same, the author, himself a member of the black middle class at the time, claimed to have lived in a household similar to the one described in the novel. However plausible Haynes’s character may be, it is clear that he is used primarily as a device for looking at the lives of the “ordinary” people of the yard. It is from Haynes’s limited perspective that the other characters and their activities are presented. Characters are seen only through his eyes; they have no independent existence outside what Haynes observes or is told. The author begins with the device of placing Haynes in Minty Alley as a voyeur, that is to say as an observer “peeping” in. He quickly abandons this and makes Haynes a participant, so that the members of the working class can be presented with greater accuracy. It is to Haynes’s, or rather the author’s, credit that most of the members of the Minty Alley household, although types, are very human. They are living people. Mrs. Rouse, in her predicament involving Benoit and Nurse Jackson, is not difficult to imagine. The strong, enduring black woman is a very familiar figure. So too is the womanizing Benoit, who loses out in the end. Maisie’s credibility as a character is maintained by having her not become romantically involved with Haynes. Theirs is primarily a sexual relationship, one from which she walks away without so much as a backward glance. “Me, Mr. Haynes. You’ll never forget me? You must not say such things.” It appears that Philomen, Mrs. Rouse’s Indian servant, is there for the purpose of raising racial questions. Her devotion, her loyalty, and her obsequiousness are a bit overdone. Because the inhabitants of 2 Minty Alley are seen through the eyes of Haynes, himself belonging to a different class, they tend to appear one-dimensional. They undergo very little, if any, development throughout the novel. This is more a case of character revelation. Themes and Meanings In an interview in 1972, C. L. R. James, in a reference to the setting of his novel, declared: “I went to live there, the people fascinated me, and I wrote about them from the point of view of an educated youthful member of the black middle class.” There is no doubt that Minty Alley is meant to be a realistic assessment of the lives of the working masses from a sympathetic middle-class point of view. Haynes’s descent into the barrack yard at Minty Alley parallels the author’s own movement and becomes the means by which the joys and sorrows, the struggles, and the trials and tribulations of the masses are reported with honesty and dignity. There is a vitality and a sense of endurance to this life, with its “drab surroundings” and its harsh living conditions. The novel, however, does much more than explore barrack-yard life from a middleclass perspective. James is much more interested in the relationship between the middle class and the masses, represented by the inhabitants of the yard. The author had always been critical of the Caribbean middle class and its impotence in the face of the

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working class. Minty Alley gives him the opportunity to bring the alienated and dull middle class into contact with the working people. It is an education process that must take place if the society is to be saved. Haynes’s stay at 2 Minty Alley results in extensive learning on his part. In the process, he becomes self-assured and is able to provide some leadership to the inhabitants. “He realized that whatever he said would carry weight with them, and with this realization came a sense of responsibility and increasing confidence.” He advises them; they listen to his advice and respect and admire him for his contribution. He becomes “the master of the house,” but this is a two-way street. In return, Maisie helps him to find his own sexuality, helps him to explore his emotions, and teaches him how to deal with his boss so that he can make reasonable demands. James seems to imply that the two classes need each other and that each one has something to teach to and to learn from the other. The act of having Haynes abandon his surroundings to go to live at Minty Alley is a device to bring the two classes together so that they can find out more about each other. It takes Haynes almost an entire year before he confronts the intolerable conditions in which Mrs. Rouse, the landlady, works to make a living. It is beyond him how “any mortal could stand that for so many hours every day for so many days.” James is mindful of the fact that Trinidad’s working class is comprised of East Indians as well, and the harmonious relationship of the two races is critical to the development of the society. The presence of Philomen allows him to explore this theme. To this end, he explores the negative attitude some Trinidadians have toward Indians. When Mrs. Rouse listens to advice from the “obeah” man and parts company with Philomen, who has served her faithfully for nine years without any complaint, James means to criticize the manner in which people can allow a workable racial relationship to be subverted by superstition. This is a novel about interdependency. The middle class needs the working class and vice versa; the Trinidadian needs the East Indian and vice versa. Alienation is detrimental to this society. Critical Context C. L. R. James, who has written volumes on areas as varied as history, political thought, sociology, cricket, literature, and philosophy, refers to Minty Alley as coming from a “prentice hand” in his masterpiece on cricket and other subjects, Beyond a Boundary (1963). For all this, Minty Alley, the only novel written by James and the first of the Caribbean novels written in English to be published in England, is pivotal to the development of the West Indian novel. Although the novel was published in 1936, it was actually written nine years earlier, before the author had left Trinidad for England in 1932. The novel is a product of the emerging literary movement that the author, together with Alfred H. Mendes, another middle-class Trinidadian writer, intended to stimulate as a way of creating a nucleus for a genuine native literature. James, in particular, had shown interest in the literary possibilities of barrack-yard

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life and had in fact written a short story, “Triumph,” that dealt explicitly and for the first time with the urban life and experiences of a Trinidad barrack yard where ordinary people live. “Triumph” is similar to Minty Alley in plot; it is obvious that the short story forms the basis for this novel. In its focus on the harsh surroundings of the yard, the social activities of the people, the violence, the use of “obeah,” and the dialect of the inhabitants, Minty Alley signaled the birth of the Caribbean novel of social realism. In this respect, it foreshadowed the outpouring of talent in the literary movement of the 1950’s. If it was a stroke of boldness and rebelliousness to use the ordinary people of the yard as a fitting subject for his novel, it was even more daring to bring the middle class, in the person of Haynes, to live among the yard people and to involve him in their affairs to the point that they can claim him as “one of the family,” “one of us.” It must also have offended and shocked the defenders of middle-class propriety to have one of their educated members conduct a sexual relationship with the “lower-class” Maisie, who educates him. In that sense, the novel had serious social and political implications, even though James, on rereading Minty Alley after its republication in 1971, claimed not to have been aware initially of the implications. “I saw,” he says, “embedded in the novel a fundamental antagonism in West Indian society between the educated black and the mass of plebeians. . . . When I wrote it down fifty years ago I did not have one iota of feeling that I was posing a social or political situation.” It may be somewhat difficult to accept this, coming from one of the twentieth century’s most astute political theorists, one who has devoted many pages to analyzing the shortcomings of the Caribbean middle class in its dealing with the ordinary working people. Whatever its implications, Minty Alley is an important milestone in the historical development of Caribbean literature written in English. Bibliography Birbalsingh, Frank. “The Literary Achievement of C. L. R. James.” In Passion and Exile: Essays in Caribbean Literature. London: Hansib Publishing, 1988. Minty Alley makes a significant contribution to the development of a literary tradition in the anglophone Caribbean. It is one of the first novels to examine important social, cultural, and political issues in the region. Booker, M. Keith, and Dubravka Juraga. The Caribbean Novel in English: An Introduction. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001. Study of nineteen formative novels in the history of Caribbean literature, of which Minty Alley is one. Buhle, Paul. C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso, 1988. An intellectual biography, this study by James’s editorial collaborator of long standing draws upon extensive interviews with critics and supporters and many previously unpublished documents. It is a penetrating portrait of the man and his times. Includes James’s views on a variety of subjects, from Caribbean literature to panAfricanism to Marxism to Third World politics. Emphasizes James’s understanding and use of ideas.

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Gilkes, Michael. “C. L. R. James (b. 1901): Minty Alley (1936).” In The West Indian Novel. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Minty Alley is intended to be a sympathetic examination of “yard” life of the “despised folk,” seen from a middle-class perspective. It also explores the potential for cooperation, and the benefits thereof, between the middle class and the working masses. Paris, D. Elliott. “Minty Alley: C. L. R. James, His Life and Work.” Urgent Tasks 12 (Summer, 1981): 77-98. Holds the view that Minty Alley is a forerunner to the later Caribbean literary movement. Notes that James’s sympathy is with the working people. This critique draws out the political implications behind the novel. Sander, Reinhard W. “C. L. R. James.” In The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Minty Alley’s primary achievement lies in its detailed presentation of the life of the working people and in its preoccupation with the coming together of the middle class and the working class. Roosevelt J. Williams

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MIRACLE’S BOYS Author: Jacqueline Woodson (1963) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Domestic realism Time of plot: Early twenty-first century Locale: Washington Heights, New York First published: 2000 Principal characters: Lafayette Miguel Bailey, a twelve-year-old boy dealing with the loss of his parents and the return of his brother Charlie Charles (Charlie) Javier Bailey, Lafayette’s fifteen-year-old brother, who has returned home, changed, from a few years in a juvenile detention center Ty’ree Alfonso Bailey, Lafayette’s twenty-two-year-old brother, who gave up college to take care of his brothers when their mother died Milagro Bailey, the deceased mother of Lafayette, Charlie, and Ty’ree Aunt Cecile, Lafayette’s grandaunt, who lives in the South and whom Lafayette visits in the summers Aaron, Charlie’s friend, who encourages Charlie to join a gang The Novel Miracle’s Boys tells the story of Lafayette, Charlie, and Ty’ree Bailey, brothers orphaned by the tragic deaths of their parents. The entire novel takes place over the course of two days, a Friday and Saturday, though it incorporates flashbacks to earlier events as well. Charlie recently returned home after spending over two years in Rahway Home for Boys, a juvenile detention center. Watching Charlie get ready to leave the apartment with his new friend Aaron, Lafayette laments the changes that have become evident in his brother since he came home. Once, Charlie was the kind of kid who would cry over a wounded dog he saw in the street and who would stay up late telling stories to his younger brother. Now, he rarely even looks at or speaks to Lafayette, and he usually denies feeling anything at all. Charlie seems to prefer spending time with hardened characters such as Aaron and acting tough in the streets. Lafayette has even taken to calling Charlie “Newcharlie,” because his behavior and personality have become so remarkably different. Charlie and Aaron leave Lafayette alone in the apartment, where he sits watching television until Ty’ree gets home. Through flashbacks, Lafayette shares his life story. Shortly before Lafayette was born, his father died from hypothermia after he rescued

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a woman and her dog from a frozen lake in Central Park. Three years ago, Charlie robbed a neighborhood candy store at gunpoint and was arrested. He was only twelve at the time, so he was sent to Rahway instead of prison for his crime. While Charlie was gone, about two years ago, their mother died of complications from diabetes. Lafayette was the one who found her that morning, unconscious in her bed. He carries guilt over her death, thinking that he should have been able to get help for her sooner. Ty’ree returns home from work that Friday to find Charlie gone and Lafayette upset about all that has happened to their family. Ty’ree does the best he can to reassure Lafayette, but both young men become upset talking about the loss of their mother and the situation with Charlie. Later that night, Ty’ree reveals to Lafayette that he had been there in Central Park with their father on the day he died. Lafayette feels a new kinship with his brother upon learning this truth, for they were each present for the death of one of their parents. That night, Charlie is arrested for riding in a stolen car and participating in a gang initiation. Ty’ree and Lafayette go to the police station in the middle of the night to get him. If Charlie is sent back to Rahway, Ty’ree will lose custody of Lafayette, who will be sent south to live with their grandaunt Cecile. A kind officer releases Charlie, as he was not the one who stole the car. This close call serves as a warning bell for Charlie, whose icy stoicism Lafayette begins to thaw. In the final scene, the three brothers sit together on the stoop, ready to face what may come next, united. The Characters Lafayette, the story’s narrator, longs for a life that no longer exists. He wishes for his mother every day, talking to her in his head when he feels troubled. He is slowly coming to terms with her loss, but he still longs for his family to be put back together in any way that it can be. Charlie’s behavior, however, makes Lafayette doubt that things will ever be normal again. Ty’ree stepped into the caregiver role after the children’s mother died, giving up a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he intended to study in the hope of someday working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He still struggles with his sacrifice, although he makes it clear to Lafayette that keeping their family together is his highest priority. Ty’ree’s loving and gentle manner draws Lafayette out of his emotional shell, but Ty’ree’s good intentions merely glance off Charlie, who at first is primed only for confrontation. Charlie desperately wants to reach out to his brothers, but the years he spent isolated in Rahway have made it difficult for him to communicate honestly or admit his vulnerability. Lafayette refers to summers spent with Aunt Cecile to develop an apt metaphor to describe what happened to Charlie, comparing him to the bitter shell of a watermelon whose sweet, juicy heart has been hollowed out. Despite the apt metaphor, Lafayette cannot truly understand the changes in Charlie. Charlie’s detentioncenter experience sets him apart from the overachieving Ty’ree and the innocent Lafayette. He views himself as the “screw-up” in the family, a perspective that is sometimes shared by Lafayette and Ty’ree.

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Lafayette and Ty’ree fear that Charlie will do something else to put the family in jeopardy, but they do not know how to reach out to Charlie anymore. Though Charlie misplaces blame on Lafayette, Ty’ree believes Charlie’s own guilt is hurting him more. When Lafayette complains about Charlie ignoring him, Ty’ree asks Lafayette if he has ever tried just talking to his brother. Ultimately, Lafayette does just that, finally cracking Charlie’s tough exterior. During the weekend when the story takes place, Lafayette manages to reconnect to his brothers. Themes and Meanings Miracle’s Boys grapples with the myriad emotions involved with experiences of profound loss, emphasizing that only through family and brotherhood can the boys survive the hand they have been dealt. Each of the brothers deals with feelings of guilt over their parents’ deaths: Ty’ree because he urged their father to dive in after the woman in the lake, Lafayette because he failed to get help in time to save their mother, and Charlie because the last time he saw their mother he was in handcuffs. Just as these varied sources and shades of guilt have different origins, they also have different consequences. Ty’ree gives up his education to become the father figure his brothers have never had. Lafayette retreats inside himself to talk to his mother’s memory. Charlie’s guilt churns itself into anger, and he looks to the street to soothe his inner pain. By depicting these various types of guilt and their effects both on each individual brother and on the family group, Woodson creates a truthful and affecting portrait. Ty’ree knows all along that he and Lafayette are the ones who can get through to Charlie, and he hopes they can accomplish it before Charlie does anything reckless. Ty’ree has taught Charlie and Lafayette to say “brother to brother” when they want to say “I love you.” In this way, he emphasizes the bond of blood that has driven him to give up—or at least postpone—his own dreams of personal achievement. Critical Context “I . . . wanted to write about how hard it is to lose someone you love—in this case, both parents—and how that pain starts shaping itself into other things sometimes like anger and isolation,” says Jacqueline Woodson about Miracle’s Boys. “Most of all, I wanted to write about three brothers who are funny, handsome, searching, and caring of one another.” Miracle’s Boys received critical acclaim upon publication. Publishers Weekly called it “intelligently wrought” and “thought provoking.” Kirkus Review picked up on the brotherhood theme, calling it “a plot without easy answers” that easily engages readers in the lives of its characters. The Horn Book compared the book’s style and mood to S. E. Hinton’s groundbreaking young adult novel The Outsiders (1967). Miracle’s Boys won both the Coretta Scott King Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Bibliography Bishop, Rudine Simms. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. History and

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analysis of the evolution of African American writing for children and young adults, from the oral culture of slave narratives through contemporary African American young-adult writers, including Jacqueline Woodson. The Horn Book Magazine. Review of Miracle’s Boys, by Jacqueline Woodson. 76 (March/April, 2000): 203. Argues that the book is stylistically similar to Hinton’s The Outsiders. Woodson, Jacqueline. Interview by Deborah Taylor. School Library Journal, June 1, 2006. Article and interview featuring Jacqueline Woodson upon her receipt of the Margaret A. Edwards Award honoring lifetime achievement in literature for young adults. Includes discussion of reader reaction to Miracle’s Boys. _______. “Miracles.” School Library Journal, August 1, 2001. Text of Jacqueline Woodson’s acceptance speech for the Coretta Scott King Award, which she received in 2001 for Miracle’s Boys. Woodson speaks of the many miracles that conspired to bring her to that moment in time. Kekla Magoon

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MONSTER Author: Walter Dean Myers (1937) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Experimental Time of plot: 1990’s Locale: Manhattan Detention Center and Courtroom, New York, New York First published: 1999 Principal characters: Steve Harmon, a sixteen-year-old detainee standing trial as an adult for robbery and murder Richard “Bobo” Evans, and James King, older “friends” and codefendants of Steve Harmon Sandra Petrocelli, the prosecuting attorney in Harmon’s trial Kathy O’Brien, Harmon’s defense attorney Asa Briggs, King’s defense attorney The Novel Walter Dean Myers’s Monster is an experimental novel written in the form of a film script by its main character, Steve Harmon. Portions of the novel also take the form of a diary kept by Harmon. Harmon is on trial for participating in a robbery and murder. In script mode, the novel alternates between representations of action in the narrative present of Harmon’s murder trial and flashbacks to events that preceded the crime. This alternation between methods of representation heightens tension and facilitates changes in mood from emotional indulgence to strong restraint. The method requires an active and thinking reader, not a passive receptor of information. As related in the novel, on December 22, two men—most likely Richard “Bobo” Evans and James King—entered a drugstore in Harlem owned by Alguinaldo Nesbitt. José Delgado was assistant to Mr. Nesbitt, but Delgado was not present at the time of the crime. Flashbacks reveal that Steve Harmon, the main character, was present at a conversation about the crime. In flashback, King points out that bank robberies are not advisable because “the man comes down hard for bank money.” He speculates that a crime against a noncitizen—one with a green card or an illegal immigrant— would not be as harshly prosecuted. Harmon merely listens and does not contribute to these reflections. A heavy woman named Peaches also listens to this conversation; however, she is not later accused as a participant in the crime, although her level of participation seems in all respects equal to Harmon’s. This and other flashbacks reveal that King, Evans, and Harmon are from the same milieu; however, the flashbacks do not establish Harmon’s complicity in the crime. The story does not offer simple answers to readers, who must draw their own conclusions about the crime and trial. It is possible that Harmon scouted the drugstore for

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King and Evans or acted as a lookout for them. He may also be innocent. In one possible reconstruction of the crime, King and Evans enter the drugstore and demand money. Nesbitt is armed. He attempts to guard his property against the two robbers. In the struggle, he loses the gun and is shot by either Evans or King. Lorelle Henry, a retired teacher, identifies King as one of the people present in the store. Her eyewitness testimony is not entirely reliable, however, and is challenged by defense attorneys. A recap of police procedures also inspires significant levels of doubt about the reliability of Henry’s account. A prisoner’s dilemma underlies these ambiguities. Evans hopes for a lighter sentence, admits his part in the events, and implicates the other two defendants. While Harmon had heard of the crime in the abstract from King, there is no evidence that either Evans or King discussed a role for Harmon in the actual commission of the crime. What is clearly the case is that Nesbitt has been killed and that Evans and King have something to do with the robbery and perhaps also the death of the owner. Whether or to what extent Harmon served as a lookout, who pulled the trigger, and who had sufficient motive are all left unclear. Diary entries that appear as interludes between court scenes generate compassion for the narrator. He records feelings of resentment, fear, and sadness. He also demonstrates a low self-image as a consequence of the prosecuting attorney’s referring to him as a “monster.” In fact, portions of Harmon’s diary evince a kind of self-rage and indulgences in self-pity on the part of the narrator. Both Steve Harmon, at age sixteen, and Osvaldo Cruz, a fourteen-year-old fellow inmate, are far too young for the environment in which a reader finds them. In fact, Cruz has come to the attention of the police because he has been accused by his girlfriend of having gotten another girl pregnant. The novel seeks to represent reality by interweaving and integrating disparate discourses into a tapestry that defies logical analysis. One prisoner points out that ascertaining the truth is not the aim of the court; instead, if a crime has been committed, someone must be locked up. What that person says about his or her innocence or guilt is immaterial to the decision of the jury. A reader who sees the U.S. juridicial system as an adversarial process essentially devoted to contests of wit may readily agree. After representing all the ambiguities and uncertainties of the narrator’s plight, the roving-camera narration records the final statements of all the trial’s attorneys. It does nothing to resolve the ambiguities, which remain very much part of the story. The jury convicts King, but it absolves Harmon of any responsibility for the crime. Harmon and his family are greatly relieved, but when he seeks to hug his attorney in appreciation for the victorious outcome, she turns aside and shuffles papers in preparation for leaving. The trial, it seems, has not bridged the gap between the product of the ghetto, Steve Harmon, and the attorney who lives the life of a suburbanite. Steve concludes rightly that his own attorney is not entirely convinced of his innocence.

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The Characters Hardened to varying degrees, the novel’s characters are young, self-serving, and immature in their thinking. This loss of moral sensitivities appears to be the result of growing up in an indifferent environment with great socioeconomic disadvantages. The judge and attorneys, meanwhile, come across as automata playing roles and similarly immature in their quest for victory in a battle that is indifferent to truth or justice. The jail scenes are dominated by indifferent and callous brutality. Perhaps it is this indifference that makes the events so chillingly hopeless. The narrator’s diary indicates that he does not see himself as an integral part of the events that surround him. Themes and Meanings Monster contributes greatly to an understanding of the social realities underlying a young person’s growing to maturity in an inner city. Growth occurs in relation to a teen’s entire milieu. The trial process, on the other hand, isolates individuals and events, and it attempts to understand them solely in order to identify agents, to determine outcomes, and to assign guilt. The justice system fails to recognize the social web and the milieu of all characters. Moreover, its officers—prosecutors and defense attorneys—are not even concerned with justice, being instead dedicated to victory, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the accused. Ultimately, the imprisonment of James King and the exoneration of Steve Harmon seem to be accidental outcomes of Kafkaesque events, as readers are left uncertain of either defendant’s innocence or guilt. Critical Context The literary technique deployed by Myers of juxtaposing an objective, camera-like point of view with subjective diary entries seems uniquely effective to carry the intense emotion of the narrative. The novel, moreover, follows in the tradition of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, the convicted gang leader who wrote children’s books from prison and sought to prevent inner-city youths from joining gangs. Like Williams’s writing, Monster seeks to illustrate the complexity of life in the United States’ poorest urban communities and the detrimental effects of the dearth of positive role models in those communities. Bibliography Bishop, Rudine Sims. Presenting Walter Dean Myers. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Brief monograph meant to introduce readers to Myers and his work, providing serious analysis of the novels and of young adult literature generally. Doughty, Terri. “Locating Harry Potter in the ‘Boys’ Market.” In The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon, edited by Lana A. Whited. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Compares the gritty— albeit experimental—realism of Monster to the fantasy setting of the Harry Potter novels of J. K. Rowling. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Walter Dean Myers: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.:

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McFarland, 2006. Extensive study of the author’s life and work, emphasizing the literary analysis of those characteristics of his fiction that are of particular interest to young adult readers. “Walter Dean Myers.” In Writers for Young Adults, edited by Ted Hipple. Vol. 2. New York: Scribner, 1997. Overview of Myers’s career and his place in the young adult canon. Reinhold Schlieper

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MONTGOMERY’S CHILDREN Author: Richard Perry (1944) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Magical Realism Time of plot: 1948-1980 Locale: Montgomery, New York First published: 1984 Principal characters: Norman Fillis, a janitor, who is thirty-nine years old when the novel begins Gerald Fletcher, a boy enduring repeated beatings from his father Hosea Malone, a drug dealer who pronounces his name Hose-ee Josephine Moore, the victim of her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s complicit silence The Novel In 1948, about one hundred fifty black people live in Montgomery, a town located about two hours north of New York City. The first black people had begun arriving about thirty years earlier. Others had come during the Depression and World War II. It is one of the oddities of the community that, as of 1948, no black person had ever died in Montgomery. That hint of immortality is but a part of what seems in many ways to be an idyllic existence. The novel picks up the story of Montgomery and its children just as the idyll is about to come to an end. Construction has just begun on a racetrack about a mile and a half outside town. To make way for it, a forest in its first growth is leveled. Norman Fillis, a janitor who is thirty-nine years old at the time, sees the animals fleeing from the forest. Soon after, the black community suffers its first death. In the thirty years that death has stayed away, the community has forgotten how to mourn. It must learn again the old lamentations and must reacquaint itself with sorrow. People will have plenty of opportunity. Norman, for one, goes mad, although it is a madness that has its own kind of lucidity, even a kind of poetry. He communes with animals and birds and finds in trees a proof of the existence of God. One morning, Norman feels a strange weight on his head, but the weight lifts when he has his head shaved at the local barbershop. On this same day, Norman discovers that watching fire, whatever the source, lets him “see.” It also fills his heart with peace and his mouth with the taste of pomegranates. There is no harm in peace and pomegranates, and there is no real harm in Norman, but when he begins to appear naked in public, it is inevitable that he will occasionally find himself in an institution. Norman’s madness carries with it a kind of power. His visions are basically true. He sees that troubles are coming, even if he can do nothing to prevent them, and he

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can fly. At first, he can fly only short distances, but his power increases with practice. He also can pass his power on, if he can find the one meant to receive it. That one may well be Gerald Fletcher. To Norman, the circle in Gerald’s eye, in fact a congenital mole, is a sign. Gerald becomes aware as he grows that he is in some strange way the focus of Norman’s attention. In fact, Norman lets Gerald see him fly, but when Gerald finds that even his best friend, Iceman, will not believe that this really happened, Gerald lets himself be talked out of his own experience. Other troubles visit Montgomery and its children. Hosea Malone deserts his wife Meredith and their seven children, the youngest of whom is blind and deformed. A desperate Meredith kills her youngest child. Norman, unobserved, witnesses her burial of the body. Hosea will learn of this twelve years later, when he returns in 1960 to Montgomery in the company of Alice Simineski, an enormously fat white woman with whom he is involved in dealing drugs. When Hosea confronts Meredith with his knowledge, she confides in the pastor, Melinda Mclain, who keeps the secret but who believes she now knows what brought death to Montgomery back in 1948. Twenty more years will pass before Meredith, now sixty-seven, will feel compelled to confess to the police. In the wake of this decision, one of Meredith and Hosea’s grown daughters, meaning to kill her father, shoots and kills Alice by mistake. Gerald’s story is not limited to his significance to Norman. Repeatedly beaten by his father, Gerald falls in love with Josephine Moore, a newcomer to Montgomery. Josephine has been repeatedly raped by her father, while her mother, who must know what is going on, has remained silent. Gerald agrees to help Josephine kill her father, although he is never seriously committed to the plan. Josephine finally kills her father without Gerald’s help and is sent to prison for her action. Others of Montgomery’s children also suffer afflictions. Twelve-year-old Jonah Washington drowns. Iceman, Gerald’s friend and confidant, is electrocuted while trying to liberate a cat from a tree. A boy named Soapsuds is killed in Mississippi; Jesus Mclain, the son of the pastor, is shot down by the police in Cincinnati, Ohio. As the story approaches its end in 1980, there are few survivors, and their situation is far from untroubled. Gerald, now living in New York City, is involved in a halfhearted effort to save a crumbling marriage. He and Josephine, who has turned up at his apartment, pay one more visit to Montgomery. Josephine confronts her mother. It is little surprise that the encounter proves unsatisfactory; it is too late for these two to connect. Josephine does learn that the man she killed was not her biological father. She sets out for Georgia in search of her real father. Gerald sees Norman once more. Since Gerald has had the mole removed (to him, it was never anything more than an annoying minor disfigurement), Norman no longer recognizes him as the one to whom he should pass on his power. Whatever wisdom or madness Norman might have passed on dies with him as his last flight ends in a fatal crash on the courthouse steps. Nobody noticed Norman flying, and the general understanding is that he has committed suicide.

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The Characters Montgomery’s Children is a densely populated novel. Its episodic structure, covering an extended period of time, permits a number of its characters to act in effect as temporary protagonists. Moreover, the characters interact with one another, moving within one another’s stories in complex and unpredictable ways. Of the many characters who populate the novel, there are four who seem to assume central importance in determining its structure. These are Norman Fillis, Hosea Malone, Gerald Fletcher, and Josephine Moore. In the eyes of the world, Norman Fillis is simply crazy, but the world does not see as Norman sees. He enjoys an intimacy with nature that is lost to the community when the forest is destroyed to make way for the racetrack. He has witnessed both of the actions that may have inaugurated Montgomery’s reign of suffering: the flight of the animals and the burial of Meredith and Hosea’s seventh child. He is a man of vision and power. He can fly, he can teach others how to fly, and he envisions a day when all black people will fly. He has a message to pass on to the right one. In the eyes of the world, he is crazy. Hosea is not crazy. Hosea has seen into the heart of things and has determined that there is nothing there. Since there is no God, since life is meaningless, there are no standards. Hosea’s power is negative. He withholds himself. He abandons Meredith and their children, and he will not give Alice the love she craves. He deals drugs out of moral and emotional indifference. Once he learns that going without a hat cures the headaches that bother him for a while, he escapes pain. Those near him, those who permit themselves to feel his influence, such as Meredith and Alice, are not so lucky. Gerald and Josephine are linked to each other by their age, by their love for each other, and by their victimization at the hands of brutal fathers. Their ultimate estrangement arises out of their differences. Josephine dares and acts, however destructive her actions turn out to be. Gerald holds back. He entertains the possibility of killing Josephine’s father, but he is never committed to the act. He is at one moment on the verge of flight, but he cannot commit himself to that action, either. In the face of his friend’s skepticism, he allows himself even to deny the experience itself and, thus, the sense of possibility the experience symbolizes. Growing up for him entails a gradual loss of direction. When he finally asks Norman to give him the message, it is too late. Themes and Meanings “According to those given to such inquiry a vast range of experience lies just beyond ordinary vision.” This sentence appears on the last page of Montgomery’s Children, and it might be suggested that “just beyond ordinary vision” is where the novel takes place. Up to a point, the novel reflects ordinary vision. It offers what could be regarded as a realistic, if impressionistic, account of the fortunes and misfortunes of a black community in upstate New York but goes beyond that point. Rather than remaining within the bounds of realism, Richard Perry matter-of-factly blends elements of realism and fantasy. The presence of the fantastic in no way cancels out, or even di-

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minishes, the real, but it may invite readers to expand notions of “reality.” This kind of blurring of the distinction between the real and the fantastic is one of the touchstones of Magical Realism. The title of the novel focuses attention on children, and there are, to be sure, a number of children in the novel. “Children” is a word that easily lends itself to metaphorical extension, as in the familiar assertion that people are all God’s children. At any rate, relationships between parents and children, broadly rather than narrowly understood, play a crucial role in the novel. The linked stories of Gerald and Josephine repeat the theme of a distortion in the parent-child relationship. The weight of responsibility in both cases falls on a brutal father, but in both cases the mother is complicit, at least to the extent of having failed to restrain the father’s brutality and having lived in the knowledge of it. Gerald makes repeated efforts to establish a loving relationship with his father (who has repudiated his own father, Gerald’s grandfather), but the efforts are fruitless. Josephine has killed the supposed father who violated her, and, when she exits the novel, is still searching for her real father. Hosea has abandoned his children, and a desperate Meredith has killed their seventh child. That he was a seventh child may associate him with magic, since the number seven carries suggestions of power in folklore. His deformity, a watermelon head, may also be significant. It is a deformity, a congenital wart, that marks Gerald as the one to receive Norman’s message, and the normalization of Gerald’s appearance breaks the connection. Further, the watermelon head seems associated with Hosea’s headaches, which disappear when he stops wearing a hat, and with the strange weight on his head that Norman feels at the beginning of his madness. Parenting here is clearly not merely a biological function. It turns out that the man who has violated Josephine is not her biological father. Parenting involves caring. It also involves acting as a bearer of tradition. A role of the parent is to pass on to the children the traditions and values of the community. From this point of view, Montgomery’s Children abounds in examples of failed parenting. A look at the two events that, it is suggested, may have brought about the destruction of the idyllic existence Montgomery had known reveals that one of these—Meredith’s killing of her child— represents the ultimate violation of a parent’s responsibility. The other imputed cause is the building of the racetrack and the destruction of the forest to make way for it. What is violated here is not the relation between generations but the relation of the community to nature. The two themes are related, though, if one accepts that a reverence toward nature, as in the religions of Africa, is part of the tradition parents are obliged to pass on to their children. The loss of a sense of tradition is humorously depicted in a conversation that takes place in the local barbershop, on the day Norman has his head shaved to remove the weight from his head. With the exception of the professor, the barbershop’s black patrons seem to find it hard to get past the notion that Africans do little beyond swinging from trees. That Africans have built empires is too far beyond their ordinary vision for these children of Montgomery to absorb.

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The themes that interact in the novel come together in the person of Norman Fillis, who has left ordinary vision behind. Norman may be without honor in Montgomery, but he is the tradition bearer. He carries the power of the spiritual parent. As the children of Montgomery have cut themselves off from the sources of spiritual energy, Norman represents a hope of redemption. The vital links with the past and with nature are still present in him. His promise of a day when black people will fly again is a powerful image of liberation. To make the connection, though, others must be prepared to move beyond ordinary vision, and even Gerald, the one best hope, grows away from the power to take that step. Norman’s death, misinterpreted as suicide, marks the ultimate breaking of the chain. Montgomery’s children will have to find whatever redemption they can through labor and pain. Montgomery’s Children, though hardly a protest novel, is not indifferent to the social and political history of African Americans between 1948 and 1980. There are references to the opening of a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Montgomery, to the appearance of African Americans on the police force, and to integration of the school board. The primary focus of the novel remains on the black community itself. Critical Context The term Magical Realism gained currency in American criticism in the context of the rise of North American critical interest in Latin American fiction, but it has been pointed out that the essential elements of Magical Realism existed in African American and African culture long before American critics had a name for it. The easy relationship of realism and fantasy associated with the term is common in the black oral tradition, and a significant part of Perry’s accomplishment in Montgomery’s Children involves his suggesting in print some of the force of the storytelling tradition. It is a quality of this kind of narrative that readers are encouraged to a more liberal notion of causality than associated with literary realism. Thus, it is here possible that the felling of a forest in Montgomery, New York, becomes part of a causal chain that leads to, say, the killing of a young black man in Cincinnati, Ohio. Readers may simply accept this without question, allowing the narrative the right to establish its own rules. They also may find in the departure from the literal an invitation to readings that emphasize the metaphorical and symbolic, thus perhaps seeing the felling of the forest as marking a rupture between the community and the natural environment, a rupture that must ultimately produce destructive consequences. A further possibility, since realism remains a component of Magical Realism, is to consider magical patterns of causality as one possible explanation while looking simultaneously for commonsense possibilities. Are the many failures in human relationships, especially in variations on the parent-child relationship, caused by phenomena such as the felling of the forest and the flight of the animals, or are these failures themselves the cause of the fragmentation of the community? It is in the nature of a novel such as Montgomery’s Children, when it succeeds, to invite readers to entertain such a multiplicity of possibilities. Brought to this state, readers are then ready to interro-

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gate received notions of reality, part of what Magical Realism is all about. Montgomery’s Children does succeed as a work of literary art, and it received enthusiastic reviews when it was published. Ironically, the review that could have contributed most powerfully to the book’s commercial success, the very favorable notice that appeared in the influential The New York Times Book Review, appeared too long after the publication date to have much effect, and the book turned up quickly on sale shelves in bookstores. This false start has to some extent limited the recognition Montgomery’s Children has received. A paperback edition that appeared in 1985 was allowed to go out of print in 1992, but this is the sort of book that delighted readers have a way of finding for themselves. It is likely to gain a permanent place in African American literature. Bibliography Bailliett, Whitney. “Upstate.” The New Yorker 59 (February 6, 1984): 124-125. The novel is concerned with evil and redemption and the ways in which black people weigh upon each other more than with how the white world weighs on the black. Davis, Thulani. “Books.” Essence 14 (February, 1984). The town of Montgomery is itself a complex character, speaking in several voices. Perry can be compared to Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed and, for mastery of Magical Realism, to Gabriel García Márquez. Hoffman, Michael J., and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. 3d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Includes essays on both Magical Realism and postmodernism. Helps situate Montgomery’s Children in its wider literary context. Hogue, W. Lawrence. Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960’s. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Compares Montgomery’s Children to Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, plumbing each for insights into the nature of postmodern subjectivity. Kissell, John. “Montgomery’s Children.” Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 19, 1984, 7. The central theme is Gerald’s love for his father. Surrounding Gerald is an impressionistic history of African Americans since World War II. Tate, Greg. “Montgomery’s Children.” The Village Voice 29 (April 17, 1984): 44. The novel is a morality tale about urban black America’s fall from the garden of racial quarantine into the dystopia of desegregation. Perry shares Toni Morrison’s gifts for psychological as well as pathological insights. Watkins, Mel. “Montgomery’s Children.” The New York Times Book Review 89 (August 5, 1984): 18-19. The novel, in which comic and surreal are balanced, is about the evils of modernism and the redemptive powers of the spirit. W. P. Kenney

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MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN Author: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Allegory Time of plot: Biblical times Locale: Egypt First published: 1939 Principal characters: Moses, the protagonist and title character Aaron, an alleged brother of Moses who is pompous and self-important Miriam, an alleged sister of Moses who fell asleep while charged with watching the baby Moses The Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt at the time of Moses’ birth Ta-Phar, a ruler of Egypt and enforcer of Hebrew slavery after his father’s death Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, a wise priest of Midian who practices monotheism and teaches Moses advanced magic Zipporah, Moses’ second wife and Jethro’s daughter Amram, Moses’ alleged father, a Hebrew slave Jochebed, Moses’ alleged mother, also a Hebrew slave Mentu, an elderly palace servant who instructs the young Moses in magic spells Joshua, a brave Hebrew who is only a child when he first meets Moses The Novel Set in Egypt during the time of the Hebrew captivity, Moses, Man of the Mountain opens before Moses’ birth. The pharaoh had decreed that all male Hebrew newborns would be put to death. When Jochebed gives birth to a third child, a boy, the family hides him for three months from the secret police. After several experiences when the baby is almost discovered, the parents put him in a basket and set him adrift on the Nile. Miriam, Jochebed’s daughter, is supposed to watch the basket and report the baby’s fate to her parents. She falls asleep, and when she awakens, the basket is gone. Before she can comprehend this event, her attention is distracted by the sight of the Egyptian princess and her ladies-in-waiting. Miriam forgets all about her brother and rushes home to tell her mother about seeing the princess. When she arrives, her mother’s frantic questioning reminds her of her original mission. She makes up a story in which the princess rescues the baby and takes him home with her to the palace. Thus, a legend was born.

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Both Miriam and Jochebed go to the palace on separate occasions, asking to help care for the baby. They are told that the princess had brought her own son home from Assyria and that their help is not needed. Still, the legend persisted. At the palace, Moses grows into an intelligent boy, filled with curiosity. He makes friends with Mentu, the elderly stablehand, and learns much about the mysterious ways of animals. Mentu first tells Moses about the deathless snake that guards the book of Thoth, located at the bottom of the river at Koptos. This book holds all the secrets of heaven and earth. Moses also learns many secrets from the palace priests. When the biannual military contests are held, Moses defeats Ta-Phar, engendering a rivalry that lasts until Ta-Phar’s death. As a leader, Moses argues for more rights and better treatment for the Hebrew slaves, but he is opposed by the majority at court, including Ta-Phar. Rumors then start that Moses is a Hebrew. Moses leaves Egypt when he is twenty-five years old. In Midian, he meets Jethro and his daughter Zipporah. He falls in love with her, and they marry. He learns many secrets from the wise Jethro during the twenty years he lives in Midian. He also visits Koptos and defeats the deathless snake that guards the book; he reads all of it. Jethro tries to persuade Moses to go into Egypt, convert the Hebrews to monotheism, and lead them out of slavery. At first Moses refuses, but then God speaks to him from a burning bush and tells him to do so. Aaron, who will speak for Moses, brings Miriam to meet Moses and help convince the slaves. Soon Aaron and Moses visit TaPhar, the new pharaoh. On a regular basis, Moses performs miracles. He turns water into blood and sends plagues of frogs, lice, flies, boils, hail, locusts, and three days of darkness. Finally, every firstborn male in Egypt, excluding Hebrews, is killed. The pharaoh agrees to let the Hebrews go but changes his mind and pursues them with his army. The Hebrews escape because the Red Sea parts for them, but the Egyptians are all drowned. Moses performs miracles for the Hebrews, sweetening bitter water, providing manna and quail, and causing water to gush forth from a cliff. The Israelites defeat the Amalekites because Moses intervenes. When the Hebrews approach Midian, Jethro and Zipporah and their servants ride to meet Moses. Miriam’s jealousy toward Zipporah causes her to agitate among the Hebrew women against Moses’ wife. Moses punishes her by briefly afflicting her with leprosy. She is never the same. Moses goes up the mountain and stays for forty nights, returning with God’s laws. He finds the Hebrews worshiping a golden calf. Those who believe in Moses’ God are charged to kill those who do not, and the unbelievers are slaughtered. Hoping that the Hebrews are ready for the promised land, Moses sends a party into Canaan; they report that all good things grow there. The Hebrews, however, are afraid to fight for their promised land, so Moses realizes that they must stay in the wilderness until the original generation has died. Eventually Miriam and Jethro die. Moses invites Aaron and his son Eleazar to accompany him to the mountain to hear God’s voice. Because Aaron has not accepted that his role is over, Moses kills him, giving the robes of the high priest to Eleazar. Moses chooses Joshua as his successor

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and returns to the mountain, deliberately faking his death. He disappears down the other side of the mountain. The Characters The characters in Moses, Man of the Mountain are portrayed through their speech and actions rather than through more indirect methods such as use of symbols. The well-rounded character of Moses dominates the novel. He displays various character traits that are for the most part admirable. He is curious, intelligent, patient, forceful, and clever. He is not portrayed, however, as a perfect man. He demonstrates anger, disappointment, exasperation, and the instinct of a gambler. It is interesting to observe that as he loses his identification with the royal family of Egypt, his speech patterns change. He begins to use the dialect of the slaves, and as the novel progresses, he seems to have completely assimilated the Israelites’ speech patterns. Moses, a man of vision, hopes to turn the Israelites into a freedom-loving people. He wants nothing for himself. When they offer him a crown, he rejects it and is disappointed that it was offered. Moses believes that a truly freedom-loving people would not be eager for a king to rule them. Miriam and her brother Aaron appear to have few redeeming qualities. Miriam, who has been renowned as a prophetess among the Hebrews before the exodus, chafes under the direction of Moses. She thinks that she is an important person and that she does not receive the power and recognition that are her due. Only after Moses smites her with leprosy does she stop her constant complaining and agitating. Aaron, less intelligent but as ambitious as his sister, fares even worse than she in the novel. Aaron mistakenly thinks that he too has been called by God and does not understand why he cannot be the leader of the Hebrews. The fact that he has no leadership qualities does not appear to enter his mind. For more than forty years, he engages in conflict with Moses, attempting to make trouble and undermine Moses’ great plans for the Hebrews. Aaron has no vision of what the future of his people could be. He is interested only in power, glory, fine clothes, servants, and adulation. He is a man who would be king if he were asked; of course, no one asks him. Even at the end, when Moses reminds him that the original slave generation may not enter the promised land of Canaan, Aaron sees himself as an exception. Moses is forced to kill him to prevent him from disobeying God’s order. Ta-Phar and Moses engage in a struggle of wills after Moses returns from Midian. Each time Moses brings a plague upon the Egyptians, Ta-Phar desperately commands his priests to equal or better Moses’ power. Moses himself is reluctant to force TaPhar to let the Hebrews go immediately because part of him enjoys the rivalry. Moses knows the outcome of their struggle from the beginning, but he wants to prove decisively to Ta-Phar the extent of his power. Joshua, an eager follower who finally becomes a leader, is portrayed as the only one who deserves the honor Moses bestows upon him. At first known for his skill as a fighter more than for his leadership abilities, he grows into leadership over time.

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Themes and Meanings Moses, Man of the Mountain is foremost an allegory. Hurston retells the biblical story of Moses and the Israelites without changing any of the important elements of this well-known episode. At the same time, her novel is the story of African Americans in white America. Although the author does not declare that the Hebrews stand for African Americans or that the Egyptians stand for white Americans, the way in which African American folklore and folkways permeate the novel leaves no doubt about its allegorical structure. The Hebrews speak in African American dialect, while Moses, at least in the beginning, speaks in the voice of a white American liberal. The themes of power and the use of political power dominate the novel. For example, both Ta-Phar and his father use power to keep the Hebrews in slavery. The possible loss of political power drives Ta-Phar to continue the Hebrews’ bondage and to lead his army in pursuit of them even after he has agreed to let them go. Moses’ power to perform miracles originates in his own personality, in his use of magic, and in God. Born with leadership qualities, he is able, as all good leaders are, to learn whatever will be of use to him. Mentu, Jethro, the palace priests, and the book of Thoth at Koptos provide him with knowledge that he uses to demonstrate his powers. The line between the power God gives him and the power he gains through studying magic is somewhat blurred in the novel. Once the Hebrews leave Egypt, the ongoing power struggle between Aaron and Miriam against Moses intensifies. Allegorically, Aaron and Miriam stand for the African American upper class, which lacks vision but wants the rewards of freedom. Aaron and Miriam appear to want power in order to distance themselves from the ordinary people. Another theme, that of the individual against society, also appears. Moses is in conflict first against the Egyptians and then against the Hebrews. Hated and feared by the Egyptians after his return from twenty years of self-imposed exile, he finally overcomes them. His conflict with the Hebrews centers on his vision of freedom and the Hebrews’ inability to share his vision completely. The question of identity appears as a minor theme. Moses is never certain about the circumstances of his birth. Hebrew legend insists that he is the son of Amram and Jochebed. He grew up believing that he was the son of an Egyptian princess and her Assyrian husband. When Moses is a mature man and the woman he knew as his mother has died, he sees that her grave is honored. He tells Jethro that regardless of whether she was his natural mother, she was good to him. Although the question of his identity is never answered definitively, it appears that Hurston has cast him as a mulatto, half Egyptian and half Assyrian. Humor plays an important role in Moses, Man of the Mountain. Never dominating, but nearly always present, the humor derives from the folklore and folkways that Hurston skillfully interweaves within the biblical account. Critical Context Moses, Man of the Mountain is Hurston’s fifth full-length work, following the novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and the

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folklore collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). At the time Hurston was writing these works, the prevailing attitude among African American authors was that only the protest novel was acceptable as a vehicle for their thoughts. Hurston did not write novels that fit such categorization, and in consequence she lost favor among influential writers and critics of the Harlem Renaissance. Moses, Man of the Mountain has, however, been read as a veiled protest novel. Because of the close identification of African American slaves with the captive Israelites in spirituals such as “Go Down, Moses,” the parallels are easy to draw. Perhaps, as has been suggested by several critics, any novel dealing with Moses’ story could be seen as a protest novel, simply for the reason stated above. Hurston does not portray the captive people to be without flaws; their occasional pettiness and lack of understanding prevent them from receiving unqualified pity. The humor in the novel prevents it from becoming a serious sociological study of an oppressed race. That the novel does not fit into a prescribed form has caused it to receive both positive and negative critical readings. The contemporary reviews of Moses, Man of the Mountain were mixed. Since then, many critics have commented on what an ambitious work it is, but most have found it to be flawed. Hurston published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, in 1942, and the novel Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948. Amid personal difficulties, her career as a writer ended, although she lived for twelve more years. Her books out of print and her reputation forgotten, Hurston died in a county welfare home and was buried in an unmarked grave. In the 1970’s, African American novelist Alice Walker rediscovered Hurston’s work. Walker located her grave, purchased a marker for it, and led the revival of interest in her life and works. Her books have been republished, critical acclaim has grown, and Zora Neale Hurston has finally been accorded a well-deserved place in African American literature. Bibliography Baker, Houston A., Jr. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Baker situates Moses, Man of the Mountain as a conjure book, emphasizing Hurston’s familiarity with hoodoo through her work as an anthropologist. He characterizes Moses as a practitioner of hoodoo, that is, a conjurer, and he attributes most of Moses’ miracles to magic rather than Judaism. Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2002. Detailed biography of Hurston, covering her personal and professional lives and relating them to the major historical events through which she lived. Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Carby discusses Hurston’s choice to write of African American rural folk rather than of urban city

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dwellers. She concludes that Hurston’s choice did not fit well into the mainstream of the Harlem Renaissance and that the choice probably damaged her career. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gates designates Hurston as using rhetorical strategies to structure her works. Although concentrating on Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gates’s ideas also illuminate Moses, Man of the Mountain. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Known as the standard biography of Hurston, this book includes critical commentary on all of her writings. He makes the point that Hurston tried out the idea of Moses, Man of the Mountain in a short story called “The Cloud and the Fire,” published in Challenge in September, 1934. He draws parallels between African Americans during slave times and the Hebrews in captivity that demonstrate the book’s allegorical nature. Howard, Lillie P. Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Howard discusses the events of Hurston’s life, along with providing critical analysis of each of her works. Examines Hurston’s critical reception and her participation in the Harlem Renaissance. Identifies the changes Hurston makes in the biblical story of Moses, concentrating on Moses’ powers. Howard concludes that Hurston gives Moses supernatural skills learned from worldly sources rather than from God. Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Doubleday, 2002. A collection of more than five hundred letters, annotated and arranged chronologically. Jackson, Blyden. Introduction to Moses, Man of the Mountain, by Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Jackson provides a brief biographical sketch and critical commentary. He asserts that the novel, although clearly allegorical, is also an investigation of power. On that basis, he compares it to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). Cheri Louise Ross

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THE MOTION OF LIGHT IN WATER Sex and Science-Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 Author: Samuel R. Delany (1942Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1957-1965 Locale: New York, New York First published: 1988

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Principal personages: Samuel R. Delany, a black bisexual science-fiction writer Marilyn Hacker, Delany’s wife, a major American poet Samuel R. Delany, Sr., Delany’s father, a major Harlem businessman and owner of a mortuary Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, Delany’s mother, a funeral director and library clerk Hilda Hacker, Delany’s Jewish mother-in-law W. H. Auden, a major British and American twentieth century poet, a dinner guest of Delany and Marilyn Hacker Chester Kallman, a writer, W. H. Auden’s lover Sonny, a large ex-convict who is, for a time, Delany’s lover Form and Content In the introduction to The Motion of Light in Water, titled “Sentences,” Samuel Delany gives some sense of how the autobiography grew and developed. He writes how his thinking about two major events in his life precipitated writing about what can only be called a fragment of his adolescent and young adult years growing up in New York City and his emergence as a major writer of science fiction. His father died of lung cancer in 1958, when Delany was seventeen. As he thinks about the other events in his life during this time, he keeps reaching a certain impasse. Was he really seventeen? And was it really 1958? Although he later acquires enough information to know that his father died in 1960, when the young Delany was in fact eighteen, he understands that knowledge of both the impression he had of those events and the truth of those events is important to any writing about his life that he might do. Essentially he is concerned with truth, the perception of one’s reality, and the ordering that is required to know either. Whether his father died in 1958 or 1960, and whether Delany was seventeen or eighteen at the time, his father died when Delany was on the verge of adulthood and change. It is a series of major changes that marks one line of the autobiography’s development. Delany’s autobiographical fragment is an oddity in African American autobiographical writing for a number of reasons. On the surface, Delany only accounts for a short time period, basically the time that corresponds with his emergence as a serious

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writer of science fiction, with all the details of his life at the time that help to account for this. His autobiography is a record of his early literary life. Delany’s background and class also make his autobiography unique. He does not record a significant amount of racial discrimination or other typical hardships that African Americans faced during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Instead, as a member of a socially elite black family with a relatively long history of being a part of the middle and upper classes of the black community, Delany has a lifestyle of privilege and of opportunities usually not available to African Americans. Most of his immediate and extended family members were professionals, owners of property, and recipients of degrees and advanced degrees from prestigious universities. Many of Delany’s family members were proud of being examples of what African Americans could achieve if given the opportunity. Delany and his cousins, for example, were members of Jack and Jill of America, a black social club for middle-class children. Their parents took the extra effort to include programs to give their children even more mainstream educational and cultural opportunities. It is against this background of opportunity that Delany positions his own growth and development. He attended the Dalton School, a private and progressive elementary school. At Dalton, he was encouraged to engage in all sorts of challenging academic and literary pursuits, such as writing poetry, reading in Latin and Greek, reading all of the American and British literary classics, and planning advanced science projects. His parents even had him attend summer camps where these same sorts of challenging opportunities were available. Delany makes it clear, then, that even if he were not a genius, the opportunities his parents gave him would make anyone think he was. When he attends public high school, it is the experimental Bronx High School of Science. Students from all of New York City’s boroughs competed to be admitted; that is, even when he attends public school, he is among the best and brightest. In the integrated Bronx High School, he begins two major explorations: intellectual and sexual. He is gifted in math and science, along with having the skills of a genius in language and writing. He befriends a number of individuals at his level. He also begins to experiment more overtly with his sexually divided nature. He has a number of “crushes” while in high school, on both boys and girls. In high school, he meets Marilyn Hacker, a girl who is a grade ahead of him but is his age. They begin in high school what becomes a lifetime friendship. Like Delany, she is intellectually precocious. Delany is a bit more detailed about recording his high school years than he is about his college ones, partly because he does not complete college and partly because he learns that for what he wants to do, a traditional college degree is not required. While in high school, he had already written several novels, though none was good enough to be published. At City College of New York, Delany begins to drift from the academic pursuits that had defined his earlier years and sense of self and begins to explore more earnestly the literary and artistic ones. Marilyn Hacker is a key person in his more serious attention to writing, for she also wants to be a writer. The two talented teens spend most of their time talking about literature and writing.

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The time they spend together takes on a new note when the two explore sexual expression with each other. Delany tells Marilyn of his homosexual side, and she apparently does not care. Sexual experimentation soon leads to Hacker’s pregnancy. Delany and Hacker decide to get married. Because he is black and she is white, the two must travel to Michigan to be married. This is one of the few times when racism has a major impact on Delany’s life. The marriage takes place in August of 1961. Delany marries Hacker more out of honor than because of romantic love. He loves her as a friend, but the passion both need to sustain a marriage is shown from the beginning of the marriage as being largely absent. Nevertheless, for several years the two keep their marriage going, even though for Delany it means that his sexual escapades with men become more frequent and increasingly more detrimental to the marriage. They do not get a divorce until 1975. During the early years of their marriage, Delany and Hacker create some of their first important literary work. They create even as they struggle to make ends meet on part-time or low-paying jobs and as the tension in their marriage mounts. They live in a tenement, with its share of roaches and rats, on the Lower East Side. Hacker’s mother disapproves of the marriage and where they live, and she does her best to exacerbate the young couple’s problems. Delany has problems adjusting to Hacker’s learning and living style. For example, after he acquires a job at a Barnes and Noble bookstore and works all day, he expects Hacker to have cleaned the apartment or at least to have changed her position since the morning, when he left her reading a book. These small disagreements and misunderstandings put a terrible strain on a relationship in which passion is already problematic. Delany’s problems with Hacker mean that he enjoys being away from home. Delany takes great effort to portray the underbelly of New York City’s gay culture during this time. At first, he is a novice at locating the haunts of gay men, but before too long he knows most of the major subway restrooms that cater to gay activity, the truck stops at the end of Christopher Street, and the bars in the Village with gay clientele. He also learns the risks these men from many walks of life take, including police raids, police harassment, and blackmail. In detailing not only the substratum of New York City gay culture but also his own developing sexual quirks and fetishes (he prefers men who bite their nails and who are of the working or lower classes, and he prefers oral sex to any other), Delany creates a realistic and wonderful sense of what it was like to be black, a genius, and gay during this time. His gay experiences are as crucial as anything else in giving him subject matter and perspective to create science fiction works that largely go against traditional notions of what is right or wrong and how people should behave. Delany tells his story primarily by taking one year at a time, highlighting major events and often juxtaposing them with events that happened later or earlier in his life. He had his first science fiction book, The Jewels of Aptor, published in 1962. He writes about what it meant to be able to sell fiction, relating this event to his later development as a writer, noting how his writing and he have changed.

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Analysis The Motion of Light in Water is an exploration of how one talented black man used the resources of his particular privileged experience of growing up to become a successful writer of science fiction, a literary genre that has few black voices. Beyond this, the work shows the process through which Delany becomes the sort of man that he is, displaying not only his talent as a writer but the internal markings that distinguish him as an individual. Moving through the shadows of memory, Delany constructs a text that is his life. Throughout the work, Delany shows his doubts that he will succeed at writing. For example, when W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman have dinner with Delany and Hacker, Delany understands the judgment the men give him when he tells them that he wants to write science fiction. Science fiction was not then considered to be an expression of “high literature,” and yet Delany brings to the writing of science fiction a broad-based knowledge of all the great Western literary discourses. In his novels, he attempts to do what had not previously been done in the genre, to make it more than an expression of popular literature. His novels are richly textured with literary and historical allusions that reveal his vast knowledge. Furthermore, Delany charts the doubts that creep into his goal of writing because he is a black man. It is true that he is a black man who has had most of the advantages of any white middle-class man or woman, but he knows that major publishers will not always be receptive to the idea of a black man writing science fiction, as publishers are always aware of their market. Although Delany brings these doubts and potential obstacles to the forefront of his narrative, he is rarely defeated by them. In fact, any defeats or real setbacks that he promotes in the narrative have far more to do with his own idiosyncrasies. For example, he wonders about his taste in men and what this may do to his future life. He often discusses his interest in men who bite their nails, and he ponders what that says about him. Is there, for instance, some lapse somewhere in his development? Is he peculiar? Although his writing and his bisexuality take up a great deal of narrative space, so do the other topics and events of his life that have helped to shape him. He tells about a number of family and social events that detail the rich and varied lifestyle of the black middle class. People of that class have their beaches and resorts, their parties, and their dances. Even as he presents these “society” functions of the black middle class, he reminds readers how important in his family was the desire to succeed. His family and its class are not so blinded by privilege that they are unaware of what the masses of African Americans face. Social or racial responsibility is an important subtext in the narrative. Delany conveys the topics and issues that shaped his life from the perspective of a seasoned insider. His voice is one that seems wise beyond his years, even when he records events that happened when he was younger. That is, although his life is presented from the adult perspective, the narrative records an insightful young man. A part of this meshing of the adult and younger voices occurs through Delany’s initial discussion that he thinks the perception of what happened in his life and the actual

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facts of his life are equally important to who he is. From the beginning of his narrative, he creates an atmosphere of trust in readers by being willing to doubt that which he had believed. Did his father die when he was seventeen or eighteen? Was it in 1958 or 1960? Even in doubt, Delany’s voice is authoritative. His narrative authority is again emphasized when he talks about topics and issues that a less honest writer might avoid. Some of this honesty is revealed in his description of a number of sexual escapades that are not always flattering and certainly are not romantic. He writes how he was sexually promiscuous, how he acquired gonorrhea, and how he often did not even see the faces of men he was involved with sexually. He tells of numerous affairs with white men—most of his gay lovers were white. Few African American male writers have been so bold and forthright. Critical Context Most responses to The Motion of Light in Water have emphasized its daring and bold treatment of subject matter usually not a part of mainstream discussions of African American literature. The book fills empty literary space. James Baldwin explored in fiction, in such works as Another Country (1962), what Delany does in autobiography and in his science-fiction novels. It would be remiss to think of The Motion of Light in Water only as a work that explores black gay experience. The work is equally important for its rendering of black middle-class lifestyles and certainly joins a tradition that gained momentum in the 1920’s and 1930’s, that of the black middle-class fictional explorations of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman. Black middle-class representations also figure prominently in the works of Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan, Gloria Naylor, John Wideman, and August Wilson. Perhaps the most prominent African American literary tradition to which this book belongs is that of black autobiographical writing, a tradition that extends back to thousands of slave narratives and forward to such writers as Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde. Black autobiographical writing is often the only genre that allows a black writer to explore the subject matter, themes, and style of his or her choice. The Motion of Light in Water takes part in that tradition even as it extends it to include subject matter that largely has been ignored. Delany is black, middle class, and gay, and he writes science fiction. Few other black autobiographical works address such dynamics; Audre Lorde’s autobiographical writing on being a black lesbian is a notable exception. Delany’s book takes the time to process the development of a gifted black writer and relates to the works of many black writers who have offered explanations regarding their own creative steps. As one of the few black voices in science fiction, Delany may well have offered a seminal text, showing the creative processes of the sciencefiction writer. Bibliography Fitting, Peter. “Positioning and Closure: On ‘Reading Effect’ of Contemporary Utopian Fiction.” Utopian Studies 1 (1987): 23-36. Looks at Delany’s creation of uto-

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pian worlds and compares those worlds to similar ones depicted in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Marge Piercy. Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Focuses on Samuel R. Delany in his discussion of black male writers. Argues that Delany is a part of the tradition in black writing that calls for diversity of subject matter and theme. Peplow, Michael W., and Robert S. Bravard. Samuel R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1962-1979. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. An extremely useful compilation of material on Delany’s writing to 1979. All of the major reviews, articles, and essays are included. Philmus, Robert, ed. “On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.” Science Fiction Studies 3 (November, 1990): 295-324. Includes an interview conducted in 1986 in which Delany discusses the genesis of the Triton (1976) novel and his return to the more conventional science fiction form. Stone-Blackburn, Susan. “Adult Telepathy: Babel-17 and The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation 30 (Fall, 1989): 243-253. Extensive treatment of the phenomenon of telepathy in Delany’s Babel-17 (1966) and the comparison of that treatment to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity and Difference. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis, this book devotes a chapter to the place of The Motion of Light in Water within Delany’s oeuvre. Charles P. Toombs

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MUMBO JUMBO Author: Ishmael Reed (1938Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Satire Time of plot: 1920’s Locale: Harlem, New York First published: 1972

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Principal characters: Papa LaBas, a Neo-HooDoo detective living in Harlem at the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral with his family of assistants Earline, Papa LaBas’s closest human confidante Berbelang, a radical black revolutionary who leaves LaBas because he believes that LaBas is obsessed with political conspiracy theories Abdul Sufi Hamid (Johnny James), a Black Muslim critical of PaPa LaBas as being too mystical and removed from real problems Hinckle Von Vampton, the white editor of the Benign Monster and illegal owner of the Jes Grew Text Biff Musclewhite, a former police commissioner of New York, now a museum curator Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, a rural African American from Re Mote Mississippi The Novel Mumbo Jumbo is an experimental novel that blends fiction and history. In it, Jes Grew, an epidemic of ecstasy originating in New Orleans, is rapidly taking over the United States, making people dance, laugh, and love life. It can be the blues, jazz, ragtime, or slang and black vernacular. Jes Grew needs its Text to survive, and apparently the Text exists somewhere in Manhattan. The novel takes place in 1920’s Harlem. PaPa LaBas’s search for the Text and the murderer of Abdul Hamid is linked to the ancient past of Egypt. Reed gives a revisionary interpretation of the rise of Western civilization, one based on an Afrocentric worldview. The conflicts in the novel revolve around a basic split in human consciousness. Osiris, the Egyptian god, created a sect of life-affirming principles that resulted in Jes Grew. Set, his brother, instigated an antilife sect determined to destroy the world—the Atonists. Osiris’s dances of fertility are recorded in The Book of Thoth, the original Text of Jes Grew. The lost Text was discovered in 1118 by the Knights Templar, a secret Christian society formed during the Crusades. Hinckle Von Vampton, an original member of the Knights Templar, steals the Text. In 1307, Pope

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Clement outlaws the Knights Templar, and Von Vampton escapes with the Text. Wherever Von Vampton goes with the Text, there are spontaneous outbreaks of Jes Grew as people sense the nearness of the sacred book. The latest outbreak of Jes Grew occurs during the 1920’s in Harlem. This is the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a great flowering of African American arts and culture. The action of the novel is played out against historical events such as the U.S. Marine invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and the politics of Warren Harding. Von Vampton is an editor of the New York Sun and disperses the Text in installments to African Americans in Harlem. He makes a deal with the Atonists that he will turn over the text if they make the Knights Templar the leading eradicators of Jes Grew. The Text ends up in Abdul Hamid’s hands. Von Vampton tries to get it back. When Abdul resists, he is killed. PaPa LaBas discovers Abdul’s body, his hand wrapped around a clue to the whereabouts of the Text. As a metaphysical detective, LaBas is intrigued by the philosophical implications the Text has for liberating African Americans. Concerned with protecting the ancient mysteries of Haitian hoodoo, LaBas is undergoing a crisis brought about by the defection of his assistants. He also has argued with Abdul Hamid, who urged a more pragmatic and stricter approach to African American organization and behavior. Berbelang is a former assistant of LaBas. He and his gang of art snatchers, the Mu’tafikah, kidnap Biff Musclewhite, the former police commissioner. Musclewhite escapes and kills Berbelang, but the Mu’tafikah recover important pieces of ethnic art and deliver them to Benoit Battraville’s ship. Battraville is a Haitian rebel fighting for freedom in the line of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who gained independence for Haiti. LaBas and Black Herman arrest Von Vampton for the killing of Abdul. They also arrest Gould, another Knight Templar, who is in blackface acting as a talking black android urging African Americans to resist Jes Grew. They deliver the two for punishment to Battraville on his ship. Jes Grew begins to die out. LaBas and Black Herman dig up an ornate box, in which Abdul hid the Text, from under the Cotton Club. The Text is gone, and in a letter Abdul explains that he burned the Text because it would be a bad influence on African Americans. In an epilogue, LaBas lectures students at a university in the 1960’s. He predicts continued conflict between the Atonists and Jes Grew, a conflict in which Jes Grew will eventually triumph. The Characters The characters in Mumbo Jumbo suggest allegory rather than social realism. Each character represents a philosophical worldview, a composite of ideas from each side of the Atonist and Jes Grew conflict. There is little attempt by the author to flesh out the characters and give them the background, personal traits, and breadth of experience normally associated with characters in a novel. Rather than using real people, the novel outlines positions on African American concerns by placing its characters in unresolvable conflict.

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Few of the characters change or develop from their initial depictions in the text. Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, the ignorant rural African American, never matures in his urban environment, and his naïve impressions seem forced by the end of the novel. Black Herman and Von Vampton are both occultists, but Black Herman strictly pursues positive African American values with his powers while Von Hampton is corrupt to the core. This strict duality of good and evil holds true for other characters in the text. Generally, the black characters represent a spectrum of African American attitudes and worldviews, while white characters each tend to reflect a single viewpoint. On the personal level, the characters are easy marks for ridicule and satire because of their ideological rigidity. The satire also works on an abstract level because the characters stand for philosophical attitudes of a broader nature. Reed shows the hypocrisy and extremism of many aspects of both black and white life through this type of allegorical or representational character presentation. PaPa LaBas and Earline are exceptions to the general presentation of types, in that their characters develop to some degree. Earline is in love with Berbelang, and her grief at his murder by Musclewhite is depicted in socially recognizable terms of sorrow and regret. Weakened and depressed by this human loss, she is overcome by Erzulie and enters a world of hallucination. She undergoes an exorcism by Black Herman that restores her human nature. Likewise, LaBas suffers a crisis of spirit when Berbelang and Charlotte leave the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral. Even Earline questions LaBas’s dedication to the HooDoo detective way of life. LaBas wonders if HooDoo can be relevant to the social changes and fragmented spirit of modern life. As a HooDoo detective, LaBas represents African American creativity and renewal through spiritual connection to the Afrocentric past. In his most positive aspects, LaBas gives structure and meaning to the novel. LaBas is one hundred years old in the 1960’s and has not changed physically from the start of the book, when he was fifty years old. Other characters, such as the white Hinckle Von Vampton and Biff Musclewhite, are obviously meant to be allegorical. Von Vampton is hundreds of years old, and Biff Musclewhite acts and thinks just as his name suggests. Characters such as these imply caricature or cartoon. These overblown and excessive personalities collide in the text, leaving mayhem and destruction in their wake. Other characters move magically through the text regardless of obstacles such as time or borders between countries. Thus, Benoit Battraville can appear in his large ship The Black Plume on the shores of Manhattan simply because Reed needs someone to represent the revolutionary aspect of Haitian life. Consequently, the characters in the world of Mumbo Jumbo defy natural laws. They can live to extraordinary ages, survive catastrophic physical punishment, and ignore the normal boundaries of human frailty. Characters such as these exist to be made fun of or to defend a radical redefinition of the African American worldview. Reed’s satirical approach in this respect can at times by extremely humorous and revealing. At other times, the didacticism of the text intrudes on the narrative flow and seems perhaps too obvious. One final note in this regard concerns Reed’s use of actual

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figures from the historical past, such as President Warren Harding and James Weldon Johnson, as characters in the text. The use of real characters in a fictional framework complicates and questions the accepted notions of how fiction is written and read. Overall, the characters in this novel have to be appreciated on the level of allegorical fantasy and cannot be expected to conform to the usual expectations of character development. Themes and Meanings As a novel of ideas and satirical criticism, Mumbo Jumbo works on a number of levels. Primarily, it is a postmodernist detective novel in the tradition of black detective fiction. It uses altered detective personas, black vernacular, double consciousness, and magic while parodying the detective form. Mumbo Jumbo’s metaphysical central mystery and its revisionist approach to history are additional indications of postmodern detective viewpoints. On another level, it is a witty indictment of extreme behavior of all types. Characters representing many aspects of the ideological spectrum are shown to be buffoonish and narrow-minded. Abdul Hamid, sounding his clarion call of black power, is ridiculed in the end as a black puritan who burns the sacred text because it is, in his estimation, too lewd and scandalous. On another level, the book suggests the ancient conflict between Eros and Thanatos. Put in its simplest terms, Mumbo Jumbo reflects humankind’s constant war with itself. On one side lie love and life, affirming revitalization; on the other side lie hate and self-destruction. Reed seems to suggest that the intensity of the conflict heightened as the world moved into the twentieth century. The social and political structure of Western civilization, based on a death-seeking ethos, is portrayed as contemptible. An example of this occurs when the chief Atonist is overjoyed to see that the watercress darter has become extinct, further proof that the Atonist cause is winning the fight for control of the planet. The continuous conflict between different ideologies and groups in the novel suggests a society as well as a world in conflict. Berbelang is a black revolutionary fighting the racist practices of institutions such as museums. There is even division among ranks, as the Knights Templar quarrel with the death-dealing Wallflower Order. Amid this chaos, there seem to be few manifestations of sanity and continuity. A broad condemnation of Western civilization is constructed through the eyes of an educated, sensitive African American. The novel posits a positive approach to African American consciousness based on Afrocentric, not Eurocentric, worldviews. Reed accomplishes this by reinterpreting the entire history of Western civilization, redefining its myths and reconstructing its gods. “Mumbo jumbo” in common vernacular suggests something unintelligible or mysterious. Reed concentrates instead on the positive aspects of the African mother tongue. Within the text itself, “mumbo jumbo” is defined as coming from the Mandingo language and means a “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.” Reed indicates by this example his intent to reconnect the African American

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community to African ancestors and to restore the African American identity by redefining the historical past. Reed does this by creating, in this and other works, his own particular worldview, or Neo-HooDoo aesthetic, based on African American perception. Neo-HooDoo stresses the positive attributes of African American community and value systems. For example, PaPa LaBas is linked to the Haitian voodoo mysteries, since LaBas is a powerful Haitian spirit connected in turn to the ancient mysteries of African religion. Reed’s revisionist interpretation establishes the Osiris/Set conflict at the very origins of human consciousness. Africa’s Egypt is seen in this sense as the progenitor of humankind, containing the seeds of both destruction and renewal. Jes Grew is Reed’s Neo-HooDoo terminology for the positive revitalization of the African American spirit that possesses the power to save all of humankind from total destruction. The term derives from James Weldon Johnson’s description of ragtime music and of the character of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): Both “jes’ grew.” Positive attributes of African American culture are stressed through the repeated insertion of real figures from black history, black music, and black politics. Reed makes constant reference to the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. This affirmation of black personalities further extends Reed’s notion of the NeoHooDoo aesthetic. By reconstructing black history and reconnecting it to the ancient past, Reed emphasizes the great strengths of African Americans. Their survival as a culture indicates the powers of an inherent Jes Grew ability to re-create spontaneously, adapting old forms to new methods of accomplishment. The book Mumbo Jumbo is a case in point. Mumbo Jumbo is an experiment in form and style; it introduces innovative ideas as well. It breaks common assumptions about how a novel should be read by creating a colorful pastiche of narrative methods. Reed inserts photos, footnotes written by himself, passages from other books, and pictures to create a new type of text. Much like Jes Grew, it seems to spring spontaneously into being. The structure of the novel follows no recognizable pattern, consisting of episodes of narrative interwoven in a pattern of interjections, footnotes, and illustrations. The linearity of the narrative is constantly under attack, suggesting the importance of circularity in time, another aspect of Afrocentric religions. The main body of the novel is preceded by a cinematic prologue. There is also an epilogue and a partial bibliography of historical and philosophical texts, giving the book a scholarly air. The novel is a blend of research, historical fact, and imagination. By interrupting the flow of narrative, stressing historical asides, and positing positive African American worldviews, Reed seems to suggest that all texts must be examined closely for fabrication. Furthermore, history itself may be a fabrication that can be manipulated by whoever interprets supposed facts.

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Critical Context Mumbo Jumbo has been hailed as a revolutionary literary work and a masterpiece of literary imagination. As in his other satirical works of fiction, including The FreeLance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Reed takes broad swipes at Western civilization. Mumbo Jumbo is his most successful novel in its breadth of vision and stylistic innovations. Reed’s earlier novels have been criticized for the very elements that make Mumbo Jumbo so successful. The ludicrousness of his plots and the bizarre confrontations of allegorical characters have not always worked. In particular, Reed has been criticized for cardboard characterization that suggests to critics a furthering of stereotypes. Many feminist critics have taken offense at his depictions of female characters. Reed’s ability to juggle these contradictions is most successful in Mumbo Jumbo. Reed’s confrontational style entertains while it instructs. Best of all, Mumbo Jumbo shows Reed at the top of his form in terms of scathing wit and humor. The mingling of fact and fiction in Mumbo Jumbo works because it does not fall to either side. The politics of the novel resist propaganda, while the themes resist polemic. The central conceit of using a black HooDoo priest as a detective holds the novel together. It creates a narrative suspense often lacking in Reed’s other fiction. Detective PaPa LaBas is a clever blend of ancient and modern consciousness. Finally, Mumbo Jumbo is most strong in its depiction of the Neo-HooDoo aesthetic. Reed’s philosophy of positive African American identity based on both the African past and the creative present is masterfully presented. Mumbo Jumbo continues the tradition of black detective fiction while showing the African American ability to create new forms out of old. Bibliography Byerman, Keith E. “Voodoo Aesthetics: History and Parody in the Novels of Ishmael Reed.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Focuses on Reed’s use of parody and reworking of history. Analyzes six novels and traces the development of a new aesthetic of African American sensibility that Reed calls Neo-HooDoo art. Cooke, Michael G. “Tragic and Ironic Denials of Intimacy: Jean Toomer, James Baldwin, and Ishmael Reed.” In Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. Recognizes Mumbo Jumbo as a high-spirited satire but criticizes Reed for not developing the concept of the Jes Grew Text into something more positive for African Americans. Fox, Robert Elliot. “Ishmael Reed: Gathering the Limbs of Osiris.” In Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Fox studies in depth seven of Reed’s novels and finds that each work builds on the previous one. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “On ‘The Blackness of Blackness’: Ishmael Reed and a Critique of the Sign.” In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary

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Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Recognizes Reed’s importance in the tradition of African American literature. Finds Mumbo Jumbo to be an elaboration on the detective novel and a postmodern text because of its use of intertextuality. Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Martin closely analyzes Reed’s evolving notion of NeoHooDoo aesthetics and how it relates to black aesthetic critics such as Clarence Major, Houston Baker, Jr., Addison Gayle, Jr., and Amiri Baraka. Comes to the conclusion that Reed refuses to acknowledge any mode of criticism. Discusses Mumbo Jumbo as a satiric allegory that is in itself the Text that is searched for in the novel. Mvuyekure, Pierre-Damien. The “Dark Heathenism” of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed: African Voodoo as American Literary Hoodoo. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Examines the role in Mumbo Jumbo of the profanation of the (Western) sacred in order to create an authentic African postmodern spirituality. Whitlow, Roger. “Ishmael Reed.” In Black American Literature: A Critical History. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1973. Covers the early work of Reed, including his poetry, and makes a strong argument for Reed’s inclusion in the absurdist literary tradition. Whitlow sees many connections to the style and satiric content of such American writers as Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and J. D. Salinger. Finds Reed’s work entertaining. Stephen F. Soitos

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MY AMPUTATIONS Author: Clarence Major (1936) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Experimental; picaresque Time of plot: 1980’s Locale: United States; Europe; Africa First published: 1986 Principal characters: Mason Ellis, an African American man born in Georgia who masquerades as the Author Chiro, Mason’s father, a dark figure who leaves Mason a complicated legacy Painted Turtle, a Native American woman who lived on a reservation in New Mexico before meeting Mason in Georgia Judith Williams, the wife of Mason Ellis and mother of their six children Edith Levine, a white, college-educated actress who conspires with Mason, Jesus, and Brad on a bank robbery Jesus, a criminal Brad, a criminal friend of Mason John Armegurn, the director of Mason’s fellowship money The Author, an unnamed and unspecified African American writer who takes the name Clarence McKay The Novel My Amputations is a postmodernist experimental novel that combines picaresque and bildungsroman techniques in a story about Mason Ellis and his search for an African American identity. Written in short episodes, the novel narrates the escapades of Mason from child to Air Force serviceman to hoodlum and bank robber and then to lecturer. His ultimate con is to receive $50,000 a year from the Magnan-Rockford Foundation. The novel is a complex blend of Mason’s past with his dreams and hallucinations. Fragments of his own novel are interjected into a narrative unreliably presented by a nameless narrator. Mason’s mental state suggests paranoid schizophrenia, as he constantly fears an unnamed conspiracy organized by the System. Mason is the son of Melba, a light-skinned black woman, and Chiro, a hard-living black man. Mason’s youth in Chicago is troubled, and he has a fantasy existence with his muse, Celt CuRoi, perhaps a derivation of his mother’s partial Irish ancestry. Mason suffers episodes of racial bigotry in the service. His apprenticeship as a writer starts conventionally, as he imitates white writers such as Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway and black writers such as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin. After the service, Mason moves back to Chicago’s South

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Side, marries, has six children, and separates from his wife. Mason and a woman named Painted Turtle move to New York City and turn to a life of crime. Mason claims that another man, possibly the Author, stole his manuscript. This same man has taken the name Clarence McKay to hide his identity. Mason kidnaps Clarence McKay and, with three others, robs a bank. After the robbery, Mason assumes the identity of the Author and claims the Author’s fellowship money. The reader is never sure if this Author is Clarence McKay, Mason himself, or the author of the novel being read. Mason lectures at colleges and universities in the United States, Europe, and Africa. Lovers and friends from the past appear briefly in the second half of the novel, but only as hallucinations. Each episode describes drinking, eating, and sexual escapades connected to his lecture tour. At different lectures, Mason reads from his work in progress. Wherever Mason lectures, violence breaks out. In London, he escapes a bomb explosion in the tube station. In Berlin, people standing at a bus stop are blown to pieces. Later, in Berlin, he is kidnapped by a neo-Nazi group, and in Italy, he is arrested and beaten by the police for being an arsonist. In each instance, alcohol is involved, the actual facts of the incident are confused, and Mason is miraculously rescued by his friends. In Nice, Mason becomes anxious about his great deception as the Author and fears a conspiracy against him. He goes to a detective fiction conference and voices questions about fog, confusion, and contradictions. These questions mirror others raised in the novel concerning truth, fiction, and the nature of reality. Mason’s quest for his identity disintegrates into hallucination. He imagines that he sees old criminal friends from his past, and then Clarence McKay attacks him on the beach with a pistol. Mason is incapable of balancing his criminal past with his current masquerade as the black Author. He imagines that he is pursued by detectives sent by the mysterious foundation that funds his fellowship. Mason descends into paranoid frenzy as he travels through Italy and Greece. Finally, he is sent an envelope by the foundation and is told to deliver it to an African chieftain in Ghana. Mason locates the village and, in the middle of the night, wearing a mask, he is escorted into the presence of the chieftain, who tells him that he has come to the end of his running. The novel ends ambiguously, questioning the nature of discourse and leaving Mason in the dark. The Characters Mason Ellis is the focal point of the novel. The reader never really knows if Mason is hallucinating or is dreaming what has happened. The first part of the novel sketches Mason’s youth and young manhood in a realistic mode, but as the novel progresses the text becomes more fantasy than reality. The possibility of Mason’s schizophrenia is brought up early in the novel in relation to his fantasy episodes with Celt CuRoi. A strict reading of Mason’s character as insane is too easy an interpretation of this complicated text. Certainly, the issue of Mason’s criminality and his great hoax of masquerading as a well-known black Author is cloaked in ambiguity. The reader comes to believe that Mason is in fact a black author struggling with defining his identity and somehow feeling as if he is an impostor.

