african-americam literature

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

AFRICAN-AMERICAN

LITERATURE

��

Wilfred Samuels

Associate Editors

Loretta Gilchrist Woodard

Tracie Church Guzzio

Encyclopedia of African-American Literature

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Encyclopedia of African American literature / Wilfred D. Samuels, editor; Tracie Guzzio,

associate editor, Loretta Gilchrist Woodard, associate editor.

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1. American literature—African American authors—Encyclopedias. 2. American literature—

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Table of

ConTenTs

Introduction iv

Acknowledgments x

AtoZEntries 1

Bibliographyof

SecondarySources 581

MajorWorksby

African-AmericanWriters 585

ListofContributors 593

Index 595

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INTRODUCTION

We have always been imagining ourselves . . .

we are the subjects of our own narratives,

witnesses to and participants in our own

experience. . . . We are not, in fact, “other.”

(Morrison, 208)

In this profoundly proud, eloquent, and bold

declaration, novelist Toni Morrison takes on those

“serious scholars” and new discoverers of what

she defines as a rich “Afro-American artistic pres-

ence” in Western culture in general and American

culture in particular. For many years Western

scholars considered the phrase African-American

literature to be either a myth or a contradiction

and either negated or dismissed the rich body of

writing by Americans of African descent.

As Olaudah Equiano declares in his 18th-cen-

tury autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of

Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African,

Written by Himself (1789), black Africans brought

with them to the strange land of the “New World”

memories of their traditions of dance, music, and

poetry, which, planted in the British colonies of

North America in particular, took root in the new

songs they sang. Today those songs run deep like

a river in the souls of black folks and reverberate

and resound in the antiphonal call-and-response

style that constitutes the foundation and heartbeat

of the African-American literary tradition.

During the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries,

unknown black bards, as James Weldon Johnson

recounts, placed their lips to the sacred fire of

poetry and created “sorrow songs” whose lyrics

responded to the dehumanization of the world of

chattel slavery, a world that, in the end, reduced

African Americans to “three-fifths other.” In their

songs, they registered their personal humanity

and simultaneously humanized the troubled and

troubling world around them. The lyrics of such

songs as “Steal Away,” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,”

and “Motherless Child,” as well as the didactic and

often humorous narratives and tales about Brer

Rabbit, Tar Baby, and High John de Conquer, com-

mented on current conditions, passed on tradi-

tions, entertained, and offered lessons in morality

and virtue in the “broken tongue” that black people

created. But when exposed to the written texts and

more formal language of Western culture, African

Americans also put pen to paper to create works of

merit. For example, kidnapped between the ages

of seven or eight, Ethiopian-born Phillis Wheatley

confounded the community of her New England

“city upon a hill,” the cradle of many Founding

Fathers, with her broadsides and eventually with

Introduction v

her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

(1773), the first known collection of poems to be

published by an enslaved black person.

Witnesses to and participants in the horrific

system of chattel slavery, early writers such as

Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Linda

Brent (Harriet Jacobs) wrote their way to freedom

with the publication of their respective works, The

Interesting Narrative . . . ; Narrative of Frederick

Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself

(1845); and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,

Written by Herself (1861), all three paradigms of

a new genre: the slave narrative–black autobiogra-

phy. These now-acknowledged classic texts are clear

evidence of the way Africans and African Ameri-

cans directly affected the development of Western

literature and even intellectual history. Like the

drafters of the Declaration of Independence and

the U.S. Constitution, documents that undergird

Western thought and philosophy, Equiano and

Douglass have much to say about the true meaning

of freedom, the rights of the individual (particu-

larly in a democracy), and universal human rights.

Many of these ideas were echoed and added to by

other 19th-century African-American writers, of

fiction and nonfiction, many of whom were fierce

abolitionists, including William W. Brown, Nat

Turner, Martin Delaney, Henry H. Garnet, and

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

African Americans entered the 20th century with

cadences of progression and precision grounded in

determination, spirituality, and literacy. In The

Souls of Black Folk (1903), which many consider the

black master text or “the African-American book of

the 20th century,” William Edward Burghardt (or

W. E. B.) DuBois, with, it seems, prophetic vision,

succinctly captures African Americans’ dogged

journey from children of emancipation to youths

“with dawning self-consciousness”:

If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no

goal, no resting place, little but flattery and

criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for

reflection and self-examination; it changed

the child of Emancipation to the youth with

dawning self-consciousness, self-realization,

and self-respect. In those sombre forests of his

striving his own soul rose before him, and he

saw himself, darkly as through a veil; and yet

he saw in himself some faint revelation of his

power, of his mission. He began to have a dim

feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he

must be himself and not another. (368)

The result of this “striving in the souls of black

folk” (371) was their “gift of story and of song”—

the means by which they carved a place for them-

selves in the American cultural landscape. DuBois

concluded, “And so by fateful chance the Negro

folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands

today not simply as the sole American music, but

as the most beautiful expression of human experi-

ence born this side of the seas. It still remains as

the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and

the greatest gift of the Negro people” (536–537).

DuBois’s task in The Souls of Black Folk was to

claim, validate, and celebrate the contributions

of African Americans, particularly in music, and

to place them at the heart of American culture—

indeed, at the heart of human culture.

and African-American

cultural traditions generally appreciate the orality,

representationality, and public dimension of her

poetry far more than those for whom poetry is an

individualist academic genre privately read and

privately experienced.

Most significant are Angelou’s serial autobiog-

raphies. Since there is no precedent in American

literary history of a writer, white or black, whose

predominant contribution to American letters

is in serial autobiographical form, the literary

Angelou, Maya 13

establishment seems confused as to how to evalu-

ate this literary phenomenon and its popularity.

Taken together, the six volumes stage the ethno-

genesis of a representative 20th-century black

female consciousness. I Know Why the Caged Bird

Sings (1970), published when Angelou was 41

years old, garnered impressive academic reviews

and marked a new era in black consciousness with

its rehearsal of black femininity and the dignity

of southern black lives lived amidst appalling rac-

ism and economic peonage. Gather Together in

My Name (1974) presents Maya as a young black

woman struggling for economic and emotional

security in segregated post–World War II Amer-

ica, and Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like

Christmas (1976) shows her married and raising a

child in the 1950s, trying to establish a career on

the stage, and regularly encountering mainstream

white racism. The Heart of a Woman (1980) shows

a mature Maya who is mostly accounting for

her roles as black mother and black woman. All

God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) pres-

ents Maya the poet, musician, and performer as a

journalist in Ghana and as an expatriate explor-

ing the promises of Pan-Africanism among black

American returnees. Perhaps the most literary

of these works since her first autobiography, this

volume forges links with her ancestors and the

slave past. It also records the history of the “lost

generation” of African-American expatriates in

Ghana and provides portraits of many African

dignitaries in the Nkrumah era, in the midst of an

African cultural renaissance. Though Angelou’s

search for an African identity ultimately eludes

her, she nevertheless finds the accepting spiritual

presence of her slave ancestors. A Song Flung Up

to Heaven (2002), the sixth volume, begins with

her return from Africa to work with MALCOLM X,

her miserable sojourn in Hawaii after his assassi-

nation; her recruitment by MARTIN LUTHER KING;

her experience of King’s assassination; her pres-

ence in Watts, Los Angeles, during the riots; and

her move to New York to find her way as a writer

among such black intellectuals as JAMES BALDWIN,

PAULE MARSHALL, ROSA GUY, Abbey Lincoln, and

Max Roach. This volume is a künstlerroman con-

taining the account of her beginnings as a writer

during the height of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT as

she began working on the manuscript of I Know

Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Angelou’s autobiographies mostly follow the

classic pattern of black autobiography: the jour-

ney out, the quest, the achievement, and the return

home. All six of her serial first-person narratives

arise directly from the aesthetics and traditions of

the slave narrative, the blues, the contemporary

African-American journey narrative, and formal

autobiography. Each is characterized by an affir-

mative pattern of moral growth and the recon-

struction of the collective myth of black female

identity. As blues traveler she confronts being

afraid and bereft through sheer style and cour-

age and offers picaresque progression experiences.

Her sympathies range across history, class, color

lines, communities, and whole continents. Recur-

ring themes include the role of the black mother,

eternal nostalgia for home, racial wounds, racial

freedom, sister friends, the call of Africa, the slave

presence, black female sexuality, WOMANIST val-

ues, dramatic confrontations, and accumulating

wisdom. The volumes all merge history, fact, fic-

tion, poetry, and religious experience. She always

provides a clear map of the inner racial surfaces of

American cultural history. Her gifted prose com-

bines remarkable metaphors, rich dialogues, vivid

street scenes, brilliant social portraiture, memo-

rable anecdotes, self-parody, and spiritual insights.

However, her enduring project is the ethnogenesis

of black womanhood. She is credited with devel-

oping serial autobiography as a significant literary

form within American letters.

Angelou has received more than 20 honorary

degrees from such prestigious academic institu-

tions as Brandeis University, Brown University,

University of South Carolina, University of North

Carolina at Greensboro, Lawrence University,

Wake Forest University, University of Durham,

and Columbia University. Her long list of awards,

fellowships, and recognitions include a Rockefeller

Foundation Fellowship; the Ladies’ Home Journal

Woman of the Year Award, 1975; a lifetime ap-

pointment as the Reynolds Professor of American

14 Angelou, Maya

Studies at Wake Forest University (1981); inau-

gural poet for President Bill Clinton (1993); the

United States of America, Congressional Record,

104th Congress, House of Representatives, Tribute

to Maya Angelou by the Honorable Kweisi Mfume,

Maryland Congressman (1996); the Board of Gov-

ernors, University of North Carolina, “Maya An-

gelou Institute for the Improvement of Child &

Family Education” at Winston-Salem State Uni-

versity, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1998);

lifetime membership to the National Women’s Hall

of Fame (2002); a Grammy for Best Spoken Word

Album (1994); the Spingarn Award, NATIONAL

ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED

PEOPLE (1994); the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference of Los Angeles & Martin Luther King,

Jr. Legacy Association National Award (1996); The

New York Black 100, Schomburg Center & The

Black New Yorkers (1996); the Black Caucus of

American Library Association, Cultural Keepers

Award (1997); a Lifetime Achievement Award for

Literature (1999), and the Presidential Medal of

Arts (2000).

Angelou currently maintains a rigorous writ-

ing, teaching, lecturing, performing, consulting,

and media appearance schedule.

Gloria L. Cronin

Annie John Jamaica Kincaid (1983)

At the end of JAMAICA KINCAID’s short novel, Annie

John, the heroine, Annie, whose coming-of-age

story the novel records, explains, while describ-

ing her parents, “I suppose I should say that the

two of them made me with their own hands. For

most of my life, when the three of us went any-

where together I stood between the two of them

or sat between the two of them. But then I got too

big. . . . And so now they are together and here I

am apart. I don’t see them now the way I used to,

and I don’t love them now the way I used to. . . .

[I]t is I who have changed” (133). Metamorpho-

sis, growth, change, independence, and rebirth are

the central themes of this bildungsroman, which

begins with the heroine’s concern and curiosity

about death and ends with her emergence as a 17-

year-old who embarks on a journey from Antigua,

her island home, to England, the motherland of

British subjects like Annie.

Annie is the love (and only) child of Annie, her

mother, and Alexander John, who is 35 years older

than his wife. Through age 12, Annie is the apple

of her parents’ eyes, and her mother particularly

dotes on her, attempting literally to shape and

mold her, gently caressing and kissing her daily

when she returns home from school. “I was ever in

her wake,” Annie states. “When my eyes rested on

my father, I didn’t think very much of the way he

looked. But when my eyes rested on my mother, I

found her beautiful” (18), Annie confesses. Annie

sleeps in a bed her carpenter father made for her,

and she wears clothes her mother, a seamstress,

had sewn just for her.

Throughout her childhood and early teenage

years, Annie is thoroughly baptized in the dual

cultures that form her legacy. She eats breadfruit,

banana fritters, pepper pot, salt fish, and porridge;

she celebrates Queen Victoria’s birthday and reads

the works of John Milton. She develops special

friendships with Gweneth and The Red Girl, while

navigating through and mastering with ease the

established colonial educational system imposed

on the Antiguan natives, literally sitting at the

head of her class as prefect, winning the respect

and envy of her uniform-clad peers in her all-girl

school. She observes her parents making love and

learns about her own sexuality. She observes, but

does not quite understand, obeah, the traditional

African religion practiced by her parents and par-

ticularly by her maternal grandmother, who comes

to their home when Annie is sick to heal her with

traditional folk medicine.

As in the stories in Kincaid’s At the Bottom of

the River (1983) and her autobiographical novel,

The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), ever

present in Annie John is the heroine’s alienation

from her community, parents, and particularly

her mother. The tension in their mother-daugh-

ter relationship becomes tangible by Annie’s 12th

birthday, when her previously doting mother

(“when I gave her herbs, she might stoop down

Annie John 15

and kiss me on my lips and then on my neck”

[25]) begins ushering her from the self-created

safety of childhood (she hid her favorite books

and the marbles she was not allowed to play with

under her house) into adolescence and young

womanhood—into “young lady business” (27).

When Annie seeks to have a dress made from the

same material as her mother’s, as she had always

done, her mother tells her; “It is time you had

your own clothes. You just cannot go around

the rest of your life looking like a little me”

(26). When her mother sees Annie talking to a

group of boys after school one day, she calls her a

slu*t, to which Annie responds, “like mother like

daughter” (102).

At the end of the novel, Annie’s parents pro-

vide or perform the appropriate rituals—bath-

ing, dressing, braiding her hair, eating, and so

forth—necessary to complete her rites of passage

into young womanhood. As she walks through

her village to the ship that will take her away,

Annie passes the significant sites where, as a nov-

ice, she had been guided and shaped by the ap-

propriate ritual priests/priestess: Miss Dulcie’s

(the seamstress), the schoolhouse, church (where

she had been christened), the store, the pharmacy

(where she had gone on errands for her mother),

the doctor’s office, the bank (where she had saved

her weekly allowance). She recalls, “As I passed

all these places, it was as if I were in a dream. . . .

I didn’t feel my feet touch ground, I didn’t even

feel my own body” (143). Upon parting, Annie’s

mother proudly tells her, “Of course, you are a

young lady now, and we won’t be surprised if in

due time you write to say that one day soon you

are to be married” (136). Annie curtly responds,

“How absurd!” (136).

Reviewing Annie John for the New York Times

Book Review, Susan Kenney wrote, “I can’t remem-

ber reading a book that illustrates [the results of

growing up] more poignantly than Annie John. . . .

[Annie John’s] story is so touching and familiar it

could be happening in Anchorage, so inevitable

it could be happening to any of us, anywhere,

any time, any place. And that’s exactly the book’s

strength, its wisdom and its truth” (Kenney, 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kenney, Susan. Review of Annie John. New York Times

Book Review, 17 April 1985, p. 6ff.

Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1985.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Another Country James Baldwin (1962)

Divided into three sections, Baldwin’s third novel,

Another Country, begins by introducing Rufus

Scott, a black jazz musician who mysteriously

commits suicide by the end of the first section,

although he remains the focus of the narrative

throughout the remaining two sections. In the

end, Another Country is a novel about sexual

and racial identities. Rufus Scott, who is uncer-

tain about his sexual orientation and frustrated

by being a southern, black American male, is

involved with Leona, a white southerner who

is seeking to escape her failure as both wife and

mother. Their physically and mentally debilitat-

ing and dysfunctional relationship, the conse-

quence of poor self esteem, leads Scott to jump to

his death from a bridge and to Leona’s breakdown

and institutionalization.

Baldwin develops Another Country, criticized

for what was seen as its flawed form, around the life

experiences of its richly eclectic characters, who,

like Rufus, are also engaged in a process of self-

discovery and, in Baldwinesque form, a process

of finding meaningful love. Vivaldo, Rufus’s best

friend, is a struggling writer and former student

and a friend of novelist Richard Salenski. Richard’s

socially conscious wife and the mother of their two

boys, Cass, disillusioned by her husband’s nominal

success in writing a “popular” novel, has an affair

with Eric, an actor from Alabama and Rufus’s erst-

while lover. Eric, meanwhile, is awaiting the arrival

of his current young hom*osexual lover, Yves, from

France, where the two met while Eric was living

abroad. Completing the group, Ida, Rufus’s sister

and Vivaldo’s lover, has a short-lived affair with

Ellis, the white promoter who promises to help get

her singing career off the ground.

16 Another Country

Baldwin exposes the characters’ inability to

connect with one another and links these fail-

ings to the inability of multiple races, sexualities,

nationalities, and classes to establish common

ground. The novel, vacillating between both time

period and location, is set in Greenwich Village,

Harlem, France, and Alabama. Using loosely con-

nected, almost jazzlike episodes, the novel traces

the multiple affairs—hom*osexual, heterosexual,

bisexual, and interracial—of Rufus’s surviving

acquaintances as they attempt to understand and

come to terms with his untimely death and si-

multaneously deal with their own shortcomings.

The characters find redemption as they attempt

to reconcile the failure of both Rufus’s and their

own dreams.

A distinctly postmodern work, Baldwin’s in-

tensely psychological novel serves as a testament

to the difficulties of self-love while disrupting and

challenging America’s sexual and racial norms.

Baldwin posits the idea of “another country” as

an individually created locale, free of the restraints

of time and place as well as socially constructed

identities.

Because of the graphic representation of sexu-

ality in Another County, Baldwin was the subject

of an FBI investigation following the complaints

it received from numerous American readers. Fur-

ther, many critics have argued that the distorted

identities of the characters are a direct result of

Baldwin’s inability to define his own boundaries.

Notably, Robert A. Bone cites Baldwin’s narcissism

for the failure of the characters in Another Coun-

try. He contends that the author “does not know

where his own psychic life leaves off and that of his

characters begins” (236). However, Charles New-

man, comparing Baldwin to Henry Adams, places

Another Country within the larger spectrum of the

American literary tradition. According to New-

man, in Another Country,

the legend of America as refuge for the op-

pressed, opportunity for the pure in heart, is

invoked only to be exposed. From the very

first, [Baldwin] is saying our vision has been

parochial. We have not accounted for the va-

riety of man’s motives, the underside of our

settlers, the costs of a new life. . . . If Another

Country is formless, it is so because it rejects

the theories of history available to it. (97)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965.

Newman, Charles. “The Lesson of the Master: Henry

James and James Baldwin.” In James Baldwin; A

Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Keneth Kin-

namon, 52–65. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice

Hall, Inc., 1974.

Ohi, Kevin. “ ‘I’m not the boy you want’: Sexuality,

‘Race’ and Thwarted Revelations in Baldwin’s

Another Country.” African American Review 33

(1999): 261–281.

Tuhkanen, Miko. “Binding the Self: Baldwin, Freud

and the Narrative of Subjectivity.” GLQ: A Journal

of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7 (2001): 553–591.

David Shane Wallace

Ansa, Tina McElroy (1949– )

Novelist Tina McElroy Ansa was born in Macon,

Georgia, on November 18, 1949. After graduating

from Spelman College (1971), Ansa worked for the

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Charlotte

Observer. Since 1990 she has been a writer-in-resi-

dence at Spelman and freelance writer for maga-

zines and newspapers, including ESSENCE, Ms., and

The Los Angeles Times. In 1978, she married Jone’e

Ansa, a filmmaker. They reside in St. Simons Is-

land, Georgia, and have one daughter.

