ANEW: Black Women and Their Fiction
What are the questions we should be asking?
Off in the distance, a future of unbelievable ecstasy exists. At least it does in books. The idea that authors and storytellers can create or recreate in our minds the world of our deepest joy, as well as its opposite, is never far from my thinking. It’s the record of our collective history, showing us a way forward in the present. That is why I write.
The crafting of literary fiction and non-fiction, prose that reads like song and poetry, captivating a pre-teen and teenage reader’s imagination, is what many authors wish to achieve when they write. When I went away to college, I wanted to write and tell stories in a similar vein as my literary heroes wrote: Ralph Ellison, Thomas Hardy, William Shakespeare, James Baldwin, John Knowles, John Keats, J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain, William Golding, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chaim Potak, Richard Hofstadter, and Alan Jones, who was my high school history and law teacher. Did you notice anything about that list? Yep, they are all men. Not only that, except for Baldwin and Ellison, they were primarily white.
The reason why I put most of these “literary” lions out in this fashion is that this was essentially my junior high and high school reading list of the authors who I read before I was eighteen and went away to college. Neither Toni Morrison nor Alice Walker was read much in high school. I must admit, I don’t even remember reading the Brontë sisters back then. We even read Gone With The Wind in school. Can you imagine?
Again, women were read back in high school, but read very few women that I remember. All of my English and history teachers from 7 - 12 were men and women who taught me so much about reading and loving what I was reading. They all happened to be white. I didn’t see myself or anyone in the books we read that looked anything like me and my fellow “honor students” of color, of which there were probably half a dozen or so. I also didn’t get to experience any Black teachers in these subjects until college, wnd even that was pretty limited.
The great men and the great books. However, reading great stories and great literature is universal, or should be. I discovered Ellison and Baldwin by happenstance and read them on my own. They hit the bullseye in my heart, speaking directly in my vernacular, experience, and mindset, creating the pathways of discovery I am still on. Of course, I did read women authirs, but the above folks were those I imbibed more than one book—in high school.
Neither my mother nor father went to college. As I’ve written, my mother left high school at 15 ½, and my father finished high school and went directly to work. He was ready to enter the workforce and make his own way, being one of thirteen children. Reading was not fundamental for him. It was surviving, supporting a family, and his social world, which was rich up until the day he died.
As a result, I marched off to college, ready to be challenged and disrupted in a way that still resonates today. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was the first Black teacher that I had in the Huanities after Grade 10 when I was on the doorstep of twenty years old. Skip, as Gates is known, had inherited a course that Toni Morrison taught that was similarly titled at Yale called “Black Women and Their Fiction,” and the rest, as they say, was history. Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Sula, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Harriet E. Wilson, whose “discovery” happened while we were in class with Skip. Gates and his graduate assistants found Wilson’s Our Nig, which reportedly was the first novel written by a Black woman in the United States.
The course was like lightning in a very dark sky. It challenged my notion of what writers talked about. I don’t remember reading Ann Petry’s The Street, but I remember when I first read a few years later because there was so much more to be discovered, and I was primed to get more from the novel because of the torcelight it blazed for other writers. Black Women and Their Fiction spoke to me and my peers because it was the language that nurtured many folks in real life. Like those stories, my narrative came from Black women, who held up more than “half the sky” in my family.
My mother’s stories growing up were not just tall tales being spun by one of the most creative storytellers that I knew, but her very life resembled Ann Petry’s “Lutie Johnson” in The Street who was a single Black mother trying to survive in the streets of Harlem juxtaposed with my mother’s life in Chicagoland.
What does all of this have to do with starting ANEW? In my estimation, if you do not know where you come from and the stories that created you, you won’t know where you’re going. As I write these lines, my mother has just called the police in her town, thinking that someone is trying to break into her home. No one is. It’s just a mind whose memory and stories are working overtime. That beautiful and brilliant mind is coming to the very end of its independence to keep her safe, my brother and I theorized.
The stories I first heard and were told came directly from this woman who was nowhere in the canon of the stories that I first read in high school or college, like those of you who have walked the path of having to understand the lessons of later life of a loved one or partner whose stories are sometimes the last things to go. I had my first Black teacher help me to discover ways to see and listen differently. Now, it is time to record those stories for safekeeping, even the recreated and imagined ones, and tell them so that we remember them and can pass them on before our own memory fades.
Curated Listening:
Who better to explain what this all means than Toni Morrison? By “this,” I means what the reader and writer wants you to know about the “who” a given reader is,, which allows us to step inside a world we may know very little about. Read Toni Morrison’s brilliant precise, as told to Charlie Rose>>>HERE.