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Mason’s background as an African American contains many authentic touches and suggests a continuity of community that Mason seems incapable of accepting. References are made to black authors and aspects of the black vernacular and folk tradition. Black musicians such as Charlie Parker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and the Platters pop up continuously in the text. Furthermore, the split in Mason’s consciousness represented by his connection to the Irish-sounding Celt CuRoi and his search for authentic African American identity and African heritage may in part be responsible for the conflicts in the novel. Mason’s criminality figures heavily in the first half of the novel, yet in the second part, he is able to talk to academic audiences all over the world, and his expertise is never brought into question. The two parts of his personality do not seem to connect in any meaningful way except on the hinge of his assumption of the black Author’s identity. In the end, perhaps readers are meant to see Mason’s and the Author’s identity as the same. The narrative then concerns the progressive disintegration of Mason’s consciousness as he travels back to his African roots for rebirth and renewal. This divorce in Mason’s reality is reflected in the other characters in the novel. Mason’s family history is well sketched. Readers recognize his light-skinned mother and his renegade father as two characters who have emotional range and depth. Mason’s progression from childhood through his time in the Air Force to his disastrous marriage in Chicago also has the ring of verisimilitude. Mason’s entry into the criminal world seems less substantive. With this descent, the novel’s focus also begins to fragment. The characters of Edith, Jesus, and Brad, with whom Mason commits a bank robbery, are shadowy at best. Edith Levine is an academic who craves the excitement of the underworld. Jesus and Brad could be anybody as they become props in Mason’s growing obsession with the Author. Nebulous characterization is best represented by the Author. The reader is never given a clue about this character. He may be Clarence McKay, or he may be Mason Ellis, who imagines himself as an impostor masquerading as himself. As the narrative focuses more on Mason’s wild hallucinations of pursuit, capture, and torture, other characters become only names who pop up in the text. This sketchy characterization becomes the norm as Mason travels (as the Author) through the United States, Europe, and Africa. Readers are hazily informed of Mason’s extracurricular activities, in which he continuously gets free meals, alcohol, and women. In Nice, his companion is an exchange student named Barbara Ann who may or may not be appearing in his bed at night chain-smoking cigarettes. In Berlin, it is a professor, Heiner Graf, with whom he spends a riotous evening ending in a mad bombing spree. In Italy, it is Vito and nameless women. In Greece, it is Zizi Kifissias, a painter, and Melina Karamanlis, a journalist. The catalog of minor characters continues to the end of the book, with no clear rationale for their existence ever established. Overall, the characters in My Amputations revolve around the central character of Mason Ellis. Mason is the focal point of the narrative, and the characters in the first part of the book help to elucidate his early background. In the second part, the charac-

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ters become whimsical and elusive. As Mason slips in and out of dreams and hallucinations, the characters may be people he meets or simply figments of his imagination. Themes and Meanings My Amputations is a metafictional novel questioning the nature of fiction and the perception of reality. It combines bildungsroman techniques with the picaresque tradition of an episodic narrative about the travels and adventures of a rogue or criminal. My Amputations is also postmodern in its self-reflexive concern with the fictional depiction of reality. The novel experiments with characters, plot, and action by refusing to use realist or naturalistic techniques. Embedded in its surrealistic flow of disconnected episodes are references to the process of fiction, the conflict between truth and imagination, and the relation of the author to the text. My Amputations is written in the third person by an unreliable narrator who refuses to conform to the dramatic verities of time, place, and action. Mason represents himself through his work in progress as an unreliable character whose dreams contradict the narrative presented in the main body of the text. Since readers have no idea who Mason is masquerading as, if he in fact is masquerading, readers are often bewildered. The last half of the novel confirms Mason’s growing despair at his quest for meaning and identity. Mason is self-educated and gives many lectures, yet readers know little about what he says or thinks or writes. His growing paranoia focuses on his fellowship agreement, his search for an impostor, and suspicion of the System. The abstract quality of his journey further questions the traditional linear narrative. The portrait that emerges is of a very troubled African American man torn in two directions. His Anglo-Saxon muse, Celt CuRoi, represents half of the equation. Within her domain fall all the references to the Euro-Americentric world of Mason’s imagination. She provided inspiration in youth, but when Mason starts his European search for African American roots, she can no longer help. Within the second half of the equation lies Mason’s identity as a black man. His picaresque adventures attempt to reconcile these two worlds and reveal his African heritage. In Europe, Mason dreams continuously of being kidnapped, tortured, and attacked. He fears that his masquerade as the Author will be exposed, and he imagines himself about to be exterminated. He believes that the foundation controls him and that everybody he meets is part of the conspiracy. He drinks too much, blacks out frequently, and lives in a hazy world of fear. This narrative conundrum frustrates readers intentionally, bringing into question the nature of the text and questioning accepted modes of perception. Mason also disappoints readers, particularly when he sidesteps intellectual conflict. This is aggravating in the African section, when Mason is asked important questions about Black Nationalism, Afrocentric identity, and the black writer’s political position. The famous Author evades these important issues by lapsing into total blankness. His facile and confusing passage through Europe reads like a travelogue written by an ignorant tourist. The emptiness of Mason’s character becomes truly frightening. Is this black man representative of his African American culture? If so, it is a strong indictment of the

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Euro-Americentric culture that it has helped to create such a confused individual. The reader is left with a distressing portrait of a paranoid black academic who teeters on the edge of total disintegration. As a series of fantastic episodes in the tradition of the picaresque, the metaphor becomes a further indictment of the dilemma of African American double consciousness. Mason’s constant analysis of himself suggests incompleteness, fabricated on the mistaken notion that black identity must be modeled on white value systems. Even more distressing is Mason’s inability to find his identity in black worldviews. In this sense, the ending of the novel holds out the most positive message. By stressing the self-reflexive nature of the narrative and the personal nature of discourse, Major seems to suggest that an individual can remake his or her reality. In Mason’s case, an African rebirth in the consciousness of self, the sense of community, and the nature of language and discourse is still possible. Critical Context My Amputations fits well into Major’s body of postmodernist writing. Major is perhaps best known for his novel All-Night Visitors (1969), which shares many of the themes surrounding African American male identity found in this novel. Major experiments with unusual narrative techniques, blending prose and poetry. He is also interested in creatively adapting genre forms, as in the detective novel Reflex and Bone Structure (1975). Major’s background as a painter is often seen in his novels. My Amputations contains many references to European painters of the modern tradition. Major is recognized as a leading experimenter in black writing and has been critically appraised as an innovative artist. In novels such as All-Night Visitors, No (1973), and Emergency Exit (1979), the author uses a combination of prose experiments to present an alternative view of the African American experience. His work is commonly appreciative of the black vernacular tradition. Through the daring use of sex, nonlinear plots, and unreliable narrators, Major confirms the postmodernist examination of fiction’s accepted roles in society. Major’s work rejects the assumption that language offers a logical means by which one might understand the world. In the end, the text represents nothing outside itself. Major is an African American poet and editor of the Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970). He is often cited as one of the founding theoreticians of the 1960’s new black aesthetic movement. As editor of a poetry anthology, The New Black Poetry (1969), Major stressed the importance of African American poetic identity in collectively attempting to revolutionize social and political relationships through creation of a brotherhood of black consciousness. This African American cultural emphasis and heightened sense of the positive black identity was shared by other black writers such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Addison Gayle, Jr., and Ishmael Reed. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. “Modernism and Postmodernism.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Places Major in the African American postmodern tradition of experimenting with language

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and form. Sees Major as parodying and extending genre forms while searching for new ways to express African American identity. _______, ed. Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. This important entry in scholarship of Clarence Major devotes an essay to the relationship between My Amputations and cubism. Black American Literary Forum 13, no. 2 (1979). This issue is devoted to Major and contains a number of interesting articles. Among these are “Towards a Primary Bibliography of Clarence Major,” by Joe Weixlmann and Clarence Major, and “Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure and the Anti-Detective Tradition,” by Larry McCaffrey and Linda Gregory. Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Chapter Eight: Clarence Major.” In The Life of Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Discusses the disruptive qualities of Major’s work in relation to the postmodernist text. Sees Major as an instrumental African American writer who blends social and racial critique into experimental texts. _______. The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Places Major in a postmodern tradition of writers including William S. Burroughs and John Barth. Considers Major an extremely clever writer confronting accepted narrative conventions. Major, Clarence. The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. New York: Third Press, 1974. A collection of varied essays, including Major’s seminal essay on the black aesthetic titled “Black Criteria.” Also includes a number of interviews, one of them a self-interview. Stephen F. Soitos

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MY BROTHER Author: Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter Richardson, 1949Type of work: Memoir Time of work: Mid-1990’s Locale: Antigua and the United States First published: 1997

)

Principal personages: Jamaica Kincaid, an Antiguan American novelist and writer Devon Drew, Kincaid’s brother Mrs. Drew, Kincaid’s mother Dr. Prince Ramsey, a physician fighting AIDS and ignorance Form and Content Written in a singsong prose style heavy with repetition, My Brother chronicles without pause or respite the ebb and flow of Devon Drew’s illness and death from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Drew, the youngest of three brothers, is the half brother of the memoir’s author, Jamaica Kincaid. The two share a mother, Mrs. Drew, but they have different fathers. They also live very different lives. Drew, a man in his thirties, lives with his mother in Antigua. Kincaid, who is thirteen years older, lives in Vermont with her own children. She is an international best-selling and critically acclaimed author, while Drew has no job, dreams of being a musician, and occasionally steals from his own brothers. Even his language does not sound like her language. In her earlier works, A Small Place (1988) and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Kincaid found abundant fault with both motherhood and her motherland. In My Brother, she again grapples with both, as she returns to Antigua to fulfill familial obligations. Kincaid struggles with herself, asking if she loves her brother. She struggles with her mother, a woman who loves her children not well but too much. She struggles with an Antiguan culture that isolates its AIDS patients and waits for them to waste away in lonely squalor. She struggles with her dying brother Devon, a man who rejects her values, questions her motives, and pursues his pleasures at his own peril. Devon’s life is devoted to sex, drugs, and reggae. A Rastafarian, he smokes “the weed” daily and occasionally uses cocaine. His family members believe that he has contracted the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) through heterosexual sex. Devon often boasts to his sister that he “loves the girls.” Enabling this lifestyle, Mrs. Drew wants only to comfort her baby boy, and she displays every ounce of motherly devotion. All of her sons live under her roof. It is only when her children show signs of independence—when her children need her not physically but only morally—that she, as the author argues repeatedly, reveals herself to be a poor mother.

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Antiguans have no access to azidothymidine (AZT) or any other powerful drugs capable of allaying the AIDS virus. They take a fatalistic approach to the disease, failing to see the point of prolonging a life that cannot be saved. Only limited resources are expended to help those who seem able to recover. People dying of AIDS are shunned, tended only by their families. Devon’s friends never visit him. Fighting this endemic denial is Dr. Prince Ramsey; a man Kincaid is surprised to find in Antigua. With his encouragement and help, Kincaid buys her brother added years of life, importing AZT and other drugs from the United States. The drugs cause Devon to make a seemingly miraculous recovery. Antiguan doctors, however, do not know what to do with a recovering AIDS patient; they have never had one before. Thanks to his sister’s generosity, Devon goes home to his mother—and to his old, self-destructive way of life. Devon has unprotected sex, and he doubts whether he even really had AIDS. He certainly never tells anyone that he is HIV-positive. It is only after Devon’s death that Kincaid learns the truth about her brother: He was bisexual, hiding his sexual orientation from even his closest friends and family. This discovery saddens Kincaid the most—not because her brother was gay, but because he could never be free to be himself. His life was a lie. Analysis My Brother tells three stories: It tells a story about family and the power of one’s roots and home. It tells a story about AIDS, about ignorance and denial. Finally, it tells a story about values and choices, about the powerlessness and helplessness one can feel in the face of a tradition steeped in superstition and dysfunction. As a story about family, the book reveals the weakness of enlightenment in the presence of senselessness. Devon Drew, a bisexual drug user, seems on the surface to be a simple man who needs only his mother, his music, and his vices. The relationship between Devon, Mrs. Drew, and Kincaid forms a triangle of miscommunication. Kincaid tells Devon that he must use protection when having sex. He laughs at her. Mrs. Drew does not serve as an arbiter between them, because the status quo reinforces her maternal role. Her martyr complex and the power she wields as mother in times of distress feed her ego and provide her with purpose and meaning. As a story about AIDS, My Brother presents the realities of life in the developing nation of Antigua. Kincaid left this country for the United States twenty years earlier, and Antigua is now familiar to her only in bits and pieces—a building here, a street there. She has become an outsider. While she can and does offer help, hope, and even life to her brother, she cannot give him her love, and she cannot ultimately save him from himself. As a story about values, the book depicts two children of the same mother who choose different roads. The daughter leaves her mother, adopts a new name, and creates a new life and a new family. The son embraces his culture and stays with his mother, but he must hide his true self in order to maintain the illusion that he fits comfortably into Antiguan culture.

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Critical Context When her brother Devon died in 1996, Jamaica Kincaid was completing The Autobiography of My Mother. Kincaid’s fictional works are often largely autobiographical. She mixes fiction with nonfiction to produce stories that are not about her own life and family but that mirror her experience. My Brother, then, is a continuation of Kincaid’s literary exploration of her childhood, her unresolved issues with her mother, and her frustration with a lethargic island attitude toward progressive thinking. Like A Small Place—a nonfiction work that derides colonialism, postcolonialism, tourism and every other ism—My Brother is direct in its pointed criticism of the backward thinking that its author believes continues to shackle the future of Antigua and its native inhabitants. With a convert’s zeal, Kincaid cries loudest and longest over lost opportunities for her homeland. Deborah E. McDowell, writing in Women’s Review of Books, states, “My Brother is fittingly more about Jamaica Kincaid than about Devon Drew.” Kincaid’s works are exercises in exorcism, expelling old ghosts, casting out old demons that still haunt her despite her attempts to distance herself from them. In an interview with Marilyn Snell published in Mother Jones, Kincaid said, “This is the life I have. This is the life I write about.” Bibliography Brophy, Sarah. “Angels in Antigua: The Disaporic of Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 117, no. 2 (March, 2002): 265-277. Explores the connection between melancholia and mourning. Questions whether Kincaid is mourning the loss of her youngest brother, whom she only saw at the beginning and the ending of his life, or her sadness and grief reflect her own lost opportunities mixed with survivor’s guilt. Kaufman, Joanne. “Jamaica Kincaid: An Author’s Unsparing Judgments Earn Her an Unwanted Reputation for Anger.” People 48, no. 24 (December 15, 1997): 109112. Powerlessness, this article suggests, is at the heart of Kincaid’s writings. On writing about her thirty-three-year-old brother’s death, she is quoted here saying, “We were both dreamers, both lived in our heads. I thought, ‘This could be me.’” Kincaid, Jamaica. “Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings.” Interview by Marilyn Snell. Mother Jones 22, no. 5 (September/October, 1997): 28-31. Refers to Kincaid’s “continuing obsessions.” Kincaid says she is more concerned with pursuing truth than with the happiness or sadness of that truth. McDowell, Deborah E. “Darkness Visible.” Review of My Brother, by Jamaica Kincaid. Women’s Review of Books 15, no. 4 (January, 1998): 1-3. Makes the point that all books about death are also about life—about what the living make of it and how death affects them. Page, Kezia. “What If He Did Not Have a Sister [Who Lived in the United States]? Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother as Remittance Text.” Small Axe 21 (October, 2006): 37-53. In an argument based on the biblical line “render unto Caesar what is

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Caesar’s,” the author suggests Kincaid’s writing is really a repayment: She pays with her writing for escaping her homeland and her most likely fate. Wachman, Gay. “Dying in Antigua.” Review of My Brother, by Jamaica Kincaid. The Nation, November 3, 1997, 43-44. Refers to the death of Devon Drew, Jamaica Kincaid’s half brother, as “a memoir of a voice.” Randy L. Abbott

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MY LIFE WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. Author: Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1927-1968 Locale: Boston, Massachusetts; southern United States First published: 1969 Principal personages: Coretta Scott King, the wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta’s husband, the founding president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Bernice McMurry Scott, Coretta’s mother, a reserved and cautious woman Obadiah Scott, Coretta’s father, an Alabama farmer of modest means Edythe Scott (Mrs. Arthur Bagley), Coretta’s sister and confidante Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., Coretta’s father-in-law, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta Yolanda Denise (Yoki) King, Coretta’s daughter and first child Martin Luther King, III, Coretta’s first son and second child Dexter King, Coretta’s second son and third child Bernice Albertine (Bunny) King, Coretta’s second daughter and fourth child Ralph David Abernathy, a close friend of the Kings and their associate in the Civil Rights movement Form and Content My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. is more than Coretta Scott King’s autobiography, more even than the story of her marriage. In key respects, it is also a mirror of the African American experience in the twentieth century. In seventeen chapters, an epilogue, and several appendixes, Mrs. King surveys her background in Marion, Alabama, her education at Antioch College (Ohio), and her fifteen-year marriage that ended tragically with the assassination of her famous husband on April 4, 1968. In that sense, her book is personal and traditionally autobiographical. However, its perspective is national and even international with regard to the mission that she identifies throughout as the raison d’être of the couple’s public career. Her account begins in October, 1964, when Martin Luther King, Jr., resting in a hospital, learns that he will receive the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Nobel Prize recep-

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tion banquet in Oslo sets the tone for the book by establishing the moral foundations of the nonviolent movement, which the author interweaves with her personal story. King referred in Oslo to the “long road” that African Americans had traveled in their quest for equality. From that imagery, Coretta Scott King drew the unifying theme of her autobiography. Not only had the road been long and hard for black Americans in general, and for Americans as a whole, but it had also been hard for her family as well. “No one who has not traveled it,” she reflected, “could possibly envision how very long it was.” For her, it was a journey that began near Marion, Alabama, a rural setting that contrasted sharply with that of her husband’s middle-class urban upbringing in Atlanta. Whereas Coretta’s father, Obadiah (Obie) Scott, was a farmer, Martin’s was the pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. Both, as it turned out, were in Boston in the early 1950’s preparing for professions that at first seemed incompatible. Martin was preparing to be a church minister; Coretta dreamed of a career as a professional musician. After her graduation from Antioch College of Ohio, she was admitted to the New England Conservatory of Music, and Martin began his theological studies at Boston University. The last thing she was looking for in a husband, she admits, was a desire to be a preacher. As she met and fell in love with Martin, however, Coretta adjusted her plans and thus became linked with one of the most influential social movements in American history. Vignettes and intimate glimpses of details otherwise not available make up much of My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. The first seven of its seventeen chapters deal with the journey to Oslo and the development of Coretta’s life with Martin from 1953 through the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955 and 1956. It is in her candid revelation of personal experiences and feelings, including her initial disappointment when she learned that Martin was planning to be a minister, that readers see Coretta emerge as a distinctive personality. She also shares her concerns about limiting her planned musical career by marrying and her reluctance to go back to the South, from which she had found some escape in Boston—where racial relations were at least formally less segregated. It is not surprising that the Montgomery experience is central to her story. The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in the capital of the old Confederacy was Martin’s first pastorate, and it was there that Coretta learned to be a mother. Their first daughter, Yolanda, was born in November, 1955, just three weeks before Rosa Parks’s historic refusal to give up her bus seat, the incident that triggered the bus boycott and sparked a new era in the American Civil Rights movement. Like her husband, Coretta viewed the Montgomery experience as pivotal in the emergence of a widespread nonviolent movement. “Montgomery was the soil in which the seed of a new theory of social action took root,” she writes. The second half of the book is devoted to events between 1957 and King’s death in 1968. These were critical years in the movement’s history. In January, 1957, the process of creating the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began at the Ebenezer Baptist Church at a moment when antiblack violence erupted again in

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Montgomery. In May, a national “Prayer Pilgrimage” on behalf of minority voting rights was held in Washington, D.C., and with it Martin Luther King, Jr., became an even more prominent national figure because of a rousing speech he delivered called “Give Us the Ballot.” Coretta recounts these events and then proceeds through the period of the first sitins and Freedom Rides (1960-1961), the campaigns in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma (1962-1965), and the difficult efforts to carry the nonviolent message northward into Chicago and other cities after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That she remained at home during most of this period limits her treatment in one sense. In another, though, her perspective is sharp and quite relevant. Through it, readers can see the strains on the Kings’ family life, Coretta’s determination to support her husband’s public efforts, and the weariness that inevitably resulted from almost impossible demands on Martin’s time. Chapter 14 has a distinctive place in the coverage because of its focus on the watershed period of 1964 and 1965. It was the time of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Nobel Prize award, and the beginnings of Coretta’s Freedom Concert programs. She outlines the music she presented in the series, which underscored the religious foundations of the movement. She also discusses the pivotal importance of the Montgomery movement and describes the August, 1963, March on Washington that was the occasion for her husband’s best-known speech, “I Have a Dream.” This chapter also candidly portrays several painful experiences, including her own difficulties getting the King children into a segregated school in Atlanta. Coretta also relates Martin’s burdensome effort to comfort the family of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young black man shot to death by police as he tried to protect his family from raiding officers. She also gives some attention to the Black Power movement, an alternative proffered by Stokely Carmichael and other young African Americans who did not share Martin’s patient commitment to nonviolence. The last section of the book focuses extensively on Martin’s assassination, the details of his funeral, and the vast outpouring of sympathy by the city of Atlanta and by millions of people around the nation. Somehow, Coretta found in the affirmation of her husband’s life and career the strength to go on with the work. She viewed My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. as a major part of her own responsibility for keeping his dream alive. Analysis At the heart of My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. is a pervasive emphasis upon the incompleteness of modern life, an emptiness caused chiefly by the materialism and social inequality that have accompanied the development of Western civilization. Even in the midst of the axial period of early Greek culture—when new heights of philosophy, religion, and democracy were attained—there was destructive inequality, the author argues. It continued in later centuries:

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Greece gave us noble philosophy and poetic insights, but her glorious cities were built on a foundation of slavery. Western civilization was also great, bequeathing to us glories of art and culture as well as the Industrial Revolution that was the beginning of material abundance for man. But it was based on injustice and colonialism and allowed its material means to outdistance spiritual ends.

Her husband, she argues, had understood this analysis and its corollary: that individuals are also incomplete for much the same reason. Indeed, the recovery of completeness within the individual is the key to real hope for social fulfillment. Drawing heavily upon the imagery of Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, Martin had called for a “Beloved Community” informed by religious faith and permeated by a spirit of selfless service to mankind. “Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do,” he had challenged, “and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it.” Both Coretta and her husband believed that only in that way could positive change come. Implicit in this is a theme of service and a related response to providential guidance. Although not a religious book as such, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. returns frequently, through quotations, conversations, and personal reflections, to the theme of God’s leadership. It first appears in a decisive way in Coretta’s recollections of that moment in Boston when she and Martin decided to accept the pastorate in Montgomery: Though I had been opposed to going to Montgomery, I realize now that it was an inevitable part of a greater plan for our lives. Even in 1954 I felt that my husband was being prepared—and I too—for a special role about which we would learn more later. Each experience that we had was preparation for the next one.

Clearly, Coretta welcomed that role in the sense that she identified with the Christian nonviolent approach—both during and after her husband’s life—and shared much of its content in her account. Particularly detailed and personal is her treatment of the assassination in Memphis and the subsequent parade and funeral in Atlanta. Stunned and shocked, she committed herself to keeping his memory and the movement alive. In one of her appendixes, she quotes Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the former president of Morehouse College, who had been a longtime supporter of Martin. “If we love Martin Luther King, Jr. and respect him,” Mays insisted at the slain leader’s funeral, “let us see to it that he did not die in vain.” Critical Context An ever-enlarging body of literature on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the nonviolent Civil Rights movement has provided the reading public with a massive literature on civil rights history. The availability of King’s papers at the King Center in Atlanta and other libraries and archives has made possible a wide variety of coverage. Most of this has been written by nonblack scholars working within the framework of academia or

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journalism. Coretta King’s autobiographical account is different from much of this in three respects, and these features define the place of her work in the history of African American literature. First, she is an African American. Her book reflects the soul-searching quest for personal identity of a young woman who, like her husband, had been forced early to learn the parameters of black Americans’ participation in society. She knew firsthand about the necessity to be the best in order to have a fair chance to enter the prestigious institutions of higher learning or to carve out a career in a society where race loomed larger as a challenge than it did after the Civil Rights movement. Second, Coretta Scott King was the wife of a man widely regarded as the most influential African American reform leader of the post-World War II period. That was surely not an easy role. She stayed home during most of the campaigns and was thus remote from the detail. She had to keep up with what was going on, to intervene at times to help her husband, to keep up the image of a happy, strong family when pressures familiar to many African American families—such as enrolling children in schools that resisted integration—were making life difficult. Early in the history of the movement, when Martin was promoting his first book, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), he was nearly killed by a deranged black woman who plunged a letter opener into his chest. Frequently, Martin was arrested, harrassed, or injured, and ultimately he was murdered. Her typically calm and optimistic account thus stands in contrast to the negativism that might have characterized a wife’s account of such events. Third, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the earliest examples of an African American memoir based on experience with the nonviolent movement. Scholars have frequently drawn on such material to enlarge the scope of documents and other more conventional sources. Ralph Abernathy wrote such a book near the end of his life; others, including Clayborne Carson and Jo Ann Robinson, have also added to this literary-historical genre. The value of such works is their unique combination of historical reflection and personal involvement, without which other observers cannot fully comprehend the momentous days of the Civil Rights movement. Bibliography Abernathy, Ralph David. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Ralph David Abernathy, An Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Few people knew the Kings better than Ralph Abernathy, whose career in civil rights meshed with Martin’s from Montgomery in 1955 until the assassination in Memphis in 1968. Abernathy’s autobiography is thus essential, despite its subjective approach and questionable recollection on some matters. Ansbro, John J. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1982. An intellectual history of Martin that complements Coretta’s more personal account. Ansbro reinforces her emphasis upon Martin’s moralitybased social reform theory. Ansbro’s is the best of the spiritual pilgrimage studies of Dr. King. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Chris-

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tian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986. Although thin as an analysis of King and the SCLC, Garrow’s account is essential because of its massive detail on the life of the famous civil rights leader. This Pulitzer Prizewinning journal of the King years was the first major work to expose King’s personal life to a candid critique. King, Coretta Scott. “He Had a Dream.” Life 67 (September 12, 1969): 54-62. This compact, illustrated extract from the first edition offers a useful introduction to her historical biography. Lewis, David Levering. King: A Biography. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. The first critical biography of King, Lewis’s work is nevertheless both much milder in its analysis than recent studies and more valuable in clarifying the motives and goals of the nonviolent movement. Peake, Thomas R. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the Nineteen-Eighties. New York: Lang, 1987. The first comprehensive history of the SCLC, this work also includes extensive material on King’s personal life, his relationship to the SCLC, and his theological perspective. Vivian, Octavia. Coretta: The Story of Coretta Scott King. Commemorative ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. Brief but suggestive monograph detailing the life of Coretta Scott King and her own accomplishments—which were often overshadowed by those of her husband. Thomas R. Peake

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A NARRATIVE OF SOME REMARKABLE INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF SOLOMON BAYLEY, FORMERLY A SLAVE IN THE STATE OF DELAWARE, NORTH AMERICA Author: Solomon Bayley (fl. early nineteenth century) Type of work: Slave narrative Time of work: 1770’s-1824 Locale: Virginia and Delaware First published: 1825 Principal personages: Solomon Bayley, an escaped slave Thamar Bayley, Solomon’s wife and a former slave of Mr. Melson Spence Bayley, son of Solomon and Thamar Margaret Bayley, daughter of Solomon and Thamar Leah Bayley, daughter of Solomon and Thamar Form and Content Solomon Bayley, a former slave, is one of the earliest antebellum African American spiritual writers. His somewhat disjointed, two-part narrative begins with a preface by Robert Hurnard, a Quaker and abolitionist from Essex, England, who met Bayley in Delaware in 1820. Having heard Bayley’s account of his escape from slavery, Hurnard persuaded him to write his life story. The publication of this narrative was intended in part to generate income for the aged and by then childless Bayley and his wife, but the narrative was also designed to place slavery in a poor light. Bayley came from a family with deep American roots. His grandmother had been transported from West Africa to Virginia at the age of eleven and sold to a brutal family. She gave birth to fifteen children, some of whom were transported to Delaware. Bayley grew to adulthood before being brought to Virginia. In his autobiographical narrative, he does not mention that his father, brother, and sister were subsequently taken to the Caribbean. His mother ultimately ran away with Bayley’s infant brother and escaped to freedom in New Jersey. Bayley begins his tale with a tribute to the power and goodness of God. Born in Kent County, Delaware, Bayley is moved against his will along with his parents and siblings—but without his wife and children—when his master takes the group to Alexandria, Virginia. Under Delaware law, slaveholders taking slaves out of the state were not permitted to put them up for immediate sale, but the Bayley family is sold soon after they arrive. Bayley brings suit to gain emancipation, but, two days before the hearing is to take place, he is shipped to Richmond, Virginia, put in irons, and thrown in jail. After a short stay that tests his faith in God, Bayley is placed in a wagon

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and shipped southward, farther away from his wife, his children, and his chance at freedom. Trusting in the Lord, Bayley jumps from the wagon and hides in some bushes. His captors conduct a brief, futile search before resuming their trek with the other Deep-South-bound slaves. Bayley then expresses his regret for sinning against God, who could have spared him his troubles. When night comes, Bayley leaves the bushes and begins to walk, but he is chased by dogs. God saves him by sending a thunderstorm that assists his escape. After a few days on the road, Bayley arrives in Richmond, where a black man pretends to be his friend while alerting slave catchers to his presence. God answers Bayley’s prayers, however, and the slave catchers miss their prey. Bayley makes his way to Petersburg, Virginia, where he and another escaped slave take a boat down the James River to the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The other man tastes freedom briefly, before slave catchers find him and beat him to death when he tries to again escape. Bayley resolves to leave the state of Virginia and bring suit in Dover, Delaware, for his freedom. Suspicious of several white men, Bayley is saved from capture by the power of God. The second part of the narrative begins in 1799, when Bayley arrives in Camden, Delaware. His master discovers him and offers to allow Bayley to purchase his freedom. Bayley argues that it is right for him to be free and that he should not need to buy what is rightfully his. Pressed by his master as to who he blames for his troubles, Bayley refuses to accept responsibility; he says that the laws of the land make liberty the right of every man and he could not be wrong in trying to achieve it. Ultimately, Bayley purchases his freedom for $80 and drops his lawsuit. Much of the remaining narrative is devoted to Bayley’s belief that God is rich in mercy, even toward great sinners like himself. He returns to his explication of events, to narrate his purchase of his wife, Thamar, out of slavery. Unwilling to live in sin, the couple officially marries. Further difficulties await the couple, as Bayley negotiates the purchase of his son, who was born into bondage. He closes his narrative with a tribute to the “Father of Mercy.” In addendums to the tale, Bayley gives a history of his family and relates the deaths of both of his daughters. Analysis Bayley’s narrative and comments about the meaning of slavery and freedom is an early form of protest literature. He wrote to expose the evils of slavery, to demonstrate the humanity of people of African ancestry, and to strike a blow for abolition. The book, published in Great Britain in 1825, also revealed the horrors of slavery to the British people and helped spur the 1833 abolition of human bondage in the British Isles. In his narrative, Bayley provides a rare glimpse into the life of an escaped slave. He reveals the fear, anxiety, and numerous obstacles that confronted runaways in the late eighteenth century. He also reveals the primary importance of the black family, Christianity, and the triumph of the spirit at a time when some southerners argued that black slaves were little more than animals with all the feelings of unthinking creatures.

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Bayley, a Methodist minister, further shows his deep commitment to Christianity in his writing. Typical of African American accounts of spiritual conversion, Bayley’s personal relationship with God is transformed into the possibility of liberating an entire community. In this respect, his writing reflects the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, when some religious leaders began to argue that individuals had control over their own salvation. Bayley ultimately responded to slavery and the racism inherent in the antebellum United States by joining the colonization movement. He and his wife left the United States in 1827 for Liberia, a fledgling colony in West Africa. Chiefly a farmer and preacher, Bayley lived near Monrovia. In 1833 he published A Brief Account of the Colony of Liberia, which discussed the agricultural and commercial progress of the colony as well as the relationship between its settlers and native Africans. Critical Context All the writings by African Americans, beginning with Phillis Wheatley in the eighteenth century, demonstrated that black people were the intellectual equals of white people. Slave narratives further demonstrated the inhumanity of treating slaves as if they were no better than livestock. Accordingly, Bayley’s writings helped advance the cause of abolition in the United States and Great Britain. In the slave narrative, American writers contributed a new form of literature to the world. These autobiographies were calculated to exert a very wide influence on public opinion. As abolitionists later noted, slavery from the side of the master was well known, but slavery from the side of the victim was not. The justifications advanced for the continuation of slavery were challenged by Bayley’s narrative. He did not benefit from slavery, and he desperately sought freedom for himself and his family. Many slave narratives were published, but Bayley’s was one of the earliest, placing him alongside Wheatley, David Walker, and Olaudah Equianao as part of the first generation of African American writers. Bibliography Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Sets Bayley’s work in the context of the earliest African American writers. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Antebellum Slave Narratives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Argues that slave narratives were not literal descriptions of reality but instead adhered to popular literary conventions. Lee, A. Robert. Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of AfroAmericans. Sterling, Va.: Pluto, 1998. Although there are no specific references to Bayley’s work, this book sets slave narratives in historical and cultural context. McBride, Dwight A. Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Argues that white and black people in the antebellum United States possessed different definitions of truth.

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Pierce, Yolanda. Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005. One of the few books to focus on Bayley’s work, this book examines the spiritual and earthly results of conversion to Christianity for African American antebellum writers. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Asserts that when they write their autobiographies, black writers claim an authority that they have not until then possessed in their lives. Williams, William H. Slavery and Freedom in Delaware, 1639-1865. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1996. Historical study of laws regarding slavery in Delaware. Provides crucial context for understanding Bayley’s lawsuit, as well as other aspects of his narrative. Caryn E. Neumann

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NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS An American Slave Author: Frederick Douglass (Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, 1817-1895) Type of work: Slave narrative Time of work: c. 1817-1841 Locale: Maryland and Massachusetts First published: 1845 Principal personages: Frederick Bailey, later Frederick Douglass, the slave narrator Harriet Bailey, the mother from whom Frederick is separated as an infant Betsey Bailey, the grandmother who nurtures Frederick until he is six years old Aaron Anthony, Frederick’s first master Thomas Auld, Aaron Anthony’s son-in-law, a cruel master Hugh Auld, the brother of Thomas Auld Form and Content In 1841, three years after Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, he launched his career as an abolitionist. In Nantucket, Massachusetts, he spoke for the first time about his slave experiences before a white audience. Before that, he had told his story only to black gatherings. So impressive was his account that he was hired as a fulltime antislavery lecturer by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. By 1844, the society was becoming increasingly disturbed that many were doubting Douglass’s authenticity. His critics saw him as being too refined and too erudite for a man who had escaped from slavery only six years previously. The leaders of the Anti-Slavery Society, therefore, urged Douglass to write his story. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, including a preface by William Lloyd Garrison and a letter from Wendell Phillips, was published in 1845. Its success was immediate. Thousands of copies were sold both in the United States and in Great Britain. The Narrative was even translated into French and Dutch. Just as there were those who doubted Douglass’s oral accounts of his experiences in slavery, there were those who declared the written version a hoax. Such an accusation was not as farfetched as it might at first seem. Many slave narratives were not only transcribed but also organized and revised by white abolitionists. The latter, however, were generally careful to indicate the extent of their assistance. They recognized that to do otherwise was to put the whole antislavery movement in jeopardy. The Narrative, for its part, is a notable exception. Frederick Douglass neither asked for nor received any help from white abolitionists.

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The decision to divide the work into two main sections was his. The first part consists of nine chapters. These detail Douglass’s experiences in slavery. The second section, with two chapters, is as long as the first and describes Douglass’s escape. This organization seems to indicate that the first nine chapters form a kind of prelude to the main action—Douglass’s escape from slavery. Before this escape takes place, readers are given a graphic account of slavery in pre-Civil War America. Douglass begins his narrative with his birth in Tuckahoe, Talbot County, Maryland. The second sentence states that he does not know his age. This is followed by other details about which the narrator is unsure. For example, although he knows that Harriet Bailey is his mother, he has very little communication with her. She dies when he is seven years old; before that, he sees her only four or five times. He lives with his grandmother, Betsey Bailey, on the outskirts of Edward Lloyd’s plantation. The young boy is introduced to the horrors of slavery when he witnesses the beating of his Aunt Hester by their master, Aaron Anthony, soon after Frederick begins living on the plantation. This beating is only the first of many at which the young Frederick is both observer and participant. Frederick later goes to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld. He considers this move providential, since it sets the stage for his eventual escape from slavery. Sophia Auld begins to teach him to read, and by the time her husband finds out and objects, it is already too late; the young slave has made the connection between literacy and freedom. There is now no turning back for the city slave. Thus, when Frederick is sent to live with Thomas Auld because of a quarrel between the brothers, Thomas cannot control him. He sends him to Edward Covey, a “nigger-breaker.” The stay at Covey’s marks another pivotal point in the young slave’s journey from bondage to freedom; when Covey attempts to beat Douglass, he defends himself and fights the older man to a standoff. If Covey is the worst master Frederick has encountered, his next, William Freeland, is the best. With Freeland, Frederick, with his eyes on freedom as never before, teaches a Sabbath school of more than forty slaves. Here, too, he plans an aborted escape. After the failed escape, Frederick is again returned to Hugh Auld in Baltimore. Auld oversees his training as a caulker. With this trade comes increasing independence and a small taste of freedom. This taste of freedom prepares Douglass for his life after slavery. After a successful escape, Frederick keeps his past shrouded in mystery; he is afraid of unwittingly divulging any information to slaveholders. Frederick Douglass, having discarded the name given him by the mother he hardly knew, settles in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with his new wife, Anna, and joins the abolitionist cause. Analysis To write autobiography is to assess the significance of one’s life. Douglass’s journey from “the peculiar institution” of slavery to freedom has both individual and soci-

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etal importance. His narrative details the “dehumanizing” and “soul-killing” effects of slavery in language that is both formal and dispassionate. As others have observed, the first page of the Narrative is replete with negatives: The slave narrator does not know his age; he is not allowed to ask about it; all he knows about his father is that he is white. This lack of identifying data is undoubtedly dehumanizing. The brutality of the slaveholders provides other examples of the dehumanization of slavery. The beating of Aunt Hester by Aaron Anthony sets the stage for the many whippings to which Douglass is to be witness. Among the first of these is the incident of the two Barneys, father and son. They take care of Colonel Lloyd’s horses, but it is clear that the horses are more valued than they are; their master whips them frequently and arbitrarily. Later, in the incident with Covey, the “nigger-breaker,” Douglass decides that he has had enough. He fights Covey and declares that the encounter marks “the turning-point in my career as a slave.” The sexual nature of these beatings has been pointed out. In the case of Aunt Hester, this aspect is fairly explicit. Captain Anthony is enraged not so much because Aunt Hester has disobeyed him and gone out in the evening, but rather because she has been with Ned Roberts, another slave. Miscegenation is, of course, rife between slaveholders and their female slaves. The slaveholder who is both master and father to his slave is quite common. Conversely, where both beater and beaten are males, homosexuality has been suggested. While such physical abuse undoubtedly leaves psychological scars, the custom of separating the slave infant from his mother is perhaps even more emotionally damaging. Douglass several times refers to this unnatural procedure. In fact, he receives the news of his own mother’s death “with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” The slave narrator, however, is no stranger to religion. References to it become increasingly specific. Early in the Narrative, the death of a cruel overseer is “regarded by the slaves as the result of a merciful providence.” Similarly, Frederick Douglass describes his move to Baltimore as “a special interposition of divine Providence.” Later, slaveholders such as Thomas Auld use religion to “sanction and support” their “slaveholding cruelty.” Also, the final portion of the Narrative concerns itself with the incompatibility of Christianity and slavery. Douglass, therefore, by examining one life addresses issues that affect society as a whole. The slave’s sense of community is referred to at crucial points in the Narrative. Douglass plans his aborted escape with other slaves, and his autobiography ends with the hope that the book will increase awareness about “the American slave system.” Such knowledge will, the slave narrator hopes, lead to emancipation. Similarly, when Douglass imagines his grandmother, it is her isolation that pains him most. She has been put out to pasture in utter loneliness. The passage in which Douglass imagines his grandmother’s loneliness is perhaps the most poignant in the Narrative, perhaps because Douglass is angry at himself for not being there when she needs him. Whatever the reason, the passage’s tone is unlike

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the tone of the rest of the autobiography. “Dispassionate,” “matter-of-fact,” “detached” are words that come to mind when the tone of the Narrative is considered. Such distanced narration could be the detachment of the erudite adult abolitionist looking back; it might also be that the dehumanizing and soul-killing institution has taken its toll. Occasionally in the Narrative, Frederick Douglass mentions his inability to write down his feelings. Is the slave narrator refusing to feel because it is too painful to do so? Feelings are perhaps not best served by a formal style, and some have described Frederick Douglass’s language as “high-flown.” One cannot but admire, however, the language of the apostrophe to the ships on the Chesapeake Bay beginning, “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave!” There is also a wonderful chiasmus as Frederick Douglass is about to describe his first confrontation with Covey: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” The fight with Covey has symbolic value for Douglass. As Douglass sees it, the slave-master who whips him in the future must be prepared to kill him. The autobiographer thus uses one incident to shed light on a larger issue, the brutality of slaveholders. The beating of Aunt Hester also addresses this issue symbolically. As the first of such beatings, it sets the stage for all the rest. In addition, the sexual overtones make the whipping akin to rape and therefore more brutal. The inextricable link between slavery and the sexual cannot be denied. So pervasive is the emphasis on community that there are critics who regard the Narrative not as autobiography but as a personal history of American slavery. That Douglass himself intended the work to be viewed as both is evidenced by the appendix. Here the slave narrator expands on a theme in the work—the incompatibility of slavery and Christianity—at the same time as he signs his new name with a certain pride and flourish. After all, the individual slave can truly be free only when slavery as an institution is abolished. Literacy, for Douglass, is the key to the slave’s freedom. His epiphany occurs when he witnesses Hugh Auld’s anger at his wife’s teaching Frederick, now eight years old, to read. By the time he is twelve, the autobiographer is reading The Columbian Orator, with its strong antislavery arguments. He soon learns to write from white street children. The ex-slave narrator is aware that true liberation can only be achieved when both body and mind are free. The actual writing of his autobiography may be regarded as the ultimate freeing of the mind for Douglass. Given the therapeutic nature of the work, therefore, any help from white abolitionists would have been inappropriate. When the ex-slave signs his new name at the end of the Narrative, he is affirming both his literacy and his identity. Critical Context Douglass’s Narrative is as important to history as it is to literature; it speaks as eloquently to African Americans as it does to whites. Ultimately, the autobiography

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looks at a timeless theme—man’s inhumanity to man—through the lens of slavery. Historically, the Narrative is a significant document in the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement. In fact, the last sentence of the appendix reminds readers of the “sacred cause” for which the autobiography was written. Douglass earnestly hopes that his story, detailing the horrors of slavery, will hasten the end of “the peculiar institution.” Douglass’s Narrative belongs to the genre of slave narratives, a popular literary mode from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the American Civil War. Thousands were written during this period, and many were translated into several languages. Douglass’s story epitomizes the best of the genre. The ex-slave’s story exists in three revised versions: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and two separate editions of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892). The original version, however, has received the most critical acclaim. The 1845 rendition has been praised for its narrative skills, succinctness, and clarity. Although the Narrative is Douglass’s masterpiece, he was also a publisher and journalist. He launched this career after returning from England, where he had fled upon the publication of the Narrative to avoid being returned to slavery. His journalistic endeavors included the North Star, Frederick Douglass Weekly, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass’ Monthly, and the New National Era. Despite his prolific journalist output, Douglass’s fame as a writer rests on the Narrative. It is a work that will continue to fascinate both the historian and the literary critic. Bibliography Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Offers a succinct and lucid biography for the general reader; Huggins is a good storyteller. McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Presents a comprehensive biography with an excellent bibliography. McFeely is particularly good in describing Douglass’s relationship with family and friends. O’Meally, Robert G. “Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative: The Text Was Meant to Be Preached.” In Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, edited by D. Fisher and R. Stepto. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1979. Argues that the Narrative has recognizable affinities with the sermons of black preachers. The audience, according to O’Meally, is white, and “preacher” Douglass is exhorting them to end the abysmal institution of slavery. Preston, Dickson J. Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Provides detailed descriptions of all important personages in the Narrative. Preston is in familiar territory, and his depiction of Douglass’s relationship with those around him is illuminating. Quarles, Benjamin. Frederick Douglass. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Presents an excellent first chapter that demonstrates how Douglass’s years in slavery influenced his later life. The epigraphs that introduce each chapter, most of which are by Douglass, give a sense of the man and his age.

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Waters, Carver Wendell. Voice in the Slave Narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Solomon Northrup. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Compares the narrative voice of Douglass to those of two other authors of slave narratives to determine features held in common by the slave narrative genre, as well as important distinctions. Sheila J. McDonald

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A NARRATIVE OF THE LORD’S WONDERFUL DEALINGS WITH JOHN MARRANT, A BLACK Author: John Marrant (1755-1791) Type of work: Autobiography Time of work: 1755-1785 Locale: South Carolina; the Atlantic Ocean; England First published: 1785 Principal personage: John Marrant, an African American freeman who recounted his adventures in his highly popular narrative Form and Content On account of its author’s freeman status at birth, John Marrant’s autobiographical A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black is not, strictly speaking, a slave narrative. Because Marrant was a black man who experienced capture and enslavement at the hands of American Indians, most scholars place his work in the slave-narrative tradition. Another reason for classifying his work as a slave narrative is that Marrant was an influential figure in the development of that genre. Marrant’s narrative is both the story of his Indian captivity and a spiritual autobiography. The two sections of the narrative feature a three-part structure. In the religious work, the parts deal with a person’s experiences of sin, conversion, and spiritual rebirth; the three sections of the Indian captivity account focus on Marrant’s experiences when he is taken captive, the transformation that occurs in him during his exposure to Indian culture, and his attainment of a freedom that is marked by a deeper awareness of life. Marrant relates the story of his experiences to the Reverend Mr. Aldridge, who serves as editor of the account; both men are primarily interested in communicating a spiritual message to readers. At the beginning of his narrative, Marrant sets forth the religious purpose and tone of his work by stating that he hopes the example of his life will be useful in encouraging men and women to become stronger believers in the Christian faith. Marrant recalls that he was born on June 15, 1755, in New York, but he does not relate his early experiences there. Neither does he say much about his later schooling in Florida and Georgia. Yet, he describes how his early youth was devoted to pleasure and drinking and how he loved to play the violin and French horn at all the balls and gatherings in town. Marrant describes himself as a slave to every vice until the age of thirteen. At that time, he is living in Charleston, South Carolina, where an event occurs that accidentally gives him the opportunity to hear the words of a great religious leader.

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On that fateful day, Marrant and his wayward companions are passing a church when they decide to disrupt the services. Marrant’s friends dare him to enter the church and blow his French horn during the delivery of the minister’s sermon. The bold youth goes into the church and prepares to cause a commotion until he is struck by the sight of the famous George Whitefield, an English evangelical preacher known throughout the American colonies. As Marrant is about to blow his horn, he hears Whitefield pronouncing striking verses of Scripture from the pulpit. The words transfix Marrant; he listens to the sermon and becomes so moved and disturbed by it that he faints and collapses in the church. Later, the stricken youth is restored to health by Whitefield, who visits him at home and prays with him until he recovers from his state of anxiety. Subsequently, Marrant abandons his sinful ways and seriously studies the Scriptures. His family members are not sympathetic to his new religious life, however, and thus he departs from them and goes into the southern wilderness to sort things out. There he is captured by Cherokee Indians, who twice threaten him with execution. Both times he is spared when he utters aloud prayers containing powerful biblical passages. The Indians understand him because Marrant, miraculously, is able to speak their own language. They then ask him to pray over their king’s daughter; as Marrant delivers the prayers that heal her, he experiences a mystical communion with the Lord. Soon after this marvelous event, the Cherokee king and his daughter ask Marrant to convert them to Christianity. Subsequently, the grateful Indians allow the young captive to wander among them at will, and he uses his liberty to serve as a missionary to the tribes living in the forest. During the several years he spends trying to convert the Indians, Marrant adopts their style of dress. His garments are the skins of wild beasts, his hair is cut in the “savage” manner, and he carries a tomahawk on his side. He also becomes more fluent in the Indian language, and he develops a close friendship with the Cherokee king. Finally, after meeting with little success in his efforts to convert the Indians, Marrant decides to return to his home in civilization. When he arrives in Charleston, he is unrecognized by all of his family members except his eleven-year-old sister. Now Marrant sees himself as a newborn Christian who has undergone a chastening experience in the wilderness. In the rest of his narrative, he emphasizes his dedication to furthering the spiritual lives of men and women, and he illustrates his special providential role in this world. During the Revolutionary War, Marrant is impressed into the British naval service. In one harrowing episode at sea, he is washed overboard three times during a storm but manages to survive. Later, he is wounded during a fierce battle and is sent to England to recover. There, he continues his religious pursuits and eventually trains to become an ordained Methodist minister. His friends encourage him to engage in missionary work among the black population in Nova Scotia, and Marrant ends his narrative by entreating his Christian readers to pray for the success of his future religious efforts.

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Analysis Marrant depicts himself as a fascinating character. He is a young, almost picaresque person who abandons his errant ways after being converted to Christianity. Much of Marrant’s narrative, however, suffers from a lack of believability. His zealous religious spirit makes him give everything a providential character. The biblically significant period of three days figures in everything that happens to him. He goes unharmed when he walks by the beasts in the forest, and he immediately knows how to speak to the Indians in their language. His prayers heal the king’s daughter, and he is able to convert the Cherokee king and his daughter with little trouble. The narrative also shows a lack of artistic design. The closing part of the account is especially weak. Marrant quickly runs through the latter facts of his life and abruptly ends his story. He says almost nothing about his impressment in the British navy, where he was a virtual slave for over six years, and he never mentions any of the prejudice that he must have encountered as an African American, despite his freeman status. Nevertheless, the story of his early adventures in the South, the absorbing picture of George Whitefield, who captures the youth’s spirit for the Christian faith, and Marrant’s marvelous experiences with the Indians in the wilderness make the narrative an appealing piece of prose. What is also interesting about Marrant’s work is that it is both an Indian captivity narrative and a spiritual autobiography. The spiritual pattern of sin, conversion, and rebirth appears alongside the Indian captivity’s structural components of separation, transformation, and freedom. These elements can be seen in the sharply outlined parts of the story. After Marrant undergoes his conversion episode, he wanders into the forest, where he is captured by Indians who plan to kill him; however, he succeeds in saving himself and his newly acquired Christian faith while he is in captivity. In fact, his faith in God is strengthened and his commitment to a religious life is deepened by his experience with the Indians, who allow him to make attempts to convert them. After several years of living as an Indian, Marrant returns to the English world and dedicates himself to furthering his missionary work. Unlike many Indian captivity narratives that depict Indians as superstitious demons, Marrant’s work gives a balanced treatment of the Native Americans. He makes a point of mentioning the Indians who help him and extend their friendship to him during his captivity, and he sympathizes with them concerning their persecution at the hands of the white Americans. He is interested in the Indian culture, to the extent that he learns the Cherokee language and adopts the Indian style of dress and appearance. The spiritual autobiographical elements in Marrant’s narrative include his portrait of his sinful life prior to his spiritual awakening and his descriptions of listening to a sermon that affects him to the point of crisis, of becoming physically ill (symbolically representing his spiritual sickness), of undergoing a conversion that must be tested by an ordeal, and of the chastening quality of the ordeal experience, which enables him, once he is free, to attain a state of spiritual rebirth. In addition, Marrant makes use of other spiritual autobiographical devices, such as stating that his purpose is to offer instruction to his readers, depicting his anxieties

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about backsliding to a sinful life, and describing his solitary meditations. He credits Providence for giving him protection from such dangers as Indians and wild animals and for helping him to survive storms and wrecks at sea that save him to do God’s work. In many parts of his narrative, Marrant depicts himself as following Christ’s example. At times he almost casts himself in the role of a Christ figure, especially in the two events that occur when the Indians come close to executing him. When Marrant relates how he is nearly burned at the stake, he describes the episode in language similar to the language that is used in the Bible to describe Christ’s crucifixion. Critical Context Marrant’s autobiography appeared in London in 1785, and despite a derisive review, the work went through six editions in a short period of time. It was published in the United States in 1789 and became one of the three most celebrated Indian captivity narratives published in America (the others were a 1757 work by Peter Williamson and the narrative of Mary Jemison in 1824). Marrant’s popular account was translated into several European languages and published in countries on both sides of the Atlantic; there was even a Welsh version printed in 1818. Editions of the narrative continued to appear well into the nineteenth century. Many early African American writers knew Marrant’s spiritual autobiography and were influenced by its themes and form. Strong evidence exists that Marrant’s work was well known by Olaudah Equiano, who is credited with writing the first major slave autobiography, the prototype for the numerous nineteenth century fugitiveslave narratives. Equiano’s two-volume work, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa, the African, appeared in 1789 and included references to other works that mention Marrant’s story. Marrant continued relating the story of his life after 1785 in the journal he kept of his missionary experiences in Canada and in New England. In 1790, Marrant’s journal was published in London and was marked by the same spiritual tone and purpose as his earlier work. Although Marrant’s autobiographical accounts say little about matters concerning black men and women, the sermons he wrote and delivered as a minister include strong comments about racial prejudice and injustice. His sermons also stress the need for African Americans to learn about the contributions of great Africans in history and to feel proud of their African heritage. Bibliography Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Chapter 2 provides a thorough study of several early slave narratives. Illustrates how the first narrators relied on captivity and conversion traditions to tell their first-person accounts to a white audience. Costanzo, Angelo. Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of

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Black Autobiography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Explains and analyzes the slave-narrative tradition as it developed in the eighteenth century. Discusses the significance of the early black writers upon the form and structure of the slave narrative as a literary genre. Contains a detailed examination of Marrant’s narrative, with a special emphasis on the portrayal of his character as a biblical type. Elrod, Eileen Razzari. Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Includes a chapter on Marrant’s slave narrative and his representation of his relationship to Jesus. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Provides a study of the history, influences, development, plots, and racial myths of the slave narratives. Discusses the eighteenth century accounts that were the forerunners of the numerous slave works published by abolitionists just prior to the Civil War. Kaplan, Sidney. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 17701800. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973. Describes Marrant’s narrative and parts of his journal. Also deals with the rousing and inspiring content of the sermon Marrant preached in Boston in 1789, in which he attacked racism and summoned black men and women to develop pride in their African heritage. Williams, Kenny J. They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 17871930. Nashville, Tenn.: Townsend Press, 1970. Emphasizes how Marrant credited divine providence for the success of his spiritual life. Chapter 3 provides a useful general account of the slave-narrative structure. Also deals with the melodramatic and didactic elements of slave works and their various religious and realistic prose styles. Angelo Costanzo

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A NARRATIVE OF THE UNCOMMON SUFFERINGS, AND SURPRIZING DELIVERANCE OF BRITON HAMMON, A NEGRO MAN Author: Briton Hammon (fl. 1747-1760) Type of work: Slave narrative Time of work: 1747-1760 Locale: Coastal Florida; Cuba; the Atlantic Ocean; London First published: 1760 Principal personage: Briton Hammon, an African American slave who is seized by Indians and subsequently rescued by a Spanish captain Form and Content Briton Hammon’s narrative is the first known slave autobiography in American literature. Hammon dictated his factual story to a writer who probably recorded the account in almost the exact way Hammon delivered it. The narrative style is plain and straightforward and marked by many awkward and ungrammatical sentences. The slave’s story is only fourteen pages long and, as Hammon himself states, deals mostly with matters of fact. His story is interesting, however, because he describes exciting adventures resulting from his captivities at the hands of Indians and Spaniards. Furthermore, his work is related to spiritual autobiography and contains many biblical references and quotations. Hammon constantly thanks the Lord for delivering him from the dangers of captivity. Published in Boston, Hammon’s brief account covers his experiences from 1747 to 1760. With his master’s consent, the loyal Hammon signs aboard a vessel bound for Jamaica. After loading up with wood in Jamaica, the ship heads back, but it soon meets with disaster when it is wrecked on a Florida reef. A boat with nine men aboard, including Hammon, is sent out to reach the shore, but a large band of Indians in twenty canoes surprises the sailors. The Indians capture them and then proceed to attack the ship and kill the captain and remaining crew members. Hammon, the sole survivor, is taken prisoner. The Indians treat him cruelly and threaten to roast him alive; but after five weeks of captivity, he is rescued by a Spanish captain who takes him to Havana, Cuba. There, Hammon becomes a slave in the governor’s castle. Hammon’s service with the governor lasts for about a year. One day while walking on a street, Hammon is kidnapped by a press gang that wants to put him aboard a ship bound for Spain. When he refuses to serve, he is taken to a dungeon and confined there for four years and seven months. Hammon is released when his plight finally reaches the governor’s attention through the efforts of an Englishwoman. His captivity continues, however, as he is placed again in the service of the governor, who later

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sends him to assist the bishop of the island. In the ensuing years, the despondent slave yearns for his freedom and makes three attempts to escape. The last one succeeds when Hammon is befriended by an English captain, who takes him on board a ship to Jamaica. Thereafter, Hammon works mostly as a cook on various military vessels that engage in severe naval battles, in one of which Hammon is wounded. Finally, while in London recovering from a fever, Hammon finds himself impoverished and decides to sign up for service on a ship going to Africa. His sudden desire to return home causes him to change his mind, however, and he switches to a vessel leaving for Boston. By coincidence, his old master is sailing on the same ship, and Hammon describes how a happy reunion between master and slave takes place after a separation of thirteen years. Analysis Hammon’s voyage begins on Christmas Day, thus signaling to readers that a new life of temporary freedom and personal discovery is about to commence for the adventurous slave. Soon Hammon’s experiences at sea reveal that his journey is one of harrowing transition from innocence to maturity, one in which, as he learns about himself and the world, he is tested for strength of character. At the beginning of his story, Hammon illustrates his naïveté in the account of how he and his companions are easily deceived when they are stranded off the coast of Florida. Hammon is first fooled by the appearance of the Indian canoes, which look like rocks. Then, when the canoes begin to move, the shipwrecked men see the English colors hoisted in one of them, and they think that they are about to be rescued by friendly forces. The men advance and fall into the hands of the Indians. To stress how his perilous adventures chasten him and test his character, Hammon graphically depicts the terrors of his Indian and Spanish captivities. The Indians threaten to roast him alive, and he lives in fear until he falls into the hands of the Spanish Catholics in Havana. During his years of captivity in Cuba, Hammon is able to withstand the threat to his Protestant faith posed by the Catholics. He gives some indication that he views their religion as being decadent and materialistic when he describes his service to the bishop. Hammon makes a point of mentioning how the bishop is carried about in a large chair lined with crimson velvet as he goes about the island confirming and baptizing people in exchange for huge sums of money. Even though his life is comfortable in the governor’s castle, Hammon makes several attempts to flee. When he finally succeeds in escaping, he enlists for service aboard various ships, where at times he is thrown in the midst of perilous sea battles. In depicting his dangerous experiences, Hammon is stressing the testing and strengthening effects upon both his character and his spiritual condition. Although Hammon’s short work can be termed a spiritual autobiography, it does not give a picture of a self-scrutinizing, conscience-stricken man looking inward for his soul’s deliverance. Hammon is concerned with factual details and outward events. He sees such events as signs of God’s plan for his soul’s suffering and deliverance,

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and he accepts life and its vicissitudes (apparently including Hammon’s own status as a slave) as events justifiably ordained by a purposeful God. Hammon shares with his white masters the view that his Indian captors are ignoble, cruel savages, but he fails to see his white captors as almost equally evil. It must be remembered, however, that Hammon is telling his story while he is still enslaved and that he is directing his narrative to a white audience. These facts, coupled with his belief that Christianity is the true way to God, probably account for his cautiousness in displaying any other feelings about his own slave status. Eighteenth century Christianity taught Hammon and other slaves the acceptance of and resignation to their servant rank in life, and it impressed upon their minds the admonition from God that servants should obey their masters. It is probable, then, that because he is telling his story while still in bondage, Hammon says nothing against his permanent slave status in America; however, he emphasizes the horrors of the other captivities that he undergoes on his journey. Hammon experiences captivity after captivity, and all are shown to be terrible and unjust. The fact that he does not criticize his initial captivity stands out, since he does depict graphically the terrors of his Indian captivity, his captivity under the governor of Cuba, and his kidnapping by the Spanish press gang and his subsequent incarceration. During all of his captivities, he describes how he always feels miserable and how he constantly seeks to escape to freedom. Hammon mixes his account of his experiences with his views about their religious meaning. Thus, his narrative contains many passages that are meant to parallel passages from the Bible. He especially evokes the story of the deliverance of the Hebrews from captivity in Egypt and their terrible ordeals in the wilderness before they reached the Promised Land. Hammon’s allusions also reveal how he identifies himself with the biblical hero David, who defeated the Philistine giant Goliath. While Hammon does not seem to think of himself as a deliverer, he does implicitly express the notion that he is acting heroically in withstanding the Indians and the Spanish Catholics. Hammon’s interpretive remarks are scarce and simple. As he states in his introductory address, he expects his readers to analyze the meaning of his sufferings under captivity. Hammon realizes that eighteenth century readers will believe that the workings of Providence generally explain all the events in a person’s life, and he also knows that his audience will understand that other, deeper meanings can be derived from the slave’s remarkable experiences. This is why Hammon wisely invites his readers to make sense of his trials in a perilous world. Because of his slave status, he makes a point of presenting himself as a lowly, unlearned person who expects his readers to probe for themselves the depths of his experiences. By humbling himself and flattering his readers, he can command attention for his life story. After all, Hammon’s narrative presents the first demonstration of a black slave expressing himself on a level of human and spiritual worth that white autobiographers had always assumed natural in their life experiences. It is clear, then, that Hammon is aware of his daring enterprise in telling his story.

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He certainly knows that white readers are going to find it difficult to believe the strange experiences of a black slave with claims to heroic qualities of human endurance. For this reason, Hammon casts himself in the figure of a simple person lacking overt interpretive abilities. He cleverly leaves it to his readers to analyze the narrative events, while he supposedly relates only the factual matters of his adventures. Critical Context Hammon’s captivity narrative was not the only work of its kind. An Indian captivity tale by Thomas Brown also was published by another Boston printer in 1760. It was a popular work and went through two editions that same year. Hammon and Brown must have been aware of each other’s works, because both their texts bear resemblances to each other that cannot be considered coincidental. As to which author borrowed from whom, it is impossible to tell. Hammon may have inspired Brown, or Brown may have influenced Hammon, but the relationships between the two narratives are certainly clear from the works. Hammon’s and Brown’s titles, prefatory remarks, and closing religious exhortations are practically the same word for word. Brown’s tale also contains elements similar to those that appear in Hammon’s work, such as accounts of Indian duplicities, captivity, danger of exposure to the alien faith of Roman Catholicism (in Brown, the French Canadians pose the threat), and kind acts by a governor and a woman. In addition, Brown and Hammon end their narratives with a religious plea taken from the same source in the Bible (Psalm 107). Although it seems that Hammon’s narrative is authentic mainly because of its ingenuous style and unique voice, the difference of tone in the short beginning and ending sections seems to indicate the work of another person. Most of the narrative, however, is presented as a plain and circumstantial account told directly by an unschooled religious person, and the consistency of language, feeling, and viewpoint supports the narrative’s claim to veracity. Hammon’s description of his adventures is important for historical reasons, because it is the first autobiographical slave narrative produced in America. Although few scholars regard it as a great literary piece, Hammon’s work unquestionably contributed to the development of the slave-narrative genre. The spiritual autobiographical elements, the biblical parallels, the heroic portrayal of the narrator, and the hidden subversive elements of the account are all techniques that appear in the more extended and developed slave narratives of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Little critical analysis of Hammon’s narrative exists, but critics who have commented on the work have remarked on its lack of sophistication, its reliance on circumstantial detail, its contrived and coincidental nature, and its weighty religious ending. Many scholars agree, however, that a consideration of Hammon’s autobiographical account is important for a full understanding of the slave narrative’s development in American literature. Furthermore, Hammon’s unusual experiences provide readers with an exciting adventure story.

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Bibliography Andrews, William L. “Voices of the First Fifty Years, 1760-1810.” In To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Discusses why Hammon found it necessary to defer to his white readers, and explains how this trait of deference characterizes early African American autobiography. Costanzo, Angelo. “Black Autobiographers as Biblical Types.” In Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Examines how Hammon portrays himself as a type of biblical hero. Also deals with the possibility of hidden meanings existing within Hammon’s narrative account. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Discusses Hammon’s account as a precursor of the slave narrative. Stresses that Hammon concentrates on presenting himself as a black person with commendable religious and character attributes. Sekora, John. “Briton Hammon, the Indian Captivity Narrative and the African American Slave Narrative.” In When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature, edited by Jonathan Brennan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Explains the importance of Hammon’s narrative existing at the border of two crucial genres in early American literature. Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. Contains scattered comments on Hammon’s work, dealing with its appearance at a time when similar sensational accounts were being published and avidly read. Starling’s investigative research into slave narrative literature, which she completed in 1946, was the first of its kind. She gives readers a sense of where Hammon fits in the line of the slave narrative’s development. Her liberal definition of what can be called a slave narrative, however, allows her to consider other kinds of slave texts, and thus Starling does not claim that Hammon’s work is the first of its kind. Williams, Kenny J. “A New Home in a New Land.” In They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 1787-1930. Nashville, Tenn.: Townsend Press, 1970. Notes the loose construction, simple expression, and pervasive spiritual interpretation of Hammon’s adventure story. Other chapters in the book deal extensively with the slave-narrative structure and prose style. Angelo Costanzo

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THE NARROWS Author: Ann Petry (1908-1997) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1950’s Locale: Monmouth, Connecticut First published: 1953 Principal characters: Abigail Crunch, a seventy-year-old New England widow Lincoln (Link) Williams, the nephew of Abbie Crunch Camilo Treadway Sheffield, a rich white heiress The Novel The Narrows, set in the small New England town of Monmouth, Connecticut, focuses upon an ill-fated love affair between a handsome, well-educated young black man, Link Williams, and Camilo Sheffield, a rich white heiress to the Treadway munitions fortune. After being graduated from Dartmouth, Link returns home intent upon writing a history of America from an African American perspective. However, when he meets and falls in love with Camilo, whom he believes to be Camilo Williams, a fashion photographer, Link abandons his writing project. Later, he learns of her deception and breaks off the affair. Camilo, hurt and humiliated, accuses Link of rape. After he is arrested, she drives away at a high speed, striking and seriously injuring a black child. The treatment of both stories in the press leads Camilo’s mother, Mrs. Treadway, and Camilo’s husband, Captain Sheffield, to murder Link. In trying to dispose of Link’s body in the river off the Dumble Street docks, however, the two are arrested for speeding, and the murder is discovered. Although the action of the novel covers only three months prior to the death of Link Williams, the story covers about twenty years, chronicling the transition of a middleclass, ethnically mixed section of Monmouth to a poverty-ridden ghetto inhabited primarily by African Americans. The story unfolds through a series of flashbacks and digressions, as certain incidents trigger the memories of the major characters. As Abbie reflects upon the early days in Monmouth before the death of her husband, she recalls a quieter, cleaner, more peaceful place. Over the years, however, the neighborhood has steadily declined—so much so that it is now referred to variously as “The Narrows, The Eye of the Needle, The Bottoms, Little Harlem, Niggertown.” Signs of the disintegration are everywhere apparent—in the pollution of the River Wye, in the drunks who loiter in the shade of the hangman’s tree, and in places like the Moonbeam Cafe and the Last Chance Saloon. Link’s memories of the past, however, reveal Monmouth in quite a different light.

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During the time that he spends with Bill Hod after the Major’s death, Link is taught respect for the culture of African American people as well as respect for himself as a black man. In fact, for most of Link’s early life, Bill Hod and other Monmouth locals supervise Link’s street education. Thus, despite the changes that so distress Abbie, Link views The Narrows and its people as a continuing source of nurture and support. The thoughts of Malcolm Powther, a newcomer to The Narrows, reveal Monmouth in still another light; his reflections provide a glimpse into the world of the rich and powerful. His position as butler at Treadway Hall allows Powther access to this world and the secrets of its inhabitants. Through his observations and the servants’ gossip, he acquires intimate knowledge of the Treadway family. Woven into the story of the Camilo-Link love affair are stories of the white inhabitants of Monmouth. There is Peter Bullock, the editor, owner, and publisher of the Monmouth Chronicle, a newspaper that had once had a reputation for espousing the abolitionist cause. That reputation, however, has eroded in the face of Bullock’s increasing concern with appeasing the rich and powerful in order to maintain his station. In contrast to Bullock is the free-lance photographer Jubine, who lives in a loft, rides a motorcycle, and chides Bullock for “having turned so many handsprings” to pay for his expensive possessions. Finally, an interesting assortment of eccentrics people Petry’s novel; their names generally reflect some behavior or physical condition: Weak Knees, Bug Eyes, the Writing Man (a shadowy figure who moves about the streets writing Bible verses on the sidewalks of Monmouth), and Cat Jimmie (a legless, armless grotesque who propels himself about on a cart and takes advantage of his position on the ground to look up women’s skirts). The Characters Ann Petry creates her characters with the skill and deftness of the consummate artist. She draws her characters in such a manner as to reflect the diversity of African American society and the interrelationship between that society and American society in general. In carefully weaving together the lives of her characters, she emphasizes both the complexity and the interconnectedness of all human life. While the two dominant voices in the novel are those of Abigail Crunch and her adopted son, Link Williams (the two characters whose psychic depths are plumbed most thoroughly), there is always, in the background, a chorus of minor voices, deepening and enriching the narrative. Except for Malcolm Powther, however, these voices are subdued, and the characters may be viewed in terms of their relationships to Abbie or to Link. In Abigail Crunch, Petry creates a character unique in African American fiction of the period—black, middle-class, strong—enduring many hardships but refusing to be defeated by them. A primary source of her strength lies in her ability to discount all but her own concept of reality. Forged in the cauldron of prejudice and racism, Abbie emerges as a typical New England matron, steeped in tradition and propriety, embracing her Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage with a passion and eschewing every aspect of her African American heritage. She refuses to associate with the inhabitants of The

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Narrows, which is now predominantly black; and she views every aspect of it—its people, its haunts, its environs—as degraded and shameful. Despite the denial of her African American heritage, Abbie reveals certain aspects of that heritage in subtle ways—sometimes in mannerisms and sometimes in her reaction to other characters in the novel, as she measures them against her concept of the ideal. Mamie Powther, for example, is held in low esteem by Abbie, who considers her loud, coarse, and vulgar. Ironically, however, Petry binds these two women together inextricably, both by place and circumstance (Mamie is Abbie’s tenant) and by personality. In fact, Mamie serves as something of an alter ego to Abbie. While Abbie is reserved and solemn, Mamie is carefree and filled with the joy of living. Much of what Abbie considers vulgar—Mamie’s blues singing, dancing, and ready laughter— is merely another side of Abbie’s personality, that exuberance and vitality that Petry recognizes as essential to the African American character. The sense of rhythm so blatant in Mamie Powther is also apparent in Abbie—though more covert, less strident—and is expressed in the little verses and nonsense rhymes that she continually composes in her head as she goes about her daily activities. Malcolm Powther, soft-spoken, well dressed, and hardworking, seems to fit Abbie’s ideal, and she immediately accepts him. He moves easily between the black and white worlds, fantasizes about white women, and regales his sons with bedtime stories about blonde-haired fairy princesses. It seems an irony that this very proper, conservative gentleman could be so totally captivated by the earthy, sensuous Mamie. From the time of their first encounter, however, he pursues her relentlessly until she agrees to marry him; Mamie brings light and joy into his life, and without her he is incomplete. For Powther, as for Abbie, Mamie seems an alter ego, the vitality of the African American experience that cries out for recognition. In Link Williams, Petry creates a character who functions as a visible “link” between the various elements of a changing society. As he moves between Number Six Dumble Street and the Last Chance Saloon, he attempts to link the traditional world of Abbie Crunch with the nontraditional world of Bill Hod. As he tries to establish and maintain an interracial relationship with Camilo Treadway, he attempts to link the traditional culture of upper-class white society and the iconoclastic ethnic culture of The Narrows. Neither Link’s training as a historian nor his research of African American history affords him the necessary insight or strength to forge a bond between these two worlds. He discovers, unfortunately, that this knowledge isolates rather than bonds; the link does not hold, and the societies remain separate. The other characters in the novel, both black and white, in one way or another reflect the traditional and nontraditional aspects of this changing community, irreparably separated by ignorance, prejudice, and hatred. Abigail Crunch, alone, acquires the double vision that allows her, ultimately, to see the connectedness of all human beings. In the end, she admits that appearances are unimportant and that everyone in the community must assume responsibility for Link’s death. As she says, “We all reacted violently to . . . Link and that girl because he was colored and she was white.”

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Themes and Meanings The Narrows is a complex novel, involving several subplots and a multiplicity of characters skillfully interwoven. Essentially, The Narrows is a New England novel: the characters are cast in the tradition of the New England Puritan ethic and may be viewed as conforming to or deviating from that tradition. Both Abbie Crunch and her friend, Frances (F. K.) Jackson, the black woman undertaker of Monmouth, conform to this tradition. Despite her genteel manner and her aristocratic attitude, Abbie is hardworking and fiercely independent. Before her marriage to the Major, Abbie earned her living as a schoolteacher; after the death of her husband, realizing that she must supplement her income in order to care for herself and Link, she rents the top floor of her house. While the transition from housewife to landlady is not easy, it is necessary, and Abbie makes it without hesitation. F. K. Jackson, though different in appearance and demeanor, is much like Abbie. She has managed to graduate from Wellesley College in a period when matriculation at that institution was almost unheard of for a black woman. She relinquishes her dreams of becoming a doctor to take over her father’s undertaking business in Monmouth, which she does quite successfully. Both Abbie and F. K. are highly intelligent, welleducated, hardworking business women, competing successfully in a world in which both their race and gender are prohibiting factors. While Abbie and F. K. conform to the tradition, the other two women of importance in the novel, Mamie Powther (black and poor) and Camilo (white and rich) deviate from the tradition. Because neither has found productive work, each becomes bored, and that boredom leads them into destructive acts. In the case of Camilo, her cruising of Dock Street in The Narrows late at night leads ultimately to the physical destruction of Link Williams and to her own emotional destruction. In the case of Mamie Powther, her sexual escapades and her penchant for bar-hopping lead her to neglect both husband and children. A major theme that Petry treats in The Narrows is the impact of the past on the present. At the outset of the novel, for example, as Abbie walks into Dumble Street, her eye is drawn to the River Wye, and her thoughts revert to a time long past—to the Monmouth of Link’s childhood, when the river was unpolluted, the Last Chance Saloon did not exist, and drunks did not loiter under the hangman’s tree. Focusing on the past, in some measure, enables Abbie to deal with present situations, to hold fast to a gentler way of life amid the forces of change that threaten to engulf her. The impact of the past on the present is also revealed in Link’s continuing interest in history. Not only does Link choose to major in history at Dartmouth, but he also searches his own cultural roots in an effort to identify himself and to understand his relationship to other people. In so doing, he discovers that African American history is a repository for the prejudice and racism that hold African Americans in bondage. Ironically, that same racism also holds whites in bondage. Camilo is held captive by a tradition that deems certain occupations to be unacceptable for persons of her social status. Captain Sheffield and Mrs. Treadway, on the other hand, are hostage to the racist tradition that forbids interracial relationships and places a death

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sentence upon any black man who engages in such a relationship. Another important theme in the novel is that of guilt and its impact on the lives of individuals. After the death of her husband, for example, Abbie is consumed by guilt because she mistook his heart attack for drunkenness. This guilt affects every aspect of her life, and it is only at Link’s funeral that she begins to come to terms with it. Also, Bill Hod attempts to make amends for a life of profligacy by trying to keep Link innocent, and Weak Knees—haunted by the memory of a murder that he committed years earlier—is often seen flailing his arms at an imaginary companion, muttering, “Get away, Eddie.” Finally, Cesar the Writing Man’s cryptic verses seem to hint at some nameless sin of which the whole town is guilty. Finally, Petry’s weaving of theme and symbol is apparent throughout the novel and is revealed in her naming of characters as well as places. Link Williams obviously provides a link between the white and black worlds portrayed in The Narrows, while the Last Chance Saloon seems to offer an escape, if only momentarily, from the world of reality. On the other hand, the imposing Treadway Hall, with its fleet of expensive cars, sits on the outskirts of Monmouth, its elegance and remoteness symbolizing the great gulf between the worlds of the poor and powerless and the rich and powerful. Critical Context When Ann Petry’s novel The Narrows was first published, it was reviewed in prominent newspapers such as The New York Times and in well-known journals such as Saturday Review. Since that time, however, it has received little critical attention. Many critics consider Petry’s first novel, The Street (1946), her best work and have frequently compared it to Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) because of its naturalistic elements. In The Narrows, though, Petry moves beyond the strictures of the naturalistic school of writers and probes the complexities of the human psyche, examining the myriad forces that influence it. Aside from The Narrows and The Street, Ann Petry produced one other adult novel, Country Place (1947). Her short stories appeared in a number of journals and anthologies and were published in a volume titled Miss Muriel, and Other Stories in 1971. In the canon of Petry’s works, however, The Narrows reveals the writer at her best. Her themes are universal, yet she is able to capture the many and varied nuances of the black experience. The novel is compelling in its psychological probing of character, its intricate interweaving of theme and symbol, and its remarkable prose style. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. “Ann Petry’s Demythologizing of American Culture and AfroAmerican Character.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and the Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Discusses the ways in which Petry’s portrayal of characters in her fiction, especially The Narrows, “debunks” certain myths in American society. Innocence and virtue are not always indigenous to the small-town environment. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Hunting Communists and Negroes in Ann Petry’s The Nar-

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rows.” In Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left, edited by Alex Lubin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Detailed explication of the direct and indirect representation of left-wing politics in The Narrows. Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Anchor Press, 1987. Hernton devotes a chapter to Petry, whom he praises as an important pioneer. McDowell, Margaret. “The Narrows: A Fuller View of Ann Petry.” Black American Literature Forum 14 (1980): 135-141. Discusses The Narrows as one of Petry’s most accomplished novels, focusing upon the skill with which the author interweaves character, theme, and symbol in the narrative. Washington, Mary Helen, ed. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 18601960. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. Examines Petry’s development of female characters in her novels, with special attention to the character of Mamie Powther in The Narrows. Weir, Sybil. “The Narrows: A Black New England Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 15, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 81-93. Examines The Narrows in light of the New England traditions that influence character development, focusing especially on the character of Abbie Crunch. Petry’s novel reflects what Nathaniel Hawthorne saw as the chain of “dark necessity” from which people can rarely, if ever, extricate themselves. Gladys J. Washington

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NATIVE GUARD Author: Natasha Trethewey (1966Type of work: Poetry First published: 2006

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The Poems Natasha Trethewey’s third book of poems, Native Guard, is dedicated to her African American mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker who was murdered by a former husband when the poet was nineteen years old. Trethewey’s white father is Canadian-born poet Eric Trethewey, author of five collections of poetry, who teaches at Hollins College in Virginia. Biracial marriages were illegal in Mississippi, where Trethewey was born, in Gulfport, in 1966, so her parents were married in Ohio. They divorced when she was six, but Trethewey retained her birth name, a decision that she believes her stepfather resented. Trethewey’s first collection of poems, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as winner of the inaugural Cave Canem poetry prize for the best collection of poems submitted by an African American poet. Several of the thirty-four poems in that book concern her maternal grandmother and her life and work in Mississippi beginning in the 1930’s. In her introduction, Dove praises the poems for their “muscular luminosity.” In the twenty-nine poems of her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), Trethewey creates the persona of a prostitute who is the daughter of a white father. She based her character on a 1912 photograph by E. J. Bellocq collected in Storyville Portraits (1971), photographs of prostitutes from New Orleans’s red-light district, which operated between 1897 and 1917. Like Trethewey’s first two books, Native Guard is a slender collection, or more aptly “book,” for as she told one interviewer, “I like to think of myself as a poet who writes not collections of poems, but books of poems.” Many if not most poets assemble collections after the fact from work accumulated over some months or years. As one poet has put it, “Books of verse are not deliberately planned—they grow.” Trethewey by contrast prefers to think of her work as an “integral whole,” and she enjoys doing the research that informs many of her poems, including those that concern the volume’s namesake, the Louisiana Native Guards unit, which was mustered into service in the fall of 1862. As she explains in her notes at the end of the book, the unit became “the first officially sanctioned regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army.” Native Guard’s title poem comprises ten linked, free-form sonnets in a corona pattern (in the manner of John Donne’s La Corona devotional sonnets). Part of Trethewey’s intention in writing it and the other poems of the book was to create a monument of sorts to the African American soldiers who served on Ship Island, offshore from Gulfport. In some interviews, the poet has indicated her commitment to correcting episodes of what she calls “historic erasure” by remembering forgotten people and events. Several poems in Native Guard are more personal memorials, commemo-

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rating Trethewey’s murdered mother, to whom the book is dedicated. In an interview, Trethewey mentions that the “stone pillow” of her mother’s grave at the end of “Graveyard Blues” does not actually exist. She has also indicated that in her attempt to “create a monument for these lesser known soldiers” she ended up creating one for her own mother as well. The thirty-eight poems of Native Guard (just twenty-nine if one counts the connected sonnets of the title poem as a single piece) are divided into three sections following the unrhymed couplets of the prefatory poem, “Theories of Time and Space,” which begins, “You can get there from here, though/ there’s no going home.” The poem directs readers down U.S. Interstate 49 in Mississippi to Trethewey’s hometown of Gulfport and on a tour of Ship Island. Significantly, the poem concludes with a photograph of “you” (a reader). Perhaps no other contemporary poet has demonstrated such consistent fascination with photography and with the poetry of ekphrasis (writing connected to a specific image, usually a painting or a photograph). In an interview, Trethewey suggests that her interest in photography began after her mother’s death, and she refers to Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977). In another interview she explains that her fascination with photographs does not simply concern memory or nostalgia, but their “narrative possibilities” as well: “I love how they both reveal a version of something, but also conceal countless other versions. They speak most to me about absence.” The concluding section, comprising eleven poems, opens with “Pastoral,” one of Trethewey’s unrhymed syllabic sonnets (perhaps a more accurate term than “freeform” sonnet). In it, the autobiographical first-person speaker dreams she is gathered with the Fugitive Poets (she names Robert Penn Warren) for a photo shoot in Atlanta. The Fugitives, beginning in the 1930’s, called for a return to traditional agrarian, or pastoral, values in the South, so Trethewey’s dreamed connection with them is darkly humorous. She concludes with a play on the last lines of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which Quentin Compson exclaims to his Canadian roommate at Harvard that he does not hate the South. In “Pastoral,” the poets ask the speaker what could well be a rhetorical question: “You don’t hate the South?” The final section—which includes examples of two strict poetic forms, the ghazal and the pantoum, additional reminders of Trethewey’s commitment to formalism— connects personal, familial, and cultural histories. In one interview, Trethewey notes that she has worked “to blend personal or family stories with collective history.” Although she has laid claim to a particular biracial perspective on life in the Deep South, Trethewey has also researched “casta paintings from eighteenth-century colonial Mexico,” which “depict the mixed blood unions and the children of such unions in the colony.” Thus, she has demonstrated interest in writing poems that would take her both outside “the muck of ancestry,” as she phrases it in “Southern Gothic,” and away from where “the old flag” of the Confederacy “still hangs,” as she writes near the end of “South,” the last poem in Native Guard.

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Themes and Meanings One reviewer of Native Guard has suggested that the book is constructed around a dialectic involving “the autobiographical as thesis, the historical as antithesis, and the intertwining of the personal and the historical as synthesis.” The book’s first section opens with “The Southern Crescent,” which tells of three trips taken by Trethewey’s mother. The first is a train trip to California in 1959 that represents a futile effort to connect with her father. The second, parallel trip eastward on the last run of the “old Crescent” is fraught with memories of yet another trip years before to meet Natasha’s father, “that trip, too, gone wrong.” The poem is a tribute to Trethewey’s tight formalism. The two numbered sections of two nine-line stanzas apiece might be said to suggest the parallel rails or the movements forward and back in time and place. As is often the case in Trethewey’s poems, the familial males are present primarily in their absence. Although the lines cannot be said to be metered in any strictly iambic way, the poet adheres fairly closely to a ten-syllable line. The major exception to that adherence occurs in the initial line, in which she makes no syllabic compensation for the numerical date (1959). Critical Context Trethewey holds the Phillis Wheatley Chair in Poetry at Emory University and lives in Decatur, Georgia. Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Various reviewers and interviewers have observed how frequently Trethewey introduces dates into her poems, sometimes in the opening lines, as in “The Southern Crescent,” sometimes in the titles, as in “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971” or in the villanelle “King Cotton, 1907.” The latter is the first poem in the four-poem series “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi,” which appears as the second piece in the second section of Native Guard. Moreover, each of the ten sonnets in “Native Guard” is dated, from “November 1862” to “1865.” The imagined first-person speaker, a literate former slave who keeps a journal and writes letters for the prisoners of war he guards, begins, “Truth be told, I do not want to forget/ anything of my former life: the landscape’s/ song of bondage—dirge in the river’s throat.” The last sonnet in the sequence reflects on the massacre of black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow in the spring of 1864 by troops under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest among the “things which must be accounted for” at the war’s end. Trethewey’s keen ear is apparent in the assonant sounds of the final lines, which link the poem to its beginning: “Beneath battlefields, green again,/ the dead molder—a scaffolding of bone/ we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told.” The lines also remind readers of the way in which certain events tend to get lost in the stream of history. Bibliography Mlinko, Ange. Review of Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey. Poetry 191, no. 1 (October, 2007): 56-60. Reads Native Guard as following the Fichtean dialectical structure of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Shipers, Carrie. Review of Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey. Prairie Schooner

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80, no. 4 (Winter, 2006). 199-201. Emphasizes the role of grief and mourning in Trethewey’s third book. Trethewey, Natasha. “Inscriptive Restorations: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey.” Interview by Charles Henry Rowell. Callaloo 27, no. 4 (2004): 1022-1034. Rowell and Trethewey talk about the forgotten and invisible aspects of history and culture and Trethewey’s project of restoring lost memory through her poetry. _______. “Interview: Natasha Trethewey on Facts, Photographs, and Loss.” Interview by Sara Kaplan. Fugue 32 (Winter/Spring, 2007): 66-74. Interview in a literary journal that also includes two poems by Trethewey. _______. “An Interview with Natasha Trethewey.” Interview by Jill Petty. Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 364-375. Trethewey discusses the role of photography in her work as the representation of absence, among other topics. _______. “An Interview with Natasha Trethewey.” Interview by Pearl Amelia McHaney. Five Points 11, no. 3 (September, 2007): 96-115. Trethewey makes detailed remarks about history, poetry, and their place in her thoughts, in an interview conducted one month after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. _______. “Native Daughter: Questions for Natasha Trethewey.” Interview by Deborah Solomon. The New York Times, May 13, 2007, p. 15. Brief but suggestive question-and-answer session on Native Guard and some details of the poet’s life and craft. Wojahn, David. “History Shaping Selves: Four Poets.” Southern Review 43, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 218-231. Compares the representation of history in Trethewey’s work to its representation in the work of Major Jackson, David Rivard, and Rodney Jones. Ron McFarland

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NATIVE SON Author: Richard Wright (1908-1960) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1930’s Locale: Chicago, Illinois First published: 1940 Principal characters: Bigger Thomas, a twenty-year-old black man from Chicago’s South Side Mrs. Thomas, Bigger’s mother Buddy Thomas, Bigger’s younger brother Vera Thomas, Bigger’s sister Bessie Mears, Bigger’s girlfriend Mr. Dalton, Bigger’s landlord and employer Mrs. Dalton, the blind wife of Mr. Dalton Mary Dalton, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Dalton Jan Erlone, Mary Dalton’s boyfriend Boris Max, Bigger’s communist lawyer The Novel Native Son narrates the life and impending death of Bigger Thomas. The novel opens with the jarring sound of an alarm clock. The family’s morning ritual is interrupted by a rat, which Bigger hysterically kills. This act marks the first instance of the fear and rage that pervade the novel. The planned robbery of Blum’s store also elicits fear and rage. Blum is white, and Bigger and his gang are used to preying on other African Americans. He fights with Gus, a member of his gang, and calls the robbery off. Bigger gets a job as the Daltons’ chauffeur. His first assignment is to take Mary Dalton to the university. She, however, wants to meet her boyfriend, Jan. All three end up at Ernie’s Kitchen Shack on the South Side of Chicago, and they get drunk. Mary is so drunk that Bigger has to carry her to her room. As he places her in bed, the ghostlike Mrs. Dalton enters. Panicstricken, Bigger suffocates Mary with her pillow. He decapitates her so that her body will fit into the blazing furnace and returns home to sleep. As the investigation into Mary’s disappearance begins, Bigger implicates both Bessie and Jan. Mary’s bones are eventually found in the furnace, and Bigger must murder Bessie, to whom he has confessed, for his own protection. He kills her with a brick while she is asleep after he has raped her. Bigger flees through abandoned buildings on the South Side of Chicago. He is finally captured atop a water tank and imprisoned.