Though she has written in several genres, Ansa

is best known for her fiction, which is set in the

southern fictional town of Mulberry, Georgia. Her

first novel, Baby of the Family (1989), is the com-

ing-of-age story of Lena McPherson. Born with

a caul—a veil left by the membrane of the amni-

otic sac, which, according to folk belief, endows

its owner with second sight—Lena is able to see

and communicate with ghosts. Familiar with this

folk belief, the delivery nurse gives Lena’s mother,

Ansa, Tina McElroy 17

Nellie, a tea to protect Lena from being plagued

by her gift. However, dismissing the belief as mere

superstition, Nellie discards the tea and caul. As a

result, Lena is troubled by ghostly visits through

which, in the end, she learns about African-Amer-

ican traditions and folk medicine. The New York

Times named Baby of the Family a “Notable Book

of the Year” in 1989, and the Ansas are converting

this novel into a film.

Ansa’s second novel, Ugly Ways (1993), is told

largely through flashbacks. After the death of Es-

ther “Mudear” Lovejoy, her husband and their

three daughters attempt to recall memories of her.

During the early years of Mudear’s marriage, her

husband physically and emotionally abused her.

Eventually, to retaliate, Mudear refuses to work,

forcing her daughters fundamentally to raise them-

selves, thereby becoming independent. Although

she is already dead at the beginning of the novel,

Mudear’s spirit eavesdrops on her daughters’ con-

versations about her. Mudear’s ghostly presence

accentuates her influence and emotional hold over

her daughters. Ansa confirms that her intention

was to make Mudear a character who subverts pre-

vailing stereotypes about African-American moth-

ers. She states, “I wanted to see more complexity.

What happens if you don’t have this strong kind of

mother?” (Peterson 54). Ansa was nominated for

a NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT

OF COLORED PEOPLE Image Award and the African

American Blackboard List named the novel Best

Fiction in 1994.

In Ansa’s third novel, The Hand I Fan With

(1996), readers are reunited with Lena McPherson,

now a single, 45-year-old wealthy businesswoman.

When Lena and Sister, her best friend from New

Orleans, conjure a man, Herman, a ghost who has

protected Lena from bad ghosts all her life, answers

the call. Through her relationship with Herman,

Lena is able to have an erotic spiritual experience

and to conquer the powers of the veil, which had

made it impossible for her to be intimate with men.

Lena adored and admired her mother, but like the

other Lovejoy women, she too must overcome the

error of her mother’s judgment.

Like Baby of the Family and Ugly Ways, which

deals with family conflicts, Ansa’s novel You Know

Better (2002) is the story of three generations of

women, the Pines. LaShawndra is a sexually pro-

miscuous 18-year-old who runs away from home.

Sandra, her mother, is more concerned with her

looks, her romantic relationship, and her career

than she is about her daughter. Sandra does not

search for her daughter, but Lily, LaShawndra’s

grandmother, does. As in the other novels, ghosts’

visits play a significant role in guiding the living in

You Know Better. Also, Ansa continues to empower

her female characters by giving each one, through

the narrative technique, a distinct voice.

Although not purely autobiographical, Ansa

admits that her work “is informed by where I

come from and who I am” (Montgomery). She

admits further that her mother, Nellie—who has

the same name as Lena McPherson’s mother—has

influenced her art. Of her narrative technique,

Ansa says, “my literary voice [is] my ‘mother lan-

guage.’. . . . [It] was through my mother’s voice that

I learned language could be funny, that it could

be painful, that it could be sympathetic, biting,

stinging, that it could be wise” (Ansa, 194). This

“mother language” is reflected in her four novels.

Ansa’s talent is her ability to present strikingly re-

alistic portraits of supernatural entities and events,

to construct picturesque settings, and to reveal the

emotional complexities of middle- to upper-class

African-American women.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ansa, Tina McElroy. “Finding Our Voice.” Essence,

May 1995, pp. 194–195.

Montgomery, Georgene Bess. “Author Interview.”

bookreporter.com. Available online. URL: http://

www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/you_

know_better2.asp#interview. Accessed September

28, 2006.

Peterson, V. R. “Tina McElroy Ansa a Real Mother’s

Tale.” Essence, December 1993, p. 54.

Tara Green

Attaway, William (1911–1986)

Novelist and scriptwriter William Attaway was

born in Greenville, Mississippi, on November 19,

18 Attaway, William

1911. His parents, William and Florence Attaway,

both professional people, a doctor and teacher, re-

spectively, relocated to Chicago in 1916. There At-

taway began writing, later attending the University

of Illinois, where he graduated in 1936.

Attaway’s earliest forays into imaginative lit-

erature included plays written for his sister Ruth’s

theater group and the draft of a novel that was re-

fused by his college dean in lieu of the prescribed

academic work. Later, Attaway had a play, Carnival

(1935), produced at the University of Illinois, and

his short story “The Tale of the Blackamoor” ap-

peared in DOROTHY WEST’s Challenge in 1936.

Attaway is best known for his two novels, Let

Me Breathe Thunder (1939) and Blood on the Forge

(1941). Both reflect the proletariat concerns of

the period, but neither work achieved much pub-

lic success. The most striking feature of Let Me

Breathe Thunder is that its central characters, Step

and Ed, are white. They are rootless men in search

of their dreams and no doubt the kinds of men At-

taway encountered during his days as a hobo while

on hiatus from college during the early 1930s. The

novel is narrated by Ed who picks up their story

as they are leaving New Mexico en route to Seattle

with a young Mexican boy, Hi Boy, who adopts

Step and Ed as his guardians. Much of the narra-

tive concerns the experiences of the rootless as they

seek to establish some permanence in their lives.

Theirs is a harsh world of like-minded men who

live precariously from day to day, working hard,

living hard, and often dying hard without ever re-

alizing their dreams. In the case of Step and Ed, the

harshness of their lives is, over time, tempered by

their care of and concern for Hi Boy, whom they

eventually lose to a tragic death.

Let Me Breathe Thunder bears a striking re-

semblance in subject matter and tone to one of

its contemporaries, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Additionally, the novel was no doubt informed

by Attaway’s own experiences on the road as well

as his involvement in the Federal Writers Project.

However, Attaway brings to bear on the novel’s

situation a dual perspective of rootlessness—hav-

ing been black and a hobo—that lifts the novel

well above the derivative or simply a tract of the

period.

Blood on the Forge, Attaway’s second novel, in

many ways furthers

the author’s interest in the

restlessness of the human spirit. Moreover, the

novel is indeed protest fiction, but protest fiction

that is artistically rendered. Here race is a prime

factor: The three brothers, Big Mat, Chinatown,

and Melody Moss, are doubly victimized by their

race and class. In the novel, Attaway focuses on the

more negative aspects of the sharecrop system in

the South and the equally damning aspects of life

in the North on the other side of the Great Migra-

tion. The brothers’ physical and spiritual destruc-

tion at the hands of freedom shows the novel’s

strong kinship to RICHARD WRIGHT’s NATIVE SON,

which clearly both influenced and overshadowed

Blood on the Forge. Still, Blood on the Forge is an

important portrayal of the effects of rootlessness

on African Americans who cast their lots with life

in the so-called “promised land” of the North;

again, Attaway’s dual perspective on rootlessness

informs the work significantly.

Because neither novel sold well, Attaway aban-

doned novel writing in favor of writing musical

compositions and scripts for various media, in-

cluding “One Hundred Years of Laughter,” a 1966

television special on black humor. An additional

short story, “Death of a Rag Doll,” appeared in

1947, and shortly before his death in 1986 Att-

away had completed work on the script for “The

Atlanta Child Murders.” Regardless of genre, Att-

away’s work is that of a perfectionist. In general,

his narratives are unencumbered by subplots, and

he demonstrates a high level of sophistication in

weaving together protest and symbolic imagery.

Also, Attaway’s importance as a chronicler of the

Great Migration should not go unnoted. As one of

the several black writers who dealt with that aspect

of African-American life, Attaway stands out for

his sophisticated handling of literary naturalism

through his black characters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carson, Warren J. “Four Black American Novelists,

1935–1941.” Master’s thesis, Atlanta University,

1975.

Klotman, Phyllis R. “An Examination of Whiteness on

Blood on the Forge.” CLAJ 16 (1974): 101–109.

Attaway, William 19

Young, Stanley. “Tough and Tender: Review of Let Me

Breathe Thunder.” New York Times Book Review,

25 June 1939.

Warren J. Carson

Aubert, Alvin (1930– )

Poet, playwright, founder of the black literary jour-

nal Obsidian, editor, publisher, and literary critic

Alvin Aubert was born in Lutcher, Louisiana, on

March 12, 1930. He was the youngest of Albert and

Lucille Roussel Aubert’s seven children. At age 14,

he dropped out of high school and later joined the

U.S. Army, where he remained until 1954. In 1947,

he completed his high school general equivalency

diploma and in 1955 entered Southern University

in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he received his

B.A. in English in 1959. A year later, he earned his

M.A. in English from the University of Michigan

and later pursued two years of graduate work at

the University of Illinois. An educator since 1960,

Aubert has taught African-American literature

and creative writing at Southern University in

Baton Rouge, the University of Illinois, the Uni-

versity of Oregon, and the State University of New

York, Fredonia. Currently, he is professor emeri-

tus at Wayne State University in Detroit, where

he taught creative writing and African-American

literature and served two years as interim chair of

the department of Africana studies; he lives with

his wife, Bernadine Tenant.

In 1975, Aubert founded and edited the journal

Obsidian: Black Literature in Review, which pro-

vided many aspiring writers in the 1970s and 1980s

an opportunity to publish their works. The edito-

rial board included Kofi Awooner, ERNEST GAINES,

Blyden Jackson, SAUNDERS REDDING, and DARWIN

T. TURNER. After it ceased publication in 1982, the

journal was reissued as Obsidian II in 1986. Obsid-

ian III: Literature in the African Diaspora is now a

semiannual journal of contemporary poetry, fic-

tion, drama, and nonfiction prose aimed at publish-

ing works in English by and about writers of African

descent. Housed at North Carolina State University,

this outstanding journal, under the leadership of

Joyce Pettis and its former editors, Gerald Barrax

and Afaa M. Weaver, continues to debut the works

of many scholars and creative writers worldwide.

An award-winning poet, Aubert has published

his work in a number of journals and anthologies

since 1966. Though he was criticized in the 1970s

for not embracing the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, his

poetry is nevertheless distinguished by his atten-

tion to craft and his focus on personal experiences,

rich in the use of Louisiana folk culture and dic-

tion. His first poetry collection, Against the Blues

(1972), deals with his childhood in Louisiana, and

Feeling Through (1975) reflects on military expe-

riences, knowledge of African-American writing,

and adolescence. Of his second volume, Jerry Ward

observes that the poems “are informed by clarity,

wit, and the easy rhythmic flow of human speech”

(2). Both South Louisiana: New and Selected Poems

(1985) and If Winter Come: Collected Poems, 1967–

1992 (1994) include a diverse range of experiences.

His latest collection, Harlem Wrestler, and Other

Poems (1995), incorporates many of his previous

themes and continues with personal reflections on

national holidays, retirement, self-awareness, and

maturing romance.

Aubert has received numerous awards, grants,

and honors. At the University of Michigan he was

a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1959, a 1968 Bread

Loaf Scholar in poetry, and a recipient of two cre-

ative writing fellowship grants from the National

Endowment for the Arts for his poetry in 1973 and

1981. He also received an Editors Fellowship Grant

in 1979 from the Coordinating Council of Liter-

ary Magazines to publish Obsidian and received

the 1988 CALLALOO Award for his contribution to

African-American cultural expression. In 2001 he

was the inaugural recipient of the Xavier Activist

for the Humanities Award.

Aubert has donated his papers and records

of Obsidian dating from its founding in 1975 to

Xavier University Library of New Orleans. In ad-

dition, he has given more than 2,500 volumes on

the creative writing of African Americans, one of

the largest gifts by a single donor, and many rare

books published by the now-defunct BROADSIDE

PRESS of Detroit.

20 Aubert, Alvin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Martin, Herbert Woodward. “Alvin Aubert: South

Louisiana: New and Selected Poems.” Black

American Literature Forum 21, no. 3 (Fall 1987):

343–348.

Ward, Jerry W., Jr. “Alvin Aubert: Literature, History,

Ethnicity.” Xavier Review 7, no. 2 (1987): 1–12.

Loretta G. Woodard

Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, The

James Weldon Johnson (1912)

When the unnamed protagonist and narrator of

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON’s Autobiography of an

Ex-Colored Man discovers he is categorized as

“colored,” the realization, he explains, marks “the

miracle of my transition from one world into an-

other” (785). The son of a light-skinned African-

American mother and a white, Southern father,

the narrator finds himself subject to the prejudices

of a caste system that categorizes any person with

“one drop” of black blood as African-American.

Johnson uses his protagonist’s precarious racial

position to explore American race relations in the

early 20th century. As Johnson develops the racial

tension of the novel, he also probes the psycho-

logical effects this tension has on the narrator’s

identification with both the white and black races.

After his schoolteacher publicly identifies him

as a Negro, the narrator is cast out from the circle

of white children and is unwilling to consort with

the black children; instead, he develops an absorb-

ing passion for the piano as a means of alleviating

his loneliness. The narrator carries these two lega-

cies of his childhood—racial alienation and musi-

cal interest—with him as he journeys through the

United States and Europe

in search of a satisfying

life. He seeks an identity through different roles in

a variety of black communities: as a student at At-

lanta University, a cigar maker in the middle class

black community of Jacksonville, Florida, a master

ragtime player in the black New York nightclub

scene; and finally, a collector of black folk music

in rural Georgia. Certain attitudes and actions of

the narrator, however, suggest his unwillingness to

identify fully with African Americans. The black

underclass of Atlanta, for example, unsettles him,

as does the sight of a white woman with a dark-

skinned black man in a New York nightclub. Like-

wise, although he reaches the pinnacle of black

folk culture as the best ragtime player in New York,

he plays for predominantly white audiences before

accompanying a white benefactor to Europe as his

personal pianist.

A renewed commitment to African Americans

and African-American culture briefly leads the

narrator back to the South, where he hopes to

help uplift the black race by collecting folk songs.

However, when he witnesses the brutal lynching of

a black man in Macon, Georgia, and the “shame

at being identified with a people that could with

impunity be treated worse than animals” (853), he

leaves the South. Returning to New York, he suc-

cessfully passes into the white community, adopts

its goal of making money, marries a white woman,

and raises two children who know nothing of their

racial heritage. The novel concludes with the nar-

rator thinking admiringly of the dedicated Afri-

can-American activists and wondering wistfully

whether he has “chosen the lesser part” by selling

his “birthright for a mess of pottage” (861).

Published anonymously and with little fanfare

in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

sold poorly. When Johnson republished the novel

in 1927—this time with his authorship acknowl-

edged and the British spelling “coloured” in the

title—it was more widely read and more warmly

received. Published at the peak of the HARLEM

RENAISSANCE, the second edition found a reading

public that was more attuned to the issues John-

son addressed. Indeed, the novel had anticipated

a number of the concerns of the Harlem Re-

naissance, including the celebration of African-

American folk culture, a vibrant black urban life

emerging in the North, and the struggle toward

an African-American racial identity. More im-

portant, with the portrayal of a light-skinned Af-

rican-American protagonist, Johnson followed in

the tradition of the “tragic mulatto” established

by such writers as William Wells Brown, FRANCES

HARPER, and CHARLES CHESNUTT, reinvigorating the

Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, The 21

conventions with a rich psychological complexity

that would influence later authors such as WALTER

WHITE, JESSIE FAUSET, and NELLA LARSEN. Johnson’s

protagonist is the first major fictive representation

of W. E. B. DUBOIS’s concept of double conscious-

ness, and this nameless searching soul would serve

as a prototype of sorts for RALPH ELLISON’s protag-

onist in INVISIBLE MAN (1952).

In the end, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored

Man’s complex blend of styles—picaresque, psy-

chological realism, social protest, and autobiogra-

phy—speaks to Johnson’s artistry. More than any

other aspect of the work, however, the narrator’s

characterization gives the novel its power. A highly

ironic character, he describes his reason for tell-

ing his story as a “savage and diabolical desire to

gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn

them into a practical joke on society” (778). De-

spite his attempts to maintain this detached ironic

distance from his story, his inability to live com-

fortably with his decisions marks him, instead, as

the object of the author’s irony. The protagonist’s

inability to control fully his own narrative mirrors

the numerous contradictions in his personality. He

is alternately a man of astonishing brilliance and

absurd naiveté, of strong voice and weak will, of

determination and vacillation, of racial commit-

ment and racial renunciation. The last of these

contradictions, in particular, has led some readers

to take issue with the novel and even mistake John-

son for his narrator, but it is this rich ambiguity of

characterization and range of possible interpreta-

tions that has engaged new generations of read-

ers and assured the novel a place of prominence in

American literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fleming, Robert E. James Weldon Johnson. Blooming-

ton: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Greene, J. Lee. Blacks in Eden: The African American

Novel’s First Century. Charlottesville: University

Press of Virginia, 1996.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-

Colored Man. In The Norton Anthology of African

American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates,

Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, 777–861. New York: W.

W. Norton, 1997.

Price, Kenneth M., and Lawrence J. Oliver, eds. Criti-

cal Essays on James Weldon Johnson. Critical Es-

says on American Literature. New York: G. K. Hall,

1997.

Andrew B. Leiter

Autobiography of Malcolm X, The

Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex

Haley (1965)

In this classic autobiography, MALCOLM X chron-

icles a life that epitomizes in every way LANGSTON

HUGHES’s speaker in “Mother to Son,” who de-

clares at the beginning of the poem, “Life for me

ain’t been no crystal stairs.” Malcolm titles the first

chapter of his autobiography “Nightmare,” and

he describes his “earliest vivid memory” as the

“nightmare night in 1929” when he was “suddenly

snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pis-

tol shots and shouting and smoke and flames. . . .

Our home was burning down around us. We were

lunging and bumping and tumbling all over each

other trying to escape” (3). Like RICHARD WRIGHT

in BLACK BOY, Malcolm in the Autobiography bears

witness to the atrocities and destructiveness of

American racism, particularly to young African-

American males growing up in a Jim Crow–domi-

nated America. In the Autobiography, Malcolm

revisits his lived experiences, dividing them into

three distinct stages, which are clearly demarcated

by the personal transformation, metamorphosis,

and accompanying name changes he undergoes as

he moves from a life as almost orphaned to life as

a street hustler to a spiritual life shaped by Islamic

teachings and beliefs.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925,

to Reverend Earl and Louise Little, Malcolm, one

of eight children, became (in part because of his

light skin) the dearly beloved child of his father, an

itinerant minister and leader-organizer for MAR-

CUS GARVEY’s “Back to Africa” Universal Negro

Improvement Association (UNIA) movement in

Lansing, Michigan. Reverend Little’s involvement

with what many “good Christian white people”

(1)—including members of the Black Legionnaires

and Ku Klux Klan—considered a troublemaking,

22 Autobiography of Malcolm X, The

radical black movement led to his violent murder

during which his badly beaten body, run over by

a streetcar, was almost cut in two. Although Mal-

colm was six, he recollects the nightmare of it all.