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The third part of the novel—the inquest and trial—is set in the Cook County Jail and its environs. Bigger faints at the inquest and is taken back to his cell, where he reads newspaper reports of himself as the quintessential “nigger.” While in his cell, he is also visited by all those who have influenced his life, including the Reverend Hammond, his mother’s minister, who gives Bigger a wooden cross. Back at the inquest, Bigger is represented by Max, his communist lawyer. Mary’s bones and Bigger’s signed confession are on display at the inquest. The deputy coroner elicits testimony from Mrs. Dalton and Jan; Max, for his part, questions Mr. Dalton. He points out that Mr. Dalton, as landlord of the rat-infested, oneroom tenement in which Bigger and his family live, must bear a great deal of the responsibility for his daughter’s death. As testimony continues, Bessie’s mutilated corpse is brought in. The jury at the inquest decides that Bigger suffocated and strangled Mary while raping her. He must now be returned to jail to await trial. Instead of being taken directly to Cook County Jail, Bigger is brought to Mary’s room at the Daltons’. He is then told to show how he raped and murdered Mary. He insists that he did not rape her and refuses to do anything. As he is being returned to jail, he sees the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan. On his return, he throws away the wooden cross given him by the Reverend Hammond and is visited by Max. Bigger tells him about his meaningless existence. Bigger’s trial begins. Max focuses on the causes of Bigger’s behavior in his defense. Despite Max’s eloquence, Bigger is convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair. An appeal to the governor fails. The Characters Bigger Thomas is a paradox—a “bad nigger” sympathetically portrayed. Not only is his the only point of view in the novel, but he is also the axis around which the other characters revolve. Bigger’s relationship with his family is fraught with tension. He regards them all as “blind” and willing to accept the dehumanizing lot white society proffers. His mother, sister, and brother all have ways of succumbing. Mrs. Thomas finds comfort in religion. Vera, Bigger’s sister, does what is expected. For her, sewing lessons at the “Y” provide a safe activity. Buddy, although he looks up to his older brother, is resolved to “stay in his place.” Bessie, Bigger’s girlfriend, has her own way of succumbing to white society. She is an alcoholic who no longer finds even sex satisfying. Bigger gives her liquor in exchange for sex, and she allows him to steal from her employers. Eventually, Bigger must kill her because she knows too much. Bessie is a true victim. Bigger and his gang—G. H., Jack, and Gus—are victims of their own fear, hate, and rage. They demonstrate these negative emotions toward both themselves and white society. They are too scared to carry out the planned robbery of Blum’s store. Each, however, recognizes that the others are afraid because Blum is white. To rob Blum is to violate the white establishment. Because a black man killing a white woman is one of the culture’s major taboos,

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Bigger’s fate is sealed when he accidentally smothers Mary Dalton. However, since the ultimate taboo is sexual intercourse between a black man and white woman, the murder charge against Bigger is trumped up to rape—which justifies, then, the death penalty. Mr. Dalton, Mary’s father, is a seeming contradiction. He gives generously to black charities while at the same time owning the rat-infested tenement in which Bigger and his family live. Similarly, he provides table tennis for African Americans but not decent housing. Mrs. Dalton displays a kind of missionary zeal in her relationship with African Americans. Her physical and psychological blindness, however, belie her actions. On first meeting Bigger, she speaks about him in his presence as though he were a textbook case. She is intent on doing what is best for him, as she sees it. Jan Erlone, Mary Dalton’s boyfriend, also wants to do what is best for Bigger. He tries to befriend him on their first meeting by shaking his hand and insisting that Bigger call him by his first name. The protagonist is understandably uncomfortable; he is not used to such behavior on the part of a white man. Later, when Bigger is in prison, Jan visits him and finds him a lawyer. It is perhaps to Jan’s credit that Bigger’s final request of his lawyer is that he “tell Jan hello.” Boris Max, Bigger’s communist lawyer, is eloquent though ineffectual. As Max sees it, white society, not Bigger, is to be blamed for the protagonist’s actions. Contrived though such a defense may seem, Max succeeds in gaining Bigger’s trust. All the characters, black and white, Bigger included, are, to a degree, stereotypes. Wright seems more interested in the message and less in the medium. Themes and Meanings Bigger Thomas, as his name suggests, is the stereotypical “nigger.” As such, he is destined to end up in jail, and Bigger knows it. Very early in the novel, he admits “that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else.” Living on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930’s, Bigger is trapped in a hostile environment. His every action is predicated on his obsessive fear of the white world. His accidental killing of Mary and his murder of Bessie are both motivated by fear. It is because he is panic-stricken at the thought of Mrs. Dalton finding him in Mary’s room that he suffocates Mary. Similarly, he murders Bessie because he is afraid she will give him away to the police. After Mary’s death, Bigger experiences feelings of power, equality, and freedom. In fact, he might even be said to have acquired an identity. So powerful is he that he no longer needs his knife and his gun. Also, he believes himself the equal of whites because he has destroyed their most prized possession. He can decide how much to tell the police about Mary’s disappearance; for a while, the “dumb nigger” is in charge, and Bigger toys with the police. For the first time in his life, he is somebody—a murderer. The word “murderer” is appropriate, since Bigger convinces himself after Mary’s accidental killing that he really intended to kill her.

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Bessie is part of his limited environment, and he kills her because he feels he must. After he murders Bessie, Bigger’s feelings of power, equality, and freedom, and his sense of an identity are all heightened. In jail, Bigger is listless and apathetic. His lawyer becomes his confidant, and Bigger tries to sort out his feelings. His dubious epiphany seems to be that his only viable option is violence. The alternative, as he sees it, is dehumanizing submission to white society. In Bigger’s view, all the other African Americans in the novel opt for submission to whites. His mother finds solace in religion; his brother unquestioningly accepts the status quo; his sister is excessively timid and believes in the tenets of the “Y”; Bessie, his girlfriend, turns to alcohol and ultimately does not even find sex satisfying. Bigger’s friends, Gus, G. H., and Jack, are not willing to go all the way to rid themselves of white oppression. The reader sees these characters through Bigger’s eyes, and they seem like stereotypes; critics have commented adversely on this aspect of the novel. To some, stereotypical character portrayal is inherently faulty, and these critics find even the portrayal of Bigger unsatisfactory. Others, however, contend that Bigger’s character, though stereotypical, is convincingly developed, whereas the other characters are mere stick figures. Among these stick figures are the whites in the novel. Bigger’s blanket response to all whites is fear, hate, rage, and shame, with two exceptions. In the case of Jan, Mary’s boyfriend, Bigger’s standard response gives way to bewilderment and later reluctant trust. As for Max, Bigger trusts him almost immediately; as a result, some commentators view the Bigger-Max relationship as contrived. If the theme of trust comes late in the novel and causes skepticism, the same cannot be said of the major theme—fear. Not only do the killing of the rat and the fight with Gus foreshadow Mary’s death, but they are also motivated by fear. Bigger fights with Gus to cover up his fear of robbing Blum’s store. He and his friends are used to preying on other African Americans, but to rob a white man’s store is taboo. Thus, the killing of Mary demonstrates how Bigger’s fear and its concomitant emotions of hate, rage, and shame culminate in increasing violence. On a much larger scale, Richard Wright seems to be saying that the fate of African Americans is determined by a hostile white environment. Determinism, then, is an important theme in Native Son. For the Bigger Thomases growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930’s, there is no escape; they will end up in jail. The only question is, what crime will justify their detention. Who is to blame for this state of affairs? For most of the novel, Wright seems to be insisting that it is white society that is at fault. As the novel approaches its end, however, readers may get the sense that Bigger Thomas is the “native son” of all Americans, black and white. By killing, Bigger has carved out an identity for himself; by destroying, he has created. Despite his meager choices, he has chosen violence over submission. Even Bigger recognizes this: “But what I killed for, I am!” At the end of the novel, readers are still trying to understand Bigger. The point of

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view is sympathetic. Wright manages to convince readers that this black youth who has killed twice and begins to feel only after he has murdered is worthy of understanding and compassion. Some critics insist that in the book’s concluding section, the pace of the novel slows to a crawl. These critics regard the final section as a major flaw in the novel, viewing it as contrived. Others concede that, although perhaps too didactic in tone, the concluding section is necessary to show the extent to which Bigger’s life is fated. Still others argue that this material should have been integrated into the rest of the novel. If critics are divided about the effectiveness of Wright’s narrative structure, his symbolism is less controversial. The snowfalls and blizzards that occur throughout the novel represent a hostile white society. Similarly, Mrs. Dalton’s physical blindness is indicative of the psychological blindness of the other characters. Time, too, has symbolic significance in the novel. Whether it be the cacophonous sound of the alarm clock in the opening line of the novel or the clock ticking at the head of Mary’s bed, the references seem to represent Bigger’s meaningless existence. Most critics grant a measure of effectiveness to these symbols. The wooden cross, however, does not fare so well. This is the cross that the Reverend Hammond, Bigger’s mother’s minister, gives Bigger when he visits him in prison. Those who bother to mention it regard it as too obvious. Bigger throws the cross away after seeing the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan; he cannot absorb the differences between the two symbols. In discarding the wooden cross, however, he is rejecting his mother’s religion and, ultimately, his mother. Critical Context When first published in 1940, Native Son was an immediate success. It was a Bookof-the-Month Club selection, and in three weeks 215,000 copies were sold. Richard Wright was a prolific writer, and his other works include Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), Lawd Today (written 1935, but not published until 1963), Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), and The Outsider (1953). As literature, Native Son employs the tenets of naturalism and existentialism to portray Bigger Thomas, the stereotypical “nigger.” If, as the naturalist contends, human beings are the products of their environment, then the very title of the novel— Native Son—seems to indicate that Bigger responds to environmental forces. In true naturalistic fashion, Bigger does not understand these forces, and hence he cannot control them. Wright is as true to existential tenets as he is to naturalism. The meaninglessness of Bigger’s existence is at one with the existential philosophy. When, at the end of the novel, Bigger says, “But what I killed for, I am!” he is accepting responsibility for his actions—yet another attribute of existentialism. Native Son is naturalistic and existential not because Wright is intent on adhering to particular philosophical systems but because, as some commentators have observed, he found black life in America both naturalistic and existential.

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Since Native Son was published in 1940, it has disturbed the complacency of Americans, both African Americans and whites. Bigger Thomas’s raw rage cannot be ignored; readers respond either negatively or positively to the novel. Wright kept the promise he made when he discovered that “even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about Uncle Tom’s Children.” He vowed that his next book would be one that “no one would weep over.” In fact, “it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” In this, Wright succeeded. Bibliography Fraile, Ana María, ed. Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” New York: Rodopi, 2007. Collection of scholarly studies explicating all aspects of Wright’s seminal novel. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. New Essays on “Native Son.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Presents a thorough examination of the genesis and background of Native Son. Kinnamon analyzes Wright’s own essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” along with letters, notes, manuscripts, and galley and page proofs to show how external forces influenced the writing of the novel. Skerrett, Joseph T., Jr. “Composing Bigger: Wright and the Making of Native Son.” In Modern Critical Interpretations: Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Offers an illuminating analysis of the biographical aspects of Native Son. Skerrett argues convincingly that Richard Wright and Bigger Thomas share many attributes. Williams, John A. The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Richard Wright. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Provides a solid biography for the general reader. Williams places Wright in his historical context both at home and abroad, giving a sense of the man and his times. Wright, Richard. Early Novels: “Lawd Today!,” “Uncle Tom’s Children,” “Native Son.” Vol. 2 in Works. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. Reinstates significant cuts that were made in Lawd Today! and Native Son. The volume, however, also deserves attention for its detailed chronology, which reads like an excellent biography. _______. “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.” In Native Son, by Richard Wright. Reprint. New York: Perennial Library, 1987. Details the genesis of Native Son. The author describes five Bigger Thomases, dating back to his childhood. Wright is his own best critic. Sheila J. McDonald

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NATIVES OF MY PERSON Author: George Lamming (1927) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Historical realism Time of plot: Sixteenth century Locale: The west coast of Africa and the Caribbean First published: 1972 Principal characters: The Commandant, the enigmatic master of the ship Reconnaissance Pinteados, the ship’s pilot Sasha, the ship’s cabin boy The Boatswain, an experienced sailor Baptiste, one of the most vocal and militant of the ordinary seamen The Novel Although Natives of My Person has a historical setting and deals with the voyage of the Reconnaissance, a vessel ostensibly engaged in the slave trade, a specific historical phenomenon, it is only partly accurate to describe it as a work of historical realism. Its realist component is not to be found in its fidelity to period costume, living conditions, or similar revealing detail. Instead of the veneer of verisimilitude that such usages provide, the novel locates its realism in the way in which it elaborately recapitulates an outlook. In order to focus readers’ attention on this enactment of a mindset, there are no reliable geographical or historical bearings. Two powerful nations are mentioned, Lime Stone and Antarctica. Although they are traditionally enemies, their enmity derives from a common commitment to the type of exploration and exploitation that the slave trade brings into being. In Lime Stone, the nation to which the Commandant and the crew of the Reconnaissance supposedly owe allegiance, the ruling institution is known as the House of Trade and Justice. The titular head of this house is Gabriel Tate de Lysle, a name perhaps intended to evoke the firm of Tate and Lyle, a real-life British sugar company with substantial plantations in the Caribbean. Antarctica, on the other hand, is represented by the pilot, Pinteados, and an admiral, signifying its maritime interests. In both cases, the appearance of cohesiveness that these spheres of accomplishment provide is deceptive. The activities emerge as a kind of shadow-play, the manifestations of which are not material but psychological. Similarly, the voyage of the Reconnaissance lacks geographical specificity and nautical detail. Nor is its purpose the traditional one of adding to the coffers of the House of Trade and Justice. Although mention is made of the Guinea coast, the cus-

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tomary West African source of slaves for the transatlantic trade, there is very little attempt to bring that environment to life. Moreover, no slaves are taken on board. As the Reconnaissance heads across the Atlantic in the general direction of the imaginary island of San Cristobal, the object of the voyage seems less to attain a new, rewarding landfall than to unveil the turbid spirit of nascent imperialism, and the emotional and spiritual squalor that lies beneath the arrogant mask of command. In Natives of My Person, much of the romance associated with going down to the sea in ships, with enduring hardship by no means other than raw courage, and with discovering new tropical paradises, is deprived of its hortatory simplemindedness and its ideologically suspect naïvete. The result is that Lamming presents a sustained critique of such onedimensional verities. The courage depicted has no moral fiber. No heavenly landfall materializes. On the contrary, the voyage is inconclusive and unproductive, its payoff violent and chaotic. This outcome is particularly telling because it issues from such an explicitly controlled and hierarchical world. Since the action is located on board a ship, elements of rank, order, integration, command, and purpose thus compose the fundamental lexicon of the reality that the characters share. So great is the emphasis placed upon such elements, and so widespread is the belief that this emphasis is in the service of an immutable, historically inscribed destiny, that it becomes inevitable that challenges to the structure of life on the Reconnaissance be identified and, if possible, extirpated. One of the most accomplished and explicit means by which the author evinces the inevitability of challenge and the inevitability of its suppression is in the characters’ speech. Formal without being orotund, dramatic without being rhetorical, it is an instrument that reveals the probes and defenses used by the characters to substantiate their common reality. This common reality, fabricated in the name of the imperial ambitions of Lime Stone’s ruling house and given direct impetus by the Commandant’s own ambition, is less durable than the mixture of unhappy personal histories and dubious motivations that the individual crew members bring on board with them. These discrete narratives of humiliation and error all have a common root in sexuality, and all pertain to the Commandant’s status both as captain of the Reconnaissance and as an intimate of the House of Trade and Justice. By seeing to it that there is no escaping the various forms of psychological enslavement that form the basis of the crew’s personal reality, and by arranging the plot of Natives of My Person so that this inner bondage is the cause of the calamitous climax of the voyage, George Lamming exposes the mortal weakness of those who sought to impose their will on the world in the name of empire. The Characters From the point of view of character, the shipboard world of Natives of My Person is divided into two halves, the world of masters and the world of men. In the latter world, the characters have actual names such as Baptiste, Ivan, and Marcel. Considered collectively, the crew members’ names resist the identification of Lime Stone with any specific imperial power. Many of the names have French associations. Of all

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the various empires to have made their marks on the Caribbean, the French was, arguably, the least prominent, so that the French emphasis becomes part of the structure of inversion upon which the novel is based. The men, by virtue of their names, attain a certain individuality, but it is an attainment that they are not permitted to experience as empowerment. Such a condition of psychological disfranchisement is endemic to life at sea. The result is that, for all their colorfulness, the various skills of their trades, and the range of their differentiated backgrounds, the ordinary seamen are utterly dependent on the ebb and flow of surmise, rumor, and gossip that they trawl for indications of what lies in store for them. They are held captive both by the enigmatic Commandant and, more fundamentally, by a social structure that demands that they be kept in a state of lesser awareness than the officers. The effect of this dependence is that their individuality is purely nominal. The manner in which the men are entrapped is largely social. In important respects, they are free of the sexual attachments that determine the fates of their superiors in rank, but this freedom is unable to assume a constructive form. There is no alternative available to the men to the command structure of the ship and the command economy that underlies and motivates it. Although they are implicated in the ways in which conditions develop on the Reconnaissance, they remain essentially outside the psychological penumbra that darkens the officers’ inner lives. Despite their machismo and capacity for belligerence, the men are for all practical purposes innocent, as the Boatswain’s story shows. This story, which tells of the intersection between the sailor’s life and the officer’s life, depicts the Boatswain attempting to redeem by means of sex the abjectness of a life spent unrewardingly in the service of the House of Trade and Justice. The story not only marks the beginning of the end of the voyage but also confirms the rigidity of the lines that control the social reality by which the characters are obliged to abide. The situation of the officers is a mirror image of that of the men. They are known not by their names but by their professional occupations such as Priest, Surgeon, and Steward. These designations clearly obviate the characters’ individuality. However, their individuality, conceived in terms of marriage, private life, sexuality, thirst for power, and willingness to judge and punish, is what the officers cannot forego. The human cost of their service is what haunts and eventually destroys them. As with the men, but in a much more decisive manner that calls into question the hierarchical principles of the Lime Stone world, the officers are incapable of overcoming their attachment to the system in which they serve. Individuating elements are inadmissable in the world of the slave-traders. What the Boatswain is with regard to the men, the Commandant is in connection with the officers. His attempts to personify for his own ends the ambitions of the House of Trade and Justice, and the fact that these attempts can be seen to be driven by a need to sublimate his sexual experiences in Lime Stone, bring to a critical, and untenable, juncture the conflicts between role and personality, between ego and id, between the amenities of land and the vicissitudes of sea. Both the Commandant and Boatswain embody to a problematic, and ultimately catastrophic, degree the tensions

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and contradictions to which the groups to which they belong are subject. Rather than developing a sense of the characters’ individuality, Natives of My Person instead explores its moral landscape by showing the destructive resistance of type to individuality. Themes and Meanings In the burgeoning field of fiction and drama dealing with imperialism, colonialism, and their consequences, Natives of My Person is of particular significance not only for its stylization of the historical background but also for its treatment of its subject exclusively through the minds of the imperialists. Taking for its theme the moral and psychological strategies by which the avatars of empire articulate their moral natures, the novel dwells on the evasions, corruptions, sublimations, and impositions that are an unacknowledged but decisive force in the workings of those natures. In one sense, it is of little consequence that the voyage of the Reconnaissance to San Cristobal is abortive. What is at issue is not the conquest but the character of the would-be conquerors. Blind to their own human fallibility, they can hardly be expected to be alive to the humanity of those who seem different to them, whether the difference is in skin color or, as in the novel, in gender. In one of the journal extracts that occur periodically throughout Natives of My Person, there is a rehearsal of some of the major tropes of racism. These include stereotypical assumptions regarding the untamed, indisciplined, sexually abandoned, and generally monstrous nature of those captured for enslavement. The inevitable conclusion is that such creatures are beyond the moral pale and must be considered alien to their captors’ codes of civilization. However, the plot of the novel subtly suggests that the same charges might well be leveled against these self-styled superior agents, not merely because of their racist views but also because of the way in which they treat their wives in Lime Stone. The consistently exploitative and punitive manner in which these women are treated not only is objectionable in itself but also contains the essence of what is morally repugnant in the world of the empire builders. Desire for power on the domestic front is suggested to be the moral basis for the voyage. The manner in which the past haunts and threatens the officers is a demonstration of the abusive psychological economy to which they have become indentured. The women themselves, however, are not to be sentimentalized. They too are not beyond attempting to create their own power bases by exploiting their sexuality. This view reinforces the reciprocal nature of the novel’s overview. Just as officers and men are complementary in their respective situations, so are husbands and wives. It is from this complementarity that the inescapable nature of the novel’s moral universe derives. Every facet of this universe has its own distinctive and persuasive part to play. Intimate interrogation in the captain’s cabin or in the marriage bed has as forceful a determining role as exploration that spans oceans. Innocence ineluctably incriminates, while the guilty accidentally fall victim to what seems the moral equivalent of their just desserts. The voyage that fails, as that of the Reconnaissance does, is as instruc-

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tive as the innumerable imperialist voyages that succeed. In its comprehensiveness, Natives of My Person embraces an immense swathe of fallible human behavior; as its title indicates, that swathe is embodied by each of the characters, each in a particular but unavoidably related manner. With his somewhat inaccessible title, the author may be suggesting that he is the inheritor of the world that the imperial mindset created, and that that world’s bequest of a mindset is its primary and most problematic legacy. Critical Context The narrative strategy of assembling a cast of characters and sending them on a voyage can be traced at least as far back as the fifteenth century German poem Das Narrenschiff (1494; The Ship of Folys of the Worlde, 1509), and the representative nature of the characters of Natives of My Person, as well as its inevitable moral critique, align it with the tradition of such works. This tradition has connotations of plotting a course and envisaging a destination, as well as of foundering and losing one’s bearings. These two sets of connotations continually interact in Natives of My Person. Despite the work’s allegorical potential deriving from its medieval prototype, the novel’s main critical context is indebted to more modern works. Although Natives of My Person is conceived and executed on a much larger scale than Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), its thematic debt to that work is not difficult to discern. The thematic force of the journey as an event of more psychological than geographical interest is obviously present in both works, and the insistence on the corrupting effects of power, and on power conceived of in exclusively exploitative terms, is also aired in Conrad’s story. It is important also not to overlook the author’s declaration of his own cultural allegiances. These are suggested in his partial dedication of the novel to the African American author Richard Wright and in the title’s echo of Wright’s most celebrated novel, Native Son (1940). Apart from the inherent interest in one writer’s public homage to another, the dedication acts as a firm reminder that the issues raised in Natives of My Person have remained current, and that the human history that engendered these issues still requires the imaginative reconstruction and moral dissection to which George Lamming subjects it. Bibliography Boxhill, Anthony. “San Cristobal Unreached: George Lamming’s Two Latest Novels.” World Literature Written in English 12 (April, 1973): 16-28. Discusses Lamming’s Water with Berries (1972) and Natives of My Person, examining in detail the latter’s treatment of historical and colonial questions. Campbell, Elaine. “West Indian Sea Fiction: George Lamming’s Natives of My Person.” Commonwealth Novel in English 3 (Spring/Summer, 1984): 56-65. Discusses the different nautical dimensions of Natives of My Person and relates them to the maritime tradition of the Caribbean novel. Forbes, Curdella. From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, and the Cultural Performance of Gender. Mona, Jamaica: University of West Indies

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Press, 2005. Devotes a chapter to the representation of the female body and of femininity in Natives of My Person. McDonald, Avis G. “‘Within the Orbit of Power’: Reading Allegory in George Lamming’s Natives of My Person.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22, no. 1 (1987): 73-86. An elaborate and complex reading of the novel’s allegorical character, which is interpreted as, ultimately, a meditation on the consequences of power as a force for coherence in the world. Munro, Ian. “George Lamming.” In West Indian Literature, edited by Bruce King. London: Archon Books, 1979. A general introduction to Lamming’s work, concentrating on his novels. The works’ various treatments of emigration and colonialism are identified. The survey also indicates ways in which Natives of My Person can be considered the culmination of Lamming’s fiction. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. The Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann, 1982. Contains a chapter on Natives of My Person. Provides a broad overview of the novel’s economic, sociological, and historical underpinnings. Also has a substantial bibliography. Peterson, Kirsten Holt. “Time, Timelessness, and the Journey Metaphor in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and Natives of My Person.” In The Commonwealth Writer Overseas: Themes of Exile and Expatriation, edited by Alastair Niven. Brussels: Marcel Didier, 1976. Highlights the journey theme in Lamming’s works and considers the contribution made by the works in relation to the establishment of a specific West Indian mentality and culture. George O’Brien

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THE NEW NEGRO An Interpretation Author: Alain Locke (1886-1954) Type of work: Essays First published: 1925 Form and Content Edited by Alain Locke, a Howard University professor of philosophy, The New Negro was a compilation of poems, short fiction, essays, and illustrations. It celebrated the appearance of a new contingent of African American writers and artists, following the Great Migration of rural southern African Americans to northern urban meccas in the early twentieth century. An expression of the creative energy and ferment of the postwar Jazz Age, the volume was both a collection of literary and visual artifacts and, in its ideological function as a racial manifesto, a cultural artifact in its own right. It hastened the emergence into public consciousness of the so-called Harlem Renaissance—Harlem was both its site and sometime subject—a phenomenon of spontaneous cultural combustion in this international capital of the “Negro” world. The volume featured novelists, poets, playwrights, critics, scholars, and artists. Its contributors made up a who’s who of black literati, with cameo appearances by representative white sympathizers. Of the thirty-eight contributors, eight were women, among them writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and novelist Jessie Fauset, who was also the literary editor of The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Alain Locke apart, the most notable male contributors to The New Negro were Jean Toomer, the author of Cane (1923), a book of vignettes of racial subject matter and formal inventiveness that had anticipated the Harlem Renaissance; the irascible West Indian poet Claude McKay, whose militant poem “If We Must Die” spoke for the younger generation; Countée Cullen, a poet more polished and conventional than the globe-trotting McKay; and the wordsmith Langston Hughes, in many respects the conscience of the younger artists. Among the elder statesmen represented were W. E. B. Du Bois, the chief editor of The Crisis; Kelly Miller, a professor at Howard University; the educator Robert R. Moton; and the widely esteemed racial diplomat James Weldon Johnson, coauthor of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “Negro national anthem.” An intermediate generation was represented by the sociologists Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, the former already established, the latter soon to make his mark. The four white contributors were Albert C. Barnes, a wealthy connoisseur and collector whose taste for European impressionist paintings coexisted with an early appreciation of African and African American art; Paul U. Kellogg, director of the famous Pittsburgh Survey (1908-1914) and editor of The Survey Graphic, a progressive monthly journal; Melville J. Herskovits, a young anthropologist and pioneer Africanist, later to be celebrated and controversial for the suggestion that African American culture was marked

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by African survivals; and Winold Reiss, an Austrian illustrator and graphic artist who specialized in the delineation of folk types in Europe and the Americas. For students of American intellectual history, The New Negro is noteworthy for the circumstances surrounding its appearance, its rhetorical purpose, and its editorial packaging, all of which are related. Appearing in 1925, The New Negro was an expanded version of a special Harlem issue of the magazine, The Survey Graphic. Underwritten in part by the Russell Sage Foundation, which had been established in 1907 to support progressive social initiatives, The Survey Graphic was the semiofficial journal of a multidimensional urban reform movement that had grown out of scientific charity and social settlement concerns. Those earlier movements were distinguished both by their attention to the so-called new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and by their early recognition that rural southern African Americans were part of a population shift to urban centers that was changing the face of the United States. Thus, The New Negro had its genesis in a sympathetic interest in problems of black city life that characterized a growing number of educated men and women. Guest edited by Alain Locke, the March, 1925, issue of The Survey Graphic addressed a constituency of social reform professionals who were liberal on matters of race. Building on the magazine’s nucleus, Locke fashioned for a wider audience a sweeping survey in book form of black cultural achievement. An ideological and cultural artifact, The New Negro was intended to make the case for a racial coming of age and, with it, a stronger claim for black participation in the collective making of a properly American civilization. The book was organized in two parts. Following four introductory essays, the first three sections of part 1, “The Negro Renaissance,” offered examples of new work by younger artists in fiction, poetry, and drama. In the following section, devoted to music, there were essays on southern spirituals and on a controversial emerging musical form, urban jazz. The final section of part 1 featured “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” an essay on the identity-building function of history by the Puerto Rican booklover and collector Arthur A. Schomburg; a discussion of African American folk literature by Arthur Huff Fauset, an acknowledged amateur authority; and a provocative essay by Locke on black music, poetry, and dance, supposedly the primary “ancestral arts” of the African diaspora. In retrospect, the most important aspects of part 1 of The New Negro were not the short contributions by younger artists but rather the introductory essays that framed the book as a whole and sharpened its ideological thrust. Part 2, “The New Negro in a New World,” provided useful snapshots of aspects of black life in the postwar era. Sociologist Charles S. Johnson, director of research and investigations for the National Urban League and editor of its journal Opportunity, discussed the Great Migration, the black population shift to the American urban frontier. James Weldon Johnson, composer, diplomat, and first black executive secretary of the NAACP, made Harlem itself his essay subject, reconstructing and celebrating its history as the black cultural capital. The young sociologist E. Franklin Frazier commented on middle-class life in Durham, North Carolina, an important site of black economic achievement. Robert Russa Moton, Booker T. Washington’s succes-

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sor as principal of Tuskegee Institute, and Kelly Miller, founding chairman of the Howard University department of sociology, contributed discussions of their respective educational institutions. In placing their essays side by side, Locke ratified the truce between supporters of industrial and higher education that had existed since Washington’s death in 1915. The Jamaican journalist W. A. Domingo contributed a pioneering discussion of the cultural contributions of foreign-born blacks. In his essay, the West Indian spicing of the Harlem community received hearty acknowledgment. In a section on “The Negro and the American Tradition,” three interesting essays were featured. Ironically—in view of the African “survivals” thesis with which he was later identified—Melville Herskovits argued the case for “The Negro’s Americanism.” This emphasis, however, fit well with Locke’s conciliatory editorial strategy. Walter White, an NAACP official light-skinned enough to pass for white when investigating southern lynchings, explored “The Paradox of Color.” Elise Johnson McDougald, an educator, social investigator, and labor activist, offered an insightful analysis of the gendered lives of different classes of Harlem women. Finally, the black predicament in the postwar world was seen in international terms. W. E. B. Du Bois brought issues of race, cultural autonomy, colonialism, and exploitative labor relations together under a single lens. He did so through a brief history of the pan-African conference movement of which he was the major architect. The ideological purposes of The New Negro were reflected in all aspects of its construction, including the layout of the volume. Alain Locke commissioned Winold Reiss to do the cover design, decorative features, and illustrations. The result was successful, Locke indicated, because Reiss, “a folklorist of the brush and palette,” did “not forc[e] an alien idiom upon nature or a foreign convention upon a racial tradition.” Instead, Locke noted, “Concretely in his portrait sketches, abstractly in his symbolic designs, he has aimed to portray the soul and spirit of a people.” The terms of his praise suggest how Locke sought to frame The New Negro and how he read the significance of the Harlem Renaissance itself. The illustrator’s success was due “as much to the philosophy of his approach as to his technical skill,” Locke suggested. To demonstrate graphically the richness of Negro folk types as a source of material “both for the Negro artist and American art at large” was an indirect but effective way, Locke argued, of asserting that value of black culture itself. The wide-ranging bibliographies that completed The New Negro were also essential to its purpose. Though not exhaustive, the listings led readers to useful information about important aspects of black life. Arthur A. Schomburg identified notable works by eighteenth and nineteenth century black authors. Arthur Huff Fauset provided titles on black folklore in the United States, Africa, and the West Indies, as well as references in several languages to aspects of African culture. Miscellaneous materials were grouped under the heading “The Negro in Literature.” Listings of English, Continental, and American fiction joined bibliographies of black poetry, slave narratives, biographies, and autobiographies. Under the heading “Negro Drama,” plays about black life and by black playwrights were identified. The richer listing of black music featured collections of black folk songs, commentaries on them, and collec-

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tions and arrangements of black spirituals. The contributionist argument of The New Negro was implicit in the bibliography that followed, “A Selected List of Modern Music, Influenced by American Negro Themes or Idioms.” Finally, Du Bois’s magisterial hand was visible in the obligatory listings on “The Negro Problems” with which the volume closed. Analysis In The New Negro, three generations of black artists and intellectuals addressed questions raised by Du Bois two decades earlier in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). What does it mean to be both black and American? On what terms can African Americans participate in the making of a common national life in the United States without denying what is distinctive about themselves as members of a particular group? What is the relationship between culture and politics? What is the relationship among history, art, and racial identity? Locke’s opening essay, “The New Negro,” is of enduring historical significance in this connection. His remarks on the politics of culture and the use of art for social purposes—specifically, on the exploitation of folk themes by middle-class artists as a form of racial lobbying—have stimulated decades of heated discussion and criticism. Responding to the tendency of sociologists to see black Americans primarily in light of the “Negro problem,” Locke insisted instead that “the elements of truest social portraiture are found in artistic self-expression.” So far as African Americans were culturally articulate, they were to speak for themselves. The flowering of a new race spirit among African Americans was an example of movements of national self-determination around the world. As a large part of the peasant matrix of the American South, black Americans had made that region a gift of their folk temperament, contributing, Locke noted, a “leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance.” At the stage of cultural adolescence, the African American was now becoming a more conscious contributor to American civilization, as a younger generation moved “from the arid fields of controversy and debate to the productive fields of creative expression.” The “forced radicalism” of an emphasis on race represented a unique social experiment, an attempt to build Americanism on race values, to turn a handicap into an advantage, and to anticipate and create a new democracy in American culture. At once therapeutic and tactical, the New Negro Movement looked within and without, Locke suggested. Internally, it sought to repair a damaged group psychology. Externally, it celebrated the paradox of ethnicity, the fact that the racialism of the Harlem Renaissance intended integration, not separatism; in Locke’s words, the fullest racial self-expression was contingent upon “the fullest sharing of American culture and institutions.” From this point of view, the cultural project was inevitably a political one. Admission to first-class citizenship on honorable terms turned on the revaluation of the African American’s “cultural contributions, past and prospective.”

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Critical Context The New Negro represented an African American intervention in debates about ethnicity, racial difference, cultural identity, and normative Americanism that were preoccupying the literate public. These issues shaped discussions of how the United States might deal with a rapidly changing population. In the face of Anglo-Saxon resentment that “model Americans” could not be made of the newer immigrants, social progressives countered that in diversity lay strength. In 1916, essayist and critic Randolph Bourne challenged the melting-pot model of Americanization. He urged that the ideal of a cosmopolitan federation of national cultures take its place. After the war, philosopher Horace Kallen weighed in with an equally cogent discussion of Culture and Democracy in the United States (1924). The emerging liberal consensus was consolidated with the Carnegie Corporation’s monumental ten-volume series of books on “Americanization Studies” published from 1918 to 1924. However, widespread nativist sentiment found political expression in the Immigration Act of 1924, which established entry quotas for less-favored foreign nationals. Nevertheless, in the course of debating the incorporation of immigrant peoples on culturally equitable terms, a more flexible public language became available. American identity was reconceived as the composite product of multiple ethnic ingredients. Because pluralism was urged as an integral dimension of a forward-looking politics, a rhetorical and conceptual space was opened up for black thinkers to exploit. Making culture a language of social and political discourse might earn African Americans a seat at the national table, while preserving a collective identity still in the making. Other factors also worked to encourage a cultural politics after World War I. An emerging interest in African motifs, famously instanced in the works of the painter Pablo Picasso, and a downward revaluation of Western abstract reason in favor of the emotional and the sensuous both helped to bring black themes within the ambit of an existing interest—artistic, anthropological, and linguistic—in “folk” peoples generally. Thus, Locke’s framing of The New Negro project was both principled and politic. Locke, however, never addressed the tricky issue of exploiting stereotypes to combat stereotypes. Beyond the confines of The New Negro itself, two classic perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance were staked out by the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and by the poet Langston Hughes, both contributors to the volume. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), an essay published in The Nation, Hughes spoke for the younger participants in the Harlem Renaissance. He embraced the zestful life of the lower classes as an unproblematic source of creative inspiration. His literary bohemianism and lack of concern with what middle-class audiences, white or black, might think, and his determination to pursue art for art’s sake rather than for purposes of interracial diplomacy, distanced him from The New Negro line. In “Racial SelfExpression” (1927), Frazier adopted an outsider’s stance, dispassionate and analytical. He discussed the dangers of a defensive and parochial nationalism that might ghettoize black culture, that might, in Locke’s striking words, “encyst the Negro as a benign foreign body in the [American] body politic.” From that day onward, discus-

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sions of the cultural strategy of the Harlem Renaissance have followed one of these two lines. Bibliography Charles, John C. “What Was Africa to Him? Alain Locke, Cultural Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Empire During the New Negro Renaissance.” In New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Australia Tarver and Paula C. Barnes. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. Discusses Locke as a modernist writer and The New Negro as an African American modernist manifesto. Garber, Eric. “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem.” In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin B. Duberman et al. New York: NAL Books, 1989. A pioneering discussion of a long-ignored but integral dimension of the lively club scene in 1920’s Harlem. Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. A useful, comprehensive discussion of the literary work of the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Notable for the author’s concern to situate the texts in their American cultural context. Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. A representative act of literary “recovery,” highlighting the important role played by women artists in the cultural ferment of the time. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. The single best evocation of the fascinating figures and kaleidescopic world of the Harlem Renaissance. An important and immensely readable book. Locke, Alain LeRoy. The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture. Edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart. New York: Garland, 1983. A useful way to unpack the cultural assumptions Locke brought to the task of editing The New Negro. Meier, August. “The Social and Intellectual Origins of the New Negro.” In Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963. A classic interpretation of the historical background and social foundations of ideological currents in black communities in the early twentieth century. The “nationalist” stirrings and differing constituencies of the Marcus Garvey and Harlem Renaissance movements are perceptively compared. Perry, Margaret. The Harlem Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliography and Commentary. New York: Garland, 1982. A useful starting point for further investigation of all aspects of the Harlem Renaissance. Highly recommended. Paul Jefferson

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1959 Author: Thulani Davis (1949) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social realism Time of plot: 1959 Locale: Chesapeake Bay, Virginia First published: 1992 Principal characters: Willie Tarrant, the narrator, a bright twelve-year-old girl Dixon Tarrant, Willie’s father, a man who has slipped into complacency after the death of his activist wife Ralph Johnson, Dixon’s former college classmate Mae Taliaferro, a teacher at Ida B. Wells Junior High Coleman Boteler, a tormented aspiring writer and teacher Maddie Alexander, a distant cousin of the Tarrants and mother of Willie’s best friend, Marian Herman Shaw, a white supremacist member of the school board The Novel On the surface, 1959 recounts the rite of passage of Katherine “Willie” Tarrant. Through the use of a first-person narrator, Davis presents an evocative portrait of a young African American teenager living during the 1950’s, an era beset by injustice and growing racial unrest. The novel opens with the razing of Turner, Virginia. Above the sounds of bulldozers rumbling over what were once modest wooden bungalows, the adult Willie Tarrant muses over the history of the town. She imagines the arrival of an African woman three hundred years earlier. This woman, abandoned by a slaver because she is sick and therefore not a marketable commodity, has no name. Willie opts to call her “Gambia.” A woman of immense dignity and fortitude, Gambia does not die. By her very survival, she becomes the progenitor of Turner’s African American community. Subsequently, Willie regards Gambia as her spiritual kin. Although the town has been leveled and the mythical Gambia lives only in Willie’s imagination, Willie the adult has returned in triumph. What follows is her story told in retrospect. On the same day in July, 1959, Willie Tarrant turned twelve and Billie Holiday died. Willie’s world is the world of most adolescents, one characterized by preoccupations with music, clothes, and the opposite sex. When her father, a college professor, tells her that twelve is the age of reason, Willie sees this as the opportunity to have her childish braids cut off in preparation for her first date. Willie reveals that her interests transcend the teenage world of boys, clothes, and music. She is mesmerized by the exploits of prominent dictators in the news, among

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them Fulgencio Batista, Papa Doc Duvalier, and Fidel Castro. Willie’s fascination with dictators and guerrillas stems from the white community’s concern over Cuban affairs, which she equates with the furor over the civil rights struggle in Little Rock, Arkansas. Interspersed within Willie’s narrative is the story of Willie’s dead Aunt Fannie. What Willie cannot glean from her father’s family stories about Fannie, she imagines. Thus Fannie becomes a mythic figure within the novel. Fannie, Willie has learned, often sneaked out of the house to see minstrel shows, in defiance of her parents’ wishes. Her niece shares her fascination with the Tambo/Mr. Interlocutor routines. Willie often begs her father to recount what his older sister had told him. Dixon is wary about re-creating the old routines for his precocious daughter. He does, however, tell her that the minstrel shows “were in a different language. It was a hungry language and all the words were a complicated code that grew more and more intricate. And all the words said, ‘I’m a fool, but I’m not a fool,’ or ‘I’m just here and I don’t understand but I know exactly what is going on.’” The linguistic code of turn-of-the-century minstrel shows becomes the code of the town when the school integration issue is raised. Many parents, including Dixon Tarrant, are concerned with what might happen if selected students from Ida B. Wells Junior High were to be sent to the all-white Patrick Henry Junior High. Fearing for their children’s safety, the parents call a town meeting to discuss the issue. Eventually, they decide to send the top six students if the desegregation issue is forced. One of those students is Willie Tarrant. Willie’s remarkable teacher, Mae Taliaferro, rigorously prepares her students for the possible move. She refuses to teach the erroneous and biased material covered in the out-of-date textbooks that the all-white board of education has provided for the Wells students. One of the board members, Herman Shaw, is outraged by what he, a white supremacist, views as Mae’s teaching of communist thought, and he calls for her dismissal. The African American community, however, stands behind Taliaferro, and Shaw’s edict is dismissed. That winter, eight African American college students openly oppose segregation laws when they sit at the lunch counter of the local Woolworth’s. Jailed and beaten several times, the students do not give up and return daily to the counter. The African American community is galvanized by this event. Dixon Tarrant becomes the leading spokesperson for the desegregation movement. Other community members, heretofore apolitical and passive, engage in the fight. The changes affect all members of the community, particularly Willie. No longer is her world a pedestrian one. She has been exposed to the evils of racial injustice and becomes an activist. At the age of reason, Willie Tarrant becomes a tireless worker for civil rights, responding reasonably to an unreasonable system. The Characters The novel contains an interesting mixture of fictional and historical figures. Because it is Willie’s story on a primary level, the changes in other characters, as well as

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in Willie herself, are filtered through the point of view of an adolescent. Davis captures the concerns and values of a twelve-year-old by interweaving the social and political issues of the time with popular culture. The music motif permeates the novel, beginning with the reference to Billie Holiday and sustained by references to jazz, rhythm and blues, and Willie’s disdain for Pat Boone. The predominant music of the white culture seems empty to Willie, yet the songs of Billie Holiday are beyond her comprehension. The Willie Tarrant of the beginning of the novel does not have the life experience to appreciate the rich, painfully poignant music of Lady Day. The adult Willie Tarrant does. Willie’s fascination with such figures as Papa Doc Duvalier and Fidel Castro is augmented by youthful romanticism. For example, she compares Castro to Dwight D. Eisenhower, finding Eisenhower wanting and Castro a Cuban version of Marlon Brando. Much of the Tarrants’ familial history is embellished by the creative Willie, especially the episodes dealing with Aunt Fannie and Gambia. Willie’s romanticizing of her ancestors is her way of creating the strong, positive female role models she believes that her life is lacking, initially not realizing that the authoritative Mrs. Taliaferro and her frivolous Aunt Maddie are women of powerful character. The male characters in the book are originally limned as passive, self-centered, or bitter. At first, in Willie’s young eyes her father is old and staid, a reasonably accurate characterization for the first half of the novel. When he rises to the defense of the eight college students, Willie barely recognizes him. As the civil unrest begins to form and shape the lives of the adults, Willie is mystified by their behavior, not realizing that she is changing as well. When the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., comes to speak to the Turner community, Willie reaches an epiphany: I felt as if I had never known who I was or where I was living. And I felt good. And I felt full of power. I closed my eyes and soaked in a feast of spirit. When he finished, the chapel exploded in joy, touchable joy. Reverend King had made me angry and happy to be angry, really more happy than angry. He also made me feel that day that Negroes felt the same way about things, that the same kind of fire was in all of us.

The fire that lights Willie lights everyone. People who have led mundane, placid lives become activists. Ralph Johnson, the acerbic barber with an engineering degree, forsakes the solace his jazz records afford and becomes embroiled in the desegregation struggle. Coleman Boteler, a womanizing, self-indulgent writer and teacher, moves from his self-imposed periphery to the center of the movement. The lives of these people are thus irrevocably altered by the winds of change heralded by such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr. Themes and Meanings Dixon Tarrant, when trying to convey to his young daughter the feelings within him during a meeting or a march, sums up the main themes of the novel:

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Sometimes it’s like when I hear spirituals I heard when I was a child. Kind of a consoling feeling. And sometimes, like the other day with the dogs, it’s like standing in the middle of a storm, but it’s not blowing around you, it’s like it’s coming from inside. Power, it’s a feeling of power.

The movement from powerlessness and even despair to power and hope shapes the novel. Davis expands on this theme through the growing complexity of Willie’s narrative, which eventually becomes a metanarrative for the African American community. The passage above concisely draws in the various devices and references deployed throughout the novel to emblazon the theme of power. Within Willie’s chronologically retold personal history are various family histories that deal with the national shames of slavery and Jim Crow laws. The elder Tarrants try to bury these histories, believing that to dredge up the darker aspects of the African American experience is harmful. For example, Dixon’s father forbids the discussion of his parents’ bondage, and Dixon is uneasy re-enacting the routines of minstrel shows. Ironically, Dixon finds some remnants of slavery, notably the singing of spirituals, to be comforting. The reluctant retelling of the Tarrant history serves as a caustic reminder of the legacy of slavery. This dark legacy is most effectively exemplified in the story of Ralph Johnson, the holder of a college degree in engineering who, because of his race, is unable to earn a living as an engineer and instead works as a barber. The brutal killing of Jack Dempsey, a local black boy, explores the issue of racial injustice in the 1950’s. Dempsey is shot in cold blood by a nervous white youth, but his murder is ignored by the justice system. Unlike the great white prizefighter for whom he was named, Jack Dempsey represents the powerlessness of humanity in an inhumane system. His story is one of despair, not of triumph. The storm itself becomes the controlling metaphor in the novel. Many times Dixon Tarrant, an amateur meteorologist, takes his young son and daughter out to observe hurricanes. His matter-of-fact explanations of weather phenomena make the storms less threatening than interesting to Willie. Dixon correlates the natural storms that buffet the Virginia coast with the social storms raging throughout the town, particularly the confrontation of the police and their attack dogs with the peaceful women demonstrators. Because of the social storm surrounding these people, they have finally become empowered. Consequently, Willie and her family’s activism makes the events swirling around the tiny community of Turner less frightening, as opposed to the novel’s beginning, when just the thought of Little Rock and the desegregation issue makes the African American community uneasy. The cycle becomes complete when Willie, who as an adult has never forgotten the lessons of power and hope the Turner desegregation efforts of 1959 taught her, becomes a journalist and activist. As a survivor, she sees her role as being continually engaged in the struggle, lest others forget.

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Critical Context Thulani Davis is a respected journalist, dramatist, and poet. Her articles have appeared in such highly respected publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, and American Film. Her libretto for the opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and her adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s 1948 The Caucasian Chalk Circle have earned her widespread critical acclaim in operatic and theatrical circles. Her first novel was 1959. Overall, the novel has received positive reviews, being favorably compared with the works of James Baldwin and Carson McCullers. Critics have found correlations between Davis’s first novel and the works of a more established contemporary writer, Toni Morrison. Both Morrison and Davis have chosen to address social issues by filtering them through events centered in small African American communities. These communities ultimately become microscosmic studies of national and social concerns. In addition, 1959 is often praised for its fusion of the historic and the fictional. The use of the juvenile narrative voice places the novel within the tradition of the female bildungsroman. Drawing upon her own experience as an African American who grew up in the era she is writing about, Davis has created a synthesis of autobiography, history, and fiction. As a work of fiction and as a social document, 1959 addresses a multitude of issues, including civil rights on a broad scale and the psychological implications inherent in the civil rights struggle on a more personal level. Davis has presented an affirming view of the African American experience. The story of Willie Tarrant and her community serves as a testament to the power of the community that bands together. The endurance and fortitude of the people of whom Davis writes had been tested and tempered. Bibliography Burn, Gordon. “Review of 1959.” The Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 1992, 21. Discusses the duality of the Willie Tarrant narrative and the broader implications of the civil rights experience, especially in the context of how the events set in motion transform the town. Davis, Thulani. My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Confronts Her Roots. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006. Davis’s historical memoir recounts her family’s biracial roots in the United States during and after the Civil War. Crucial background for situating her literary and dramatic endeavors. Gates, David. “Review of 1959.” Newsweek 119 (March 9, 1992): 60. Sees the civil rights activities in the novel as a microhistory of the Civil Rights movement and as an emblematic prophesy of the African American experience. Analyzes Davis’s fictionalized account of how an African American community discovers its inherent power and the limits of that power from the standpoint of persuasive discourse. Hull, Gloria T. “Review of 1959.” Women’s Review of Books (May, 1992): 6. Identifies the influences of Toni Morrison’s works on Davis’s novel. Views the novel as an affirmation of the spirit and dignity of people of the period described. Offers

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a brief analysis of Davis’s employment of characterization, asserting that the revelation of character through situation is poetic. Overall, Hull deems 1959 to be an excellent first novel, one that is lively in tone and subject matter and evinces the author’s talent. Knight, Kimberly. “Thulani Davis: Writing the Untold Stories.” Essence 23 (May, 1992): 60. Discusses how Davis has drawn upon her own life and family experiences in her writing of 1959. Provides limited biographical information on Davis. Levine, Beth. “Review of 1959.” The New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1992, 18. Examines how the novel presents a moving testament of communal power, a power that ignited the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s. Points out how Davis’s deft use of time and place, especially the function of the town’s history and Fannie Tarrant’s diary in the narrative, evokes that power. Molesworth, Charles. “Culture, Power, and Society.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Concisely deals with how contemporary American writers in general address and thereby illuminate the question of power. Considers the issue of social and political consciousness in the postwar era. Of particular interest is a discussion of the presence of adolescent sensibility in the contemporary novel, a device that allows postwar novelists to explore the notion of power versus powerlessness. Anita M. Vickers

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NOTES OF A NATIVE SON Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987) Type of work: Essays First published: 1955 Form and Content Notes of a Native Son is a collection of ten essays that James Baldwin published in magazines such as Commentary, Harper’s, and The Partisan Review between 1948 and 1955. It also includes “Autobiographical Notes,” written for this volume. Taken together, the essays reveal self-knowledge, cultural understanding, and articulateness that are astonishing when one considers that Baldwin wrote these essays without the benefit of a formal college education and before he was thirty years old. Baldwin makes clear in “Autobiographical Notes” that he was driven to be a writer, to use his imagination on his own experience, and thereby to create order out of chaos by facing his past and America’s past fearlessly and honestly. To make himself into a writer, he had to become articulate, to understand and come to terms with his culture, and to know himself. The essays of Notes of a Native Son present the outlines of his quests and show what he had learned by 1955. The book is divided into three sections. The three essays of the first section are cultural commentaries on representations of the African American in the arts. They show Baldwin’s mature assessment of the complexity of his position as an African American intellectual. The three essays of the second part examine aspects of African American life during and shortly after World War II. These essays show Baldwin’s origins, the home and the culture that he had to understand in order to become himself. The four essays of the third part discuss Baldwin’s experiences living in Europe. These pieces reveal the crucial process by which Baldwin gained—through expatriation—the distance from his cultural history that allowed him to know and accept the identity from which he speaks in all the essays. Although the outlines of Baldwin’s quest to become a writer are apparent in this collection, and although certain concerns—such as identity and culture—pervade the essays, the topics are various. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” the opening piece, Baldwin notes that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) seem both to accept the American theology of white supremacy. This essay alienated Wright, who had befriended the younger man. The much more detailed discussion of Native Son in “Many Thousands Gone,” the second piece, widened this rift rather than healing it. Baldwin did not change his thesis about Native Son, even though he was careful to discuss the importance of Wright’s novel to African American writers. Critic Horace Porter believes that this essay, somewhat oddly written in the voice of a white liberal, was in part Baldwin’s attempt to declare artistic independence from Wright, his literary father. Baldwin’s title essay suggests that he is offering himself as a substitute for

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Wright’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, as the native son of the next generation of African American writers. In “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough,” Baldwin reviews Carmen Jones (1954), an Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Preminger film updating Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen (1875), with a black cast and dubbed voices. Although the film was a popular success, Baldwin saw clear evidence of the pretense of acknowledging African Americans while remaining utterly ignorant about the reality of African American life and consciousness. “The Harlem Ghetto,” the first piece of the second set, offers a portrait of urban African American life and consciousness after World War II. The Harlem described is little different from the Depression era Harlem in which Baldwin grew up; therefore, the piece tells both about current conditions and about his background, with special attention to politics, media, religion, and especially anti-Semitism in Harlem. “Journey to Atlanta” discusses African American attitudes toward politics, using the story of his brother’s exploitation by the Progressive Party during the 1948 election campaign. In the autobiographical “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin tells mainly about his relationship with his stepfather, though he never in this piece explains that David Baldwin was his stepfather, that his own birth was illegitimate, and that he never knew his biological father’s identity. Knowing this information, however, only increases the essay’s power. In telling of David Baldwin’s funeral on James Baldwin’s nineteenth birthday, James acknowledges his deep ambivalence toward the man who seemed to show him so little love. The four essays on Baldwin’s early years in Europe return repeatedly to the theme of identity. “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” discusses the associations of African Americans with one another and with African colonials in the postwar climate of Paris. “A Question of Identity” examines American students in Paris after the war and how they deal with the pressure that being in a foreign culture exerts on them to examine their own personal and cultural identities. “Equal in Paris” tells the story of Baldwin’s mistaken arrest for the theft of a bedsheet, an incident that taught him that the protective laughter of whites that he so hated in the United States was, in fact, a universal phenomenon. Realization that his race was not uniquely the victim of such laughter began a phase of his liberating understanding of his native culture. “Stranger in the Village” relates Baldwin’s experience of being the first black person ever seen in the remote Swiss village to which he retired to finish Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). This visit gave him insight into how the American experience has changed African American and white identities since the first slaves were brought to America. Analysis In “The Creative Process,” an essay that appears in The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin says, “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.” This quotation aptly describes one of the main threads of Baldwin’s literary career, a thread that is clear in Notes of a Native Son as well as in the body of his fiction, drama, and prose. One main

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effect of this collection is to reveal the United States to itself from the special position Baldwin was able to occupy in the original publications, speaking to both white and African American magazine readers about African American life. Baldwin ends “Autobiographical Notes” with this statement: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” In this essay, he makes clear the main barriers he had to overcome in order to achieve these goals, barriers having mainly to do with race. Although much has been written about “the Negro problem,” in fact very little is known about African American life and consciousness. The best way to reveal this littleknown life is through works of art. To be an artist requires some distance from the arena of social reform and protest writing, but becoming an African American writer subjects one to a great pressure to be active in this arena. This situation occurs, in part, because the history of African American life is so painful that few want to look into it seriously, and those who study it become so angry that they rarely can attain the artistic distance necessary to create works of art. To be an honest man and to know who he was, Baldwin had to look seriously into the past, his own and America’s. To become a good writer, he had to be able to stand back from the horrors of that history. In his later writings, Baldwin shows that he eventually concluded that in the process of learning to stand back from the pain of his personal and social history, he learned to accept suffering and to learn from suffering to love all of struggling humanity. Speaking on the same subjects in “The Creative Process,” Baldwin said that in the particular aloneness of artistic creation and perception, “one discovers that life is tragic, and therefore unutterably beautiful.” “Notes of a Native Son” shows Baldwin moving through a cycle of this process as he contemplates the death of his stepfather. Several important events occur close together in the summer of 1943: his father’s death, his youngest sister’s birth, his father’s funeral, his nineteenth birthday, and a race riot in Harlem. The coincidence of these events helps to make clear to Baldwin what sort of world he will have to make his way in and what resources he has available. He explains that his father reared him in a very protected environment, as separated as possible from white people, who represented to David Baldwin the evil of the outside world against which he preached in his small Harlem church. Although his father protected the children, he showed them little affection, and as he succumbed to mental illness, he tyrannized over and restricted them. When James leaves home after high school to work in a defense plant, he is ill-prepared to get along with the white people he then has to work among. He is used to associating with people on an equal footing, so he does not adjust easily to the attitudes and behaviors of inferiority. When he returns home for his father’s death and sister’s birth, he is filled with rage at his society for branding him and at his father for failing to love him. At the funeral, however, he begins to see some of the ways in which his father really had loved him, however imperfectly, and he realizes that despite his anger toward and even hatred of his father, he also loves the man. He learns that life and death matter, but color really does not. He learns that hatred always destroys the hater. He sees the paradox that he will have

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to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance . . . of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never . . . accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.

He learns that this fight must be fought first in one’s own heart by keeping it free of hatred and despair: “This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.” These realizations complete perhaps the first important cycle of learning in Baldwin’s artistic life, in which he begins to see how to step back from his ambivalent feelings for his father and accept them, learning in an important way how to love the terrible world about which he would write. In addition to coming to terms with his personal history, Baldwin also had to come to terms with his social history, with the history of African Americans in the United States. He repeats in several essays that Americans, perhaps more than other people, are reluctant to know themselves as products of their history. They cultivate ignorance of their culture and history and so fail to know themselves. A major difference between white Americans and African Americans on this issue is that white Americans believe that their ancestors voluntarily surrendered their European backgrounds in order to become Americans, while African Americans believe their history was removed and hidden by force. In “Stranger in the Village,” one of his best-known essays, Baldwin offers a view of how the history of the United States has created unique cultural identities for whites and African Americans. His extended stay in an isolated Swiss village, where no one had ever before seen a black man, provides him with a base from which to measure how Europeans and Africans have changed during three centuries of living in North America. The Swiss villagers at first are filled with wonder at his physical differences from themselves. Their innocent behavior strikes him as culturally loaded because he is the product of the American experience. When children call him “Neger,” they only announce the presence of this strange being, while in his memory the word “nigger” echoes with all of its cultural freight. When a kindly woman explains how their village “buys” Africans by giving money to the church for their missionary conversion, what seems a generous and sacred act to her reverberates with horrors for him. When he has remained longer, he sees evidence of their beginning to make use of him as a cultural other, to connect his color with the European mythology in which blackness is associated with evil, death, and hell. The constant he sees between these “innocent” white Europeans and his fellow Americans is the idea of white, Christian superiority over black, African pagans: the foundation of white supremacy. The main difference he sees is that the fundamental morality of American democracy has always conflicted with the main American consequence of white supremacy. The convenient beliefs that Africans were less than human and that they could be made slaves contradict the fundamental tenet of American

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political morality, that all people are created equal before God and the law. The trend in this long conflict of values has been toward honoring the ideals of democracy and abandoning, however violently and grudgingly, the ideas of white supremacy. One result of this uniquely American struggle has been the creation of “a new black man . . . and a new white man.” Baldwin notes, “It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” He sees the United States as destined either to realize a multiracial, multicultural civilization or to destroy itself. He believes the former to be more likely. Written in the middle of the twentieth century and in Baldwin’s youth, these essays seem mature and prescient in their understanding of Baldwin’s self and culture. They show a young artist finding himself in his world, becoming an honest man and a good writer. Critical Context Fred Standley, in his obituary for James Baldwin, quotes literary figures from Irving Howe and Norman Mailer to Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou as affirming that Baldwin was among the foremost American intellectuals of the twentieth century and that his essays, like those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken, have contributed centrally to the self-understanding of the people of the United States. Notes of a Native Son was Baldwin’s second book. Together with Go Tell It on the Mountain and his regularly appearing short stories and essays in American magazines, this collection helped to establish Baldwin as a powerful and important voice in American culture. With this volume, Baldwin in effect claimed new territory for African American writers. Although he was not the first to call for freeing African Americans from having to write mainly about racial relations, he articulated an approach that he followed himself and that was taken up by younger writers, such as his friend Lorraine Hansberry. Fred Standley describes Baldwin’s approach well: “Autobiography becomes transformed into frequently unforgettable expressions of image and insight that transcend the specifics of personal experience to become the means of providing situations and statements of universal applicability that are then inferred to possess even more relevant individual significance.” This book was followed by several other important collections of his essays that elaborated and extended Baldwin’s ideas and influenced—by example and provocation—many writers and thinkers in the United States and throughout the world: Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963), and The Price of the Ticket (1985). Bibliography Baldwin, James, and Sol Stein. Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century. New York: One World, 2004. A collection of letters and other documentation exchanged between Baldwin and Stein concerning the creation of Notes of a Native Son. Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. Updated ed. New York: Chelsea House, 2007.

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Extensive collection of essays on Baldwin’s life and work, including an explication of the significance of Notes of a Native Son. Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking, 1991. This full biography, by a man who knew Baldwin personally, is especially interesting because it draws on the Federal Bureau of Investigation files kept on Baldwin. Campbell deals frankly with Baldwin’s bisexuality. Included are sixteen pages of photographs. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. In this selection of twelve essays and Kinnamon’s introduction are discussions of several of Baldwin’s major works. Langston Hughes’s review of Notes of a Native Son praises and criticizes the book. F. W. Dupee’s essay looks at Baldwin’s development from Notes of a Native Son through The Fire Next Time. Also included is Eldridge Cleaver’s discussion of Baldwin’s essays from Soul on Ice (1968). O’Daniel, Therman B. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. This volume contains essays on Baldwin as novelist, as essayist, as short-story writer, as playwright, and as scenarist, as well as a section on his raps and dialogues and a bibliography. The secondary bibliography is extensive. There are four pieces on Baldwin’s essays. Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Porter gives considerable attention to Baldwin’s essays in order to study the development of his ideas about relating art and social protest. He devotes one chapter to Baldwin’s relationship with Richard Wright. Pratt, Louis H. James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. A useful introduction to Baldwin’s life and works. Chapters 1, 5, and 6 deal in various ways with Baldwin’s essays, including an examination of their artistry. Contains a chronology and an annotated bibliography. Pratt believes that the essays are Baldwin’s major contribution to American letters. Standley, Fred L. “James Baldwin.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1987. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. This obituary article provides an excellent introduction to Baldwin’s career and writings, laying out concisely his major ideas and achievements and summarizing contemporary opinion about Baldwin’s contributions to American literature. Standley, Fred L., and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. This volume is divided into sections including ones on fiction, nonfiction, and drama. The introduction surveys Baldwin’s literary reputation, and the collection opens with a 1979 interview with Baldwin. There are ten essays in the nonfiction section, including pieces by Langston Hughes, Stephen Spender, and Julius Lester. In the general section appear several more essays on Baldwin’s nonfiction work. Terry Heller

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ONCE UPON A TIME WHEN WE WERE COLORED Author: Clifton L. Taulbert (1945) Type of work: Memoir Time of work: Late 1940’s-1963 Locale: Glen Allan, Mississippi, and environs First published: 1989 Principal personages: Clifton Lemoure Taulbert, an African American author who depicts the community of his youth Mozella Alexander, the author’s aunt, who has kept the family’s deeds to land Joe Young (Poppa), the author’s great-grandfather Pearl Young (Ma Pearl or Mama Pearl), the author’s greatgrandmother Elna Peters Boose (Ma Ponk), the author’s grandaunt Mary Taulbert, the author’s mother Mr. Hilton, a white grocer Mrs. Knight, a white seamstress Cleve Mormon, the author’s uncle and Glen Allan’s ice supplier Joe Maxey, the deacon sent to an NAACP meeting Billy Jennings, a white teenager who befriends the author Form and Content In his introduction to Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, Clifton L. Taulbert writes about returning to his hometown of Glen Allan, Mississippi, in the 1970’s and visiting Mozella Alexander, his elderly aunt, who shows him land deeds proving the truth of stories he had heard in childhood. The deeds establish that Taulbert’s family owned a plantation, which was auctioned off during the Great Depression to pay back taxes his great-grandparents had not known were due. Having grown up in the last years of legally enforced segregation in Mississippi and having associated land with personal worth, the author is initially bitter over the loss of this land. Nevertheless, he comes to replace this bitterness with a sense that the supposed owners of land merely hold it in trust until they return to it at their death. Taulbert decides that the important aspect of his past is not land gained or lost but the love that surrounded him as he grew up materially poor in a small, rural town. He experienced this love among the members of his extended family and his friends during a time when the people now called “African Americans” or “blacks” were, in polite speech, “colored.” Although the author organizes this memoir of good and bad times topically rather than chronologically, he does relate a racial incident of early childhood in his first

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chapter and mentions in that chapter that his mother, Mary Taulbert, was unwed and had only recently left high school when he was born in the house of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Joe and Pearl Young, his “Poppa” and “Mama Pearl.” Because his mother later married someone other than his father, the author lived not with her but nearby, with his great-grandparents, during most of his first five years. When his great-grandmother developed a terminal illness, Taulbert moved within Glen Allan to live with his grandaunt Elna Peters Boose, his “Ma Ponk,” with whom he stayed until he graduated from high school. After the first chapter’s introduction to the author’s beloved Poppa and to Glen Allan, Mississippi—to its people and its buildings, as well as to its racial divide—the remaining ten chapters present numerous incidents in the life of the African American community as it celebrates, fears, worships, grieves, and works, and as it interacts with the white community. Taulbert recounts his eighth-grade prom. He describes rare fish fries at Ma Ponk’s and excited gatherings to listen to a battery-powered radio and cheer as Joe Louis defends his heavyweight boxing championship. He recalls a nervous gathering on a Thursday night at Saint Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church to bless Deacon Joe Maxey, who is leaving for Baltimore to attend a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Saint Mark’s is also the site of lively services attended by dignified members of the Mother’s Board and conducted by a vigorous preacher. Taulbert recalls such joyous services, as well as somber events: the death watch for Mama Pearl and the care afterward with which Ma Ponk combs her dead loved one’s hair. Always—in the background, if not in the foreground of the chapters—there is work. Riding on the back of a truck, the author travels with other members of the African American community to one plantation or another to chop and later pick cotton. He also sells candy on behalf of his mother, keeps the post office floor in good condition, delivers ice with his Uncle Cleve Mormon, rakes leaves meticulously, and performs various tasks at a grocery store. Combined with his academic work—first at a one-room school, later at the new Glen Allan colored school (with flush toilets), and finally at O’Bannon High School in nearby Greenville—the long, hard work for money makes Taulbert hope for a materially better future than he could achieve by remaining in Washington County, Mississippi. Analysis Young Taulbert longs not only for a materially better future but also for a socially better future—a future in which African American children and white children play together, in which he does not have to sit on the opposite side of a movie theater from whites, in which he does not have to urinate alongside a deserted road because African Americans cannot use a restroom at a service station, and in which his mother will not react with alarm if he meddles in politics by asking who the presidential candidate is whose picture appears on a billboard. Taulbert has relatives who have moved north, and they attest that such a future is possible. Indeed, they say that it already exists there.

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Taulbert experiences a measure of racial integration in Glen Allan: Mr. Hilton, a white grocer, hires him to work at the Hilton Food Store. Mrs. Knight, a visually impaired, white seamstress, prepares lunch for him as he rakes leaves, and they eat together in her home; Billy Jennings, a white teenager who works alongside African American field hands at the Jennings farm, acts friendly toward the author and allows him to share the secret that Billy’s girlfriend stops by for kisses. Despite this minor progress in Taulbert’s individual experience, the Civil Rights movement that gained national attention in the 1950’s has not much changed Glen Allan by the time Taulbert graduates as valedictorian of his high school class in May, 1963. Not being a star athlete, he receives no college scholarship, but he does receive an invitation to live in St. Louis—a northern city where, according to his dream, he can work to earn the money he will need to pay for a higher education and meanwhile live in a harmoniously integrated community. Once upon a Time When We Were Colored ends as the author, sitting in a train car for African Americans only, rides one of the last Illinois Central passenger trains to serve Greenville. He is headed north. In the sequel to this memoir, The Last Train North (1992), Taulbert reveals that his father, a figure missing from this earlier memoir but revealed in the later one to be a prominent minister, invited him to live in St. Louis—in someone else’s home. The absence of any reference to Taulbert’s father in Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, along with the subtle presence of adultery and divorce, indicate that problems exist in colored Glen Allan that are not the immediate result of racial injustice. Taulbert also deals with such minor troubles as having his lunch stolen by older children on his first day at school. However, the love of his mother, his extended family, and his church carries the author through what could have been a severely disturbing childhood and adolescence. Glen Allan from 1945 to 1963 was not paradise, nor, in fact, does the author claim that it was. It was a flawed town, like all others, but it was a town where there was a deep happiness amid a struggle to survive poverty and genuine racism. Critical Context Taulbert would eventually settle in the southern city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it was there that Once upon a Time When We Were Colored was published in 1989 by Council Oak Books. Despite the small size of the publishing firm, the book received favorable reviews in national periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, and it sold well. In 1995, the big firm Penguin Books USA republished it, and early in 1996 its film adaptation, Once upon a Time . . . When We Were Colored, was released to American theaters. The film, directed by Tim Reid and written by Paul W. Cooper, received high praise from the famous critics Roger Ebert and Michael Medved. As for the book itself, Taulbert’s obvious affection for most of his rural African American community, his often vivid descriptions, and his ability to see the good within bad circumstances lent his first memoir an appeal to readers regardless of their race. Once upon a Time When We Were Colored remains a call to persons of all colors not to forget the human bonds of community.

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Bibliography Bower, Anne L., ed. Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. New York: Routledge, 2004. Includes an essay on the representation of racial and ethnic culture through food in the film adaptation of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored. Bray, Rosemary L. “Good Times in the Bad Times.” Review of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, by Clifton L. Taulbert. The New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1989, 18. Acknowledges that racially segregated Mississippi appears more pleasant in Taulbert’s account than in the memory of the African American reviewer but praises the book for its charm. Edmonds, Anthony O. Review of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, by Clifton L. Taulbert. Library Journal 114, no. 12 (July, 1989): 88. Faults the author for a sentimental portrayal of African Americans and for incoherence in the general structure of the book but calls it emotionally powerful. Jim Kobak’s Kirkus Reviews. Review of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, by Clifton L. Taulbert. 57 (May 1, 1989): 682. Briefly summarizes the memoir in words of consistent praise, especially for Taulbert’s sincere portrayal of an oppressed but dignified and humane people. Weathers, Barbara. Review of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, by Clifton L. Taulbert. School Library Journal, December, 1989, 130. Praises Taulbert for his depiction of loving, family-oriented, hard-working persons. Victor Lindsey

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ONE MORE RIVER TO CROSS Black and Gay in America Author: Keith Boykin (1965) Type of work: Cultural criticism/memoir First published: 1996 Form and Content Keith Boykin graduated from Harvard Law School in 1992 and soon became involved in Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Upon Clinton’s election, Boykin was asked to work for the administration assisting with media relations. The early 1990’s were an important period for the American gay and lesbian community: In 1993, President Clinton held the first meeting between an American president and national gay and lesbian leaders, a meeting that Boykin helped organize. The Clinton administration also confronted the controversial issue of whether to permit gay people in the military. Boykin participated in these events and had the opportunity to meet a wide cross section of gay and lesbian leaders, activists, and ordinary citizens. One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America is the result of this period of intense activity; Boykin became frustrated by media and administration misunderstandings of gay issues and decided to leave the Clinton administration to “tell the stories of the people the media neglected.” The book begins with Boykin telling his own story. He recounts coming out to his family, both nuclear and extended, in St. Louis, Missouri. The intense pressures and difficulties Boykin experienced in this process lend passion to the telling of his own tale, as well as his recounting of the lives of others. At the age of twenty-five, he chooses his first book on homosexuality in a Harvard Square bookstore, and he plucks up the courage the next day to call his mother and tell her he is gay. Her reaction mirrors that of many mothers of gay sons, as she asks, “Have you tried dating women? How long have you known this? Is it something I did?” Following his first chapter, “In Search of Home,” Boykin expands his focus beyond himself to discuss the experience of other African American gay men and lesbians. This discussion is based on interviews he conducted for the book. When gay people marched in Washington in 1993, they were consciously retracing the nationtransforming March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. Both marches sought to rid the nation of oppression; both marches re-proclaimed that the United States was the land of freedom. However, for many African American leaders, ministers, and ordinary members of the community, the conflation of the sacred history of the struggle for African American equality with the struggle of a group whose agenda appeared to be sexual license was unthinkable. Boykin sails into this controversy with a cool head and attempts to analyze the issues involved in comparative oppression, calling on the data from his extensive interviewing to light his way. No less formidable a black leader than General Colin Powell helped cement a hard-

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line attitude in the black community against gay men and lesbians, when he insisted that race and sexual identity could not be conflated because skin color is benign while sexuality is behavioral. The history of black oppression in America, the general asserted, is the history of a people discriminated against for no reason other than the innocent fact of their skin color, while oppression against gay men and lesbians is based on non-innocent behavior. Boykin deals deftly and clearly with this prejudiced view, arguing that Powell’s thinking comes from a mistaken idea of both race and sexuality: Powell himself misunderstood the two and failed to consider that race is not only about blacks and that sexual orientation is not only about gays. Nevertheless, even Powell recognized some similarities between the plights of the two groups when he told President Clinton privately that he would oppose the segregation of homosexual soldiers if the gay ban were lifted.

Boykin’s arguments are contained in his long and compelling chapter, “Are Blacks and Gays the Same?” The title may puzzle at first glance; what Boykin is asking is whether the oppression experienced by African Americans is qualitatively the same as the oppression experienced by gays. For many gay white men, Boykin points out, sexual orientation is the only factor that distinguishes them from the rest of the population. Depending on the type of community they live in and the degree to which they have come out, they may experience little discrimination or they may suffer intensely from discrimination every day. For African American gay men, on the other hand, sexual orientation is hardly the sole cause of discrimination against them. In that sense, African American gay men may be better able to handle the experience of discrimination itself. As Boykin puts it, to some extent African Americans are already used to being discriminated against for no good reason, whereas whites experiencing discrimination for the first time may have a more difficult time coping with it. Sexual identity is only one aspect of the “otherness” of gay people of color. The terminology used by the white gay and lesbian community differs from that used by the African American community. As in many other parts of the world where gay identity is seen as one aspect of an American and Eurocentric modernity, the black alternate sexuality community might hesitate even to identify with the word “gay” and its connotations of white, middle-class, minimalist drama. Boykin’s interviewees shy away as well from the word “queer,” not identifying with it at all. Few members of the black same-sex community interviewed by Boykin want to become a part of the white gay community; on the other hand, they want very much to maintain their ties within the wider African American community. This very same African American community, however, causes a great deal of pain for the gay men and lesbians within it. As a gay activist, Boykin has participated in a project to “out” closeted black ministers who damn gay men and lesbians from the pulpit. The dynamism and warmth of many African American churches makes such

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unreflective and poorly researched condemnation of their homosexual members all the more painful. An African American church’s official line has a considerable influence on attitudes within the wider African American community and within black families. Some gay people of color try to deal with the difficulties of their situation, Boykin maintains, by splitting themselves into various personas, “seeking the comfort of different homes for different needs.” Analysis One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America is a closely wrought, compelling book about the issues facing people who are both black and gay. It also speaks to the larger gay community, pointing out critical similarities and crucial differences between the white and black experiences of gayness in America. To a certain extent, Boykin distances himself from the white gay establishment and writes a book with which homosexual people struggling in developing nations or traditional cultures can identify. Only a small portion of the world’s gay population can afford the highly visible, individualistic lifestyle available to white, middle-class gay men and lesbians in the United States and Europe. The agony of the African American same-sex community in dealing with family and the broader African American community finds reverberations around the globe. From that point of view, Boykin’s book speaks to a larger readership than might be imagined. Critical Context Keith Boykin has devoted his life to clearing up muddles created by the media, by churches, and by a general refusal to think on the part of heterosexuals. His activism and his writing serve the common goal of pushing back the darkness surrounding issues of alternative sexuality and race. His 2005 book Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America takes on the problem of bisexuality in the African American community. Boykin struggles here, too, to roll back an easy ignorance and laziness that continue to produce a great deal of suffering. Bibliography Broverman, Neal. “No Voice for Black Gays.” The Advocate, November 22, 2005, p. 16. Reports on how a black minister, the Reverend Willie F. Wilson, prevented Boykin from giving an address at the Millions More March on October 15, 2005. The incident illustrates the unity and integrity of Boykin’s writing and activism. Chibarro, Lou. “Black Gays Launch Marriage Equality Campaign.” Washington Blade, December 12, 2003, p. 1. Documents Boykin’s ongoing attempts to educate the black community on gay marriage and to undo media fallout suggesting that same-sex marriage is an issue in the black community. Kenan, Randall. “Eyes on the Prize.” Review of One More River to Cross, by Keith Boykin. The Advocate, September 17, 1996, pp. 83-85. Praises Boykin for his clarity in analyzing the complexities of being black and gay. Townes, Glenn. “Shooting the Rapids.” Review of One More River to Cross, by Keith

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Boykin. Lambda Book Report, February, 1997, 10. Generally a positive review of One More River to Cross, but the reviewer faults Boykin for an overly strident tone of voice, lamenting the “overly political activist voice that pounds throughout the book.” Van Buskirk, James. Review of One More River to Cross, by Keith Boykin. Library Journal, October 15, 1996, 79. Boykin’s skill in weaving the lives of real people into his book is praised. Enumerates the various religions Boykin examines for their views of homosexuality. Hideyuki Kasuga

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OUR NIG Author: Harriet E. Wilson (1808-1870) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: Mid-1800’s Locale: Boston, Massachusetts, and environs First published: 1859 Principal characters: Frado, a pretty mulatto girl Mrs. Bellmont, the book’s principal antagonist James, the Bellmonts’ son The Novel Our Nig is the story of an abandoned mulatto girl, Frado, who works from the age of six until she is eighteen as an indentured servant for a white, middle-class family in Boston. Before Frado’s narrative moves forward, Harriet E. Wilson swiftly presents the background story, telling how Frado became an orphan. Next, she gives a full account of the protagonist’s suffering at the hands of two cruel mistresses, and then she rapidly summarizes the sad events following Frado’s arduous servitude: a bad marriage ending with desertion, single parenthood, and extreme poverty. The reader first meets Frado’s natural mother, the “lonely Mag Smith,” a lowerclass white woman who has been seduced and abandoned by an aristocratic white male. As a ruined woman, Mag enters into a relationship with a “kind-hearted African” named Jim, part owner of a coal-delivery business. Out of pity and a belief that marriage to a white woman, even one at the bottom of her world, can be a means for his upward mobility, Jim proposes to Mag; for her own financial security, Mag accepts. After the marriage, Jim becomes a devoted and dutiful husband. When Jim dies a few years later, Mag has two young mulatto daughters; the older one is Frado. Widow Mag is courted by Jim’s business partner. After a period of financial struggle, she is convinced that she needs a man’s help, so she marries her second black suitor. The day comes when Mag and her new husband decide to leave the village to seek a better life. Since neither of them wishes to be saddled with two little girls, they slyly leave six-year-old, high-spirited Frado with a white, middle-class family, the Bellmonts. Thus begins Frado’s life of misery and pain. Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter Mary become Frado’s chief tormentors. Day and night, they make the young girl’s life miserable with their constant demands, beatings, and psychological assaults. To make matters worse, Mrs. Bellmont assigns Frado drab and unhealthy sleeping quarters. The good-hearted characters, Mr. Bellmont, Jack, James, Jane, and Aunt Abby, witness the abuse, but they are too preoccupied or passive to effect any substantial changes for the young servant. Frado saves

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herself eventually by realizing her own power to dictate limits to what she will endure. The critical scene in which Frado learns to resist her chief enemy occurs after James, her favorite in the Bellmont household, dies. James is Mrs. Bellmont’s son, but he is very different in temperament from his mean mother. He is more like his father in kindness; but, unlike Mr. Bellmont, he is more inclined, however ineffectively, to protect Frado. Despite James’s sympathy for Frado, he never suggests to her that she can stand up for herself. Not until after James dies does Mr. Bellmont tell Frado that she should not allow herself to be beaten when she does not deserve it. The first opportunity Frado has to apply this novel concept comes shortly thereafter. Mrs. Bellmont sends Frado for wood, and when Frado does not return soon enough for her, she walks out to Frado’s woodpile, takes a stick, and strikes Frado over the head. To her surprise, Frado loudly refuses to be beaten again. In amazement, Mrs. Bellmont leaves the yard. From that moment on, Frado knows she is free. During the next and final year of her indenture, Frado receives her usual scoldings and a few whippings, but never again does Mrs. Bellmont threaten her with similar violence. Frado’s servitude ends when she is eighteen. She is sent out into the world with only one dress, a Bible, and a physical constitution too frail for hard work. Mrs. Moore, a kindly Christian woman, takes Frado in and teaches her to make straw hats. After a short apprenticeship, Frado uses her quickly acquired skill to support herself. This short period of autonomy for Frado ends when a black man named Samuel walks into her affection-starved world and sweeps her off her feet. Against Mrs. Moore’s advice, Frado marries Samuel, a shifty orator who makes his living off abolitionists, giving “humbug” speeches about his life as a slave, although he has never been below the Mason-Dixon line. After a few months, Frado’s marriage goes awry, but by this time she is already pregnant. Because of her delicate condition and lack of money, she has to go to a poorhouse, where she gives birth to a son. At one point, Samuel, Frado’s husband, reappears, giving her some respite from abject poverty, but he leaves again without warning. Later, she receives word that Samuel has died of a fever. Frado is forced to put her little boy in a foster home. Under these desperate circumstances, Frado starts to write her story. The story ends with Frado’s hopeful vision that the book’s sale will provide enough money to support herself and her child. The Characters Frado’s basic impulses to laugh and to enjoy life’s simple pleasures are not easily repressed by the cruel servitude she enters when her white mother, Mag, runs off and leaves her with the Bellmonts, a white family dominated by a cruel and bigoted matriarch. Although life with the Bellmonts is exceedingly grim for Frado, the bright light of her humanity never completely dies. Indeed, Wilson writes, during the first three years of Frado’s indenture, when she attends school, her constant “jollity” cannot “be

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quenched by whipping or scolding.” Even after her formal education ends and life becomes creased by constant insults, the “spark of playfulness” manifests itself in the occasional “funny thing” she says to her sympathizers, in her performance of daring stunts, and in her amusements with animals. Mrs. Bellmont, a fierce social climber, takes out her frustrations on Frado. Consequently, no matter what occurs to “ruffle” Mrs. Bellmont, “a few blows on Nig seemed to relieve her of a portion of ill-will.” Mrs. Bellmont is enthusiastically assisted in her efforts to break Frado’s spirit by her equally willful and malcontent daughter, Mary, who advances in the practice of cruelty as she matures. Constantly besieged by the two cruel Bellmont “ladies,” Frado receives crumbs of kindness from three key family members: Mr. Bellmont, the father of the family, and Jack and James, his two sons. (Jane, a crippled daughter, and “Nabs,” the elderly maiden aunt, live in the house and are kind to Frado, but they are too cowed by their states of dependency to speak out.) Although Mr. Bellmont is consistently sympathetic toward Frado, his sympathy never translates into action. His refusal to exert his influence to stop the outrages against Frado shows that Mr. Bellmont’s respect for white privilege outranks his sense of justice for African Americans. Nevertheless, Mr. Bellmont does not have the stomach to watch Frado suffer. He avoids being a witness to her punishments by leaving the house at moments of crisis. Through his cowardice, which he mistakes for kindness, the attacks upon Frado, being uncensored, are prolonged. As an adolescent, Jack saves Frado several times from undeserved suffering at the hands of his mother and sister. As Jack grows up, however, his outside interests and friendships begin to occupy his time and thoughts, and Frado’s plight becomes only a small area of abrasion in his otherwise smooth life. James, the oldest of the Bellmont children, is Frado’s most effective protector, but even he fails to rescue Frado. James’s failure is at first the result of his long absences from home during Frado’s childhood; later, it is his marriage that keeps him separated from Frado. When James returns to his paternal home for good, Frado is nearly grown, and he is encumbered by a fatal illness. He no longer has the stamina to be a vigilant intercessor on Frado’s behalf. Seeing the hopeless despair of Frado’s earthly existence, James makes a concerted effort, in his last days, to convert her to Christianity. Despite his earnest entreaties, however, Frado cannot bring herself to worship the same God who, according to James, is the savior of her enemies. Samuel, the “fine, straight negro” whom Frado finally marries after she frees herself from both the physical and psychological chains of servitude, proves to be a charlatan—a free-born black man who lectures as a former slave in the abolitionist cause. His maverick spirit causes him to leave Frado without a protector at the times when she needs him most, during her pregnancy and during her struggle to care for her child.

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Themes and Meanings Our Nig is the recently recovered first novel written by an African American woman. It is also the first book to give an African American’s view of the racial abuse and exploitation that defined the quality of life many “free” blacks experienced in the North. On August 18, 1859, Mrs. Harriet E. Wilson went to the clerk’s office of the District Court of Massachusetts and entered the copyright of her novel, Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadow Falls Even There. At her own expense, one hundred fifty copies of the novel were made available for sale on September 5, 1859. This simple record marks the only notice her book received. The public’s apparent lack of interest in Wilson’s book during the nineteenth century is still puzzling to current scholars, who continue to speculate about the slight this novel received during a time when evidence of black scholarship (especially writings) was enthusiastically noted as fuel for antislavery arguments. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a literary theorist with a particular interest in the works of African American writers— and the person who actually recovered Our Nig from its literary graveyard in 1982, confirms that period historians, bibliophiles, and biographers alike neglected mentioning Wilson’s literary effort. Gates could find only five scant references to the novel in the 124 years of criticism following its publication. Confirming that her work was autobiographical, Wilson maintained that she had edited her story to minimize negative depictions of the condition of blacks living in the North so that the antislavery cause would not be threatened. In the book’s preface, she wrote, “I have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home.” Although Wilson maintained that she had suffered worse horrors than those she recorded in her book, she asserted that her book was not meant to be an attack on northern whites. Hoping that she would not be misunderstood, Wilson rationalized her awful experiences by contending that her mistress “was imbued with southern principles.” Harriet E. Wilson’s fear of being misinterpreted was indeed well founded. Not only was her appeal to whites to buy her book of no avail, but her appeal to the free Negro community for patronage was also ineffective. Gates and other scholars suggest that bias against the themes and subject matter of Our Nig can explain the mysterious silence surrounding Wilson’s work. Modern critics agree in their assessment that the fate of the book had nothing to do with its quality or literary merit. They point out that the dramatic power, clarity, and striking beauty of Wilson’s language still recommend the novel highly. Despite the novel’s stock characters and sentimental plot, Our Nig remains remarkably readable, unlike the bulk of nineteenth century sentimental novels. Although Wilson utilized many of the formulas of the genre (an underdog heroine, an unfriendly environment, and absolutely good and evil characters, for example), she stretched the form and improvised in original ways to tell her own story. Gates has

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suggested that it was probably those innovations—the taboo themes and Afrocentric colorings—that supply the best explanation for the 124-year-long literary entombment of Our Nig. Indeed, depiction of Northern racism, of interracial marriage, and of phony escaped slaves duping abolitionists must have been unpopular even with the most liberal whites of the day as well as with free blacks, who probably did not wish to distance themselves from their benefactors. Perhaps the highest offense Wilson may have given in offering the book to the public was her assignment of the novel’s ironic title. She took a vile epithet, a cruel term used to demean her race, and reclaimed it. By boldly using the word “nig,” a pet abbreviation for “nigger,” Wilson may have sought to create a level ground where she could assert her own equality with the name caller, but such an innovative and startling device was probably misinterpreted by her intended audience. Those who were not embarrassed by the unusual use of the term may not have appreciated its sarcastic flavor or its empowering intent. It was probably a far more comfortable approach for the “liberal” reading audience of the day to ignore Wilson’s problematic work, hoping it would go away. Critical Context Although the story of Our Nig ended on an optimistic note, Gates uncovered a sad finale to Wilson’s true-life story. He found that the writer was disappointed in the precise ways she had hoped for success. The book did not create a source of income, and her precious son, for whom she undertook the task of writing a book, died of a fever at the age of seven. (Ironically, the recent discovery of an obituary notice for Wilson’s son in a local paper supplied the most cogent evidence of Harriet E. Wilson’s existence as a real person, and also confirmed her social classification as an African American.) The ironic fate of Wilson and her book is a cruel yet a fitting finale to the saga, for Wilson’s social vision was exceedingly advanced for her time, as was her expanded humanistic vision reflected in Our Nig. Certainly, the author herself recognized that the world probably was not ready for her story. In an unusual foreword to Our Nig, Wilson acknowledged the problem the subject matter of her book could pose for an important segment of her audience that she called “good anti-slavery friends.” Wilson nevertheless exposed how prejudiced people living in Massachusetts in the 1850’s were abetted in their outrageous behaviors by the passivity of white liberals whose antislavery convictions were directed toward the South. She offered the pitiful story of her harsh life as an indentured servant in the North as proof. Bibliography Boggis, JerriAnne, Eve Allegra Raimon, and Barbara A. White, eds. Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing, and Region. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007. Thorough scholarly study of Our Nig as a regional text—both the representation of New England in the book, and the influence upon the book of its composition in New England.

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Jefferson, Margo. “Down and Out in Black Boston.” The Nation 236 (May 28, 1983): 675-677. Focuses on Wilson’s ingenious use of irony and sarcasm as key elements distinguishing her book from other narratives written by antebellum blacks. Explores Wilson’s sophistication in satirizing contemporary white women writers of the period through her careful selection of a title for her book. Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Surveys the conditions of blacks in Northern states after those states abolished slavery and details the prejudices that circumscribed the lives of free blacks living in the North. Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. A pioneering study of slave narratives. Provides a helpful context for assessing Our Nig. Tate, Claudia. “Allegories of Black Female Desire; or Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Addresses the issue of why traditional African American scholarship has produced negative readings of Our Nig and other books written by nineteenth century black women. Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Edited, with an introduction, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2d ed. New York: Random House, 1983. Gates’s fifty-five-page introduction places Our Nig in its historical context. Gates summarizes the interesting and involved research used to authenticate the authorship of the novel, and he analyzes Wilson’s narrative style, demonstrating how the writer used both the conventions of the sentimental novel and innovative devices to write her unique story. Sarah Smith Ducksworth

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THE OUTSIDER Author: Richard Wright (1908-1960) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Naturalism Time of plot: 1951 Locale: Chicago, Illinois; New York, New York First published: 1953 Principal characters: Cross Damon, the protagonist, age twenty-six, a black intellectual Bob Hunter, a Pullman-car waiter and member of the Communist Party Ely Houston, a hunchbacked New York City district attorney Gil Blount, a member of the Central Committee of the U.S. Communist Party Eva Blount, the young wife of Gil Blount, a painter Jack Hilton, a power-hungry, ruthless Communist Herndon, a fascistic landlord The Novel Cross Damon’s wintry search for meaningfulness and happiness falls into five stages, omnisciently narrated in books of the novel entitled “Dread,” “Dream,” “Descent,” “Despair,” and “Decision.” By the time Cross reaches the fifth stage, no decision can stem the worsening of his life that is suggested by the first four titles. When the story opens, Cross dreads everything about his intolerable life, which quickly comes to a crisis under pressure from his fifteen-year-old pregnant girlfriend, his abused wife, and his moralistic mother. Then the completely unexpected happens: He survives a subway accident and learns that a mangled victim has been identified as him. Cross takes this opportunity to create himself anew. Again, however, the unexpected happens; he is seen by a friend, and rather than return to a life made even worse, Cross kills him. Cross’s life is now dreamlike, because he carries in his mind a twenty-six-year identity that he is consciously denying. He is only early in the process of inventing what he believes will be a new personality, and therefore he is at the mercy of external circumstances. An accident in the dining car of a train causes him to meet two people who will haunt him like images in a dream that turns into a nightmare. Bob Hunter entangles him in the Communist Party, and Ely Houston is insightful enough to recognize him as a fellow outsider inclined to “ethical lawlessness.” The style of Wright’s narration in this part of the story is not dreamlike, however, as philosophical analysis plays a major role in his narration and characterization.

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In New York, Cross meets Party members who claim to be rational, objective, and benevolent but whose only law is their purpose of domination. Cross, needing human contacts to give substance to his new identity, and believing that with his intelligence and existential freedom he is more than a match for anyone else, agrees to live with Gil and Eva Blount, in order to aid the Party’s challenge to the racist practices of their landlord, Herndon. Increasingly for Cross, the flow of ideas is the believable and sustaining fabric of life. He believes that he actually is his idea of himself. Paradoxically, however, the more he intellectualizes life, the more he rationalizes his behavior with philosophical excuses, and the more he is driven by his own dread and compulsions. Thus Cross’s descent begins when, projecting ideas that threaten him onto other persons, he finds that those persons are, to his mind, ideas that offend him. Refusing existentially to go on living the bad faith of transcendental hope, he begins to share the Communists’ and fascists’ bad faith of exploitation through deception. Acting godlike, Cross appropriates absolute power, in the name of personal freedom and integrity, by killing Gil Blount and Herndon. In despair over his discovery that, in exercising the freedom to create a new self, he has compulsively reenacted an ancient pattern of violent human behavior, Cross begins a love affair with Eva Blount, although he knows that she loves her image of him as an innocent victim. Ely Houston also prefers to think that Cross is innocent, rather than the kind of modern outlaw who would kill without need of transcendent justification for his act and without feeling transcendent judgment upon it. However, a combative Cross cannot resist his compulsion to taunt Houston with the assertion that “humanity is nothing in particular” and that, therefore, a human may be anything at all. Another Communist, Hilton, now becomes offensive to Cross, intending to exercise moral ownership of him. Immediately before Cross kills him, Hilton expresses the non-Marxist personal philosophy that life is not justifiable, but merely exists for no particular reason. Individuals, he says, should make life whatever they want it to be. Cross counters that human suffering proves that life has meaning. Indeed Cross almost kills Eva to save her from the suffering that she is sure to feel if she learns that he is a murderer. He is stopped by his love for her, which causes him to feel hope and to commit himself to her. In the last book, Houston confronts Cross with evidence of his guilt in the murders. Cross says nothing, and Houston sends him home. There Cross makes the decision to confess to Eva, hoping that she will somehow understand and forgive; instead, she loses all remaining trust and hope and leaps from a window to her death. Party thugs shoot Cross; on his deathbed, he confesses to Houston that his life has been horrible, all the more so because he has felt his existential innocence. He has, however, also learned that persons must not alienate themselves from humanity, which is, in essence, a promise that must not be broken. The Characters Cross Damon, as his name implies, is the embodiment of a complex idea. Wright conceived of a man who has been martyred by his Christian upbringing and by the

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institutionalization of values based on Christian and other Western mythologies that have been rendered obsolete by industrialism, but also a man whose existentialist attempt to create a new and free identity merely frees his egoistic compulsion to replace the defunct Godhead with his own godlike exercise of power. Thus he acts demonically, in the senses both of Satan and tormented demiurge. He is both driven and inspired to obliterate the enemies of human freedom, only to find that the more he defeats them, the more like them he becomes. He is a shockingly violent murderer who yet can claim to be innocent of transcendental and therefore societal guilt. Ironically, he re-creates himself as a heroic outsider, only to find that every other thoughtful person, law-abiding or not, is also an outsider. As characters, these outsiders differ only inasmuch as the ideas that they embody differ. For example, the Communists are as free of traditional mythology, as violent, and as self-serving as is Cross, but their idea is to enslave, not to set free. Houston, the district attorney, is an “ethical criminal” like Cross, but any violence that he commits is within the law. Although Houston stands outside society in his personal and philosophical points of view, he chooses to conform to societal imperatives, because he knows that a sane human life requires community. When Eva Blount experiences love and trust, she modifies her idea of meaningful art in the direction of community. It is through Cross’s experience of love, and of betrayal of trust, that he learns the necessity of community and commitment. It is then that he is fully able to appreciate the horror of his life, in its mixture of dread, compulsion, betrayal, and innocence. His deathbed confession of horror and hope seems as much the logical conclusion of his creator’s theory as the result of a heartfelt change in personal perspective. As Richard Lehan and others have pointed out, Wright’s characterization repeats the naturalistic methods of his earlier fiction, especially Native Son (1940). Wright places Cross Damon in situations that illustrate Wright’s ideas and that test and prompt his protagonist’s thoughts. Cross’s behavior then further illustrates Wright’s analysis, which is conveyed by his omniscient narration or by Cross’s self-analysis. At opportune times, Wright informs his readers of relevant ideas by having characters explain themselves or by having them confront Cross with questions, which he answers with lectures from his extensive reading. Actions that are not informed by philosophy are motivated by the most common creaturely drives. Cross tends, therefore, to careen from one extreme to another, and this state is reinforced by Wright’s imagery: The outer world is wintry, and the inner world, when aroused beyond dialectic, is like a furnace. Nevertheless, the novel retains interest in spite of its artistic flaws because of the importance of its philosophical framework and struggle. Similarly, its characters are engaging because, although they are types, they are haunting in their representation of modern individuals, capable of—and even inclined toward—both petty and large destructions of life.

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Themes and Meanings Richard Wright wrote fiction as a way of pursuing his thoughts on an issue— usually racism. The Outsider is a “novel of ideas” in which he attempted to clarify, and perhaps contribute toward a solution for, an issue that he saw as larger than racism. He was concerned about the possibility of identity, meaningful action, and fulfillment in the modern world, in which judgments of good and evil (for example, of racism as practiced in America or Nazi Germany) cannot be made on the basis of faith in the existence of a transcendent being or scheme regarding the value of humanity. Wright addressed this concern by accepting the challenge, and presenting his critique, of two modern lines of thought with which he had recently been engaged: Marxism, as he had observed its practice in the Communist Party of the U.S.A., and existentialism, in which he had read widely and which he had discussed in Paris with major existentialist thinkers and novelists. Marxism emphasizes the determination of history and individual lives by economic forces. Existentialism, however, emphasizes individual freedom to create unique selfhood and value. Both propose that traditional systems of meaning and value that include the existence of a transcendent creator are untrue and useless. There exists no covenant (promise) between a god and his creatures, and no divine judgment. Wright’s strategy for examining these philosophies, as they would be lived, was to invent a protagonist who had found his entire life meaningless and revolting, but who possessed the intelligence and knowledge to analyze his predicament and seek an existential solution. In one winter of this protagonist’s discontent, he learns lessons about Communism, existentialism, and his own personality, and he also learns a hopeful truth about humanity. Book 1 of the novel is entitled “Dread,” and Wright suggests throughout the novel that this state is shared by humanity in general. The epigraph, by the nineteenth century existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, characterizes dread as a psychological complex of simultaneous desire and fear, attraction and repulsion, toward every aspect of life. Cross Damon knows that the cause of his troubles is that he has broken promises; he also understands that what causes him to make promises that he cannot keep is dread. He believes that his dread results from his religious upbringing by his frightened and clinging mother, who uses the threat of God’s punishment to control her son. Influenced by his readings in existentialism, Cross believes that he is suffering feelings of guilt in a world that is devoid of any reasonable basis for assigning individual guilt, since there is no God or other transcendent basis for values or for rules of behavior. Life is empty, but an individual is therefore free to fill the void. An accident allows Cross to apply the idea that he can step outside history and all myths that have failed humanity and can create a self that satisfies him. He will make his own rules. He soon finds, however, not only that he is unable to avoid involvement with humanity (partly because accidents keep happening in life) but also that he requires involvement to confirm his sense of having an identity. Like Wright’s earlier protagonist, Native Son’s Bigger Thomas, Cross learns that to successfully cry “I am,” he must tell his story to someone other than himself, someone who will respond in kind. This becomes ironically important: Cross realizes that suffering is what gives

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meaning and value to human life (including his own), but he has compulsively become such an extreme source of suffering to others that he has isolated himself. Ely Houston, the district attorney, wants to hear Cross’s story, because Cross, as a black intellectual, is a rare individual who can understand Houston’s own outsider point of view. To Cross, however, Houston represents societal judgment that will limit his freedom. Members of the Party ask for his story, promising to arrange for him to help them serve the cause of racial freedom; in fact, though, they cannot understand him and only want to own him. When they accuse him of “everything,” he counters with a story of human history, focusing on the psychological and political damage done by industrialization. Like the ancients, Cross explains, modern humanity is driven by dread, but cannot assuage it through belief and hope. So humanity has placed its faith in absolutism, and therefore men have arisen who seek absolute freedom for themselves, and absolute, self-justifying power with which to control everyone else. These godlike men include leaders of the Party, whom Cross murders, thereby exercising the same godlike power that he hates. Eventually, the party convicts and executes Cross. Eva Blount, the one person who loves Cross, wants to hear only the romantic story that she has imagined. Cross knows that she will judge him harshly if he tells her who he really is. Indeed, when he finally tells her his true story, she flees to her death. By insisting on the nothingness of life and therefore the “anythingness” of any particular human, Cross steadily narrows his options, and his range of listeners until he is reduced to nothing. At that point, realizing too late that humanity itself is a promise that must not be broken, but clinging to his sense of his existential innocence, Cross dies—ironically, both more outside and more inside humanity than he has ever been. Critical Context Critical and scholarly reception of The Outsider has largely focused on four areas of interest: its relation to American racism, its existentialist thought, its artistry, and its relation to Wright’s life. Some reviewers and scholars have expressed disappointment that Wright, having abandoned his homeland for residence in Paris, seemed to lose touch with African American life and to betray his promise as a critic of racism. Wright does, in fact, make it clear in the novel that his protagonist has not thought of himself significantly in terms of color and does not intend to redefine himself in racial terms. His condition, Wright suggests, is the condition of all modern humanity. Racist stereotyping is only one manifestation of the larger modern malaise, the arrogation of power in an attempt to find meaning where positive, transcendent systems of value have failed. In reducing racism to a symptom, perhaps Wright also reduced the contribution that he could make toward achieving freedom and justice for many people and instead set his imagination and his artistic powers adrift in European philosophical speculation. Thus, some critics have faulted Wright for his inability to understand or contribute to existentialist thought, remarking that the novel appears to be existential in intent but actually contradicts that view of the human predicament. Others, however, have

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pointed out that the novel is actually Wright’s portrayal of the failures of a philosophy that he had debated with his contemporaries in Paris, including Jean-Paul Sartre. Wright had already shown signs of interest in an existentialist protagonist when he created Bigger Thomas, but by the time he created Cross Damon, his thinking was moving beyond existentialism, as well as Marxism, to an interest in emerging African countries, in which he saw hope for a sane vision of humanity. Indeed, Wright’s experience of American racism made it possible for him to understand both the insights and the shortcomings of existentialism. Whether existentialist or not, the novel has been found engaging by many critics because of the significance of its social, psychological, and philosophical issues and because of the challenge presented by its protagonist. There is universal agreement among critics, however, that The Outsider became so much a novel of ideas that Wright’s artistic control and effectiveness suffered. Bibliography Brignano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Claims that The Outsider gained attention because of interest in existentialist philosophy and literature, but that in fact the book, like Wright’s late nonfiction, argues for reasoned cooperation in the creation of peaceful and free societies. Davis, Allison. Leadership, Love, and Aggression. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. This psychological study of Wright’s personality and life, especially the childhood traumas caused by his “sadistic maternal family,” illuminates many motifs in his fiction. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated by Isabel Barzun. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Places The Outsider in the context of Wright’s evolution from Marxism to existentialism, then discusses his critique of the latter as he turned his attention to the human potential that he saw in newly independent African nations. Fishburn, Katherine. Richard Wright’s Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977. Wright created a protagonist who blends the innocence of the American Adam (but more alienated) with the dispossessed outsiders of European existentialism and nihilism (but more influenced by environment and history). Fishburn quotes important passages from existentialist works that Wright and his protagonist read. Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980. Preoccupied by the conflict between nihilism and freedom, Wright knew from experience that religious mores and political authoritarianism stimulate impulses to lawlessness that must be moderated by compassion and concern for the common good. Self-restrained persons, like the character Ely Houston, realize that freedom is not absolute but relative and in need of limits. Lackey, Michael. African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Sociocultural Dynamics of Faith. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.

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Devotes a chapter to the representation and importance of atheism in The Outsider. Lehan, Richard. “Existentialism in Recent American Fiction: The Demonic Quest.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1 (Summer, 1959): 181-202. An extensive analysis of major American and French existential novels. Like the others, The Outsider presents a demonic hero whose quest for an autonomous identity leads him to overreach himself. Wright’s naturalistic method of storytelling, however, contradicts existentialism. Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Wright tried to “reconcile his basically humanitarian and liberal beliefs with a profound feeling that man is fundamentally amoral and anarchistic.” In the same way that his protagonist cannot reconcile freedom and order, however, Wright could not resolve the contradictions posed by the novel’s ideas, and the result was serious artistic flaws. Tom Koontz

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OXHERDING TALE Author: Charles Johnson (1948Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: 1838-1862 Locale: South Carolina First published: 1982

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Principal characters: Andrew Hawkins, the novel’s narrator, a light-skinned young slave of mixed blood George Hawkins, Andrew’s father, a butler at the Cripplegate plantation Mattie Hawkins, George’s wife and Andrew’s stepmother Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, Andrew’s tutor Minty, a seamstress Flo Hatfield, a middle-aged widow and farm owner Reb the Coffinmaker, a hardworking carpenter Horace Bannon, the “Soulcatcher,” a sadistic manhunter Peggy Undercliff, Andrew’s white bride Dr. Gerald Undercliff, a Spartanburg physician The Novel Oxherding Tale depicts the startling and varied adventures of Andrew Hawkins as he attempts to negotiate the perilous passage from slavery to freedom, crossing racial barriers and throwing his identity into crisis along the way. Born into slavery on a cotton plantation, Andrew from an early age at the same time becomes an exceptionally sophisticated thinker after being tutored by an intellectual. His status at Cripplegate, a plantation owned by Jonathan Polkinghorne, is deeply ambiguous; conceived by an enslaved butler, given birth by Polkinghorne’s wife, well regarded by Polkinghorne, he attempts to exploit his unusual position to negotiate a path to freedom. At twenty, having fallen in love with Minty, a seamstress of blossoming beauty, Andrew is emboldened to confront Polkinghorne, requesting a deed of manumission in order to earn money so that he might marry Minty. Polkinghorne sends Andrew to a widow’s distant farm to work for wages and promises to sign the freedom papers only when Andrew returns with the money. Aflame with the possibilities, Andrew sets out to take responsibility for his future, to shape a destiny for himself and his loved ones. The novel consists of two major parts. Part 1, entitled “House and Field,” is devoted largely to Andrew’s life at the Polkinghorne plantation and to his service at Flo Hatfield’s farm. Most of Andrew’s childhood and adolescence is presented in flashbacks; at the end of chapter 1, Andrew has received his assignment to the Hatfield

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farm, and his memories of Minty, George, Mattie, and Ezekiel are woven into the current action. At the Hatfield farm, Andrew becomes a sexual servant to the beautiful Flo Hatfield, a sensuous woman in her forties who has made a habit of grooming at least one young servant for a pampered life in the house. Although Andrew enjoys with Flo the indulgences of opium and an erotic education, she evades the subject of his wages. Losing his temper, Andrew one day strikes Flo while they are making love and is immediately banished to the slave quarters; he is then sent with Reb to certain death at the mines. When they report to the Yellowdog mine with a group of other slaves, Andrew poses as a white employee of Flo’s in order to engineer an escape to the North with Reb the Coffinmaker, a carpenter. Part 2, “The White World,” concerns the new life forged by Andrew. During their ride northward on stolen horses, Andrew and Reb are joined by Horace Bannon, a manhunter who pretends not to recognize his prey; his method is to wait until a runaway loses all hope before acting. Suffering from severe withdrawal from an addiction to opium, Andrew is taken by Bannon to a white doctor, Gerald Undercliff, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Unable to pay for his treatment, he is forced to accept work under an assumed identity as a schoolteacher, with Reb posing as his manservant. All the philosophical and moral wherewithal that Andrew has acquired is put on trial when he is pressured into marriage with Peggy Undercliff, the doctor’s daughter. Having achieved a modest security in his marriage and his new identity as a white man, Andrew one evening wanders into a slave auction and finds Minty on sale. Slavery has robbed her of her beauty; she is exhausted and diseased. Grief-stricken, Andrew buys her freedom and persuades Peggy to accept Minty into their home. Although he has achieved a measure of uneasy comfort, he accepts responsibility for Minty at the risk of his own life. At the novel’s climax, Minty’s death coincides with Andrew’s final confrontation with Horace Bannon. Andrew learns that his father is dead but that his own identity as an escaped slave will be protected and his life spared. The Characters Andrew Hawkins, of course, is by far the most important and complex figure in Oxherding Tale. The characters of what might be called the supporting cast appear sequentially, often for a chapter or two at a time, each figure portrayed engagingly, wittily, but quickly, in the mode of a series of sketches. However, the supporting cast cannot be said to consist simply of flat characters, for the author is interested in the intersubjective dimensions of identity, in the degree to which Andrew’s selfhood is bound up in an ever-shifting web of relationships. This element is clearly marked in the novel’s preoccupation with telepathy and transcendentalism, and it accounts in part for the novel’s episodic yet unified plot structure. The characterization of Andrew himself is achieved largely through the language of his first-person narrative. Andrew’s discursive perspective is wryly authoritative and urbanely observational, a frank departure from the tone of most picaresque narratives of youth. Such novels often attribute to their youthful protagonists a charming

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naïveté, improvisational verbal dexterity, and, underlying all else, an innocent, unspoiled wisdom. Johnson partakes of this tendency only to the extent that he deploys a protagonist whose utterances within the novel’s dialogue are dextrous, capable of trickster-like dissembling. Andrew’s narrative voice, though, rarely betrays a naïveté concerning his circumstances. In a uniquely existential perspective on whirlwind, life-threatening adventures, Andrew’s tone as narrator is musing, detached, and skeptical. His propensity for interiorized reflection—amidst a plot line comparable to those of nineteenth century melodramatic narratives—contributes an ironic counterpoint to suspenseful, dramatic exterior action and thickens the linguistic texture of the novel. Ezekiel is typical of the characters of the supporting cast in the sense that his importance long outlasts his actual appearance within the plot. In fact, many of the stories of Ezekiel, George, and Minty are told in lengthy flashbacks and reminiscences after Andrew has left Polkinghorne. Andrew’s relations to the supporting cast members are dialectical and always shifting, with many ongoing effects in the characters’ absences. A certain intermingling of identity occurs among Andrew’s three dark-skinned elders: George Hawkins, Reb the Coffinmaker, and the Soulcatcher. Eventually, these figures each demonstrate a patronizing but affectionate indulgence for Andrew, and each finds his life to be clearly altered because of Andrew. As a triumvirate of African American male strength, they come to seem crucial figures in the story of Andrew’s attempt to negotiate his identity. After George has forsaken his father’s urgent advice by passing for white in order to make his escape, he carries a burden of guilt. In fact, Andrew had described George as something of an object of satire: a belligerent “Race Man” unaware of the nuances of Andrew’s experiences, a meat-lover comically forced to eat vegetables. This relation is resolved to an extent through the nexus of George, Reb, and the Soulcatcher. Through the mystical capacities of Reb and, especially, the Soulcatcher, the relationship between Andrew and George is redeemed, when the father metaphysically “saves” his son’s life. Themes and Meanings Oxherding Tale is a richly textured work that uses the first-person viewpoint to portray the complex sensibilities of Andrew Hawkins and of the novel’s central characters, none of whom is a stock type. Andrew is characterized chiefly through the language of his narration itself; the prose style, learned, graceful, philosophic, and reflective, bespeaks a genuinely searching character who is open to all manner of perception and who sees deeply into the lives of his acquaintances. Johnson’s method of presenting Andrew’s early life through several flashbacks allows readers to learn about characters piecemeal, through interwoven series of events that thicken a sense of the density and immediacy of Andrew’s experience and yearnings. Although Andrew’s mature point of view is sometimes ironic and comic, he sees himself as a butt of humor as often as he ridicules others. The problem of identity is the novel’s central theme. Andrew is uniquely posi-

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tioned as a character who, light-skinned, refined, and eloquent, can traverse the boundary of race. As he desperately finagles a limited degree of autonomy, he must acknowledge the moral nature of his actions. Oxherding Tale resists easy categorization because of its experimentation with different forms and traditions of writing. In one sense, the novel joins with the tradition of picaresque novels to which Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) belongs, novels whose structures are episodic rather than tightly integrated. Andrew is flung from one situation into another; he careens like a pinball through the novel’s action, achieving what little control he can over his destiny through his superior wits. The novel makes use of the picaresque tradition to the degree that Andrew cleverly improvises language and tactics to meet each new challenge. In this connection, the novel makes use of the trickster-figure tradition of African American folk-tales exemplified by such characters as Brer Rabbit and the Signifying Monkey. Further, the picaresque hero rarely displays any radical development of character through his succession of adventures. Andrew is so mature in his views and language from an early age that his story often seems to be less about personal development or coming of age than about the exploits of an already sensitive and precocious character in an absurd world. The picaresque hero is often carefree and happy-go-lucky, however, and in this sense the novel represents a revision of the form. The adventures of Andrew—first a slave, later a runaway slave, and finally a man with an assumed identity—are sometimes comic, but they do not allow for an entirely lighthearted tone. In another sense, Johnson uses the form of the bildungsroman, the novel of formation or novel of education. Such novels usually begin with an account of the circumstances into which their hero is born and follow the hero’s growth into early adulthood and into a discovery of identity and purpose in life. Johnson’s use of this form is underlined by the novel’s first scene, a largely comic account of the bizarre night on which Andrew is conceived by George Hawkins and Anna Polkinghorne. The opening of the novel with a humorous account of the narrator-hero’s own conception, leaving readers to wonder how these events are known to the narrator, is also a feature of Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth century bildungsroman. Oxherding Tale is not focused centrally on the extraordinary development of Andrew Hawkins, which is presented as already achieved, but the novel crucially raises questions of identity and of life’s purpose as its hero enters adulthood. The form of writing to which Oxherding Tale is perhaps most importantly connected is the nineteenth century slave narrative. Johnson makes explicit reference to these writings in his novel. Slave narratives are nonfictional, first-person accounts written by former slaves, often tracing a movement from slavery to freedom and from South to North; the most famous examples of this form are Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). With Oxherding Tale, Johnson invents a fictional slave narrative that imparts a sense of the density of lived experience upon the form. Rather than portray his characters as good or evil stock types, Johnson renders the sensibilities of his fictional slaves and slaveholders as complex, three-dimensional, and ambiguous.

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The language of the novel varies considerably, sometimes using contemporary slang alongside the southern vernacular of the nineteenth century. By using modern as well as antiquated language in a novel about slavery, Johnson suggests the difficulty of comprehending the past, the timelessness of the themes of identity and responsibility, and the influence of the past over the present. Like a jazz musician improvising upon standard melodies, Johnson creates a freehand mix of styles and literary modes of expression in order to provide an imaginatively rich, magnanimous, and immediate sense of his characters. Oxherding Tale is a virtuoso performance that incorporates many linguistic and narrative strategies into a re-exploration of the tangled problem of how slavery can be understood from the perspective of the twentieth century. There is some affiliation between the transcendentalist teachings of Ezekiel and the movement of the novel itself: The narrative scope extends beyond narrow limitations, platitudes, or stereotypes toward a full, imaginatively rich vision. Critical Context Oxherding Tale received favorable notice in periodicals when it was published in 1982; it was admired by reviewers for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Publishers Weekly, and The New Yorker, among others. The novel, however, did not immediately receive the scholarly critical attention that it was due. The second of Johnson’s novels (his first was 1974’s impressive Faith and the Good Thing), Oxherding Tale won for Johnson a widening readership that continued to expand. In 1988, he published a collection of short fiction, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and in 1990 he published Middle Passage, which extended his improvisations to seafaring stories. Middle Passage won the National Book Award, the first time that honor had been awarded to an African American male since Ralph Ellison won for Invisible Man (1952). Bibliography Chandler, Gena. “‘In-Itself-for-Me’: Decomposition and Art in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale.” In Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher, edited by Marc C. Conner and William R. Nash. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Influenced by phenomenology and German Idealism, this reading of Oxherding Tale establishes and critiques Johnson’s philosophical project in the text. Davis, Arthur P. “Novels of the New Black Renaissance, 1960-1977: A Thematic Survey.” CLA Journal 21 (June, 1978): 457-491. Analyzes the work of twentyfour modern black writers, including Johnson. A useful introduction to the major African American fiction of the period. Harris, Norman. “The Black Universe in Contemporary Afro-American Fiction.” CLA Journal 30 (1986): 1-13. Claims that Johnson, like Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, moves beyond the naturalism and realism that characterized earlier African American fiction.

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Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Johnson discusses the development of African American literature and his own theories of fiction. He asserts that the best literature is a blend of imagination, invention, and interpretation. _______. “Reflections on Fiction, Philosophy, and Film: An Interview with Charles Johnson.” Callaloo 1 (October, 1978): 118-128. A wide-ranging discussion of the author’s varied areas of interest. Shultz, Elizabeth. “The Heirs of Ralph Ellison.” CLA Journal 22 (December, 1978): 101-122. Useful for gauging Johnson’s significance in the context of post-World War II African American literature. James Knippling

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PAINTED TURTLE Woman with Guitar Author: Clarence Major (1936) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Experimental Time of plot: 1930’s-1980’s Locale: Arizona; Colorado; New Mexico First published: 1988 Principal characters: Painted Turtle, a Zuni woman singer and guitar player Baldwin (Baldy) Saiyataca, the narrator, Painted Turtle’s lover and musical partner Old Gchachu, the father of Painted Turtle’s clan Grandma Wilhelmina, Painted Turtle’s grandmother Waldo Etawa, Painted Turtle’s father Marelda Etawa, Painted Turtle’s mother The Novel Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar is an experimental novel in the fable tradition that traces the moral, personal, psychological, and spiritual development of Clarence Major’s principal character, Mary Etawa, called “Painted Turtle.” Born into a traditional Zuni family on December 17, 1938, Painted Turtle gets her nickname because she crawls on all fours and raises her head like a turtle. In some ways, this name comes to define her position to everyone and for everything outside her own life. She tries to shut out the traditions of her family and the realities of her ancestry, much like a turtle in its shell. She exists in a place between actual reality, dreams, mystical experiences, and the construction of her autobiography, as told through the “voice” of her lover, Baldy. In many ways, this story is a poetic statement on alienation and transformation, the misunderstanding inherent in the dynamics of multicultural interaction, pride and prejudice, sexism and racism, and the known and unknown spaces that exist between the traditional roles of men and women. The novel begins with Baldy’s explanation of how he came to know Painted Turtle. It ends with their riding through the barren landscapes of the Southwest as a committed team in both music and love. In between is the story of many people who inhabit Painted Turtle’s world as children, ghosts, parents, relations, relatives, and spirits. All these relationships are complicated by the demands of tradition fighting against Painted Turtle’s desire for identity and independence. Painted Turtle’s life is difficult and confusing because she defies traditional mores and dares to disagree with authority. As if unconscious and in a trance, Painted Turtle wanders through her life as much

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an observer as an active participant. She does what she wants to do, needs to do, has to do, not quite knowing why or how. She knows that the “old ways” keep her in a state of agitation, and therefore she rebels against what appears to be a fixed position in life. She does not fit into the social and cultural systems of the reservation, nor does she accept the demands of motherhood. Her defiance, as well as her rape and bearing of twins, makes her an unacceptable bride; her lack of conventionality forces her to leave the Zuni reservation to escape its restrictions. Moreover, her desire to go beyond the ordinary means that her life cannot be like that of her mother, who by making pottery out of clay follows the traditional static path of females. After attempting to drown the twins, Painted Turtle is placed in the Gallup Indian Medical Center. Released after a few months, she returns to the reservation but soon realizes that she can no longer live there. This begins her quest for identity. She takes a few odd jobs; after being arrested for prostitution, she finally picks up her guitar again and finds the space where her life has meaning. In a series of trips away from the reservation and on visits back to bury the dead and observe rituals, she discovers that she is more fulfilled, even as a very proud and conscious Zuni, away from the reservation. Thus, time on the cantina circuit takes on a life of its own; she meets Baldy and allows him to travel with her. Familiarity grows into love and mutual respect into a partnership. The story ends as they ride to their first job together. The Characters Painted Turtle’s alienation from her culture allows her to transcend reality through her music. Early in her life, she yearns to be a boy and experience the freedom of her father’s sphere; however, she must learn the confining ways of the worlds of her mother and grandmother. When she is raped at age thirteen and gives birth to twins, most of the Zuni interpret this as a curse, and their attitude gives meaning to the lifelong distance and discomfort she always feels for the demands and expectations placed upon her by gender and culture. To escape, she goes to a mental hospital and later becomes an unsuccessful barmaid and prostitute; eventually, she becomes a nightclub performer. She finally realizes that her childhood guitar can offer her not only an escape from reality but also an escape from a dreaded life on the reservation. Thus, she travels to third-rate clubs, bars, and hotels, singing for tips while sleeping in flophouses and hour-rated motels, until she meets Baldy. Baldy, the narrator in the story, peers into Painted Turtle’s life across actual time and mythic distance; his own story becomes woven into hers. He initially meets Painted Turtle on “the grimy cantina circuit” when he is sent to hear her perform by their mutual agent, Peter Inkpen. Baldy’s task is to transform Painted Turtle into a more commercially appealing singer by suggesting that she switch to the electric guitar; instead, she unwittingly transforms him, and he joins her act when he trades in his prized electric guitar for an acoustic one. Being the son of a Hopi mother and a Navajo father makes him emblematic of the story; he, like Painted Turtle, must walk between two worlds. He represents the historic conflict that has always existed between different people. Throughout the novel, Baldy remains a distant figure and a stilted voice,

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telling little of Painted Turtle’s life and even less about his own. He is seen through her eyes as the narrative reveals her life to the world. Old Gchachu, the father of the clan, is the human incarnation of the old ways. The collective memory—culture, custom, folklore, and history—is represented in his being; while she is in his presence, Painted Turtle is never sure if her experiences are dreams or reality. He prophesies when she is young that she will marry a wise priest, become famous for her traditional cooking skills, and become legendary for her love of children and family. When these beliefs do not come true, he reminds her that the soul of a Zuni dies if it strays too far from home. Grandma Wilhelmina, Painted Turtle’s grandmother, represents both the sanctity of the past, as she embodies the traditional female role of healer and caretaker, and the options of the future, as she produces fine jewelry and sells it in stores all over the Southwest. Without saying much, she validates Painted Turtle’s independent spirit and sanctions her movement away from the traditional life. Waldo Etawa, Painted Turtle’s father, symbolizes both the traditional father figure and the erosion of the Native American way of life. On one hand, he drinks; on the other, he teaches his daughter male tasks and helps her develop skills usually not taught to women. He fuels her independence by treating her like a son. Though successful, he lets the family’s material and social status slip as he fails to keep white society and modernization from altering the “old ways.” Marelda Etawa, Painted Turtle’s mother, represents the stability of hearth and home and the probability of continuation. She remains at home, caretaker to both an older and younger generation as well as keeper of the family lore, its customs, and traditions; she rears the two grandsons in Painted Turtle’s absence. Themes and Meanings Painted Turtle is an emotionally complex yet psychologically distant character. In some ways, she represents no one but herself; in others, she is everyone. To some extent, she is the eternal poet, always searching for herself in a lyric, always revealing herself in a song. While Major wants readers to see Painted Turtle as a character representative of Native American culture in general and Zuni culture in particular, Painted Turtle is not sufficiently developed; thus, the other characters are utilized to display the dynamic ways in which earth, wind, fire, and air connect to sustain life. The stereotypes and minor characters in this novel all serve functions necessary to an understanding of the story. An example of this is Baldy’s Aunt Franny, who represents the stereotype of the “drunken Indian” but who also symbolizes what happens to women who leave their ancestral home and forsake the old ways. Her presence evokes more shame than pity. As she eats with Painted Turtle and Baldy, the rose Franny puts in Painted Turtle’s hair serves more to anoint her own independence of spirit and defiance of tradition than it does to recognize the beauty of her nephew’s friend. Aunt Franny is drunk because she lost her soul by marrying an “anglo.” Thus, the message is clear: Step outside the acceptable boundaries of the culture and invite disgrace and misfortune.

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This point is made quite clearly when Old Gchachu, as patriarch and senior mystic, tells Painted Turtle that if she ventures from the clan her soul will die. A Zuni soul cannot live too far from home. His words have power, yet she continues to defy his wishes. In one instance, when he and Painted Turtle are alone in his home, he seeks to engage her sexually; she refuses, and he summons evil spirits. They come and dance around her; she refuses their advances also, and they possess her. She has no power to fend them off. Painted Turtle awakens in her own bed only to realize that perhaps this was all just a bad dream. The point has been made, however: To be disobedient is to crave punishment. The interaction that Painted Turtle has with her Grandma Wilhelmina is never frightening, harsh, or unpleasant; it is, however, very complex. Grandma Wilhelmina says little, listens a great deal, and renders few opinions. This is the comfortable and special relationship that can only exist between a grandmother and her granddaughter; in this context, Painted Turtle does not feel alien, nor does she feel uncomfortable. With the resignation that only aging can bring, Grandma Wilhelmina has a calming and soothing effect upon her contentious grandchild. It is only with Grandma Wilhelmina as reference that Painted Turtle feels a part of the Zuni nation. In the presence of her grandmother, Painted Turtle does not chafe under the conformity demanded on the reservation. While her parents fulfill their respective roles, Painted Turtle enjoys being with her father more than with her mother. She likes the outdoors and the activities that males are expected to perform. She finds the world of women too closed, the actions too predictable, the tasks too monotonous. Men lead active lives full of different tasks and are always anticipating something new and exciting to happen. In the interactions with her immediate family Painted Turtle finds the most pain; it is their desire to make her conform to her role in their society that she must escape. Painted Turtle refuses to accept the sacred traditions her family holds dear, and this refusal and failure to compromise force her on the road. Critical Context Painted Turtle is a continuation of Major’s incursion into what is called experimental fable. This short book examines the birth, childhood, and adult life of a character, Painted Turtle, whom Major first introduced as an older woman in My Amputations (1986). It continues his interest in metafictional characters and issues that transcend both time and space. Indeed, reality and mysticism are as prominent in this work as they are in the interesting and engaging Such Was the Season (1987) and his long poem “Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Twentieth Century” (1990). Some critics suggest that this is one of Major’s most accessible works, and it represents a significant model for the emerging genre of multicultural literature in the United States. In some ways, Painted Turtle allows Major to break completely away from the self-consciousness of his earlier work and to demonstrate that the spaces that exist between class, ethnicity, gender, and race do not prevent serious writers from transcending their own realities to delve in interesting and respectful ways into those of others. The frequent use of undefined or unexplained terms in the Zuni, Hopi, Na-

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vajo, and Spanish languages lends a certain distance and intrigue to this work. It is there on the printed page but slightly inaccessible; it is readable but somewhat incomprehensible. The barrier of language becomes a metaphor for the barriers of difference. In this short novel, Major presents an example of a new aesthetic devoid of the personal social reality that is common among black writers. To accomplish this, he uses random allusions, incomplete textual development, lyrical poetry, and disjointed rhythms in an attempt to step beyond himself to create a new direction in fiction. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. “Modernism and Postmodernism.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Places Major in the postmodern tradition of experimentation with language and form. _______, ed. Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Collection of scholarly essays on Major and his relationship to aesthetics; includes an interview with the author. Cagidemetrio, Alide. “The Real Thing: Notes on an American Strategy.” In Critical Angles: European Views of Contemporary American Literature, edited by Marc Chénetier. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Discusses Major’s writing as a response to the need and desire to break away from the confines of race-specific literature. Notes that some of Major’s earlier themes that find ultimate expression in Painted Turtle reflect a style that is deliberately disjointed, random, and confused. Major, Clarence. The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. New York: Third Press, 1974. Includes an important essay by Major on the “Black Aesthetic” and several interviews, including a self-interview. _______. “Necessary Distance: Afterthoughts on Becoming a Writer.” Black American Literature Forum 23 (Summer, 1989): 197-212. Asks whether or not the writer can separate the literary from the personal and to what extent all writing is somewhat autobiographical. Major reflects on innovation and on time and space in the process of writing. He notes that writing Painted Turtle caused him to go beyond the narrow confines of experience and to delve into mysticism. Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Identifies Major as one of the writers who has done much to translate the metaphysical nature of blackness into a major literary genre. Martin looks at Major, Reed, and others as having found and utilized the revolutionary potential of black literature. Alphine W. Jefferson

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PARABLE OF THE SOWER and PARABLE OF THE TALENTS Author: Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) Type of work: Two novels Type of plot: Science fiction Time of plot: 2024-2090 Locale: Robledo (a gated community) and Olivar (a corporate city), near Los Angeles, California First published: Parable of the Sower, 1993; Parable of the Talents, 1998 Principal characters: Lauren Olamina, a young African American woman who founds the Earthseed religion Bankole, a landowner who offers his land for a new community Andrew Steele Jarret, the leader of a Christian-fascist dictatorship Larkin/Asha, Lauren’s daughter, who is renamed when she is kidnapped by the fascists and sent to her uncle to be raised Marcus, Lauren’s brother, who is a Jarret loyalist The Novels When Parable of the Sower was first published, its image of Robledo as a wealthy gated community living in fear of the have-nots beyond its walls seemed dystopian. The continued development of gated communities since has made its vision of the future more plausible. By contrast, the company town of Olivar, where people are promised food, employment, and a modicum of security in exchange for total submission to their employment, is somewhat more alien to the experience of most readers, but it still has recognizable historical analogs in the company store system of the nineteenth century. Within Robledo’s illusory security, young Lauren Olamina grows increasingly frustrated with her parents’ refusal to confront the reality of their new world. While they prefer to look backward to a lost time of prosperity, Lauren develops a new religion called Earthseed and writes its sacred text, The Books of the Living. When she attempts to present it to her neighbors, she is at first mocked, but in time she begins to gain their attention, particularly as the walls that protect Robledo from the poverty and desperation outside begin to break down. In the end, Lauren leads a small surviving remnant northward to found a new community, Acorn, on land donated by Bankole, one of the refugees. Even as Acorn represents hope, however, Lauren and her followers recognize the necessity to defend their small community and preserve its ability to grow its own food, including the need to meet violence with violence.

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Thus, the novel’s utopian element is tempered by a harsh recognition of the limited ability of human goodness to overcome adversity. Parable of the Talents continues the story. Lauren has grown older and married, and she is raising a daughter. Meanwhile, a power vacuum has developed as a result of the collapse of the old order, and a new fascistic Christian Right government has arisen under the leadership of Andrew Steele Jarret. The government seeks to enforce its religious doctrine upon all Americans. It has attacked the Earthseed community and imprisoned Lauren, who is haunted by her own failure adequately to cope with the threat and to protect those who trusted her leadership. Under the Jarret’s Christian government, Acorn becomes a concentration camp where dissidents, including Lauren, are routinely tortured in an effort to break their wills and force them to adopt the party line of Christian America. Lauren disguises herself as a man to protect herself from assault by gangs of rapists and travels across the country spreading her vision of a new way of thinking. Although at first she had conceived of Earthseed primarily in terms of small groups of highly committed people, Lauren eventually permits the publication of Earthseed: The Books of the Living in order to better spread her ideas. A second narrative thread in Talents follows Lauren’s daughter, Larkin, who was kidnapped by the fascist government, renamed Asha, and given to a childless couple in Seattle. Later, the adult Asha meets Lauren’s brother, Marcus, but she is unaware that he is her uncle. Questions of identity permeate the story of Larkin/Asha and Marcus, who is himself a heavily closeted homosexual, unable to acknowledge and embrace his own identity because it is condemned as sinful by his Christian beliefs. The Characters Lauren Olamina is an odd messiah, a young African American woman living in a gated community that seeks to preserve its slender claim on prosperity by walling out the poverty of the outside world and looks backward to a lost time of wonders when the cities still shone with light. However, her inability to rest upon the comfortable certainties her parents’ generation embraces drives her to develop the new religion she calls Earthseed, which is founded upon a metaphor of seeds and sowing humanity’s future. It rejects the patriarchial image of God as sky-father that pervades Christianity, as well as the matriarchial earth-mother goddess of paganism. Instead, Earthseed incorporates Buddhist and Sufi ideas, embracing the notion of reciprocal transformation to describe God as Change. Although Butler repeatedly said that she would not write utopias because she could not believe that flawed human beings could create a perfect society, in Earthseed she offered a vision of hope that transcendent consciousness can see humanity through even the grimmest of futures. Andrew Steele Jarret, the villain of the second book, embodies the worst of the Religious Right. He is a fascist who imposes his own ideas of Christianity upon the country in the name of rescuing it from anarchy and chaos. His past connections with the Ku Klux Klan are openly remarked upon at several points in Parable of the Tal-

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ents. He not only coerces people’s consciences, crushing dissidents through imprisonment and torture, but also kidnaps their children and places them in the homes of loyalists. Siblings are separated in order to reduce them to isolated social atoms, less able to resist the pressure to conform to “correct” beliefs. Themes and Meanings Throughout both novels, the central theme is the absolute necessity to embrace change. The idea that God is Change is central to the beliefs of Earthseed, the fictional religion created by the protagonist of the two novels. The novels’ principal antagonists are people who seek to deny and forestall change. The adults of Robledo tried to wall change out and maintain their tiny community in the idealized image of a lost past. Andrew Steel Jarret and his followers not only shut change out but also strive to stop it and even turn it back by the application of force. Neither group can stop change and restore their idealized pasts. Indeed, their efforts to do so cause great harm to others, and they become not merely formal antagonists but actual villains. By contrast, Lauren and her followers discover that by actively embracing change, they can turn change into a tool for their own empowerment. Critical Context Because both Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are science-fiction rather than mainstream works, they have largely escaped the notice of most literary critics, who often dismiss so-called genre fiction as unworthy of significant study or consideration. However, within the science-fiction community the novels received considerable interest as dystopic visions of the worst aspects of American society growing to obscure and even extinguish the nation’s ideals. Many reviewers within the science-fiction community have noted that Butler does not merely draw upon the science-fiction trope of the collapse of society to lower levels of organization, a trope that traces back at least to H. G. Wells’s novel The Shape of Things to Come: She also draws upon particularly African American motifs, such as exploitation and the preservation of dignity in the face of oppression. Because of the strong critical reception the Parable novels received in the science-fiction community, many feminist and African American critics examined them more closely. Bibliography Agustí, Clara Escoda. “Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Extrapolation 46, no. 3 (Fall, 2005): 351-59. Focuses primarily upon the novel’s use of the themes of exploitation and its escape. Butler, Robert. “Twenty-First-Century Journeys in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” In Contemporary African American Fiction. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Examines the use of the motif of a physical journey as symbolic of an internal transformation. Gant-Britton, Lisbeth. “Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: One Alternative to a Futureless Future.” In Women of Other Worlds, edited by Helen Merrick and Tess

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Williams. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 1999. Focuses upon the dystopic and post-catastrophic elements of the novel. McCaffery, Larry. Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Includes an interview with Butler that provides a look inside her and a description of her writing process. Melzer, Patricia. “‘All That You Touch You Change’: Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” FEMSPEC 3, no. 2 (2002): 31-52. Focuses on the role of characters’ reactions to change in the development of the two novels, from a feminist critical perspective. Phillips, Jerry. “The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Novel 35, nos. 2/3 (Spring, 2002): 299-311. Examines the motifs of Parable of the Sower in the context of other works of utopian and dystopian literature. Leigh Husband Kimmel

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PARADISE Author: Toni Morrison (1931) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Magical realism; historical realism; social criticism Time of plot: 1976 Locale: Ruby, Oklahoma First published: 1998 Principal characters: Mary Magna, the mother superior of the Convent Consolata/Connie, a young Brazilian orphan raised by Mary Magna whose power of spiritual healing transforms the women in the Convent Mavis Albright, a distraught young woman who has abandoned her young children, fled her abusive husband, and found her way into the sheltering Convent Seneca, a sexual abuse survivor who happens upon the Convent after she rescues a townswoman Gigi/Grace, a passionate and sexually attractive young woman who becomes Seneca’s lover Pallas Truelove, a wealthy woman who runs away from home when her mother takes up with Pallas’s lover Deacon and Steward Morgan, identical twins who helped found Ruby and who help lead the attack on the Convent K. D. Smith, a nephew of the Morgans who has an abusive affair with Grace Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood, founders of Ruby and leaders of the attack on the Convent Menus Jury, an attacker who is injured and permanently disabled as a result of the attack The Novel The opening sentences of Paradise are startling and hint at the ominous events that unfold in the novel. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here.” “They” refers to a group of nine men, composed of many of the founders of the city of Ruby, Oklahoma, who have taken it upon themselves to kill the six women who live in a mansion that townsfolk have named the Convent, seventeen miles outside of Ruby. Although the mansion was originally owned by an embezzler—and contains sexually explicit paintings and statues depicting sensual poses—a former nun, Mary Magna, turned the house into a school for or-

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phaned Native American girls. When the novel opens, however, Mary is dying, and her daughter, Consolata/Connie—a Brazilian orphan whom Mary has raised as her own—has been elevated to the role of mother superior for the numerous women who will take refuge in the house. The plot of the novel develops in a nonlinear fashion, twisting and turning in a labyrinthine way that involves multiple perspectives, mysterious clues to the identities of characters, and fragmentary allusions to historical events. These elements must be stitched together in order to reveal the action of the novel. For example, the white girl mentioned in the first sentence is never identified, nor is it ever clear why a white girl is among the women at the Convent. Numerous subplots digress from the opening action, revealing bits of information about Ruby’s history and the reasons for the men’s attack upon the Convent. Several of the novel’s chapters take their title from the name of one of the women residing at the Convent, and a portion of the chapter tells that woman’s story before digressing in other directions concerning the complex relationship between Ruby and the Convent. Although the action of Paradise occurs in the 1970’s, culminating with the Convent attack in 1976, the historical events that underlie the plot involve the migration of black people from the South to the West in the late eighteenth century. The novel tells of several families that got together—among them, families whose descendants would participate in the attack—and moved westward with hopes of settling into one of the numerous all-black towns that were then being established. In an event called “The Disallowing,” the families were refused acceptance into several towns. The town of Fairly, Oklahoma, did provide food for the migrants, but it refused to allow them to reside in town because of the dark color of their skin. The families had nowhere to go, but a mysterious stranger appeared out of nowhere to lead them in the desert, and they followed him for twenty-nine days. When their guide suddenly vanished, they built a town called Haven on the spot where he left them. At the center of town, the families built a communal oven, called the Oven, where community rituals occured. By the end of World War II, Haven was no longer the haven and center of purity that it had initially grown to be, so descendants of the original founders moved even farther west and built a town named Ruby. The town was named after Ruby Morgan, the mother of town cofounder K. D. Smith. By the 1970’s, Ruby’s attempts to keep itself pure have faltered: The original vision of the town as a bastion of racial purity (a town for dark-skinned African Americans only) has been disrupted not only by the sexual inbreeding of the original families but also by what the elders perceive to be a breakdown in the moral and social order. Such a breakdown is most forcefully demonstrated when the Oven—which the elders have carried from Haven and reassembled in Ruby—is desecrated with the symbolic raised fist of the Black Power movement. The Convent also becomes a symbol for the sexual breakdown of society. The men of Ruby see the Convent as the refuge of impurity: The sexually explicit statues and paintings were never removed when Mary Magna turned the mansion into the Convent; the mansion houses only women, and there are rumors of inappropriate sexual

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behavior among the women. Thus, one night in 1976, Steward Morgan and his identical twin, Deacon, lead seven other armed men out to the Convent—which they often refer to as the coven—to purify the town by killing the women living there. The town of Ruby is divided over the massacre. Many of the women who live in Ruby, although they are not given substantial parts in the novel, oppose the plot to attack the Convent. Lone DuPres, for example, tries to warn the women in the Convent about the attack, but they ignore her. When the killings are over, the bodies disappear, and the town must come to terms with this action that has destroyed not only the women’s lives but also the town itself. In a rather strange plot twist, but one characteristic of many of Toni Morrison’s novels, the dead women are resurrected and speak to their family members as a way of bringing healing for past actions. Paradise ends with a spiritual vision in which Peidade, the supernatural spirit in Connie’s visions earlier in the novel, foresees the spiritual bonds of female community being formed through the earthly works of groups of women. The Characters The stories of the women living in the Convent form the center of Paradise. Although the women are unknown to one another when each arrives at the house, they quickly form a community. Each woman is running away from a particularly bad situation in life and finds some redemption in the community at the Convent. Formerly a nun in Brazil, Mary Magna moved into the embezzler’s mansion outside of Ruby in order to establish a school for Native American girls. Soon, however, the last student has passed through the Convent’s doors, and Mary begins her slow decline. Although she figures little in the novel after her death, she symbolizes the spiritual power of the women who follow her. Connie becomes the spiritual leader of the Convent after Mary’s death. Before assuming this role, however, she engages in an affair with Deacon Morgan, one of the men who eventually attacks the Convent. Devastated when he ends their affair, Connie sinks into alcoholism before the plight of the women around her rouses her to spiritual healing. Her openness to spiritual vision and to the supernatural provides her with powers of healing and insight that help transform the women but that the men of the town view as witchcraft. In the opening scene of the novel, Connie tries to heal the white girl who has been shot, only to be shot herself by Steward Morgan, the identical twin of her former lover. Mavis Albright is the first of the outsiders to arrive at the Convent. Abused by her husband and frightened of him, she accidently leaves her twins, Merle and Pearl, locked in a car on a hot day, and they suffocate. Although she has other children— whom she visits at least once in the novel—she is afraid of them as well as of her husband, so, having visited her mother, she drifts westward without purpose. She hears the voices of her dead children at the Convent, so she remains there. Mavis often looks down on the sexual behavior of the other women in the Convent. In her postattack appearance, Mavis reunites with her daughter.

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Gigi/Grace is the next to arrive at the Convent. During her early days there she ironically takes K. D. Smith, one of Ruby’s founders and one of the leaders of the attack, as her lover. When he abuses her, she, Mavis, and Seneca drive him out of her life. Gigi and Seneca become lovers. In her post-attack appearance, Gigi reunites with her father, a prisoner on a chain gang. Seneca, who was sexually exploited and abandoned as a five-year-old child, inadvertently happens upon the Convent after she has rescued a distraught Sweetie Fleetwood—the wife of one of the men in Ruby who participates in the attacks—and accompanied her to Ruby. She has an encounter with her mother in her post-attack appearance, but Seneca denies ever having known her mother. Pallas Truelove is a wealthy woman who has run away from home. She gives birth to a son the night prior to the attack on the Convent. It was her mother’s decision to begin a romantic relationship with Pallas’s lover that drove Pallas from home, and Pallas refuses to speak with her mother during her post-attack appearance. The men of Ruby are divided between those who attack the Convent and those who oppose the attack. The latter see little action in the novel, other than in a brief scene in which they express their opposition. Most of the attackers are founders of Ruby and are seeking to restore Ruby’s purity. Some of the attackers have also had relationships with women living at the Convent, and the motives of other men involved in the attack are unclear. For example, Sergeant Person and Wisdom Poole participate in the attack, but no motives for their actions are ever provided. Menus Jury’s motive is doubly unclear. Not only is it left unexplained, but it also seems to contradict the positive relationship he has developed with women in the Convent who helped him overcome his alcoholism. The families of Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood, members of two of the founding families of Ruby, are dying out due to illness. Rivals with the Morgans, their participation in the attack grows out of a desire for self-preservation and a desire to unite their family tree with that of the Morgans. The Morgans’ nephew, K. D. Smith, has an affair with Gigi at the Convent until the women drive him away. His motives for participating in the attack are also unclear, though his hatred of Gigi motivates him to some degree. The identical twin Morgans, Deacon and Steward, are founders of Ruby. Both are bankers, and they manage Ruby’s financial affairs. Steward has no patience with outsiders and feels he knows what is best for Ruby. Deacon has an affair with Connie, and Steward—whose own marriage is marked by long fidelity—cannot forgive his brother for such an affair. Steward kills Connie in the attack. Themes and Meanings Paradise functions thematically on many levels. The book’s title, of course, recalls the biblical paradise of Eden, described in Genesis, and the sin that disrupted this paradise. It also recalls the third book of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Whether or not Morrison is intentionally drawing on these earlier texts, her novel raises issues of the

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human capacity for evil, the longing for a paradisiacal community, and the role of the supernatural in human communities. (Unlike Dante and Milton, Morrison draws on African and Brazilian spirituality rather than Christian spirituality.) Both the men in Ruby and the women in the Convent strive to create a utopian community that will preserve its members from the evils of the outside world. In the end, they all discover that the human capacity for evil lurks in the souls of even the most utopian bodies and that such a community is impossible as long as human beings lack the perfection they once possessed in paradise. Paradise also deals with the themes of racial purity, unity, and harmony. The clan at the center of Ruby—the “8-rock,” a name that refers to the darkness of their skin— has built a community that allows only like-colored members into its center. In fact, one of the reasons Ruby is falling apart is that it disallows other African Americans (especially light-skinned ones) from joining its community. Thus, Ruby’s future is less than hopeful. Not only does the Convent represent the moral disorder of the outside world—symbolized by sexual anarchy—but it also represents a loss of purity. The founding fathers cannot coexist with this impure world situated so close to their own, so they seek to eradicate it. The complex relationships between men and women are also themes of Paradise. What does love mean? Is love pure only when it occurs between men and women? What about the love of one woman for another? Are the sexual and social bonds that women form in community threatening to men, and why? Paradise depicts two worlds: Ruby, which is ruled by men, and the Convent, where women have escaped the rule of men and have gained the freedom not only to be themselves but also to challenge patriarchal rules. Critical Context Paradise was the first novel Morrison published after she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In that same year, her house in New York burned down, and she lost everything, including many of her original manuscripts. Four years later, she published Paradise. In the novel, she explored the themes of racial purity, racial hatred, love, religious truth, unity, utopia, and desire by combining the elements of historical fiction, magical realism, and mythic tales. In depicting the central event of the novel—the attack upon the Convent—she drew upon a story she had heard about a group of men who attacked and killed a group of black nuns in Brazil. Although she later learned that the story was false, it provided the tale from which would flower her mythic retelling of the ways in which communities reinvent their paradisiacal pasts. Unlike Morrison’s earlier novels, Paradise was greeted with very mixed reviews. While some critics praised the novel for its mythic structure and its strong characters, others saw it simply as a failure. According to many critics, the plot is contrived, the characters are one-dimensional, and the thematic structure of the novel yields no new insights. Some critics even called it sentimental, opaque, and reductive. The novel brings to a close the trilogy that Morrison began with Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992), but for the critics, this was the least successful of those books.

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Bibliography Bemrose, John. “Trouble in Utopia.” Maclean’s 111, no. 13 (March 20, 1998): 65. Praises Morrison for creating complex characters that reflect the foibles of real human beings. Gates, David. “Trouble in Paradise.” Newsweek 131, no. 2 (January 12, 1998): 62. Criticizes the novel for having too many characters about whom readers might care. Gray, Paul. “Paradise Found.” Time 151, no. 2 (January 19, 1998): 62-69. A fine article that situates Paradise within the context of Morrison’s life and writings. Jones, Emily. Review of Paradise, by Toni Morrison. Library Journal 123, no. 3 (February 15, 1998): 172. Praises the novel for examining the mysteries of race in explosive ways. Kakutani, Michiko. “Paradise: Worthy Women, Unredeemable Men.” The New York Times Book Review, January 6, 1998, p. E8. Finds Morrison’s novel unimaginative and lacking the brilliance of her earlier efforts. Stave, Shirley Ann. “Jazz and Paradise: Pivotal Moments in Black History.” In The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, edited by Justine Tally. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Offers a close reading of the ways that Morrison uses history in two of her novels, Jazz and Paradise. Wood, James. “The Color Purple.” The New Republic 218, no. 9 (March 2, 1998): 29-32. Discusses Morrison’s failure to elevate her novel above the level of an oppressive parable. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

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PASSING Author: Nella Larsen (1891-1964) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: 1920’s Locale: New York, New York; Chicago, Illinois First published: 1929 Principal characters: Irene Westover Redfield, the protagonist, a respected member of the black middle class of Harlem Clare Kendry (Mrs. John Bellew), Irene’s childhood friend, orphaned as a young teenager Brian Redfield, Irene’s husband, a successful black physician who longs for the opportunity to practice medicine in an environment free of racial discrimination John Bellew, Clare’s wealthy white husband Gertrude Martin, a childhood friend of Irene and Clare; she also passes for white Zulena and Liza, Irene’s maids The Novel Passing explores the psychological and social costs of racial passing on two women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. Although Irene does not, except on occasions when it is convenient, pass as white, Clare’s passing and subsequent decision to reenter parts of the black experience through her friendship with Irene disrupt the lifestyle Irene has fought so hard to maintain, doing so with tragic consequences for both women. Larsen pays special attention to the emotional bonds that connect the two women. The opening chapter begins with Irene musing over a letter she receives from Clare. Irene’s emotional state is made obvious in her reflection on what the letter’s contents might mean. She focuses on the letter’s more personal message. Clare writes about how lonely she is and how she must see Irene, as though Irene is the only person in the world who might alleviate her loneliness. The next chapter emphasizes the emotional connection between the two women. It depicts their meeting two years previously. They had not seen each other since they were teenagers. Irene has temporarily decided to pass because it is hot and humid in Chicago, where she is visiting her father and shopping for her two sons. She has tea at the top of the Drayton Hotel and meets Clare. At first, Irene is simply fascinated with the woman’s beauty and is curious as to why the woman keeps staring at her. Her first thought is that the woman might suspect that she is passing. Before long, the bold

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Clare makes her identity known. The women begin discussing old times and, briefly, new ones. During tea, Irene notes the rage she feels toward Clare, who has done the despicable in denying her race, but she also notes Clare’s beauty, thinking of Clare as a lovely creature. Clare wants Irene to come to her house for tea, and although Irene knows that she should not do it, because Clare’s husband is white, she agrees, almost as if compelled. Two years later, Irene is in the same predicament. Clare has requested another meeting, and in spite of knowing that she should not meet with her, Irene agrees. She knows that more is at risk this time because Clare, being in New York City, is on Irene’s turf. Anything outrageous or scandalous that happens will have immediate consequences on Irene’s life. Irene and Clare meet. Clare tells Irene of her plan to spend time with black people, to become reacquainted with the black experience. Against her better judgment, Irene agrees to help Clare in her plan. The novel next showcases a number of parties, racial uplift meetings, and dinners that the two women attend in Harlem. Most people are charmed with Clare, and everything seems to be working fine until Clare’s visits to the Redfield home become more frequent. Irene notes the attraction Brian has for Clare. Added to Irene’s growing jealousy is the complication of Clare’s husband, who returns from a business trip. His presence makes Clare’s getting away to be among black people more difficult and dangerous. The novel is divided into three major sections, entitled “Encounter,” “Re-Encounter,” and “Finale.” Larsen advances her story by detailing Irene’s responses to the changes in her life that Clare’s “newfound” blackness brings. At various times, Irene either hates or loves Clare, feels sorry for her or feels contempt, and wants Clare near her or banished to another part of the world. It becomes clear to Irene that Clare’s attention to Brian may be all he needs to make a decision to leave Harlem, costing Irene the material and social comfort she has worked hard to get. Irene resolves that Clare must leave her life. Irene often hopes that something will happen to remove Clare from the Redfields’ social circle. The novel’s ending, which includes Clare’s death, is ambiguous. Irene wanted Clare out of her life, but the narrative does not make it clear whether Clare accidentally fell from an apartment window, jumped, or was pushed by John Bellew or by Irene. In any event, Irene is relieved that Clare is dead. The Characters Larsen uses a third-person omniscient narrator who is always close to Irene Redfield’s thoughts and feelings. Most of the novel’s meaning depends on Irene’s character. Irene, Clare, and Brian are the most fully realized of the characters, though several relatively undeveloped characters are present, including Gertrude Martin, John Bellew, Zulena, Hugh Wentworth, and Felise Freeland. Irene is a complicated character whose exterior conventionality masks a woman who wants adventure and excitement and whose reinvolvement with Clare gives her vicarious outlets for feelings she has denied. Irene is an inauthentic woman. By dis-

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closing her thoughts, feelings, and life choices, Larsen highlights not only the extent of this inauthenticity but also how it creates a woman more dangerous in her denial of self than Clare is in her overt risk-taking. Irene has groomed herself to be a model of black middle-class respectability. She marries a physician, has two sons, lives in a respectable Harlem brownstone, associates with the right people, and supports the right social causes, such as the Negro Welfare League. On the surface, she has it all. Beneath the surface, Larsen shows the price Irene pays to live a fraudulent life. When Irene reflects on her relationship with Brian and the constant tension she has to quell to keep him from moving to Brazil and disrupting her life, she understands that she does not love him and never has. She thinks that if he were to die, she would only look askance at his photograph. She and Brian even sleep in separate bedrooms. She remains in her marriage for the financial security and social standing it provides. When Clare poses a risk to her security, Irene decides to do something about it. Most of her activity is relegated to an ever-increasing series of thoughts, first centering on how nice it would be if Clare disappeared from their circle of friends and then proceeding to visions of Clare’s death. Irene is also inauthentic in her role of mother. She makes sure that her sons are dressed, are fed well, and are doing their homework, but she takes no real interest in their lives other than wanting them not to be hurt by racism. She will not discuss racism or human sexuality with them because she thinks that if these topics are not discussed, then they do not exist. In other words, Irene “passes” as a wife and mother. Both guises make her angry and irritable just beneath the surface. Another Irene lurks deeper inside, one craving the very danger she objects to in Clare’s life. Larsen presents this part of Irene’s character through a detailing of Irene’s oscillating thoughts and feelings about Clare. In her thoughts, Irene often hates Clare, seeing her as a despicable black woman and mother, but in her actions she always lets Clare have her way, at least until the final pages of the novel. Psychologically, Irene is fascinated with Clare, with her vitality, her risk-taking, her doing what she wants to do. Irene is always preoccupied with Clare. Clare Kendry is not so preoccupied with Irene. From the beginning of the novel, Clare is presented as someone who has always taken risks to get what she wants. Her decision to pass and then to marry a white man is her most significant risk, for she can have no control over the color of any children she might have. When she meets Irene in Chicago and invites Irene and Gertrude to meet her husband, John, she is again taking risks. He might suspect not only that her friends are black but also that she is too. Reentering the black experience through Irene’s contacts is yet one more risk Clare takes. Her risks are taken with little thought as to how negative consequences might affect others, for example her child and her black friends. In this sense, Clare is willful, selfish, and daring. More important, unlike Irene, Clare makes the choices to live as she wants to, not as others might expect her to. Her decision to rejoin black people is not presented in any noble way. She does not seem to want to reidentify with black

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people. Her intention is to have experiences that satisfy her. The price for her choices is her death. Themes and Meanings Passing develops many issues that converge on the novel’s larger theme of the consequences and nuances of racial passing in the 1920’s. Larsen extends her understanding of passing to more than its obvious racial considerations. In her extended coverage of the phenomenon of passing, her focus is on those who do not live authentically. To Larsen, living inauthentically is a human tragedy. This idea is advanced most directly in her scrutiny of the Redfields, particularly Irene. Larsen critiques racial passing from the position that racial uniqueness, which in the United States includes a historical and cultural African American tradition, is not something that one should dismiss. Even as she details Clare’s reasons for passing, which include economic and social opportunity and sometimes peace of mind, Larsen suggests that these do not take the place of one’s racial culture. Clare’s reasons for wanting to reenter the black experience make the point. In spite of the wealth and leisure she has in her marriage to John Bellew, Clare misses her people. Although she is not always sincere in her determination to be a part of black people’s lives, Clare is sincere when she tells Irene how much she misses black people. The price individuals pay when they choose to pass racially is high. Many remain trapped in their new white world, forever geographically and socially separated from their people, but always spiritually connected in some way. If, as in Clare’s case, they choose to return to their people, dire consequences threaten, as evinced by John Bellew’s reaction to the knowledge that Clare is black and more poignantly by Clare’s mysterious death. Larsen’s critique of the other kinds of passing is no less severe. In her close attention to Irene’s psychology, Larsen emphasizes that living inauthentically by adhering to cultural scripts of conventionality and material possession, even within one’s race, is dangerous and damaging to the human spirit. Irene is a shell of a woman. She is intelligent and creative, but those traits are wasted in maintaining a marriage to a husband she does not love. She persists in the marriage only because she wants the upperclass life-style that it affords. Wanting to believe that Clare’s intrusion into her life is a threat to her marriage, Irene does all she can to destroy a friendship that provides her only real living. Irene’s change from doing whatever Clare says to finding ways to sever their friendship accompanies her recognition that her marriage to Brian, indeed her entire adult life, is a fraud. Rather than accept this growing understanding, Irene denies it. She thinks that if only Clare were out of the way, all else would return to normal. At the novel’s end, Larsen makes it clear that Irene’s relief at Clare’s death is temporary. At Clare’s death, Irene is faced with the knowledge that her life is empty. Her passing, like Clare’s passing, has come to naught.

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Critical Context Larsen’s Passing, like her first and more ambitious novel Quicksand (1928), explores black middle-class milieus and the lack of choices and alternatives available to women who are a part of them. Although on a surface reading the women in Passing appear to have choices, a closer scrutiny of the text suggests that they have few real options available to them. For those such as Clare who choose to pass, a white middleclass life-style, with its restrictions on possibilities for women, is offered. For women such as Irene, the same choices are present, only couched within middle-class respectability. In Quicksand, Helga Crane, the protagonist, travels across the United States and then to Europe in search of a place where she can live an authentic life. She spends much time complaining about the limited choices available to black middleclass women. For many of them, being respectable and good, which often means marrying a professional black man and having his children, are the only acceptable roles. In both novels, Larsen demonstrates the toll such limited choices take on her protagonists, who are both psychologically defeated. Larsen’s novels, furthermore, examine black middle-class women’s lives from a different and more aesthetically challenging position than those of her contemporary, Jessie Fauset. Fauset usually had her protagonists not only acquiesce to marriage but also enjoy the subservience of it. Larsen’s novels, when compared to Fauset’s, present a more in-depth treatment of black middle-class subject matter. Larsen’s novels look forward to a time when black female writers would be able to explore a wider range of subject matter and include even more options for black female characters. Deborah E. McDowell, for example, in the introduction to the 1986 America Women Writers reissue of Quicksand and Passing, suggests that Larsen proposed the alternative of lesbian sexual expression in her creation of the friendship of Irene and Clare. Black women writers of the 1980’s and 1990’s have freedom that Larsen did not have in creating character, subject matter, and theme. With two slim novels and a short story as a record of her creative production, Nella Larsen is considered by most critics of African American literature to be of seminal importance in presenting the black female character’s way of viewing the world in the 1920’s. Such acclaim began appearing in the late 1970’s, when black feminist critics looked at Larsen’s work anew and resurrected it from a critical tradition that had denied it any authority. Bibliography Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Considers Nella Larsen to be one of the most important novelists to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance. Focuses on Larsen’s aesthetic issues and on her political and social critiques. Christian, Barbara T. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 18921976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. An important discussion of black female writers that helped to bring about a new assessment of their fiction. Signifi-

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cant analysis of Nella Larsen, the integrity of her fiction, and the forward-looking quality of her vision. Davis, Thadious M. “Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic.” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin. New York: Garland, 1989. Argues that Larsen’s aesthetic faithfully captures the spirit of her times. Emphasizes the tension Larsen evokes between the social and the personal. Kaplan, Carla, ed. Passing: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, by Nella Larsen. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. This Norton Critical Edition includes the complete text of Passing, as well as contemporary reviews, twenty-first century analyses, and explications of the author’s influences and source materials. McDowell, Deborah E. Introduction to “Quicksand” and “Passing.” New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Excellent discussion of both novels that places them in a number of critical and historical contexts to elucidate their meaning. Reads Passing as a novel with obvious lesbian suggestions. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933. New York: Meridian, 1988. Presents a general and useful overview of black female writers. Has a specific discussion of Larsen’s life and her major works. Charles P. Toombs

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THE PATTERNIST SERIES Author: Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) Type of work: Five novels Type of plot: Science fiction Time of plot: 2000 b.c.e. through the future Locale: West Africa and the United States First published: Patternmaster, 1976; Mind of My Mind, 1977; Survivor, 1978; Wild Seed, 1980; Clay’s Ark, 1984 Principal characters: Teray and Coransee, the good and evil sons of Rayal, the Patternmaster Amber, Teray’s wife and a healer Mary, the first Patternmaster and the daughter of Doro Doro, a herder of psychically talented humans and the consort of Anyanwu Anyanwu/Emma, a shapeshifter and healer Alana, an Afro-Asian orphan and a diplomatic genius Elias Doyle, an anthropologist of extraterrestrial life who accidentally brings a plague back to Earth Keira, a doctor’s daughter and an exemplary survivor of the “transition” ordeal by which humans can be transformed into the superior Clayark species The Novels Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist series chronicles an alternate history of the earth and other planets, and the novels of the series are set chronologically in a different order from that in which the books were published. Wild Seed (1980) depicts events taking place from 1500 b.c.e. to the 1850’s c.e. Mind of My Mind (1977) is set in the twentieth century, through about 1970. Clay’s Ark (1984) takes place in the late twentieth century; Survivor (1978) takes place in the twenty-first century; and the first book to be published, Patternmaster (1976) is the last in chronological setting, depicting events beyond the twenty-first century. The plots of the various novels are not seamlessly joined. Instead, they depict related events in different time periods. By considering the order of the novels’ publication, one can observe progress both in the thematic structure of Butler’s work and in the artistry of her narrative style. Butler was twenty-nine when Patternmaster was published. She finished Clay’s Ark eight years later. Patternmaster portrays a distant future society that is ironically medieval in the level of its technology. This society is a classist, racist, speciesist, and sexist empire composed of Patternists, who have mental powers such as telepathy, precognition,

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and telekinesis; “mutes,” or humans without mental powers; and the mutated Clayarks, who are sentient but regarded as animals. The plot concerns the power struggle set off by the death of King Rayal, the Patternmaster, between his sons Teray and Coransee. Favored by his father, Teray is triumphant. Teray wins the sympathy of Amber the healer, as well as some readers, by being kind to a Clayark. Mind of My Mind portrays the classist, racist, sexist United States of the second half of the twentieth century, during which Doro, the Pattern creator, fights Mary, one of his many daughters. Mary kills her father and thereby wrests control of his hegemony from him with the support of Emma, Doro’s old and ambivalent consort. Mary’s preeminent mental power allows her to create a network for the Patternist people with her dominant and benevolent will at its center. Survivor, first drafted in the late 1960’s before Patternmaster was written, presents white missionaries, their followers, and their adopted Afro-Asian daughter Alanna Verrick, who leave behind the Patternist Earth of the later twentieth century to start a human colony on the planet Kohn, half of whose indigenous species is addicted to a powerful drug called “meklah.” None of these characters possesses mental powers. Alanna’s strengths are her capacity to experience the agony of radical change and her genius for revolutionary diplomacy. She twice undergoes addiction and life-threatening withdrawal from meklah. She marries and has a child with a Tehkohn leader male and negotiates withdrawal from meklah and safe resettlement for her human parents and their followers. Wild Seed, perhaps Butler’s single best novel, narrates the story of the beginning of the Pattern by Doro, a three-thousand-year-old African being who steals bodies and extinguishes minds. He finds the three-hundred-year-old, charismatic, and shapeshifting healer Anyanwu (the Emma of Mind of My Mind) in West Africa. Doro forces Anyanwu to join him as the mother of a portion of his “family” of humans with mental potential. Together, they travel the historic Middle Passage of the slave trade, following a group of kidnapped Africans to antebellum America. Doro must kill to live. Anyanwu mutates, and she heals herself and others. Between them there develops a tortuous bond of loathing, hate, and love. Clay’s Ark was the last Patternist novel to be published. In it, the twenty-first century African American Elias Doyle returns to the southwestern United States from a space voyage to Proxima Centauri carrying a “plague” that will transform many of the younger humans on Earth into a superior species that will replace humanity, turning many humans into fur-covered quadrupeds. A doctor’s daughter, Keira, is cured of her leukemia through the plague’s syndrome of transformation, becoming also one of Elias’s sexual partners and perhaps the mother of one of his children. The Characters The characters of the Patternist series are largely allegorical, and their moral register is usually clear. They allow Butler to speak with oracular elocution through many masks. This oracular quality and the accompanying sobriety of her narratives reflect the Old Testament influence the author explicitly acknowledged. The characters rep-

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resent personalities that might bring forth a species that is not as fatally self-mutilating as humanity seems to be. In the 1970’s, Butler joined Samuel R. Delany in bringing to African American literature the poetics of science fiction narrative. Butler employed simple syntax and an active voice to craft dramatic narratives in a fashion reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s literary naturalism. Her particular use of such a style proved as fitting for her fantastic stories of elemental perseverance in the face of violent and tragic struggle as was Hemingway’s to his more realist subject matter. In Butler’s naturalistic science fiction, characters have hyperbolic, exaggerated powers, and they live their parables through stories that amplify and illuminate the endless pain of Earth’s underclass masses. The moral polarity of her universe is summed up in two characters: Doro is an entity that exists by migrating from human body to human body, killing each new consciousness with his own and using each body until it weakens and dies. His ancient purpose is to find and “herd” humans gifted with mental powers, who “taste” better to him as host bodies. Anyanwu is endlessly young, because she can use her mental powers to renew the aging cells of her body. She can also change her DNA and shift into the shape of any living creature or become biologically male. In addition, she too can “taste” people and can make a medicine in her saliva to heal them, and she can cause them to regrow lost body parts. Doro is the symbol of an almost preternatural project of impersonal violence that Butler sees in the universe. Anyanwu (and the character’s other incarnations) is a compassionate healer. Female personalities ground Butler’s narrative. Virtually all are annealed by male violence. The cause may be nothing more than human tendencies toward particular gender roles. Doro and Anyanwu are nonetheless compelling as figures of messianic stature in a naturalistic cosmology in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and Hemingway. Themes and Meanings The themes that would emerge in Butler’s later work were initiated in the Patternist series, most brilliantly in Wild Seed. These themes would become explicit in Xenogenesis (1987-1989). For example, the longevity of Doro and Anyanwu in Wild Seed dramatizes a historical, millennial vision that is repeated in the author’s later works. The series is also demonstrative of the prevailing sobriety of Butler’s narratives. With the exception of the shape-shifting play of Anyanwu in Wild Seed, the novels present little potential for comedy. Instead, they tell grim tales of revolutionary portent, portraying humanity’s repeated acts of inhumanity through a history wherein this barbarism is not, Butler clearly hopes, the only choice. The tropes of these novels are violence, change, pain, the brief consolation of love, death, grief, phoenix-like rebirth, and renewed Sisyphean struggle. They relate the abuse of power by incompetent and immoral agencies—by parents, governments, and empires. They desperately interrogate the real history of humanity. Butler longs to find an exercise of power that does not corrupt. In the Patternist se-

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ries, she begins the search for a solution to the problem she later named in Xenogenesis: nature’s chiastic strategy of putting intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior. This strategy for Butler represents the ultimate amplification of natural selection, a virtual reification and apotheosis of dispassionate violence. It is what Doro represents in the Patternist series. Using her declared strategy of treating storytelling as a search for new possible realities, Butler crafts narratives that are crucibles in search of people and depicts species who practice sympathy and compassion with the existential other—the sexual, racial, species, evolutionary, and cosmological other. Her most heroic Patternist personality is Anyanwu, who identifies with creatures by “tasting” them and replicating their DNA in herself, thereby knowing them well enough that she can practically become them. Anyanwu’s behavior comes close to representing metaphorically the New Testament creed to love one’s neighbor as oneself. This creed represents the subtext of both Mind of My Mind and Butler’s later Parable novels. Critical Context All of Butler’s writing is consciously parabolic and leaves no human question unaddressed. Her last novel, Fledgling (2005), with its post-African heroine Shori pursues the meaning of being human. It also explores what humans do not seem to be able to be. It proposes a significantly improved species—which, shockingly, happens to be vampiric. Some version of this vision informs all of Butler’s works, from the Patternist series through Kindred (1979), a fictional slave narrative; Xenogenesis, in which humanity is found tragically to put its intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior; and the Parable novels (1993-1998), which portray ordinary humans wandering on a wasting earth. Anyanwu may be seen as a precursor of the gene-trading Oankali of Xenogenesis. Butler’s prize-winning short story “Bloodchild” also echoes the exploration of human nature and human history evident throughout Butler’s work. Her characters represent her search for new ways of conceiving both humanity and sentience. They are biologically and physiologically sturdier. They question the myths of gender superiority, monogamy as imperative, heterosexuality as exclusively moral, and supernatural interest in or deliverance of humanity. In this agenda, love is real and widely available, but it is also fleeting and dies easily in the progress of power and hierarchy. The ecstasy of an individual consciousness can transport a person, but its time is brief. It dies. It is survived by that final rite of grief that is hope. Bibliography Anderson, Crystal S. “The Girl Isn’t White: New Racial Dimensions in Octavia Butler’s Survivor.” Extrapolation 47, no. 1 (2006): 35-50. Argues that Survivor’s AfroAsian Alana epitomizes “strategies of negotiation” by Afro-Americans who engage other ethnic groups. Butler, Octavia. “‘Radio Imagination’: Octavia Butler on the Poetics of Narrative Embodiment.” Interview by Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating. MELUS 26, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): 45-76. Butler discusses the meanings and narrative strategies behind all of her writing.