Malcolm records the tragic consequences caused

by the deterioration and eventual separation of his

family, including his mother’s mental breakdown

and the inevitable separation of his family, when he

and his siblings were placed in foster care. Despite

the ensuing instability in his young life, Malcolm

excelled educationally and even became president

and valedictorian of his eight-grade class. How-

ever, Malcolm’s aspiration to become a lawyer by

profession was discouraged by his English teacher,

who told him, “you have got to be realistic about

being a nigg*r. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal

for a nigg*r. You need to think about something

you can be” (36).

After dropping out of school during his teen-

age years, Malcolm relocated to Boston to live with

his half sister, Ella. There, he was introduced to the

black middle class,

which he rejected outright for

city life and particularly the black underclass life he

found in the Roxbury section of Boston. Employed

first as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland State Ball-

room—where he learned to lindy hop, conked his

hair, and was tutored by his new streetwise friend

Shorty—and later as a waiter on the railroad, trav-

eling the eastern corridor from Boston to New

York on the “Yankee Clipper,” he fell prey to and

embraced the underworld of criminality, drugs,

and burglary that dominated his Harlem environ-

ment. To immerse himself fully in his new lifestyle,

Malcolm, at age 17, moved from Boston to Harlem,

where his new surrogate fathers, including Charlie

Small and West Indian Archie, schooled him “in

such hustles as the numbers, pimping, con games

of many kinds, peddling dope, and thievery of all

sorts, including armed robbery” (83). Malcolm

confesses, “A roll of money was in my pocket. Every

day, I cleared at least fifty or sixty dollars. In those

days . . . this was a fortune to a seventeen-year-old

Negro. I felt, for the first time in my life, that great

feeling of free!” (99). Thus, hustling, Malcolm was

convinced at this stage of his life, provided an av-

enue through which he could challenge the world

that insisted on emasculating him. Sidone Smith

argues, “through criminality, he [Malcolm] recov-

ers his manhood”; he is no longer the “mastered

but the master” (79). After learning his lessons

well, Malcolm, whose street name was “Detroit

Red,” eventually landed in prison, having “sunk to

the very bottom of the American white man’s soci-

ety” (150), where he remained from 1946 to 1952.

While in prison Malcolm reeducated himself

by reading the dictionary and the works of the old

philosophers, “Occidental and Oriental,” and was

introduced to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad,

the leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Black

Muslims. According to Michael Eric Dyson, “Mal-

colm was drawn to the Nation of Islam because

of the character of its black nationalist practices

and beliefs: its peculiar gift for rehabilitating black

male prisoners; its strong emphasis on black pride,

history, culture, and unity; and its unblinking as-

sertion that white men were devils” (Dyson, 6).

Literacy, for Malcolm, as for FREDERICK DOUGLASS,

became his key to his desired freedom and trans-

formation. Malcolm writes, “I knew right there in

prison that reading had changed forever the course

of my life” (Autobiography, 179). Upon his release,

Malcolm, who at his conversion to Islam changed

his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X and

was personally mentored by Elijah Muhammad,

his new surrogate father, became the assistant

minister of the Detroit Temple Number One, a

minister of Harlem’s Temple Number Seven, and,

within a short time, the NOI’s most visible leader

and powerful spokesperson, preaching to the black

masses across the nation that “Our enemy is the

white man!” (251). This transformation began the

second phase of his life.

Distraught when a personal rift between him

and Elijah Muhammad—over Muhammad’s al-

leged extramarital affairs, as well as their growing

political differences—led to his ouster and silenc-

ing, Malcolm took the requisite pilgrimage, the

Hajj, to the Muslims’ holy city, Mecca. This spiri-

tual journey initiated the final phase of Malcolm’s

life; he became El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz. In Mecca,

where he had witnessed “The people of all races,

color coming together as one!” (338), Malcolm

discovered the true brotherhood of humankind

as taught by orthodox Islam, which encourages

Autobiography of Malcolm X, The 23

everyone, irrespective of race or color, to honor

the same God, Allah. Returning to America, after

also visiting Africa and the Arab nations, Malcolm

began teaching that “if racism could be removed,

America could offer a society where rich and poor

could truly live like human beings” (371). Before

leaving on his pilgrimage, he had founded the

Moslem Mosque, Inc., to work within the Ameri-

can mainstream and more cooperatively with

extant civil rights leaders. Reflecting on his meta-

morphosis from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X to

El Shabazz, Malcolm concluded, “it is only after the

deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it

is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest

appreciation of freedom can come” (379).

Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965

at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, where

he had gone to talk about the Organization of Af-

rican Unity (OAU), which he had founded. He was

married to Betty (Sanders) Shabazz, the mother of

his six daughters: Attallah, Qubilah, Ilyasah, Gami-

lah, and Malaak and Malika, twin girls.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X not only re-

cords Malcolm X’s effort to assess and even shape

his historical and personal importance but also

reveals his complexity as an individual who, as

Dyson notes, was willing, in his quest for truth, “to

be self-critical and to change his direction [which

is] an unfailing sign of integrity and courage”

(Dyson, 17). Malcolm X has been resurrected as

an important icon at the end of the 20th century.

His influence and ideas continue to be felt. He is,

says Robin Kelly, “a sort of tabula rasa, or blank

slate, on which people of different positions can

write their own interpretation of his politics and

legacy” (1236).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dyson, Michael Eric. Making Malcolm: The Myth and

Meaning of Malcolm X. New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1995.

Kelly, Robin. “Malcolm X.” In Africana: The Ency-

clopedia of the African and African American Ex-

perience, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1233–1236. New York:

Basic Civitas Books, 1999.

Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley. The

Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine

Books, 1965.

Smith, Sidone. Where I Am Bound: Patterns of Slav-

ery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography.

Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The

Ernest Gaines (1971)

One of ERNEST GAINES’s most popular novels, The

Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has as its title

character one of African-American literature’s

most memorable characters. The novel spans

Jane’s entire life—all 110 years. Her “autobiogra-

phy” is recounted to an African-American high

school teacher collecting oral personal histories.

His voice frames the narrative, but Jane’s artful sto-

rytelling becomes the core of the novel. Her his-

tory marks the years between the Civil War and the

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT of the 1960s. Jane’s trans-

formation from slave to free woman illustrates the

changes in American society over the span of her

lifetime. In genre, the work is a neo–slave narra-

tive, modeling itself after the thousands of oral and

written narratives of former slaves but presented

in a contemporary fictional form. The purpose of

such novels, including TONI MORRISON’s BELOVED, is

to highlight the connections between the past hor-

rors of slavery and the present problems of racism.

Jane’s account begins with her life as a slave

named Ticey at the close of the Civil War. A Yan-

kee soldier befriends her and suggests that she take

a new name to represent her new freedom. She

chooses the given name Jane and, in the tradition

of true slave narratives, pays respect to the soldier

who helped her by taking his surname, Brown. For

a time, she dreams of moving North to the “prom-

ised land,” but after federal troops leave the South,

following Reconstruction, Jane is convinced that

the North holds little more promise of freedom

than the South. Jane’s life is also disrupted by fam-

ily tragedy: Racists murder an adopted son, and

her husband is killed in an accident.

24 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman repre-

sents the numerous stories of slave life that have

been silenced in history. Though a fictional per-

sona, Jane embodies both

the triumph and the

suffering of many unknown, but real, men and

women. The closing scene of the novel, where Jane

finally drinks from a “whites only” fountain, por-

trays the victory of the African-American spirit

over adversity.

Tracie Church Guzzio

Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The 25

��

Baker, Houston A., Jr. (1943– )

Born and raised in “racist, stultifying” Louisville,

Kentucky, Houston Baker is one of the preemi-

nent scholars and critical theorists of African-

American literature in the United States today.

Over the course of his career, Baker has published

numerous theoretical works, scores of scholarly

essays, and several works of poetry and edited

scholarly collections, including his anthology

Black Literature in America (1971). He served as

the first black president of the Modern Language

Association of America. He has held teaching ap-

pointments at numerous prestigious universities,

including Yale (1968–1970), University of Virginia

(1970–1974), University of Pennsylvania (1974–

1998), and Duke University (1998–present). He

received his B.A. from Howard University in 1965

and his Ph.D. from the University of California at

Los Angeles in 1968.

In his poetry, Baker presents the Louisville of

his childhood as a socially complicated site where,

on the one hand, economic decline and white

racism led to intense feelings of “hatred, bitter-

ness, longing.” On the other hand, the same site

was significant because it provided Baker with a

real sense of communality with his predecessors.

Baker writes in “This Is Not a Poem,” “Had you

been there while I was growing up, or / Even in the

thin / worn time of their decline, / I would have

introduced you. / Allowed you to share the fine

goodness of ancestral / Caring.” The constant pull

between the hatred of racism and appreciation of

communality rooted in a specific location is char-

acteristic of Baker’s critical output.

Whereas his dissertation and first publications

focused on Victorian poetry, throughout the ma-

jority of his career Baker’s work has been cen-

trally concerned with theoretical paradigms for

studying vernacular literatures. Baker argues that

canons that are built not on conventional works

of high literary and cultural value but written in

what he calls “standard” language require their

own individuated modes of criticism. The study of

African-American literature, he concludes, needs

to follow principles rooted in African-American

aesthetic experience. The BLUES, then, and specifi-

cally blues musicians like Robert Johnson “at the

crossroads,” become generative figures for mak-

ing meaning out of African-American art. When

combined with the philosophical, social, and

linguistic considerations of “high” theorists like

G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx and of contempo-

raries like Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson,

Baker’s approach puts the sociocultural signifi-

cance of the art into dialogue with works written

in “standard” languages. As Baker states in one

of his seminal works, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-

American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984),

“Afro-American culture is a complex, reflexive

enterprise which finds its proper figuration in

blues conceived as a matrix. . . . The matrix is

a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of

intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in pro-

ductive transit” (3).

In more recent works, Baker has turned to

questions of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic

hybridities in which language is multiply marked

by intersecting and mutually influential matrices.

Rap music, modernism, and the HARLEM RENAIS-

SANCE are all subjects of critique, as Baker looks

at ways in which vernacular languages existing on

the periphery of American literature come into

contact with, influence, and are influenced by a

standardized, “central” American canon. In Turn-

ing South Again (2001), Baker critiques modern

notions of citizenship as he analyzes the place of

the plantation economy in the work of BOOKER

T. WASHINGTON, and he draws parallels between

the constraints on black mobility at the turn of

the century and the contemporary “prison-indus-

trial” complex.

Unlike the conventional model of an American

academic involved only in intellectual endeavors,

Baker has been extremely active in forging rela-

tions with the multiple communities of which he is

a part. The importance of pedagogy in high school

has led to programs whereby university instruc-

tors and high school teachers exchange knowl-

edge. Baker has also stressed the need for literacy

programs in the inner cities, as well as the need

to adopt a critical stance resisting the ways racial

formation is used to continue to deprive people of

color in the United States. In short, the “invitation

to inventive play” (14) that Baker offers in Blues,

Ideology, and Afro-American Literature continues

to address imperative contemporary concerns

across the American landscape.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Houston. Black Literature in America. New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

———. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

———. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Litera-

ture: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1984.

———. Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modern-

ism/Re-reading Booker T. Durham, N.C.: Duke

University Press, 2001.

Keith Feldman

Baldwin, James (1924–1987)

James Baldwin, fiction writer, essayist, dramatist,

and poet, was born in Harlem, in New York City, in

1924. Growing up in the inner city had a profound

influence on his life and writing, often serving as a

literary and spiritual touchstone for his later works.

Baldwin attended DeWitt Clinton High School,

where he became inspired by HARLEM RENAIS-

SANCE poet and teacher COUNTEE CULLEN. After his

graduation in 1942, he met and became influenced

by RICHARD WRIGHT. During the 1950s and 1960s,

Baldwin was not only an important fiction writer

but also became, through his provocative essays, a

reckoning force in the struggle for civil rights. Bald-

win later moved to Europe in an effort to distance

himself from America’s racism and hom*ophobia.

Baldwin’s first novel was the autobiographically

charged GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (1953). In

it, he introduces a young African-American male,

John Grimes, who struggles to determine his place

in an extended dysfunctional family; moreover,

John struggles to define his racial, sexual, and re-

ligious difference within a society that demands

sameness. Baldwin would examine these themes in

all of his subsequent novels and stories. Baldwin’s

next novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), explores ho-

mosexuality in terms that few writers have matched

either before or since. David, the protagonist, is a

young American sailor who finds himself at the

crossroads of sexuality. Ultimately, David is unable

to accept his attraction to male flesh or acknowl-

edge his true feelings for Giovanni. For Baldwin,

it is not hom*osexuality per se that is the destruc-

tive force but the absence of honesty and truth in

human relationships, sexual or otherwise. This is

the central theme of ANOTHER COUNTRY (1962), his

third and perhaps most controversial novel.

Baldwin’s novels and stories of the 1960s, AN-

OTHER COUNTRY, Going to Meet the Man (1965),

Baldwin, James 27

and Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone

(1968), extend his preoccupations with various

crossings between race and sexuality. In addition,

Baldwin begins to construct an extended definition

of black manhood, a project that would continue

throughout the remainder of his published works.

Moreover, these novels become meditations on the

necessity of truth and honesty in human relation-

ships. He also wrote two plays during this time, The

Amen Corner (1968) and Blues for Mister Charlie

(1964), which were well received by audiences.

The 1970s saw Baldwin’s career as novelist begin

to wind down, but not until he produced If Beale

Street Could Talk (1974) and his last novel, Just

above My Head (1979), two very different novels

that, at the same time, are variations on the themes,

character types, and situations that constitute his

canon. Indeed, Just above My Head is culminatory

in scope and treatment as Baldwin attempts to

crown his previous achievements by producing the

quintessential narrator/witness, Hall Montana; the

fully composite black hom*osexual artist in society,

Arthur Montana; the victim-made-whole through

the renouncing of religion and the acceptance of

truth, Julia Miller; and young black males striving,

but often failing, to make their way in a society

that uses but neither values nor understands them,

the Trumpets of Zion.

Beginning in the 1950s, Baldwin’s essays ap-

peared regularly in leading literary magazines and

intellectual journals, including Harper’s, The New

Yorker, Esquire, and Partisan Review. Not only were

his topics timely and his analyses far-reaching, but

also the combination of an elegant prose style

and a driving fury seething just below the surface

established Baldwin as a true public intellectual

and an ardent spokesperson for civil rights. No-

table among these essays is “EVERYBODY’S PROTEST

NOVEL,” in which Baldwin argues for artistic free-

dom for black writers, especially from the mantra

of the protest tradition presided over by RICHARD

WRIGHT. Likewise, “The Fire Next Time” put white

America on notice and prophesied correctly the

turmoil that the civil rights struggle would become

during the 1960s.

Baldwin’s last published works also include a

brief selection of his poems, Jimmy’s Blues (1985),

and the essay collections The Devil Finds Work

(1976) and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985).

Among his unpublished manuscripts are two that

he was working on at the time of his death, “Har-

lem Quartet” and “The Welcome Table.” Though

these late works offer little that is new in terms of

Baldwin’s approach or concerns, they confirm his

continued focus on the things that had made his

writing provocative and alluring in the first place.

James Baldwin is not easily categorized as a

writer. He is modern in many ways and both tradi-

tional and contemporary in many others; that he

wrote in so many varied genres does not make such

categorization easier. For example, although he

broke with protest writing in the mid-1950s, much

of Baldwin’s work continues in the protest vein, yet

some of the works, especially If Beale Street Could

Talk and Just Above My Head, transcend protest

and become almost meditative. Similarly, many of

the essays, though they do offer protest, tend to be

cast more broadly as protests of the human con-

dition. Stylistically, Baldwin is a probing, incisive

writer who examines every nook and cranny of the

matter at hand in an effort to get at the essence

of truth, regardless of how elusive it is. His style

is often dismissed as repetitive and as evidence of

poor control, but the final revelations, regardless

of how brief, show how Baldwin adds to the clar-

ity of his examination cubit by cubit. In addition,

Baldwin’s texts have frequently been regarded as

“preacherly,” owing much to his early experience

as a child preacher in the fire-baptized church.

Even so, there is a sincerity about Baldwin’s work,

and doubtless he was committed to exposing the

whole truth, often at great personal expense. Also,

music—most often jazz, BLUES, and gospel—per-

vades Baldwin’s texts, and just as often the medita-

tion turns to musicality, musicianship, and the role

and special challenges of the musician as artist. Fi-

nally, Baldwin’s lifelong project was the construc-

tion of a definitive statement on black manhood,

a definition he sought to establish through both

fictional and nonfictional means.

Critical appreciation for James Baldwin has

been widespread, but until recently the attention

has been devoted mostly to the earlier works, while

the later works have often been neglected. There

28 Baldwin, James

are a number of interviews, reviews, articles, es-

says, full-length studies, biographies, and literary

biographies of Baldwin. Likewise, Baldwin has

been the subject of many doctoral dissertations,

conference presentations, and symposia. His work

continues to be in print and appears as part of the

Library of America series.

Clearly, James Baldwin was one of the most

important writer/activists of the 20th century. He

never wavered from what he perceived as the es-

sential role of the artist—to expose the truth and

present it for consumption—and he never abdi-

cated his responsibility as one who was charged

by his gift of talent to serve humankind through

his art. More to the point, Baldwin occupied an

important place in the continuing development of

the black masculinist tradition in African-Ameri-

can writing by both extending and transcending

protest literature. He died in France in 1987.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates. New York: Vi-

king, 1991.

Leeming, David. James Baldwin. New York: Knopf,

1994.

Miller, Quentin, ed. Re-Viewing James Baldwin:

Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 2000.

O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. James Baldwin: A Critical

Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University

Press, 1981.

Troupe, Quincy, ed. James Baldwin: A Legacy. New

York: Touchstone, 1989.

Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New

York: Laurel, 1989.

Warren J. Carson

“Ballad of Remembrance, A”

Robert Hayden (1948, 1962)

Transcending the didacticism of ROBERT HAYDEN’s

Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), “A Ballad of Re-

membrance” presages his later modernist ex-

perimentation. Occasioned by Hayden’s 1946

encounter in New Orleans with Mark Van Doren,

“A Ballad”—first published in 1948 and revised

and published again in 1962—dramatizes Hayden’s

effort to confront the legacy of slavery that threat-

ened to silence the poet’s voice.

“A Ballad’s” surrealistic imagery depicts a Mardi

Gras tradition, a parade led by a degradingly comic

Zulu king figure:

Quadroon mermaids, Afro angels, black

saints

balanced upon the switchblades of that air

and sang. . . . (1–3)

A quantifier central to America’s system of chat-

tel slavery, “Quadroon” posits “race,” a tenacious

historical artifact, as a natural division of human

existence. “Quadroon” renders the biracial female

slave’s body as exotically monstrous—it is one-

quarter “Negro” and three-quarters “other”—even

before the word “mermaid” is juxtaposed to inter-

vene. The 1948 version associates the “Quadroon

mermaids” with “the minotaurs of edict” (38).

Slavery’s institutions and their Jim Crow succes-

sors monstrously split humanity, defining some

individuals as only partially human. Institutions

policed and citizens internalized such division,

rendering New Orleans a “schizoid city” (42).