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Call, Lewis. “Structures of Desire: Erotic Power in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.” Rethinking History 9, nos. 2/3 (June/September, 2005): 275-296. Interprets Wild Seed as in part a story of an ultimately wholesome love affair between a paternal Doro and earth-mother Anyanwu. DeGraw, Sharon. “‘The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same’: Gender and Sexuality in Octavia Butler’s Oeuvre.” Femspec 4, no. 2 (June, 2003): 219. Reprises the Patternist series (except Clay’s Ark) and finds Patternmaster to be set nominally in the future but actually culturally and technologically in the past, before Wild Seed. Observes that the status of women remains the same, second class, in all the books of the series. Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1984): 82-87. Links four Patternist works to Kindred, a novel Butler once intended as part of the Patternist series. Sands, Peter. “Octavia Butler’s Chiastic Cannibalistics.” Utopian Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 1-14. Sees in Butler’s use of cannibalism a crucial representation of otherness, one that mirrors the attitudes of some rhetorical theory. Vint, Sherryl. “Becoming Other: Animals, Kinship, and Butler’s Clay’s Ark.” Science Fiction Studies 32, no. 2 (July, 2005): 281-300. Anchored by an interpretation of the transformation in Clay’s Ark of principal characters into animal-human hybrids as an improvement of the species. Traces to other Patternist narratives (except Survivor) Butler’s similarly approving dramatization of human/animal and human/subhuman combination and interbreeding. Wood, Sarah. “Subversion Through Inclusion: Octavia Butler’s Interrogation of Religion in Xenogenesis and Wild Seed.” Femspec 6, no. 1 (June, 2005): 87. Claims Butler’s fiction “admonishes unquestioning reliance on religious myths.” John R. Pfeiffer

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PHILADELPHIA FIRE Author: John Edgar Wideman (1941Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Social criticism Time of plot: 1960’s and 1980’s Locale: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania First published: 1990

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Principal characters: Cudjoe, a would-be writer working as a barman on the Greek island of Mykonos; he returns to Philadelphia Simba (Simmie) Mintu, a young boy orphaned as a result of the police attack on the MOVE compound Margaret Jones, Cudjoe’s sole direct link to the fire and therefore to Simba John Africa (James Brown), the charismatic leader of the MOVE organization, the “dirtiest man” Margaret Jones ever saw John Edgar Wideman, the novelist and, in the second of the book’s three parts, the narrator J. B., a strange figure who plays a prominent but decidedly ambiguous part in the novel’s final section The Novel After learning of the 1985 police attack on the Philadelphia headquarters of John Africa’s MOVE organization, an attack that destroyed fifty-three houses and killed eleven people, Cudjoe, a once-promising black novelist, leaves the Greek island where he has been living since his divorce and returns to Philadelphia. There he hopes to find some explanation for this seemingly senseless tragedy, and then, like Wideman, to write about it. First he must locate Simba, the child who escaped the fire at the MOVE compound. Simba, orphaned as a result of the fire, stands for all the novel’s lost children, including Cudjoe’s biracial children now living with their mother; Wideman’s imprisoned son, who along with Wideman figures prominently in the second of the novel’s three parts; the inner-city youths whom Cudjoe taught before abandoning them in order to pursue his own higher education; and finally the younger Cudjoe, who sought to escape both his identity and his responsibility as an African American. At the sparsely attended funeral service for the eleven victims of the fire, “White college kids riff and scat an elegy for four voices.” Philadelphia Fire is itself an elegy for multiple voices written by an author who, although not himself white, has, like Cudjoe, gained entrance to the white world and enjoyed the “Power Money Things” coveted by Kaliban’s Kiddie Korps (KKK), the youths whom Cudjoe had taught earlier in his life and who now communicate through graffiti and violence. The novel

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mourns the eleven direct victims of the fire along with the child Simba, living but lost, for all practical purposes one of the KKK; Wideman’s son; Cudjoe’s children; and more generally the idealism of the 1960’s that resulted in so few changes in the lives of so many black Americans. Bringing a “riff and scat” style to bear on so conservative and conventional a literary form as the elegy poses considerable difficulties for both the writer and especially his readers, who may well assume that elegy, social criticism, and narrative innovation should remain separate. Formidable as these difficulties may be, they are central to the novel’s purpose. Divided into three progressively shorter parts, Philadelphia Fire is written in a prose that is at once elliptical and densely packed, filled with social detail and mythic resonance. There is little plot as such and even less linear development. The novel’s multiple narratives probe the interior lives of its characters, dropping them and readers into a nightmarish reality vaguely reminiscent of that earliest (and most gothic) of Philadelphia fictions, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn: Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (part 1, 1799; part 2, 1800), set, like Wideman’s short story “Fever,” during the scarlet fever epidemic of 1793. Ultimately, Philadelphia Fire is no more gothic than it is conventionally elegiac. “Maybe this is a detective story,” Cudjoe wonders at one point. If it is, then it is a convoluted one, one that even in its final paragraph chooses to compound the mystery rather than resolve it: Cudjoe hears footsteps behind him. A mob howling his name. Screaming for blood. Words come to him, cool him, stop him in his tracks. He’d known them all his life. Never again. Never again. He turns to face whatever it is rumbling over the stones of Independence Square.

Whatever Cudjoe is about to discover is left unclear, as unclear as the identity of the enigmatic J. B., who figures prominently yet ambiguously in the novel’s concluding section. The only certainty is that Cudjoe has stopped running. He is now willing to face all that he once sought to evade and that, since he heard of the fire and returned to Philadelphia, has evaded him, especially as a novelist. “Words fail me,” Wideman writes midway through the novel, “because there are no words for what’s happening. I am a witness.” He is witness chiefly to his own perplexity, which also belongs to Cudjoe and even to readers, who must negotiate a novel the form of which is complex and vehemently nontraditional. Philadelphia Fire recounts several parallel stories, each reflecting the others as if in some surreal funhouse. The Characters The visual metaphor of the novel as a hall of mirrors has its verbal equivalent in Wideman’s relay of narrative voices. Cudjoe, for example, plays the part of the Pied Piper. Magician and musician, he is also the one who writes and the one about whom is written. “Why this Cudjoe, then?” Wideman (now as narrator) asks. “This airy other floating into the shape of my story. Why am I him when I tell certain parts? Why am I hiding from myself? Is he mirror or black hole?” The novel serves as both mirror

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and black hole, reflecting and devouring, shedding light (wisdom) and preventing its escape, its real subject being an absence (Simba, for example) detectable only by virtue of the bodies (planetary or human) caught in its gravitational pull. Wideman’s characters are similarly constructed. They are mirrors and voids rather than stable subjects: shifting, shapeless, voiceless (insofar as they have no voice of their own), and disembodied. Having no (one) voice of its own, the novel, like its characters, speaks in an amazing multiplicity of ventriloquized voices and interpolated styles and forms: nursery rhymes, biblical echoes, the radio monologue of a rapper, a dialogue between two mayors (one black, one white), and passages from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623) and other texts. It also uses more conventional narrative devices such as dialogue, description, indirect discourse, letters, and a notebook passage. Cudjoe’s thinking and remembering often takes the form of editing, and much of Margaret Jones’s story takes the highly mediated form of a tape recording that Cudjoe plays and fast forwards at will. The narrative discontinuity reflects and echoes the discontinuity of the characters’ (especially Cudjoe’s and Wideman’s) lives as well as a postmodern conception of the human subject and the part narrative plays in its formation. The second part of the novel, for example, begins by forgoing even the minimal continuity evident in the novel’s opening section, intruding a second narrative presence that both merges with and diverges from Cudjoe. It opens with a brief objective description of the May 13, 1985, police attack on the MOVE headquarters in West Philadelphia. The next paragraph begins, “Pretend for a moment that none of this happened. . . . Pretend we can imagine our events into existence. . . . Imagine our fictions imagining us.” A later paragraph quotes from the Annals of Philadelphia for 1850, while the next section quotes in part from, and retrospectively comments on, a telephone conversation that Wideman has with his imprisoned son. The next section, longer still, recounts how Wideman and his wife watched live television coverage of the Philadelphia fire, an account made strange by the fact that it starts out in the second person (“push button scanning of all available channels, flipping, clicking, twentynine cable options and none satisfactory so you choose them all and choose none, cut and paste images, you are the director, driver, pilot, boss hoss, captain, the switch is in your hand”) only itself to “switch” in mid-paragraph to first person. Wideman develops, or structures, his characters in much the same way that he structures the novel’s plot and establishes its setting, the city that is virtually a character in its own right. Nowhere is this mode of characterization more apparent than in Wideman’s handling of the enigmatic J. B., who figures prominently in the novel’s concluding section. J. B. seems less a character than a composite sketch, the “Everyman” of medieval allegories. J. B. is, however, an Everyman who has no hope of reaching the Celestial City, for he finds himself not in an allegory but in a labyrinth of race and poverty, in the city of brotherly love transmogrified into the inner city of “brothelly” love. Literally a black derelict, J. B. is also John Africa, born James Brown, escaped (like Simba) from the Osage Street fire. He is a version of Simba but also one of Hitler escaped from his bunker, Christ risen from his tomb, and the leg-

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endary phoenix reborn from its own ashes. Among other things, J. B. is a Caribbean trying to find work in order to buy the freedom of his wife and children who are being held hostage (although they may already be dead), perhaps in the Dominican Republic or neighboring Haiti, where Cudjoe’s former wife, now remarried, lives with her and Cudjoe’s children. J. B. is also someone who, like Cudjoe but unlike many innercity African American men, did not fight in Vietnam. That appears to be the only suffering that this black version of Archibald MacLeish’s J. B. from J. B.: A Play in Verse (1958), a rendering of the biblical Job, has been spared. Wideman’s J. B. is both Job and a God weary of having to tame the light every morning and of “playing father son and holocaust to the kids running wild in the streets and vacant lots,” presumably the same KKK that sets the sleeping J. B. on fire one morning. J. B. is also singer James Brown, singer of the blues that reflect the lives of African Americans, whose fate is to be both anonymous and demonized. Themes and Meanings Philadelphia Fire begins its meditation on the origins and meanings of the holocaust on Osage Avenue with William Penn’s instructions for the placement of houses in the middle of grass plats to ensure that the city would always be green and wholesome and “never be burnt.” It ends with the memorial service for those who died in the fire. The memorial program offers hope, but the poor attendance leads the narrator to comment, “Yes, there’s a party. Problem is, looks like Philadelphia ain’t coming.” The collective failure of the largely white city to mourn the deaths of eleven of its citizens or to acknowledge its responsibility for their tragic fate is merely the last in a series of betrayals and abandonments, both public and private. Between Cudjoe’s guilt over his children and Wideman’s anguish over the fate of his son and over the mayor’s handling of MOVE as an urban renewal problem, the novel offers various images of a society that has become the antithesis of the one William Penn envisioned three centuries earlier. The local university dismantles its school of social work on the grounds that its city-centered approach runs counter to the university’s newly defined “international” mission. As the narrator explains, “The forces at work in the University mirrored those in the larger society.” There are more private visions of the horror, including Cudjoe’s dream in which, cut off at the knees, he becomes the helpless witness to “a boy lynched from the rim” of a basketball hoop. Philadelphia Fire is Wideman’s version of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927) combined into one narrative. It explores the deepening of racial and socioeconomic divisions and the threat of forgetting that hangs over the Osage Street fire. Wideman, in his role as narrator/character, realizes that he must write his son’s story and that “not dealing with it may be causing the forgetfulness” he experiences, a forgetfulness that contributes to the novel’s troubling but purposeful discontinuity. To remember means both to recall and to reassemble a dismembered whole. As witness, Cudjoe/Wideman sees but does not claim to understand the “moral” of the scene before him any more than he claims to know exactly where and when the metaphorical fire in fact began (with Jackie Rob-

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inson, he wonders, or with William Penn?). If “looking backward” leads to uncertainty, then looking ahead leads to a form of qualified despair or, alternatively, a minimalist hope. Thus comes Wideman’s advice to his son, “Hold on,” and J. B.’s advice to himself, “On with it.” Philadelphia Fire offers a succession of failures to do just that, to get “on with it.” These include the ambitious production of The Tempest that Cudjoe’s ten- and eleven-year-old inner-city students rehearse but never have the chance to perform. Offering a set of variations on a Shakespearean theme, the novel retells The Tempest in a double sense: telling again and telling differently. Cudjoe’s version is first rained out and then abandoned when Cudjoe leaves teaching to pursue his own higher education. In succeeding where the students fail, Cudjoe and Wideman in effect become prosperous (or even Prosperos), at least for a time. Critical Context Robert Bone, author of the seminal study The Negro Novel in America (1958), has called Wideman “perhaps the most gifted black novelist of his generation.” Wideman began his writing career showing little interest in the African American tradition. He seemed more interested in and aware of the tradition that began with the eighteenth century English novel, which was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Wideman has cited Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne as major influences on his work. His dense style, stream-of-consciousness technique, and formal experimentation, all of which derive from that tradition as transformed by writers such as James Joyce, set him apart still further from his African American heritage and more particularly the influential Black Arts movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The black literary movement has come to exert a powerful, if belated, influence on Wideman’s writing, particularly after his agreement, after some initial reluctance, to establish a black studies program at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970’s, shortly after his years in England as a Rhodes scholar. Beginning with The Lynchers (1973) and, after an eight-year “silence,” continuing with his highly acclaimed The Homewood Trilogy (1985: includes Damballah, 1981; Hiding Place, 1981; and Sent for You Yesterday, 1983), Wideman’s work began to show the results of his immersion in a literary tradition that was at once foreign to him and yet his own. His books have also been increasingly personal. They include his thoughts on his return to the Homewood section of Pittsburgh where he grew up; a nonfiction account of himself and his brother, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without parole (Brothers and Keepers, 1984); and Philadelphia Fire. “In America, especially if you’re black,” Wideman has said, “there is a temptation to buy a kind of upward mobility. One of the requirements is to forget. Eventually I felt impoverished by that act.” Forgetfulness and impoverishment are the twin themes upon which Philadelphia Fire plays its disturbing variations. Combining trenchant social criticism and postmodern narrative techniques, Philadelphia Fire is, like Cudjoe’s planned production of The Tempest, a work of great daring, impassioned artistry, and exceptional courage. It is also a novel that, in risking so much, risks being

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misread. The same year that Middle Passage (1990)—another densely (but playfully) intertextual novel about racial divisions—won the National Book Award, its author, Charles Johnson, summed up Philadelphia Fire, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this way: “And there you have it: a novel in which we learn nothing new about the MOVE incident, a book brimming over with brutal, emotional honesty and moments of beautiful prose lyricism . . . but by no means a page turner.” In a novel that combines so many literary traditions and covers so much ground, encouraging the turning of pages no longer seems quite the virtue in a novel that Johnson believes it to be. Bibliography Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. An excellent, although brief, introduction to Wideman’s writing through The Homewood Trilogy. Bell’s discussion of Wideman’s shift from a Eurocentric to an African American tradition is particularly good. Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. This highly sympathetic study traces Wideman’s movement “from an uncritical acceptance of the forms and themes of mainstream modernism as practiced by white literary masters to a black voicing of modernism and postmodernism that is consistent with Afro-American perspectives and reflects a commitment to the needs of the black community.” Concludes with an interview of Wideman conducted in 1988. O’Brien, John. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. In an early but important interview, Wideman discusses the modernist influence on his first three novels and the importance of myths and “racial memories,” particularly in The Lynchers. Pinckney, Darryl. “’Cos I’m a So-o-oul Man: The Back-Country Blues of John Edgar Wideman.” Times Literary Supplement, August 23, 1991, 19-20. Pinckney reviews Fever (1989) and Philadelphia Fire in the contexts of Wideman’s career and the larger cultural shift that has made Wideman’s return to his African American roots both explicable and predictable. Although he praises Fever for its range of characters and “carefully realized” situations, Pinckney finds Philadelphia Fire to be marred by Wideman’s penchant for profundity. Overall, “Wideman suffers from a wish to prove that he can be both poetic and funky.” Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview with John Edgar Wideman.” Callaloo 13 (Winter, 1990): 47-61. Wideman discusses his background, his earliest interest in writing, the impact of his return to the United States in 1967 following his Rhodes scholarship, and use of “public history” in The Lynchers, Fever, and Philadelphia Fire. TuSmith, Bonnie, and Keith E. Byerman, eds. Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Collection of essays on a wide range of issues in Wideman’s work. Includes four separate essays on Philadelphia Fire. Robert A. Morace

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A PHOTOGRAPH Lovers in Motion Author: Ntozake Shange (Paulette Williams, 1948) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Psychological realism Time of plot: Late twentieth century Locale: San Francisco, California First produced: 1977, at the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York, New York First published: 1981 Principal characters: Sean David, the protagonist, an amoral, struggling photographer Michael, Sean’s female live-in lover, a dancer who listens to his artistic ambitions Earl, an attorney and longtime friend of Sean who serves as a liaison between Sean and the women who cluster around him Nevada, a wealthy attorney and patron for Sean Claire, a hedonistic model used by Sean in his photographs The Play A Photograph: Lovers in Motion details the complex relationship between artistic creation, sex, and love in the life of photographer Sean David. Largely enacted within his San Francisco flat, the play traces his evolving relationship with a boyhood friend, an artistic patron, a model, and his current lover. The constant touchstones are his artistic ambitions and his developing commitment to Michael, his lover. In involved discussions, Sean explains his aggressive artistic philosophy to Michael. In an early scene, as he shows her his photographs, he states his goals. “i’m gonna go ona rampage . . . this camera’s gonna get em.” His art, as he explains, is a means of re-creating the world “in my image.” Photography, for Sean, is a tool for filling the holes in his life; he tells Michael, “give me a camera & i cd get you anything you wanted.” For Sean and Michael, artistic creation is inextricably connected to their daily lives. Because their discussions often take place on their bed, the focus naturally shifts to sex and relationships. Both reject any “normal” romantic conception of heterosexual love. Michael explains to Sean why she is attracted to him. She tells him “i’ve kept a lover/ who waznt all-american/ who didnt believe/ wdnt straighten up. . . . i loved yr bitterness and hankered after that space in you where you are outta control.” Sean’s conversations with Michael are interrupted periodically by Earl, Nevada, and Claire. Each wants a piece of Sean, for each sees his or her life as interwoven with Sean’s art. Sean controls their wishes and actions, thus revealing the ability of his artistic vision to corrupt.

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Sex and sensuality are never far from the surface of the play. The selfish and decadent implications of Sean’s goals are revealed in earthy scenes with Claire, his model. The first modeling session portrays Claire and Sean moving, in a well-oiled dance of lust and desire, from abuse to sex. Sean encourages the willing Claire to pour whiskey over herself and speak of her sexual accomplishments as a prelude to sex. Although Sean delights in Claire’s actions, she is not a passive victim. Like each of the characters, she has a philosophy that dictates her actions. Her “artistic” vision is vitally connected to the need to be desired. In a later scene, she explains that the foundations for her actions emanate from advice from her father. “yr body is the blood & the flesh/ god gave his only daughter/ to save alla his sons. . . . give a man exactly what he wants & he wants you/ simple as that.” Sean uses Earl and Nevada just as brazenly. Seeing themselves as the architects of Sean’s development, they often discuss their role as collaborators. Since in their eyes, Sean is an unfinished work of art they can influence, Earl and Nevada “know” what the photographer needs. Referring to their material success and social status, Earl explains to Nevada that Sean must attain “what you & i have.” Sean “needs some sense of his future.” Although Earl and Nevada, both attorneys flush in middle-class comfort, are confident in prescribing what Sean lacks, they are far from being “free.” Both speak often about the freedom they possess, yet in their continued involvement with Sean, both encourage new forms of enslavement. Earl passively accepts verbal abuse and helplessly watches Sean engage in sexual acts with his former girlfriend, Claire. Nevada, Sean’s wealthy patron, persistently tries to buy Sean’s affection, even as she is rejected and ridiculed. As she recounts how Earl and Sean once “let” her “be wild” after she passed her bar exam, she reveals that her money cannot buy her vision of a romantic relationship in which she is dependent on a dominant man. Sean rejects her attempts to “give him some part of me like in the bar.” Discussions about freedom and enslavement appear in a number of overlapping scenes. As each character recounts incidents from the past, the specter of oppression becomes a haunting, ever-present image. Each feels the lingering effects of various forms of enslavement. In contrast to Earl and Nevada, who seem eager to forget their African American heritage and join a mainstream culture, Claire never lets the others forget the effects of racial identity. She reminds the others that Alexandre Dumas (Sean’s spiritual hero) was a “niggah.” Ignoring their soaring ambitions for his art, Claire suggests that Sean, like Dumas, still retains this “acrid stench.” The effects of this shared African American heritage permeate the play, though each character reacts to it differently. Sean, in particular, is haunted by his past. As the play fades back to scenes of Michael and Sean discussing their relationship, a portrait of Sean’s childhood with an absent, drug-abusing father emerges. The new form of slavery he has inherited entails an impulse toward self-destruction and an inability to love. Unable to form commitments, he aggressively demands that others allow him to take what he “needs.” Thus, even as he tells Michael that she is the driving force in his life, he insists that he needs other women to fuel his art.

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Michael responds to these demands with an independence that the other women do not possess. Rejecting a relationship built upon subservience, she tells Sean “i’m physically incapable of chasing & arguing abt a man.” As the play progresses, it becomes evident that Michael possesses a strength and vision that the others gravitate toward. Both Sean and Claire attack this strength. Michael counters Claire’s attempts to seduce her, and unlike the others, remains unmoved by Sean’s contrived and brutal photographs. She draws on a heritage of strong women who held families together when the men were destroyed by white culture. Unlike Sean’s family, her “people took care of themselves.” She tells him “dont nobody own history/ cant nobody make ours but us.” The ability to “rewrite” her history daily is the foundation of her art. The poetic song that accompanies her dance is a powerful refrain that echoes her strength. I can move be free in time/ a moment is mine always . . . I’m a rustlin of dead leaves collections of ol women by the weddin the legs of a cotton club queen . . . I’m gonna dance for all of us . . . I can always remember make it come again . . .

Her independence and the force of her vision draw Sean to her. By the end of the play, she demands a commitment of love from him as well as his rejection of other women. She denounces his desire to harden and kill, in both his art and his relationships, and forces him to confront his racial heritage. She asks him, “if not now when.” Ultimately, she demands that he find “treasures” that will make art and life resonate. Themes and Meanings Relationships between friends and lovers inevitably are complex. When they are complicated further by ambitions, the effects of artistic aims, racial heritage, class structure, and gender identity, the complexity is often overwhelming. Ntozake Shange, building upon African American and feminist traditions, argues for life-sustaining sources of art and for relationships based on honesty, independence, and a sense of community. In A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, the characters reveal the complex sides of their African American heritage. Sean and Earl symbolize what some would suggest are the troubles of many black men. Sean perpetrates the neglect, self-abuse, and inability to nurture learned from his father. Unwilling to commit to a relationship or to conceive of a friendship not based upon exploitation, he exists as a stagnant and destructive force. Devoid of “healthy” male role models, Sean and Earl construct their present out of the chaos of the past. Only Michael is able to use the past as a healthy tool for constructing the present. Her links to strong matriarchal black women who held families together and fought adversity when men were rendered helpless contrast with the past offered to Sean and Earl. Her heritage is filled with examples of self-sacrificing, independent women able to take care of themselves and others. While Sean allows his past to tear him down, Michael embraces the experiences of women who preceded her and uses these as a foundation of strength.

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Shange also illustrates the dangers for both men and women of blindly accepting romantic gender roles. Claire and Nevada are uncritical victims, dependent on dominating male figures. Because she accepts her father’s image of women as objects of desire, Claire falls into debauchery, loneliness, and ultimate despair. Nevada also is a victim of role conditioning. Despite her economic independence and social status, she still seeks the “enslavement” of subservience. In this regard, Michael again stands in contrast, as an independent woman who demands honesty and commitment in a relationship, whose “life’s work” can exist without the “prop” of a man to serve. The dialogue between Sean and Michael explores how art can serve as a constructive force in both the artist’s life and the larger culture. Based on an aggressive ambition and a lust for exploitation, Sean’s art is frozen and static. Michael’s art, the dance, is fluid and alive, tied intimately to the earthy “dance” of women who nurtured her. In contrast to Sean’s art, which denies the reality of his past, Michael’s dance re-creates and “rewrites” the heritage that created her. Rejection of values that hinder loving relationships is a central theme. Thus, Earl and Nevada’s reliance on materialism and status and Claire’s hedonism and street sensuality are rejected. Also rejected are confining sex roles for both men and women as well as attempts to deny the influences of race, culture, and history. Shange’s poetic dialogue, her fluid transitions within scenes, and her rejection of standard English and conventional punctuation connect her prose to the dance and to the tradition of vibrant storytellers. Shange’s rejection of traditional forms mirrors her rejection of conventional explanations and conclusions. Critical Context Drawing directly on stylistic concerns of an African American heritage, A Photograph: Lovers in Motion has been praised for its insights into romantic relationships, for its portrayal of the African American middle class, and for its critical look at the sources of artistic expression. Although the play depicts uniquely American characters and themes, Shange herself has suggested that her influences reach beyond the American experience. Her poems, plays, novels, and essays build upon poetry, jazz, and traditional oral traditions from Latin American, African, and African American sources. Scholar and critic Paul Carter Harrison includes Shange among black writers from many countries who use a common “iconography.” Harrison suggests that building upon traditional forms and rhythms exposes a communal memory that can help produce “the critical insights required to deal with profound feelings of alienation.” Learning to deal with the self-hatred produced by alienation from the dominant white culture is a central theme in this play and in other key works by female African American writers from Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Walker. Editor and essayist Cheryl Wall argues that Shange and other black female writers have established a new literary tradition that cannot be evaluated without taking into account gender, race, and women’s sexuality. The themes reflected in Shange’s poetry, plays, and novels reveal these multiple contexts at work.

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Distinguished editor Mary Helen Washington sees Shange as a pioneer in demystifying female sexuality. Along with other feminist critics, Washington suggests that by placing women as strong solitary figures, artists can undermine culturally ingrained roles for women in romantic plots. When characters such as Michael reject “male-dominated forms,” they can then begin the work of re-creating the future. Because Shange consistently depicts contemporary themes and portrays African American culture as complex and diverse, her work often has been controversial. Some critics argue that Shange harshly portrays the black male experience and devalues traditional heterosexual relationships. Because, as Mary Helen Washington suggests, Shange often “locates much of women’s oppression in the sexual arena,” this controversy will follow her work. Bibliography Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, eds. Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: William Morrow, 1987. A collection of interviews exploring the sources of inspiration for contemporary female playwrights. Shange’s interview connects writing to the rhythmic and visceral world of dance. Shange explores political and cultural links to Latin American and Third World writers and discusses the effects of performance art on her writing. Fisher, James. “‘Boogie Woogie Landscapes’: The Dramatic/Poetic Collage of Ntozake Shange.” In Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook, edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Routledge, 2007. Reading of Shange’s work at the intersection of theater and poetic practice. Harrison, Paul Carter, ed. Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World Repertory. New York: Grove Press, 1989. A collection of plays from eminent African American, African, and Afro-Caribbean writers. The introduction links Shange and other writers to the social, political, and cultural roots of the black world repertory. The heart of this tradition is a connection to ritualized roots, non-Western rhythms, and culturally ingrained improvisation. Links to the black church, to poetry, to jazz, and to oral traditions are fully realized in Shange’s writing. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Portraits of contemporary writers. Includes a thorough and fascinating look at Shange’s artistic development. Wall, Cheryl A., ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. A collection of essays from academic feminist critics committed to black female writers. The introduction emphasizes the need to rethink the concept of tradition as it applies to Shange and other contemporary black female writers and argues for evaluating these writers in multiple contexts. Connects Shange to feminist, cultural, and political concerns. Washington, Mary Helen, ed. Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds: Stories by and About Black Women. New York: Anchor Books, 1989. A diverse collection of

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works by contemporary black female writers. In a preface to Shange’s stories, Washington connects Shange’s stories, poems, and plays to feminist concerns with heterosexual relations and suggests that creating women who are strong solitary figures undermines the traditional romantic plot. Shange’s rejection of Standard English reflects her insistence on independence from male-dominated forms. Mark W. Vogel

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THE PIANO LESSON Author: August Wilson (1945-2005) Type of work: Play Type of plot: Social realism; historical realism Time of plot: 1937 Locale: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania First produced: 1987, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut First published: 1990 Principal characters: Boy Willie Charles, a brash thirty-year-old man with an infectious grin and a boyish charm Berniece, Boy Willie’s sister, a thirty-five-year-old widow Doaker Charles, the brother of Boy Charles, who was the father of Berniece and Boy Willie Lymon, Boy Willie’s twenty-nine-year-old companion Avery, a suitor of Berniece Winning Boy, Doaker’s brother Maretha, Berniece’s eleven-year-old daughter Grace, a woman who comes home with Boy Willie and later with Lymon The Play All the action of the play takes place in the kitchen and parlor of Doaker Charles’s house, which, though sparsely furnished, has an old upright piano in the parlor. The piano’s legs are covered with mask-like figures, artfully carved in the manner of African sculpture. When the play begins, it is five o’clock in the morning and Boy Willie is at the front door banging and shouting. Doaker admits Boy Willie and Lymon, who have just arrived from the South with a truckload of watermelons. Boy Willie soon informs Doaker that Sutter, a descendant of the white family that once owned the Charles family, has died, that Sutter’s brother wants to sell Boy Willie the remaining one hundred acres of Sutter’s farm, and that he, Boy Willie, intends to sell the piano as a means of helping him buy the land. Doaker calmly tells him that Berniece “ain’t gonna sell that piano.” After Berniece is heard screaming from upstairs because she has seen Sutter’s ghost, Maretha comes downstairs, greets Boy Willie, and plays a song for him on the piano. Soon, Avery Brown arrives and tells the story of how he has been called to preach. By scene’s end, Boy Willie confronts Berniece with his intention of selling the piano, to which Berniece rejoins that if he has come to Pittsburgh to sell the piano, he “done come up here for nothing.” As the scene ends, Boy Willie an-

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nounces that “I’m gonna cut it in half and go on and sell my half.” Scene 2 begins three days later, with Doaker and Winning Boy sitting around drinking and reminiscing about their lives. Boy Willie and Lymon enter, and, in a crucial scene, Doaker tells Lymon the story of how his grandmother, also named Berniece, and her little boy, who grew up to become Doaker’s father, were traded by their owner, Robert Sutter, to another white man for a piano that Sutter wished to give to his wife, Miss Sophie, on their wedding anniversary. Because Miss Sophie started missing her slaves and could not get them back, Sutter ordered pictures of Berniece and her son to be carved into the piano by one of his slaves, who also added pictures of other members of the family as well as of important family events. After Miss Sophie’s death, Doaker’s father, Boy Charles, became obsessed with the idea that he must take the piano away from Sutter. When he did and was found hiding in a railroad boxcar along with four hobos, the boxcar was set on fire. Not long afterward, the suspected murderers started falling down wells, and the legend was created that it was the ghosts of the boxcar who were doing the pushing. When Boy Willie and Lymon try to move the piano, the sound of Sutter’s ghost is heard, and then Maretha from upstairs screams at the sight of Sutter’s ghost. In the first scene of act 2, Doaker tells Winning Boy that he too has seen Sutter’s ghost in the house. Boy Willie and Lymon come home to announce that they have had good luck selling the watermelons, Winning Boy convinces Lymon to buy his old but fancy clothes, and Lymon prepares to go out with Boy Willie to find some women. In scene 2, Avery arrives to tell Berniece that he has found a place for his church and that what he now needs is a wife. Berniece tries to get Avery to rid the house of Sutter’s ghost by blessing it. Meanwhile, Avery tries to persuade Berniece to donate her piano to his new church, where she could play it and even start a choir. Later on that night, in scene 3, Boy Willie arrives with Grace, a woman he has just met, but Berniece chases them both away. Lymon then arrives and, after complaining about his luck with women, offers perfume to Berniece, kisses her, and is rebuffed by her. In scene 4, Boy Willie wakes up Lymon to tell him he has been offered $1,150 for the piano. Together they try, but fail, to move the piano, which elicits the sound of Sutter’s ghost, while Doaker informs Boy Willie that they are not taking the piano anywhere until Berniece comes home. Boy Willie leaves, telling Doaker that he is going to get some rope and wheels and that nobody is going to stop him from taking the piano. In scene 5, Boy Willie sits attaching casters to a board in preparation for moving the piano while he makes one last defense of his need to make his way in the world with a farm; Berniece challenges him by mentioning her gun. Soon, Avery enters with his Bible, Lymon arrives with the rope, Boy Willie tries to move the piano, Winning Boy comes in and sits down to play the piano, and Grace, who has been waiting for Lymon in his truck outside, tries to get Lymon to leave. Amid all the confusion, Sutter’s ghost appears. Avery begins an exorcism and sprinkles the place with water, while Boy Willie engages in a struggle with the ghost itself. Berniece suddenly sits down at the

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piano and begins to play with rousing intensity until a calm settles over the house. Boy Willie, realizing Berniece’s triumph, urges her to keep playing and leaves to catch a train. Berniece, who has been enlisting the aid of her ancestors in her song, expresses her gratitude for the peace that has returned to her life. Themes and Meanings The Piano Lesson deals with the historical phenomenon of the African American migration from the southern, agrarian way of life to the large industrial cities of the North in search of freedom, dignity, and economic opportunities. As such, the play has two settings, the onstage setting of Doaker’s house, located in a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh in the present, and the setting of the past in the South from which all the characters in the play have come. It is through the collective memories of the characters that the southern, offstage setting is brought to life by talk of shared experiences, acquaintances, and family relations. The sparsely furnished setting, “lacking in warmth and vigor,” of Doaker’s house captures the quality of life of those African Americans who have migrated to the North, where they are cut off from their family roots and history. Their life is stark, cold, and often lonely, and they live a life of grim necessity, hard work, and poverty. It is contrasted with life in the South, where, even though prejudice abounds, African Americans live close to the earth and their familial homes, close to the struggle, the suffering, and the meager triumphs of their ancestors, from which they draw spiritual sustenance. The temporal location of the play is the year 1937, a time when the black migration northward was gaining momentum. Wilson is intrigued by this phenomenon and has said that he believes that it was a mistake for African Americans to leave the South, where they could have eventually gained economic power by owning the land. Instead, in the North they still encountered prejudice and found themselves huddled in squalid neighborhoods and working in menial jobs. The conflict of The Piano Lesson is classic in its naturalistic simplicity. Two people are obsessed with conflicting desires: Boy Willie is determined to sell the piano, and Berniece is equally determined that he will not. At the heart of the play is the piano itself, which evolves into a rich symbol as well as a powerful dramatic device. To Berniece, the piano, with its carved faces of family members and events, represents the history of the pain and oppression of their family, including their father’s own death. To Boy Willie, the piano represents opportunity for the future; by selling it for cash, he hopes to buy the land on which their ancestors were slaves. Berniece, who has moved to the North and is cut off from her family roots, sees the piano as her connection with her past and her own personal identity. Boy Willie, who has stayed close to his family roots in the South, views the piano as a means of gaining equality with the white landowners, which would also mean achieving dignity and personhood. As a dramatic device, the piano is a catalyst for much of the action. Not only do Berniece and Boy Willie create dramatic tension by fighting about the piano, but also the whole suspense of the climactic scene is built as Boy Willie makes elaborate prep-

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arations for moving the piano while Berniece gets her gun to stop him. Moreover, it is by means of the piano that much of the family history is brought forth. Berniece, who has not touched the piano in many years because of the cruel memories that it contains for her, begins to play the piano in the last scene and thereby invokes the spiritual power of their ancestors through its music. The “piano lesson” of the title is not a lesson in how to play the piano but a lesson in what the piano means. Another powerful dramatic device that is also rich with symbolic value is the ghost of the white landowner, Sutter, which symbolizes the memory of the enslavement and oppression of African Americans by whites. The drive of the play is toward the liberation of these people from that history, which can come about only through a sense of self-worth, which is what both Berniece and Boy Willie seek. Although the piano belonged to the Sutters, the Charles family believed that it belonged to them, not only because their grandfather had carved their family history on it but also because it was paid for with their flesh and redeemed by their blood. After her father’s death, Berniece’s mother made her play the piano because she understood that it was a form of possessing it. When Berniece is about to lose the piano through Boy Willie’s scheme, she repossesses it by playing it and thus exorcises Sutter’s ghost. Boy Willie gives up his plan because he then understands that the family has its identity and pride intact, and he does not need land to gain those qualities. Critical Context The Piano Lesson is part of August Wilson’s cycle of ten plays that portray the black experience in America in the twentieth century. The first play in this series was the Tony Award-winning Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (pr. 1984), which dealt with jazz musicians in the 1920’s who were exploited by white entrepreneurs. Fences (pr. 1985), which won a Pulitzer Prize, takes place in the 1950’s and dramatizes the effects of the exclusion of black baseball players from professional baseball. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (pr. 1986) takes place in 1911 and portrays the anguish of those who had fled the enforced labor gangs of the South and suffered the destruction of their families and the tribulations of a migratory existence. Wilson was committed to write a history of African Americans and of how they have been denied participation in American life. Wilson said that African Americans are “leftovers from history,” meaning that when free labor was needed, African Americans were valuable, but as the world moved into the industrial age and the computer age, “we’re no longer needed.” The Piano Lesson is a vivid documentation of history in the process of expelling African Americans and of the African American’s struggle to retain dignity, pride, and personhood by clinging to the symbols of history. Bibliography Bigsby, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collection of scholarly essays on Wilson’s plays, including studies of The Piano Lesson and other individual works, as well as broader discussions of the playwright’s overall project.

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Henry, William. “Exorcising the Demons of Memory.” Time, April 11, 1989, 77-78. A profile of August Wilson, his life, his work, and his beliefs. Surveys his work to this date. Migler, Rachael. “An Elegant Duet.” Gentleman’s Quarterly 60, no. 4 (April, 1990): 114-144. Wilson and Lloyd Richards, the director of Wilson’s plays, are profiled. They discuss their effort on The Piano Lesson. Biographical information on each is given. Savran, David. “August Wilson.” In In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1988. A probing interview of Wilson conducted by Savran on March 13, 1987, at the West Bank Cafe in New York City. Wilson talks freely about his beginnings in theater, his work, his experiences, and his political, social, and historical views. “Two-Timer.” Time, April 18, 1990, 99. A discussion of Wilson on the occasion of his second Pulitzer Prize, for The Piano Lesson. He has transcended the label of “black” playwright, but comparisons with Eugene O’Neill may be premature. Wilson, August. “August Wilson’s American: A Conversation with Bill Moyers.” Interview by Bill Moyers. American Theatre 6, no. 3 (June, 1989): 12-17, 54. Interview focusing mainly on Wilson’s view of history, American society, African Americans’ position in that society, and the way in which Wilson’s views relate to his work. Tony J. Stafford

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PLATITUDES Author: Trey Ellis (1962) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Parody Time of plot: 1930’s and mid-1980’s Locale: New York, New York; rural Georgia First published: 1988 Principal characters: Dewayne Wellington, a recently divorced and depressed middleaged black writer Isshee Ayam, a successful middle-aged black feminist writer who criticizes Dewayne’s work-in-progress as sexist and outside African American folk tradition Earle Tyner, the protagonist of Dewayne’s story, a pudgy, awkward, and romantic middle-class black boy Dorothy LaMont, a young waitress at her mother’s Harlem diner who cultivates a friendship with Earle that grows into a satisfying romantic relationship Darcelle LaMont, Dorothy’s mother, owner of a Harlem diner specializing in country-style black cooking Janey Rosebloom, a pretty, socially popular friend of Dorothy and white schoolmate of Earle Captain Nat Mee, a New York City police precinct captain who dates Earle’s mother Stevie, an elderly janitor and caretaker Richard, an elegant and rich white male model The Novel Platitudes is a novel within a novel that tells two parallel love stories. The first story concerns the romance of high schoolers Earle Tyner and Dorothy LaMont. The second story is about the growing attraction of authors Dewayne Wellington and Isshee Ayam. The romance of the two authors develops while Dewayne is writing the story of Earle and Dorothy, called Platitudes. These two stories are periodically interrupted by parodies of aptitude test questions, menus, song lyrics, and different comic lists. At the beginning of their story, Earle and Dorothy attend different private schools in New York City and have not met. Both black students try in different ways to fit in at their mostly white schools. Earle excels in computer class and associates with computer buffs Donald and Andy. Together they call themselves “Trinary.” They are looked down upon by the other students, who call them “Nerd One, Two, and Three.”

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Dorothy divides her time between the wild social life of her wealthy friends at school and the dull work at her mother’s Harlem home-cooking restaurant. After introducing these characters, author Dewayne interrupts the story of Earle and Dorothy to confess that he is having trouble writing and to ask for assistance. He receives a sharply worded response from Isshee Ayam, who criticizes what Dewayne has written as sexist and offers her version of Earle and Dorothy’s story. In Isshee’s first chapter “Rejoice!,” Earle is a respectful child of a poor but honest rural black family struggling for survival against a heartless creditor, Mr. Wyte. Dewayne continues to write about Earle in a sexist way. Earle and his friends are frustrated in relationships and take an interest in sex. Earle begins to develop a relationship with a white classmate, Janey Rosebloom, after he helps her in computer class. She invites Trinary to a party, where they feel foolish and out of place. Later, when they are both feeling depressed about relationships, Earle and Janey spend a romantic evening together. Earle begins to develop a relationship with Dorothy after they meet at her mother’s Harlem restaurant. Dorothy admires Earle’s work for black mayoral candidate Al Robinson and begins to see him as not just another computer nerd. They spend romantic time together. Earle’s life seems to be coming together all at once. He is having success with registering voters, losing weight, and getting close to Dorothy. While Earle gets closer to Dorothy, Dewayne gets closer to Isshee. Though still critical of Platitudes, she approves of the continued development of Dorothy and Earle from stereotypes into believable characters. Dewayne and Isshee agree to meet at a writers’ convention in New York. Isshee misses her date with Dewayne because a former boyfriend, the famous writer Richard Johnson, comes to see her. Dewayne feels so betrayed by Isshee and becomes so depressed that he decides to write an unhappy ending for Platitudes. Earle is betrayed in both love and work. When Earle accidentally finds Dorothy in bed with a successful male model, Richard, he loses faith in her. Police captain Nat Mee accuses Al Robinson of stealing money from his mayoral campaign. This unhappy ending is turned around when Isshee recognizes how much she has hurt Dewayne and decides to make a special trip to New York to see him. To cheer him up, she writes a happy ending, in Dewayne’s sexually explicit style, to her version of Platitudes. In her version, Earle bravely defends Dorothy from the lecherous Mr. Wyte. During his long-awaited night with Isshee, Dewayne suffers from impotence, which he cures by writing his own happy ending to the story, in which Dorothy explains to Earle the conflict between her social status and her love for him. “You’re too pure. And sometimes I didn’t need pure; I didn’t have all the time for pure and ice skating and Coney Island because I am not that way. . . . Who wanted to fall in love with a fat nerd.” The Characters Like the other important characters in Platitudes, Dewayne Wellington develops from a stereotype into a full-bodied person. Although the story he writes is not explic-

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itly autobiographical, he uses it to resolve some of the tensions in his personal and creative lives. His early focus on sex and the power of women to hurt men reflects his own feelings of loneliness and betrayal after his divorce. Unlike Dewayne, Isshee is confident of her ability as a writer and happy with her identity as a woman and an African American. She is a successful author of wellknown works of black folk life and is frequently invited to lecture around the country. While she helps Dewayne to rise out of his depression with her challenging criticism of both his work and his view of women, she gains new insight from him and comes to an understanding that there is more than one way to write about African American romance. Dewayne expresses his anxiety through his creation, Earle Tyner. As Dewayne grows in confidence and in understanding of Isshee’s black feminist perspective, Earle goes beyond his original role of a computer nerd interested in pornography. He gains confidence in himself while working in the voter registration drive that allows him finally to talk to women. In the end, he outgrows his boyish view of women as objects either of low sexual desire or of high romance and comes to see Dorothy as a loving but fallible human being, both a friend and a lover. The fast social and sexual life of white New York young people appeals to Dorothy because she admires its freedom. She yearns to escape the suffocating atmosphere of her mother’s Harlem diner and live as a liberated middle-class woman. She looks forward to the day when she will earn a good salary in a high-powered business position. Although she is an extremely popular girl, Dorothy finds common ground with Earle as a fellow member of the new black middle class in a largely white world. Despite their race, Earle and Dorothy successfully integrate into private-school life. Earle is known not primarily as an African American but as a computer buff and member of “Trinary,” along with white Andy and “beige” Donald. Although she lives in Harlem, Dorothy attempts to leave down-home family life behind in her fast-lane partying with rich white friends such as the exclusive Janey Rosebloom or the charming model Richard. Like Dorothy, Earle comes in contact with characters of different races and classes. A favorite of white computer instructor Commander Considine, Earle also learns about city racial politics from the elderly janitor Stevie. The characters in Isshee’s version of the story stand in stark contrast to Dewayne’s Earle and Dorothy. In Lowdnes County, Georgia, there is a simple distinction between the positive and productive lives of the poor-but-happy families of Earle and Dorothy and the uncaring materialism of the landlord Mr. Wyte and his agent, the race traitor I. Corinthians. Themes and Meanings Trey Ellis, like Dewayne Wellington, attempts to write a new kind of fiction about African Americans. Ellis himself calls this style the “New Black Aesthetic,” an attempt to refine and revise the African American view of art. He also takes his characters into a world where mingling across class and race boundaries is nothing new.

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Platitudes builds on the foundation laid by earlier black writing to express a vision of a black urban life that is as comfortable with black tradition as with mainstream ideas of achievement and success. Earle and Dorothy are urban African Americans who happily exist integrated with mainstream urban society. Although not ashamed of their race, they both pursue success as defined by mainstream values, Earle looking toward the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dorothy toward business school and a well-paid executive position. They move effortlessly between the black world of their families and the mixed-race milieu of the private-school scene. Another way that Ellis tries to create a new kind of black novel is by using experimental writing techniques. Ellis takes his narrative beyond the traditional realistic form and style of black fiction into a playful and eclectic postmodernism. Along with the romance of Earle and Dorothy comes the second-level encounter of authors Dewayne and Isshee, which complicates the realism of Earle’s story. In addition, Ellis uses various satirical lists only marginally connected with the story, from aptitude test questions to menus and even a love poem that Earle ordered from Dewayne himself. These techniques add a self-consciousness to the romance stories that constantly reminds readers that this is fiction. Key to Ellis’s experimental style is the way he connects the lives of the two authors to the story of Earle and Dorothy. Throughout the novel, the ideas and feelings of Dewayne and Isshee are expressed through their different versions of the story they each write. As Dewayne comes out of his depression, Earle learns how to succeed with women. When Isshee wants to apologize to Dewayne, she makes Earle the brave hero in her version of the story. A theme central to both stories is that self-confidence is necessary to recover from betrayal and disappointment. Feeling betrayed by his recent divorce, Dewayne learns to trust Isshee and to value her criticism when she begins to appreciate his talent. Even after she misses their planned meeting, Dewayne is willing to accept her apology. Likewise, though Dorothy has hurt him through her affair with Richard, Earle shows his new maturity by allowing Dorothy to make it up to him. Presumably the whole black community will have to recover from the betrayal of traitors such as the embezzling mayoral candidate Al Robinson and bill collector I. Corinthians. The conclusions of both unlikely romances express the supreme power of romantic love. Love has the power to reconcile the great differences between Dewayne’s sexism and Isshee’s feminism. It also brings together the shy computer nerd Earle and the outgoing clubhopper Dorothy, despite all the force of high-school opinion against their friendship. Once he discovers the “real thing” in his passion for Dorothy, Earle “wonders how he had ever lived so long without it.” Critical Context Platitudes has been called a call for peace between black feminist writers and those who criticize them. Parodying both the writing of sexual freedom favored by male authors and the emphasis on folk culture and family solidarity of female writers, Ellis

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suggests synthesis and the inadequacy of each style when practiced in isolation. Dewayne Wellington is reminiscent of African American male writers such as novelist, poet, and social critic Ishmael Reed. Reed has criticized black feminist writers for their negative portrayals of black men as sexist. His own satirical fiction is known for its portrayal of a conspiracy against African American men, as in his novel Reckless Eyeballing (1986). Reed’s narrative style relies on experimental techniques that blend black folk culture with material from white American culture in a playful postmodern style. One of the female writers criticized by Reed is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker. Like Isshee Ayam, Walker is a well-known novelist and feminist critic. Her best-selling novel The Color Purple (1982) focuses on the warmth and vitality of black folk and family life in the rural South, where black people are protected from the corrupting values of white society. Isshee’s version of the story of Earle and Dorothy is a broad parody of the folkloric style of Walker’s fiction. Ellis believes that each of these traditions by itself risks falling into stereotypes, or, as the novel’s title suggests, meaningless platitudes. For him, both the experimentalism of Reed and the tradition represented by Walker are necessary for a vibrant African American literature. In his article “The New Black Aesthetic” (1989), Ellis argues for a new style of African American literature and a new kind of African American artist, the “cultural mulatto.” This new black artist playfully combines elements of traditional black culture with materials from both mainstream mass culture and serious art. In Platitudes, romantic love is a metaphor for the positive intentions that the new black artist uses to bring together different cultural, class, and racial traditions. Just as romantic love resolves the stark differences between Dewayne and Isshee and between Earle and Dorothy, an honest and open appreciation of diverse kinds of artistic material, taken from both black and white creators, will serve as a model for cultural desegregation and rejuvenation. Bibliography Ashe, Bertram D. Foreword to “Platitudes” and “The New Black Aesthetic,” by Trey Ellis. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Discusses the relationship of Ellis’s novel to his aesthetic manifesto and the importance of each in African American literary history. Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo 12 (Winter, 1989): 233-246. The current younger generation of black writers, artists, and musicians is creating a new kind of black culture that combines traditional African American elements with material from mainstream white culture. The creations of the new “cultural mulattos” will be just as vibrant as those of the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance or the 1960’s Black Arts movement. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. African American writing is organized around the figure of the “signifying Monkey,” a trickster in West Afri-

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can folktales known for his quick wit. This influence of the vernacular trickster tradition is examined in the work of major African American authors including Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker. Hunter, Tera. “‘It’s a Man’s Man’s World’: Specters of the Old Re-newed in AfroAmerican Culture and Criticism.” Callaloo 12 (Winter, 1989): 247-249. Hunter criticizes Ellis’s “The New Black Aesthetic” as a return of sexism. Lott, Eric. “Hip Hop Fiction.” The Nation 247 (December 19, 1988): 691-692. Ellis’s novel is seen as a young writer’s plea for a truce between male and female black writers. Platitudes parodies both the folkloric style of such feminist writers as Alice Walker and the experimental style of such postmodernist male writers as Ishmael Reed in an attempt to bring the two styles together. In the end, though, Ellis himself comes out far closer to Reed than to Walker. Reed, Ishmael. Reckless Eyeballing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. An experimental postmodernist novel that explores Reed’s idea that black men are the victim of a widespread conspiracy against them and that criticizes Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Tate, Greg. “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke: The Return of the New Black Aesthetic.” Voice Literary Supplement (December, 1986): 7. African American writing, art, and music have revived the energy of cultural nationalism and placed it in the new context of 1980’s popular culture. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square Press, 1982. Reprint. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Walker’s novelistic affirmation of the vitality of rural black life and criticism of black men for replaying the role of plantation owner in their oppression of black women. Erik D. Curren

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PLUM BUN A Novel Without a Moral Author: Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) Type of work: Novel Type of plot: Bildungsroman Time of plot: 1900-1920’s Locale: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York, New York First published: 1928 Principal characters: Angela Murray, a beautiful mulatto girl who learns that she can “pass” as white Virginia (Jinny) Murray, Angela’s beloved younger sister Roger Fielding, a well-meaning but feckless white playboy Anthony Cross, a talented painter whom Angela meets while attending art classes Junius Murray and Mattie Murray, the parents of Angela and Virginia Rachel Powell, a young black woman Ralph Ashley, a young, white, aristocratic New Yorker The Novel Plum Bun is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, about Angela Murray, whose romantic illusions about the advantages of “passing” as white are shattered by a succession of cruel experiences. The format of the novel is based on the old nursery rhyme “To Market, to Market/ To buy a Plum Bun;/ Home again, Home again,/ Market is done.” The “plum bun” represents all the advantages Angela hopes to obtain by using her charm and talent to enter the upper-class white world. In the first section, entitled “Home,” sixteen-year-old Angela is introduced, along with her sister Virginia and their parents. The family lives in a poor but respectable black neighborhood in Philadelphia. Junius and Mattie Murray are hardworking, thrifty, religious-minded parents who have tried to teach their daughters the highest moral standards. Virginia is happy in this humble domestic setting, but the restless, ambitious Angela can hardly wait to be old enough to escape to New York, where she hopes to use her talents as an artist to find a more stimulating life, even if this means denying her own race forever. “Market,” the second section, deals with Angela’s early experiences in New York in the 1920’s, after both her parents have died, leaving her enough money to move to the big city. “Plum Bun,” the third section, deals with Angela’s affair with the white playboy Roger Fielding, who represents all the comfort, security, prestige, and sophistication she desires. Fielding, who believes Angela to be pure white, falls in love

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with her but is afraid to propose marriage, because his domineering father will permit him to marry only a woman with wealth and family background. The charismatic Fielding persuades Angela to go against all her moral and religious training and become his mistress. She hopes this illicit affair will lead to marriage, but Fielding becomes tired of her, and they break up after a nasty quarrel. In the meantime, Virginia has moved to New York to pursue her own career as a musician. Because of her color, she has no chance of entering the white world, nor does she wish to do so. She moves to a segregated neighborhood and becomes involved in the Harlem Renaissance, meeting many talented and interesting black people. In “Home Again,” the longest section of the book, the thoroughly disillusioned Angela tries to establish meaningful relationships with men and women of both races, including her estranged sister Virginia. She discovers that there are many gifted black people who feel no need to be recognized by white society; she also meets some progressive whites who have risen above the bigotry of the time. The man to whom Angela is most strongly attracted is a young portrait painter named Anthony Cross. Ironically, Cross is also “passing” and does not feel that he can aspire to Angela’s affections, because he takes her to be white. Instead, Cross becomes emotionally involved with Virginia; he is ignorant of the fact that she is Angela’s sister, since the two young women have kept their relationship a secret. In the final section, “Market Is Done,” the many deceptions are unraveled. Angela is outraged when a fellow art student, Rachel, is denied a scholarship because she is black. This prompts Angela to reveal her own racial identity, with the result that she too is barred from enjoying the benefits of a scholarship. She sails to Paris to study art on her own resources, assisted by loans from some of her true friends of both races. She is still heartbroken over her loss of Anthony Cross; in a rather implausible ending, however, Cross breaks up with Virginia and comes to Paris to join Angela in matrimony and an exciting new creative life. Angela has learned two lessons about life: One is that it is a mistake to lie about one’s true ethnic background or to use deceit in any other way for personal advancement; the other is that it is a mistake for a woman to marry for any reason except love. Although Plum Bun is subtitled A Novel Without a Moral, it might not be unfair to say that the implicit moral can be found in the New Testament: “What profiteth a man if he gaineth the whole world and loseth his own soul?” The Characters The most important character in this novel is Angela Murray, since the entire story is about her intellectual, artistic, and moral development. Every incident and every other character is described from Angela’s point of view, although the narration is in the third person. This literary device has the effect of making Angela seem extremely perceptive and sensitive, as she is intended to be. She analyzes the people she meets with unerring accuracy; however, she generally keeps her own counsel, and her observations and conclusions are conveyed to readers through the dispassionate thirdperson narrator.

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Angela’s character evolves in the face of the disillusioning experiences she undergoes during the thirteen years spanned by the novel. Fauset highlights these experiences with significant scenes that strike directly at readers’ emotions. For example, when Virginia first comes to New York, Angela is at the train depot to meet her. Just before the train arrives, Roger Fielding suddenly appears by chance and stands talking to Angela, who wants him to believe she is white and dreads having him discover that the dark-skinned Virginia is her sister. When Virginia comes forward to greet her beloved sister after a long period of separation, Angela makes the bitter decision to pretend she does not know her. This moving scene, more than any other in the novel, makes Angela realize how much she had changed. The memory keeps coming back to haunt her. Another significant scene occurs when Angela and Fielding are having dinner at a fashionable restaurant and three well-dressed, well-mannered black people ask to be seated at a table. Fielding is outraged by the idea of “colored people” wanting to eat with whites. The spoiled, headstrong playboy makes a terrible scene and has the African Americans ejected. Angela understands their feelings perfectly; she thinks that the three people might easily have been her own mother, father, and sister. Angela must keep up her masquerade, and Fielding, ironically, thinks that her obvious emotion was caused by the fact that black people wanted to eat in the same room with her. In this scene, Angela first realizes that crossing over into the white world will force her to share in its bigotry. Virginia Murray, the book’s second most important character, serves as a foil to her older sister. Virginia does not have grandiose ambitions; she is happy associating with people of her own race, and she would never consider sacrificing her integrity for the sake of wealth or fame. Since these two young women are so close, they are often able to discuss their character development directly with each other. Roger Fielding is the most important male character in the story, and he is presented mainly through Angela’s point of view. At first she considers him to be the embodiment of all the things she wants, including wealth, sophistication, and social position. As their relationship becomes more intimate, however, she realizes his short-comings, including his bigotry, selfishness, snobbishness, and contempt for women. Fielding’s character is presented through several dramatic scenes that involve Angela either as a participant or as a spectator. The most significant scene occurs when the two break up; Fielding reveals that he has lost his respect for Angela simply because she allowed him to seduce her. The other characters in the book are of minor importance, and they seem to exist primarily to serve as object lessons for Angela. Anthony Cross goes through a process of self-realization that parallels that undergone by Angela; both recognize the futility of pretending to be something they are not. The miscellaneous white characters exist primarily to exemplify white attitudes toward African Americans. Angela’s parents appear only in the first short section and function mainly to illustrate the virtues of industry, integrity, and conjugal fidelity, virtues that Angela is in serious danger of forgetting once she moves to New York.

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Themes and Meanings Plum Bun is a didactic novel containing several messages to readers, all of which are imparted through Angela Murray’s life experiences from adolescence to mature adulthood. The dominant theme throughout the novel is the moral that African Americans should be themselves and should stop imitating whites. The novel was written at a time when African Americans were so submerged in the dominant culture that they were virtually “invisible,” to use the striking metaphor coined by the African American author Ralph Ellison in his 1952 novel Invisible Man. It was natural for many African Americans of the time, consciously and unconsciously, to adopt white values, including white ideals of physical beauty. Jessie Redmon Fauset, like many other writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, was deeply concerned with persuading African Americans to recognize their own beauty, values, and racial heritage. Fauset creates an African American protagonist who happens to look white. This device not only creates many suspenseful scenes, making the novel read a bit like a spy story, but also poses a question in a provocative way: If Angela herself cannot find happiness in adopting white cultural values, what chance does the ordinary African American have of doing so? By pretending to be white, Angela involves herself in one unpleasant experience after another. She becomes the kept mistress of a white playboy, and she eventually finds herself alienated from her beloved sister. She is unable to marry the one man she truly loves because, ironically, he is of black descent and believes that she is white. Another message in the novel is that women should not sell themselves for financial security or social prestige. This is directly related to the message that African Americans should be true to themselves. Women, too, should be true to themselves and refuse to deceive themselves or others for gain. Angela’s relations with men are unsatisfactory until she arrives at the decision to be herself, both as an African American and as a woman. Once she makes this courageous decision, she is able to achieve a reconciliation with her sister, marry the man she loves, and find her true vocation as an artist. Critical Context Plum Bun received mostly favorable reviews when it first appeared in 1928, although many of the reviews by white critics tended to be somewhat patronizing. Fauset’s novels enjoyed modest success both in America and in Great Britain, but she was nearly forgotten after the publication of her last novel, Comedy, American Style, in 1933. The Great Depression of the 1930’s largely eclipsed the interest in African American writers begun with the Harlem Renaissance. The 1950’s saw an entirely different attitude toward African Americans and toward race relations in general. In The Negro Novel in America (1958), Robert Bone labeled Fauset an old-fashioned, “Victorian” writer. In 1962, the militant playwright and activist LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) dismissed middle-class African American writers such as Fauset in his essay “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature.’” Baraka ar-

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gued that most such writers had attempted “to prove to America, and recently to the world at large, that they were not really who they were, i.e., Negroes.” Later criticism has tended to take a more generous view of Fauset’s work. Plum Bun is regarded as Fauset’s best novel; its strengths are seen as the author’s characterization of the protagonist and her shrewd observations of white middle-class life. Its weaknesses are viewed as its old-fashioned sentimentality and its portrayal of African Americans as essentially no different from whites in any important respect. The unrealistic dialogue, too, is often pointed to as a glaring defect; there is no slang, no dialect, and the characters often sound impossibly intellectual or idealistic. Moreover, Fauset seems reluctant to express strong feelings about injustices suffered by African Americans; in Plum Bun, she frequently refers to outrageously discriminatory practices as merely “silly.” However, with the rise of feminist criticism, Fauset’s achievements as a novelist grappling with both racism and sexism have come to seem increasingly impressive. Bibliography Barker, Deborah. Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist. Lewisberg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2000. Compares Plum Bun to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) as another text that seeks to authenticate the African American female artist. Berzon, Judith R. Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1978. A study of the historical, sociological, and scientific backgrounds of American novels about the problems of mulattoes, with frequent references to the works of Fauset. Berzon analyzes the “crisis experience” common to many of these novels and the modes of adjustment to the experience. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 18921976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. This historical study emphasizes the common themes in novels by black women writers, beginning with Harper’s Iola Leroy. Fauset’s works are evaluated in relation to those of other black women novelists. Johnson, Abby Arthur. “Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance.” Phylon 39 (June, 1978): 143-153. Summarizes Fauset’s career as a writer and editor and attempts to evaluate her significance in African American literature. As the title of the article suggests, the author considers Fauset important mainly for her influence on her contemporaries and successors. Sato, Hiroko. “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.” In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. A discussion of Fauset’s life and work, with special reference to her role in the Harlem Renaissance. Contains photographs of prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance and many interesting articles about Fauset’s contemporaries. Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer. Troy,

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N.Y.: Whitson Publishing, 1981. A full-length study of Fauset’s life and works. Argues that Fauset was a more important author than generally acknowledged and that she has been unfairly accused of denying her own racial values in favor of those of middle-class whites. Sylvander’s study was originally undertaken as a doctoral dissertation and contains an exhaustively researched bibliography. Bill Delaney

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POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL Author: Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) Type of work: Poetry First published: 1773 The Poems When Phillis Wheatley wrote Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book published by an African American, she began two traditions simultaneously: the African American literary tradition and the African American women’s literary tradition. This was a monumental accomplishment for a slave. Phillis belonged to the John Wheatley family in Boston. A letter from her owner to her publisher, also included in the book, provides the first account of her early years. It states that she was brought from Africa to America in 1761, being at that time seven or eight years old. Without formal schooling but with tutoring by the family, especially Mary Wheatley, the family’s daughter, Phillis learned the English language in sixteen months to the extent that she could read the most difficult parts of the Bible. Wheatley started writing poetry at the age of twelve and quickly gained recognition as an occasional poet. Since the occasion usually was death, and the preponderance of her poems were elegies, she soon became Boston’s muse of comfort. Her elegy “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770” gained her instant recognition in England as well as in the colonies. Sending this elegy along with a cover letter to Selina Hastings, the countess of Huntingdon, an early promoter of English Methodism who had in 1748 appointed Whitefield her chaplain, Wheatley acquired the countess’s patronage. Published first as a broadside, this widely printed elegy was also included by the Reverend Ebenezer Pemberton of Boston as an addendum to his funeral sermon for Whitefield, which was published in 1771 in London. The publicity generated by this elegy spurred Mrs. Susanna Wheatley’s efforts in 1772 to publish Phillis’s small collection of poetry. Although proposals for the book were advertised four times, subscribers did not respond in sufficient numbers for the book to be printed. Thoroughly exasperated, Susanna Wheatley began to seek a London publisher for the poems. One was found, Archibald Bell, a printer of religious works. After being acquainted with the troubled history of the project, he insisted on a written verification of Phillis’s authorship. The Wheatleys complied by having an attestation signed by the Massachusetts governor and lieutenant governor along with sixteen other notable Bostonians, including John Hancock. Next, the Wheatleys in the spring of 1773 sent Phillis to London to superintend the publishing of the book. Accompanied by their son Nathaniel, who was going to London to expand the family’s business, Phillis sailed from Boston on May 8 and arrived in London on June 17. Phillis had also been sent on the trip because doctors thought the sea air might miti-

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gate her chronic respiratory ailments. From her arrival to her departure on July 26, 1773, because of the serious illness of Susanna Wheatley, Phillis was lionized in London. She visited and was visited and escorted by English philanthropists, statesmen, members of Parliament, abolitionists, titled men and women, politicians, merchants, a female writer, a botanist and explorer, and a fellow American, Benjamin Franklin. Clearly this was the social and professional apex of her life. The slim volume, consisting of 127 pages, does not contain her complete canon. In addition to her twenty-two extant letters, her canon consists basically of four groups of poems: thirty-eight written by 1773 and published in her book, eight written by 1773 but not published in the book, twenty-eight or possibly twenty-nine written after 1773 but not extant, and ten written after 1773 and extant. Thirty-three poems and thirteen letters were collected for a proposed 1779 volume, but again Bostonians did not respond to advertisements for subscribers. Not only was this book not printed, but also the manuscript was eventually lost after Wheatley’s death; the manuscript probably was abandoned by her improvident husband, John Peters, whom she had married on April 1, 1778. Themes and Meanings Wheatley’s New England education, acquired through informal tutorial sessions, influenced her poetry. According to Margaretta Matilda Odell, who wrote a brief account of Wheatley’s life, that education consisted of astronomy, ancient and modern geography, ancient history, the Old and New Testaments, and Greek and Roman mythology. Odell also observed that Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer was one of Wheatley’s favorite books. As a consequence of this education, Wheatley’s poetry emphasizes the classics and the Bible. Wheatley’s exposure to the classics influenced her to write in the neoclassical style of the time. Examples of that style abound in Poems on Various Subjects. Like other neoclassical poets, she wrote public poetry celebrating events of historical importance. In “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” Wheatley expresses the nation’s gratitude to King George III for the repeal of the Stamp Act. In “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North-America,” Wheatley praises an administrative appointment to the colonies. It should be noted that in writing these and similar poems, Wheatley was the first American female poet to speak of politics. Another example of the neoclassical influence is the personification in Wheatley’s poetry of such abstractions as virtue, recollection, imagination, and humanity. Yet another is her use of invocation to the muse. The opening lines of “Goliath of Gath” resound with an invocation, as do those of “Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo.” Wheatley did not restrict the invocation to these two epic-like poems; she used it in at least nine other poems in her book. Additional evidence of Wheatley’s neoclassicism can be seen in her Latinate vocabulary, circumlocution, formal tone, and closed heroic couplets. Finally, allusions to Greek and Roman mythology abound in her poetry; classical

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mythology inspired her imagination and fancy, so that in rendering Ovid’s story of Niobe, for example, she added interpolations and her own interpretations. In addition to classical and neoclassical influences, Wheatley’s poetry also evinces emphasis on religion and the Bible. She occasionally assumes the persona of a preacher. In “To the University of Cambridge, in New-England,” she admonishes the young men at Harvard to shun sin: “An Ethiop tells you ’tis your greatest foe.” She further evangelizes in “On Being Brought from Africa to America”: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,/ May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” Her elegies represent a marriage of the classical and Biblical influences on her poetry. They constitute a major genre in her canon; of her eighty-five poems, extant and nonextant, twenty-five are elegies, of which four are nonextant. Her early ones were written primarily upon request. Poems on Various Subjects contains fourteen elegies, including six on the deaths of children. Wheatley individualizes her treatment of this genre by elegizing the deaths of babies and children and by describing the grief of both parents. Although elegies for children were not unusual at that time, those for adults were more prevalent. Wheatley, however, consistently affirms the importance of children both on Earth and in an afterlife. Although her elegies represent one of the classical genres, and although they utilize neoclassical conventions, they contain few allusions to Greek and Roman mythology. Probably Wheatley thought that paganism was not consonant with their Christian theme. Since elegies span her poetry, a comparison of her last five with her earlier ones can reveal her improvement and maturity as a poet. The later ones are less formulaic and predictable; also, they seem more sincere in the conferment of honor and in the expression of grief—in most instances her personal grief. Certainly, after the death of two of her own babies she could empathize more with other parents on the loss of theirs. In her last poems, another change appears—Wheatley’s increased nationalism. During and immediately after the revolutionary war, “the Afric muse” wrote poems celebrating America and liberty. Her inclination to speak of politics and to celebrate liberty combine to produce the nationalistic tone in “To His Excellency General Washington” (1775), “On the Capture of General Lee” (1776), and “Liberty and Peace” (1784). In all three of these poems, she warns England to curb its thirst for power and wild ambition. In “Liberty and Peace,” Wheatley quotes her own lines from “To His Excellency General Washington”: “The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,/ Olive and laurel binds her golden hair.” Wheatley proudly reminds readers of her accurate prophecy that the United States or its personification, Columbia, would eventually offer peace (olive) and honor (laurel). Paradoxically, she developed her strongest nationalistic and anti-British sentiments despite the increased knowledge and appreciation of Great Britain she acquired during her trip to London. Critical Context Two arguments against Wheatley’s poetry have been discussed through the years by critics. One is that she was an imitator of imitators; the other is that she lacked in-

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terest in fellow slaves, Africa, and Africans. Much of her poetry is derivative, as was that of many poets and poetasters of mid-eighteenth century America. Like them, she used Pope and John Milton as models. Her own imagination and fancy, however, prevented her from following her models slavishly. Early twentieth century critics discerned Wheatley’s alleged lack of interest in Africa and blacks in part in her stance and tone in poems such as “On being brought from Africa to America,” which states, “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land.” Several factors influenced her thoughts on the subject. She grew up among Bostonians who regarded Africa as a primitive and heathen place, and she was likely constrained as a slave writing for a predominantly white reading public. However, she was herself a constant statement against slavery; abolitionists used her as an embodiment of their argument of what the slave could become if freed and educated. Although occasionally her poetry reveals her as more interested in slaves’ souls than in their bodies, she was, even in her early years, opposed to slavery. A growing chorus of critics, having benefited from recently discovered poems and letters, argue convincingly that Wheatley was not devoid of racial feelings. The strongest indictment of slavery in her book is in her poem to the Earl of Dartmouth: I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatched from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat; What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

Two pivotal events in Wheatley’s life further galvanized her opposition to slavery. During the five weeks in 1773 when the poet was in London, she was legally a free woman under English law. Moreover, sometime during the fall or winter of 1773, Phillis was manumitted by the Wheatleys; she then began to write in a stronger, more confident voice. In seven of her extant letters, six written during and after the summer of 1773, she acknowledges her concern for Africans and blacks. Her strongest antislavery sentiments in a letter appear in one written to the Reverend Samuel Occom on February 11, 1774. In controlled but passionate words, she equates contemporary white racists, including Christian ministers who owned slaves, with the ancient Egyptians. By far her strongest overt statement against slavery in poetry is found in “On the Death of General Wooster” (1778). She speaks in the persona of the dying general, who in his final prayer importunes God to lead America through the revolutionary war successfully and keep it “virtuous, brave, and free”; but he deplores America’s withholding freedom from its slaves:

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While Wheatley was developing stronger antislavery feelings, she was also learning more about Africa. She writes in one of her letters that she is studying maps of Africa and a gazetteer. No more does she allude to Africa as a “pagan land” or the “land of errors, and Egyptian gloom.” Instead, she finds much about it to praise. In her “Reply to the Answer in our last by the Gentleman in the Navy,” she recalls a description of the luxuriant beauty of the Senegal/Gambia area, the land of her birth: Charm’d with thy painting, how my bosom burns! And pleasing Gambia on my soul returns, With native grace in spring’s luxuriant reign, Smiles the gay mead, and Eden blooms again.

One regrets not only that Wheatley’s poetic productivity was not greater after 1773 but also that much of what she did write during that period has disappeared. There were, of course, understandable reasons for her limited productivity: the demise of the entire Wheatley nuclear family, the revolutionary war, a disappointing marriage, three sickly children born in six years, and deteriorating health ending in Wheatley’s untimely death on December 5, 1784. In “An Elegy on Leaving _______,” published five months before her death, she recalls when first she felt the poetic flame inspired by Cynthio (or Apollo). Prosperolike, she breaks her staff and bids farewell to her magic: But, ah! those pleasing hours are ever flown; Ye scenes of transport from my thoughts retire; Those rural joys no more the day shall crown, No more my hand shall wake the warbling lyre.

Thus was she precluded from fulfilling her desire stated in “To Maecenas”—to “mount and ride upon the wind,” yet she was able to write poetry that nurtured and fed not only her own spirit and being but also the spirits and beings of her admirers. Bibliography Hayden, Lucy K. “Classical Tidings from the African Muse: Phillis Wheatley’s Use of Greek and Roman Mythology.” CLA Journal 35 (June, 1992): 432-447. That Wheatley, influenced by Alexander Pope and neoclassicism, used classical mythology throughout her poetry is the main focus of this essay. Wheatley’s poem “Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI, and from a View of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson” provides the centerpiece of the discussion.

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Langley, April C. E. The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Includes a study of Wheatley’s narrative epistemology and her representation of knowledge. Richmond, Merle. Phillis Wheatley. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. This 111-page biography provides an overview of Wheatley’s life and is written primarily for younger readers. Illustrated. Robinson, William H. Phillis Wheatley: A Bio-Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. A brief but scholarly introduction is followed by a chronological list of Wheatley’s poems and letters and an annotated bibliography of writings about her from 1761 to 1979. _______. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. New York: Garland, 1984. Robinson’s sixty-six-page critical biography “On Phillis Wheatley and Her Boston” and his thirty-nine-page essay “On Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry” introduce a comprehensive collection of Wheatley’s work. Includes all of her extant poems and letters, a selection of her letters and various poems in facsimile, and a facsimile of her entire volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. In the appendixes are the 1834 memoir of Wheatley, the biblical and Latin originals that she paraphrased and translated, and two letters by George Washington, one discussing Wheatley and the other written to her. The fountainhead for much of the subsequent scholarship on Wheatley. _______, ed. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Robinson’s introductory essays on Wheatley and his chronology of important dates in her life precede the essays, which provide reliable scholarship on Wheatley’s canon. Wheatley, Phillis. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Edited by Julian D. Mason, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. Contains Wheatley’s complete canon: all her poems, as well as their variants, and all her letters. Mason’s scholarly footnotes and essays are valuable additions. Lucy K. Hayden

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THE POETRY OF AI Author: Ai (Florence Anthony, 1947) Type of work: Poetry First published: Cruelty, 1973; Killing Floor, 1979; Nothing But Color (audiotape), 1981; Sin, 1986; Cruelty/Killing Floor, 1987 (reprint); Fate: New Poems, 1991; Greed, 1993; Vice: New and Selected Poems, 1999; Dread, 2003 A Poetry Without Emotion Few American poets have established such a distinct voice as has Ai. Some commentators on American poetry believe her pseudonym to be the sound of a cry, such as those uttered by many of her personas; critic Hayden Carruth suggests that her name means “love” in Japanese (Ai has described herself as one-half Japanese). In one important sense, she does not fall within the canon of traditional African American writers. Her subjects transcend the most common concerns of that canon, and her style, as it has developed, incorporates a flat, almost emotionless tone, regardless of her subject matter—no matter how beautiful or how hideous. Ai awakened critics to her work in 1973 with poems that treat such subjects as murder, suicide, sexual and physical violence, whoring, and simple lusts. She presents her subjects usually through first-person voices that are flat and atonal. Indeed, the experience of listening to her early poems on the audiotape Nothing But Color (1981) adds to a sense that there is a terrible rhythm to the cruelties of the world and that she has tapped into that rhythm. She reads in a flat yet lyrical voice; all of her poems sound the same, as if she were in a trance and reading the work of some other poet. The experience can be at once delightful and unsettling. All but two of the poems on the tape are from Killing Floor (1979). A different version of her “Blue Suede Shoes,” titled “Blue Suede Shoes: A Fiction,” is included in Sin (1986), as is “The Mother’s Tale.” Ai’s reading adds a terrible beauty to the brutal poem “The Kid,” in which she takes on the persona of a fourteen-year-old boy who murders his entire family. No reason is given for the murders, for the breaking of the father’s skull with a rod, for the beating of the mother on the spine with the same rod, for the shooting of the little sister in the backyard. After it is all done, Ai ends the poem: “Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway./ I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from no-where./ I can break your heart.” Ai’s first two books of poetry, Cruelty (1973) and Killing Floor, pose the world as a mechanistic, terrible accident in which horrors are to be expected. Ai’s device is always the voice of the person speaking, of the person brutalized, of the person drawn down to a level of bestiality and shame. In her poem “Prostitute,” from Cruelty, Ai’s first-person narrator first goes to the trouble to pretend that her latest customer is her “husband,” whom she shoots. Then she robs him and considers the possibilities available to her. After all, she never cost much in the past, but now, with two combs in her hair and a gun in her belt, who knows what she can do?