Singing as “mermaids,” “angels,” and “saints,”

marchers leave humanity silent, proclaiming and

inscribing slavery’s enduring influence. Echoing

this song, the “Zulu king” and “gun-metal priest-

ess” perpetuate their burdensome legacy and his-

tory: The line “Accommodate, muttered the Zulu

king” suggests a grotesque attempt to personify

racism’s caricatures (20). With almost silenced

voice (mutter derives from the Latin for “mute”),

oppression speaks. Embracing the inhumanity

racism fantasizes, the priestess ironically voices her

capture by the racism she would protest:

Hate, shrieked the gun-metal priestess

from her spiked bellcollar curved like a

fleur-de-lis:

As well have a talon as a finger, a muzzle

as a mouth. . . . (23–25).

After the parade disperses, the “dance,” extend-

ing the past into the present, “continued—now

“Ballad of Remembrance, A” 29

among metaphorical / doors, coffee cups float-

ing poised / hysterias . . .” (29–31). Conceptually,

segregation (“doors”) becomes “metaphorical.”

Hayden and Van Doren, while attempting to open

such doors by having coffee together in several

French Quarter restaurants, found that segrega-

tion laws made it virtually impossible for them to

do so (McClusky, 161). This biographical “dance”

with hysteric racism translates as poetic crisis.

Spellbound by this racist history, the poet cannot

voice his humanity to announce that history’s pos-

sible demise.

Van Doren delivers the poet from the “dance”

and the parade, which surged as “a threat / of

river” (15–16):

Then you arrived, meditative, ironic,

richly human; and your presence was shore

where I rested

released from the hoodoo of that dance,

where I spoke

with my true voice again. (34–37)

Encountering another’s humanity, the poet regains

what the 1948 version calls his “human voice,” and

“the minotaurs of edict dwindle f*ckless, foolish”

(37, 38). In the end, “A Ballad” exemplifies Hayden’s

continued faith that humanism may be neither fu-

tilely utopian nor perniciously ideological.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chrisman, Robert. “Robert Hayden: The Transition

Years, 1946–1948.” In Robert Hayden: Essays on

the Poetry, edited by Laurence Goldstein and Rob-

ert Chrisman, 129–154. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 2001.

Hayden, Robert. “A Ballad of Remembrance.” 1962.

In Collected Poems, edited by Frederick Glayshere.

New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,

1985.

McClusky, Paul. “Robert Hayden: The Poet and His

Art: A Conversation.” In How I Write / 1, 133–213.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Williams, Pontheolla T. Robert Hayden: A Critical

Analysis of His Poetry. Urbana and Chicago: Uni-

versity of Illinois Press, 1987.

Robert S. Oventile

Bambara, Toni Cade (1939–1995)

Novelist, essayist, short story writer, activist, and

screenwriter Toni Cade Bambara was a prolific

artist and a spokesperson for issues affecting

black women. She was born Mitona Mirkin Cade

to Helen Brent Henderson Cade in New York City

on March 25, 1939. She grew up in Harlem, Bed-

ford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and Queens. She

took the name Toni when she entered school and

added the name Bambara later when she found

it on a sketchbook belonging to her great-grand-

mother. She attended the public schools of New

York and then entered Queens College to study

theater arts and English. After receiving her degree

in 1959, she continued her education at the Uni-

versity of Florence, where she studied commedia

dell’arte, and in Paris at École de Pantomime Eti-

enne Decroux. She returned to the United States

to complete an M.A. at City College in 1964. She

undertook additional work in linguistics at New

York University and New School for Social Re-

search. She did doctoral work at State University

of New York, Buffalo.

During this period Bambara was also involved

in community activism. During college she worked

as a social investigator for the New York Depart-

ment of Social Welfare and then for Metropolitan

Hospital and Colony House Community Center.

Later, she was part of the SEEK program of City

College and the New Careers Program in Newark,

New Jersey.

Her first short story, “Sweet Town,” published

while she was a student, received the John Golden

Award for fiction. In 1970, she published The Black

Woman, an anthology of poetry, essays, and stories

by NIKKI GIOVANNI, ALICE WALKER, AUDRE LORDE,

and others. Her second collection, Tales and Sto-

ries for Black Folks, included works by both estab-

lished African-American authors and students of

Livingston College of Rutgers University, where

Bambara was teaching at the time.

In 1972, she published Gorilla, My Love, a col-

lection of stories written between 1959 and 1970.

They were narrated in the voices of black women

of different ages, from childhood to maturity,

and had both northern urban and southern rural

settings. They made considerable use of the oral

30 Bambara, Toni Cade

tradition and are distinguished by the speech pat-

terns of the narrators. In “The Lesson,” “My Man

Bovanne,” and the title story, she affirms the expe-

riences of the black community and especially the

women in it.

During the period after this publication, she

traveled to Cuba and Vietnam and established

ties to women’s organizations in those countries.

She also moved to Atlanta with her daughter. In

1977, she published her second collection of sto-

ries, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, which was in-

fluenced by these experiences. The key characters

of several of the stories are community activists

who must come to terms with the complexities of

a black community pulled in different directions

while still suffering the effects of racism. Within

the community, there is conflict over political and

gender issues. The heroic figures are women who

try to engage these concerns while moving the

community forward.

In her first novel, The Salt Eaters (1980), Bam-

bara continues this theme through the story of

Velma Henry, a southern activist who is trying to

hold together the centripetal forces of the social

movements in her community. Because each group

believes its cause is most important, they refuse to

cooperate and thus effectively eliminate the possi-

bility for social change. In despair, Velma attempts

suicide but is resuscitated through the efforts of

the faith healer Minnie Ransom. The message of

the text is that life inherently involves change and

that there is no secure, fixed identity for either self

or community. Life, according to Bambara in this

work, is a constant process of re-creation. The Salt

Eaters won the 1981 America Book Award.

Bambara began working in other genres after

the publication of the novel. In line with her train-

ing in theater, she had been writing screenplays for

several years. Zora had been produced in Boston

in 1971, The Johnson Girls by NET in 1972, and

Transactions by Atlanta University in 1979. In

1981, ABC produced The Long Night. Bambara

also adapted TONI MORRISON’s novel Tar Baby in

1984. Her most important film project was The

Bombing of Osage in 1986, which tells the story of

MOVE, a radical black organization that was the

target of police action, including a bomb, which

killed several people, including children, and de-

stroyed much of the neighborhood. It won awards

for best documentary from both the Pennsylvania

Association of Broadcasters and the National Black

Programming Consortium.

In 1993, she was diagnosed with colon cancer

and underwent extensive treatment. She contin-

ued to work, however, focusing her attention on

Louis Massiah’s documentary W. E. B. DuBois: A

Biography in Four Voices, which was produced in

early 1995. She died on December 9 of that year.

A collection of her essays and stories, Deep

Sightings and Rescue Missions, was edited by TONI

MORRISON and published by Pantheon in 1996.

Three years later, the same press brought out Those

Bones Are Not My Child, also edited by Morrison.

This novel was the result of 12 years of research

into the Atlanta child murders, which occurred in

the early 1980s, and traces one family’s dealings

with corruption, cover-up, and incompetence in

the investigation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schirack, Maureen. “Toni Cade Bambara, 1939–1995.”

Available online. URL: http://www.edwardsly.

com/bambara.htm. Accessed September 28, 2006.

Keith Byerman

Banneker, Benjamin (1731–1806)

A social critic, inventor, almanac compiler, as-

tronomer, mathematician, and poet, Benjamin

Banneker was, like PHILLIS WHEATLEY and OLAU-

DAH EQUIANO, living evidence to debunk prevail-

ing 18th-century ethnic notions about the innate

inferiority of Africans and their descendants. Even

the framer of the Declaration of Independence,

Thomas Jefferson, wrote, in Notes on State of Vir-

ginia, that blacks, “in reason [are] much inferior

[to whites] as I think one could scarcely be found

capable of tracing and comprehending the investi-

gations of Euclid; and in imagination they are dull

tasteless, and anomalous” (139). Banneker, the

son and grandson of former slaves and a farmer

by profession, was born free

on November 9, 1731,

on a farm near the Patapsco River, a short distance

Banneker, Benjamin 31

from Baltimore, Maryland. Although his family’s

background is not well known, he is thought to

be the son and grandson of native Africans by

some biographers, whereas others believe he is the

grandson of Mollie Welsh, “an English woman of

the servant class” (Baker 101).

Banneker’s interest in mathematics and sci-

ence made him, according to RICHARD BARKS-

DALE and Keneth Kinnamon, “the foremost Black

intellectual of the eighteenth century” (49). His

friendship with members of the Ellicott family,

prominent Quaker merchants who recognized

his genius, provided Banneker with access to the

scientific instruments, which he used to develop

his curiosity in and explore engineering and the

physical sciences, particularly astronomy. By age

20, Banneker invented what many consider the

first American clock, which he carved with a pock-

etknife from a piece of wood. According to Henry

E. Baker, Banneker’s clock “stood as a perfect piece

of machinery, and struck the hours with faultless

precision for a period of 20 years” (106). By age

60, the primarily self-taught Banneker published

his first Banneker’s New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Dela-

ware, Maryland and Virginia Almanac or Ephemeris

(1791). Unlike many of his contemporary fellow

astronomers, Banneker successfully predicted the

solar eclipse of April 1789. Banneker’s Almanac,

although short lived, was viewed favorably along

with its rival, Poor Richard’s Almanac, which was

published by the better-known inventor-states-

man Benjamin Franklin.

Recognizing Banneker’s genius, President

George Washington appointed him, along with

Major Andrew Ellicott, to a commission headed by

the French civil engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant to

survey the Federal Territory, the future District of

Columbia, Washington, D.C. Announcing Bannek-

er’s appointment, the Georgetown Weekly Ledger

(March 12, 1791) called Banneker “an Ethiopian,”

noting that his “abilities as surveyor and astrono-

mer already prove that Mr. Jefferson’s concluding

that that race of men were void of mental endow-

ment was without foundation” (Baker, 121). As

Winthrop Jordan points out in White Over Black,

“Ironically, Banneker’s nomination had come from

the Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson” (450).

Although Banneker is credited with writing

poetry, his verses, primarily mathematical and sci-

entific riddles, pale in comparison to the works of

better-known 18th-century poets GEORGE MOSES

HORTON and Phillis Wheatley. His poem in which

a vintner hires a cooper to make a bathtub is

exemplary.

The top and the bottom diameter define

To bear that proportion as fifteen to nine,

Thirty-five inches are just what I crave,

No more and no less, in depth will I have;

Just thirty nine gallons this vessel must

hold,—

Then I will reward you with silver or gold.

The speaker’s ultimate concern is found in the

final couplet:

Now my worthy friend, find out, if you can,

The vessel’s dimensions and comfort the

man!

(Loggins, 40)

Banneker’s greatest literary legacy, however, is

the letter exchange he engaged in with Jefferson.

Not only aware Jefferson’s public stance and pub-

lished theory on the innate inferiority of blacks

but also certain that he was living proof to the con-

trary, in 1791 Banneker sent Jefferson a copy of his

Almanac with a cover letter in which he politely

chided the Secretary of State:

Sir, if these are sentiments of which you are

fully persuaded, I hope you cannot but ac-

knowledge, that it is the indispensable duty of

those, who maintain for themselves the rights

of human nature, and who possess the obli-

gations of Christianity, to extend their power

and influence to the relief of every part of the

human race, from whatever burden or oppres-

sion they may unjustly labor under. . . . Sir, I

have long been convinced, that if your love

for yourselves, and for those inestimable laws,

which preserved to you the rights of human

nature, was founded on sincerity, you could

not but be solicitous, that every individual,

32 Banneker, Benjamin

of whatever rank or distinction, might with

you equally enjoy the blessings thereof.” (Ban-

neker, 51)

Banneker unabashedly informed Jefferson that the

“train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which

so generally prevails with respect to the Negro

should now be eradicated. Jefferson’s response

conveys a sense of sincerity: “no body wishes more

than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that

nature has given our black brethren, talents equal

to those of the other colours of men.” (quoted in

Baker, 110–111)

Committed to peace and justice, Banneker sug-

gested in an Almanac essay that the U.S. govern-

ment add to the president’s cabinet a secretary of

peace to offset the existing Department of War.

Banneker died in October 1806.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Henry E. “Benjamin Banneker, The Negro

Mathematician and Astronomer.” Journal of Negro

History 3 (April 1918): 99–118.

Banneker, Benjamin. “Letter to Thomas Jefferson.” In

Black Writers of America, edited by Richard Barks-

dale and Keneth Kinnamon, 50–52. New York:

Macmillan Company, 1972.

Barksdale, Richard, and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. Black

Writers of America. New York: Macmillan Com-

pany, 1972.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed-

ited by William Peden. Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1955.

Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black: American Atti-

tudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. New York: W.

W. Norton, 1968.

Loggins, Vernon. The Negro Author: His Development

in American to 1900. Port Washington, N.Y.: Ken-

nikat Press, 1931.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Baraka, Amiri (Everett LeRoi Jones)

(1934– )

Prolific essayist, dramatist, short story writer, poet,

music critic, popular culture historian, and politi-

cal activist, Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi

Jones to middle-class parents in Newark, New

Jersey. His father, Colt Leroy Jones, was a postal

supervisor, and his mother was a social worker.

After graduating from high school, where he had

amused himself by writing comic strips and sci-

ence fiction stories, he spent two years at Rutgers

University before transferring to Howard Univer-

sity, where he received a B.A. degree in English

in 1954. After his graduation, Baraka spent three

years in the U.S. Air Force, from which he was dis-

honorably discharged for submitting poetry to al-

leged communist publications.

In 1957 Baraka moved to Greenwich Village,

where he became “the most talented Black among

the Beats” (Redmond, 323); married Hettie Cohen,

a Jewish woman with whom he edited Yugin; and

became a music critic, primarily of jazz, for such

publications as Downbeat, Jazz Review, and Met-

ronome. He also founded Totem Press, which pub-

lished the works of such writers as Allen Ginsberg

and Jack Kerouac. Throughout the late 1950s,

Baraka, known for his vigorous language and

images, was not, for the most part, ideologically

driven. However, in 1960 he was invited to Cuba,

where he met with artists and writers who were

discussing the political ramifications of art and

revolution. Returning to an America deeply in the

throes of the Civil Rights movement led by MAR-

TIN LUTHER KING, JR., which was morphing into a

Black Power movement headed by MALCOLM X,

Baraka began to systematically integrate his art and

politics, particularly Black Nationalism, in order to

denounce white racism and oppression.

From 1961 to 1964 Baraka published Preface to

a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1963) and coed-

ited, with Diane DiPrima, Floating Bear, a literary

newsletter; he explored, biographically and the-

matically, his mistrust for European-American

society and culture in two plays: The Slave (1964)

and The Toilet (1964). Using African-American

music as a vehicle in Blues People: Negro Music

in White America (1963), he traced the transfor-

mation of Africans into American slaves.

Were he alive today, DuBois would undoubtedly

be able to assess critically the last 100 years as a his-

torical playing field on which African Americans—

not only through their music, including blues, jazz,

and particularly rap music, but also through their

oral and written texts—re-envisioned, redefined,

and re-represented themselves, not merely “darkly

as through a veil” but also in the multifaceted

spaces they created for themselves outside and

inside the black/white paradigm imposed on them

as a people, as writers, and as scholars of a more

dynamic black world and culture.

In light of the racial realities and marginalization

faced by African Americans, these accomplishments

did not come easily. In fact, from a legal perspective,

the double-conscious striving of African Americans

lasted into the middle of the 20th century. when

the Supreme Court rendered its 1954 decision in

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ostensibly

tearing down the doctrine of “separate but equal”

vi Encyclopedia of African-American Literature

inherent in segregationist Jim Crow laws. Black

writers, particularly Richard Wright, considered

it their responsibility to fight the same battle for

equality, as exhibited in their work.

The dilemma African-American writers faced

throughout much of the 20th century is concisely

outlined by Hoyt Fuller, a black scholar/critic and

the editor of the Negro Digest / Black World, in

his essay “Contemporary Negro Fiction” (1965),

in which he responds to John W. Aldridge’s con-

tention that “the writing of novels is basically a

process of assigning value to human experience”

(322). Were all things equal, Fuller maintains,

there would be no problem. However, a conflicting

line is drawn, he concludes, because “in practice,

if not in principle, the two major races in America

often have different values, or at least different

ways of interpreting the same values” (322). Fuller

further argues, “. . . the reading public, which is

white, must be cognizant first of the nature and

purpose of literature in general before taking the

further step toward the appreciation of that litera-

ture produced by Negroes. The failure or refusal

of both critics and public to do this in the past has

resulted in the attachment of stigma to the des-

ignation, ‘Negro literature,’ making it easy, when

desirable, to dismiss much of this literature as

inconsequential” (323). Fuller claims that “Negro

literature” is often derided as “protest literature,”

because “if it deals honestly with Negro life, it will

be accusatory toward white people, and nobody

likes to be accused, especially of crimes against the

human spirit” (324). Fuller concludes:

The reading public must realize, then, that

while it is the duty of any serious writer to

look critically and truthfully at the society of

which he is a part, and to reveal that society

to itself, the Negro writer, by virtue of his

identification with a group deliberately held

on the outer edges of that society, will, if he is

honest, call attention to that specia1 aspect of

the society’s failure. (324)

Throughout the 20th century, the question

for black writers, from James Weldon Johnson

(“Preface,” The Book of American Negro Poetry)

and Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the

Racial Mountain”) to Richard Wright (“Blueprint

for Negro Writing”), James Baldwin (“Everybody’s

Protest Novel”), Ralph Ellison (“The Art of Fic-

tion: An Interview”), and LeRoi Jones (Imamu

Amiri Baraka), became the relationship between

art and propaganda or polemics. While Elli-

son maintained that “The understanding of art

depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend

one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human

life” (175), Baraka and the architects of the Black

Arts Movement argued that “Black Art is the

aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power

Concept. As such it envisions an art that speaks

directly to the needs of and aspirations of Black

America” (Neal, 257).

Even a cursory review of the 20th-century

debate over the existence, much less the value,

of an African-American literary tradition—often

engaged in by white critics and scholars, includ-

ing Robert Bone, C. W. E. Bigsby, Warren French,

and Alfred Kazin—reveals that African-American

writers occupied both sides of the debate. It fell to

Bone to define with clarity not only what white

Western scholars saw as the problem but also what

the dilemma was for the African-American writer.

Bone wrote in his now-classic text, The Negro

Novel in America (1958):

The Negro must still structure his life in

terms of a culture to which he is denied full

access. He is at once a part of and apart from

the wider community in which he lives. His

adjustment to the dominant culture is marked

by a conflicting pattern of identification and

rejection. His deepest psychological impulses

alternate between magnetic poles of assimila-

tion and Negro nationalism. (3–4)

Black scholars, particularly Darwin T. Turner and

Hoyt Fuller, rushed to respond to Bone’s partially

correct but, they vehemently argued, flawed con-

tention. On the one hand, although Fuller noted

Bone’s understanding of the central issues, he

also conceded that generations of black writers

Introduction vii

have embraced “assimilationism.” He writes, “It is

true that some of the writers in the twenties and

thirties, Walter White and Jessie Fauset among

them, sought in their novels to illustrate how little

difference there was between Negroes and whites,

even going to the extent of presenting heroes and

heroines white enough to pass. After all, it is natu-

ral for man to want to belong, really belong, to the

society which nurtured him” (326). On the other

hand, despite acknowledging Bone’s “commend-

able effort,” Turner, in “The Negro Novel in Amer-

ica: In Rebuttal,” caustically took Bone to task for

the “errors of fact and inference, inconsistencies

and contradictions, supercilious lectures, and flip-

pant remarks often in bad taste. . . . Unfortunately,

not content to confine himself to the role of critic

and historian of individual writers, [Bone] has

presumed himself to serve as psychiatrist, philoso-

pher, and teacher not only for all Negro writers

but for all Negroes” (122).