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As Ai’s poetry develops, she shows an interest in understanding the human mind, particularly the relationship between what people say and what they do. The poems in the first two books present one-dimensional characters, but her later personas are more complex. Her ability to take time to study extensively and her success as an American poet seem to have given her an opportunity to draw out, in her later work, what she was only able to begin in the earlier poems. Fellowships and Awards In 1975, Ai was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship, providing her with invaluable time to spend on her art. In 1976, she received a fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation. Awards quickly followed. Killing Floor was the 1978 Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, and Ai received the first of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1980. The second came in 1985. The writing of Sin was further augmented by receipt of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant and an Emergency Fund for Writers award from the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists. Sin was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999) won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry. These awards established Ai as a major poet, despite the controversy surrounding her work and its lack of widespread, mainstream appeal. In 2003, Ai released another book of poems, Dread. Following a stint as visiting associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1996-1997), Ai held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing for the 2002-2003 academic year at Southwest Texas State University. She then moved to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she became a professor of English as well as serving as the vice president of the Native American Faculty and Staff Association. Few African American writers can boast as an impressive list of grants, awards, and fellowships as early in their careers as could Ai. Although she eschews the “African American” classification, she will be remembered as one of the most important African American writers and as one of the leading voices in contemporary poetry. A Controversy over Content Ai’s poetry can be disturbing, so much so that debates have raged about whether she writes a kind of pornography, a pornography of pain and extremity, raising the question of why readers participate in the dissemination of her work. Clearly, Ai is skillful at manipulating words and at drawing readers into poems about a multiplicity of subjects. Critics have questioned, however, whether readers participate primarily because they take a perverse pleasure in watching others in the throes of pain, or because they marvel at the ability of the poet to so capture the fringes of human emotion. The poems in Sin are longer and more meditative than the poems in the first two books. Where the early poems posed a kind of disorder and dismemberment in the social fabric, these longer poems explore human consciousness through the poetic me-

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dium, as if primal acts are those intended for the most basic understandings. Ai’s dispassionate readings indicate a split in her approach to her work between identification with and analysis of her characters. She suggests in some of the poems that to give oneself up to another completely—by voice, by body, by relationship, by poetry— would constitute a kind of suicide. “The Resurrection of Elvis Presley,” from Fate: New Poems (1991), presents a man who cannot be Elvis Presley, a man who knows Vaslav Nijinksy in life and Ernest Hemingway in death, a man who becomes the embodiment of appetite. His life is a series of pills, women, television sets, and shows to perform. Ai’s Presley is not resurrected; rather, he exists in a purgatory in which he must do what Hemingway says— including not sing—for reasons that remain unclear. The time that they share is portrayed as better than the ice-encrusted world of heaven. The difference between this poem and others like it, on one hand, and the early poems, on the other hand, is that the later poems develop an ontology, or an attempt at one. The early poems are about death, despair, suicide, and murder. The later poems investigate the necessity for such conditions and the possibility that they are not inevitable, that through the voices of (often) famous people, a reader can learn lessons to prevent similar occurrences in the future. If lessons may be learned, however, they are not guaranteed. Ai’s “Two Brothers,” about John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, constitutes a long conversation between the two dead men, who commiserate, remember their lives, and express regrets. All their reasoning and wishing, though, is seen as a complicated riddle; the Kennedy name was what the people wanted, and it was what the people got, even in the brothers’ deaths. Similarly, “The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” one of the poems collected in Vice, presents a man fooled by the world in which he was reared, a man who believed that William Blake had been right about the relationship between art and science: As a boy, he had believed in science as a pure investigation into truth, uncontaminated by values or ethics, that could simply discover the truth and present it to the world. He never suspected what he was to learn, the secrets of the atomic bomb that was to be attributed to his name. “I was always motivated/ by a ferocious need to know,” he says, and like a good scientist, he discovers that the “truth” is always changing. Perhaps he did not have to learn the terrible secrets of atomic fission after all. Regardless, his lesson is that humankind is on a relentless search for annihilation and has finally stumbled upon the mechanism for it. By way of contrast, Ai presents a nihilistic persona in Greed (1993), in “Riot Act, April 29, 1992.” The poem’s speaker plans to take advantage of the Los Angeles riots to obtain his share of the goods that were previously available to him only behind the TV screen, a glass panel similar to the storefronts that he now only has to smash to get what he wants. In these poems, Ai takes on big questions that govern the world. Her definition of human potential almost always is negative, but one never gets the feeling that that is her fault. Rather, it is the nature of what she has discovered for and about the world.

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Ai seems to understand that single events of human history, whether involving John F. Kennedy or a nameless prostitute, are the hinges upon which the world turns and are therefore possibilities for the heart to turn in a different direction. No matter how bleak her observations may appear, they allow readers to come to their own conclusions as to what one must do in response to observations. In some ways, Ai acts like a seer in classical Greek drama. She presents what she knows, what is true. A reader, like the audience of a Greek play, must determine whether her vision is not only true but also right. The gods (and the current world order) are neither necessarily right nor just. Ai sees in her personas the possibility of presenting universal tendencies and effects of both the living and the dead. She mines the living for their mistakes and the dead for their contemplation of what they would do if given another chance. Ai builds her poems from book to book, from monstrous acts by unnamed characters to similar acts by people familiar to her readers. Her point is that the anonymous and the famous are the same. The pope is no different from any other man; Marilyn Monroe had nothing that other women lack. The living keep alive this illusion of difference; the dead are able to look over the world and understand that it is an illusion. This movement of the poet develops from seeing, to real vision, to meditations on those visions, to possible suggestions for change. Ai’s Subjects Ai is not interested in heroes; she is interested in survivors, for only the living are capable of any kind of real epiphany. Even a comatose patient, the speaker of “Sleeping Beauty: A Fiction,” is fully aware of the violation that occurs when a hospital aide rapes her, sensing how he steals into her room to pay his “furtive visits” and “prick” her with “the thorn of violence” in a fairy tale that is more of a horror story and has no happy ending. Ai’s larger agenda has been her assertion of how little one person can affect the world—except perhaps for people such as Oppenheimer. She is interested in raising the consciousness of a social order that has become increasingly anesthetized to the brutalities of the human condition as they have become increasingly recognized. Ai moves from private, personal myth to a public myth that may have the capacity for salvation. In the title poem of Dread, for instance, Shirley Herlihy describes her life as a police officer in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing. Despite her own brother’s disappearance in the terrorist attacks, she must maintain a tough but fair public demeanor and go about the business of cleaning up the rubble and “remnants of people.” She is no stranger to hardship, both of her parents having died in an episode of domestic violence when she was fifteen and her brother was twelve. She says “we raised ourselves,” yet, because of her brother’s drinking and difficulty holding a job, Shirley often supported him financially. In a twist of irony, when her brother stopped drinking “for good” and told her that he would soon return to work, he was pulled into the “fire’s cold embrace” of the bombing, after “having barely escaped the inferno of family violence.”

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Critical Context Ai’s style may seem straightforward, but if it were as simple as it appears, someone else would long ago have done what she has done so masterfully. Critics such as Hayden Carruth commend her passion; reviewers such as G. E. Murray admire her authority. Randall Albers appreciates Ai’s unflinching confrontation of grim reality and her portrayal of human determination in the face of it. Carolyn Forche is struck by her ability to capture a moment that is “the hinge of history” and allows the possibility for radical change. Ai’s passion, her authority, and even the seeming dispassion of her poetic voice all come from the development of a clean, largely unpunctuated freeverse line. The use of personas, literally masks, is paramount in the poet’s work. There is, however, a modulation present in the control of that work that resounds with rhythms of the living, with the breath line of modern American poetry, and with the chanting of a more primal human element. Fastidious, disciplined, organized, chastened: All these words have come to characterize Ai’s writing. She is not enamored of figurative language, but she utilizes it much more in the later work than in the earlier. Not every commentator on Ai’s poetry praises it. Several question the need for such brutality. Stephen Yenser, for instance, attributes an obsession with violence to the poems in Killing Floor. Nevertheless, he respects Ai’s style, which he calls highly disciplined, clean, organized, and well-punctuated free verse. John N. Morris, on the other hand, finds little to commend in Ai’s poetry, which he doesn’t believe is worthy of the name. Instead, he would classify it as a “pornography of pain.” Some wonder at the poetry’s dispassion, and at least one critic has questioned Ai’s distortion of facts to fit her presentation. To her credit, she subtitles many of her poems “a fiction,” as if to implore readers to accept a mythic version of what has been seen as a “real” event. Ai’s intention in the blurring of fact and fiction becomes especially clear in her poem “Evidence: From a Reporter’s Notebook”: She does not trust “real” accounts as they have been given to the world. She trusts the voices of her created and mythic personas more. The world knows versions of the Kennedys, Elvis Presley, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Hoffa, George Armstrong Custer, and James Dean, but the world does not know the truth about these people and the events that surround them. Ai’s versions may as well be that truth. It is in that light that one must read her poetry. As one reviewer noted, dying does not end anything. For Ai, though, there is a truth in the final act of life that cannot be denied, and she has taken it upon herself to render that truth as vividly, as eerily, as voluptuously, and as terrifyingly as any poet can. Bibliography Ai. “A Conversation with Ai.” Interview by Canéla A. Jaramillo. Standards 7, no. 2 (Spring/Summer, 2001). Ai describes the difference between “safe” work and hers, her desire to be true to character, her writing process, and the recognition of her work, particularly for a woman of color. _______. “Interview with Ai.” Interview by Okla Elliott. The Pedestal 16 (June/Au-

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gust, 2003). Ai describes her attraction to persona poems and the subjects she chooses for them. A brief biography and three poems are also included. Albers, Randall. Review of Killing Floor, by Ai. Chicago Review 30, no. 4 (Spring, 1979): 119-122. Presents an in-depth critical reaction to Ai’s early poetry. Carruth, Hayden. “Impetus and Invention: Poetic Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Harper’s 258, no. 1548 (May, 1979): 88-90. Specifies Ai’s place in the poetic tradition from which she springs and attempts to explain her idiosyncratic style. Forché, Carolyn. “Sentenced to Despair.” The Washington Post Book World, March 11, 1979, p. F2. The author comes face to face with the subjects of Ai’s work— rape, sodomy, death, and drowning—all in relation to the contemporary world. Murray, G. E. “Book Notes: Killing Floor.” The Nation 228, no. 19 (May 19, 1979): 578. Another early view of the idiosyncrasies of Ai’s poetry by a well-known Chicago columnist and book reviewer. Seshadri, Vijay. “When Bad Things Happen to Everyone.” Review of Dread, by Ai. New York Times Book Review, May 4, 2003, p. 7. Identifies Ai’s central concerns as current events, victims, and victimizers. Yenser, Stephen. Review of Killing Floor, by Ai. The Yale Review 68, no. 4 (Summer, 1979): 566-569. Attempts to explain Ai’s excesses in such a way that her poetry can fit into the contemporary canon. John Jacob, updated by Holly L. Norton

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THE POETRY OF MAYA ANGELOU Author: Maya Angelou (Marguerite Annie Johnson, 1928) Type of work: Poetry First published: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie, 1971; Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, 1975; And Still I Rise, 1978; Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?, 1983; Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987; written for Tom Feelings’s drawings of black women); I Shall Not Be Moved, 1990; “On the Pulse of Morning,” 1993 Angelou’s Journey to Success The televised reading of her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration ceremony of President Bill Clinton in January, 1993, represented a crowning moment for Maya Angelou, who had already received many honorary degrees and awards during her multifaceted career. The broadcast also reminded her readers that Angelou, although better known as an autobiographer, is first and foremost a poet. Angelou’s poetry occupies a special position in her development as a writer. As a child, Angelou went through five years of self-imposed silence after she was raped at the age of seven by a Mr. Freeman, who was subsequently kicked to death by her uncles. The loss of her voice was a result of the trauma, which made her imagine that her voice could kill. Thanks to her teacher, Bertha Flowers, Angelou started writing poetry and overcame her trauma. Poetry thus played an essential part in the recovery of her voice, which in turn signaled the success of the healing process. Angelou’s commitment to be a writer began at the age of about thirty. By the time she started publishing, she had gone through a number of dramatic turns in her personal and social life. The pattern emerging from those events is that of a person’s struggle to establish, as Dolly A. McPherson says of Angelou’s autobiographies, “order out of chaos,” a struggle to relate her personal experience to the general condition of African Americans, so that the individual’s chaotic life is given order through the awareness of being related to the communal experience. Angelou’s poetry also bears out this struggle, which Pricilla Ramsey characterizes as the transformation of “the elements of a stultifying and personal, social, political and historical milieu into a sensual and physical refuge.” Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie (1971) is typical of Angelou’s poetry in that the poems employ two related voices to address individual as well as communal issues, so, eventually, the personal voice (for example, the lover’s) merges with and becomes indistinguishable from the communal voice (for example, the social critic’s). The communal voice, in other words, transcends the personal at the end of the struggle. The two voices are evident from the two parts of the book. Part 1, “Where Love Is a Scream of Anguish,” focuses on various kinds of malefemale relationships and employs the “I” persona. Some of these relationships are love affairs filled with bittersweet emotions, as in “Remembering” and “Tears.” Even

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at the most tender and most intimate moments, the shadow of insecurity and loss looms large, as in “After.” The shadow is especially prominent in relationships that are somewhat abnormal, as in the case of a prostitute and her transient clients in “They Went Home” and that of a woman and a “lover-boy” who has turned to a younger woman in “No Loser, No Weeper.” At times, the woman even indulges in the morose premonition of her own demise, as in “Mourning Grace.” Despite the gloom that dominates in part 1, there is nevertheless a poem that signals the persona’s desire to transcend the impasse. In “On Diverse Deviations,” the persona, out of exasperation, expresses her wish to be carried off “To a shore,/ Where love is the scream of anguish/ And no curtain drapes the door.” The poem also serves as a transitional link to the next section, which can be understood as the other “shore.” Part 2, “Just Before the World Ends,” deals with communal, social, and political issues. Despite the greater variety of subject matter here, the poems are unified by their social realism and criticism with regard to the predicament of African Americans, exemplified by such works as “Times-Square-Shoeshine-Composition” and “When I Think About Myself.” Social realism is inseparable from social satire, which can be directed at white society, as in “The Calling of Names,” or at the African American community, as in “Sepia Fashion Show.” At times, satire gives way to sarcastic protest. In “My Guilt,” for example, the persona declares in bitterness that her guilt is making music out of slavery’s chains, her crime is being alive to tell of heroes dead and gone, and her sin is hanging from a tree without screaming aloud. At her best, Angelou is able to combine satire and protest into a powerful indictment. One remarkable example is “Miss Scarlett, Mr. Rhett, and Other Latter-Day Saints.” In this poem, the lynching of African Americans on a plantation colludes with a grotesquely surrealistic Christian ritual in which victims turn out to be Jesus and Ku Klux Klan members serve as priests for King Kotton as God. The ritual even includes a “little Eva” as the Virgin Mary of Dixie who, in order to guard the relic of her intact hymen, plays a part in “daily putting to death,/ into eternity,/ The stud, his seed.” Angelou’s relentless indictments approach the power of apocalyptic visions on occasion. In “Riot: 60’s,” readers are offered a glimpse of “Lighting: a hundred Watts/ Detroit, Newark and New York,” in which African Americans are shot by nervous National Guards. In “No No No No,” which contains the line responsible for the volume’s title, the colonial, racial, and global violence perpetuated by the West compels the persona to deny the possibility of love and forgiveness. The hint of nihilism in this kind of bitterness is accentuated by the threat of a nuclear war, the subject of “On a Bright Day, Next Week.” The subtitle of part 2 comes from this poem. The two parts of the book are tied together antithetically: The poignant emotions and personal sufferings of part 1 are juxtaposed with the activist militancy and critical reflections of part 2, as if to suggest that the individual’s failures and distresses in life and love ought to be understood and measured in the context of the community’s historical and social conditions. The framework of the book is closely related to the title of the volume itself, which, Angelou has said, refers to her “belief that we as individuals in a species are still so innocent that we could ask our murderer just before he puts

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the final wrench upon the throat, ‘Would you please give me a cool drink of water?’” Symbolically, it is the innocence—and the courage—to ask for such a “cool drink of water” that allows the communal persona in part 2 to voice its understanding and critique of the anguishes and tribulations of the individual persona in part 1. The black woman may have suffered, both as an individual and as a collective persona, but as “The Mothering Blackness” suggests, Angelou’s interest is in highlighting her return to the mother’s waiting arms “blameless,” “black,” and “tall as was Sheba’s daughter.” Therapeutic Poetry In writing Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), which was inspired by a song (the tune from “a slave holler” and the words from a nineteenth century spiritual), Angelou’s purpose was “to put all the things bothering me—my heavy load— in that book, and let them pass.” The book continues the pattern of ordering chaos by merging the individual and the communal voices, but there is an increasing amount of humor, wit, tenderness, and meditation. The first two parts, which deal with love in its various guises ranging from consolation (“Conceit”) to frustration (“Poor Girl”), are intensely personal. The success of these poems lies mainly in their drama: Moments of moodiness are captured lyrically (“Passing Time”) along with temperamental outbursts (“The Telephone”) to suggest a special type of romance that an early-middleaged African American woman (see “On Reaching Forty”) finds herself getting into, only to realize that instead of romantic leaves and birds and snows and nights, “I need to write/ of lovers false/ and hate/ and hateful wrath/ quickly” (“Art Pose”). The personal drama in this volume once again is enacted against the backdrop, in parts 3 through 5, of historical and contemporary realities, including the alienation of the poor (“Alone”), the abandonment of the underprivileged (“Request”), the sexist victimization of women (“Chicken-Licken”), and various other social injustices (“Southeast Arkansas”). This sense of heaviness is directly related to the failure of the American Dream for African Americans. Angelou’s emphasis here is not so much to condemn America as to rediscover the real America (“America”) and, as an antidote, to appreciate the New Africa emerging from colonialism and to learn about African civilization itself (“Africa”). Linking the two continents by means of space (the ocean) and time (history), Angelou comes to terms with her identity and ethnicity in a series of carefully crafted poems including “Child Dead in Old Seas,” “Song for the Old Ones,” and “Elegy.” Mysteriously, these poems are characterized by a combination of poignancy and triumph, thus indicating the poet’s belief that her race has never been broken. And Still I Rise (1978) further develops Angelou’s pattern of turning chaos into order, and order dominates. Part 1, “Touch Me, Life, Not Softly,” consists of poems about love in many guises. Here Angelou treats it as a subject of study and critique rather than as an experience to indulge in. For example, in “A King of Love, Some Say” and in “Men,” she addresses the issue of abusive relationships; in “Where You Belong: A Duet” and “Just for a Time,” she portrays types of men who “fool around” and regard women as possessions. Because the poet frequently assumes the persona

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of a man, the voice in these poems is not only a lover’s but also an actor’s or a director’s. In part 2, “Traveling,” the analytical mind is also brought into play, in casestudy portraits of various types of personages including drug addicts (“The Lesson”), pretentious philanthropists (“Lady Luncheon Club”), self-righteous welfare mothers (“Momma Welfare Roll”), happy-go-lucky tricksters (“Willie”), menial laborers (“Woman Work”), and hypocritical politicians (“Through the Inner City to the Suburbs”). In these vignettes, Angelou’s clinical observations of society and her mockery of reality are also infused with a strong sense of compassion, as if to prepare readers for the next section. The subtitle of part 3, “And Still I Rise,” is taken from the first poem of the section; this title is not only the namesake of the volume but also the title of a 1977 play based on the poem. “And Still I Rise” is indeed one of the most important aphorisms by which Angelou’s poetry can be understood. The poem opens with a mundane but powerful simile: “You may write me down in history/ With your bitter, twisted lies,/ You may trod me in the very dirt/ But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” The poem then continues in a proud, even haughty, tone, which through a series of stanzas rises steadily in pitch, in dauntless challenge to the history and reality of oppression, and in selfcongratulatory celebration of dignity, strength, and survival. The kind of bitterness found in earlier volumes is conspicuously absent, indicating that perhaps a process of sublimation and transcendence has taken place upon the triumphant close of the Civil Rights era. Indeed, in some of her most lighthearted moments, Angelou can even afford to sound clownishly funny. In “Ain’t That Bad?,” a carnivalesque poem with festive dance rhythms, after giving the audience a rundown of a dozen or so black celebrities ranging from Stevie Wonder and Jesse Jackson to Muhammad Ali and Andrew Young, the poet jests comically: “Now ain’t they bad?/ An’ ain’t they Black?” There are also serene moments when the poet turns meditative, contemplating God but without feeling obligated to be submissive, for she now sees God as the God who has made a pact with Job and given His Word, the Word that the poet can “step out on” (“Just Like Job”). Appropriating Christianity and reinventing the religion for African Americans, Angelou declares in the concluding poem of the volume that her God is “Brown-skinned,/ Neat Afro,/ Full lips,/ A little goatee./ A Malcolm,/ Martin,/ DuBois” (“Thank You, Lord”). As a poet, Angelou reached maturity with the publication of And Still I Rise because she had found her voice, her self, her history, her race, and her God; order is coming into shape out of the chaos of her life and of her world. The volumes that follow are in general further attempts to adumbrate and reinforce this order along the trajectory traced above, but each volume contains some new elements. In Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983; the title is taken from a John Henry song), the persona is often a black woman. Besides being assertive and assured of herself (“Weekend Glory”), she is afflicted by the blues (“Good Woman Feeling Blue”) and becomes nostalgic (“A Georgia Song”), insomniac (“Insomniac”), and even depressed (“The Last Decision”). In the sentimental but suggestive title poem, “Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?,” the persona asks a bedmate, the “Shaker,” in the middle of

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the night why the Shaker does not sing. The reader is mystified as to why the Shaker has “withdrawn/ your music and lean inaudibly/ on the quiet slope of memory.” If the turn taken by Angelou in Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? is a sentimental one, then Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987) can be seen as a turn toward sensuality, but in a feminist way. Angelou has commented that the work is “a play on the Song of Solomon. We never heard Sheba’s song.” The book is dedicated to all her “sisters,” by which Angelou refers to “all my brown, black, beige, yellow, red and white sisters.” Taking advantage of Tom Feelings’s monochrome drawings of black women in various poses, Angelou boldly celebrates the beauty of the sexuality and spirituality of black womanhood: “From the columns of my thighs/ I take the strength to hold the world aloft/ Standing, too often, with a cloud of loneliness/ Forming halos for my head.” The volume is perhaps the most emblematic of Angelou’s poetic achievement, thanks to the mythmaking image of Sheba as a black woman of beauty in body and in spirit. Poetry of the Nation Because Angelou’s stature as a public figure has been enhanced by her connections with presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, her poetry has taken yet another turn, namely toward the construction of a civic culture conducive to the democracy of the United States. She may be perceived as being didactic in many poems, including “On the Pulse of Morning,” but since she has courageously taken up the burden of a public mission, these poems ought to be understood in the context of the rage toward order to which Angelou has devoted her entire life. The drive toward the great order of the nation is evident from many poems in I Shall Not Be Moved (1990). The title of the volume is derived from the refrain of “Our Grandmothers,” a composite portrait of the historical role of black women. It also reminds readers of a popular song that declares, “On our way to freedom, we shall not be moved.” Evidently, Angelou cannot bear to see the chaos of an individual like herself expanded to a national or even global scale; as she writes in “These Yet to Be United States,” that country’s awesome power is the source of suffering at home and abroad. This statement is, however, a patriotic one because Angelou’s ultimate concern is how the wounds can be healed. Risking didacticism, she explains that “In minor ways we differ,/ in major we’re the same. . . . We are more alike, my friends,/ than we are unalike” (“Human Family”). She then goes on to denounce bigotry in “Main Bigot,” call for the morality of forgiveness in “Forgive,” and sing of equality in “Equality.” In her vision, the Savior is one who practices sacrifice out of agape, or the love of humanity (“Savior”), and paradise is a place “where families are loyal/ and strangers are nice,/ where the music is jazz/ and the season is fall” (“Preacher, Don’t Send Me”). All these themes culminate in her optimistic outlook in the inaugural poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” in which multiculturalism is offered as a viable solution to the problems of American society, a blueprint for creating supreme order out of the devastating chaos of history and the world. Because Angelou’s poems make use of the voice and are meant for the ear and the heart rather than the eye, they can be deceptively simple to some of her readers. Bor-

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rowing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notion that “Easy reading is damn hard writing,” she has said that a simple style can contain “deep talk,” that is, meanings that go deep beneath the surface of language. In Angelou’s poetry, the “deep talk” is the talk of the world through a nation, the talk of the nation through a race, the talk of the race through a black woman, and the talk of the black woman through a human being. As lyrical statements of this talk of humanism, her poems resonate with such a vital pulse that chaos must give way to order. Although she once thought that her voice could kill, it is in fact life-giving by virtue of this transcendence. Bibliography Angelou, Maya. Conversations with Maya Angelou. Edited by Jeffrey M. Elliot. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. A handy collection of thirty-two interviews conducted at different times. Contains many comments by Angelou on her own poetry. Bloom, Harold, ed. Maya Angelou. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Collection of scholarly studies of Angelou’s poetry and prose, situating her within the African American and American canons. McPherson, Dolly A. Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Provides theoretical insights into Angelou’s writings. Plimpton, George. “Maya Angelou.” In Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. 8th ser. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. An interview in which Angelou discusses the concept of “deep talk,” which sheds light on her poetry. Ramsey, Pricilla R. “Transcendence: The Poetry of Maya Angelou.” In Current Bibliography on African Affairs, 17, no. 2 (1984-1985): 139-153. A rare article focusing on Angelou as a poet; proposes the idea of transcendence in her poetry. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Contains an interview with Maya Angelou (reprinted in Conversations with Maya Angelou). This collection also puts Angelou in the context of contemporary black women’s writing. Balance Chow

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THE POETRY OF AMIRI BARAKA Author: Amiri Baraka (Everett LeRoi Jones, 1934) Type of work: Poetry First published: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 1961; The Dead Lecturer, 1964; Black Magic—Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art: Collected Poetry, 19611967, 1969; It’s Nation Time, 1970; In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style, 1970; Spirit Reach, 1972; Hard Facts, 1975; Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1979; Reggae or Not!, 1981; The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader (edited by William J. Harris), 1991; Wise, Why’s, Y’s, 1995; Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka, 1995; Funk Lore: New Poems, 1984-1995, 1996; Somebody Blew Up America, and Other Poems, 2003 A Long and Influential Career Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones) is a leading African American poet who has also written essays, short stories, a novel, a major study of American jazz, plays, a musical drama, and an autobiography. He has founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater-School, edited seminal anthologies and journals of avant-garde and African American writing, received major scholarly fellowships and awards, taught at several major American universities, and been an influential political and cultural leader in the African American community. Baraka’s life, achievements, and writing have reflected—and have often helped determine—the evolution of African American thought in the last half of the twentieth century and beyond. The philosophical and political developments in Baraka’s thinking have resulted in four distinct poetical periods: a 1950’s and 1960’s involvement with the Greenwich Village Beat scene, an early 1960’s quest for personal identity and community, a phase connected with Black Nationalism and the Black Arts movement, and a Marxist-Leninist period. Everett LeRoi Jones was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934. His father was a postal worker; his mother was a college dropout who became a social worker. Graduated with honors from Barringer High School in 1951, Jones first attended Rutgers University on scholarship and transferred to Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1952, only to be expelled in 1954 for failing grades. He immediately joined the U.S. Air Force, attaining the rank of sergeant, but he was discharged “undesirably” in 1957 for having sent some of his poems to purportedly communist publications. Upon his release, Jones moved to Greenwich Village; became friends with such avantgarde poets as Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Charles Olson; and married Hettie Cohen, with whom he edited a literary journal. Political Awakening In 1960, Jones—along with several other important “Negro writers”—was invited to visit Cuba, where he met Fidel Castro. He witnessed Cuba’s socialist infancy firsthand and realized how political poetry could be. The success of his play Dutchman

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(pr., pb. 1964) and the murder of Malcolm X in 1965 convinced Jones that Greenwich Village’s white Beat poetry scene and his white Jewish wife contradicted his interests in African American communities and issues. Consequently, he moved initially to Harlem and then back to Newark. During this period, Jones—along with Larry Neal, Hoyt Fuller, Don L. Lee, and others—initiated the Black Arts movement, a cultural embodiment of Black Nationalism. He also married Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka) and in 1967 changed his name to Imamu Ameer Baraka, meaning “spiritual leader and prince who is blessed.” He later simplified the name to Amiri Baraka. Throughout the 1960’s and into the 1970’s, Baraka’s major interests were the Black Power movement, Black Muslim philosophy and politics, Maulana Ron Karenga’s Kawaida cultural revolutionary doctrine, and pan-Africanism. In 1974, however, Baraka became convinced that these “cultural nationalist positions” were too narrow in their concerns and that class, not race, determines the social, political, and economic realities of people’s lives. For this reason, he shifted his focus in writing and politics to Marxist-Leninist thought. Post-World War II avant-garde Greenwich Village poetry represented a break from what Baraka considered the impersonal, academic poetry of T. S. Eliot and the poetry published in The New Yorker. When Baraka read Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl,” it was a turning point in his poetic life. Baraka says “Howl” moved him because “it talked about a world I could identify with and relate to. . . . I now knew poetry could be about some things that I was familiar with. That it did not have to be about suburban birdbaths and Greek mythology.” In “How You Sound??” Baraka wrote: “MY POETRY is whatever I think I am. . . . I CAN BE ANYTHING I CAN. I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives.” He came to believe not only that any observation, experience, or object is appropriate for poetry but also that “There must not be any preconceived notion or design for what the poem ought to be. . . . I’m not interested in writing sonnets, sestinas or anything . . . only poems.” The Politics of Personal Experience and Popular Culture What interests Baraka is his own experience, popular American culture, and the struggle between the seemingly contradictory black and white worlds in which he dwells. A number of Baraka’s early poems published in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) express a yearning for a more orderly and meaningful world that he associates with radio. He calls this yearning “A maudlin nostalgia/ that comes on/ like terrible thoughts about death.” In “In Memory of Radio,” Baraka compares the wisdom of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and the Shadow to his own lack of insight into the evil that “lurks in the hearts of men.” Meanwhile, “Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today” contrasts the certainty of radio’s imagined worlds to the real world, in which, Baraka realizes, “nobody really gives a damn” and “All the lovely things I’ve known have disappeared.” Almost despairingly, he wonders, “Where is my space helmet, I sent for it/ 3 lives ago . . . when there were box tops. . . . THERE MUST BE A LONE RANGER!!!” Neither the Lone Ranger nor his other radio com-

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panions come to the rescue. The poet is left alone and forlorn, “My silver bullets all gone/ My black mask trampled in the dust.” In making popular culture the focus of his poetry, Baraka reflects the poetic shift from mythological and literary icons (which he considers bourgeois, academic, and dead) to the vitality of the everyday. Baraka and his circle looked to Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Surrealist painters to help them create a new American poetic tradition. The personal “I,” so important to the whole body of Baraka’s poetic works, also began to develop during this period, which is characterized by direct and even confessional poems such as “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.” In that poem, Baraka writes, “Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way/ The ground opens up and envelopes me/ Each time I go out to walk the dog.” This personal voice expresses the confusion the poet feels living in both the black and white worlds. “Hymn for Lanie Poo” juxtaposes images from 1950’s New York with images from Africa and laments the capitulation of the poet’s schoolteacher sister to white values. She is, he says at the end of the poem, happy in the huge & loveless white-anglo sun of benevolent step mother America.

In the volume’s final poem, “Notes for a Speech,” Baraka writes, “African blues/ does not know me.” He gives voice to feelings of alienated from his racial heritage: They shy away. My own dead souls, my, so called people. Africa is a foreign place. You are as any other sad man here american

He thus ends Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by expressing confusion over his identity, his place, and his voice. Such confusion contributed to Baraka’s split with his wife, his move from Greenwich Village to Harlem and eventually to Newark, and his quest for personal and racial identity captured in his second book of poetry, The Dead Lecturer (1964). Baraka describes “trying to puncture fake social relationships and gain some clarity about what I really felt about things.” In his autobiography, Baraka remarks of the poems of this period, “again and again they speak of this separation, this sense of being in contradiction with my friends and peers.” In “A Poem for Willie Best” (an African American film actor who performed demeaning, stereotypical roles), Baraka wrestles with his estrangement in the world:

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A face sings, alone at the top of the body. All flesh, all song aligned. For hell is silent [. . .] It was your own death you saw.

Forced to act in a way contrary to his nature, to dance a dance that “punishes speech” and to speak words that are not his own, Willie Best is able “to provoke/ some meaning, where before there was only hell,” so that those who come after him may “Hear,” as the last line of the poem insists. Baraka also creates Crow Jane in this poetry collection, a “white Muse appropriated by the black experience.” She embodies for Baraka a rejection of the white Western aesthetic. Baraka describes her as “Dead virgin/ of the mind’s echo. Dead lady/ of thinking, back now, without/ the creak of memory”; in the last poem of the series, he implores, “Damballah, kind father,/ sew up/ her bleeding hole.” Transformed by African culture and the African American experience, the muse may live again. During this period of racial and political unrest, Baraka says, “I was struggling to be born. . . . I was in a frenzy, trying to get my feet solidly on the ground, of reality,” a fact that rings out in poems such as “I Substitute for the Dead Lecturer.” He asks, What kindness What wealth can I offer? Except what is, for me ugliest. What is for me, shadows, shrieking phantoms.

Somehow, he feels destined to give a new “lecture” on the horrors of American reality: “The Lord has saved me/ to do this” despite his fear of failure. He invokes in another poem “black dada nihilismus,” a black god, to destroy all vestiges of white culture and to assume its own righteous power. During his second period, then, Baraka posed tough questions regarding identity, integrity, and society without knowing the answers. He negated what was but was hard-pressed to offer positive alternatives. He searched for his self, though he was not sure who that would turn out to be. As he says in “The Liar,” “When they say, ‘It is Roi/ who is dead?’ I wonder/ who will they mean?” Baraka’s Black Nationalist Period Not until he involved himself with the Black Power movement, the Nation of Islam, the West Coast Kawaida revolution, and the Black Arts movement did Baraka come to see himself and his art clearly. In Cuba, Baraka had come to see that politics and poetry could work together; in his Black Nationalist period, he successfully

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joined the two. In his essay “The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation,” Baraka declares, “The Black artist . . . is desperately needed to change the images his people identify with, by asserting Black feeling, Black mind, Black judgment”; in “State/meant,” he says: “The Black Artist must draw out of his soul the correct image of the world.” In the poem “Black Art,” Baraka insists that art should be intimately connected with the real world, not an exercise in abstraction. Art must reflect and change that world: “We want ‘poems that kill.’/ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot/ guns.” In the final stanza, he writes: “We want a black poem./ And a/ Black World.” His poems call for separatist Black Nationalism. In “Return of the Native,” he imagines a completely African American world, “where we may see ourselves/ all the time.” His tribute to Malcolm X, “A Poem for Black Hearts,” celebrates the contributions of the “black god of our time” and looks to his memory to transform those who follow. “Poem for HalfWhite College Students” is a warning to black students whose words, gestures, and values are compromised by the white academic world. “Ka’Ba” honors the beauty of blackness: “We are beautiful people/ with african imaginations/ full of masks and dances and swelling chants.” Baraka calls for the African tradition evoked by Black Nationalism to supply meaning, self-affirmation, and order in an alien land. Marxism-Leninism Baraka has observed that “all nationalism finally, taken to any extreme, has got to be oppressive to the people who are not in that nationality.” Recognizing the constrictive effect of Black Nationalism led Baraka to adopt a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Baraka has attributed the change in his thinking to his realization that “skin color was not determinant of political content.” Furthermore, he has stated, “I see art as a weapon, and a weapon of revolution. It’s just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms.” In his poem “When We’ll Worship Jesus,” for example, Baraka criticizes Christian America for its failure to help people in any substantive way: “he cant change the world/ we can change the world.” He insists, “throw/ jesus out yr mind. Build the new world out of reality, and new vision.” In “A New Reality Is Better than a New Movie!” Baraka envisions the old, unequal, capitalist world being consumed in an inferno. What is captured on film pales in comparison to the revolutionary reality to come: “The real terror of nature is humanity enraged, the true/ technicolor spectacle that/ hollywood/ cant record.” Such outrage will lead, Baraka predicts, to a demand for “the new socialist reality . . . the ultimate tidal/ wave” that will change the world. In poems such as “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and “Das Kapital,” Baraka presents a poetic articulation of socialist ideology. In his 1982 poem “In the Tradition,” Baraka moves beyond strict Marxist concerns to address African American culture, providing a tribute to the contributors to that tradition: “We are the composers, racists & gunbearers/ We are the artists.” He wants American history and culture to “get out of europe/ come out of europe if you can.” Were scholars to look for truly American culture, he maintains, “nigger music’s almost all/ you got, and you find it/ much too hot.” Baraka’s long poem “Why’s/Wise”

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(later published as part of Wise, Why’s, Y’s, 1995) also focuses on the life and history of African Americans, though Baraka is still committed to his Marxist vision. A lifework of more than three decades of poetry, Transbluesency was published in 1995 as a body of poety and knowledge that captures the ideological transformations of Baraka from avant-garde bohemian to cultural nationalist to international socialist. The book takes its name from a 1946 Duke Ellington composition that means “a blue fog you can almost see through.” Transbluency reveals the extent to which Baraka— from his 1961 publication of Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note to Wise, Why’s, Y’s in 1995—has consistently sought allegiance between what is radical or subversive politically and what is avant-garde poetically. It is a revelation of both the transformation of Baraka’s consciousness and the poet’s effective use of art as a weapon of revolution. Baraka’s Funk Lore: New Poems, 1984-1995 (1996) represents a poetic exploration of the concepts of “funk” and “lore” and their expansive gamut of meanings. The denotative definition of “funk” was transformed by popular usage during the 1960’s, from something that either stank or was coarse or indecent into a particular body of knowledge (lore) characterized first by a slow, mellow groove and later by the harddriving, insistent rhythm characteristic of sexual intercourse. In the same way, Baraka treats a broad range of topics, from popular culture to the politics of history, as he demonstrates his continued mastery of tone and performance. From the stench of the “bovine fecal sauce mixture,” which to Baraka constitutes the ingredients of his “Fusion Recipe” to the academic lore of history in “Othello Jr.,” “Black Reconstruction,” and “Tom Ass Clarence,” among other poems, Baraka’s intense groove and rapid-fire expressions of the lore of funk is also a tribute of gratitude to such jazz greats as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughn, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane. In 2003, Baraka’s Somebody Blew Up America, and Other Poems appeared as an unorthodox response to the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book, like its infamous title poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” is a scathing indictment of whiteness as diabolical, dangerous, and terroristic. It is a declaration of aesthetic war on U.S. imperialism and European hegemony. As an incendiary work, the poem blames white supremacy for putting Eastern European Jews into ovens yet implicates the state of Israel in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Other poems in the book reveal other aspects of the invidious nature of whiteness. From the demand for reparations in the poem “Why Is We Americans?” to the ugly thing floating on the backs of black people in “In Town,” Baraka portrays the legacy of white supremacy as one of tragedy and terror. The poetry of Amiri Baraka is wide-ranging in content and style. He continues to work, to grow, and to influence other poets. As critic Gerald Early observes, Amiri Baraka has been “the most influential black person of letters over the [late twentieth century], particularly influential among young blacks,” and he has had “a striking ability to communicate to people who [have] never read his books. It is not likely that any black writer or intellectual will generate a similar power any time in the near or foreseeable future.”

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Bibliography Abodunrin, Femi. Blackness—Culture, Ideology and Discourse: A Comparative Study. Bayreuth, Germany: E. Breitinger, 1996. International comparative study of several writers, including Baraka, from the point of view of the African diaspora and the postmodern politics of negritude. Baraka, Amiri. “Revolution: The Constancy of Change.” Interview by D. H. Melhern. Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 3 (Fall, 1982): 87-105. Baraka discusses the development of his politics, philosophy, and art. Berry, Jay R., Jr. “Poetic Style in Amiri Baraka’s Black Art.” CLA Journal 32 (December, 1988): 225-234. Insists that though his attention in Black Art is primarily political, Baraka also shows great concern for poetic style and structure. Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Comprehensive examination of Baraka’s thought and work from his bohemian stage through Black Nationalism to Marxism, with particular emphasis on the influence of jazz upon him. Miller, James A. “‘I Investigate the Sun’: Amiri Baraka in the 1980’s.” Callaloo 9 (Winter, 1986): 184-192. Maintains that, despite some critics’ claims to the contrary, Baraka’s poetry has not deteriorated since his “conversion” to MarxismLeninism. Phillips, Marilynn J. “LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka: A Study in Creolization.” MAWA Review 2 (June, 1986): 8-10. Claims that creolization, the incorporation and mingling of the vocabulary and grammar of two or more language groups, marks Baraka’s poetry. Baraka uses “all language varieties available to him” to express his ideas. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Argues that two ideas unify Baraka’s works and ideas through all of their various stages: populism and modernism. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Massive, comprehensive examination of Baraka’s aesthetic and political work and their mutual imbrication. Laura Weiss Zlogar, updated by Michael H. Washington and Lori I. Morris

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THE POETRY OF EDWARD KAMAU BRATHWAITE Author: Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1930) Type of work: Poetry First published: Panda No. 349, 1969; The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, 1973 (contains Rights of Passage, 1967; Masks, 1968; Islands, 1969); Days and Nights, 1975; Other Exiles, 1975; Black + Blues, 1976; Soweto, 1979; Word Making Man: A Poem for Nicólas Guillèn, 1979; Third World Poems, 1983; Jah Music, 1986; Korabra, 1986; Sappho Sakyi’s Meditations, 1989; Shar, 1990; Middle Passages, 1992; DreamStories, 1994; Trench Town Rock, 1994; Barabajan Poems, 14921992, 1994; Words Need Love Too, 2000; Ancestors: A Reinvention of “Mother Poem,” “Sun Poem,” and “X/Self,” 2001; Born to Slow Horses, 2005; DS (2): DreamStories, 2007 Caribbean Traditions and Caribbean Themes Edward Kamau Brathwaite, a major Caribbean writer of African descent, was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in 1930 in Bridgetown, Barbados, a British colony until 1966. A prolific poet of international stature, he has received broad recognition for his work, including the 1976 Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry for Black + Blues (1976), the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize for Born to Slow Horses (2005). Brathwaite employs Afro-Caribbean cultural forms such as myths, cults, rituals, music, dance, speech, and creolized expressions to explore themes ranging from the Middle Passage and exile to national identity and the anticolonial struggle for freedom. His poetic works are central to the emerging canon of West Indian literature. Also recognized as a scholar, critic, storywriter, playwright, editor, historian, professor, and educator, he has a long list of publications that reflect his efforts toward the establishment of a national cultural identity for the Caribbean. Brathwaite started publishing poems during the 1950’s, when he was a student on scholarship at the University of Cambridge. While in England, Brathwaite realized that the Western culture that was imposed upon him as a black man in a British colony would be denied to him once he presumed to claim it as his own. The resulting sense of rootlessness led him on a quest for cultural identity in Africa, where he served as an education officer in Ghana (1955-1962) under Kwame Nkrumah. His African experience proved to be a turning point in his career. Reassuring him of a cultural home in Africa and inspiring him to unearth the African heritage of the Caribbean upon his return in 1962, it shaped his vision of a national culture. The encounter had a definite impact on his poetry, scholarship, and literary criticism. In particular, African cultural forms such as rituals and oral performances gave him insights into the type of holistic poetry he would need to write in order to overcome the problems of fragmentation with which West Indians were burdened.

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A Poetics Against Fragmentation Throughout his career, Brathwaite has developed a series of cultural concepts that shed important light on his poetry. The most important is the notion of fragmentation, by which he refers to the geographical, historical, cultural, political, ethnic, and linguistic realities of the West Indies. To deal with fragmentation, Brathwaite believes, a West Indian writer’s mission is to establish political and ethnic unification by helping forge a national culture. Connected to fragmentation is the idea of “the submerged,” by which Brathwaite refers to the “base” of the fragments preserved in the racial memory of Amerindians and Afro-Caribbeans. This submerged culture, similar to the geographical formation that connects the individual Caribbean islands at the base of the ocean, is a potential force for the sea change of unification. Brathwaite sometimes personifies the submerged as the untamable and uncolonizable Sycorax, the mother of the colonized subject Caliban in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623). On other occasions, he calls it nam, which he defines as “secret name, soul-source, connected with nyam (eat), yam (root food), nyame (name of god)”; nam is “the heart of our nation-language which comes into conflict with the cultural imperial authority.” As the “core” inside the protective mask, nam represents the survivability and spirituality of the Afro-Caribbean. In literary terms, to overcome fragmentation by means of the submerged entails a conscious effort to develop what Brathwaite calls the “creole aesthetic” to counteract the “missile,” or Eurocentric, aesthetic. For Brathwaite, creolization is an organic process that involves imitation (regarded as initiation) and invention. Because creolized cultural forms, such as the jazz novel, are creative appropriations rooted in folk tradition, it is through the creole aesthetic that Caribbean artists and writers can create, or “possess,” their own national culture. As Brathwaite writes in an editorial titled “Timehri,” The recognition of an ancestral relationship with the folk or aboriginal culture involves the artist and participant in a journey into the past and hinterland which is at the same time a movement of possession into present and future.

He states that “through this movement of possession we become ourselves, truly our own creators, discovering word for object, image for the Word.” Integral to Brathwaite’s creole aesthetic is the idea of possession, which he explains in terms of kinetic energy: In Africa, the more energy you can accumulate and express, the nearer you will come to God. . . . I’m using the concept of kinesis to make us aware of the things that we do possess, and the people who write the poetry of kinesis do actually in themselves enact a religious process whereby they become aware of certain omens and icons that are vital to themselves.

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Practicing what he preaches, Brathwaite has employed in his poetry a great variety of creolized cultural forms, such as rasta, reggae, limbo, calypso, ska, jazz, blues, the yard theater, and the drum, in order to achieve the condition of possession. As the culmination of the aesthetic-religious experience, this would allow West Indians to come to terms with “dispossession” and other problems associated with the legacy of colonialism and slavery. Of the more than one dozen books of poetry by Brathwaite, arguably the most important are The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973) and Ancestors (2001, also known as the Bajan trilogy). Because both works share Brathwaite’s search for identity as an Afro-Caribbean, they can be regarded as constituting an autobiographical record of the poet’s inner experience. Insofar as they exemplify his efforts to establish, or “possess,” a national culture for the West Indies, they can also be seen as the epic of a nation. This duality is by no means a dichotomy, because the personal “I” and the communal “I” found interspersed in these two works constitute a united rather than a divided consciousness. Sometimes known as the collective voice of the African diaspora, this consciousness is developed into an archetypal voice with mythical implications. On the whole, Brathwaite’s works follow this pattern. The Arrivants Brathwaite started working on his first trilogy upon his return to the Caribbean in 1962. The individual works of the trilogy were published in England while he was pursuing a doctoral degree in history at the University of Sussex (1965-1968). The three parts—Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969)—were republished collectively in 1973 as The Arrivants. This new edition was preceded by a quotation from the Kumina Queen of Jamaica, in Creole, about the “arrivance” of her ancestors as “arrivants” from Africa. The epigraph sums up concisely the theme of the trilogy, in that the narrator not only acknowledges her African heritage but also asserts her West Indian identity in the present. This discourse of acknowledgment and assertion constitutes a double movement between past and present, between Africa and the West Indies, between personal experience and communal history, and between dispossession and possession. The double movement of The Arrivants is immediately evident from the title of the first book, Rights of Passage. “Passage” refers not only to the Middle Passage of African slaves in the past but also to the exile of West Indians in the present. “Rights,” a pun on “rites,” refers not only to the “rites of passage” marking the growth of a person and a people through ritualistic ordeals but also to the “rights” of “possession” to be gained through such rituals. The title hence encapsulates the main theme of the collection, the individual poems of which deal with major aspects of the double movement and the rights/rites of passage of the Afro-Caribbean. The double movement is also structured into the four divisions of Rights of Passage, the overall action of which begins in Africa, shifts to the Americas, and then bounces circuitously through Europe, back to Africa, and once more to the New World. Masks, the second part of the trilogy, continues the double movement, but the ac-

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tion lingers at the pivotal point of Africa, particularly Ghana, home of the Akan. The title, Masks, also implies nam, or the core behind the mask. The collection opens with an Akan proverb, “Only the fool points at his origins with his left hand,” thus making explicit that the subject is the quest for ancestral origins in Africa and that the search itself has to be conducted with the deepest reverence. All the poems deal with aspects of African culture, such as myths, cults, rituals, ancestors, and heroes, which in turn are all “masks” behind which is to be found authentic African identity. The overall action of this collection, following the pattern of a rite of passage, also involves a journey. The journey takes place in Africa itself and culminates in a return to, and arrival at, the cultural home. In Islands, the double movement comes full circle as yet another sort of middle passage. The poet focuses on the Afro-Caribbean person’s physical and spiritual return to the West Indies equipped with a new sense of home and belonging that makes the possession of a national culture possible. Paralleling somewhat the concept of nam that is central to the theme of Masks, the poems in Islands, by dealing with the colonial experience as well as the racial memories and cultural practices shared among Caribbeans, also point to the submerged formation that is the common core of the West Indian community. Although the cycle is complete, the epigraph, from James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), makes it clear that the double movement will be reenacted as necessary. Although the three books of The Arrivants are best read together, each exhibits a character of its own and contains a variety of points of interest peculiar to its design and locale. In Rights of Passage, the predicament of black people in the United States prior to and after emancipation is given much attention. The portrayal of Uncle Tom is especially poignant. He is endowed with a psychological depth that evokes both pity and compassion; despite his sufferings, he is given colossal qualities reminiscent of Job in the Old Testament. The “angry Negro” of the late 1960’s, as a counterpoint to Uncle Tom, is portrayed vividly as a self-exiled Odysseus who, upon the discovery of Rastafarianism, begins to jive in dance and song. Whereas Rights of Passage is characterized by its lively sociohistorical drama, African cultural forms dominate Masks, to the extent that the whole collection resembles a re-created ceremony replete with libations, invocations, incantations, sacrifices, drum rhythms, and other related rituals, all of which contribute to the religious and performative qualities of the book. In Islands, the primordial past and the colonial past exist alongside the present, when the fragile postcolonial nation is still in its infancy. Islands evinces an impulse to synthesize the religious and performative qualities of Masks and the sociohistorical drama of Rights of Passage. This synthesis is best epitomized by the poems dealing with the limbo dance, for example “Caliban.” Said to be derived from physical exercises Africans conducted in the crowded space of slave ships, the limbo is symbolic of not only the brutal experience of the Middle Passage but also enslaved Africans’ desire and strength to rise above such humilities. Furthermore, as if to suggest that the national culture of the West Indies must be derived from

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the African tradition as rejuvenated by West Indians, Islands is populated with an entire pantheon of African deities, whom the poet both invokes and transforms in order to counteract the myths of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. The Bajan Trilogy Brathwaite’s New World trilogy has demonstrated eloquently to skeptics, including his Caribbean compatriots, that it is possible to create something out of the apparent nothingness of West Indian culture. Because the mythmaking project he began in The Arrivants offers promises of a national culture that Afro-Caribbeans can call their own, that trilogy came to be regarded as a prelude of sorts to the second, or Bajan, trilogy, which attracted attention even before it was completed. Comprising Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987), the Bajan trilogy was revised, expanded, and republished as a single volume titled Ancestors in 2001. It focuses on the national character of black Bajans as it is shaped by the social, historical, cultural, and anthropological forces of the Caribbean, Africa, and the West. As “Bajan” means “Barbadian,” the trilogy is apparently meant to have national significance. Barbados as the mother-island is epitomized by the figure of the subjugated woman in the text, in which readers see her conduct daily chores, undergo various ordeals, and harbor uncertain hopes with regard to the future of herself and her children. The futility of most of her efforts is symbolized by the “rock seed” that fails to germinate. The reason Brathwaite focuses on such a downtrodden figure is that slavery had extremely debilitating effects on what he calls “the manscape,” the character of the Caribbean men who, while victims of slavery and colonialism, also contribute to the victimization of black women. These women survive in spite of their hardships because of their nam, thus making it possible for the new generation to emerge. As a counterpoint to the geological symbolism and feminine realism of Mother Poem, the focus in Sun Poem is astronomical and masculine. The figure of the black male is rendered as the sun, which is both the son of creation (Adam) and the fathersun, as opposed to the mother-island. The sun is also connected with the rainbow, the agent that joins the earth and the sky. The poem is ingeniously organized so that the action is structured according to the cyclical trajectory of the sun, from dawn through dusk to dawn. Each of the episodes also links a certain human action to the cosmic action. For example, “The Crossing” refers both to the movement of the sun toward the meridian and to “the Middle Passage in reverse,” whereas “Return of the Sun” refers both to the reemergence of the sun (after an eclipse) and to the return of the prodigal son. Sun Poem hence reenacts the double movement of The Arrivants, but it goes further by recasting it in cosmic terms. This cosmic dimension of the poem also turns the poet into a godlike creator. With parental archetypes thus set up by the mythical framework of Mother Poem and Sun Poem, the last work of the trilogy, X/Self, is designed to complete the project by portraying offspring. In this puzzling poem, that offspring turns out to be a transhistorical figure called “X/Self,” whose name may designate a crossed-out self, a former self, or a creolized self. In the poem, X/Self, not unlike the visionary Greek

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prophet Tiresias, has witnessed many episodes in history. These historical events are mostly concerned with the conflict and interplay between the descendants of the Roman Empire—the white race—and the nonwhite races. The lines “rome burns/ and our slavery begins” serve as a leitmotif throughout X/ Self and point to the dynamics of history that led to the rise and fall of civilizations and empires. Although the poem’s action centers on Europe, the main thrust is antiEurocentric, because the mission of X/Self, a voice representing the postcolonial consciousness of the developing world, is to offer a relentless critique of Western ideology. The poem that concludes the book, in which X/Self invokes Xango (“Pan African god of thunder, lightning, electricity and its energy, sound systems, the locomotive engine and its music”), celebrates the triumph of the mission. The Bajan trilogy embodies the major themes that Brathwaite has been exploring throughout his career. In it, he achieves a formidable level of complexity and depth appropriate for his mythmaking task. Brathwaite’s capacity as a scholar plays a prominent role in this tremendous project, but at the same time the poems are impressive as being intensely personal. As was the case in the first trilogy, the personal voice and the communal voice converge in the Bajan trilogy into a collective voice. Because of the mythological design of the work, however, on top of the collective voice emanating from the human characters and the personified landscape, a sacred voice also emerges that belongs to the cosmic process of creation. The New World trilogy and the Bajan trilogy, because of their epic proportions, rightfully established Brathwaite as one of the most prominent poets not only of the West Indies but also of the developing world. In his poetry as well as in his other writings, by focusing on the reconnection of the West Indies’ submerged African heritage with the indigenous traditions still alive in postcolonial Africa, Brathwaite has created an idiom and a vocabulary that allow not only himself but also other writers to address and redress the problems of dispossession and fragmentation resulting from slavery and colonization. Brathwaite’s contribution, in this light, is exemplary in that it goes beyond poetry per se and enters the realm of history itself. The Tripartite Structure of Other Works Many of Brathwaite’s short poetry books are offshoots of the two designated trilogies, and the use of the tripartite structure as a literary form appears to have an important place in his poetics. Beside Arrivants and Ancestors, one could also considered a trilogy to be constituted by Black + Blues (1976), Third World Poems (1983), and Middle Passages (1992). The tripartite structure is also often used within a single volume, as for instance in Black + Blues, which consists of three sections (“Fragments,” “Drought,” and “Flowers”) suggestive of a progression. In the case of Third World Poems, the tripartite division represents a movement in reversal of the slaves’ journey across the Atlantic, taking readers from the Caribbean (the section “L’Ouverture” alludes to the Haitian revolution and includes a poem about the slave rebel Bussa), through colonial Africa (the section “Ashanty Town” alludes to Ghana), to the independence of African and other developing nations. The

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section “Irie” includes “The Visibility Trigger,” a tribute to preeminent African leader Kwame Nkrumah, and “Poem for Walter Rodney” in honor of the Caribbean pan-Africanist. The indications are that trilogies and tripartite structures represent Brathwaite’s attempt, as a “black Atlantic” writer, to reconstitute the Middle Passage experienced by African slaves. In the volume Middle Passages, the hint is that the traumatic Middle Passage will need to be reconceived as a wound to be healed and a gap to be bridged by means of the music, language, culture, and the political struggles of the people of the African diaspora. In the poetry of Brathwaite, the private individual as a person is in the main blended into the public persona of the cultural historian and postcolonial agency, but from the mid-1980’s on, the intensity of the personal voice and vision become heightened, in part as a result of unfortunate circumstances. During the period of what Brathwaite calls his “Time of Salt,” the poet suffered traumatically as a result of the death of his wife, Doris Monica (1986); the near destruction of his home, library, and archive of documents in Irish Town by Hurricane Gilbert (1988); and a home invasion by armed robbers (1990) so life-threatening that he considered himself to have been “killed” metaphorically. These events are captured in an autobiographical series of books, which may be regarded as a “Salt Years” trilogy that chronicles the poet’s journey through the dark night of the soul. The Zea Mexican Diary (1993) is a “transboundary,” mixed-genre collection incorporating journal entries, letters, and poetry. In it, the passing-away of the poet’s wife (“Zea Mexican”), who was then completing a major bibliography of the poet’s oeuvre, is associated in a symbolic way with Brathwaite’s notion of “middle passages,” thus adding a spiritual dimension to the term. In Shar (1990), woven into the descriptions of the devastating Hurricane Gilbert is an allegory for the deracination of the history of slavery. Trench Town Rock (1994) deals with the violent break-in but situates it against the larger backdrop of pervasive crime, violence, poverty, and injustice with which many slum communities are afflicted. The volume offers to treat the break-in as a kind of “Middle Passages Today”; the work’s title also alludes to the lyrics of reggae musician Bob Marley’s song, “Trench Town Rock,” which contains the lines: “You reap what you sow,/ and only Jah, Jah know/ I’d never turn my back,/ I’d give the slum a try/ I’d never let the children cry,/ ’cause you got to tell Jah, Jah why.” (The book’s epigraph quotes a variation of these lines.) The poet thus transcends his experiences of personal trauma and transforms them by means of perspective and perseverance. Formal and Generic Experimentation During his later career, especially during the Time of Salt, Brathwaite has employed two signature styles in the writing and publication of his work. The first is the “transboundary” style, or mixed use of genres including documents (letters, diaries, and so forth) and creative writing (in prose and in verse). Brathwaite’s second signature style is the printing of his work using the “Sycorax Video Style”—typographic fonts of various sizes and shapes generated by computer. Brathwaite has been fasci-

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nated by computer technology due to its associations with memory-ghosts in the machine, which the poet relates to Sycorax and accordingly invokes as his muse. These aesthetic experiments have led to a proliferation of “dreamstories” (collected as separate volumes in 1994 and 2007 but ongoing), which apparently break down boundaries of genre as they are predominantly prose-poem stories that are also partly conversations, memoirs, fables, allegories, and dreams. Large doses of wordplay, verbal slippage, and neologisms also conspire with the deliberately jarring “Sycorax” typographics (and peculiar orthography) to evoke the voice of Caliban and the rhythms of the “nation language” developed from the African diasporic experience. They create a heterospatial reality that is embedded in the realism and Magical Realism of the poet’s postcolonial imagination. It is significant that the figure of “Dream Chad,” who emerges in one of the “dreamstories” as the composite of an African woman and Lake Chad, has become the new inspiring muse for Brathwaite in Words Need Love Too (2000), a volume written “for Dream Chad” and in acknowledgment of “the yamFestival of three DreamChad years of love and understanding.” The title poem, written as an epithalamium, represents the thanksgiving musings of a resilient poet. Having survived trauma, he appears to be paying tribute to Africa (Dream Chad) as the bride of his love; in repeating the phrase “Words Need Love Too” as a refrain to the wedding song, the poet highlights language (and culture) as the forces that transform the lover and sustains his spiritual union with the bride. For Born to Slow Horses, when it won the coveted Griffin Poetry Prize, Brathwaite was cited as the creator of “an epic of one man (containing multitudes) in the African diaspora” and recognized for “what may well be the first enduring poem on the disaster of 9/11,” a poem that turns Manhattan into “another island in the poet’s personal archipelago.” The volume also contains a tribute to Brathwaite’s departed wife, “Kumina,” which refers to “the most African” of wake ceremonies. Oral performance is an integral aspect of the book, which appears to belong to a new phase in Brathwaite’s poetic output, as he concentrates on applying the concept of “tidalectics” in further “transboundary” developments. Positioned as a continuation of Words Need Love, there are hints that Born to Slow Horses could very well be central to another tripartite exploration characteristic of Brathwaite’s epic journey through the African diaspora. Bibliography Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (Fall, 2003). In this inaugural issue of Anthurium, a peer-reviewed electronic journal derived from the Twenty-second Annual West Indian Literature Conference, Brathwaite is the featured subject. Includes an essay by Kelly Baker Josephs on X/Self, an essay by Anna Reckin on Brathwaite’s concept and application of “Tidalectics,” and an essay by Loretta Collins on the function of radio in “Meridian” and Ancestors, as well as the text of Brathwaite’s lecture “Namsetoura and the Companion Stranger.” Bobb, June. Beating a Restless Drum: The Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek

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Walcott. New York: Africa World Press, 1997. Exploring the commonalities and differences between Brathwaite and Derek Walcott (another major Caribbean poet), this study focuses on their engagements with the history, culture, and mythology of the Afro-Caribbean experience and their contributions to the development of modern Caribbean poetics. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Kingston: Savacou Publications, 1974. Focuses on pluralistic patterns of creolization and the role they play in the cultural diversity of the Caribbean; important concepts introduced by Brathwaite include “alter-Renaissance” and “indigenization.” _______. LX the Love Axe/L: Developing a Caribbean Aesthetics. Leeds: Peepal Tress Press, 2008. Study of the Caribbean’s history, culture, literature, and aesthetics; also deals with significant texts and the intellectual and artistic movements that have led to a revolution in postcolonial consciousness in the region. _______. The Poet and His Place in Barbadian Culture. Bridgetown: Central Bank of Barbados, 1987. Delivered by the poet as a Sir Winston Scott Memorial lecture, this book evolved into Barabajan Poems: 1492-1992, a mixed-genre book incorporating scholarship, autobiography, and creative writing. _______. Roots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Scholarly essays written between the 1950’s and 1980’s by Brathwaite about Caribbean literature; topics range from cultural roots and jazz, to creative literature during slavery times in the British West Indies, the African presence in Caribbean literature, and Caribbean critics. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, a lecture previously published as a pamphlet in 1984, is also included in this volume. Brown, Stuart, ed. The Art of Kamau Brathwaite. Wales: Seren, 1996. This collection of essays explores three interconnected concerns that have shaped Brathwaite’s consciousness: Africa, jazz, and the use of West Indian language in poetry. The poet himself also provides both an interview and a major work in his “Metaphors of Underdevelopment: a Proem for Hernan Cortez.” Naylor, Paul. “Kamau Brathwaite: Tidalectic Rhythms.” In Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Argues that Brathwaite’s work can be understood as a “creolization” of Caribbean, African, and Euro-American culture. Pattanayak, Chandrabhanu. “Brathwaite: Metaphors of Emergence.” The Literary Criterion 17, no. 3 (1982): 60-68. Report based on Brathwaite’s lectures given at the University of Mysore. Concise and excellent introduction to his poetry. Pollard, Charles W. New World Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Argues that the cosmopolitanism of postcolonial writers such as Walcott and Brathwaite has been influenced and informed by Eliot’s modernist principles, including tradition, poetry’s relation to speech, and the social function of poetry. Reiss, Timothy J., ed. For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau

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Brathwaite. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2002. Large collection of essays on Brathwaite’s writings and his significance in poetry and literature, historical and sociological research, and cultural and literary criticism; includes three memoirs by fellow Caribbean figures close to him. Thomas, Sue. “Sexual Politics in Edward Brathwaite’s Mother Poem and Sun Poem.” Kunapipi 9, no. 1 (1987): 33-43. Feminist critique of the visionary voice in the two poems. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. “Kamau Brathwaite and the Caribbean World.” In Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Applying methods of comparative literature and focusing on Brathwaite as one of three Caribbean writers who constitute a “decentralized literary order” (the other two being René Despestre of Haiti and Pedro Mir of the Dominican Republic), the author examines Brathwaite’s career and the theoretical implications of his writings, arguing that the poet strives toward cultural authenticity by bringing a genuinely Caribbean language into visibility. Williams, Emily Allen, ed. The Critical Response to Kamau Brathwaite. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Extensive collection of essays focusing on the poetry of Brathwaite arranged by decade since the 1960’s; includes an interview conducted in 2002, as well as a chronology and introduction by the editor. Balance Chow

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THE POETRY OF GWENDOLYN BROOKS Author: Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) Type of work: Poetry First published: A Street in Bronzeville, 1945; Annie Allen, 1949; Bronzeville Boys and Girls, 1956 (children); The Bean Eaters, 1960; Selected Poems, 1963; In the Mecca, 1968; Riot, 1969; Family Pictures, 1970; Aloneness, 1971; Beckonings, 1975; Primer for Blacks, 1980; To Disembark, 1981; The Near-Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems, 1986; Blacks, 1987; Gottschalk and the Grand Tarantelle, 1988; Winnie, 1988 Brooks’s Slow Path to Recognition However the canon of African American poetry is to be construed—from Phillis Wheatley to Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countée Cullen to Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka to Michael S. Harper, Robert Hayden to Haki R. Madhubuti—there can be no way of diminishing, or sidelining, the wholly singular achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks. Quite simply, she ranked as a prime American imagination from the publication of her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Black by birthright, consciously or not “womanist” (in Alice Walker’s term), she showed the ability to range from a modernist experimentalism (Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Countée Cullen being key influences) to a “down-home” intimacy of idiom drawn from blues, spirituals, jazz, and rap, and, from the start, the example of Langston Hughes. Even so, and despite the Pulitzer Prize that deservedly came her way in 1950 for Annie Allen (1949), she remains seriously undervalued, a writer whose virtuosity only began to receive anything like its due during the last years of her life. Kansas-born but reared and educated in the Chicago of Hyde Park and the South Side, she attended in turn Hyde Park High School, the all-black Wendell Phillips High School, and Englewood High School, before graduating from Wilson Junior College in 1935. The “Bronzeville,” or black Chicago, of her poems thus draws upon a lived familiarity. Brooks was also a deeply committed family woman, and the strength of her relationship with her parents, David and Keziah Brooks, would readily carry over to her brother Raymond, to her husband and fellow poet, Henry Blakely, and to her two children, Henry, Jr., and Nora. To Brooks “family” meant more, namely black “family” or “community” oneness. That attitude showed in her poetry from the start, whether in “the old marrieds,” from the 1940’s, with its lovely cadence of “But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say;” or in “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” from the 1960’s, with its imagistic, affecting “She kisses her killed boy./ And she is sorry./ Chaos in windy grays/ through a red prairie;” or in “Paul Robeson,” from the 1980’s, with its insistence “that we are each other’s/ harvest:/ we are each other’s/ business:/ we are each other’s/ magnitude and bond.” In each of these poems, as in most of her poetry, the colloquialism is subtle, a complex, highly wrought simplicity.

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Moreover, she never gave way to polemics; the particularity of her poetry’s voice and imagery guarded against any inclination simply to lecture or harangue. In her teasingly reflexive “The Egg Boiler,” as if to set a marker, she wrote of her “eggboiler,” “You come upon it as an artist should,/ With rich-eyed passion, and with straining heart.” Similarly, in “The Chicago Picasso,” she urges “We must . . . style ourselves for Art.” In “To Don at Salaam,” she writes approvingly of her great friend and fellow poet Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti), “Your voice is the listened-for music./ Your act is the consolidation.” For all her insistence upon the private crafting of poetry, she did not shun the American institutional domain or fail to bring her “Bronzeville” into a more public hearing. She was a Guggenheim Fellow (1946); an invitee at the Library of Congress Poetry Festival (1962); an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 1964 at Columbia College, Chicago; a participant in Fisk University’s Second Black Writers’ Conference (1967), from which she dated her “awakening” into the Black Arts movement and the thinking of the Black Aesthetic; Poet Laureate of Illinois (1969); recipient of To Gwen with Love (1971), a dedicatory volume written mainly by Chicago’s Organization of Black American Culture; and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1985). In all these, her own insistence on her work as a form of ceremonial, an outgoing gift of the personal, was paramount. As synoptic a comment as any on the plenitude she found in African American life can be encountered in the opening of her five-part “Another Preachment to Blacks” in Beckonings (1975): Your singing, your pulse, your ultimate booming in the not-so-narrow temples of your Power— call all that, that is your poem, AFRIKA.

Brooks’s own “poem,” or rather her own lifetime’s “poem,” begins with A Street in Bronzeville, her gallery of beautifully nuanced soliloquies and portraits. She evokes, for example, in “kitchenette building,” the tenants whose “dream” must persist “through onion fumes” and “yesterday’s garbage”; in “the mother,” a woman who cannot forget her abortions; in “when Mrs. Martin’s Booker T.,” a woman whose son has “ruined Rosa Brown” and whose only wish is to see him “take that gal/ And get her decent wed”; in “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” the zoot-suited Romeo whose dandyism barely compensates for his essential aloneness; in “Queen of the Blues,” the shake-dancing, sad “Mame,” alone and, for all her singing, thought of as no more than a figure out of cheap burlesque; and in “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” and the accompanying sonnets, the death-threatened soldiers shortly off to war. All these “street” types she invokes as if slightly displaced, a community seen, and as it were heard, precisely, from an oblique angle of observation. An equally elliptical, symbolist imagery energizes the poems that make up Annie Allen, the story of a “chocolate,” acquiescent, brown-skinned girl whose dreams of

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romance die as tenement city life constricts and, finally, nearly buries her. The book’s central component, “The Anniad,” with its Homeric echo, is a cautionary tale against unused, unfulfilled womanhood. Even so, the Annie who arrives late to adult, feminine consciousness can say “Open my rooms, let in the light and air.” Always dense in its racial and emotional imagery (“Harried sods dilate, divide,/ Suck her sorrowfully inside,” as Brooks describes Annie in a Stevensesque turn of phrase at one point), Annie Allen as a sequence belongs in the company of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as a small masterpiece of “the buried life.” The redemption it offers lies in a shared, black, womanly maturity. Appropriately, Brooks concluded the section she entitled “The Womanhood” with the command “Rise./ Let us combine.” The Difficulty of Achieving Simplicity The Bean Eaters contains some of Brooks’s best-honed poems, preeminent among them “In Honor of David Anderson Brooks, My Father,” an exquisite memorial, with its opening Eliotesque quatrain: “A dryness is upon the house/ My father loved and tended./ Beyond his firm and sculptured door/ His light and lease have ended.” Likewise, the collection’s title poem calls upon memory, the intimate, unspoken remembrances of an “old yellow pair” amid “their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.” So lyric a poem plays against the staccato, imitatively laid-back youth talk of “We Real Cool,” or the hard-hitting, satiric slap at white, middle-class patronage in “The Lovers of the Poor,” which ends “They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,/ Are off at what they manage of a canter,/ And, resuming all the clues of what they were,/ Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.” Brooks was never short on variety. Again, too, Brooks displays throughout a controlled impressionism, a poetry whose technical skills of free verse, of assonance, and of an inventive, unpredictable rhetoric of likeness in difference belie any apparent simplicity of theme. In this respect, the ending of “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” bears out the point to perfection: And true, they are hurling spittle, rock, Garbage and fruit in Little Rock. And I saw coiling storm a-writhe On bright madonnas. And a scythe Of men harassing brownish girls. (The bows and barrettes in the curls And braids declined away from joy.) I saw a bleeding brownish boy. . . . The lariat lynch-wish I deplored. The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.

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This poem, too, points the way to the radical change that came about for Brooks in the 1960’s: her response, as one virtually reborn, to the call of Black Power. In each of her subsequent main collections, “Blackness” becomes a more explicit dynamic. As she wrote in “To Kereoapetse Kgositsile (Willie),” from Family Pictures, “Blackness is a going to essences and unifyings.” In “Boys. Black,” from Beckonings, she spoke from another vantage point, that of a motherly, custodial presence encouraging “Black Boys” to “Take my Faith./ Make of my Faith an engine./ Make of my Faith/ a Black Star. I am Beckoning.” Discovering Black Nationalism One major impetus for this changed direction lay in her writerly association with Madhubuti, Baraka, and their fellow nationalists. Then, too, she reacted admiringly to the clenched-fist militancy of the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims, and other groups. She especially felt at one with the rest of black America in her reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, and, on her home turf, with the ensuing “Chicago disturbances” under the regime of Mayor Richard Daley. Not least in her “awakening” was the pilgrimage she took to East Africa in 1971. So, in her Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972), she could say engagingly: I—who have “gone the gamut” from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun— am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-towards progress. I have hopes for myself.

In the Mecca, in its first part of the same name, portrays black Chicago as a multiverse, a polyglot, mosaical city of both high culture and vernacular African American memory and voices. Deservingly, it has been compared with Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930), another myth of urban America. In its second part, “After Mecca,” Brooks can thus write both of “The Chicago Picasso” (“Art hurts. Art urges voyages”) and of “The Blackstone Rangers” (“There they are./ Thirty at the corner./ Black, raw, ready./ Sores in the city/ that do not want to heal.”), double-tokens of a citied, metropolitan America as a kind of living tableau. Primer for Blacks assumes a speaking voice even more direct: “Blackness/ is a title,/ is a preoccupation,/ is a commitment Blacks/ are to comprehend—/ and in which you are/ to perceive your Glory.” She goes on, with not a little irony, to address the poem to “you proper Blacks,/ you halfBlacks, you wish-I-weren’t Blacks.” This same lack of solemnity, though with a ready affection, applies in her following poem, “To Those Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals.” She writes “You never worshiped Marilyn Monroe./ You say: Farrah’s hair is hers./ You have not wanted to be white,” and, concluding, insists, “Your hair is Celebration in the world!” Her “black” self-awakening, her “new black sun,” continues over even more emphatically into Beckonings. Prefaced by an elegy to her recently dead brother, Ray-

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mond Melvin Brooks, Beckonings contains poems of high drama (“The Boy Died in My Alley”), a memorial to John Oliver Killens (“You were a mender/ You were a sealer of tremblings and long trepidations.”), and, in “A Black Wedding Song,” a kind of richly patterned anthem to black rebirth and strength (“I wish you jewels of black love”). The same inflection expresses itself, with a symptomatically deft indirection, in “Elegy in a Rainbow”: When I was a little girl Christmas was exquisite. I didn’t touch it. I didn’t look at it too closely. To do that might nullify the shine. Thus with a Love that has to have a Home like the Black Nation, like the Black Nation defining its own Roof that no one else can see.

To Disembark contains the three-part “Riot,” which is prefaced with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, observation that “A riot is the language of the unheard,” and which moves from a pioneer’s negrophobia through a Chicago political shoot-out to a community back at one with itself (“On the street we smile”). The title poem, in turn, of The NearJohannesburg Boy, and Other Poems opens upon Soweto and the voice of a child coming to the embrace of, and the coming victory of, his own blackness: Tonight I walk with a hundred of playmates to where the hurt Black of our skin is forbidden. There, in the dark that is our dark, there, a-pulse across earth that is our earth, there, there exulting, there Exactly, there redeeming, there Roaring Up. . . . we shall forge with the Fist-and-the-Fury: we shall flail in the Hot Time: we shall we shall

Chicago’s South Side to Africa, “Bronzeville” to “Near-Johannesburg,” Stevens or Cullen to Madhubuti or Baraka: The journey, in imagination as in life, was a remarkable one for Gwendolyn Brooks. It was undeniably uniquely her own, that of an American writer, an African American writer, at poetry’s leading edge.

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Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Collection of essays on Brooks’s life and work by noted scholars of African American poetry and literature. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Reprints an extract from Brooks’s autobiography, together with essays by Addison Gayle on black self-awareness in Brooks and by George Kent on the range of styles and voice in her poetry. Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. The most authoritative biography. Contains an excellent account of her Chicago upbringing and literary life, a full set of readings of the poetry and fiction, and a helpful placing of Brooks as a leading African American writer. Madhubuti, Haki R., ed. Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. A timely celebration of Brooks both for her writings and for her example as role model. Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Eighteen essays covering the entire range of Brooks’s writing. Contains important essays by Houston A. Baker (on Brooks’s overall achievement), George E. Kent (on Brooks’s aesthetics), Gayl Jones (on “Community and Voice”), and Barbara Christian (on the 1953 novel Maud Martha). The bibliography is especially helpful. Shaw, Harry B. Gwendolyn Brooks. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Dutiful (if at times contentious) life-and-works overview. Annotated bibliography. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Includes a revealing interview on Brooks’s move toward Black Nationalism. A. Robert Lee

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THE POETRY OF STERLING BROWN Author: Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989) Type of work: Poetry First published: Southern Road, 1932; The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems, 1975; The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, 1980 Background and Upbringing Born into an educated, middle-class African American family, Sterling A. Brown was the last of six children and the only son of Adelaide Allen Brown and the Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown. His father had taught in the School of Religion at Howard University since 1892, and the year Brown was born, his father also became the pastor of Lincoln Temple Congregational Church. The person who encouraged Brown’s literary career and admiration for the cultural heritage of African Americans, however, was his mother, who had been born and reared in Tennessee and graduated from Fisk University. Brown also grew up listening to tales of his father’s childhood in Tennessee, as well as to accounts of his father’s friendships with noted leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Blanche K. Bruce, and Booker T. Washington. Brown attended public schools in Washington, D.C., and was graduated from the well-known Dunbar High School, noted for its distinguished teachers and alumni; among the latter were many of the nation’s outstanding black professionals. Brown’s teachers at Dunbar included literary artists such as Angelina Weld Grimké and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Moreover, Brown grew up on the campus of Howard University, where there were many outstanding African American scholars, such as historian Kelly Miller and critic and philosopher Alain Locke. Brown received his A.B. in 1922 from Williams College (Phi Beta Kappa) and his M.A. in 1923 from Harvard University. He then began a teaching career that took him to Virginia Seminary and College, Lincoln University in Missouri, and Fisk University before he settled at Howard University in 1929. He remained at Howard until his retirement in 1969 and died in Takoma Park, Maryland, on January 13, 1989. Folk Poetry The poetry of Sterling Brown is imbued with the folk spirit and culture of African Americans. For Brown, there was no wide abyss between his poetry and the spirit inherent in slave poetry; indeed, his works evidence a continuity of racial spirit from the slave experience to the African American present and reflect his deep understanding of the multitudinous aspects of the African American personality and soul. The setting for Brown’s poetry is primarily the South, through which he traveled to listen to the folktales, songs, wisdom, sorrows, and frustrations of his people, and where the blues and ballads were nurtured. Brown respected traditional folk forms and employed them in the construction of his own poems; thus he may be called “the poet of the soul of his people.”

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Brown’s first published collection of poems, Southern Road, was critically acclaimed by his peers and colleagues James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke because of its rendering of the living speech of the African American, its use of the raw material of folk poetry, and its poetic portrayal of African American folk life and thought. Later critics such as Arthur P. Davis, Jean Wagner, and Houston Baker have continued to praise Brown’s poetry for its creative and vital use of folk motifs. Some of the characters in Brown’s poetry, such as Ma Rainey, Big Boy Davis, and Mrs. Bibby, are based on real people. Other characters such as Maumee Ruth, Sporting Beasley, and Sam Smiley seem real because of Brown’s dramatic and narrative talent. He was also highly skilled in the use of poetic techniques such as the refrain, alliteration, and onomatopoeia, and he employs several stanzaic forms with facility. Brown’s extraordinary gift for re-creating the nuances of folk speech and idiom adds vitality and authenticity to his verse. Brown was successful in drawing upon rich folk expressions to vitalize the speech of his characters through the cadences of southern speech. Though his poems cannot simply be called “dialect poetry,” Brown did imitate southern African American speech, using variant spellings and apostrophes to mark dropped consonants. He used grunts and onomatopoeiac sounds to give a natural rhythm to the speech of his characters. These techniques are readily seen in a poem that dramatizes the poignant story of a “po los boy” on a chain gang. This poem follows the traditional folk form of the work song to convey the convict’s personal tragedy. Brown’s work may be described as working-class or rural poetry, influenced by poets such as Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost; he was able to draw upon the entire canon of English and American poetry as well as African American folk material. Thus he was fluent in the use of the sonnet form, stanzaic forms, free-verse forms, and ballad and blues forms. In Southern Road, several themes express the essence of the southern African American’s folk spirit and culture. Recurring themes and subjects in Brown’s poetry include endurance, tragedy, and survival. The theme of endurance is best illustrated in one of his most anthologized poems, “Strong Men,” which tells the story of the unjust treatment of black men and women from the slave ship, to the tenant farm, and finally to the black ghetto. The refrain of “Strong Men” uses rhythmic beats, relentlessly repeating an affirmation of the black people’s ability and determination to keep pressing onward, toward freedom and justice. The central image comes from a line of a Carl Sandburg poem, “The strong men keep comin on.” In “Strong Men,” Brown praises the indomitable spirit of African Americans in the face of racist exploitation. With its assertive tone, the rhythm of this poem suggests a martial song. Some of the endurance poems express a stoic, fatalistic acceptance of the tragic fate of the African American, as can be seen in “Old Man Buzzard,” “Memphis Blues,” and “Riverbank Blues.” Another important aspect of the endurance theme as portrayed by Brown is the poetic characters’ courage when they are confronted with tragedy and injustice. In the poem “Strange Legacies,” the speaker gives thanks to the legendary Jack Johnson and John Henry for their demonstration of courage.

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Tragedy and Endurance Brown’s poems reflect his understanding of the often tragic destinies of African Americans in the United States. No poet before Brown had created such a comprehensive poetic dramatization of the lives of black men and women in America. Brown depicts black men and women as alone and powerless, struggling nevertheless to confront an environment that is hostile and unjust. In this tragic environment, African American struggles against the schemes of racist whites are seen in “The Last Ride of Wild Bill,” published in 1975 as the title poem of a collection. A black man falls victim to the hysteria of a lynch mob in “Frankie and Johnnie,” a poem that takes up a familiar folktale and twists it to reflect a personal tragedy that occurs as a result of an interracial relationship. Brown emphasizes that in this story the only tragic victim is the black man. The retarded white girl, Frankie, reports her sexual experience with the black man, Johnnie, to her father and succeeds in getting her black lover killed; she laughs uproariously during the lynching. “Southern Cop” narrates the mindless killing of a black man who is the victim of the panic of a rookie police officer. Brown’s poems show black people not only as victims of whites but also as victims of the whole environment that surrounds them, including natural forces of flood and fire as well as social evils such as poverty and ignorance. Rural African Americans’ vulnerability to natural disasters is revealed in “Old King Cotton,” “New St. Louis Blues,” and “Foreclosure.” In these poems, if a tornado does not come, the Mississippi River rises and takes the peasant’s arable land and his few animals, and even kills his children. These poems portray despairing people who are capable only of asking futile questions in the face of an implacable and pitiless nature. The central character of “Low Down” is sunk in poverty and loneliness. His wife has left and his son is in prison; he is convinced that bad luck is his fate and that in the workings of life someone has loaded the dice against him. In “Johnny Thomas,” the title character is the victim of poverty, abuse by his parents and society, and ignorance. (He attempts to enroll in a one-room school, but the teacher throws him out.) Johnny ends up on a chain gang, where he is killed. The poem that most strongly expresses African American despair of the entire race is “Southern Road,” a convict song marked by a rhythmic, staccato beat and by a blues line punctuated by the convict’s groaning over his accursed fate: My ole man died—hunh— Cussin’ me; Old lady rocks, bebby, huh misery.

The African American’s ability to survive in a hostile world by mustering humor, religious faith, and the expectation of a utopian afterlife is portrayed in poems depicting the comical adventures of Slim Greer and in one of Brown’s popular poems, “Sister Lou.” The series of Slim Greer poems, “Slim Greer,” “Slim Lands a Job,” “Slim in Atlanta,” and “Slim in Hell,” reveals Brown’s knowledge of the life of the ordinary

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black people and his ability to laugh at the weaknesses and foolishness of African Americans and whites alike. With their rich exaggerations, these poems fall into the tall-tale tradition of folk stories. They show Slim in Arkansas passing for white although he is quite dark and Slim in Atlanta laughing in a “telefoam booth” because of a law that keeps African Americans from laughing in the open. In “Slim Lands a Job,” the poet mocks the ridiculous demands that southern employers make on their black employees. Slim applies for a job in a restaurant. The owner is complaining about the laziness of his black employees when a black waiter enters the room carrying a tray on his head, trays in each hand, silver in his mouth, and soup plates in his vest, while simultaneously pulling a red wagon filled with other paraphernalia. When the owner points to this waiter as one who is lazy, Slim makes a quick exit. In “Slim in Hell,” Slim discovers that Hell and the South are very much alike; when he reports this discovery to Saint Peter, the saint reprimands him, asking where he thought Hell was if not the South. In “Sister Lou,” one of his well-known poems, Brown depicts the simple religious faith that keeps some African Americans going. After recounting all the sorrows in Sister Lou’s life, the poem pictures Heaven as a place where Sister Lou will have a chance to allow others to carry her packages, to speak personally to God without fear, to rest, and most of all to take her time. In “Cabaret,” however, Brown shows the everyday reality that belies the promises God made to his people: The black folk huddle, mute and forlorn, in Mississippi, unable to understand why the Good Lord treats them this way. Moreover, in poems such as “Maumee Ruth,” religion is seen as an opiate that feeds people’s illusions. Maumee Ruth lies on her deathbed, ignorant of the depraved life led by her son and daughter in the city, and needing the religious lies preached to her in order to attain a peaceful death. Sterling Brown’s poems embrace themes of suffering, oppression, and tragedy yet always celebrate the vision and beauty of African American people and culture. One such deeply moving piece is “Remembering Nat Turner,” a poem in which the speaker visits the scene of Turner’s slave rebellion, only to hear an elderly white woman’s garbled recollections of the event; moreover, the marker intended to call attention to Turner’s heroic exploits, a rotting signpost, has been used by black tenants for kindling. A stoic fatalism can be seen in the poem “Memphis Blues,” which nevertheless praises the ability of African Americans to survive in a hostile environment because of their courage and willingness to start over when all seems lost: “Guess we’ll give it one more try.” In the words of Sterling Brown, “The strong men keep acomin’ on/ Gittin’ stronger. . . .” Bibliography Bolden, Tony. Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Includes a chapter on the blues poetics of Southern Road and Brown’s influence on later blues-inflected poetry. Brown, Sterling. “Sterling Brown: The New Negro Folk-Poet.” In The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938, ed-

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ited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Brown’s own statement on African American poetics and folk traditions. Davis, Arthur P. “Sterling Brown.” In From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. A comprehensive study by the dean of African American critics. Davis knew Brown personally and taught with him at Howard University. Includes an extensive bibliography. Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. An overall discussion of the Harlem Renaissance authors that views them in terms of their general historical and literary significance. Brown’s work is considered alongside that of his literary contemporaries, and an overview of his major themes and concerns is given. Redding, J. Saunders. To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939. This pioneering study gives an effective overview of the intellectual and literary influences on African American poets of the time. Although it includes only a few pages on Brown himself, it is essential background reading. Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, a Critical History. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976. Redmond treats the historical importance of the poet as well as his themes, images, language, and his use of the African American folk traditions and dialect. Redmond also discusses Brown’s role as a critic. Sanders, Mark A. Afro-modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Study of Brown’s work at the intersection of African American literary traditions and modernist poetic practice. Wagner, Jean. “Sterling Brown.” In Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Translated by Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. A comprehensive and insightful study of the poetry of Brown. Betty Taylor-Thompson

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THE POETRY OF LUCILLE CLIFTON Author: Lucille Clifton (1936) Type of work: Poetry First published: Good Times, 1969; Good News About the Earth, 1972; An Ordinary Woman, 1974; Two-Headed Woman, 1980; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980, 1987; Next: New Poems, 1987; Ten Oxherding Pictures, 1989; Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990, 1991; The Book of Light, 1993; The Terrible Stories, 1996; Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000, 2000; Mercy, 2004 Clifton’s Family History Lucille Clifton is a distinguished African American poet and a recipient of the National Book Award, numerous poetry and literary prizes, and honorary degrees from five colleges and universities. Her first collection of poems was published during the year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the year of her father’s death. She was thirty-three years old, and her mother had died eleven years earlier, at the age of forty-four. In the book’s title poem, she admonishes readers to “think about the good times.” The tough spirit of that practical wisdom—accepting, forgiving, determined, and celebratory—forms the predominant tone of her early works. The voice that speaks this wisdom throughout Clifton’s poetry is the voice of an empowered and empowering woman, specifically a black woman whose identity has been molded by memories within a family that was given its genesis by American slavery. The family’s female progenitor, Caroline Sayle, was a midwife who was born eight years before her enslavement and who died long after the emancipation. Familial memories and Clifton’s art drive her in her poetry to sing about freedom, symbolized by Africa, and about a future symbolized especially by daughters and mothers yet to be born. Clifton’s poetry may be seen as an African American “Song of Myself” (1855): While she suffers grievous losses, her story echoes Walt Whitman’s affirmation in that nineteenth century poem that “there is really no death,/ And if ever there was it led forward life.” The members of Clifton’s family play significant roles in her poetry, and she has presented details and moving commentary on her family history in Generations: A Memoir (1976). The poet’s father, Samuel Louis Sayles, Sr., recounted that his greatgrandmother was brought into slavery from Dahomey, West Africa, in 1822, when she was eight years old. She walked in a coffle to Virginia, where she was sold away from her mother to the Donald family, who named her Caroline. When she was a young woman, she was purchased by a neighboring plantation owner, who gave her in marriage to his slave Sam Louis Sale (1777-1860). (After the emancipation, the family changed its name from Sale to Sayle in order to distinguish themselves from their former owners.) She lived until 1910, becoming a powerful figure in the region. She was a highly respected midwife to black mothers and white mothers alike and had at least six children of her own.

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One of Caroline Sayle’s daughters, Lucille (Lucy), bore a son, Gene Sayle, whose father was Harvey Nichols, a married carpetbagger. Lucy killed Nichols with a rifle and was hanged. Gene and his wife, Georgia, had four children, including Clifton’s father, Samuel (who added the s to the end of the family name), and her Aunt Lucille. Samuel’s first wife died at age twenty-one, leaving him with their infant daughter, Josephine. He then married Thelma Moore, with whom he had a daughter, Thelma Lucille (the poet, born in 1936) and a son, Samuel, Jr. Lucille married Fred Clifton, with whom she parented a family of four daughters and two sons; Thelma Moore Sayles died at age forty-four, one month before the birth of her first grandchild. A Poetics of Family and Gender While raising her family, Clifton became a writer of children’s books and poety. Many of her book titles suggest awareness of the lives of women, and indeed womanhood is a major presence in her art. As she wrote in 1987, “this is the tale/ i keep on telling/ trying to get it right.” Her poems portray a long “line/ of black and going on women,” who reject and rediscover their blackness, endure cold, make mistakes, grieve, blame and dream, hunger and feed, bleed, break and break through, love and defend, “trust the Gods,” expend their bodies, and perform with daily magic the making of families and homes. Although individuals sometimes fail or are destroyed, together they are the survivors through whom black America keeps persevering. They “know how long and strong life is” and they know “what to do.” In many poems, the history and fate of the family is presented in the form of a mother-daughter dialectic of the same but different self. To the mother, the daughter is “my more than me.” The daughter “puts on a dress called woman” but does not forget. Lucy is the history of her girls are the place where lucy was going

The good and the bad times in the lives of families are associated with men also. Men have the power to “murder it or/ marry it.” Fathers may be frightening and haunting, may have to be forgiven their debts, but often they also love their families and provide for them. Men are gardeners who plant and who bloom in their own ways. The stunning beauty of black sons causes people to ask, “What is the meaning of this?” Black men suffer the annihilating power of racism, and Clifton’s poems show some who waste to nothing, but more “walk manly” and “don’t stumble/ even in the lion’s den.” They bless blackness with the beauty of their ordinary comings and goings. Some become national leaders, imprisoned or assassinated, as a black man named Jesus brought the promise that “Men will be gods/ if they want it.” Clifton’s father was a griot, or storyteller, who taught her the power of history; her

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husband brought a saving and triumphant wholeness to her life and family history. In her poem “the message of fred clifton,” Lucille’s husband teaches from his fatal illness that “the only mercy/ is memory,/ . . . the only hell/ is regret.” Clifton’s relationship with her father is ambiguous. She refers to childhood abuse in several poems, and the implication is that she suffered this abuse from her father. In “moonchild” (2000), she writes of her girlish longings and of her unspoken relationship with her father when her girlfriends ask “who is teaching you (to kiss)?” In “shapeshifter poems” (1988), she asks “who is there to protect her from/ from the hands of the father.” In the title poem of The Terrible Stories (1996), Clifton asks of her mother—whom she otherwise idealizes—“they are supposed to know everything/ our mothers what did she know/ when did she know it.” The poet’s relationship with her brother is also fraught. Clifton’s brother died from unnamed causes; in one poem, he reflects in “heaven” as he looks down on her: “‘she was my sister,’/ I feel him say,/ ‘even when she was right, she was wrong.’” Her relationships with the men in her life, other than her husband, seem to cause her both physical and psychological pain. She has stated how difficult these poems were to write but also how necessary they were as a means for Clifton to give voice to other victims of abuse. Memory and History Regret is sometimes expressed in Clifton’s writing, perhaps because memory has been such a strong feature of her artistry. She writes in Generations, “Who remembers the names of the slaves? Only the children of slaves.” The bones of the African American poet, she says, remember the soul of the African homeland, just as the name Lucille recalls the ancestors of her African bloodline. Clifton calls herself a “twoheaded woman” who looks both outward and inward; while looking back along the way that her people and family have come, she also looks ahead to the promise of constant renewal. History, then, is a garden ripe with living and cherishing memory, as in the exchange of recollections while rocking on the porch or in the giving and regiving of names. Related to memory, naming is a feature of Clifton’s understanding of her art, for in the act of naming the essential realities of persons are released: “we are lost from the field/ of flowers, we become/ a field of flowers.” The job of the poet, Clifton explains in “the making of poems,” is to try to give true names and to accept the inevitable failures (or half successes) of a being of flesh: The rightful names, the true identities, of persons and things exist in the realm of pure spirit beyond life, while poems are made of “the blood that clots on your tongue.” Nevertheless, as Clifton suggests in “my dream about time,” without these attempts, persons would face the nightmare of a world for which they had no language, like a room full of clocks that all “strike/ NO.” Clifton’s art demands that she speak plainly and directly of the spiritual meaning and value of ordinary human experience. Clifton herself has overcome whatever racist stereotyping she has experienced in the African American community. Often, though, the whites whom she presents in poems are representative of those persons whom she has met or observed who are blinded by color prejudice, and much of

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American culture seems to her to reflect their weaknesses. She suggests, for example, that white New Englanders might view their rural landscape as a sign of a long past, but without responding to it as regenerative history. Therefore they become exploitative or, at best, careless, so that “the land is in ruins/ no magic, no anything.” This attitude toward history on the part of white Americans denies for Clifton the extent to which their living history includes the stories of the Native American Trail of Tears and of the Middle Passage that brought African slaves to America. The white men and women in those stories have faces that black people, too, need to forget. In her early collections, whites are depicted as spiritually and socially underdeveloped, pitiable creatures. They are lost souls who would not know what to do in truly hard times. The ways of white men are the ways of death; they kill their own trees, cities, and even children (“Kent State”). To Clifton, the resulting fear and loneliness of their alienation in time seems like the “final Europe” of the mind. Africa, in contrast, stands for life unfettered by slavery and undistorted by a preoccupation with racism. In such a life, persons grow into the selves of their natural design and responsible inclination, demonstrating respect for all humans and all species of life. It is “the life thing in us/ that will not let us die.” The other name of that place is love. In Clifton’s later poems, slavery changes the holiness of life into a misery of existence, as slaves are not protected by Jesus but instead left to suffer. This attitude of racism continues into the twentieth century: Clifton reflects in “Memphis” that although she is “northern born,” the Mississippi River and the loss of civil rights activists Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney are “so many questions” in which she will “float or drown.” The Dahomey women from whom Clifton is descended were warrior women who represent power and promise. To be descended from them is to know that one is free, even within the “temporary thing” of slavery; it is to know that one is under historical orders to fight for the truth and that one has the resources to carry on that struggle until the promised victory. It is also to know that to be a woman is to be the vessel of the magical power of the life force itself. As Clifton writes in the poem “female,” “there is an amazon in us/ she is the secret we do not/ have to learn./ . . . birth is our birthright.” Lucille means “light,” and ten poems at the end of Two-Headed Woman (1980) tell of “the light that came to lucille clifton” and the voices of her ancestors that populated that light. Hearing them, in a room that was empty except for the poet, was an extraordinary experience of a kind that lent itself to sympathetic misinterpretation as madness. It shattered the poet’s old verities and radically altered her perspective, yet, like the Zen enlightenment of satori, in its full effect it was as natural and ordinary as walking becomes for those who once were lame. In “speaking of loss,” Clifton says that she is “left with plain hands and/ nothing to give you but poems.” She would suffer more losses, but the song of herself that began in the 1960’s has continued to expand into a song beyond herself, just as the daughter begins in the mother but lives beyond her mother’s identity and life. In Clifton’s later works, Blessing the Boats (2000) and The Terrible Stories, she writes about lifechanging events, in particular her struggle with breast cancer. Her poetry is graphic in

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the depiction of her changed body and the fear she battles as the cancer returns. These are poems of survival. She uses spare language without constraints of punctuation or capitalization to express her themes, including dreams and biblical imagery. In some of the poems, she uses the animal imagery of a fox who waits outside her door with terrible stories to tell. She writes of seeing the fox “next night again/ then next then next/ she sits in her safe shadow/ silent as my skin bleeds/ into long bright flags/ of fur.” Sometimes, she speaks in the voice of mythic or biblical characters such as Leda, Lazarus, or Lot’s wife. These later poems show an evolution from an emphasis on women’s issues and racism to more universal themes. Clifton’s great-great-grandmother Caroline said to her daughter, also named Lucille, “Get what you want, you from Dahomey women.” What Clifton’s poems want, get, and give is life—the mysterious power that living offers to all who will accept its conditions with tough good humor and who will assert its truths. Bibliography Clifton, Lucille. “A Simple Language.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Statement by Clifton about how being a black woman poet affects her writing and its reception. Holladay, Hilary. “Black Names in White Space: Lucille Clifton’s South.” Southern Literary Journal 34, no. 3 (Spring, 2002): 120-133. Discussion of Clifton’s works and her status as a Southern writer. Lazer, Hank. “Blackness Blessed: The Writings of Lucille Clifton.” The Southern Review 25, no. 3 (July, 1989): 760-770. Argues that because the primary purpose of Clifton’s poetry is to help African Americans know themselves, her uses of language necessarily fuse political and aesthetic concerns. Lupton, Mary Jane. Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006. Biography and discussion of the themes in Clifton’s poetry and her children’s books. McCluskey, Audrey T. “Tell the Good News: A View of the Works of Lucille Clifton.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Notes that in her poetry and children’s books Clifton writes with realism and the strength to say “yes” to life. Madhubuti, Haki. “Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Interpretation by a noted African American poet of the importance of Clifton’s poetry for African Americans. Rushing, Andrea Benton. “Lucille Clifton: A Changing Voice for Changing Times.” In Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Asserts that the major influence on Clifton’s poetry was the Black

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Arts movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, with its emphasis upon political, sexual, and spiritual liberation; black speech and music; the intuited truths of black experience; and a black audience. Says Clifton found her own voice by writing about women’s issues, the psychic tensions in the complex lives of modern women, her family heritage, and her religious experience. Tom Koontz, updated by Dolores Amidon D’Angelo

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THE POETRY OF WANDA COLEMAN Author: Wanda Coleman (1946) Type of work: Poetry First published: Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, 1977; Mad Dog Black Lady, 1979; Imagoes, 1983; Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, 1968-1986, 1987; The Dicksboro Hotel and Other Travels: Poems, 1989; African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems, 1990; Hand Dance, 1993; American Sonnets, 1994; Bathwater Wine, 1998; Mercurochrome: New Poems, 2001; Ostinato Vamps, 2003; Wanda Coleman: Greatest Hits, 1966-2003, 2004 A Mad Dog Poet Born and reared in the slums of Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman writes passionately about her life as a member of the dispossessed and downtrodden in that city, re-creating its outrageous banalities, mundane sufferings, and quotidian tragedies not only as an eyewitness but also as a player in the drama. She is best known for the anger in her poetry, which she has sometimes read to audiences dramatically by getting on all fours and barking like a mad dog. Largely neglected by literary circles and academia beyond the Pacific coast, Coleman, who knows firsthand what it means to be a welfare mother, a typist, a waitress, an editor for a soft-core pornographic magazine, and a medical clerk, is a grassroots poet whose outcry comes straight from the hearts of a largely silent majority of marginalized “minorities.” Coleman’s anger is inseparable from her day-to-day experience of poverty, racism, and sexism, but concomitant with the anger is her love for the community that has defined her life. As Coleman reveals in an interview, “I have one desire—to write. And, through writing, control, destroy, and create social institutions. I want to wield the power that belongs to the pen.” The racial riot in Watts in 1965 led Coleman to participate in community service for young African Americans, thus preparing her for a writing career. Fighting against tremendous odds, she ventured into experimental theater and dance and then took up scriptwriting. Although she later went on to win an Emmy Award for an episode of the soap opera Days of Our Lives in 1976, she was disillusioned by Hollywood and began to concentrate on writing poetry and short fiction. Coleman’s poetry is informed by African American speech and the blues tradition; her background in drama and scriptwriting also has an impact on her poetry. What sets her apart, however, are her writing habits, which are closely tied to the chores and burdens of her quotidian life. Speaking to her interviewers, Coleman describes herself as a “catch-as-catch-can” writer: I write poems while I’m standing in line at the supermarket, while the car is getting fixed. When you are poor, you spend a lot of time waiting. I never wanted to waste that time, so I always had a book or notebook handy, something I could work on.

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She turns her notes into poems, and if she is not initially satisfied with the result, she will keep them for future use. Because of these habits, she has developed what may be described as an “accumulative notebook style.” A Coleman poem often comes into being when enough notes on a certain topic are gathered, and now and then a new poem will emerge under a previously used title when additional notes are collected. Coleman’s first book, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag (1977), contains examples characteristic of her poetry. Focusing on the goings-on in a pornographic film studio and the inner thoughts of the producer, his associates, and the actors and actresses, the volume’s three title poems exemplify Coleman’s application of the scriptwriting technique to poetry, with scenes fading and zooming in and out according to the shifting of perspectives. More significant, furthermore, is her treatment of sexual exploitation as a theme, allegorized by means of the “court of the blue fag” and his associates, a murderously calculating and apathetic clique. With regard to Mad Dog Black Lady (1979), the book by which Coleman’s reputation was established, she has explained that “being a mad dog . . . was one image I had for myself in terms of my response to racism. I had to be either cured or killed. And there is no cure for rabies. . . . ‘Mad Dog’ is also slang for Mogen David 20/20, a ‘rot gut’ favored by winos.” Many poems in the book contain powerful, if shocking, expressions of Coleman’s anger. For example, the persona in “Where I Live” claims that she lives “at the lip of a big black vagina/ birthing nappy headed pickaninnies every hour on the hour” and goes on to state that “the country is her pimp and she can turn a trick/ swifter than any bitch ever graced this earth/ she’s the baddest piece of ass on the west coast/ named black los angeles.” In the slumscape typified by “Somewhere” and many other poems, Coleman depicts such characters as a man dropping to his death from the top of a building to avoid his debt collector (“Untitled”), a waitress slipping out “to give/ pussy to cute yellow don” in order to get extra tips (“At the Stop”), a number of prostitutes—including a teenage male (“Dear Little Boy”), cannibals (“Woman Eater”), and so forth. The injustices of society, as epitomized by these characters, have driven the poet to compare herself in “Doing Battle with the Wolf ” to an African warrior who, though dripping blood, must fight against the “white wolf ” of racism that “has a fetish for black meat.” Apart from autobiographical poems in which the poetic persona and Coleman seem identical (as in “Doctor Spider,” “Drone,” and “Accounts Payable”), one of the most important personas in Mad Dog Black Lady is the composite figure of the black woman who voices her protests against her society. In “A Black Woman’s Hole,” she complains that, after she has struggled to transform her “hole” of an apartment into a paradise, “if the world knew it would put her hole up for sale and turn her out.” Unmistakably, the black woman’s protests are often couched in terms of the economics and politics of sex. For example, in “Sweet Mama Wanda Tells Fortunes for a Price,” the persona is a prostitute who calls herself happy in strictly economic terms; in “No Woman’s Land,” the black woman condemns “love politics” as “a legislature of pricks.” The black woman, represented as the object of many seductions (“The Deuce of

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Cups”), is constantly afraid of being hurt and abandoned (“Wanda in Worryland”). She curses and threatens the “bourgeois nigger bitch” who has jilted her (“The Red Queen”), muses that in order to survive “you have to sort out all the sh*t life keeps/ dishing into your bowl” (“An Overdose of Lovers”), and advises that a woman judge a man by his silences (“You Judge a Man by the Silence He Keeps”). Sexuality, then, is one of the most important figures of speech in Coleman’s imagination; it has a positive role to play in the black woman’s protests as well as in the poet’s project of selfdefinition in her autobiographical poems. Along with race and gender, it constitutes Coleman’s rhetoric of “doing battle with the wolf” as a “mad dog black lady.” The Quest for Spiritual and Sexual Maturity Imagoes (1983) continues the major tendencies of Mad Dog Black Lady, but a new trend also begins to emerge in this collection. As Coleman has explained to interviewers, the book’s title refers not only to the “sexually mature state of insect larvae” (of butterflies and moths) but also to the “idealized state of self” and “images.” “Imagoes” as a term hence signals the evolution of Coleman’s self-identity as a developing artist. In the title poem, the poet transposes her meditation on imagoes to a mediation of self (“white birds do not eat them/ they taste bitter”) and confronts her phobia of moths and butterflies until, through a semiconscious state induced by the sexual ecstasy of the present and the dreamlike memory of her ancestry, she is transformed in such a way that “in my soul winged beings flutter.” The poem can be regarded as emblematic of Coleman’s self-fashioning maneuvers in the book, the main concern of which is her quest, through the perfection of expressive language, for a sexually and spiritually mature (or idealized) self. Coleman’s quest is evident from the first two poems in Imagoes. “In Search of the Mythology of Do Wah Wah” rewrites Greco-Roman civilization in terms of the melodrama of racist America: “oedipus, spawned on the breeding plantations of civil war america/ slays his white father and covets his black mother.” “Daddyboy,” a sketch of her father’s life, is the poet’s poignant recognition of her own identity through her father’s; when the family’s children address their father as “daddyboy,” an affectionate nickname, he reacts angrily, and the family’s mother must explain that “your father’s black. white people/ disrespect black men by calling them boy/ call him anything but.” Having thus established the Africanness of her being, Coleman moves on to a series of three poems about a “radical revolutionary red neck” from Georgia who became a civil rights fighter and who married a black woman in Watts (the “Jerry” poems). The interracial marriage undergoes various ordeals and concludes on a tragic note: “history lay between them/ love did not survive injustice.” The failure of this interracial relationship, apparently followed by other unsuccessful relationships in “Mama’s Man” and “Men Lips,” leads the poet to reflect bitterly in “Diagnosis”: “men come and go/ i whisper to my shadow, ‘there’s a qualitative/ difference between a love and a f*ck.’” Sexuality is once again employed as a figure of speech, in this case to exemplify how the black woman’s fashioning of the self entails the maturity not only of her spir-

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itual being but also of her sexual being. This quest for maturity is traced skillfully in part 2 of Imagoes, in which the poet explores the full range of the black woman’s experience of sexuality, including pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, family life, household chores, domestic conflicts, separation, sexual escapades, single parenting, unemployment, and welfare life. In these poems, Coleman registers the ontological difference of the black woman in the urban United States as a person marginalized not only by race but also by gender and economics. This ontological difference, which some feminist critics have come to recognize as the hallmark of black women’s writings, is best captured in “Rape,” a tour de force dramatizing how a woman raped during a burglary is subjected to multiple levels of victimization by the rapists, the police, and even her husband. Realistic vignettes such as “Rape” make clear that, in Coleman’s poetry, sexuality has come to mean sexual politics as well. Accordingly, Coleman’s quest for spiritual and sexual maturity is also an allegory for the struggle of African American women in society and in history. In Imagoes, Coleman is in noticeably better command of her poetic idioms than in her earlier work. She has started polishing her language; it is less cryptic and disjointed, more fluent and pliant. The poet can afford the luxury of wry humor (“Dinner with a Friend”) or even an occasionally playful gesture of complacency (“Pigging Out”). Indeed, Coleman’s anger now serves as an undertone rather than as the dominant melody. This change is epitomized by a poem in which the previous book’s “mad dog” reappears under a different guise: blue bruise my thigh i won the fight . . . blue bruise my thigh after fight [. . .] blue day he came got his clothes left the key ... blue monday street rife with hustle muscle and winos sipping blue grape mad dog 20/20.

The mad dog, no longer a dog but the slang term for a kind of liquor, is not so much a metaphor for anger as an agent of the blues, a form that Coleman begins to favor from this volume on. Blues Poetry Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, 1968-1986 (1987) is a showcase of Coleman’s literary art in the lyric, dramatic, and narrative modes. Here, although the poet is covering familiar ground, the storytelling impulse is stronger, and third-person perspectives begin to dominate. Frequently, the poetic self seems to disappear from the text, particularly in character studies (“Mother Taylor” and “Mister Clark”) and blues poems (“Trouble on My Doorsteps Blues” and “Bottom Out Blues”). An important hint about the character of this volume can be found in “Walking Paper Blues,” in which the figure of the “mad dog” for which Coleman is known is used in the context of the blues:

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Here, the emphasis has shifted from anger and helplessness to celebratory defiance, thus signaling the self-sufficiency characteristic of the mature self. Because the poetic self is quietly in control rather than submerged, the volume demonstrates Coleman’s success in achieving the maturity that she sought earlier in Imagoes. In African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems (1990), Coleman continues to excel in her regular repertoire (“Notes of a Cultural Terrorist,” “Starved for Affection Blues,” “In the Kitchen My Potatoes Are Polemical,” “Self-Immolation,” and others), but has expanded it to include a discourse on acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), in “Current Events,” “The Educational Lab Counselor,” “A Late 80’s Party,” “Obituaries,” “A Civilized Plague,” “The Article in the Newspaper,” and “Nesomania (2).” Also apparent are Coleman’s attempts to enhance her expressiveness by experimenting with form (“American Sonnet” and “Koan”) and with language in order to address the issues of the American Dream more effectively. The two title poems, which are rather obscure, employ medical metaphors to illustrate a black woman’s experience of feelings of inauthenticity, disintegration, and loss of self—a complex syndrome that, in turn, signifies the dysfunctionality of African American communities as a consequence of slavery, racism, oppression, and mistreatment. In the first “African Sleeping Sickness” poem, the disease is associated with the persona’s insistence on memory, language, dreaming, and becoming; in the second, the disease is related to the persona’s sexuality. In both poems, the persona implores the implied listener to sing to her of rivers, an allusion to Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Significantly, Coleman does not stop at hinting that the American Dream is the general issue; at the end of the second poem, by announcing that “between my thighs runs the river whiskey and he—he is a divin’ duck,” the persona also reiterates Coleman’s rhetoric of sexuality, linking the American Dream to gender issues. A closer examination of some other poems in African Sleeping Sickness reveals that Coleman’s rhetoric of sexuality also begins to focus on the reproductive aspect of the central motif. An important example is the first poem of the book, “Black Madonna,” in which the poet characterizes the archetypal black woman as the “night of nights” and “victim of victims,” with legions of children tearing at her breasts and partaking of her flesh, thus calling into question the relevance of the crucifixion. Rejecting Christianity as a religion oppressive to black people, the poet turns to the Egyptian goddess Isis to celebrate her procreative fertility in “Black Isis.” Another telling example is “Baby I’ve Got the Reds,” in which the poet transforms the language of the blues into a discourse about the inherent relationship between abortion

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and poverty. As a counterpoint, in “Art in the Court of the Blue Fag (9),” the persona’s surrealistic, abortionlike childbirth is associated with wealth-generating exploitation. The language of reproduction begins to permeate Coleman’s poetry to the extent that even menstruation begins to play the role of poetics: When a male poet asks his wife whether she likes his poems, “she took off the sanitary napkin she was wearing/ and plopped it on the page/ ‘needs more blood in it’/ and went back to the kitchen” (“Ars Poetica”). This reproductive rhetoric boldly reiterates Coleman’s persistent concern with the ways in which the social role of the black woman is governed by sexual politics. By reinstating reproduction as an integral part of the black woman’s sexuality, Coleman in effect challenges the politics that has sought, through distorted and reified notions of sexuality, to reduce black women to “the victim of victims.” If Wanda Coleman’s poetry strikes readers as polemical and quarrelsome in intention and graphic and grotesque in expression, it is because she has succeeded in a clinically candid and aesthetically unique representation of the United States as a pathological society. As she has said to interviewers, “The body politic of America is gangrenous”; what she tries to do, she says, is to get diagnostic studies under way, to “cut open the flesh and see that sepsis”—which is, of course, not pretty, but which is nevertheless real. Because the issues that she addresses are relevant to so many, her poetic voice demands urgent attention. Since the 1990’s, Coleman has become an irrepressible voice bearing witness to the kind of social trauma exemplified by the Los Angeles riots, with her testimony captured in many of the prose entries in the nonfiction collection Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors (1996)—for example, in “City in Denial: L.A. Diary, 1993.” As her writing career has expanded and her reputation has grown, she has also recorded performances of her poems as “spoken-word poetry,” thus gaining recognition by Rolling Stone magazine in 1993 as a poet “with a rock-and-roll attitude.” In 1998, Coleman was featured in the groundbreaking anthology A Revolution of Black Poets: 360 Degrees as one of forty contemporary black poets whose work represented “thirty years of ‘black fire.’” Her work has been included in many other anthologies focusing on social issues, women’s lives, workers’ conditions, and human rights, suggesting that she has attracted an audience that finds her work engaging. Coleman has also managed to meet with an increasing level of acceptance from mainstream arbiters of taste. Hand Dance as an Aesthetic Manifesto When Hand Dance was published in 1993, Coleman received little if any notice from reviewers, but this volume deserves attention for its range and depth. At first glance, Hand Dance covers familiar ground in terms of subject matter and poetic style; there are poems inspired by the blues (“Lovin’ Breakfast Blues” and “Moanin’ Groanin’ Blues”) and by the urban landscape of Southern California (“UCLA Graffiti Bio Med Library”), as well as poems addressing issues of work (“Sh*t Worker in General” and “The Tao of Unemployment”), race (“Aptitude Test” and “All Maps

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Tell Lies”), gender (“His Comments After Her Hanging” and “Want Ads”), health and sexuality (“Mastectomy”), and crime (“David Polion” and “Current Events”). Coleman’s “American Sonnets” also begin to make a more prominent appearance in Hand Dance, in which sonnets 3 to 11 appear. In 1994, a limited edition collection titled American Sonnets was published. The titular sequence continued to grow after its publication in include more than one hundred poems. On closer examination, it can be observed that Coleman is attempting to organize her entire poetic output in terms of the hand dance. While paying tribute, symbolically, to this African American art form that can be traced back to the Harlem Renaissance, Coleman appears to be developing a particular aesthetic that embodies, specifically, the kind of poetry she has been producing. In the eponymic poem dating to 1983 and serving as the epigraph that opens the book, the poet’s career is characterized as a hand dance: this is the ritual of the whole becoming the hand shaping a certainty to complete the cycle. to share my life with my man. to feed my children. my hands (they dance this anger. They sing it, paint it make it pay. it is bigger than mere hands can hold) born in slavery died enslaved yet not a slave born in misery died miserably yet not miserable.

As stated in the biographical note that also serves as the epilogue to the book, Every time her hands take flight her heart rides with them. It takes maximum effort to unshroud her mind’s eye from the raucous inner theatre of her feelings and set her hands in motion do that poetic waltz, heady-handed, floating above the world as she creates and recreates it her universe imagined and revealed depths hidden—a reality once loved once lived. The doing is manifest as her poems, short stories and essays continue to appear.

In between these two bookends, Coleman groups the poems into four sections: “The Dexter,” “The Sinister,” “But Ambidexterously,” and “The Laying on of. . . .” These terms all have something to do with the hand: “Dexter” means the right hand; “sinister,” the left hand; “ambidexterous,” skillful in the use of both hands; and “the laying on of hands,” while part of the dance, is also often used in religious or healing rituals involving the power of the Holy Spirit or God. Coleman may therefore be alluding to the extent to which her life as a black woman and writer involves personal and political engagements with both the poetic (associated with the dexter) and jour-

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nalistic (associated with the sinister) impulses. This dynamically and socially engaged writing is the artistic means by which her personal life finds expression and fulfillment. In Hand Dance, Coleman thus appears to be projecting a unified aesthetic vision that could pave the way to her proper and well-deserved recognition. For Bathwater Wine (1998), which contains poems of the “Dangerous Subjects” series, as well as a collection of autobiographical poems and another of “American Sonnets,” Coleman received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which was established by the New Hope Foundation and administered by the Academy of American Poets. Her next volume of poetry, Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001), includes more “American Sonnets” and a playfully innovative section of poems, “Retro Rogue Anthology,” written in imitation of (and in dialogue with) various contemporary American poets. The book became a finalist for the National Book Award. Coleman’s Ostinato Vamps (2003) saw publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the distinguished Pitt Poetry Series, establishing irrefutably that the voice of Coleman, long-time blueswoman and unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, now belongs to the nation as well. Bibliography Coleman, Wanda. “Clocking Dollars.” In African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1990. Important position statement by the poet about the impact of poverty on her writing; also shows how Coleman, as a marginalized author, differs from other black writers sanctioned by the establishment. _______. Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1996. Collection of articles and interviews in which Coleman offers readers “a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory.” See especially the introduction titled “A Career in Brief.” _______. The Riot Inside Me: More Trials and Tremors. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 2005. Twenty-six articles (essays, memoirs, interviews, and reports) divided into four sections: autobiography (including “Love-Ins with Nietzsche: A Memoir,” previously published separately as a pamphlet), commentaries on polemical issues, reviews (including a controversial one of Maya Angelou’s A Song Flung Up to Heaven, 2002), and essays on race, class, and poetry. _______. “Sweet Mama Wanda Tells Fortunes: An Interview with Wanda Coleman.” Interview by Tony Magistrale and Patricia Ferreira. Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 3 (Fall, 1990): 491-507. Comprehensive interview; essential reading for Coleman scholars. _______. “What Saves Us: An Interview with Wanda Coleman.” Interview by Priscilla Ann Brown. Callaloo 26, no. 3 (Summer, 2003): 635-661. The poet discusses how her life and writing have been shaped by California, the purpose of art, the craft of poetry, poetry and social change, and the significance of family in her work.

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Goldstein, Laurence. “Looking for Authenticity in Los Angeles.” Michigan Quarterly Review 30, no. 4 (Fall, 1991): 717-731. Contains a review of African Sleeping Sickness and discusses Coleman’s work in the ethnic and cultural context of Los Angeles. Hacker, Marilyn. “1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.” The Nation 269, no. 19 (December 6, 1999): 44-47. Announcing Bathwater Wine as the winner of this prestigious prize, Hacker discusses the merits of Coleman’s book and praises her verbal prowess and stylistic range. Kosiba, Sara. Review of Ostinato Vamps, by Wanda Coleman. African American Review 39, nos. 1/2 (2005): 247-249. Compares Coleman’s use of language to that of Toni Morrison, in that both find ways to convey unvoiceable emotions through words. MacPhee, Graham. Review of Bathwater Wine, by Wanda Coleman. African American Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 554. Emphasizes Coleman’s uniqueness in American poetry, which MacPhee attributes to her command of multifarious styles and strategies and to the power of her vision. Magistrale, Tony. “Doing Battle with the Wolf: A Critical Introduction to Wanda Coleman’s Poetry.” Black American Literature Forum 23, no. 3 (Fall, 1989): 539554. Indispensable in-depth study of Coleman’s poetry. Weil, Eric A. Review of Mercurochrome, by Wanda Coleman. African American Review 36, no. 4 (2002): 695-696. Discusses the importance of racial and sexual justice in Coleman’s work. Balance Chow

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THE POETRY OF JAYNE CORTEZ Author: Jayne Cortez (1936) Type of work: Poetry First published: Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, 1969; Festivals and Funerals, 1971; Scarifications, 1973, 2d ed. 1978; Mouth on Paper, 1977; Firespitter, 1982; Coagulations: New and Selected Poems, 1984; Poetic Magnetic, 1991; Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, 1996; Jazz Fan Looks Back, 2002 A Revolutionary Poetics of Anger Jayne Cortez is a poet of anger who utilizes urban scenes of violence and dehumanization. Her poetry is a volatile mixture of major trends in both the art and the politics of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She is a social revolutionary, passionately interested in the plight of downtrodden people everywhere, and she is a seeker of African roots and bases of morality who uses the techniques of free verse, borrowing artistic concepts from surrealism. Hers is a prophetic voice that uses jazz rhythms and relates existentialist philosophy. Her insistence on discovering the origins of African moral concepts and her use of a voice that has the overtones of Old Testament prophecy indicate that she is also very much aware of the uses of the past. Jean-Paul Sartre, the great twentieth century French existential writer, named authors who write out of their revolt against colonialism as the mauvaise foi, or those of bad faith. His study of the work of Leon Damas, a black novelist and poet originally from French Guiana, brought to light the elements that enabled Sartre to make his analysis. Damas and his friend Leopold Senghor of Senegal were important writers in Paris in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. These two, along with their friend Aimé Césaire of Martinique, went on to develop the concept of negritude, an aesthetic and ideological affirmation of black culture. The first mention of this concept occurs in a poem by Césaire written in 1939. The ideas of these three writers have influenced Jayne Cortez’s poetic revolt against a racist society and its norms, which she sees as exploitive and destructive. There is another facet to her poetry, however, in her celebratory poems about black and African themes and people, whom she affirms. Cortez’s revolt against the society in which she finds herself centers on her home of New York City. One of her most powerful poems bears its name, “I Am New York City.” It was originally collected in Scarifications (1973); in the later Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1984), she gave it the first page. In many ways, it is emblematic of her work. She anthropomorphizes the city, using street language. Her metaphors are violent and often repulsive, and she relies heavily on bodily parts and functions, especially scatological functions. Responding to Sandburg Like much of Cortez’s work, “I Am New York City” has literary antecedents, including Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” written in 1914. In Sandburg’s poem,

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there is a celebration of raw power and untamed insolence. His city is masculine, powerful, and young. Sandburg does mention the negative side of Chicago but gives it only three lines, admitting that in Chicago he has seen “painted women . . . luring the farm boys,” that the city is “crooked,” and that its “gunmen kill and go free to kill again.” His third negative line admits that the city is brutal and that the narrator has seen the marks of “wanton hunger” on women and children’s faces. After this brief unfavorable notice, Sandburg returns to affirming his robust and masculine town. Sandburg’s city is of the working class, but it is young and strong; it hopes to rise in life through strength and “cunning.” Cortez’s poem does not celebrate New York. Rather, it dissects the city. Sandburg’s city was masculine; her city appears to be feminine. In early stanzas, the city appears to be exploited and old, a woman with “legs apart” who has her “contraceptives.” She is not proud of her profession, however, and says in the next line, “look at my pelvis blushing.” If New York is a painted woman, she is not pretty, desirable, or even healthy. She has only half an ankle and half an elbow, and she wears a “rat tail wig.” This city presents a character completely different from that of Sandburg’s city. Sandburg sees “wanton hunger” on the faces of women and children; readers may wonder if the slut depicted by Cortez is sluttish because of this very real physical hunger. Sandburg has names and metaphors for Chicago; Cortez gives a physical description of the city-woman who sports “my marquee of false nipples/ my sideshow of open beaks/ in my nose of soot.” Sandburg portrays his town as laughing and bragging, but Cortez’s will “piss/ into the bite of our hand-shake.” She ends her description by inviting its citizens to “break wind with me.” This poem introduces Jayne Cortez’s anger at a society that allows such filth, such waste, and such disregard for decent human values. She blames the economic and political system, laying out her premises quite baldly in “There It Is,” a poem addressed to black people. In this poem she insists that the “ruling class” will try to exploit, absorb, confine, disconnect, isolate, or kill to preserve its privileges. She sees drugs as tools used by white society to “ossify” black society. Her solution is for members of the black community to fight, resist, organize, unify, and control their own lives. She warns that if they do not, the “dehumanized look of fear” and the “decomposed look of repression” will be theirs forever. Sandburg gives women and children a mere mention, but Cortez is terribly concerned about what happens to them, particularly black women and children, in the city. In her poem “Give Me the Red on the Black of the Bullet,” she asks for the bullet that hit Claude Reece, Jr., a fourteen-year-old shot by New York City police officers. She wants to make a statue, an “explosion of thunder,” and a “cyclone of protest.” She insists that she wants the bullet to make power for “the blackness called pent-up frustration/ called unidentified negro/ called nigger revolutionary.” In Cortez’s city, black children are shot and women are raped. “Rape” is about the situations faced by Inez Garcia and Joanne Little, who were victims of this crime in the 1970’s. Cortez equates the violence of the act of rape with the violence of the act of war. Inez Garcia’s rapist “carved a combat zone between her breasts.” Then he ex-

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pected her to “lick crabs from his hairy ass/ kiss every pimple on his butt.” After the rape, when the three-hundred-pound man started coming at her again with a knife, she was able to grab a rifle and started “doing what a defense department will do in times of war.” Another victim, Joanne Little, killed a policeman with an ice pick when he attempted to rape her. Cortez asks whether Little was supposed to: “choke on his clap trap balls/ squeeze on his nub of rotten maggots.” Cortez ends the poem in a celebratory mode, saying “from coast to coast/ house to house/ we celebrated the day of the dead rapist punk/ and just what the f*ck else were we supposed to do.” Sandburg personifies his city as a strong, young worker who embodies hope because he can work and because he has jobs. Many black people find that there is no way that they can get jobs, no way that they can hope to be part of the mainstream. In “Blood Suckers,” Cortez shows her concern for what happens to people of color both in the United States and elsewhere. She rails against those forces of politics and economics that siphon off the lifeblood of the people. She sees corrupt officials in Miami “resucking/ the dried mutilated scalps of a Seminole nation.” The effect of their corruption is not limited to people—they destroy animals and the environment as well. She finds them “grunting and chewing and pissing” on stuffed alligators. They are sucking in “little Pretoria” and in the dumps of Love Canal, the city built on a toxic dump, and Liberty City, the section of Miami torn by black rioters. Response to Global Politics The combination of capitalism and exploitation knows no national boundaries, and in Jayne Cortez’s poems, it knows no moral boundaries. In Firespitter (1982), she includes a poem entitled “Nigerian/American Relations.” It has only two lines, repeated to fill a page: “They want the oil/ But they don’t want the people.” She is equally explicit in “Expenditures: Economic Love Song 1,” which appears in the section of new poems in Coagulations. In that poem, she writes entirely in capital letters. The poem consists of two two-line stanzas that are repeated to fill almost two pages. They read: MILITARY SPENDING HUGE PROFITS & DEATH MILITARY SPENDING HUGE PROFITS & DESTRUCTION

In “Firespitters,” a poem about an African city, Cortez’s tone changes. Before writing the poem, she attended the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria. This experience served to heighten her interest in African politics and gave her insights into her African roots. For Cortez, the city of Lagos has the element of hope that Sandburg finds in Chicago. Although Cortez recognizes the problems in Lagos, the city calls up images of both her father and her mother. She sees the firespitters in her poem of that name, their “lips spreading like/ stripes and medals from the chest of my father.” She also sees “torches gleaming like/

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the gold tooth of my mother.” In Lagos, Cortez finds a homeland that is both beautiful and ugly, that teems with energy just as Sandburg’s Chicago did. She finds “painted skins swiveling pupils gut blasting moans and/ the supersonic sound of invisible orchestras.” Although Lagos is not a perfect city, as she travels past the city dumps on the outskirts she feels an exhilaration at the “dark puree of flesh in a mask of spinning mirrors.” She encourages the city, like a dancer, to “shake everything in your beautiful nasty self/ we’re here.” Cortez and Music Although Sandburg merely mentions singing in “Chicago,” he was interested in music and traveled across the country to collect folk songs. Jayne Cortez’s interest in music also goes deep. She often reads her poetry with musical accompaniment, and she has made several recordings of her poetry. At many of her readings throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, she has used a background of music. She also has written a number of celebratory poems about people, especially black musicians. These include “Rose Solitude (For Duke Ellington),” and “So Many Feathers,” for Josephine Baker, the famous singer, dancer, and entertainer who found fame in Paris and worked in the resistance movement in World War II. In Sandburg’s poem about Chicago, there is only one mention of art. His city is “singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” Music is far more important to Cortez. She invokes it and its artists often, frequently referring to jazz. In “Tapping,” from Scarifications, she calls up a “Johnny Hodges like” theme, “Charlie Parker riffs,” a “Coltrane yelp,” “a Satchmo pitch,” and “Ma Rainey Blues.” She is especially interested in drums and invokes them and their percussive sounds in several poems. One of these is “If the Drum Is a Woman.” She repeats several phrases in this work, using the title line a number of times as well as repeating “why are you” and “your drum is not.” She ends the poem with the drumbeat sounds of “don’t abuse your drum/ don’t abuse your drum/ don’t abuse your drum.” Different kinds of drums occur in “I See Chano Pozo,” all of which have marvelous sounds in their names: Atamo, Mpebi, Donno, Obonu Atumpan, Mpintintoa, Ntenga, Siky Akkua, Bata, and Fontomfrom. Cortez’s drum names are also drum sounds of great subtlety. With or without mention of music and musicians, Cortez’s celebratory poems often use words or syllables that emulate drumbeats. “The Red Pepper Poet (For Leon Damas)” is one of these. At the end of almost every line, she uses “ah,” “a,” “uh-huh,” or “uh-hun.” The final stanza incorporates “ah,” placing that word next to “I.” This use of single syllables detached from syntax produces a percussive effect that adds emphasis to Cortez’s tribute to a poet whose work embodies many of her own major concerns. Damas’s work reflects his influences: the French surrealist painters, the literature and music of the Harlem Renaissance, and the speech of working-class people. These influences are also Cortez’s, although her criticism of colonial concepts and racism is excoriation rather than protest. This use of extra syllables at line endings occurs in another significant celebratory poem, “For the Poets (Christopher Okigbo and Henry Dumas).” Both of these young

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black men were killed early in their careers. Henry Dumas, an extremely talented short-story writer who was active in the Civil Rights movement, was killed by a New York City subway policeman, ostensibly in a case of mistaken identity. Christopher Okigbo, a young African poet who served as a major in the Biafran army during the Nigerian civil war, was killed in action. In her poem, Cortez celebrates their lives, making a “delta praise for the poets,” and lashes out at the killers and at white officials who support black intertribal warfare: Because they’ll try and shoot us like they shot Henry Dumas huh because we massacre each other and Christopher Okigbo is dead uh-huh because i can’t make the best of it uh-hun because i’m not a bystander uh-hun.

Cortez is not a bystander. She is a fighter, and she urges others to stand up and fight. Formal Protest Even poetic form is a matter of principle for Cortez. Both she and Sandburg utilize the form of free verse, Sandburg being one of its early pioneers. For Cortez, its use is a matter both of aesthetics and of politics. In “Plain Truth,” she refers to a “They” that can only be the same “They” of “Bloodsuckers.” In this poem, one of the new poems in Coagulations, she says, “They want you/ to hate yourself” and “Suck/ their national standard/ of/ dead metrical feet/ and free-base into/ refugee camp. . . .” This line indicates that Cortez equates the old metrical forms with oppression. Like Adrienne Rich and other contemporary poets, she sees free verse as not only form but also substance. Both Sandburg and Cortez also use repetition. In “Chicago,” Sandburg slightly rephrases his opening stanza and uses all its ideas in his closing stanza. This is a technique that Cortez uses frequently. A number of her poems repeat the first stanza or variations of it in the last stanza. Her “I Am New York City” does this, making the parallels with Sandburg unmistakable. Her opening line, “i am new york city,” is also the opening line of her last stanza. In addition to repetition and the sounds from music, Cortez uses the shock value of scatological language and vivid images of degradation. Her metaphors are often unusual to the point of obscurity, although they may at times represent some in-group knowledge. All of her work appears in free verse, but in the later poems in Coagulations she experiments with various shapes on the page. Her early work often used short lines to describe subjects and locales of the United States. In her later poetry, her lines lengthened and her subject matter became universal, but her anger, which was her first hallmark, did not abate. Cortez’s poetic voice is so strong that readers may become confident that it is also her voice in life. She confronts and battles others, exhorting them to take their lives in their own hands, to make their destinies by their

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own actions. She does not depend on any deus ex machina, any intervention from heaven. She writes about the world in which she lives, and she is determined to work with what is available in the here and now, taking a revolutionary existential approach. If Cortez’s work is polemic and didactic and if sometimes her politics supersedes her poetry, her outrage against the conditions in New York City and in the world may be justified. Poets are not called upon to be popular or diplomatic. Cortez is very much aware of this, as she fulminates in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. She cares enough about the women and children who are victims to bring their grisly situations to the attention of her readers. She tells the truth about the conditions of people of color around the world. If her metaphors sometimes seem severe, contrived, or contorted, if she relies too much on the four-letter words of the street, it is because of the rage that she feels. In Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1996), the sultry and revolutionary air of Cuba and Brazil provides a milieu for the themes Cortez seeks to explore. Nicolás Guillén, once Cuba’s national poet, represents a revolutionary artistic ideal in the collection. In 1981, Cortez’s peripatetic voice searches for Guillén, and while she does not find him until 1985, in the process Cortez finds Cuba. Her multitudinous discoveries in her poetry unveil a particular essence that is both visceral and tangible and that ultimately speaks to her concerns as a poet. In “The Guitars I Used to Know,” Cortez unearths the old “excavated rhythms” of her cultural roots that are deep in the “apocalyptic blood-stained finger boards.” Such pursuits are prone to certain disappointments. In “Now I Dig Up Patinas,” the poetic urge to discover and create is finally met with despondency: “I say I’m a poet to . . . corpse of a roach in a cup.” The voice of the collection, however, eventually emerges triumphant and reclaims the revolutionary ideal and confidence of Césaire, whose “poetry became poetry unique to poetry.” By the book’s close, Cortez has made strides in confronting her poetics and cultural heritage, but this is no collection of self-importance or egoism. As a socially aware and prophetic poet, Cortez ends with “Find Your Own Voice.” Her argument is ultimately for collective discovery. “Find your own voice & use it,” Cortez exclaims, for “The river turtle/ does not breathe like/ a slithering boa constrictor.” A student new to the work of Jayne Cortez may be drawn to Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002), a collection of new and older poems that synthesize what Cortez has called “superealism,” which identifies a worldview prone to intensity of vision, as opposed to the detachment often associated with surrealism. The poetry in this collection represents a fusion of thought. The relevance of cultural heritage and roots is foregrounded, yet Cortez is just as skilled at creating short, immediate poetry that, while it may not penetrate the abyss of cultural consciousness, remains playful and worthwhile. “Ribs and Jazz Fest 94” conveys an American standard in a scant nine lines. As Cortez sees ”This chewing and licking of fingers in my face,” she yelps “Hooray” for the music and finds herself at this moment “very optimistic.” Cortez’s body of poetic work creates a complex web of jazz, cityscapes, and postcolonial culture. In the midst of all of it is Cortez herself, strong, thoughtful, and

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in tune. Carl Sandburg was active in the labor movement and was a champion of the common people. He often quoted, with admiration, one of Rudyard Kipling’s characters: “I will be the word of the people. Mine will be the bleeding mouth from which the gag is snatched. I will say anything.” Jayne Cortez has snatched the rag from the bleeding mouth, letting her city and her times speak. Bibliography Anderson, T. J., III. “Hot House: Jayne Cortez and the Music of Illumination.” In Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Study of Cortez’s poetic aesthetic that carefully explores her sources and influences, as well as engaging in close readings of relevant poems. Cortez, Jayne. “Jayne Cortez—The Unsubmissive Blues: The Great Poet.” Interview by Val Wilmer. Coda 230 (February 1, 1990): 16. Useful interview that details the role of the blues in Cortez’s work. Frazier, Vernon. “The Poetry-Jazz Fusion.” Poets and Writers Magazine 20 (March 1, 1992): 26. Describes how Cortez’s work carries on a tradition that dates back to Homer and Sappho of marrying music and verse. Melhem, D. H. Heroism in the New Black Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Describes six writers, Cortez among them, who have extended the concept of leadership and thus are heroes. Each essay is clearly written and provides a good introduction to a writer’s work. Contains primary bibliographies. Nielson, Aldon Lynn. Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Discussion of five writers, each of whom is given a chapter. Cortez’s chapter addresses the signifiers around her poetry and performances, in particular how the poet’s voice unites with rhythms, creating a “capillary network” that contains the history of African American culture. Ann Struthers, updated by Steven Bellomy

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THE POETRY OF COUNTÉE CULLEN Author: Countée Cullen (Countée Porter, 1903-1946) Type of work: Poetry First published: Color, 1925; Copper Sun, 1927; The Ballad of the Brown Girl: An Old Ballad Retold, 1927; The Black Christ, and Other Poems, 1929; The Medea, and Some Poems, 1935; The Lost Zoo (A Rhyme for the Young, But Not Too Young), 1940; On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countée Cullen, 1947 “Poet Laureate” of the Harlem Renaissance The contributions of Countée Cullen to African American literature are well established. He was one of the most important figures of the Harlem Renaissance—he is sometimes labeled its poet laureate—and in fact most of his major poetry was written during the 1920’s. In his day, Cullen was the most popular African American poet since Paul Laurence Dunbar, but since that time, his works have been viewed as too derivative and too locked into white, bourgeois perceptions of art—a criticism often launched against Dunbar as well. There is a certain simplicity in the lyricism of Cullen, showing his indebtedness to William Wordsworth’s “language of the common man.” His poetry is also shaped by his admiration of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, other significant British Romantics. His diction is sometimes imprecise, sometimes sentimental and unoriginal. Nevertheless, at his best, Countée Cullen is an outstanding poet worthy of admiration and deserving of much more serious critical attention than he has received. While Cullen’s poetry is derived from the Western lyrical heritage, it raises a number of important and interesting questions about the poet and about race, spirituality, the outcasts of society, and the meaning of Africa for African Americans. Critics consider his most important poems those that reflect his own experiences as an African American, though he wrote many poems that have little or nothing to do with race. These poems deal with love, friendship, and conventional poetic themes such as nature and death. In some of his greatest poems, he contrasts paganism with Christianity, recognizing his own “pagan” inclinations, which he cannot quite overcome despite his commitment to a Christian worldview. As he got older, he was ready to embrace a Christ who was “black” and reject the images of white religion that he, like so many of his fellow African Americans, had embraced during times of their bondage. Born Countée Porter on May 30, 1903, he at the age of eleven or thirteen (biographers are not sure which) became the adopted son of the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen and his wife, Carolyn Bell Mitchell, who were associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Cullen’s upbringing was a rigid one; the Reverend Cullen was a fundamentalist who instilled in Countée a deep sense of guilt while at the same time inspiring in him a love of learning. Until he was adopted by the Cullens, he lived with his maternal grandmother.

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A Stunning Debut In 1925, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Cullen published his first collection of poetry, Color, which is still considered his finest work. The central theme of the collection, race, reflects the “race consciousness” generally associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Included in the collection is the frequently anthologized and important poem “Yet Do I Marvel.” This poem uses the sonnet form for which Cullen is best known and introduces two central and interconnected themes of Cullen’s work: the theme of race and the theme of spirituality. The speaker of the poem, presumably Cullen himself, ponders a series of questions concerning the nature of God. Using a rather Blakean and Romantic mode, Cullen raises questions about the motivation God might have had in making “a poet black” and bidding “him sing” in a world that is fundamentally racist and that does not readily accept the creative work of African Americans. His conclusion is that God is too complex for the human mind to comprehend, though he raises questions about whether God is indeed “good, well-meaning, kind” in making the world as it is and making an African American poet. Another important poem in this collection, “A Brown Girl Dead,” reflects on the ambiguity and irony of dressing a dead African American girl in the colors of her oppressors: “With two white roses on her breasts,/ White candles at head and feet,/ Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;/ Lord Death has found her sweet.” Her mother has to sell her wedding ring in order to see to it that her daughter is dressed in white, and the poet writes that the girl would be proud to see herself in this attire were she alive to do so. She is a “Dark Madonna” in that she represents childhood innocence and purity that were not destroyed by a racist society. Ironically, she died perhaps believing, like her mother, that white is superior. To the poet, however, it is clear that the girl and her mother fail to recognize the degree to which they have allowed the white, racist society to alter their perceptions of themselves. “Black Magdalens” perhaps influenced such later poets as Gwendolyn Brooks to write about social outcasts, including prostitutes. It deals with the inverse of the white Madonna figure of Western culture symbolized by the Virgin Mary. Rather than allow their human dignity to be destroyed by those who judge them, the “black Magdalens” hide their pain and “wrap their wounds in pride.” Unlike Mary Magdalene, they do not have Christ to defend them against the self-righteous, judgmental “chaste clean ladies,” so they must fend for themselves. Nevertheless, those who consider themselves worthy of Christ’s kingdom find it easy to “cast the first hard stone.” This poem, like many other Cullen works, demonstrates his sympathy and identification with the outcast and his criticism of judgmental and provincial Christians. In the poem “Tableau,” Cullen addresses the homoerotic friendship between a white and a black boy. Although Cullen was married twice, biographers have concluded that Cullen, like his adopted father, was homosexual. Although hidden and repressed from his works as a whole, in this particular poem a homoerotic undercurrent is evident in the relationship between the two boys. Primarily concerned with the reactions of the community, the poem shows the boys walking “arm in arm” through both the “golden splendor of the day” and the “sable pride of night,” a line that sug-

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gests their intimate relationship. At the same time, the poet uses metaphor to equate the white boy with day and the black boy with night. The implication is that they complement each other, but the community itself is appalled by the relationship, not so much because it has elements of homoeroticism (of which they probably are not conscious) but because the racist and segregated society of the time forbade such closeness and interaction. While the community watches behind the blinds and talks about the boys, the friends do, however, achieve a certain sense of personal freedom not shared by those locked into the conventions of society. They are “Oblivious to look and word.” Here again, Cullen identifies with the outcast and suggests there is a certain freedom in violating the conventions of society. The poem closes with an unusual image: “They pass, and see no wonder/ That lightning brilliant as a sword/ Should blaze the path of thunder.” The phallic sword is connected with the symbol of power and rebellion against convention, the thunder, and these two images together suggest the unconventional relationship between the two boys. Perhaps, also, Cullen indicates that in violating social codes the friends run the risk of disrupting the provincial society of which they are a part. In the simple, often-anthologized lyric poem “Incident,” Cullen reflects on a boy’s first experience with overt racism. The speaker, a man looking back on a trip he took to Baltimore as an eight-year-old, comments on how he so innocently expected his trip to be an ideal experience. Ironically, he first sees himself as an alien being on the trip, for a white boy, who was “no whit bigger” than the speaker, called him the pejorative “nigger.” Though he spent much more time in Baltimore, he can recall nothing else about the experience there. In this poem, Cullen demonstrates the effects of a painful experience involving the loss of innocence and indicates that human beings have a tendency to remember the worst rather than the best occurrences in their lives. He also shows the effects of racism on the self-esteem and growth of the individual African American. “Heritage,” which is dedicated to Cullen’s intimate friend Harold Jackman, concerns a common theme of Cullen’s work: Africa. This poem is considered by some to be the greatest poem of the Harlem Renaissance. It demonstrates the poet’s ambivalence about his African heritage but argues against the inferiority imposed by the white and Western culture. Searching for a God who is black rather than the color of his oppressor, the speaker calls on Africa to inspire him to reconcile himself to God. Cullen associates Africa with the sensual side of the self that the Western culture of which he is a part has taught him to deny. Cullen’s conflict between paganism and Western religion is evident through these lines: “My conversion came high-priced;/ I belong to Jesus Christ,/ Preacher of humility;/ Heathen gods are naught to me.” Critic Jean Wagner considers the poem a commentary on the “inner struggle” of Cullen over his sexual orientation, his race, and his heavily religious (and orthodox Christian) nature. Darwin Turner has commented that “Heritage” concerns “the lyric cry of a civilized mind which cannot silence the memories of Africa that thrill the blood, of a heart which responds to rain and which, prostrate before the Christian altar, yearns for a

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black god who might comprehend suffering as no white god can.” A comparable poem in the same collection is “The Shroud of Color,” which reveals Cullen’s spiritual struggle as well. Cullen’s Sophomore Effort Cullen’s second collection, Copper Sun, which appeared in the same year as the long poem “The Ballad of the Brown Girl,” did not receive the acclaim his first one did. Mark Van Doren, a friend, warned Cullen not to publish a second collection so soon after the first, but he ignored the advice. Admittedly, few poems in this collection are of major importance, and some have argued that this is because only seven poems in the collection deal with race. The collection does, however, include one of Cullen’s best and most influential poems, “From the Dark Tower.” After receiving a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1925 and a master’s degree from Harvard University in 1926, Cullen wrote a column on literary criticism for Opportunity titled “The Dark Tower” for nearly two years. In the poem, one of his greatest sonnets, he reflects on the experience of African Americans and suggests that the time has come for them to stop suffering: “We were not made eternally to weep.” In some sense, “From the Dark Tower” can be labeled a protest poem, with apocalyptic overtones suggesting the possibility that African Americans will no longer stand by as they are abused and exploited. Nevertheless, they do “hide the heart that bleeds,/ And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.” These last lines indicate the effects of living in a world where African Americans are outcasts, forced to mask their pain and wait for the day when complete liberation of the mind and spirit will come through overcoming racial barriers. The masking motif common to much African American literature implies that the pain is hidden as an attempt to triumph over the oppression of racist whites. In “Threnody for a Brown Girl,” another memorable poem from Copper Sun, Cullen again employs a racial theme. The poet raises questions about the ways in which white society is responsible for the death of the girl and implies that the girl’s mother should not purchase a tombstone of white marble: “Lay upon her no white stone/ From a foreign quarry;/ Earth and sky be these alone/ Her obituary.” To cover her grave with such a symbol of white oppression would be inappropriate. As Jean Wagner has commented, “White, here, is the symbol of a commitment, of a racial and spiritual allegiance, and the use of white would mean doing violence, in the first place, to the deeper meaning of the dead girl’s existence.” In the same year as Copper Sun, Cullen published, in pamphlet form, The Ballad of the Brown Girl: An Old Ballad Retold, a retelling of an earlier Western ballad that adds the element of interracial marriage and changes the brown-haired girl of the earlier versions to an African American woman. The poem is more than two hundred lines long. Many people, including the influential scholar George Lyman Kittredge, praised the poem as an excellent example of the ballad. In the poem, an aristocratic young man, Lord Thomas, marries a black woman for her land and gold, but he loves another woman, who is white. Attacking the idea of white female virtue so well estab-

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lished in the South, Cullen suggests that the white race triumphs over the oppressed African American woman. The black woman stabs her rival and is in turn stabbed by her husband. In death she is also an outcast, for her husband and the white woman are buried next to each other. Through this poem, Cullen again points out the alien status of African Americans and their exploitation and abuse by white Americans. In 1928, Cullen received a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Paris, where he remained for almost two years. Meanwhile, his marriage to Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the inspirers of the Harlem Renaissance, failed, ending in 1929. After returning to the United States in 1929, Cullen taught French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City until his death. His second marriage, to Ida Mae Robertson, occurred in 1940. In 1932, he published his only novel, One Way to Heaven, which concerns the role of the church in the African American community. A children’s book in verse form, The Lost Zoo (A Rhyme for the Young, But Not Too Young), appeared in 1940. Critics and biographers are uncertain as to why Cullen wrote little new poetry after the 1920’s, but some have speculated that his reduced output was a result of his commitment to teaching. Later Work Cullen’s next collection, The Black Christ, and Other Poems, which was published in 1929, contains few memorable poems other than the title poem. By this point, Cullen had begun to move closer to his traditional Christian upbringing and to a large degree away from his pagan inclinations. “The Black Christ” demonstrates his commitment to a Western religious heritage at the same time it illustrates his desire for reconciliation with his African self. Concerned with the lynching of a black man, the poet again shows his propensity to protest racial oppression. Jim, the main character in this narrative poem, rebels against God and clashes with his mother, who blindly follows her Western religious (and Christian) heritage. While superficially the poem concerns a lynching, a number of critics, most notably Jean Wagner, see it as “a masterly reconstruction of the poet’s inner drama,” the conflict between disbelief and faith. Wagner argues that the poem reflects Cullen’s own reconciliation with Christianity. Jim dies but is resurrected, like Christ, and he is portrayed as a Christ figure. There are many parallels with the Passion story of Christ as well. The poem illustrates Cullen’s movement toward Christian mysticism, and some critics have argued that therein lies its major weakness. Cullen’s last collection, other than his collected poems, was entitled The Medea, and Some Poems. It includes a retelling of the classical Euripides tragedy Medea (431 b.c.); Cullen emphasizes the racial differences of Medea and her alien status. The poems most memorable in this collection are “Medusa” and “Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song.” In the former work, Cullen, who often uses allusions to Greek mythology (an aspect of his paganism), addresses in sonnet form the mythic figure of Medusa. Unlike most of the poems for which he is known, “Medusa” does not concern race but reflects Cullen’s fascination with Greek mythology. The poem’s speaker expresses his undying curiosity concerning the Medusa figure: “But I was never one to be sub-

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dued/ By any fear of aught not reason-bred,/ And so I mocked the ruddy word, and stood/ To meet the gold-envenomed dart instead.” Unlike the Medusa of Greek mythology, however, this one does not destroy the speaker when he looks upon her but instead blinds him: “I know it was a lovely face I braved.” “Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song” is a protest poem, the only one in the collection dealing directly with the issue of race and social injustice. The title refers to the Scottsboro, Alabama, trial of nine black men accused of raping two white girls. After the conviction, one girl recanted her previous accusation, but after the case was heard in the Supreme Court, four men were convicted to life imprisonment. Cullen sees this event as similar to the injustice involving the Sacco-Vanzetti case of the 1920’s. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were accused and convicted of armed robbery and murder in April, 1920, even though they had witnesses verifying they could not possibly have been at the scene of the crime. Eventually, they were executed, despite the discovery that a gang of robbers had been responsible for the crime. Cullen uses this case and the Scottsboro incident to attack the American system for condemning those of ethnic and minority groups and devaluing their existence. The speaker expects poets, to whom the poem is dedicated, to see the Scottsboro case as an inspiration for their art. The racial element of the poem is especially evident in these lines: “Here too’s a cause divinely spun/ For those whose eyes are on the sun,/ Here in epitome/ Is all disgrace/ And epic wrong,/ Like wine to brace/ The minstrel heart, and blare it into song.” In referring to the “minstrel,” Cullen condemns American racism, which has reduced African Americans and other minorities to mere masks of humanity. As the poem ends, Cullen points out the irony in the fact that poets should have been inspired to write by the Scottsboro case as they were by the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, but they were unwilling to protest injustice against African Americans. In 1947, Cullen’s On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countée Cullen appeared. He had selected the poems for inclusion just before his death, which was caused by complications from high blood pressure in 1946. This collection includes major poems from previous collections as well as half a dozen previously unpublished poems. These new poems, while maintaining the style and content for which Cullen is noted, add nothing to his literary reputation; critics consider them lesser poems than most of the earlier poems. Though most of the poems for which Cullen is known deal with the subject of race and were written during the 1920’s, his literary reputation as a significant American poet is stable. As Houston Baker has written, Cullen “never achieved the ‘Vision Splendid.’ He can be classified as a minor poet whose life and poetry raise major problems.” Bibliography Baker, Houston A., Jr. A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974. In this important but brief study, Baker emphasizes Cullen’s Romantic heritage and places him within the context of African American poetry up through the Harlem Renaissance. There are useful analyses of individual poems, especially those from Color. The notes and bibliography,

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though somewhat dated, may be useful for finding other materials on Cullen. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers (1900 to 1960). Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. A general but useful overview of the life and career of Cullen. Davis emphasizes the dual nature of Cullen as both pagan and Christian and suggests that he seems to have reconciled himself to his Christian side after his first volume of poetry. A select bibliography of primary and secondary material is included. Hutchinson, George, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Includes a chapter by James Smethurst comparing the lyric poetry of Cullen to that of Langston Hughes. Onyeberech, Sydney E. Critical Essays: Achebe, Baldwin, Cullen, Ngugi, and Tutuola. Hyattsville, Md.: Rising Star, 1999. Study of Cullen alongside four other major black authors, determining the similarities and differences between men of color writing in different parts of the world. Redding, J. Saunders. To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939. Although Redding’s book concentrates on African American poetry before the Harlem Renaissance, his perceptive remarks concerning Cullen, though brief, may be of use even today. Redding calls Cullen the “Ariel of Negro poets” and mentions Cullen’s reluctance to be labeled a Negro poet and his confusion about race. Nevertheless, to Redding, Cullen is best when writing about racial issues. Tarver, Australia, and Paula C. Barnes, eds. New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. Includes an essay by David Jarraway discussing the influence of diasporic culture on Cullen’s poetry. Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. A short but useful discussion of Cullen’s life and work. Turner stresses that Cullen was a Romantic poet who allowed his emotional inclinations to interfere with his intellectual abilities; as a result, Turner argues, Cullen was a failure after his first collection of poetry. A select bibliography, mostly containing articles on Cullen, is included. Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Translated by Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. By far the most complete and excellent discussion of Cullen’s life and career, this work includes biographical information not included elsewhere and offers analyses of Cullen’s spiritual and racial poetry. Includes an effective section on Cullen’s use of Africa in his works and a lengthy analysis of “The Black Christ.” There is a useful bibliographical appendix and a bibliographical supplement. D. Dean Shackelford

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THE POETRY OF OWEN DODSON Author: Owen Dodson (1914-1983) Type of work: Poetry First published: Powerful Long Ladder, 1946; Cages, 1953; The Confession Stone: Song Cycles, 1970 (with James Van DerZee and Camille Billops); The Harlem Book of the Dead, 1978 An Early Poetic Influence One of nine children, Owen Dodson was born on November 28, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, to Nathaniel Barnett Dodson, a freelance journalist, and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Goode Dodson. Owen grew up proud of his identity and of his lineage. He early knew of the social contributions of such black luminaries as Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Fate conspired to turn the young Owen Dodson into the writer he became. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School; the school’s principal, Elias Lieberman, was a poet. Lieberman encouraged the boy to enter contests that resulted in his winning medals for public recitations of verse. Owen was at this time also active in the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, where he imbibed the cadences of black spirituals with which he was later to infuse his verse. Upon graduation from high school, Dodson received a scholarship to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he enrolled in a freshman course that John Berkelman taught. Dodson brashly told Berkelman that he had the capability to write sonnets as good as those of John Keats. Berkelman thereupon told Dodson to write a sonnet a week until graduation. Carrying out this assignment helped Dodson to perfect his craft and resulted in his publishing pieces in the New York Herald Tribune, in Opportunity, and in Phylon before he left Bates in 1936 to continue his studies at Yale University, where he received an M.F.A. degree in 1939. Although Dodson was diverted from writing poetry first by the demands of his program in drama at Yale and later by his service in the United States Navy, where he was assigned to write dramas to boost the morale of black servicemen, a number of his poems appeared in such publications as Common Ground, New Currents, Theatre Arts, and Harlem Quarterly between 1942 and the publication of his first volume of verse, Powerful Long Ladder, in 1946. The poems Dodson published in these periodicals were incorporated into this first volume. During his time at Yale, Dodson also produced his verse play, Divine Comedy (pr. 1938), a portion of which appears in Powerful Long Ladder and which was awarded the Maxwell Anderson prize for verse drama. Although Dodson felt that his greatest poetic achievement was The Confession Stone: Song Cycles, which he first published in 1970, most critics have turned to the earlier work as best representing Dodson’s poetry.

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Powerful Long Ladder Powerful Long Ladder is concerned with human struggle, particularly with the struggle of black people in a society that first enslaved and then simultaneously exploited and ignored them. At the time the book was published, segregation was widespread. Dodson had recently been discharged from the Navy, where he belonged to a segregated company at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station outside Chicago. The book, divided into five sections, takes its title from the Dodson poem “Someday We’re Gonna Tear Them Pillars Down,” a seven-page verse drama that uses dramatic technique to the utmost. The pillars are symbolically akin to the wall in Robert Frost’s famous poem “Mending Wall”; they are barriers that serve as points of demarcation between people—in the Dodson poem, between African Americans and the dominant society. Dodson has often been compared to Frost. In a sense, however, this comparison may be misleading because of Dodson’s deep personal involvement on a daily basis with the inequities of segregation and discrimination, which continually devoured his spirit. Robert Frost could afford a philosophical detachment that no black of Owen Dodson’s period could reasonably enjoy. The first section of Powerful Long Ladder contains a dozen poems of from two to six pages each. The range of these poems is remarkable. Some focus on individuals; others deal broadly with topics ranging from racial tension to death to the accomplishments of African Americans. Many of them are dialect poems. The first poem, “Lament,” which is not in dialect, is exceptionally interesting, beginning with an imperative to a dead boy to wake and tell how he died. What the poem essentially conveys is the hopelessness of trying fully to understand life’s common abstractions—love, freedom, terror, death. A more complicated view of human existence emanates from “Guitar,” a ballad about a black jailed for hitting a white person. Society decrees that, without solid evidence, the black should be adjudged guilty. This poem has strong metrical overtones from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. The tone of the poem is one of despair tempered by resignation. The black man has no recourse as society is constituted. Among the best-known Dodson poems is “Black Mother Praying,” a war poem about a mother whose sons have left to defend their country. She compares her sacrifice to Christ’s crucifixion, her sons to the son of Mary. The rub is that when her sons come home—if they come home—the freedom they fought to ensure will, because of their color, extend neither to her nor to them. This poem is a precursor of Dodson’s The Confession Stone, in which Dodson makes the Virgin Mary and her son quite ordinary people dealing with the details of daily life. Mary admonishes the young Jesus not to play with Judas when he goes out. The second section of Powerful Long Ladder contains a substantial excerpt from Dodson’s verse play, Divine Comedy, which is an ironic presentation of the kind of hope that the evangelist Father Divine offered his hapless followers, most of them black, for several decades. Dodson as a boy went to one of Father Divine’s meetings with his brother Kenneth and never forgot the experience. Like Jesus feeding the five

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thousand, Father Divine fed his followers. He drew milk from a seemingly bottomless well. When the crowd had dispersed, however, Kenneth lifted the tablecloth to find that a black boy was underneath pumping milk into the vat from which Father Divine magically extracted it. Surely this experience provided an initial stimulus for Divine Comedy, which also has many structural elements borrowed from Dante’s masterpiece. Dodson’s verse drama provides, in essence, a startling insight into how black people, stripped of much of their hope, can be exploited and duped, as Father Divine’s followers usually were, even by their fellow black people. The other sections of Powerful Long Ladder, “Poems for My Brother Kenneth,” “All This Review,” and “Counterpoint,” develop the racial themes that Dodson examines in the earlier sections. The latter sections, though, show a growing artistic maturity on the author’s part, particularly in the lyricism with which he approaches his material. The twenty-four-year hiatus between Powerful Long Ladder and The Confession Stone occurred because Dodson was serving as professor of drama at Howard University. During this period—1947 until 1969—Dodson concentrated primarily on writing plays, although he did write two novels, The Boy in the Window, published in 1951, and A Bent House, completed when a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953 enabled Dodson to spend an extended period in Italy. This novel did not appear until 1977, retitled Come Home Early, Child. The thin poetry collection Cages, which Dodson also completed during his stay in Italy, explores essentially the same racial themes that are found in his first collection. The Confession Stone consists of seven brief sections, including comments by Mary on Jesus, letters from Joseph to Mary, journals of Mary Magdalene, songs from Judas to Jesus, songs by Jesus to God, songs by God to His son, and a final song by Mary to Jesus. The parallels between the biblical epic and the racial situation from which Dodson wrote are striking. An additional volume of Dodson’s poems remained unpublished at his death. Owen Dodson was caught between two compelling movements, a part of neither. The Harlem Renaissance had run its course by the time Dodson began to emerge as a literary figure. Ahead lay the black militancy of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. When Powerful Long Ladder appeared in 1946, some critics considered it too much concerned with issues of race, although these critics, including John Holmes, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, found considerable promise in Dodson’s writing. Alfred Kreymborg commented on the notable dramatic qualities in Dodson’s poetry, observing that the poet could infuse old topics such as estranged love with “fire, wisdom, and dignity.” Richard Eberhart, on the basis of this first volume, called Dodson the best black poet in the United States. The poems in Powerful Long Ladder are largely concerned with the effects of continuing poverty and prejudice upon a race transplanted from its own continent, enslaved, and freed only to endure humiliation and repression from mainstream society. Obviously, in a poem such as “Autumn Chorus: After the Prophet Has Been Killed,”

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the poet uses such dramatic devices as dialogue and a chorus to sustain a plaint that seems eerily prescient: Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., were alive but were scarcely known to the public at the time that this chilling poem was written. To those nonblack critics who suggest that Dodson was too much concerned with race, one can only say that a cauldron of racial tension was simmering and was soon to boil over in America. Dodson was daily exposed to the tensions that within twenty years would result in the violence that darkened the 1960’s. He could not ignore the strife he saw around him. On the other hand, Dodson did not consciously fan the fires that were smoldering. He was being objective, but his objectivity was from the black rather than the white point of view. Therefore, his stance seemed to many whites to be more extreme than it was. The most personal and, in some ways, the most deeply felt poems in Powerful Long Ladder are those contained in the section entitled “Poems for My Brother Kenneth,” in which Dodson reflects on personal memories and relives portions of his youth. The racial tone in these poems is more subdued than in the other sections of this collection, although it necessarily intrudes even upon these poems. Dodson and African American Identity Dodson resisted being identified with African Americans who were grouped merely by their color. Invited to join Bates College’s black alumni association, he declined, asking, “Did I learn black Latin?” His poems continually reflect a similar attitude. He suggests that if African Americans are to become a part of mainstream American life, such organizations as black alumni associations must go. In his poems, Dodson exudes energy. He does not shrink from the struggle in which his race, in his eyes, must participate actively—and he suggests that white people can help in this struggle. In “Miss Packard and Miss Giles,” Dodson celebrates the two white women who founded Spelman College for Negro Women in Atlanta, where he taught from 1938 until 1941. He commends their stalwartness, their refusal to return to their native New England when things were not going well. Similarly, in poems such as “Epitaph for a Negro Woman” and “Black Mother Praying,” the suggestion is that people must keep moving forward, struggling hand over hand up the ladder that provides the title for Dodson’s first volume of poetry. In small details of his later life, Dodson followed his own advice. When, severely crippled by arthritis, Dodson went to an experimental theatrical production with James Hatch, he had to climb a long flight of stairs to reach the auditorium. Giving Hatch his canes, he grasped the railing and, quite painfully, pulled himself up the stairs, refusing help offered by passersby. In this act, Dodson was playing out the philosophy that many of his poems espouse. Throughout his career, Dodson wrote poignant death poems, some celebrating the deaths of individuals, such as “Countee Cullen” in Powerful Long Ladder, others addressing the topic generally. He wrote the poems for The Harlem Book of the Dead, a collection of funeral photographs taken by James Van DerZee and assembled by Camille Billops.

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Most of Dodson’s death poems express the sentiment that death, the great equalizer, diminishes one’s blackness. The earth consumes it, a thought which appears to be comforting for the poet. One of his last poems, “There Are No Tears” (1981), suggests that grief “photographs” all that has been. It is not accompanied by tears or the sounds of trombones, but the dead person’s “heart is quiet;/ A grain of sand./ His beach is not afraid/ Of the ocean anymore.” Owen Dodson was an inheritor of the black poetic tradition established by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Countée Cullen, to whom Dodson acknowledges his debt. He was also well acquainted with the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, although his poetry seems less influenced by their work than by that of poets closer to him in time. Dodson was different from most of the black poets before him, because he had essentially been reared in a middle-class northern black family that was not dysfunctional in the way that, for example, Langston Hughes’s family was. Dodson’s going to New England to attend a predominantly white college also set him apart, as did his further education at Yale University. Although he knew what it was to feel discrimination and to be subjected to segregation, Dodson also knew what it was to be accepted and not to endure segregation. Perhaps this dichotomy made him feel more deeply than some earlier black poets the stings of racial prejudice when he encountered them. His was essentially a moderate voice bridging the period between the Harlem Renaissance, with its artistic promise, and the racial strife of the 1960’s. Bibliography Baraka, Amiri. Eulogies. New York: Agincourt, 2002. This collection of homages to figures important to poet and dramatist Amiri Baraka includes Baraka’s tribute to Dodson. Hardy, Sallee W., ed. Remembering Owen Dodson. New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 1984. This is a collection of reminiscences, poems, and other materials about Owen Dodson presented at his funeral. Among the contributors are Margaret Walker, David Abram, Amiri Baraka, and Joe Weixlmann. Hatch, James V. “Remembering Owen Dodson.” In Artist and Influence, 1985. New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 1985. Hatch, who first met Dodson when he participated in a playwriting workshop at the University of Iowa while Hatch was a student there, provides warm reminiscences about an evening when he and Dodson, then badly crippled and barely mobile, went to see a new play written by one of Hatch’s students. _______. Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Biography of Dodson that finds the beauty amid the sorrow of the poet’s life. O’Brien, John. “Owen Dodson.” In Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. O’Brien conducted this hourlong interview in 1971. Dodson later supplemented it with written responses. It is revealing in that Dodson comments

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on other black writers and clearly distances himself from some who wrote in the turbulent 1960’s. Dodson discusses the themes of religion and history in his work. Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. “The Legendary Owen Dodson of Howard University.” Crisis 86 (November, 1979): 373-374. Peterson, although not the most disinterested critic of Dodson, has, nevertheless, a good feeling for his writing and for its place in and relationship to black writing in the United States generally. Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards Press, 1973. Schraufnagel devotes only two pages to Dodson and concentrates essentially on his novels. Nevertheless, his comments help to place Dodson in a useful literary context. R. Baird Shuman

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THE POETRY OF RITA DOVE Author: Rita Dove (1952) Type of work: Poetry First published: The Yellow House on the Corner, 1980; Museum, 1983; Thomas and Beulah, 1986; Grace Notes, 1989; Selected Poems, 1993; The Darker Face of the Earth (verse drama), 1994; Mother Love, 1995; On the Bus with Rosa Parks, 1999; American Smooth, 2004 An Award-Winning Poet Rita Dove is a major force in contemporary American poetry. She has published seven full-length books of poems (her Selected Poems gathers the contents of her first three books), received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and spent two years as poet laureate of the United States (1993-1994). She was born August 28, 1952, in Akron, Ohio, and grew up with two younger sisters and an older brother. Her father, the first African American industrial chemist to work for Goodyear Tires, figures prominently in several of her poems. She shares her father’s love of mathematics and science but has embraced her mother’s love of literature and describes herself as an avid reader since early childhood. The poem “Geometry,” from her first book, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), begins, “I prove a theorem and the house expands.” In her introduction to her Selected Poems (1993), Dove describes herself as “passionate about books,” and she tells of writing a novel when she was in elementary school: “The words led me, not the other way around.” Helen Vendler has described Dove’s imagination as “rapid, extrapolative, montage-like, and relational.” After receiving a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in 1973 from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Dove attended the University of Tübingen, where she studied German and modern European literature on a Fulbright fellowship. She received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1977, and while there she met her future husband, German writer Fred Viebahn, who was teaching at Oberlin College. They married in 1979 and spent two years writing in Israel and Germany. From 1981 to 1989, Dove taught at Arizona State University, and in 1983 their daughter Aviva was born. Since 1989, they have lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Dove teaches as Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is an accomplished cellist and singer with classical voice training, and she and her husband are competitive ballroom dancers. Poetry Without Limits As an African American writer with strong European connections and a sense of the past as well as the present, Dove has claimed a vast world for her subject matter, one full of mysteries, small objects, broken promises, desires, contradictions, cruelties, and strange weathers. She explores the particularities of race, gender, and culture in the interstices of everything and everywhere. At the end of “Nexus,” from her first

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book, the “giant praying mantis” that has haunted her efforts to write from his place at the window expands and is transformed when she walks into the evening: I walked outside; the grass hissed at my heels. Up ahead in the lapping darkness he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green, a brontosaurus, a poet.