Most scholars agree that in the 1960s and

1970s, the Black Aesthetics and Black Arts move-

ments challenged the hierarchy with radical and

militant voices that spoke cacophonously black,

insisting that blacks were not victims but agents.

For example, Baraka identified blacks as magi-

cians who own the night. Despite this challenge,

however, black writers and critics in general con-

tinued to value assimilationism, led, according

to Professor Lawrence Hogue, by “elite/middle

class African Americans” who were interested in

racial uplift, in protesting racism, and in refuting

negative images of African Americans. This [atti-

tude] kept the black/white binary firmly, coun-

terproductively, destructively, and “supremely in

place.” Here, Hogue echoes Baldwin who, in his

critique of Wright’s Native Son, “Everybody’s

Protest Novel,” in which he derided the protest

novel, argues that Bigger’s tragedy is “that he has

accepted a theology that denies his life; that he

admits the possibility of his being sub-human

and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for

his humanity according to those brutal criteria

bequeathed him at his birth” (23). According

to Baldwin, Bigger seeks “acceptance within the

present community” (23).

Hogue argues that the acceptance of a black/

white binary “failed to engage and appreciate Afri-

can American differences, rich cultural diversity

and approaches to life that comprise American/

African American life” (2). Ironically, it also cre-

ated yet another paradigm, the elite or black mid-

dle-class norm/center, reducing African-American

differences to a “singular formation.”

Hogue demands that a wider net be cast—one

that would include, embrace, and

Also

in 1964 Baraka established his reputation as a

playwright when his controversial Obie Award–

winning play, Dutchman (1963), was produced

Baraka, Amiri 33

off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theater in New

York City. Eventually made into a film, this play,

through its main characters, Clay and Lula, sug-

gests, as DARWIN T. TURNER points out, “the man-

ner in which the white world destroys the black

who intellectually has become a threat; simulta-

neously, it denounces the black who chooses to

use his knowledge in sterile pursuits rather than

directing it toward the destruction of oppres-

sion” (18). Despite the anger his work expresses,

Baraka remained committed, until he was deeply

affected by the assassination of MALCOLM X in

1965, to Western aesthetics, specifically Western

use of language.

Following Malcolm X’s death, however, Baraka

revised his artistic perspective and commitment,

prioritizing a more functional art as demanded by

a traditional African and black aesthetic. Together

with LARRY NEAL he spearheaded the BLACK ARTS

MOVEMENT and founded the short lived Black

Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem to produce agi-

tation-propaganda (agitprop) plays and poetry

that strictly addressed the needs and liberation of

black people. Baraka and Neal identified the utili-

tarian function of art in the black community in

their respective works, “Black Art” and the “Black

Arts Movement.” Baraka announced the urgency

for transition and revolution in “SOS”—“Calling

all black people / . . . Wherever you are. . . . / . . .

come in, black people, come / on in”—and penned

“Black Art,” which became the movement’s mani-

festo: “Poems are bullsh*t unless they are / teeth

or trees or lemons piled / on a step. . . . We want

‘poems that kill.’ / Assassin poems. Poems that

shoot / guns.” Neal explained:

Neal pronounced that “The Black Arts Move-

ment is radically opposed to any concept of the

artist that alienates him from his community.

Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister

of the Black Power concept, as such, it envi-

sions an art that speaks directly to the needs

and aspirations of Black America. In order to

perform this task, the Black Arts Movement

proposes a radical reordering of the western

cultural aesthetic” (257).

In 1968 Baraka and Neal coedited Black Fire,

the signature anthology of black revolutionary lit-

erature. Baraka’s play Home on the Range was per-

formed as a benefit for the Black Panther Party.

In 1969 his Great Goodness of Life became part of

the Successful Black Quartet off-Broadway, and his

play Slave Ship was widely reviewed.

In New Jersey Baraka became a leading politi-

cal voice; he founded and chaired the Congress of

African People, a nationalist Pan-Africanist orga-

nization, and was one of the chief organizers of

the National Black Political Convention, which

convened in Gary, Indiana. He also founded Spirit

House Players and produced two plays, Police and

Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself, that addressed police

brutality in urban black communities. In addition,

Baraka divorced from Hettie Cohen, with whom

he had fathered two children; married Sylvia Rob-

inson (Amina Baraka), an African-American with

whom he fathered five children; became a Mus-

lim; changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka;

and committed himself completely to black lib-

eration and Black Nationalism. He assumed

leadership of Kawaida, founded to promote the

ideology of Black Muslims and Black Nationalism

and, from 1968 until 1975, was the chairman of

the Committee for Unified Newark, becoming, as

Eugene Redmond noted, “the most influential of

the young activist poets” of his generation (12).

In 1974, disappointed and disgruntled with

both Islamic and Black Nationalist ideology,

Baraka dropped Imamu (“teacher”) from his

name and soon thereafter embraced a more Marx-

ist-Leninist position. In 1983 he and Amina edited

Confirmation: An Anthology of African American

Women, which won an American Book Award

from the Before Columbus Foundation, and in

1987 they published The Music: Reflections on Jazz

and Blues. Baraka independently published his

life story, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri

Baraka, in 1984.

Baraka has won numerous literary prizes, in-

cluding a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a

National Endowment of the Arts Grant, the PEN /

Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award

for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award from

34 Baraka, Amiri

the City University of New York. He has held teach-

ing positions at various universities, including the

New School for Social Research, the University of

Buffalo, Columbia University, Yale University, and

San Francisco State University. Most recently, he

served as the Poet Laureate of New Jersey until he

was removed for writing poetry that some critics

considered anti-Semitic.

Like W. E. B. DUBOIS, JAMES BALDWIN, and

RICHARD WRIGHT, Amiri Baraka is one of the most

important writers and cultural critics of 20th-cen-

tury America. He has striven, with the same force

of his rejection of European-American society and

cultural norms, to create a more didactic art that

reflects clearly the values of African-American cul-

ture, the richness of its history, and the complexity

of its multifaceted community.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baraka. Amiri. The Autobiography of Le Roi Jones /

Amiri Baraka. New York: Freundlich Books, 1984.

Bentson, Kimberly. Baraka: The Renegade and the

Mask. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.

Jones, Leroi. The Baptism: the Toilet. Evergreen Play-

script. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” In The Black

Aesthetics, edited by Addison Gayle, 257–274. Gar-

den City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972.

Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of

Afro-American Poetry, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor

Books, 1976.

Turner, Darwin T., ed. Black Drama in America.

Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1971.

Raymond E. Jannifer

Barksdale, Richard K. (1915–1993)

Richard K. Barksdale, the son of Simon and Sarah

Brooks Barksdale, the brother of Phillips, Mason,

and Clement, was born October 31, 1915, in Win-

chester, Massachusetts. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate

of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (1937),

Barksdale received two master’s degrees in En-

glish, one from Syracuse University (1938) and the

other from Harvard University (1947). In 1951,

he became the second African American to earn

a Ph.D. degree in English from Harvard. Bowdoin

awarded him an honorary doctor of humane let-

ters degree in 1972.

Barksdale began his illustrious teaching and

administrative career in the Deep South at sev-

eral historically black colleges and universities

(HBCUs), including Southern University, Touga-

loo College, North Carolina Central University,

and Morehouse College. The culmination of these

HBCU achievements was his appointment as pro-

fessor of English and dean of the graduate school

at Atlanta University. In 1971, Barksdale joined the

faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign-

Urbana as professor of English and graduate dean.

He remained there until his retirement as professor

emeritus in English in 1986. After retiring, Barks-

dale became distinguished visiting professor at nu-

merous colleges and universities, his appointments

including the Langston Hughes Visiting Profes-

sorship in American and African-American Lit-

erature at the University of Kansas (spring 1986),

Tallman Visiting Professor of English Literature at

Bowdoin College (fall 1986), visiting professor in

African-American Literature at Grinnell College

(April 1987), the United Negro College Fund Dis-

tinguished Scholar at Rust College (spring 1988),

and visiting professor in African-American Litera-

ture at the University of Missouri, Columbia (fall

1988).

The author of many articles on the African-

American literary tradition, Barksdale’s work

appeared in numerous scholarly journals, includ-

ing the COLLEGE LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION JOURNAL,

Phylon,

Black American Literature Forum, and the

Western Humanities Review. Coeditor, with Keneth

Kinnamon, of the first BLACK AESTHETICS anthol-

ogy, BLACK WRITERS OF AMERICA: A COMPREHEN-

SIVE ANTHOLOGY (Macmillan, 1972), Barksdale is

credited with having greatly influenced the Black

Aesthetics perspective of CALL AND RESPONSE: THE

RIVERSIDE ANTHOLOGY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN

LITERARY TRADITION (Houghton Mifflin, 1997),

edited by Patricia Liggins Hill, Bernard W. Bell,

Trudier Harris, William Harris, R. Baxter Miller,

and Sondra A. O’Neale, with Horace A. Porter.

Barksdale, Richard K. 35

Barksdale is also the author of Langston Hughes:

The Poet and His Critics (1977) and his swan-song

collection of selected essays, Praisesong of Survival:

Lectures and Essays, 1957–1989 (University of Il-

linois Press, 1992), in which his defining, signature

essay, “Critical Theory and Problems of Canonic-

ity in African American Literature” presents his

insightful message; “African American literature

cannot effectively survive critical approaches that

stress authorial depersonalization and the essential

unimportance of racial history, racial community,

and racial traditions.”

Barksdale was one of the founding presidents of

the COLLEGE LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION (1973–1975),

a major organization for blacks who taught En-

glish, as the doors of the segregated Modern Lan-

guage Association were still closed to them at that

time. He was also one of the founding presidents

of the Langston Hughes Society (1981–1983),

which granted him the Langston Hughes Prize

in 1986. In 1989, he received three major awards:

the Therman B. O’Daniel Distinguished Educa-

tor Award presented by the Middle Atlantic Writ-

ers Association, the National Council of Teachers

of English Black Caucus Distinguished Educator

Award, and the Olaudah Equiano Distinguished

Award for Pioneering Achievements in African

American Literature and Culture. He was a distin-

guished member of the advisory committee for the

Mellon Humanities Program for Black Colleges

from 1975 to 1979, the Graduate Record Exami-

nation Administrative Board from 1976 to 1978,

and the University of Illinois Press Board from

1982 to 1986. He was also a consultant for the Ford

Foundation from 1968 to 1970; the Commission

on Higher Education, North Central Association

from 1973 to 1986; and the National Endowment

for the Humanities in 1983.

Barksdale was married to Mildred Barksdale

(1922–2000), the first black to receive the rank of

professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta,

who joined him at the University of Illinois at Ur-

bana-Champaign as assistant dean of the College

of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He was the father of

four children—Maxine, Richard Jr. (deceased),

Calvin, and James—and seven grandchildren—

Nikomis, James Jr., Adam, Andrew, Kirby, Nathan,

and Samuel. Although trained as a British Victo-

rian scholar, Barksdale was, during the 20th cen-

tury, one of the major literary and critical voices

of the African-American literary tradition, partic-

ularly as a black literary historian and Black Aes-

thetic theorist and critic, having written in the area

for nearly four decades. His literary legacy lives on,

as it continues to expand and influence indelibly

the broader literary world and the Africana literary

tradition in particular.

Clenora Hudson-Weems

Barlow, George (1948– )

Although born in Berkeley, poet George Barlow

grew up in Richmond, California. After receiving

his B.A. in English from California State Univer-

sity, Hayward (1970), he completed an M.F.A.

degree in English from the University of Iowa

(1972), where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow

and a Ford Foundation Fellow. Returning to the

University of Iowa after teaching courses in cre-

ative writing and African-American literature at

DeAnza College and Contra Costa College for

more than a decade, Barlow received an M.A. de-

gree in American studies in 1992.

Barlow has published two collections of poems,

Gabriel (1974), a Broadside Press publication, and

Gumbo (1981), which was published by Doubleday

as a 1981 National Poetry Series selection (selected

by ISHMAEL REED). He coedited, with Grady Hill-

man and Maude Meehan, About Time III: An An-

thology of California Prison Writing (William James

Associates, 1987). His poetry is included in such

major anthologies as Trouble the Water (1997),

edited by Jerry Ward; In Search of Our Color Ev-

erywhere (1994), edited by E. ETHELBERT MILLER;

and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century Afri-

can American Poetry (1996), edited by CLARENCE

MAJOR. His work has also been published in such

leading journals as The American Poetry Review,

Obsidian, CALLALOO, and The Iowa Review.

Although he cannot be placed fully within the

camp of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT and its major

architects, thematically Barlow’s poetry resounds

with many of the central tenets of this movement,

36 Barlow, George

particularly its celebration of the African-Ameri-

can community, black family, history, culture, and

black masculinity. However, his work is not unlike

that of the more traditionalist ROBERT HAYDEN in

its approach to these themes. For example, Bar-

low is interested in paying homage to black slaves

who made a difference, as Hayden does in “Ga-

briel,” “Frederick Douglass,” and “The Ballad of

Nat Turner.”

Barlow makes this celebration his primary task

in the title poem of his first published collection

of poems, “Gabriel,” a praisesong for the heroic

life and action of Gabriel Prosser. An educated, re-

bellious blacksmith-slave, Prosser is credited with

attempting to lead a slave revolt in Richmond,

Virginia, with, according to Herbert Aptheker,

more than a thousand “conscious revolutionist[s]”

in 1800. The planned insurrection was literally

washed out by torrential rains, as Barlow chron-

icles: “Wind, rain, / cracks in the sky: / a stranger

storm / has come to stop / the march; / high water

/ splashing from hell; / . . . / Gabriel / & one thou-

sand armed blacks / can’t cross / into Richmond.”

Prosser and several of his followers were hung for

their revolutionary plot.

However, unlike Hayden, who focuses on Ga-

briel’s death in his poem, Barlow concentrates

on the totality of his character’s life, emphasizing

from the outset Gabriel’s complexity as a black

man-slave-rebel-leader-trumpeter. “He is Gabriel;

/ black man & slave; / blacksmith / rebel leader;

/ Thom Prosser’s nigg*r; / black man, armed &

thinking, blending with the landscape, plotting in

the swamp.” Consequently, Barlow’s Gabriel trum-

pets “death / in life / & life in death.” Like John

the Baptist, Gabriel is prophet preparing the way

for the ultimate revolutionary and liberator, Nat

Turner: “Our own substance / black flesh, black

bone / black fiber & liquid— / a newborn war-

rior— / our son, Nat! Nat Turner.” Born in Virginia

in 1800, the year of Prosser’s failed revolt, Turner

led a successful slave insurrection in Southampton

County 30 years later.

Barlow’s signature style, rhythm, and themes

are deeply submerged in black culture, par-

ticularly music, from folk ditties, Negro spiritu-

als—W. E. B. DUBOIS’s “sorrow songs”—and the

BLUES to contemporary rhythm-and-blues and

jazz. He successfully incorporates these styles by

using antiphonal narrators, or call and response:

(“Steal Away, brother, steal away / question & ques-

tion / Run away, run away”), song titles and lyrics

(“Bitch’s Brew,” “Hear it in the dark / Here is the

spirit in the dark”), and musicians (Aretha, Maha-

lia, Nina, B. B., Otis, Sam, Billie, Diz, and Bird).

Barlow seems to suggest that music is the single

most important means to both knowledge and

understanding of black culture and community,

which Barlow demands that we “feel . . . in the

spirit / feel . . . in the dark.” In the spirit in the dark

one can descend into memory (to “re / remember,”

to use a TONI MORRISON trope) to experience con-

tinuity, the fluidity of the

past and present. Black

history, the history that records Prosser’s experi-

ence, is, unlike linear Western history, synchronic,

like the planting and harvesting seasons that beat

out the rhythms of traditional life and record rit-

ual praise songs for heroic communal members.

Like Prosser, Barlow becomes cultural trumpeter,

a spirit in the dark.

Not surprisingly, Barlow’s work is replete with

humor and the language of signifying, as is clearly

seen in “The Place Where He Arose,” with its focus

on an urban, cool, posed, styling, profiling brother-

man, determined to register his presence—his

proud black male self—into a world that often

chooses to ignore and, even worse, erase him.

brother-man be out there . . .

he ain’t no linear dude

so why should he

stroll between the lines

of the crosswalk . . .

Like Prosser; like Barlow’s brother, Mark (“glid-

ing gazelle-like”); like his father, Andy, with his

“spit – shined shoes”; like the “low-ridin army”

cruising in cars inscribed with such names as

“Prisoner of Love,” “Duke of Earl,” and “Fireball,”

this “dapper dude,” Barlow’s speaker, screams si-

lently and loudly, is a man:

dead up in there

always been here

Barlow, George 37

he is

what it is.

The recipient of numerous awards, Barlow has a

wife, Barbara, and two children, Erin and Mark.

Barlow is a member of the English and American

studies faculties at Grinnell College.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts.

New ed. New York: International Publishers, 1974,

219–226.

Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-

American Poetry, A Critical History. Garden City,

N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Beatty, Paul (1962– )

Once described by ISHMAEL REED as possessing

“the guts and verve of a Tiger Woods on paper,”

the poet and novelist Paul Beatty, who fuses ref-

erences to elite, hip-hop, and street cultures with

equal dexterity, has elicited high praise from liter-

ary peers and critics alike. Beatty, who was born in

Los Angeles in 1962, earned his advance degrees

in the east—an M.F.A. in creative writing from

Brooklyn College and an M.A. in psychology from

Boston University.

In his first published volume of poetry, Big

Bank Take Little Bank (1991), Beatty displayed the

facility with language, humor, and incisive cultural

observations that have become his hallmark. In

the poem “Darryl Strawberry Asleep in a Field of

Dreams,” he comments on America’s favorite pas-

time, baseball, while raising larger questions about

the uneven nature of the country’s euphemistic

playing fields: “is this heaven / no its iowa / is this

heaven / no its harlem / . . . / do they got a team /

aint sure they got dreams / damn sure aint got a

field / or crops that yield.”

Beatty’s second collection, Joker, Joker Deuce

(1994) includes such titles as “Big Bowls of Cereal”

and “Verbal Mugging.” In the latter, the writer, who

is also a performance artist, shares his observations

on how to play the performance poetry game suc-

cessfully. In “About the Author,” one of his most

scathingly satirical pieces, he dares to imagine the

iconic MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., caught up in the

celebrity endorsem*nt game that has ensnared

other vaunted figures: “this is mlk . . . yes suh /

i thank god i wear air integrationists / crossover

trainers by nike / hallelujah.” Virtually nothing is

sacred within Beatty’s literary world.

While the critical responses to Beatty’s po-

etry have been strong, his novels have generated

even higher levels of praise. His first, The White

Boy Shuffle (1996), features protagonist Gunnar

Kaufman, an African American with some of the

most embarrassing yet comical ancestors in black

literary history. Among them are a freeborn cho-

reographer who dances his way into slavery, a ser-

vant so dedicated to his master that no one has the

heart to tell him that his master has died, and a

music promoter who only handles white Motown

wannabes. When Gunnar’s mother realizes that

her children consider themselves different from

inner-city black youths, she moves them from pre-

dominantly white Santa Monica to a tough section

of Los Angeles. There the book-smart, former sub-

urbanite struggles to fit in until he asserts his po-

etic voice, learns he has a jump shot, and by novel’s

end becomes a reluctant messiah for his people.