In The Yellow House on the Corner, Dove’s subjects range from a slave mutiny in “The Transport of Slaves from Maryland to the Mississippi” to classical music in “Robert Schumann: Or, Musical Genius Begins with Affliction.” Her verse ranges from the simple, domestic images of “Small Town” to the surreal imagery of the three poems entitled “Adolescence,” in which the first-person speaker encounters “three seal men with eyes as round/ As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.” Dove’s second book, Museum (1983), continues to range broadly through geography and history. Notes at the end provide information on a Chinese empress, on Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Catherine of Siena, on Benjamin Banneker, and on Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo’s murder of twenty thousand black Haitian workers for their inability to pronounce properly the Spanish word for parsley. This last horror is presented coolly yet powerfully in the final poem, “Parsley,” which is composed in two parts. The first is a villanelle, reminding readers of Dove’s fascination with formalism. Her ninth book, Mother Love (1995), incorporates many freeverse sonnets, of which Dove inquires rhetorically in her foreword, “Can’t form also be a talisman against disintegration?” Chaos, she writes, lurks outside the gate, but the sonnet “defends itself against the vicissitudes of fortune by its charmed structure.” One of the most talked about poems in Museum is “Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove,” which reflects on a 1929 painting by Christian Schad that was used for the book’s cover. This poem, along with the next, “At the German Writers Conference in Munich,” contributes to the establishment of a cosmopolitan perspective that various readers, such as Greek critic Ekaterini Georgoudaki, have admired in Dove from the outset. Dove has been fortunate in her critics, having attracted the favorable notice of such commentators as Arnold Rampersad and Helen Vendler. The advent of book-length treatments of the writer and her work constituted an important step in the march toward literary canonization. Significant in this respect, the first such treatment was the product of a European critic, Therese Steffen, whose Crossing Color (2001) addresses, among other matters, how Dove’s writings “fit into the African-American, U.S. and international scene.” The second book-length study of Dove’s writing is Malin Pereira’s Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism (2003). As Georgoudaki observes, Dove “speaks with the voice of a world citizen who places her personal, racial, and national experience within the context of the human experience as a whole.” Directly following the two poems mentioned above, Dove offers a section titled “My Father’s Telescope,” nine personal poems that reflect on family rela-

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tions in such a way that readers are almost always aware of a tension between the personal, even the autobiographical, and the world at large. Thomas and Beulah Dove’s third collection of poems, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah (1986), draws on the experiences of her own grandparents, a connection suggested by the printing of their photos on the book’s cover and acknowledged by Dove in interviews, though not explicitly stated in the book. The volume concentrates on the separate lives of a married couple. Dove allots first twenty-three poems to Thomas and then twenty-one to Beulah, and she provides a chronology dating from Thomas’s birth in 1900 until Beulah’s death in 1969. Their individual lives are shown obliquely in relation to larger social forces and events, such as the March on Washington in 1963. The stories of Thomas and Beulah are told separately, from their youthful experiences before they met, through a long marriage, and on to old age and death. Each member of the couple is presented as essentially alone, with his or her greatest pains, disappointments, and dreams kept private from others, but shared with readers in a cryptic and fragmented way. The effect is eerily intimate while at the same time tragically distant. Thomas grieves and perhaps feels some guilt for his drowned friend Lem; consequently, he appears slow to find other sources of meaning and affirmation. Late in his sequence, in “Roast Possum,” Thomas reveals a passionate desire to teach a manly kind of woods lore, survival skills, and a capacity for enjoyment to his one grandson, significantly named Malcolm. The poem contains a pun on Malcolm X’s birth name, Malcolm Little: “it was for Malcolm, little/ Red Delicious, that he invented/ embellishments.” Beulah is given no single tragic incident to mourn. Instead, she evinces a subtle movement from disappointment to fantasies to meditative resignation, or possibly wisdom. In “Headdress,” working as a milliner, Beulah lets the hat she has created for another woman become the image of her own dreams: The brim believes in itself, its double rose and feathers ashiver. Extravagance redeems. O intimate parasol that teaches to walk with grace along beauty’s seam.

Among all her achievements in Thomas and Beulah, Dove’s handling of narrative voice has generated the most commentary. Praising the discipline and compression of Thomas and Beulah, Bonnie Costello analyzes Dove’s success in overcoming the problems of how to “get years of her grandparents’ joy and anguish into spare lines without presuming to sum up for them; how to telescope distances of place, back-

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ground, dreams, without narrating,” and pronounces Dove’s solutions to be brilliant. In his essay on the book, John Shoptaw discusses “One Volume Missing,” in which Thomas purchases an incomplete set of encyclopedias “for five bucks/ no zebras, no Virginia,/ no wars.” Shoptaw sees the poem as providing a clue to understanding the “gaps, divisions, and deletions” in Dove’s own collection. Dove’s poetry is a “fragmentary alphabet,” according to Shoptaw, and “the never-never Volume that would integrate . . . the narrator and her stories, must remain missing.” Post-Pulitzer Work Of her fourth volume of poetry, Dove has commented, “With Grace Notes I had several things in mind: every possible meaning of grace, and of notes, and of grace notes, and also a little added riff.” In writing Grace Notes (1989), she sought to counter “the heavy weight of Thomas and Beulah, which had such a big scope.” The collection marks Dove’s return to a purely lyric mode, but an autobiographical impulse also dominates the work. More than in any of her previous collections, Dove can be seen as the actor in each vignette, whether as a young child learning a brutal lesson in the Southern black school of survival (“Crab-Boil”) or as a mother groping for a way to reveal feminine mysteries to her own young daughter (“After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed”). In the ironic “Ars Poetica,” she places herself on the literary chain of being with what might pass for self-deprecation. Her ambition is to make a small poem, like a ghost town, a minute speck on the “larger map of wills”: “Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:/ a traveling x-marks-the-spot.” In her assessment of Grace Notes, Bonnie Costello finds that the literary features readers have grown to appreciate in Dove arise here in their finest form: descriptive precision, tonal control, metaphoric reach within uncompromising realism. Moreover, she has brought these talents to bear upon a new intimacy and moral depth, served by memory and imagination working together.

Prose Works Accomplished though she is as a poet, Rita Dove also writes fiction, and discussion of her poetry can benefit from an awareness of her work in that genre. Her slim volume of short stories, Fifth Sunday, was published in 1985 and her novel, Through the Ivory Gate, in 1992. Her stories convey some of the same qualities of compression and understatement that are found in her poems, along with a similar range of locations between Europe and America. Included among the eight stories in Fifth Sunday are “Zulus,” about an American motorcycle gang crashing the wedding of one of its own; “Vibraphone,” about a woman music student who follows one of her musical heroes to a revealing and disappointing meeting in Italy; and “The Spray Paint King,” a moving story about an outlaw graffiti artist. The poignant title story tells of adolescent infatuation. The subject of incest broached in “Aunt Carrie,” the last story of Fifth Sunday, is revisited in Through the Ivory Gate, which Malin Pereira describes as “a novel of

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artistic development.” The novel “underlines the importance of reading the episode as a symptom of a repressed primal scene of cultural amalgamation” and concerns the protagonist’s resolution “of some of the tensions about her life as a cultural mulatto.” The main character, Virginia, abandons her relationship with a black man to work with a white man, a puppeteer in an Off-Broadway play. As Pereira observes, the title “alludes to Virginia’s one-way, no-turning-back passage through the gates of the traditionally white-identified, college-educated, middle-class,” and it addresses the issue of maintaining “racial and cultural affiliation when one has gone through the ‘ivory gate’ and become culturally mixed.” In Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), the gate of ivory is that of false dreams. Later Verse Following the 1993 edition of her Selected Poems, which collected her first three books of poetry but did not include the poems from Grace Notes, Dove moved into drama with the verse play The Darker Face of the Earth (pb. 1994, pr. 1996), set on a plantation in antebellum South Carolina. Taking its origins from the Oedipus tragedy, the play in fourteen scenes concerns both incest and miscegenation, and it comes to its climax in a slave revolt, but the slaves’ cry of freedom at the end resonates with bitter irony. First aired at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland in the summer of 1996, the play was also staged in the fall of 1997 at The Kennedy Center. Therese Steffen connects Dove’s use of myth in the verse play with her next collection of poems, Mother Love (1995), which is composed largely of free-verse sonnets (more than forty in number, including the title poem, a double sonnet). In these poems, Dove revisits the myth of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades, providing a twopage introduction in which she comments on her use both of the sonnet form and of the ancient story. She declares the myth to refer to “a modern dilemma as well,” that point at which “a mother can no longer protect her child, when the daughter must go her own way into womanhood.” In “Persephone, Falling,” for example, the mother’s voice is offered parenthetically as she warns her daughter to go straight to school and not to speak to strangers, but when Persephone leans over to pull a narcissus, she has “strayed from the herd” and Hades (not named in the poem) springs from the earth “on his glittering terrible/ carriage” and claims “his due.” In the seven-poem sequence “Persephone in Hell,” which is not composed of sonnets, the first-person speaker appears as a naïve young woman in contemporary Paris “girded” with “youth and good tennis shoes” and speaking just “seven words of French.” In the remarkable six-sonnet sequence “The Bistro Styx,” Demeter meets with her daughter, her “blighted child,” who poses as a nude model for a painter of appalling canvases, faintly futuristic landscapes strewn with carwrecks and bodies being chewed by rabid cocker spaniels.

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As Pat Righelato has observed, Dove elsewhere has acknowledged her debt to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (1922) in producing her modern-day Persephone. In her next book, her sixth full-length collection of poems, Dove declared by her title, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), that she would be returning to the context of African American history and culture. The title applies to the ten-poem sequence with which the book ends, looking back to Rosa Parks’s historic refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. The book opens with a ten-poem narrative sequence entitled “Cameos,” which follows the lives of Lucille, pregnant among the plastic flamingos; her absent husband Joe, who “ain’t studying nobody;” and their son, from 1925 until about 1940. This sequence not only asserts Dove’s return to familiar turf but also introduces a new interest in form. This time, the poet is concerned with concrete verse, poems shaped in various patterns, like the diamond that ends “Graduation, Grammar School”: Joe sees his son flicker. Although the air is not a glass, watches as he puts his lips to the brim—then turns away, bored. He is not mine, this son who ripens, quiet poison on a shelf.

Although Dove does not indulge in such formal play elsewhere in this collection, she returns to it occasionally in American Smooth (2004). In the three central sections of On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Dove creates alternative personas or presents herself in the first person, as in “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967,” in which “I” appears as a fifteen-year-old girl (Dove’s age in 1967). The poem’s speaker indulges her voracious appetite for reading everything from “Gone with the Wind because/ it was big” to “haiku because they were small.” As various readers and critics have noted, however, Dove rarely stays at home in her poems. She can be reminiscent, historically grounded, and even domestic, but if one poem can feature an epigraph from civil rights protester Mary Louise Smith Ware—“I’m just a girl who people were mean to on a bus. . . . I could have been anybody.”—another, “The Venus of Willendorf,” incorporates Romanian poet Paul Celan: “Let your eye be a candle in a chamber,/ your gaze a knife;/ let me be blind enough/ to ignite it.” Of this witty poem, Therese Steffen writes, A beautiful black woman visits an archaic Venus in Austria and feels exposed to the white, predominantly male gaze. . . . A tension between dead white art and live black beauty permeates the poem, but in the end the mystery of art transcends the color and gender division.

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Typical of Dove’s constantly shifting presentation of place, the next poem in the book, “Incarnation in Phoenix,” concerns the birth of her daughter in Arizona. Dove describes her biracial, African American and Norwegian, nurse as “an African Valkyrie.” The nurse’s name, Raven, is perhaps a coincidental counterpoint to Dove’s name. The forty-four poems of American Smooth are divided into five sections, the first of which, “Fox Trot Fridays,” includes several poems dealing with ballroom dancing. Dancing may have performed a therapeutic role for Dove after a fire in 1998 destroyed her home in Charlottesville and many of her manuscripts. Dove provides her own definition of the type of dancing named in the title poem, a form “in which the partners are free to release each other from the closed embrace and dance without any physical contact, thus permitting improvisation and individual expression.” This definition might be said to apply almost as well to her craft of poetry. The collection’s second section, “Not Welcome Here,” comprises eight poems dealing with the experiences of African American soldiers during World War I. A nine-part sequence is offered as Corporal Orval E. Peyton’s diary of his crossing of the Atlantic with the Ninety-third Division. The four regiments of this segregated division were issued French uniforms (the shoulder patch features a blue French-style helmet on a black field) and attached to French divisions rather than fighting together as a unit. Twelve pattern poems designed to decorate the backs of marble chairs in the lobby of the Federal Court House in Sacramento, California, make up the volume’s third section. The remaining twenty-two poems are divided between two sections that are somewhat miscellaneous in nature. The first, “Blues in Half-Tones, ¾ Time,” contains poems such as “Bolero” and “Rhumba” that pertain to dancing, a scene from African American movie history in “Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove,” and two works that draw on ancient legend: “The Seven Veils of Salomé” is a five-poem sequence, while the single poem “From Your Valentine” deals with the martyrdom of Valentinus. The book concludes with the dozen poems of “Evening Primrose,” most of which are first-person lyrics, the title poem being perhaps as close to a “pure” lyric as one might encounter. Dove’s Positions and Poetics Dove has made herself available to interviewers, with the result that a number of her ideas about her own writing, about the craft of poetry, and about a variety of other concerns such as feminism, race, politics, and human values are available in published interviews. Thirteen such discussions have been collected in Earl G. Ingersoll’s Conversations with Rita Dove (2003). Both Steffen’s and Pereira’s critical books on Dove’s writing conclude with interviews. In her interview with Mohamed B. TalebKhyar in Callaloo (1991), Dove says that in her poems she tries very hard to create characters who are seen as individuals—not only as Blacks or as women, or whatever, but as a Black woman with her own particular problems, or one White bum struggling in a specific predicament.

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Dove considers herself to be a feminist but notes that “when I walk into my room to write, I don’t think of myself in political terms. I approach that piece of paper or the computer screen to search for . . . truth and beauty through language.” Perhaps this passage from her 1992 interview with Steven Ratiner will suffice as a response to the many who have asked Rita Dove about the importance of music to her poems: A poem convinces us not just through the words and the meaning of the words, but the sound of them in our mouths—the way our heart beat increases with the amount of breath it takes to say a sentence, whether a line of poetry may make us breathless at the end of it, or give us time for contemplation. It’s the way our entire body gets involved in the language being spoken.

Bibliography Dove, Rita. Conversations with Rita Dove. Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Collection of thirteen interviews with Dove that cover a broad range of issues in her personal and public lives, as well as the relationship between the two. _______. “An Interview with Rita Dove.” Interview by Helen Vendler. In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry L. Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Begins with biographical information, including information on Dove’s visit to Germany, and proceeds to a discussion of some particularly arresting images (the parrot in “Parsley,” the mandolin in Thomas and Beulah). Dove acknowledges the domesticity of her first volume of poetry, which she says was followed by a “counter impulse.” In her later poems, she notes, she is concerned with children and motherhood. McDowell, Robert. “The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove.” In Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, edited by James McCorkle. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Overview of Dove’s Yellow House on the Corner, Museum, and Thomas and Beulah. Regards Dove as a storyteller who “tells all sides of the story” from different perspectives. Stresses her use of myth, which she distorts and revises along gender lines, and her relating public and private events as in “Parsley.” Pereira, Malin. Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Chronological study of Dove’s entire output, including her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose. Argues that Dove was in danger of being defined narrowly by her racial identity early in her career but that she eventually transcended this narrow definition to become “cosmopolitan.” Rampersad, Arnold. “The Poems of Rita Dove.” Callaloo 9, no. 1 (1986): 52-60. Stresses Dove’s importance as an exemplar of African American poetic practice during what Rampersad sees as an otherwise stagnant decade for African American poetry. Righelato, Pat. Understanding Rita Dove. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Strives simultaneously to find the common links among all of Dove’s

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poetry and to recognize the distinctive nature of each individual collection. Rowell, Charles H., ed. Callaloo 14, no. 2 (Spring, 1991). Includes a special section on Dove, including a review of Grace Notes by Bonnie Costello, an essay by Ekaterini Georgoudaki, and an interview by Mohamed B. Taleb-Khyar. Shoptaw, John. “Segregated Lives: Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Argues that Thomas and Beulah resembles fiction more than it does “a poetic sequence.” Outlines the chronology of the poem, finding that the couple “rarely intersect” and remain separate. Focuses on the lasting impact of Lem’s death on Thomas and on the unfulfilled promises in Beulah’s life. Concludes with an analysis of the biblical and religious use of “Beulah.” Steffen, Therese. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Uses the notion of “crossing over” to study Dove’s ability to transgress a host of boundaries, including those governing race, gender, nation, culture, and genre. Vendler, Helen. “Rita Dove.” In The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Study of Dove and three other poets, comparing the “givens” over which they had no control (such as race, family, or upbringing) to the acts of will in which they engaged to refashion those givens into art. Thomas L. Erskine, updated by Ron McFarland

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THE POETRY OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR Author: Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) Type of work: Poetry First published: Oak and Ivy, 1893; Majors and Minors, 1895; Lyrics of Lowly Life, 1896; Lyrics of the Hearthside, 1899; Lyrics of Love and Laughter, 1903; Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 1905; The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1913 A Prolific Young Writer Although he lived a mere thirty-three years, Paul Laurence Dunbar published six volumes of poetry, four novels, and quite a few volumes of short stories. Altogether, he authored no fewer than twenty books. For all this prodigious productivity and in spite of his widespread reputation as the first African American to master the art of writing poetry, Dunbar, a lyricist of tremendous ability, has come down to modern readers primarily as a poet of “Negro” dialect. In the process, he also acquired the reputation of being a superb reader of his own poetry. As poet and reader, he was eagerly sought after, and whether it was in London, New York, Washington, the South, or his birthplace, Dayton, Ohio, his soft, musical voice induced his listeners to take note of his poetic abilities, his devotion to his art, and his determination to live as a professional artist. Encumbered by sorrow, ill-health, frequent financial difficulties, unfulfilled love, and an unhappy marriage, he persevered; with a heroic resilience, Dunbar composed throughout his entire life, each composition showing promise of greater literary achievement than the one before. Even in the midst of failing health and a crushed spirit, he could produce poetry full of love, laughter, and sunshine. From all accounts, his untiring devotion to his mother, and hers to him, must have gone a long way in maintaining this equanimity in the midst of trying times. Pigeonholed as a Dialect Poet Though more than two-thirds of Dunbar’s poems are written in Standard English, these are not the works that made him famous, nor are they the ones that have secured him a place in the history of American literature. The qualities that he displays in his standard poetry—such as the detailed attention to nature, the skillful manipulation of imagery, the masterful experimentation with rhyme and meter, and the controlled handling of serious philosophical themes—have traditionally been ignored in favor of the rhythmic, narrative, and pleasing delineation of black peasant life that characterizes much of his dialect poetry. Little did Dunbar know that when one of America’s most influential literary critics—William Dean Howells—favorably reviewed Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors, it not only would bring the poet instant fame but also would place severe limitations on him as an artist. Scarcely twenty years old, Dunbar had written Oak and Ivy in 1892 and followed this collection of poetry with another in 1895, Majors and Minors.

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Being very poor, he found himself reduced to selling copies of these collections himself; the favorable review of these volumes by Howells in Harper’s Weekly was more than welcome news to Dunbar at the time. Howells not only arranged for the publication of Lyrics of Lowly Life in 1896 but also wrote an introduction to the volume, describing Dunbar as “the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature.” Howells proceeded to characterize him as “the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically.” Though Howells admitted that some of Dunbar’s poetry in literary English was quite good, he was emphasizing that these were not “distinctively his contribution to the body of American poetry.” For him, that distinction belonged to the dialect pieces, in which he saw the poet presenting black life with a humor and sympathy as had never been done before. While Dunbar must have initially felt honored by Howells’s promises, he soon came to regard them as a mixed blessing. One year later, Dunbar wrote a friend with the complaint that “Mr. Howells has done me irrevocable harm in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse.” This dictum made it difficult for the young poet from Ohio to be accepted as a serious artist. After Lyrics of Lowly Life, Dunbar published his Lyrics of the Hearthside in 1899, followed by Lyrics of Love and Laughter in 1903 and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow in 1905, thus clearly demonstrating a preference for the lyrical mode. The volume of Dunbar’s literary output during these years suggests a frantic race with time, since the poet knew as early as 1899 that he was suffering from an incurable illness, to which he finally succumbed in 1906. Seven years after his death, all of his poems were assembled in one volume, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar provides the key to evaluating his work in “The Poet”: He sang of life, serenely sweet, With, now and then, a deeper note. From some high peak, nigh yet remote, He voiced the world’s absorbing beat. He sang of love when earth was young, And Love, itself, was in his lays. But ah, the world, it turned to praise A jingle in a broken tongue.

With more than two-thirds of Dunbar’s poetry focused on “life, serenely sweet,” the public saw fit to praise his “jingle in a broken tongue.” Therein lay the basis for Dunbar’s discontent. (Mis)Representing African American Experience As soon as one approaches the dialect poetry, one understands why the white literary public at the time praised his poetry, why he himself rejected the dialect poems,

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and why subsequently many critics, particularly black ones, would be harsh in their judgment of Dunbar. As “jingles,” they are not on the level of serious poems, jingles being no more than short, catchy songs. Moreover, to characterize their language as that of a “broken tongue” is to diminish the very medium of those poems. An examination of the content and language of the dialect poems substantiates Dunbar’s assertion to some degree. Generally speaking, Dunbar’s dialect poetry presents an idealized, and therefore unrealistic, picture of black peasant life in the South. This life is characterized by a plenitude of good living. There is an abundance of food of all descriptions, as in “The Party”: Well, we eat and drunk ouah po’tion, ’twell dah wasn’t nothin lef, An’ we felt jes’ like new sausage, we was mos’ nigh stuffed to def!

The people are always ready to “Feed you tell you hear the buttons/ Crackin’ on yore Sunday vest” (“After a Visit”). There is always something to eat, even if it is merely a hot “co’n pone” (“When de Co’n Pone’s Hot”). Here no one goes hungry. In fact, Dunbar’s characters often seem to be celebrating a holiday, as in “Chrismus Is A-Comin’,” “Dey’ll be lots o’ chicken/ Plenty tukky, too.” Constant merrymaking seems to be the order of the day. There is frequent dancing, sometimes “all night th’oo,” and youngsters are always “A-singin’ o’ the ol’ tunes/ In the ol’-fashioned way”; there is always someone to play the “real ol’-fashioned banjo” (“A Banjo Song”) or the fiddle, and there are those who are at all times ready “to give dheir feet a fling” as they dance “Jigs, cotillions, reels an’ break-downs, cordrills an’ a waltz er two” (“The Party”). There is a good time to be had by one and all. It stands to reason that if dancing and singing and, in general, merrymaking are associated with the slave plantation, then the old slaves would be distressed over the abolition of slavery. There are fond memories of “de happy days gone by,” for the slave sees in the deserted plantation “All dat loved me an’ dat I loved in de pas’” (“The Deserted Plantation”). So tied to his slave past is the slave that he decides to “stay an’ watch de deah ole place an’ tend it” until death. The slaves’ gratitude to their master reaches beyond the grave to heaven, where they hope to continue serving their old master; faced with the prospect of being released from slavery, men and women begin crying and are ready to “tell Mistah Lincum fu’ to tek his freedom back” (“Chrismus on the Plantation”). When the black peasants in Dunbar’s idyllic world are not having a joyous time, singing and dancing, they are hunting “fu’ coon an’ fu’ ’possum” (“Hunting Song”), fishing without a care in the world (“Fishing”), or courting (“A Spring Wooing,” “The Old Front Gate”). There is very little notion of the turbulence taking place in black people’s life at the time. Living and writing in a period when black people were in-

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creasingly being disenfranchised, when the country was rapidly being segregated, when the lynching of a black man was fast becoming the pastime of white hate groups, and when terror was being generally directed at the black community, this son of ex-slaves chose to ignore the essential factors that helped to shape the lives of the very people his dialect poetry purported to reflect. Hints at the Reality Underneath There are times, however, when Dunbar suggests in his dialect poetry that all is not quite well. From time to time, there is a muted sense of protest. The maid in “When Dey ’Listed Colored Soldiers” is proud that her man has gone to fight for his freedom on the side of the North, but this sentiment is undercut by the fact that she can be equally touched by the death of her two “mastahs . . . in gray suits.” There is also a distinct sense of freedom permeating “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” but the seriousness of the poem is undermined by the humor that crops up from time to time. In the very last paragraph of “A Banjo Song,” there is a hint that all is not right. The music of the banjo is important because it is “de greates’ joy an’ solace/ Dat a weary slave kin know!” and because it is one of the few pleasures “O’ dis life.” When the slave finally begins to think of “de days w’en slavery helt me/ In my mis’ry—ha’d an’ fas’,” and acknowledges the cruelty of slavery, he is very quick to forget “de whuppins” and the terror of the “block an’ lash” (“The Old Cabin”). These sentiments of the slave on the plantation may be accounted for or explained away in the poem “We Wear the Mask.” It is significant that the “mask” not only “grins,” but it “lies” as well. This mask hides “tears and sighs,” “torn and bleeding hearts,” and even “tortured souls.” All this is achieved while “We smile” and while “We sing.” Among Dunbar’s dialect poems, there is only one that comes close to questioning the plantation stereotype, to challenging the necessity to “wear the mask.” In “Philosophy,” the poet announces: But you don’t ketch folks a-grinnin’ wid a misery in de back; An’ you don’t fin’ dem a-smilin’ w’en dey’s hongry ez kin be.

The poet does seem somewhat appalled at the idea of having to “grin/ W’en we knows dat in ouah innards we is p’intly mad ez sin.” This is not a very strong protest, however, nor is it sustained in any way; it certainly is not sufficient to erase or invalidate the prevailing posture of the rest of his dialect poems. It is not only the distorted picture of life and the philosophy of the dialect poems that have irritated many critics; the language of the poems has been a sore point as well. It is by no means an accurate representation of folk speech. It is rather a highly conventionalized literary speech that seeks to achieve its objective by means of exaggeration and deliberate truncation of Standard English. Dunbar himself refers to it merely as a “broken tongue,” suggesting that it does not have the integrity of a sepa-

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rate language and that it is not worthy of being considered valid. The white literary public at the time, however, viewed it as a failed attempt to speak “proper” English on the part of the black folk. For all of the objection that one may have to Dunbar’s dialect poetry, one must still acknowledge and admire the strong rhythmic and narrative qualities of the dialect poems. Poems like “Dat Ol’ Mare o’ Mine,” “The Old Front Gate,” and “Lullaby” charm with their tale and music. Moreover, Dunbar humanizes his characters and makes them likable to some degree. This in itself is an achievement of considerable importance, even if Dunbar himself may not have thought so. Not attaching much significance to his dialect poetry, the poet seems to have reserved for his poetry in Standard English his most serious themes. These are the poems in which his philosophy of life is most consistently articulated. In these poems, he exhibits the true breadth of his interest as a man and a poet; in them, he is able to demonstrate his mastery of conventional literary forms. In fact, these poems suggest an attitude of mind that is not only different from but also contradictory to that which emerges in his dialect poetry. Work in Standard English Dunbar’s poetry in Standard English reveals a Romantic in the vein of John Keats, who, like Dunbar, died an early death. His “Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes” is worthy of the best in the tradition. In the tradition of the Romantic poet, Dunbar has an affinity to and a fascination for nature. He loves to “walk with nature heart by heart” (“In Summer Time”) and wishes “Dame Nature were [his] mate” (“Nutting Song”). The poet responds to nature in its myriad manifestations. Nature in its wild, luxuriant state provides the atmosphere for the subjective experience of Dunbar. As such, every season of the year, every segment of the day, every flower and bird known to the poet, every natural phenomenon meets with extensive treatment. His commitment to nature is summed up in the skillfully wrought poem “Nature and Art,” in which he pronounces the marriage between the two: “And at the morrow’s dawning they were wed.” Dunbar also uses his standard poetry to articulate philosophical positions, most noteworthy of which are his deliberations on life itself. For the poet, life is a constant struggle, for his “days are never days of ease.” Life is sad and “cheerless,” since “Life’s music beats for me/ A melancholy strain” (“Worn Out”). Elsewhere, life is an “arduous” journey beset by “cruel thorns,” “detaining hands,” and “frowning skies” (“By Rugged Ways”); at its worst, it becomes a prison for the poet—a prison in which he feels trapped much as the “caged bird” who beats his wing on cruel bars in the poem “Sympathy.” Still, life is more than mere pain. In one of his more famous and popular poems, “Life,” the poet speaks of life in all of its essential contradictions. It is: A minute to smile and an hour to weep in, A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, And never a laugh but the moans come double.

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Believing that each thing is an interpenetration of opposites, so that if life grants “the smile to warm” it must also grant “the tears to refresh,” the poet consoles himself with the thought that “joy seems sweeter when cares come after,/ And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter.” Those who from reading his dialect poetry are quick to assert that Dunbar is “brainwashed” and has no sense of racial consciousness would do well to pay close attention to some of his standard poems. Poems such as “Frederick Douglass,” “Ode to Ethiopia,” “The Colored Soldiers,” “Black Samson of Brandywine,” “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” “Robert Gould Shaw,” and “We Wear the Mask” project one who is not only conscious but also committed. Occasionally, he can even produce a militant tone, as when he condemns “grim Oppression” in “Frederick Douglass” and insists in “The Colored Soldiers” that “the Blacks enjoy their freedom” because they won it dearly. He is not unmindful of the damaging effects of racism on African Americans. In an act of total identification, the pain of the lynched victim becomes his own pain, and the “curse of a guiltless man” against the oak tree on which he has been lynched becomes the poet’s curse as well in “The Haunted Oak.” Such attitudes signal a clear departure from the world that Dunbar presents in his dialect poetry. His standard poetry is also reserved for his comments on the critical issue of his concept of his art and his feelings about his career as a poet, the joy that his art brings him and the simultaneous feelings of bitter disappointment over the fact that his dialect poetry has been praised and preferred while his standard poetry has been overlooked and disregarded. He is terribly bothered by people’s expectations of him as a poet. In “Misapprehension,” he speaks of having written a very serious and emotionally charged poem; one who claimed to have loved it, “read and considered it,” and said: “Ay, brother,—’t is well writ,/ But where’s the joke?” It is obvious that this person has come to expect and prefer the qualities of the dialect poetry. Haunted by these expectations, and considering himself a failure for not having achieved fame for his standard poetry, Dunbar despairs in the end and writes what seems to be his own obituary. Affirming that he has not properly used “the gift of song” that “God in His great compassion” gave him, the poet is convinced that the “Master in infinite mercy” now rewards him with death (“Compensation”). The critic need not accept this self-assessment. In fact, Dunbar himself would be forced to reassess his self-evaluation were he alive today, for his reputation now stands more on his poetry written in Standard English than on his “jingle in a broken tongue.” One need only read Dunbar’s more serious poetry to agree with him that “I sing my song, and all is well.” Bibliography Baker, Houston A., Jr. “Paul Laurence Dunbar, an Evaluation.” In Singers of Daybreak. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Examines the tremendous sociohistorical and psychological odds against which the poet had to struggle. Notes the literary framework with which Dunbar had been burdened and within which he had to write. Applauds the limited success the poet achieved in his

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“skillful blending of southern folk regionalism with a conscious literary tradition.” Brawley, Benjamin. Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936. A biography and a critical analysis. Highlights some of Dunbar’s earliest works in tracing his pursuit of his aspiration and the development of his career. Deplores the “slavish” adherence by some critics to Howell’s review of Dunbar’s poetry. Ends with an impressive bibliography of Dunbar’s works, both primary and secondary. Brown, Sterling. “Dunbar and Traditional Dialect” and “Dunbar and the Romantic Tradition.” In Negro Poetry and Drama and the Negro in American Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Gives Dunbar credit for humanizing, to some degree, black folk life; notes with regret, however, the many omissions in his portrayal of that life. Observes that Dunbar reserved most of his serious issues for his poetry in Standard English, but that these are largely imitative. Cunningham, Virginia. Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Song. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947. Literary biography based on scrapbooks and on documents written by and to Dunbar and his mother. Contains valuable explanations of and background to many of the poet’s works. Gayle, Addison G. Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Argues that Dunbar was forced to sell his soul in order to survive in a country that constantly deemed him unworthy. Makes the point that Dunbar knew that very little of what he wrote in dialect was true. Hudson, Gossie Harold. A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1999. Reconsideration of Dunbar’s life and work from the point of view of the dawn of the twenty-first century. Ramey, Lauri. Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Study of the formative role played by songs and lyrics of American slaves in the genesis and evolution of African American poetry. Helpful for understanding the importance of Dunbar’s dialect verse. Revell, Peter. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Analyzes Dunbar’s work, paying special attention to his treatment of themes from African American life and history. Contains a biographical summary along with an analysis of the problems faced by black writers at the time. Examines the poetry in literary English and that in dialect separately. Roosevelt J. Williams

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THE POETRY OF MARI EVANS Author: Mari Evans (1923) Type of work: Poetry First published: Where Is All the Music?, 1968; I Am a Black Woman, 1970; Nightstar, 1973-1978, 1981; A Dark and Splendid Mass, 1992 Writing as a Woman of Color Mari Evans’s work in the last decade of the twentieth century remains as original and striking as it did when she published her first poetry in the initial stages of the emerging social revolution in black consciousness in the mid-1960’s. The title of her second collection, I Am a Black Woman, became a signature statement for a generation of African American women, proclaiming in unapologetic, forceful terms the fundamental facts of existence for a hitherto nearly invisible, effectively silenced people. Her poetry, like that of Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Carolyn Rogers, was a profound demonstration of the aptness of Robert Frost’s claim that poetry should be “common to experience but uncommon to expression”; the work of Evans and others provided, for the first time in American literary history, the vernacular language, particular rhythms, and psychological perspective of African American women in published form. In addition, she shared the political awareness of such poets as Amiri Baraka (then writing as LeRoi Jones) and Haki R. Madhubuti (then writing as Don L. Lee), who insisted on the obligation of the poet to speak as the forceful voice of a suppressed segment of the population that had been victimized—or terrorized—by racist society. While poetry has always existed in an oral form in the African American community, very few black men, and even fewer black women, were able to break into print during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the critic Barbara Christian has pointed out, the “rich, oral tradition” of African American culture ran “counter to the accepted norms of European poetry,” so that the highly gifted Phillis Wheatley, for example, fashioned herself into a convincing replica of an eighteenth century English poet in her published work. Moreover, anthologies of black poetry present little work by women of measurable poetic accomplishment before Margaret Walker (born in 1915) and Gwendolyn Brooks (born in 1917). The implication of this apparent dearth of preservable poetry was that poets such as Wheatley seemed like unusual exceptions rather than the voices of a neglected mass; when Evans, among others, found the means to get her work into print, its first appearance had the exhilarating effect of opening a huge field, introducing a voice largely unfamiliar to most readers or listeners. Writing as a Craftswoman The pioneering aspects of Evans’s work are undeniably significant, but they may have tended to obscure other elements that are equally important in terms of her

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achievements and that are an integral aspect of her continuing poetic interest. Like Brooks, Evans has worked from a thorough familiarity with the traditions of English poetry and with the dedication to craft that is the mark of the serious artist. As she mentions in the essay “My Father’s Passage,” she learned from Langston Hughes the necessity for a commitment to writing as a way of living, and this led her to a definition of writing as craft, “a rigorous, demanding occupation, to be treated as such.” She worked as an assistant editor at a chain-manufacturing plant, the “first Black employee to work anywhere in the company other than the foundry or delivery,” and for three years apprenticed, in a sense, with a skilled professional writer whose demands for revision were not initially welcomed but who gave her the basis for her command of style and form. At the same time, the openly racist arrangements of the company led her toward the position taken by many other members of her generation who saw themselves as the vanguard of the Black Arts movement. Consequently, Evans has combined her mastery of traditional English with a sensitivity to the particulars of what Madhubuti has called a “blackening” of the language, insisting on an awareness of how writers working within the African American tradition have used language devices in unconventional fashion. This widening was a part of a post-World War II embrace of the concept of the poet who could incorporate into poetry the language of citizens without literary training, as Walt Whitman proposed to do, and who could use the “healthy speech” (as Henry David Thoreau defined poetry) of people with no conscious literary ambition in a poetic form. Evans shared with poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Robert Creeley the feeling that a poem was not meant to be a rigid container for one’s ideas or emotions but rather a supple, flexible construct that developed in accordance with the demands of the subject and mood. Her first published poems appeared in periodicals such as Negro Digest and in the landmark collection Black Voices (1968), edited by Abraham Chapman; some of these were gathered into Evans’s initial volume, Where Is All the Music? Among these early poems, the often-anthologized “Black Jam for Dr. Negro” expresses the same attitude of disgust or contempt as Baraka’s “Black Bourgeoisie” and Madhubuti’s “But He Was Cool or: he even stopped for green lights,” which are extremely critical of the accommodationist stance taken by some African Americans who “accepted” white ideas of beauty and behavior. Evans uses the robust vernacular of the plain speech she heard around her to resist the bogus manners of the officially credentialed “Dr. Negro”: “my ancient/ eyes/ see your thang/ baby/ an it aint/ sh*t” she asserts, enraged that someone has decided to “cut my afro turn/ my collar/ down” and commit other acts of cultural suppression. Evans’s first collection is more the product of an artist in a stage of development than of one who is fully prepared to set out the dimensions of a vision. In 1970, six years after her first poems were published in journals, Evans collected some of her earlier work in I Am a Black Woman. The volume moved beyond expressions of resistance to a directly political, defiantly feminist, conspicuously blackened poetics that conveyed the mood, contributed to the tone, and cast the die for a mode of discourse that has come to seem the dominant female poetic voice of its time. Her title is both

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an echo of and a contemporary response to Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a woman?” demand that her gender be recognized. More than a century later, Evans has removed the interrogative doubt to proclaim her race and gender with pride, reiterating her identity by placing the poem at the beginning of the collection and then repeating the last part at the book’s close. Developing an Assured Voice The feeling of assurance, the emphasis on the “I” observer as a seer, and the willingness to exhibit and share strength are characteristic of Evans’s subsequent poetry. To combat the enforced impression that there is something inferior about being black and a woman, Evans creates an initial image of a soulful beauty enduring through centuries of tribulation, “the music of my song/ some sweet arpeggio of tears/ is written in a minor key.” This introduction leads to a compressed historical survey, moving from the agony of the middle passage (“I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea”), through the pain of slavery (“I lost Nat’s swinging body in a rain of tears”), when rebellion usually ended in death, to the sacrifice of African American soldiers at Anzio, Da Nang, and Pork Chop Hill in wars fought for a democratic ideal unavailable to African Americans. Bringing the poem to the present, Evans shifts from mourning fallen warriors to active involvement in political action (“Now my nostrils know the gas”). In a second section, she acknowledges the protean, mythic quality she embodies and connects her existence to the cosmos, claiming an eternal, life-affirming essence previously denied: I am a black woman tall as cypress strong beyond all definition still defying place and time and circumstance assailed impervious indestructible

In a summary statement of unquenchable optimism, speaking like a prophet in a voice that encompasses historical epochs, she counsels, “Look/ on me and be/ renewed.” The strength of Evans’s voice in this poem is built on a historical foundation of silent yearning. The unspoken heritage of black experience is expressed in language that is both contemporary and biblical. Because of its assurance, there is no dramatic sense of a poet progressively gaining control of means and material; instead, from the start the work gives the impression of a mature style that gradually ripens and becomes somewhat more reflective. Although she declares that “a black woman” is “be-

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yond all definition,” the unspoken assumption of the poems that follow is that Evans will be able to offer some sense of how she has been formed, of what matters to her, and of how she lives. The example of her spiritual mentor Langston Hughes, who “sang the shimmering depths of Blkactions,” gives her a strategy that depends on the conviction that the richness of the culture she expresses can be captured and conveyed in poetry and the belief that this poetry is a vital contribution to “an evolving Family/ Nation.” The subjects that engaged Evans in her first book remain the ones that continue to interest her, as well as to extend—in her responses—the “definition” of black womanhood. Their treatment across her three major collections is a more effective method of considering her work than a division within each volume. A crucial component of the cultural vitality she considers and celebrates is the figure of the hero, sometimes seen in the form of a legendary giant such as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr., but also regarded for the potentially heroic act of an unknown citizen or even a social renegade. The poem that honors Malcolm X, “El Hajj Malik Shabazz,” is a tribute to the continuing impact of the man, written in dense, charged language that projects a troubling, inspiring presence (“ . . . and we/ inbreathed him and he became a part of me/ and you/ carry him in you/ and he is restless and demands/ Demands an action”). The poetic reflection on King never mentions his name but uses the reaction of the American media (“a million hard white eyes/ swung impiously heavenward”) to indict a social policy that has been responsible for “quiet” assassinations that “occupy the heart/ four hundred/ years.” The unnamed, indefatigable old people in “The Elders” are a symbol of black endurance, “bony symbols of indomitable will” who “survived cotton and cane/ branding iron and bull whip” and continue on into the turmoil of the present smiling “through smoking Watts.” In an appropriate use of a vernacular that conveys the immediacy and enthusiasm of a living language, Evans says “they be our national treasure.” The activist Hoyt Fuller is remembered in a personal eulogy, “Brother, Comrade, Confidant.” Horn player Lee Morgan and other great jazz musicians and artists who kept the soul and spirit of African American life vibrant in their art are presented in poetry that attempts to use the rhythmic structures of jazz to capture the moods of the music in verbal arrangements. Evans’s recognition of the central place of music in African American life is also evident in her use of the blues tradition to show how a folk-centered form of expression can be updated to carry a contemporary feminist philosophy (as in “Liberation Blues”). She also demonstrates how the blues form has survived because its archetypal complaint about careless love (“Blues in B=”) still applies. The blues’ ability to carry a message of pain and remorse (“Cellblock Blues”) in an almost prearticulate language (“Doin black/ time by the hour/ don eeeven be about no days”) appeals to an instinctive feeling for almost metaverbal communication. Similarly, the cumulative power of the biblical cadences of the sermon of exhortation are used in musically inclined, stirring poems delivered as if from a pulpit or a platform to an audience hungry for affirmation and direction. “If we would rise/ O brethren/ first/ we stand/ At one with time,” she says in “The Time Is Now.” “Touch Your Finger to the Wind,” her address to her “Kinsmen,” challenges them to “peel the opaque from your eyes/

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denounce the scented blossoms what/ bouquet more delicate and deadly/ Ours to be plucked and savored, what/ delusive dreams”; here, Evans uses vivid, flamboyant language to redirect sensual passion toward productive social activity. The need to identify heroic figures, to invoke the force of the black arts, and to deliver sermons of hope stems from the necessity to preserve African American traditions in the face of racist pressures that are designed to degrade or dissolve those traditions. The social situation in which this has been happening for four centuries has moved Evans to comment that “I think of myself as a political writer”; while this is not the dominant thrust of her work, poems such as “Vive Noir!,” with emphatic assertions such as “i’m/ gonna spread out/ over America/ intrude/ my proud blackness/ all/ over the place” have left the impression, especially in earlier critical commentary, that she is basically a political poet. Actually, her more specifically political poems are versions of social commentary in which the political content is implied more than instructed, as in “The Friday Ladies of the Pay Envelope,” which describes prostitutes “in the broken doorways” accepting payment with “their drydamp/ limpworn hands.” “When in Rome” is written from the point of view of a rich woman’s servant who is the dubious recipient of largesse. Even the most overtly political poems, including “Alabama Landscape” and “The Great Civil Rights Law (a.d. 1964),” are cast in the form of historic recollection so that the lessons of history grow from the angle of vision and the context. Like Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez, who have also written some powerful, angry, even violent political poems, Evans has a lyric ability that she has employed throughout her poetry. There are many examples of what can be called love poetry, including the poignant, plaintive “I Have Not Ceased to Love You,” which has a lyrical conclusion: I have not ceased to love you Nor have I ceased to care

This is quite a linguistic distance from “III Entitlement,” which begins “them muthuhfuhyuhs think they baddd”; the contrast serves to suggest the limits of any attempt to categorize so accomplished a poet. All the poetry Mari Evans has written since her work began to appear in journals in the early 1960’s has been a continuation of the poetic persona who introduced herself by saying, “I am a black woman,” the singular expression of a strong, confident, evolving artist, teacher, and political activist. A poet working in the oral African American tradition, an honors graduate of Howard University, a professional writer with a command of her craft that is evident in the range of her subjects and her language, Evans has joined and directed a cultural legacy that is enriched by her participation.

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Bibliography Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985. Offers a context for understanding Evans’s writing. Particularly helpful is the chapter entitled “Afro-American Women Poets: A Historical Introduction.” Cook, Mercer, and Stephen E. Henderson. The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. An examination of the mood of the 1960’s, when a great deal of poetry designed as political protest was written. Evans is covered briefly but as a significant figure. Evans, Mari. Clarity as Concept—A Poet’s Perspective: A Collection of Essays. Chicago: Third World Press, 2006. Important collection of Evans’s nonfiction writing; provides insights into the poet’s aesthetics, as well as her thoughts on a variety of subjects both public and private. _______, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Includes Evans’s important essay “My Father’s Passage,” in which she describes her philosophy of composition. Contains considerable additional information about Evans and two critical essays on her poetry. Keys, Romey T. Foreword to Nightstar, by Mari Evans. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1981. A brief but incisive introduction to the second major volume of Evans’s poetry. Melhem, D. H. Heroism in the New Black Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Refers to and discusses Evans’s work in the course of interviews with Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. An overview that does not go much below the surface but that provides a historical perspective from a transatlantic point of view. Evans is mentioned only in passing. Leon Lewis

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THE POETRY OF NIKKI GIOVANNI Author: Nikki Giovanni (Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, 1943) Type of work: Poetry First published: Black Feeling, Black Talk, 1968; Black Judgement, 1968; Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement, 1970; Re: Creation, 1970; Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis, 1970; Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children, 1971; My House, 1972; Ego-Tripping, and Other Poems for Young People, 1973; The Women and the Men, 1975; Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, 1978; Vacation Time: Poems for Children, 1980; Those Who Ride the Night Winds, 1983; The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, 1996; Love Poems, 1997; Blues: For All the Changes, 1999; Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems, 2002; The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 1968-1998, 2003; Acolytes, 2007 Early Work Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee, Nikki Giovanni grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. At the age of sixteen, she entered Fisk University; she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in history in 1967. Her political involvement at the university in the early 1960’s, combined with her increasing interest in writing, led to her obtaining a Ford Foundation grant in 1967 that aided her in the publication of her first book of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968). Publication of Black Judgement followed in the same year. The unifying themes of the work are the black struggle and the role she sees for herself as both a participant in and a witness to the historic events of the Civil Rights movement. Giving a glimpse into the childhood of the poet is the poem “Nikki-Rosa,” which highlights a happy childhood: “everybody is together and you/ and your sister have happy birthdays and very good/ Christmases.” In addition to writing about her sister, Gary, in many of her works, Giovanni describes her close relationship with her mother, Yolande; her father, Gus; and her maternal grandparents, John and Louvenia Brown. Later, with the birth of her son Tommy in 1969, Giovanni began writing collections of children’s poetry, including Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children (1971), Ego-Tripping, and Other Poems for Young People (1973), and Vacation Time: Poems for Children (1980). She sought to transmit her values of black aestheticism to children through her poetry, as in the following: i wish i were a shadow oh wow! when they put the light on me i’d grow longer and taller and BLACKER

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Inner and Outer Selves The social and political changes that Giovanni has witnessed have affected the tone of her works. Chronicling the changes are her autobiography, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet (1971), and her collection of essays Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles (1988). Pulling the tenets of her life together, Giovanni faces, as do her readers, contradictions in her poetry. Many of these seeming contradictions are the result of the changes that have taken place in what she calls the “rooms outside” (society) and the “rooms inside” (the individual)—major themes in her poetry. In an interview with Claudia Tate, the poet addresses these contradictions: If I never contradict myself then I’m either not thinking or I’m conciliating positions and, therefore, not growing. There has to be a contradiction. There would be no point to having me go three-fourths of the way around the world if I couldn’t create an inconsistency, if I hadn’t learned anything. If I ever get to the moon, it would be absolutely pointless to have gone to the moon and come back with the same position.

Beginning with My House (1972), Giovanni attempts to put the truth into perspective for herself and many other black women, identifying the “inner self ” and the “outer self.” These personas are, in part, the result of the tumultuous 1960’s; the poet must reconcile her role in speaking for the many and her responsibility to verbalize her own unique, individual experiences. Introduced as the “Princess of Black Poetry” in the volume’s foreword by Ida Lewis, a close friend, Giovanni describes in My House the drama that is taking place in her mind. Divided into two sections, “The Rooms Inside” and “The Rooms Outside,” the collection mirrors the conflict between the individual’s desire to assert herself in her uniqueness and the altruistic desire to help others. For example, in the poem “The Only Song I’m Singing,” from “The Rooms Inside,” she focuses on this conflict: “in fact the truth is true/ the only song i’m singing now is my song/ of you.” The persona then asks: “baby please/ please somehow show me what i need/ to know so i can love you right/ now.” Inherent in the poem is its pleading tone, as the individual struggles to define herself in relationship to others. In the world outside, however, “Nothing Makes Sense,” as Giovanni notes in the title of a poem in “The Rooms Outside.” An image of destruction amplifies the conflict: “the blinding light . . . quickly swept up to my house melting my flesh.” Therefore, the theme of self-sacrifice is in direct conflict with the theme of self-actualization. Moreover, the house of the book’s title becomes a symbol for Giovanni’s art; the house is a place both to create in and to retreat into domesticity. In “My House,” the concluding poem, she states: i’m saying it’s my house and i’ll make fudge and call it love and touch my lips

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to the chocolate warmth and smile at old men and call it revolution. . . .

In an interview, Giovanni has stated that “literature is only as useful as it reflects reality.” Therefore, the African American woman of the early 1970’s is portrayed as trying to put her house in order to keep outside atrocities from tearing down her house (“in a day where the c.i.a. could hire Black hands to pull/ the trigger on malcolm”). That house is built on both the reality of “baby/ clothes to be washed . . . loneliness to be borne” and dreams of revolution, which is “screeeeeeeeeeeching to a halt.” As the model for this both personal and public struggle, Giovanni uses her strength through language to describe “that a change had come.” A Quiet Revolution In The Women and the Men (1975), the theme of revolution is redefined to mean “that if i dreamed/ natural dreams of being a natural/ woman doing what a woman/ does when she’s natural/ i would have a revolution.” Soul singer Aretha Franklin is the subject of “Poem for Aretha,” in which the poet examines the need to deal with Franklin as “a mother with four children,” not as a talented singer to use and to exploit, “to relive billie holiday’s life.” The emerging natural woman, who derives pleasure from her children and her man, whom she seems unable to hold on to, also sits by the typewriter, but instead of writing, questions its value: “and i think/ not of someone/ cause there isn’t anyone/ to think/ about and i wonder/ is it worth it.” In the poetry included in the collection’s second section, “The Men,” the poems wrap around the theme of love—a satisfying, rich love: “i’m gonna grab your love/ and you’ll be satisfied.” Ultimately, the natural woman finds satisfaction in her devotion to her man’s love, and Giovanni’s poetry is a reference for the black woman in which her role is described and reaffirmed: “the heat/ you left with me/ last night/ still smolders.” She adds, “i am a leaf/ falling from your tree/ upon which i was/ impaled.” Although the love is satisfying, it may also be destructive for the artist, the individual. Ironically, the third section of the collection, “And Some Places,” although not part of the main title of the book, is the section that unifies the private, personalized poetic journey with the more public, political one. For example, the poems “Africa,” “Night,” and “Poetry” provide a link between the two aspects of truth—the inner and outer self—for the African American poet, as exemplified in the following: [poetry] never says “love me” for poets are beyond love it never says “accept me” for poems seek not acceptance but controversy it only says “i am”. . . .

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The individualistic spirit of Giovanni’s voice reasserts itself in this concluding section, but it is much softer and less strident than in earlier works. In Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978), the poet’s tone is compromising; the spirit is dampened. She confronts the themes of loneliness and disillusionment. In her poem “The Rose Bush,” her sense of isolation is reflected: “Now I don’t fit beneath the rose bushes anymore.” The theme of homelessness permeates the poetry and dramatizes the poet’s conflict: She can no longer keep her private, inner world of art separate from the more public, outer world and its demands. In an attempt to define her position, she appears lost in thought on a rainy day. The theme is introspection—not retreat, but the reexamination of one’s goals defines the collection. Giovanni’s Evolving Rhythms and Style In general, Giovanni’s poetry is rhythmic and replete with arbitrary yet universal imagery. In her earlier works, however, a simple, repetitive rhythm is striking and resonant, as in the poem “The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” in which she asks “Nigger/ Can you kill” over and over again. The harmonious blending of the lines stands in stark contrast to the tone of rage. The poet uses this unique combination to emphasize the harshness of the theme. In addition, she frequently uses alliteration, as in “Poem (No name No. 2)”: “Bitter Black Get/ Blacker Get Bitter/ Get Black Bitterness/ NOW.” Giovanni’s poetry in later volumes focuses on the use of more personal imagery associated with family, domesticity, and everyday life. Although the poems are rhythmic, they rely more on descriptions that create common, natural visual images, as in the poem “The Butterfly,” which describes hands as “butterflies fluttering/ across the pleasure/ they give/ my body.” In “The December of My Springs,” the rhythmic pattern reinforces the universal theme of aging: “that pitter-patter rhythm of rain/ sliding on city streets is as satisfying/ to me as this quiet has become.” Ultimately, the past language she has used to describe black experience does not offer her the dimension she needs to formalize the poet she has become. Therefore, in a subsequent collection, Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983), the language and form are very different. In the preface to the 1983 collection, Giovanni asserts that “language has opened . . . becoming more accessible . . . more responsive . . . to what people really think.” The poetic style is nontraditional. The lines are fractured by ellipses, and the form resembles a prose passage rather than a stanza of poetry. In an attempt to reunite private and public self as one universal model for African American women, she has dismissed a poetic form that had placed too many restrictions on her as both a witness and participant in this transformation. In “I Am She,” domestic chores are sacrificed for a dream, for a creative journey. As a poet, Giovanni seems comfortable with her role, which sometimes can be lonely. The “ride” is worth the price: “When I write I want to write,” she explains, “to day trippers . . . urging them to turn/back . . . toward the darkness . . . to ride the night winds . . . to tomorrow.” Describing herself as charting the “night winds,” she imagines a journey that forces people “to look . . . a little . . . deeper.” The tone is encouraging, instructive, and hopeful.

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Those Who Ride the Night Winds not only marks a significant change in Giovanni’s poetic style but also provides the foundation for her collection of autobiographical essays and articles, Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles. The often humorous, cynical, yet challenging poet takes on lofty American institutions such as Miss America pageants, sports, and consumerism. In an essay that echoes the theme of My House, she describes the “house” as being in “serious disorder,” indicating that “we are still separate and unequal.” Unlike in the earlier collection, however, the point of view is one of a unified voice, as exemplified in the “we,” that can make a difference. The concluding essay reaffirms this unity and captures the universal theme for all, focusing on “home,” not “house,” focusing on similarities, not differences, between black people and white people. “Whether it was a European booking passage on a boat, a slave chained to a ship, a wagon covered with sailcloth, they all headed toward the unknown with all nonessentials stripped away.” She concludes that “we” are all pioneers, with “a deep desire to survive and an equally strong will to live.” The variety of Giovanni’s later output can be understood based on her output in a single year, 1996. Her 1996 publications range from The Genie in the Jar—whose children’s poems are derived from such diverse sources as nursery rhymes, jazz, and folk tales—to Love Poems, which runs the gamut from the erotic to the gently romantic, to The Sun Is So Quiet, in which Giovanni describes wonderful childhood moments. Published three years later, Blues: For All the Changes (1999) offers fifty-two new and extremely personal poems, including her tribute to African American baseball great Jackie Robinson, “Stealing Home,” and the passionate and defiant “Road Rage Blues.” The new century saw the emergence of Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems (2002), along with The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 19681998 (2003) and Acolytes (2007). Acolytes features eighty new poems that demonstrate Giovanni’s ability to retain her critical and poetic edge, as in her piece on civil rights icon Rosa Parks and the disappearance of civil rights worker Emmett Till. The collection is leavened, however, by intimate and personal memories of friends, family, and even favorite meals. A lung cancer survivor who stands up for smoker’s rights, Giovanni has taught poetry and literature at Virginia Tech since 1987 and earned the rank of University Distinguished Professor. She has worked on writing projects with groups beyond the campus, resulting in such books as Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler (1991), by residents of the Warm Hearth Village retirement center in Blacksburg, Virginia; Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance (1996), collecting poetry that illustrates the African American experience; and Paint Me Like I Am: Teen Poems from Writerscorps (2003), which brings together the diverse voices of city teens participating in writing programs. Giovanni achieved a measure of fame for her inspiring Virginia Tech convocation speech on April 17, 2007, which helped inspire and unite the campus in the wake of the previous day’s killings of thirty-two students and teachers by student-gunman Cho Seung-Hui. Giovanni had encountered him before, in 2005, when she had had

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him removed from one of her creative writing classes because of his disruptive influence. Her short speech was delivered in a kind of poetic cadence that brought a positive response from those who listened to it and read it, at a time when something positive was badly needed. It was transcribed verbatim by a number of different news outlets. Giovanni has survived inner and outer conflict and emerged with a strong, mature poetic voice. She is willing to ride the night winds to describe her unique yet universal experiences as an African American woman. Bibliography Fowler, Virginia C. Nikki Giovanni. New York: Twayne, 1992. A colleague of Giovanni’s at Virginia Tech, the author details the evolution of the poet, using her poetry to identify the influences of historical events, personal changes, and maturity on her work. Giovanni, Nikki. Conversations with Nikki Giovanni by Nikki Giovanni, edited by Virginia C. Fowler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Chronological compilation of interviews of Giovanni from various sources over more than two decades, providing insight into the writer’s views on feminism, politics, religion, literature, and many other areas. _______. Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Somewhat selfcentered collection of essays linked together by one common theme: the major influences on Giovanni’s life and work as she perceives them. Giovanni, Nikki, and Margaret Walker. A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Dynamic dialogue between two major African American women writers. Reveals an aggressive yet poised Giovanni, who describes her vision of black power. Lazenby, Roland, ed. April 16th: Virginia Tech Remembers. New York: Plume, 2007. Virginia Tech journalism students chronicle the shooting rampage in 2007 that left thirty-two people dead. Giovanni is cited as having brought the campus together in the wake of the tragedy with a speech she wrote and presented one day after it happened. Cynthia S. Becerra, updated by Paul Dellinger

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THE POETRY OF MICHAEL S. HARPER Author: Michael S. Harper (1938) Type of work: Poetry First published: Dear John, Dear Coltrane, 1970; History Is Your Own Heartbeat, 1971; Photographs, Negatives: History as Apple Tree, 1972; Song: I Want a Witness, 1972; Debridement, 1973; Nightmare Begins Responsibility, 1974; Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems, 1977; Rhode Island: Eight Poems, 1981; Healing Song for the Inner Ear, 1985; Songlines: Mosaics, 1991; Honorable Amendment, 1995; The Family Sequences, 1998; Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems, 2000; Selected Poems (edited by Ronald A. Sharp), 2002 Bearing Poetic Witness The poetry of Michael S. Harper bears eloquent witness to relationships between humans, humankind, and cosmology; speech and body; and past and present. It bears witness to the historical and personal suffering of people of African American heritage and to the suffering of all humanity. Harper offers healing songs rather than despair and celebrates family, friends, musicians, and heroes in his diverse poetry. He seeks unity rather than diversity, and his themes and interests are wide-ranging, from music, such as jazz and blues, to history, birth, death, and myth. Harper was born at his parents’ home in Brooklyn, New York, in 1938. His father, Walter Warren Harper, was a postal worker, and his mother, Katherine Johnson Harper, was a medical stenographer. The family’s large record collection first interested Michael in music, which he says has always been the primary influence on his poetry. He grew up to the sounds of Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, and Charlie Parker. When Harper was thirteen, the family moved, and Harper claims he would not have become a poet had he not moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles; his world was both collapsing and full of possibilities. Harper; his younger brother, Jonathan Paul; and his sister, Katherine Winifred, moved with their parents to West Los Angeles, where Harper enrolled at Susan Miller Dorsey High School. He was placed in the school’s industrial arts program rather than in an academic program until his father spoke to the school counselor about Michael’s academic ability. During high school, Harper’s poetic talents lay dormant, and he only occasionally scribbled out what he calls “doggerel” in the back of his English texts. He destroyed his early efforts and wrote prose and short drama until he was almost through college. After he graduated from high school in 1955, Harper attended Los Angeles State College from 1956 to 1961, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1961. Throughout his college years, he worked full-time as a postal worker, and he claims that that work experience was the real beginning of his life. He was surrounded by educated African Americans who could not find employment in the private sector, and he recalls that he learned a

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great deal from them. Their sharp wit presented a constant challenge to Harper; they would often stop and discourse on Anton Chekhov or Fyodor Dostoevski, and they told their own stories as well. It was here that Harper learned about narrative, about the silences inherent in speech, and how to pace a good story. He also learned about the country he lived in and about people. Harper faced the same racial roadblocks that held back his coworkers. While Harper was in a premedical course in college, his zoology professor advised him to give up medicine, saying that African Americans could not succeed in medical school. The experiences of racism and rejection that Harper encountered in his life and the lives of African American friends and acquaintances were influential in forming the vision of American society that appears in his poetry. During college, Harper was greatly influenced by his reading of John Keats’s letters and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and these works prepared him for the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he began working toward a master’s degree in creative writing in the winter of 1961; he earned the degree in 1963. Harper was also influenced by a course called “The Epic of Search,” in which the classics were presented as a historical view of the human quest for self-assertion. At Iowa, Harper began to appreciate his uniqueness—he was the only African American in the poetry and fiction classes there—but he also became aware of racial differences; the university maintained segregated living quarters, and this reinforced Harper’s view of society as fragmented. At Iowa, he began writing poetry seriously. Since his beginnings as a poet, Harper has become the poet laureate of Rhode Island (1988) and a full professor of English at Brown University (1974,) as well as a visiting professor at many universities, including Harvard and Yale. His honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1977; he has read at the Library of Congress and received both a National Institute of Arts and Letters Creative Writing Award and a Massachusetts Council Creative Writing Award. He was nominated for the National Book Award in 1971 and 1977 and was honored with the Black Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1972. He received an honorary doctorate degree in 1987 from Trinity College and in 1990 from Coe College. As a university educator, Harper is also known for his two comprehensive anthologies of African American poetry (co-edited with Anthony Walton): The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000), and Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (1994). These two volumes considered together constitute a major addition to the reconstruction of the African American literary canon from the 1700’s to the late twentieth century. Developing a Poetic Voice Harper’s poetic vision is mainly of the African American tradition; his vision is rendered in a magical language composed of the oral-musical traditions of jazz, the blues, and spirituals. He employs black literary motifs, black idioms, and black traditions within larger American landscapes, American institutions, and American lexicons. “Most of my ancestors were black; I’m one of their trustees; the context is

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America,” says Harper. The definition of the country is “up for grabs,” he has said. He feels that much of the country’s recorded resonance is mundane and should be heightened by rigor and rhetoric, by some sophisticated truth-telling. Harper agrees with Ralph Ellison’s statement that the African American is the most intimate part of American history, and he views black contributions to American culture as fundamental. Harper does not apologize for loving Keats and Robert Frost, however, because he locates himself in their terrain as swiftly as he does in his own family. Therefore, he claims, the way into the family archives of literature must be earned, and this is done by eloquence. Poetry for Michael Harper is not a career and not a choice. It is expiation and bondage. He thinks in sequences of poems with overlapping thematics, and he is intrigued with framing devices, such as those found in Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708; also known as The Thousand and One Nights). Harper considers himself a narrative poet who plays with syntax for musical overtones, and he hears everything he writes. His poetry is for the ear, he says, but not for a mechanical ear; it is elegant phrasing and perhaps unelegant associations, plus narrative drive, and he enjoys putting things together that do not belong together. Harper’s first book of poetry, Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970), is named for the inspiration that the musician John Coltrane provided to Harper throughout their friendship until Coltrane’s death in 1967. Harper refers to Coltrane as his Orpheus, his personal signature for competence, and Coltrane’s music has encouraged Harper’s belief in his own intuitive power. Thus, Harper named his book for the love he had for a man who never gave up the struggle and whose vision and inner strength encouraged others; the title represented a symbolic love that becomes universal in the poetry. The book pays tribute to many different musicians; the poem “Alone,” for example, is dedicated to Miles Davis. The poetry in this book is rhythmic rather than metric, and the poems are meant to be sung or read aloud. Harper mostly writes in free verse and uses rhythms to enhance his images as extended metaphors. Dear John, Dear Coltrane is a collection of seventy-two poems with the theme of redemption, and Harper symbolizes the often painful African American experience by portraying the blues musician, who is at his best when he is low and suffering. Harper’s poetry never despairs; like the blues, it encourages singing to alleviate pain and sorrow and proclaims the need for people to rise above personal and historical pain and suffering. The poems of Dear John, Dear Coltrane can be divided into three categories. The first includes poems about Harper’s personal relationships, including those with friends and musicians such as Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and James Brown. Harper connects personal experience, family experience, and the experience of African Americans to universal questions of self-assertion and transcendence, but this never leads to failure or despair. His poem “Reuben, Reuben,” for example, is about his own loss of a son; in the manner of blues musicians, Harper attempts to transcend his own suffering through creative response to the pain. The book’s second category is made up of geographical poems that evolved out of

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Harper’s travels to Mexico in the summer of 1967 and his search to find himself in relation to humankind’s history. To Harper, geography and seminal sites are most important. The third category is composed of historical or political poems that concern central incidents, such as Lewis and Clark’s expedition in “Clark’s Way West: Another Version.” “American History” uses the more modern incident of the deaths of four black girls in an explosion at an Alabama church as a reminder of “five hundred middle passage blacks.” History and Healing As Harper’s poetic career continued to develop, the implications of history gradually began to inform the major part of his subsequent volumes, including History Is Your Own Heartbeat (1971), Photographs, Negatives: History as Apple Tree (1972), Song: I Want a Witness (1972), Debridement (1973), and Nightmare Begins Responsibility (1974). In these collections, historical events such as the founding of Rhode Island by Roger Williams (“History as Apple Tree”), the abolitionist movement (“History as Cap’n Brown”), and the Vietnam War (the John Henry Louis poems in “Debridement”) are deeply invested with social as well as personal meaning, as Harper renders the politics of African American history into poetic meditations about the nightmarish reality of the American Dream. In these poetic meditations, in addition to the language of jazz music, Harper employs the language of medicine and photography as his new metaphorical idioms to broaden his rhetorical range. A new point of departure is similarly found in the next book, Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems (1977), which incorporates the practice of the “honoring of kin” central to African American culture. In part a retrospective collection, this volume also introduces materials exemplifying the emerging theme of healing that serves to unify the rest of Harper’s poetic output for years to come. Harper’s ninth book, Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985), is an experiment with elegy organized around certain themes. The text is divided into five sections, with personal history as the central theme. Continuing in the tradition of his other books, Harper celebrates musicians, folk heroes, poets, friends, and family. There is a feeling of the preciousness of life and an awareness of crimes committed against humanity, as in “The Drowning of the Facts of a Life”: Tonight we talk of losses in the word and go on drowning in acts of faith knowing so little of humility, less of the body, which will die in the mouth of reality. This foolish talk in a country that cannot pronounce napalm or find a path to a pool of irises or the head of a rose.

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Harper includes poems on racial inequities in South Africa, and he questions the myths and lies of politicians, historians, sociologists, and writers. He joyfully sings of the full range of the African American experience while seeking his own personal freedom through his poetic creations. These poems are specifically individual and yet vastly universal. They encompass the earth, reflecting experience as “monuments to history and pain” in such diverse places as Stockholm, Soweto, and Mount Saint Helens. In “The View from Mount Saint Helens,” Harper says: The flying African would leap from the shores of the continent called America, though it was really only an island in the Caribbean: the text demanded the casirenas be called cedars, what a great poet called the insulted landscape, which is the breast of your forehead now, so dense with frenesy and greasepaint.

Harper’s poetry focuses mainly on exploring the dual consciousness of being an African American poet and an American poet by unifying the past with the present. He seeks unity in diversity and finds universality in the specific. Criticism on Harper’s poetry has included that of the conservative critic Edwin Fussell, who wrote that Harper’s poetry is very likely the finest poetry being written in a “woe-begone and woe-begotten country.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks finds in Harper’s poetry an unafraid strength, his writing vigorous as well as brilliant, and although technically dexterous, magnificently different from most contemporary writing. He balances the past with the present, uncovering stereotypes and myths as he goes, and he uses race as a metaphor. He claims that since he loves people and how they talk and sound, he doubts that he will ever run out of subject matter. Harper’s ideas about historical injustices and about the necessity of healing converge again in the 1995 collection Honorable Amendments, as exemplified in the poem “Judicial Assignment” (written for the occasion of the initiation of Ojetta Rogeriee Thompson as an associate justice of the Rhode Island Superior Court): “when most history worth knowing/ is seldom recorded;/ now you must build up/ honorable amendments.” Critical Context In a review of Honorable Amendments, Calvin Forbes comments that Harper “is a well-known presence, yet his poetry has not received the recognition that several other poets of his caliber and generation have garnered.” This situation resulted in part from the small circulation of his poetry published in academic journals or produced by university or small presses and in part from the difficulties encountered in

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reading his texts and understanding their contexts. It has been mitigated by the publication of his own edition of Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (2000), and Ronald A. Sharp’s edition of Harper’s Selected Poems (2002), as well as Ben Lerner’s critical companion and Michael Antonucci’s doctoral dissertation devoted to his work. In Songlines in Michaeltree, which consists of 220 pages of the best poems from the past, as well as another 150 pages of new poems, Harper provides a generous amount of notes (“Notes on Form and Fictions” and “Notes to the Poems”) as well as biographical materials and autobiographical poetry that should help encourage explications and in-depth studies of his poetry, eventually leading to his recognition by a broader audience. Hints abound in these notes about African American figures, such as writers and musicians, who have influenced or inspired Harper, suggesting that his work is an integral part of an entire cultural canon and needs to be studied in appropriate contexts. Songlines in Michaeltree, as an edition compiled by the author, is framed in such a way that it begins and ends with the same epigraph: When there is no history there is no metaphor; a blind nation in storm mauls its own harbors: sperm whale, Indian, black, belted in these ruins.

In these lines (each line is actually replicated three times) Harper insists in no uncertain terms upon the necessity to reckon with history and declares his intention to do so by means of poetry. Bibliography Callahan, John F. “The Testifying Voice in Michael Harper’s Images of Kin.” Black American Literature Forum 13 (Fall, 1979): 89-92. Fairly brief and general examination of Harper’s poetic voice, language, images, and idioms. Special attention is paid to his performance poems, such as those that focus on musicians or historical action. Also examines Harper’s development of the relationship between himself and his reader. Callaloo 13, no. 4 (1990). Special issue devoted to Harper. Includes twenty-eight pages of Harper’s poetry, a twenty-page interview with Harper, and eight essays on Harper by friends and students. Dodd, Elizabeth. “The Great Rainbow Swamp: History as Moral Ecology in the Poetry of Michael S. Harper.” In Beyond Nature Writings: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Short study suggesting Harper’s moral impulse in his treatment of history; another example of how new critical tools may be employed to examine Harper’s poetic work. Fussell, Edwin. “Double-Conscious Poet in the Veil (for Michael S. Harper).” Par-

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nassus, Fall/Winter, 1975, 5-28. Mostly about Harper’s book Nightmare Begins Responsibility, though touching on the other volumes of poetry published by 1975. Discusses what Harper tries to do with his poetry and the difficulty of Harper’s aesthetics for both him and his readers. Also examines Harper’s theories on the limitations of language, Harper’s poetic techniques, the recurrent image of the skeleton throughout Harper’s poetry, and his concept of “myth-as-a-lie.” Grimes, Kyle. “The Entropics of Discourse: Michael Harper’s Debridement and the Myth of the Hero.” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 3 (Fall, 1990): 417440. Employs Harper’s notion of the “open-ended myth” as a critical tool to examine the poet’s work about the African American soldier’s experience in Vietnam and in the United States; essentially, Harper is seen to be debunking the myth of heroism promoted by the political establishment. Harper, Michael S. “Don’t They Speak Jazz.” MELUS 10, no. 1 (Spring, 1983): 3-6. Autobiographical essay describing the poet’s formative years, his family background, his connections with South Africa, his literary forebears, and influences on his writing from jazz musicians. _______. “An Interview with Michael S. Harper.” Interview by James Randall. Ploughshares 7, no. 1 (1981): 11-27. Discussion includes the influence black Africa has on African American writers, Harper’s early years, and Harper’s teaching experiences. _______. “The Map and the Territory: An Interview with Michael S. Harper.” Interview by Michael Antonucci. African American Review 34, no. 3 (Fall, 2000): 501508. Useful and suggestive interview, with written revisions and elaborations explaining his complex attitudes toward intricate issues. _______. “The Situation of American Writing, 1999.” American Literary History 11, no. 2 (Summer, 1999): 215-353. In this “forum” of twenty-six novelists and poets, Harper contributes written responses to questions posed by the journal. He explains how he relates to his social group (including mentors such as Gwendolyn Brooks and inspiring influences such as John Coltrane), describes the backgrounds of his books, and recounts his experiences with publishers, readers, reviewers, and critics. He makes an important point about black writers not so much being obsessed with race as, rather, with white supremacy. Harris, Judith. “God Don’t Like Ugly: Michael S. Harper’s Soul-Making Music.” In Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Ties Harper’s poetry to music and healing. Lerner, Ben. To Cut Is to Heal: A Critical Companion to Michael S. Harper’s “Debridement.” Providence, R.I.: Paradigm Press, 2000. Edited by Lerner as an undergraduate, this companion seeks to clarify one of Harper’s most important works; an interview with the poet is included. Stepto, Robert B. “Michael Harper’s Extended Tree: John Coltrane and Sterling Brown.” Hollins Critic 13 (June, 1976): 2-16. Explains that a primary tradition in African American literature is the honoring of kin, especially kin who are also artists. Conducts an in-depth exploration of Harper’s poems on the jazz musician

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John Coltrane and the poet Sterling Brown, both African American artists whom Harper celebrates. _______. “Michael S. Harper, Poet as Kinsman: The Family Sequences.” Massachusetts Review 17 (Autumn, 1976): 477-502. Stepto is interested in Harper’s use of kinship as a recurring metaphor for poetic process and the artist’s obligations to traditions. In order to explore these ideas and examine the processes of kinship within the poems, Stepto focuses on Harper’s poetic family sequences, such as the twenty-poem series section entitled “Ruth’s Blues” from Song: I Want A Witness. Rebecca Bliss Herman, updated by Balance Chow

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THE POETRY OF ROBERT HAYDEN Author: Robert Hayden (1913-1980) Type of work: Poetry First published: Heart-Shape in the Dust, 1940; The Lion and the Archer, 1948 (with Myron O’Higgins); Figure of Time: Poems, 1955; A Ballad of Remembrance, 1962; Selected Poems, 1966; Words in the Mourning Time, 1970; The NightBlooming Cereus, 1972; Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems, 1975; American Journal, 1978, 1982; Collected Poems, 1985 A Wide Range of Styles in a Small Body of Work On February 24, 1980, the day before Robert Hayden died at the age of sixty-six, the Center for African American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, where Hayden had taught since 1969, sponsored a daylong tribute to Hayden. The occasion served to celebrate Hayden’s accomplishment as a poet and his integrity as a man. The ascendancy of Hayden’s critical reputation signified by that occasion has continued, and Robert Hayden is recognized as one of the significant American poets of his generation. The quantity of his work is not great—his Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1985, runs to fewer than two hundred pages—yet it is work that sustains a high level of artistic merit and that includes a handful of authentically great poems. Hayden’s poetry is impressive for the range and variety of form and theme that it embodies and for the poet’s success in fusing a multiplicity of influences into a body of work as coherent as it is eloquent. The influences manifest in Hayden’s first published book, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), are essentially two. The first, and the more fundamental in shaping Hayden’s notions of the nature of poetry, is the example of the Harlem Renaissance, the name most commonly given to the remarkable flowering of African American art and literature in the 1920’s. For an African American looking for his own authentic poetic voice in the 1930’s, the work of the poets of the earlier decade confirmed the possibilities of a poetry beyond the orthodoxies of the established schoolroom anthologies. The second influence was more immediately relevant to Hayden’s early sense of the function, as distinguished from the nature, of poetry. Hayden was as a young man attracted to the left-wing ideology, loosely Marxist, that more or less intensely engaged the attention of many young black American artists and intellectuals in the 1930’s. Not surprisingly, then, themes of protest play a significant role in this first collection. The poems themselves would ultimately be dismissed as apprentice work by their author; the mature Hayden would especially move away from the overt protest poems, the primary function of which is to arouse readers to the correct state of political awareness. Hayden would never, however, become indifferent to politics in the broader sense or to the political dimension of the poet’s art. The influence of the Harlem Renaissance would never be rejected but, combined with other influences Hayden would absorb, would become an integral part of his own developing identity as a poet.

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The development can be traced in two pamphlets, The Lion and the Archer (1948) and Figure of Time (1955). The poet in full maturity emerges in A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), consisting of revised versions of poems from the two pamphlets and a number of new poems. This book represents the poet’s own evaluation of his work to 1962, what he thought significant and worth preserving. First Mature Work The poet of A Ballad of Remembrance challenges and may at times even baffle readers, especially readers who come to the book with misguided preconceptions about what to expect from an African American poet. It is not protest poetry that is found here, although Hayden casts a clear-eyed gaze on the tensions and torments— but also on the triumphs—that are part and parcel of the experience of being black and American. It is also not a popular poetry, granting easy access to the casual reader, although it finds much of its inspiration in the genius of African American popular culture. It is not a personal, certainly not a confessional, poetry, although Hayden locates sources of pain and reconciliation in the circumstances of his own life, and although the sense of the author as a feeling moral presence binds together the impressively varied contents of the book. African American history provides Hayden with the thematic source of some of his finest, most intensely realized poems. “Middle Passage” is inspired by the uprising of slaves, led by one Joseph Cinquez, aboard the slave ship Armistad and the incident’s aftermath. Rather than taking a straightforward narrative approach to this material, Hayden makes of it a modernist meditation on history, heroism, the inhumanity that is always a human possibility, and the unkillable human wish for freedom. The influence of a key work of literary modernism, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), makes itself felt in the montage of fragments and multiplicity of voices, ironically juxtaposed, that constitute the first two sections of the poem. In the third section, the focus on the Armistad episode becomes clear through the voice of a surviving officer of the slave ship, who, in a telling and typical irony, believes his words will ensure the death of Cinquez and the defeat of his cause. In thus presenting the historical materials of the poem in a nonlinear fashion and through a multiplicity of voices, Hayden observes the impersonality that Eliot and others made central to the modernist aesthetic. At the same time, Hayden adapts the accents of modernism to an affirmation, however removed from sentimentality and soft idealization, of the human. Hayden thus breaks dramatically with the articulation of despair, the “Waste Land motif,” associated not only with Eliot but also with many of the major European and European-American works originating from the modernist impulse. Emerging from this, and marking Hayden as the eloquent chronicler of what is most complex in the complex fate dramatized in the poem, is the sense of the Middle Passage as both historical reference and resonant symbol of the American experience, involving both black and white, as an unfinished voyage toward an uncertain shore. A similar sensitivity to history, its irreducible complexity, and its role in defining

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the present and in shaping aspirations for the future can be found in other poems in this volume. In “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” Hayden imagines the utterances of yet another leader of a slave rebellion. He does not, however, focus on the bloody outcome of the rebellion, but on the moment when Nat awakens to his destiny. Hayden does not write as a polemicist; it is not the rightness of Nat’s cause that concerns him, but the awfulness of his awakening. The poem carries a powerful psychological and dramatic charge, intensified by the interplay between the spiritual depth of the human situation the poem depicts and the predictable simplicities of the ballad form Hayden employs. Form and subject interact to different, but equally persuasive, effect in Hayden’s sonnet on Frederick Douglass, who is made to incarnate a committed and exemplary awareness of the needfulness of freedom. In other poems, Hayden draws on aspects of twentieth century African American culture. In “Homage to the Empress of the Blues,” a singer reminiscent of the great Bessie Smith wins the allegiance of her audience as she acknowledges, authenticates, and elevates the pain and confusion of their everyday experience and gives it back to them as art. This art belongs to her, in that she is the performer, yet it is just as much theirs, not simply because she performs for them, but because they are what she performs. “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday” finds irony, but also compassion, in the violent death of a gospel singer. “Tour 5” finds the menace in the eyes of the rawboned Southerner for whom a black man asking directions is the enemy. Merging the Personal with the Political Recollections of a more personal sort, though always held at a distance, inform other poems. “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield” has as its protagonist a composite of Hayden’s biological and his foster mothers; the name the character bears is in fact the maiden name of Hayden’s foster mother. In “The Whipping,” the reminiscence motivated by the sound of a child being beaten is ultimately inspired by Hayden’s memories of beatings he suffered at the hands of his foster mother. The poet’s insight that the beatings the woman administers are a pathetically inadequate revenge for the beatings life has given her brings the poem to rest in compassion rather than in bitterness. A note of reconciliation is also struck in the fine poem “Those Winter Sundays.” Here the poet belatedly recognizes and accepts the love manifested in tending the furnace on cold Sunday mornings and in similarly unrecognized acts of caring performed by an otherwise remote and, at times, frighteningly angry foster father (in the poem, simply “father”). A particular personal experience generates one of Hayden’s most powerful treatments of the theme of art, one of the frequent concerns of his mature poetry. Hayden and Mark Van Doren, a white poet, critic, and educator, had read their poems from the same platform at a bond rally in New Orleans in 1946. In accordance with the Jim Crow practices of the period, however, the two men could not sit down to coffee together in any of the city’s restaurants. The irony of the situation might easily have given rise to a fairly conventional protest poem. Instead, in “A Ballad of Remembrance,” the title poem of the volume, Hayden assaults readers with a rush of violently

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juxtaposed images, suggesting a Mardi Gras that has gone over the edge. The poem builds to a chaos in the environment and in the self, a jumble of feelings, attitudes, responses, and hostile presences that the poet transcends by finding the human voice drawn forth by the presence and example of Van Doren, who is identified by name in the poem. That it is the human, rather than the narrowly racial, voice that must be found and that it can for Hayden be exemplified by a white poet, suggests how far Hayden’s thought here is removed from the ideology of Black Nationalism, at least as that ideology would, before the 1960’s were over, emerge as a major force within the African American community. It was a force whose impact Hayden would be made to feel. An especially impressive quality of this book, the mark of the mature poet, is the mastery Hayden demonstrates over a range of formal and tonal strategies. The thematic energy of the poems is consistently echoed in their formal qualities. The baroque elaboration of diction and imagery in “A Ballad of Remembrance,” yielding to the almost ingenuous directness of the closing, is one example. The controlled elevation of rhetoric in “Frederick Douglass,” the ease and assurance with which the poet has mastered here the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, again claiming for African American poetry all that is useful and relevant in the European tradition, lend to the poem its particular kind of eloquence: a grandeur—never grandiosity—of the whole, arising out of language only slightly elevated above the common, intensified by the deliberateness of progression with which the poem moves to its conclusion. In a different register, the blues feeling of “Homage to the Empress of the Blues” and the echoes of gospel music in “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday” give emotional and spiritual definition to their subjects. In “The Whipping” and “Those Winter Sundays,” a relative starkness of language, coming as it does from a poet whose virtuosity is elsewhere in the book so dazzlingly on display, makes its own compelling statement. A Ballad of Remembrance was published in Europe. For his Selected Poems, published in 1966, Hayden was able to find an American publisher, a reflection of the degree of recognition he was beginning to enjoy. It was also in 1966 that Hayden was the recipient of the Grand Prix de la Poesie awarded by the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal; Langston Hughes was one of the jurors. It was in that same year, too, that Hayden received recognition of a more troubling sort when the first Black Writers’ Conference convened at Fisk University, on whose faculty Hayden had served since 1946. Hayden was distressed to find himself the target