All of this occurs as he is surrounded by an

outlandish cast of friends (including a fellow bas-

ketball player who worships Mishima) and an-

tagonists (such as young, black sexual terrorists

Betty and Veronica) who are also trying to find a

place for themselves in a world in which difference

is generally a liability. Richard Bernstein of the

New York Times declared Beatty to be “a fertile and

original writer, one to watch” (25).

Tuff, Beatty’s second novel (2000), received a

similarly glowing reception. Its male protagonist

is 19-year-old, 320-pound Winston “Tuffy” Fos-

hay, whose run for city council allows the always

acerbic Beatty to pick apart every aspect of poli-

tics, from voter apathy to campaign strategies. Yet

he ends this novel on a hopeful note. Again, his

protagonist lives in a world populated with a vari-

ety of over-the-top characters. Still, even some of

those who applaud Beatty’s brilliance believe the

best is yet to come from this young writer. Reed,

38 Beatty, Paul

for example, who praises Beatty’s “extraordinary

eye for detail,” suggests that Beatty follow the path

“paved by his predecessors, Chester Himes, John

O. Killens and John A. Williams . . . [,] think the

unthinkable” and step away from characters who

are “police lineup chic” (1). Reed’s perspective is

generally outweighed by other critics who have al-

ready called Beatty the new RALPH ELLISON because

of his deft handling of issues of race, gender, and

identity.

Beatty, who says he writes because he’s “too

afraid to steal, too ugly to act, too weak to fight,

and too stupid in math to be a Cosmologist,” lives

and works in New York City.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernstein, Richard. “Black Poet’s First Novel Aims the

Jokes Both Ways” New York Times, 31 May 1996,

c25.

Furman, Andrew. “Revisiting Literary Blacks and

Jews.” The Midwest Quarterly 45, no. 2 (Winter

2003): 131–147.

Mosely, Walter. “Joker, Joker, Deuce.” Review Publish-

ers Weekly, 2 February 1994. Available online. URL:

http://reviewpublishersweekly.com/bd.aspx?/

sbn=0140587233&pub-pw. Accessed February 16,

2007.

Reed, Ishmael. “Hoodwinked: Paul Beatty’s Urban

Nihilists.” Village Voice Literary Supplement,

April–May 2000. Available online. URL: http://

www.villagevoice.com/specials/ULS/167/read.

shtml. Accessed February 14, 2007.

Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Trash, Art, and Performance

Poetry.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 23, no. 1/2

(1998): 356–358.

Svoboda, Terese. “Try Bondage.” Kenyon Review

(Spring 1995): 155–157.

Deborah Smith Pollard

Beckham, Barry (1944– )

The novelist and book publisher Barry Beckman

was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March

19, 1944, to Clarence and Mildred (William) Beck-

ham. At age nine, he moved with his mother to a

black section of Atlantic City, New Jersey, which

offered him a wealth of cultural exposure. He at-

tended interracial public schools and graduated

from Atlantic City High School. While there,

he enjoyed the popularity of his peers and read

such writers as JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, RICHARD

WRIGHT, and CHESTER HIMES. In 1962 he entered

Brown University as one of only eight black mem-

bers of the freshman class. Inspired by the craft of

novelist John Hawkes, Beckham began writing his

first book, My Main Mother, in his senior year. In

1966 he graduated with a B.A. in English, married,

and briefly attended Columbia University College

of Law on a scholarship. Beckman has taught and

served as director of the graduate writing program

at Brown University and as writer-in-residence at

Hampton University. Since 1997, Beckham has been

married to Monica Scott of

Washington, D.C.

In 1969 Beckham, at age 25, completed My Main

Mother, which won him praise for having “pen-

etrating personal insight.” Set in an abandoned

wooden station wagon, My Main Mother presents

the psychological profile of a young man driven

to matricide by his mother’s avarice, promiscuity,

betrayal, and abuse of his personal things. As the

protagonist, Mitchell Mibbs, relives his experi-

ences through flashbacks while in rustic Maine, in

Harlem, at an Ivy League college, and during his

Uncle Melvin’s funeral in Boston, Beckham suc-

cessfully unravels the psychological complexity of

a lonely young man who quests for love, attention,

and respect, suggesting the extent to which people

will go to be recognized as human beings.

In 1972 Beckman published Runner Mack, his

most accomplished work; it was nominated for

a 1973 National Book Award. In Runner Mack,

Henry Adams, an aspiring black baseball player,

encounters several agents of racial oppression:

big business, the military, and professional sports.

Adams is convinced that baseball, his forte, is

an objective venue to his desired success. How-

ever, the fast-talking revolutionary Runner Mack

forces Adams to confront what he sees as Adams’s

false perception, shaking Adams’s convictions. As

Adams grows and seeks personal fulfillment and

identity in an oppressive society, Mack continues

to have an impact on him—one that is likened to

the force of a Mack truck.

Beckham, Barry 39

Holloway House released Double Dunk (1980),

which was initially rejected by other publishers.

A novelized biography of the Harlem basketball

legend Earl “the Goat” Manigault, the inventor

of the double dunk shot, Double Dunk chronicles

Earl’s life as he succumbs to heroin addiction and

petty crimes before making a miraculous recovery

while in jail. Once out, Manigault forms his own

summer Goat Tournament for youngsters. With

a masterful blend of the stream-of-conscious-

ness technique and street dialogue, Beckham, like

CLAUDE BROWN, shows how a black man who grew

up in mean urban streets can transcend the adver-

sities he has to face, give back to the community,

and live his dreams through others. In 1996, Re-

bound, the movie based on Earl Manigault’s life,

aired on HBO, featuring Don Cheadle, Forest

Whitaker, Eriq LaSalle, Loretta Devine, James Earl

Jones, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Beckman’s difficulties with publishers encour-

aged him to take matters into his own hands. In

1982, with the assistance of students from Brown,

he compiled, edited, and published the first edition

of Black Student’s Guide to Colleges, which was well

received in the academy. In 1989, in Maryland, he

founded Beckham House Publishers (now called

the Beckman Publications Group), a major black-

oriented book company.

Before launching his career as a writer, Beck-

ham worked as an assistant editor of New York’s

Chase Manhattan News. In July 1999 he published

his long-awaited novel, You Have a Friend: The Rise

and Fall and Rise of the Chase Manhattan Bank. It

became the first serialized full-length book to be

published on the Internet. A compelling narrative

combining historical events, You Have a Friend de-

tails a richly textured social history of corporate

America. Beckham presents, from firsthand expe-

rience as a Chase public relations writer, a portrait

that goes beyond mere institutional history and

focuses on landmark characters and events. One

of the dominant themes throughout the novel is

the inability of the Chase Manhattan Bank to de-

fine itself with authority during the 1960s and the

1970s, two of the most turbulent decades of the

bank’s existence.

Beckman has been published in Black Review,

Brown Alumni Monthly, Esquire, Intellectual Digest,

and New York Magazine. Beckman published the

novel Will You Be Mine? in 2006.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Loeb, Jeff. “Barry Beckham.” In The Oxford Com-

panion to African American Literature, edited by

William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and

Trudier Harris, 55. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1997.

Umphlett, Wiley Lee. “The Black Man as Fictional

Athlete; ‘Runner Mack,’ the Sporting Myth, and

the Failure of the American Dream.” Modern Fic-

tion Studies 33, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 73–83.

Watkins, Mel. Introduction to Runner Mack. New

York: Morrow, 1972. Washington, DC: Howard

University Press, 1983.

Loretta G. Woodard

Beloved Toni Morrison (1987)

According to critics, Beloved fits into the subgenre

of African-American literature known as the “neo-

freedom or neo-slave narrative.” The immediate

setting is Ohio in 1873–1875. The plot unfolds

through flashbacks and the narrative voices of the

central characters, primarily Sethe Suggs, who, at

age 13, was taken as a slave to Sweet Home, a Ken-

tucky plantation owned by the Garners. Mr. Gar-

ner was a relatively benevolent slave master, but

upon his death, his cruel relative “Schoolteacher”

replaces him. Although Sethe and the other slaves,

Paul A, PAUL D, Paul F, Sixo, Halle (Sethe’s hus-

band), and their children, resolve to escape, only

Sethe and her children succeed. Eventually, they

arrive in Cincinnati, at 124 Bluestone Road, where

BABY SUGGS, Sethe’s mother-in-law, lives. Surviv-

ing the arduous journey, after giving birth along

the way to her fourth child, Denver, Sethe enjoys

28 free days—loving her children in a way she

had not before dared—before slave catchers lo-

cate them and attempt to return them to slavery.

Sethe sets out to kill her children and then com-

mit suicide, but manages only to kill her “already

40 Beloved

crawling” but not yet named baby girl. After serv-

ing time for her crime, Sethe returns to Bluestone

Road to continue her life, while attempting to keep

the past “at bay.”

At the beginning of the novel, Sethe, Denver

(now 18), and the sad, spiteful spirit of Sethe’s

murdered baby girl are living at 124 Bluestone

Road when Paul D—who had been captured dur-

ing the attempted escape from Sweet Home, sold

South, and eventually consigned to a chain gang—

joins them. He immediately drives away the spirit

child, only to have it return in the flesh, the identi-

cal age she would have been had she lived. Identi-

fying herself as B-E-L-O-V-E-D, the letters written

on her gravestone, the fleshly ghost personifies the

composite desire that deprivation under slavery

fomented. A highly disruptive presence, Beloved

not only seduces Paul D and drives him away but

also sets about draining the life out of Sethe, her

guilt-ridden mother, who is eventually rescued

and saved by a communal exorcism.

The other major characters include Baby Suggs,

the spiritual center of the free black community,

and Denver, its symbolic future. Baby Suggs is also

the ancestral presence Denver must invoke to save

Sethe’s life. Present only in the memories of Sethe

and Paul D, Sixo is the most apparent symbol of

physical resistance in the novel. In one detailed

confrontation with Schoolteacher, Sixo is beaten;

in another he is killed during an escape attempt

when Schoolteacher realizes that he will never be

a willing slave. Ella, along with Stamp Paid, oper-

ates the Underground Railroad station, the venue

through which Sethe and her children successfully

arrive at 124 Bluestone Road. Ella, a former slave

who had been made the sex object for a slave owner

and his son, measures life’s atrocities against what

the two did to her. She leads the communal exor-

cism that saves Sethe’s life. Born Joshua, Stamp

Paid renamed himself after being forced to give his

wife over as concubine to his master’s son. When

Stamp Paid shows Paul D the newspaper clipping

with the record of Sethe’s heinous deed and result-

ing arrest, he enhances the wedge between Paul D

and Sethe that Beloved’s presence had set in place.

Shortly after Paul D confronts Sethe with this in-

formation, Sethe realizes that Beloved is, indeed,

her daughter.

In addition to portraying a previously missing

black historical

subject, TONI MORRISON aims with

Beloved to depict the inner lives of blacks who were

victimized by New World slavery. She addresses

questions concerning self-identity, manhood,

motherhood, womanhood, sexual and reproduc-

tive exploitation, love, and desire. She makes actual

historical events part of the narrative, displaying

her extensive knowledge of African and African-

American folklore. Beloved received unprecedented

critical acclaim and attention for a work by an

African-American writer. The novel garnered for

Morrison a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and was largely

responsible for her Nobel Prize for literature in

1993. In 2006, a panel of critics assembled by the

New York Times named Beloved the best work of

American fiction published in the last 25 years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, William L., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Toni

Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1999.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Beloved; Modern Critical Inter-

pretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999.

Plasa, Carl, ed. Toni Morrison’s Beloved. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1999.

Solomon, Barbara H., ed. Critical Essays on Toni

Morrison’s Beloved. Critical Essays on American

Literature. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

Lovalerie King

Belton, Don (1956– )

Although Don Belton’s family moved into an inte-

grated Philadelphia neighborhood two years after

the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of

Education of Topeka, which declared illegal “sepa-

rate but equal” practices in the United States, he

grew up in the Hill District of Newark, New Jersey,

cared for by his grandmother, before the riots of

1967. Slipping through the cracks of imprison-

ing spaces to which Newark’s “black boys” were

often consigned (unlike his brothers and nephew),

Belton, Don 41

Belton attended Philadelphia’s Penn Charter, a pri-

vate Quaker school, before attending and graduat-

ing from Vermont’s Bennington College and later

Virginia’s Hollins College. In his personal narra-

tives Belton speaks lovingly and proudly of his

grandparents and great-grandparents. For exam-

ple, in the introduction to Speak My Name (1995),

Belton speaks the name of his great-great-great-

grandfather, Albert Stone, a Virginia slave, mas-

ter hunter, and equestrian who taught dignity to

white men with his stellar character, will, and de-

termination as a member of a race that, although

it “had lost everything . . . still had the heroism to

re-create itself in a lost new world” (3). Born the

third son of a father whose name he fails to men-

tion at first—although it is later given as Charles,

Belton writes, “My father worked himself to death,

a man from whom I inherited a legacy of mascu-

line silence about one’s own pain going back seven

generations” (3). Before publishing his first novel,

Almost Midnight (1986), Belton worked as a re-

porter for Newsweek magazine and taught creative

writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Although Martha and Peanut are the central

characters of Almost Midnight, their narratives

center around the life and impact of their father,

Reverend Daddy Poole, a biracial former spiri-

tual leader, preacher, millionaire incestuous pimp,

numbers runner, and drug dealer, who, “as old as

Methuselah,” lies on his deathbed at the beginning

of the novel. Although Peanut hates Poole with a

vengeance and welcomes his death, Margaret, her

half sister, whom Poole raises after she was aban-

doned by her mother, Poole’s most prized prosti-

tute, believes he is invisible and, indeed, “that he is

God and won’t die” (37). Martha will not abandon

Poole or curse him, as Peanut does, on his death-

bed, despite the horrific stories of abuse, neglect,

incest, and exploitation that, she knows from per-

sonal experience, can be attributed to him. Peanut,

considering her father a soulless man, tells Martha,

“Your daddy got to pay for the sh*t he dealt women”

(28). Martha remains suspicious of Peanut’s mo-

tives, convinced that Peanut is interested purely in

developing further the lesbian relationship they, as

young women who were sexually abused by their

father, had explored together. Peanut refutes this:

“I don’t believe in living in the past. This ain’t even

about the past really. It’s about all the stories of the

women what lived it—and seen—coming together

into one story” (25).

During his young adulthood, Poole, the son

of a Louisiana prostitute and voodoo priestess,

Mozelle, who had given him up for adoption, finds

his mother, who by then had become well known

for giving “spells to people to perform good or

evil” (129). She takes him and at first trains him to

“identify those plants used for healing and divina-

tion and [tells] him of their different uses” (131).

Later, becoming the oracle of the snake, she per-

forms the proper rituals to empower him with her

magical gifts. In Newark, the Eden to which they

migrate with great expectation, Poole is loved and

feared by the members of his Metaphysical Church

of the Divine Investigation, his prostitutes, and his

children because of his knowledge of the occult,

specifically voodoo and other forms of African

traditional religious beliefs and practices, that

he inherited from his mother. “You could pay to

have private sessions with him, and there was a

time he sold cures and spells for everything from

TB to love trouble. . . . [H]e sold magic powders

and potions with names like Lucky Jazz, Get Away

and Easy Life” (47). In the end, however, neither

his knowledge nor his daughter can save him from

death, which comes at midnight.

Ultimately, Almost Midnight is about self-em-

powerment: “you must read the scripture of your

own heart.” This is particularly true of women,

who in the novel too often seem to be totally de-

pendent on men, who exploit and abuse them;

this gives the novel a feminist twist. It is also about

black migration from the South to the North and

the inevitable disappointment blacks encounter

when their naively imagined primordial space

turns out to be a nightmare. Ironically, before mi-

grating to Newark, Poole envisions it as a place

“where gas-powered automobiles were plentiful

and parks with lakes and fine trees lay in the thick

of granite and limestone” (135). A postmodern

world of alienation and destruction, Newark is a

place where deferred dreams were manifested in

“the conflagration of the 1967 riots” and attested

to with “burning streets and burned-out, gutted-

42 Belton, Don

out stores and houses, [and] mothers and babies

shot up on their own porches” (32). Belton writes,

“Today, Newark is a ghost of a city” (1995, 223).

Although he has not published a second novel,

Belton, proudly embracing his hom*osexuality

like ESSEX HEMPHILL, stands in the vanguard with

black male writers who “chorus a black masculin-

ist movement, speaking their names, demanding

their right to self identification, describing their

lived experiences and challenges of oppression

while confronting a racism so covert and insidi-

ous” (1995, 225), while celebrating their successes

and victories. He does so in the book he edited,

Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and

the American Dream (1995). His fiction has been

anthologized in Calling the Wind: A Twentieth

Century Anthology of the African American Fiction,

edited by CLARENCE MAJOR, and Breaking Ice: An

Anthology of African American Fiction, edited by

TERRY MCMILLAN.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belton, Donald. Almost Midnight. New York: Beach

Tree Books, 1986.

———, ed. Speak My Name: Black Men on Mascu-

linity and the American Dream. Boston: Beacon

Press, 1995.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Bennett, Hal (1930– )

Hal Bennett was born George Harold Bennett on

April 21, 1930, in Buckingham, Virginia; he was

reared and educated in Newark, New Jersey. At age

16, he became a feature writer for the Newark Her-

ald News. He served in the U.S. Air Force as a writer

for the public information division during the Ko-

rean War (1950–1953). Taking

advantage of the

G.I. Bill, he moved to Mexico and attended Mexico

City College. There, Bennett became a fellow of the

Centro Mexicano de Escritores. In 1961, Obsidian

Press published his books The Mexico City Poems

and House on Hay. Doubleday published his Wil-

derness of Vines (1966), which won him a fiction fel-

lowship to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and

which Bennett, in an interview, described as influ-

enced by the musical arrangement of Beethoven’s

Ninth Symphony. He next published The Black

Wine (1968) and Lord of the Dark Places (1970). In

1970 Bennett was selected most promising writer

by Playboy magazine for his short story “Dotson

Gerber Resurrected.” He received the Faulkner

Award in 1973. His other books include Wait until

the Evening (1974), Seventh Heaven (1976), and

a collection of short stories, Insanity Runs in Our

Family (1977), all published by Doubleday.

Always a man who likes to distort tradition,

order, and standards to show that deeper mean-

ing and understanding dominate life and that one

need only be willing to search to find them, Bennett

authored numerous titles under the pseudonyms

Harriet Janeway and John D. Revere. In 1979 New

American Library published This Passionate Land

(Janeway) and Pinnacle published the five-set as-

sassin series (Revere): The Assassin (1983), Vatican

Kill (1983), Born to Kill (1984), Death’s Running

Mate (1985), and Stud Service (1985). In 1983

CALLALOO awarded Bennett its annual award for

fiction. His work has also been published in the

Virginia Quarterly Review and Negro Digest (BLACK

WORLD). In 1997 Turtle Point Press republished

Bennett’s Lord of Dark Places.

Bennett often worked within the ideological

framework of the BLACK AESTHETICS MOVEMENT.

Characters in his novel constantly move from one

location to the next searching for freedom. Ac-

cording to James Miller, many of Bennett’s char-

acters shuttle back and forth, representing the

saga of African Americans who sought a new life

through migration from the South to the North

and from the rural country to the urban, indus-

trial city. With that migration comes new ways

of adapting and adjusting to new communities,

people, customs, and beliefs. In his novels, Ben-

nett challenges traditional Christian symbols and

images by presenting protagonists who exercise

agency in their lives to create valued, valid, and

empowered individuals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Miller, James A. “Bennett, Hal.” In The Oxford Com-

panion to African American Literature, edited by

William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and

Bennett, Hal 43

Trudier Harris, 57–58. New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1997.

Newman, Katherine. “An evening with Hal Bennett:

An Interview.” Black American Literature Forum

21, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 357–378.

Jerome Cummings

Berry, Venise T. (1955– )

Venise Berry has devoted much of her professional

life to attempting to demonstrate how the media

portrays African Americans. “Stereotypical ideals

and attitudes have been formed and solidified over

decades into accepted ideologies and norms about

African Americans,” writes Berry in her ground-

breaking book Mediated Messages and African-

American Culture: Contemporary Issues (1996).

While growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, where

she was born in 1955, Berry became fascinated

with the media. She attended the University of

Iowa, where she received a bachelor’s degree in

journalism and mass communication (1977) and a

master’s degree in communication studies (1979).

Although she began her professional media career

in radio news in Houston, Texas, Berry left the

airwaves and entered the academic world, teach-

ing at Huston-Tillotson College while pursuing a

doctorate at the University of Texas, Austin. She

wrote the first drafts of her debut novel, So Good

(1996), in a scriptwriting class. After receiving her

doctorate in radio, television, and film in 1989,

Berry adapted the screenplay for publication as a

novel but found no interested publishers.

In the meantime, Berry returned to the Univer-

sity of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Com-

munication in 1990, where she became the first

African American to receive tenure in 1997. Her

research in the areas of media, youth, and popular

culture and African-American cultural criticism

reflects an intersection of her experiences as both

a practitioner and an observer of mediated mes-

sages: “Although I don’t believe that the media

have an all-encompassing power or control over

their audience, I do recognize that they serve as a

primary source of communication in this coun-

try, and, therefore, their images and ideals can af-

fect specific people, at specific times, in specific

ways, depending on the context of the situation”

(Berry, viii).

Berry’s commercial publishing endeavors co-

incided with the publishing industry’s increasing

interest in African-American contemporary fic-

tion, enhanced by the success of TERRY MCMIL-

LAN’s novel Waiting to Exhale. Securing an agent

and a publisher, Dutton, Berry published So Good

(1996), which focuses on the relationships of sin-

gle and married 30-something African-American

women with careers and male-female relationship

problems. Reflected in the story are Berry’s trade-

marks of media criticism, intellectual discussions

of current issues, and intelligent protagonists.

Lisa, the heroine, pursues both a doctorate and

a good man. Her sister, Danielle, and her long-

time friend Sundiata round out the cast of cen-

tral characters. Although Danielle is married to a

loving husband, she is not sexually satisfied and

has an affair. Through Sundiata’s husband, a Ni-

gerian, Berry is able to explore cultural conflicts.

Critics describe Berry’s writing style as nonlit-

erary and journalistic, but they have lauded her

storytelling abilities and wit. So Good was a Black-

board best seller and an alternate selection of the

Literary Guild.

In her second novel, All of Me: A Voluptuous

Tale (2000), Berry focuses on the experiences of

her heroine, Serpentine Williamson, an over-

weight, ambitious news reporter who is tormented

by the stereotypes and labels thrust upon her by

society. Serpentine’s self-esteem finally collapses

under the pressure. Berry thoughtfully explores

the unconditional self-love Serpentine must em-

brace while recovering. All of Me garnered a 2001

Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the

American Library Association and the 2001 Iowa

Author Award from the Public Library Founda-

tion in Des Moines.

In Colored Sugar Water (2002), Berry takes

a sharp departure from her previous novels, yet

some familiar strains continue. Protagonists Lucy

Merriweather and Adel Kelly are best friends, 30-

something professional black women with male-

female relationship problems. However, Berry

uses them and the men in their lives to adeptly

44 Berry, Venise T.

explore issues related to religion. What is the right

faith? How can one find spiritual fulfillment?

Berry’s commercial publishing ventures have

not overshadowed her scholarly work. Mediated

Messages and African-American Culture: Contempo-

rary Issues (1996), coedited with Carmen L. Man-

ning-Miller, was published almost simultaneously

with So Good. Contributors examine the media’s

images and messages about African Americans. In

1997, Mediated Messages received the Meyers Cen-

ter Award for the Study of Human Rights in North

America. In addition to continuing to teach in the

School of Journalism and Mass Communication

at the University of Iowa, Berry published The 50

Most Influential Black Films (2001), coauthored

with her brother, S. Torriano Berry, a professor of

film studies at Howard University. Capturing the

historical and social contexts of movies starring

and largely produced by African Americans since

the start of the film industry, the book is a valuable

resource, particularly for media scholars.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berry, Venise T., and Carmen L. Manning-Miller, eds.

Mediated

Messages and African American Culture:

Contemporary Issues. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage

Publications, 1996.

Townes, Glenn R. “When It Feels Good.” Pitch Weekly,

6–12 February 1997, 46.

Vanessa Shelton

Big Sea, The Langston Hughes (1940)

The Big Sea is the first of LANGSTON HUGHES’s

autobiographical texts, preceding I Wonder as I

Wander (1957). Probably the best-known and

most prolific writer of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE,

Hughes offers, in The Big Sea, insight into his de-

velopment as an artist and a major literary figure.

The work covers his early years, from his child-

hood in Kansas through his years as a mess boy on

a merchant ship to his impressions of the Harlem

Renaissance.

Hughes divides The Big Sea into three parts. In

Part I, he begins with his departure for Africa on

the S.S. Malone, a merchant ship, at 21 years old.

Born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin,

Missouri, in 1902, Hughes grew up in Lawrence,

Kansas. Although he knew his parents, Carrie

Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes,

his maternal grandmother primarily raised him

until he was 12 years old. After Hughes was named

class poet of his elementary school in Kansas, he

wrote for the Central High School magazine in

Cleveland, Ohio. In the remaining chapters of

Part I, Hughes recalls his trips to Mexico to visit

his estranged father, and Columbia University,

which he left after his first year to write and work.

Both were unpleasant experiences. Fearing a life

of dull, physical labor, Hughes joined the mer-

chant marine.

In Part II of The Big Sea, Hughes recounts his

exploits in Africa and the West Indies, where his

coworkers took economic and sexual advantage

of the indigenous population. In Paris, France, he

worked as a dishwasher, spending his days “writing

poems and having champagne for breakfast” (163).

Hughes concludes Part II with his entry into the

literary world of Harlem. After being “discovered”

by poet Vachel Lindsay while he was working as a

busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel, Hughes en-

tered the OPPORTUNITY magazine literary contest,

winning the poetry prize. At the awards banquet,

Hughes met CARL VAN VECHTEN, who became in-

strumental in the publication of The Weary Blues,

Hughes’s first poetry collection.

In Part III, the concluding section of The Big

Sea, Hughes recalls his life in Harlem during the

“Black Renaissance,” his college experience at Lin-

coln University in Pennsylvania, and his travels

through the American South. Hughes offers com-

mentaries on JEAN TOOMER’s racial politics, A’Lelia

Walker’s extravagant parties, Carl Van Vechten’s

controversial novel nigg*r HEAVEN, and Hughes’s

own difficulties with his collection of poems Fine

Clothes to the Jew. Additionally, Hughes critiques

the all-white faculty at his alma mater, Lincoln

University, as well as the patronage system that fu-

eled the Harlem Renaissance. The final chapter of

The Big Sea discusses the quarrel that signaled the

end of his friendship with ZORA NEALE HURSTON

and their collaboration on the play Mule Bone.

The break seemed emblematic of the end of the

Big Sea, The 45

Harlem Renaissance, and Hughes’s postscript to

the autobiography notes the close of the era.

Hughes’s The Big Sea provides a unique and in-

timate look into the Harlem Renaissance, taking

the reader beyond the propaganda and manifes-

tos. It offers not only a glimpse of the glittering

existence of the literati but also an uncompromis-

ing look into the daily struggles of the young artist

during Harlem’s heyday.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond

Harlem. Westport, Conn.: L. Hill, 1983.

Haskins, James. Always Movin’ On: The Life of Langston

Hughes. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1993.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography.

New York: A. A. Knopf, 1940.

———. I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical

Journey. New York: Rinehart, 1956.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Barbara Wilcots

Black Aesthetic

This movement represents the attempt to formu-

late theories to govern the production of African-

American artistic expression in relation to the

evolving nature of black life in the United States

in the aftermath of the organized movement for

civil rights in the 1960s. When the racial designa-

tion and self-identity of African Americans under-

went a radical change (from “Negro” to “black”)

after the declaration of “black power,” many of the

younger, more militant voices of the artistic com-

munity called for a redefinition and new direc-

tion for black literature. Proponents of the Black

Aesthetic sought to influence the development of

black expressive works by insisting that black writ-

ers adhere to the nationalistic principles that had

emerged as the most visible, if not dominant, mode

of black intellectual thought. Just as the BLACK

ARTS MOVEMENT served as the cultural arm of the

BLACK POWER movement, the Black Aesthetic was

an attempt to dictate the content, style, and form

of African-American writing so that the works

produced by writers from the black community

would adhere to black revolutionary principles.

As a result, Black Aesthetic advocates most often

proclaimed that black works had to be relevant to

black political causes; they had to actively seek to

improve the social conditions of the black masses.

The most widely discussed Black Aesthetic

documents include the seminal nationalist anthol-

ogy BLACK FIRE (1968), edited by AMIRI BARAKA and

LARRY NEAL, which includes Neal’s famous after-

word, “And Shine Swam On,” in which he writes,

“Finally, the black artist must link his work to the

struggle for his liberation and the liberation of his

brothers and sisters. . . . The artist and the political

activist are one. They are both shapers of the future

reality. Both understand and manipulate the col-

lective myths of the race. Both are warrior priests,

lovers and destroyers. For the first violence will

be internal—the destruction of a weak spiritual

self for a more perfect self ” (655–656). For Neal,

the goal of the black artist was to help destroy the

“double consciousness”—the source of tension “in

the souls of black folks.”

Among some of the other important publica-

tions containing Black Aesthetic writings are AD-

DISON GAYLE, JR.’s collection of essays, The Black

Aesthetic (1971), and STEPHEN HENDERSON’s an-

thology, Understanding the New Black Poetry

(1972). Gayle’s volume applies Black Aesthetic

principles to various genres of black artistic ex-

pression while offering essays that explore Black

Aesthetic thought of writers and scholars from

earlier generations, such as W. E. B. DUBOIS, ALAIN

LOCKE, and LANGSTON HUGHES. With this volume

the term Black Aesthetic became the formal desig-

nation for the theoretical ideas that would govern

“committed” black writings. Henderson’s intro-

duction to his anthology, “The Form of Things

Unknown,” represents one of the most important

detailed, theoretical discussions of “black” poetry

in the history of the literary tradition to date, one

that attempts to explore the historical development

of Black Aesthetic concerns in the poetry itself as

opposed to separating the works of recent writers

from their historical roots.

46 Black Aesthetic

Although the term Black Aesthetic is most often

associated with the theoretical thought that shaped

primarily the poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose

produced during the Black Arts Movement, Black

Aesthetic thought is best understood when exam-

ined as part of the continuum of African-American

critical concerns about the nature and purpose of

the literature and art of African Americans. Some

critics, including Reginald Martin, have argued

that the Black Aesthetic during the 1960s is only

one of several phases of Black Aesthetic thought,

ranging from the articulation of freedom cries by

slaves and former slaves during the antebellum pe-

riod and beyond,

to negotiations of civil liberties

and rights through the 20th century until the end

of the Civil Rights movement; the third phase cov-

ered only a short period of years during the 1960s.

Nevertheless, today the Black Aesthetic, as well

as the Black Arts Movement as a whole, is often

narrowly defined and characterized by its most ex-

treme or problematic pronouncements. Even Larry

Neal had revised many of his earlier views before

his untimely death in 1981. Many of those who

were at the forefront of developing Black Aesthetic

thought were poets and dramatists, but as DARWIN

T. TURNER has noted, the theory of the art actually

preceded the art itself, a progression that, in retro-

spect, was possibly the movement’s tragic flaw.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fabio, Sarah Webster. “Tripping with Black Writ-

ing.” In Within the Circle: An Anthology of African

American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Re-

naissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitch-

ell, 224–231. Durham, N.C.: Duke University

Press, 1994.

Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Black Aesthetic. New York:

Doubleday, 1971.

Henderson, Stephen. “The Form of Things Un-

known.” Introduction to Understanding the New

Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Po-

etic References, 3–69. New York: William Morrow,

1972.

Jones, LeRoi, and Larry Neal. Black Fire: An Anthol-

ogy of Afro-American Writing. New York: William

Morrow, 1971.

Seibles, Timothy. “A Quilt in Shades of Black: The

Black Aesthetic in Twentieth-Century African

American Poetry.” In A Profile of Twentieth-Cen-

tury American Poetry, edited by Jack Myers and

David Wojahn, 158–189. Carbondale: Southern

Illinois University Press, 1991.

Reggie Young

Black American Literature: Essays, Poetry,

Fiction, Drama Darwin T. Turner, ed.

(1970)

Formerly published in separate volumes (by C. E.

Merrill in 1969), Black American Literature: Es-

says, Poetry, Fiction, Drama was a central part of

a core of anthologies of black writing for college

and university classrooms during the 1970s and

1980s. This anthology was part of a growing body

of material used in the scholarship and research

of developing programs and departments in Afri-

can-American studies. In the introduction to the

selection of 15 essays, DARWIN T. TURNER provides

historical background and analysis of essays rang-

ing from Jupiter Hammon’s “Address to Negroes

in the State of New York” (1787) to Eldridge’s

“The White Race and Its Heroes” (1968). Within

this 181-year span of essays, Turner demonstrates

that black essayists have evolved from insisting on

black inclusion in American democracy to ques-

tioning the standards on which democracy rests.

Turner’s design is also to include examples that

do not focus on race, such as the essay “Letter XI”

by William Wells Brown, from his 1852 collection

Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and

People I Have Met.

The selections in volume 2 of Turner’s anthol-

ogy point to the developing subject matter and

style of such poets as Lucy Terry (whose poem

“Bars Fight” [1746] was the first known poem

written by a black American), PHILLIS WHEATLEY,

and GEORGE MOSES HORTON. Turner observes that

later poets, like those from the HARLEM RENAIS-

SANCE, were given the opportunity to come to-

gether as artists and become “aware of the ideas

circulating among artists of their own race” (160).

Black American Literature: Essays, Poetry, Fiction, Drama 47

This mingling is reflected in the racial pride in

such poems as “Africa” (CLAUDE MCKAY) and

“Dream Variation” (LANGSTON HUGHES). Turner

includes a sampling of his own poetry from his

collection, Katharsis (1964), and poems by Don

Lee (HAKI MADHUBUTI) and LeRoi Jones (AMIRI

BARAKA).

Turner’s inclusion of more short stories from

early writers than later ones in volume 3 stems

from his concern that students of black literary

history might have less access to early stories like

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR’s “The Mortification of

the Flesh” (1901), WALLACE THURMAN’s “Cordelia

the Crude” (1926) or FRANK YERBY’s “My Brother

Went to College” (1946). Turner’s other selections

are stories that may not be included in other an-

thologies: RALPH ELLISON’s “Mister Toussan” (1941)

and WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY’s “The Only Man on

Liberty Street” (1963).

The final section of this anthology is devoted to

drama, the genre in which black writers have had

the least “opportunity for recognition,” accord-

ing to Turner. In response to this dearth, Turner, a

scholar in American theater, offers an extensive in-

troduction to such plays as Randolph Edmonds’s

Nat Turner (1943) and Kingsley B. Bass Jr.’s We

Righteous Bombers (1969).

This anthology includes thorough introduc-

tions to each genre, informative explanatory sec-

tions to each author, and extensive bibliographies.

It reflects Turner’s dedication and legacy as an

exemplary scholar of African-American litera-

ture and criticism, his devotion to students, and

his consistent support of the craft of teaching.

Turner, whose memory is honored with a num-

ber of scholarships, was 18 when he completed

an M.A. at the University of Cincinnati in 1949.

When he was awarded the Ph.D. from the Univer-

sity of Chicago, Turner had taught at Clark Col-

lege (now Clark Atlanta University) and Morgan

State College (now Morgan State University). His

academic career, which included numerous ad-

ministrative positions, extended over 40 years, the

last 20 of which were spent as chair of the African

American World Studies Program at the Univer-

sity of Iowa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turner, Darwin T. Black American Literature: Essays,

Poetry, Fiction, Drama. Columbus, Ohio: Charles

E. Merrill, 1970.

———. Black Drama in America: An Anthology.

Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press,

1994.

———. Katharsis. Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley Press,

1964.

Australia Tarver

Black Arts Movement (1965–1974)

The Black Arts Movement continued the tradition

of revolutionary writing by African Americans.

According to LARRY NEAL, African-American “tra-

ditions, the politics, art, culture . . . have always

been democratic and because of this—in the con-

text of chattel slavery, reaction, white supremacy,

racism, national oppression—our traditions are

revolutionary” (Neal, xiv). The literature of the

Black Arts Movement spoke specifically to African

Americans. Black Arts Movement artists called

for African-American self-determination, self-

respect, and self-defense. Participants sought to

create a revolutionary art that exposed the white

power structure that condoned violence directed

against blacks and perpetuated institutional and

social racism.

The architects of this movement sought to

transform American culture in general and spe-

cifically African-American culture. LeRoi Jones

(AMIRI BARAKA), Larry Neal, SONIA SANCHEZ, NIKKI

GIOVANNI, Don Lee (HAKI MADHUBUTI), ADDISON

GAYLE, HOYT FULLER, and many others used their

poetry, plays, essays, and work in other genres to

define the African-American aesthetic, identity,

and black art. They also were interested in creating

an art that would “educate and unify black peo-

ple in our attack on an anti-black racist America”

(Neal, x). Black Arts Movement artists used their

art as a blueprint for the revolution they hoped

would aid the liberation of black people in the

United States and across the diaspora. In addition

to paying homage overtly to African-American

48 Black Arts Movement

history, African-American leaders, and the African

ancestral past, these writers attempted to create a

“symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology”

specific to black culture and separate from the

dominant white culture (Neal, 62).

The Black Arts Movement succeeded in in-

creasing black-operated and financed publishing

houses and journals. BROADSIDE PRESS, for example,

was one of four black publishing houses operating

in the 1960s. African-American journals such as

The Journal of Negro Poetry, Black Scholar, Negro

Digest, (BLACK

WORLD) Liberator, and Black The-

ater provided black artists with a forum in which

to share their work and discuss extant political and

social problems and possible resolutions, central

to which were reclaiming black history, asserting

pride in blackness, insisting on the liberation of

blacks in American society, and reconstructing the

image of blackness in mainstream American art,

media, music, and literature.

Writers of the Black Arts Movement sought

to validate black vernacular, as noted by DUDLEY

RANDALL in his introduction to The Black Poets.

Dudley Randall explains that the writers used the

language of “the folk, the streets, to jazz musicians,

the language of black people for their models”

(Randall, xxvi). The directness of the language al-

lowed them to make an unmistakable plea to all

African Americans to rise up and fight all oppres-

sive forces, with violence if necessary, in order to

free African Americans from the evils of segrega-

tion, educational and employment discrimination,

disenfranchisem*nt, and white violence. Also, they

often used drama as a vehicle to convey their mes-

sage and validate black language. In addition to the

formation of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/

School to meet this goal, there was an increase in

community-based black theaters that provided a

forum for black playwrights, actors, and directors

to develop their craft.

Also, during the Black Arts / BLACK POWER

MOVEMENT, black recording artists, including

Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder,

James Brown, Gil Scott Heron, and Curtis May-

field, wrote and performed socially and politically

conscious songs. Franklin’s “Think,” Brown’s “Say

It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Gaye’s “Inner

City Blues (Make Me Want to Holler),” Wonder’s

“Living for the City,” Mayfield’s “We the People

Who Are Darker Than Blue,” and Gil Scott Heron’s

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” became

anthems, of a sort, during this period.

Writers and the artists of the Black Arts Move-

ment were directly influenced by the political

rhetoric of key black political figures including

MARTIN LUTHER KING, MALCOLM X, Stokely Car-

michael, Huey P. Newton, and Bobby Seale. Mal-

colm X, with his call for black self-determination,

was most influential. Writers were also concerned

with the violence, both internal and external to the

United States, of the period, including the Vietnam

War, the black liberation struggle throughout the

African continent, the assassinations of Malcolm X

in 1965, Medgar Evers in 1963, Martin Luther King

in 1968, and many others. In fact, following the as-

sassination of Malcolm X, according to Sonia San-

chez, in the film “Not a Rhyme Time 1963–1986,”

LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) sent letters to black

writers, painters, musicians, social/political critics,

and so forth, asking them to work within the black

community, help organize the masses, and create

the functional art associated with the Black Arts

Movement.

The writers of the Black Arts Movement acted

as a voice for the displaced and poor black masses

in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.

However, the various factions of the Black Arts /

Black Power movement and Civil Rights move-

ment used differing ideological perspectives to

structure their work. The Black Arts Movement au-

thors more often than not defined themselves and

constructed their work through the lens of Marx-

ism, cultural nationalism, or Pan-Africanism.

The Black Arts Movement came to a climax

around 1974 for a number of reasons, including

government harassment of the artists and a move

away from interest in Black Arts / Black Power

within the academy. Also, several artists became

targets of COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence

program of the FBI that attempted to neutral-

ize perceived “Black Nationalist Hate Groups.”

Despite attempts to downplay the significance of

Black Arts Movement 49

the Black Arts Movement to African-American

literature, particularly within certain quarters of

the academy, it was truly the most African Ameri-

can–centered and revolutionary movement in Af-

rican-American art and culture during the 20th

century. The artists raised black consciousness, in-

stilled pride in blackness, and influenced the shift

in the national spotlight onto the evils of Ameri-

can racism and its effects on African Americans.

Today, many Black Arts Movement artists, includ-

ing Giovanni, Sanchez, Madhubuti, and Baraka,

continue to pursue their art, are ardent activists,

and serve as mentors to a younger generation of

African-American artists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baraka, Amiri. “It’s Nation Time.” In Black Fire: An

Anthology of African American Writing. New York:

William Morrow and Company, 1968.

Gayle, Addison. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Dou-

bleday, 1971.

Hampton, Henry. Not a Rhyme Time, 1963–1986.

Film. Blackside, 1999.

Neal, Larry. Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts

Movement Writings. New York: Thunder’s Mouth

Press, 1989.

Randall, Dudley. The Black Poets. New York: Bantam

Books, 1971.

Deirdre Raynor

Black Boy Richard Wright (1945)

An innovative genius, RICHARD WRIGHT, author

of the classic novel NATIVE SON (1940), was born

on September 4, 1908, in Natchez, Mississippi,

where, while growing up, he became aware of

“the ethics of living Jim Crow,” confronting and

combating (usually through deception) the rac-

ism and segregation he encountered, from places

of employment to the public library from which

he was legally barred. In Black Boy (1945), the first

part of a longer autobiographical work, American

Hunger, Wright documents the atrocities of his

poverty-ridden life, symbolized by his incessant

hunger; the instability his family had to endure

after his father, a sharecropper, abandoned them,

and the insecurity and fragmentation that marred

the family’s life when his mother became perma-

nently disabled, forcing them to seek sanctuary in

the homes of various family members.

Black Boy begins with four-year-old Richard set-

ting fire to the curtains in the family home, partly

to combat his boredom and partly to rebel against

his restrictive parents, who had forbidden him

from touching the curtains. Naively, he takes refuge

under the burning house to escape punishment,

only to be found and severely beaten by his parents,

who were frightened by their inability to find him.

The adult Wright reports, “I was lashed so hard and

long that I lost consciousness. I was beaten out of

my senses. . . . A doctor was called” (13).

Wright, whose Black Boy, like the best slave

narratives, moves beyond the personal narrative

of an individual to represent the general experi-

ence of the black southern masses, suggests that

the life of black sharecroppers living in the South

at the turn of the 20th century was not unlike that

of former slaves, for whom the quest for freedom

was paramount. He further reveals, through his

parents’ brutal response, a form of misplaced ag-

gression, the way some blacks internalized their

oppression. The child’s psychological damage and

sense of betrayal are symbolized in young Rich-

ard’s dream: “Whenever I tried to sleep I would

see huge wobbly white bags, like the full udders

of cows, suspended from the ceiling above me. . . .

I could see the bags in the daytime with my eyes

open and I was gripped by the fear that they were

going to fall and drench me with some horrible

liquid” (13).

Not surprisingly, the adult Wright would

broodingly write;

After I had outlived the shock of childhood,

after the habit of reflection had been born in

me, I 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 in-

tangible sentiments that bind man to man and

how shallow was even our despair (45).

50 Black Boy

Throughout Black Boy,

Wright uses whiteness,

like the threatening white bags that hover above

the child’s head, as a metaphor for the endemically

oppressive world he knows intimately—found not

only in the dichotomized society he must endure

but also often in the biracial home of family mem-

bers, especially his white-looking grandmother.

His naive “black boy,” and later young adult Rich-

ard, must escape. For example, by age nine Rich-

ard learns a lesson about the power of whiteness

while living in Elaine, Arkansas, with his Aunt

Maggie and Uncle Hoskins, proprietors of a black

saloon, with whom his mother had sought sanc-

tuary. When covetous whites kill Uncle Hoskins,

the entire family is forced to flee in the middle of

the night out of fear that they, too, will be killed.

Wright recalled;

I did not know when or where Uncle Hoskins

was buried. Aunt Maggie was not even allowed

to see his body nor was she able to claim any

of his assets. Uncle Hoskins had simply been

plucked from our midst and we, figuratively,

had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into

that white-hot face of terror that we knew

loomed somewhere above us. This was as close

as white terror had ever come to me and my

mind reeled (64).

Unlike the black masses of Mississippi, Arkan-

sas, and Tennessee, whose enforced obsequious-

ness and self-deprecation before white people he

had grown to detest, Richard developed a rebel-

lious spirit, becoming an outcast even among fam-

ily members who, seeking to protect him, insisted

that he, too, defer to his “Jim Crow station in life”

(274). The clear exception was the well-crafted buf-

foonery that Wright employs, for example, to gain

access to the public library and the “strange world”

of books, for which he hungered upon discovering

that words could be used as weapons—as the vehi-

cle to self actualization and true freedom. In 1927,

Wright migrated to Chicago—the North—where,

he was convinced, “life could be lived in a fuller

and richer manner” (281).

Black Boy, which ends with Wright’s departure,

at age 18, from the American South, surpassed

the success of NATIVE SON and Uncle Tom’s Chil-

dren (1938), a collection of short stories about Jim

Crow life in the South. For most critics, black and

white, it was an angry—almost too angry—book.

In March 1945, Black Boy received the Book-of-

the-Month Award. In 1992, Library of America

published Wright’s complete original work, Black

Boy together with American Hunger, which covers

his experiences in the North.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gates, Henry Lous, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Richard

Wright. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Perennial Li-

brary, 1966.

Linda Johnson

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-

American Writings LeRoi Jones (Amiri

Baraka) and Larry Neal, eds. (1968)

AMIRI BARAKA and LARRY NEAL, leading architects

of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, edited Black Fire,

selecting writers whose nationalist leanings reso-

nated with their ideological prescription for the

production of a more utilitarian, functional art

with emphasis on the political interconnected-

ness of the artist/writer and the black community.

Most of the writers were driven by a sense of ur-

gency for change, one Baraka announced in his

May Day poem “SOS”: “Calling all black people,

man woman child / Wherever you are, calling you,

urgent, come in.” Baraka declared in the foreword

that black artists are black magicians, wizards, and

bards whose role, as founding fathers and moth-

ers of a new black nation, was to destroy Western

culture as it existed and fulfill the immediate needs

and well-being of the black community. Convinced

that new writers were adhering to this admonition,

Baraka celebrated: “We are beings of goodness,

again. We will be righteous, and teaching” (xvii).

Neal explained, in his manifesto “The Black

Arts Movement,” “The cultural values inherent

in western history must either be radicalized or

destroyed. . . . In fact, what is needed is a whole

new system of ideas” (188). Like Baraka, he, too,

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writings 51

wanted the black artist to “Clean out the world

for virtue and love.” Neal further explained, “The

Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any

concept of the artist that alienates him from his

community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiri-

tual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it

envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs

and aspiration of Black America. . . . The Black

Arts and the Black Power concept both relate to

the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination

and nationhood.” Neal further explained, “A main

tenet of the Black Power concept is the necessity

for Black people to define the world in their own

terms. The Black artist has made the same point

in the context of aesthetics” (187).

As editors Baraka and Neal selected for in-

clusion in Black Fire writers and works that met

their criteria, including James T. Stewart, CALVIN

C. HERNTON, Sun-Ra, DAVID HENDERSON, SONIA

SANCHEZ, and Yusef Imam. The included essays

bore titles that denoted the authors’ perspec-

tive, for example, Stewart’s “The Development

of the Black Revolutionary Artist” and Stokeley

Carmichael’s “Toward Black Liberation.” Revolu-

tionary fiction and samplings of agitprop drama

popularized by Baraka were also included, such

as Neal’s “Sinner Man Where You Gonna Run

To?,” Jimmy Garrett’s “We Own the Night,” and

ED BULLINS’s “How Do You Do.” Much like the

Calvinist settlers of colonial America who were

convinced God had sent them on an “errand into

the wilderness” to establish a “city upon a hill,”

Baraka closes his foreword with a resonant sense

of mission: “We are presenting, from God, a tone,

your own. Go on. Now” (xvii).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baraka, Amiri, and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An

Anthology of Afro-American Writings. New York:

Bobbs Merrill, 1968.

Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” In The Black

American Writer. Vol. 2: Poetry and Drama, edited

by C. W. E. Bigsby, 187–202. New York: Penguin

Books, 1969.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Black Issues Book Review (BIBR)

In the first published volume of Black Issues Book

Review (BIBR) (January–February 1999), the edi-

tors declared, “So it is with great pride that Cox,

Matthews & Associates, Inc., presents the first is-

sues of a magazine passionately devoted to books

by and about the people of the great African di-

aspora.” Despite this stated global mission, BIBR

was also to be “the premiere source of information

and news about books for the African American

audience.” The staff included president and edi-

tor in chief William E. Cox, executive editor Susan

McHenry, and editorial advisers E. ETHELBERT

MILLER, Angela Dodson, WANDA COLEMAN, and

Sheila Walker.

Cox explained that BIBR would not be a tra-

ditional review in which critics offered lofty

opinions about books. Instead, BIBR would be “a

community-in-print, where readers and writers

exchange ideas about the many ways in which par-

ticular books move us.” BIBR would also celebrate

music, visual arts, films, dance, and other models

of spirituality, health and healing, sports, science,

politics, economics—“indeed every fact of life

we think and write about as black people” (5). In

summary, Black Issues Book Review was committed

to examining the range of issues that shape and

define black culture. “New times, new challenges

and new publication attuned to it all” (7).

Each issue of BIBR includes news and articles

placed within seven categories: (1) “Between the

Lines,” which offers news from the publishing in-

dustry; (2) “Market Buzz,” which focuses on trends

in the industry; (3) “Book Bytes,” which offers

information about the Internet and publishing;

(4) “Faith,” which focuses on inspirational, mo-

tivational, and spirituality texts; (5) “Eye,” which

focuses on art and coffee table books; (6) “Self

Publishing,” which provides advice from self-pub-

lishing experts and highlights

value the multiva-

lent black voices and identities of African Americans,

including “jazz/blues African Americans, Voodoo

African Americans, working class African Ameri-

cans, subaltern African Americans, modern African

Americans and urban swinging African Americans”

(2)—which, in the end, is concerned less with white

racism and more with defining and constructing

themselves as subjects with agency. Hogue calls for

a more polycentric theoretical perspective to access

and assess the African-American literary tradition

and “to examine and discuss African Americans in

terms of their own distinctions and traditions, to

engage the polyvalent nature of African American

literatures, history, and criticism” (2).

Returning now to the question of what DuBois

might discover at the beginning of the 21st cen-

tury in a new exploration of the “striving in the

souls of black folks,” it would be impossible to

deny that he would discover a veritable vineyard

in which, as unfettered and emancipated former

chattel, African Americans flowered the American

literary landscape with their gift of story, reaping

a rich and bountiful harvest that runs the gamut

from autobiography and slave narrative to slam

poetry; hip-hop and rap narratives; black erotica

and experimental fiction; blues drama and novels;

baby mamma drama fiction; gay, lesbian, detec-

tive, and science-fiction popular best sellers; femi-

nist, womanist, and Africana Womanism voices;

African-American–Caribbean voices; modernist

and postmodernist voices; the humorous tales of

Jesse B. Semple; and the bitingly satirical voice of

The Boondocks comic strip. No doubt, he would,

indeed, say “amen” to Morrison’s claim with which

this introduction began: that African Americans

“have always imagined” themselves.

viii Encyclopedia of African-American Literature

Moreover, DuBois would find the now-undeni-

able progress and contributions made by African

Americans in their efforts to create and validate

an African-American literary tradition emblema-

tized in the history-making publication of sev-

eral anthologies by major presses, specifically the

Norton Anthology of African American Literature

(1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology

of the African American Literary Tradition (River-

side, 1997), Cornerstones: An Anthology of African

American Literature (St. Martin’s, 1996), and Trou-

ble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry

(Mentor Books 1997), as well as major reference

works such as The Oxford Companion to Afri-

can American Literature (1997) and Macmillan’s

African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000

(1999). Equally significant are major electronic

productions, such as the Encarta Africana multi-

media encyclopedia maintained by Harvard’s Pro-

fessors Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony

Appiah at Africana.com; the related site Encyclo-

pedia Africana, managed by Henry DuBois (W.

E. B. DuBois’s grandson); and the online Oxford

African American Studies Center.

African-American writers of serious and popu-

lar literature have never been more influential. They

are interviewed on Good Morning America and The

Today Show, as well as Sixty Minutes. Their works

are regularly selected and celebrated by members of

Oprah’s Book Club; reviewed in the New York Times

Book Review, Publications of the Modern Language

Association, African American Review, and Callaloo;

promoted in Black Issues Book Review; and taught

on college and university campuses across the

country. African-American writers are noted for

embracing, validating, and proclaiming an America

that is diverse, beautiful, and complex.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The Encyclopedia of African-American Literature

covers the entire spectrum of the African-Ameri-

can literary tradition, from the 18th-century writ-

ings of pioneers such as Equiano and Wheatley to

20th-century canonic texts to the finest of today’s

best-selling authors. This volume includes entries

on major and minor writers, including writers

of fiction and nonfiction, poets, dramatists, and

critics, as well as entries on the finest works of

African-American literature, from all genres and

time periods.

Browsers will find entries on all the canonical

autobiographers, novelists, and poets, including

Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Charles Chesnutt,

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Paule

Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John Edgar

Wideman, and August Wilson. The volume also

highlights a host of emerging (in some cases

already award-winning) literary voices, such as

Jeffrey Reynard Allen, Toi Derricotte, Pearl Cleage,

Thomas Glade, E. Lynn Harris, William Henry

Lewis, Sapphire, Danzy Senna, and Trey Ellis, and

popular fiction writers, such as Jerome Dickey,

Omar Tyree, and Zane, whose works are read-

ily available and whose readers are numerous and

diverse. Finally, this volume includes discussions

of the major critical and theoretical schools and

scholars that have influenced the perception and

reception of this body of material, as well as entries

on important terms, themes, historical events, and

more. Entries are cross-referenced for ease of use.

Given the successful movement toward vali-

dation and inclusivity witnessed today, the edi-

tors found it imperative to include a handful of

representative voices from hip-hop culture, and

specifically from rap poetry. Our intention does

not signal, in any way, a decision to be blind to,

supportive of, or cavalier about the pervasive

colonialist, nihilistic, oppressive, drug-promoting,

hom*ophobic, lust-filled, and misogynist mes-

sages of many rap videos and lyrics, often, but not

exclusively, by gangster rappers. Such messages

proclaim, as bell hooks notes, that “Blackness rep-

resents violence and hate” (53). We do not mean

to endorse such particular views or ideologies.

However, we recognize that hip-hop culture

is firmly rooted in the call-and-response cadence

that undergirds African-American culture in gen-

eral and the African-American literary tradition

specifically and that can be heard in everything

from Negro spirituals, work songs, blues, and jazz

to the poetry of Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou,

Introduction ix

Nikki Giovanni, and Kevin Young. Ultimately,

what attracts us to hip-hop culture and rap is the

seeming continuity and resonance between it and

the Black Arts Movement apparent in the often

raw, unveiled, and unsilenced voices of many

hip-hop artists, including Tupac Shakur, Queen

Latifah, and Public Enemy, who use their lyrics,

poetry, and fiction as social and political vehicles

of comment. As critic Mel Donalson maintains,

“Much like poets Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti,

Gil Scott Herron, and Nikki Giovanni, who sought

to use the Black Arts Movement as a vehicle

for black consciousness and liberation, Public

Enemy and the new black youth culture sought to

empower their generation and the black commu-

nity through rap lyrics and hip-hop sounds.”

In summary, we have chosen to include more

than just the best-known authors of the African-

American canon. Indeed, our emphasis is on new

and emerging writers, who, we are convinced, are

equally and totally committed to speaking the

unspeakable; we also call attention to what Hogue

identifies as the more “polyvalent nature of Afri-

can American literature, history and criticism”

(2), not only to distinguish the Encyclopedia of

African-American Literature from other reference

works but also, in our view, to provide some of its

most significant value.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” In

Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955,

13–22.

Bigsby, C. W. E., ed. The Black American Writer. Vol.

1, Fiction. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1969.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958.

Donalson, Mel. Interview. Pasadena, Calif.: June 20,

2006.

DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. In W. E. B.

DuBois:

up-and-coming self-

publishing authors; and (7) “Tribute” a focus on a

major author whose legacy is generally well estab-

lished. The author usually appears on the cover of

the magazine.

Science fiction writer OCTAVIA BUTLER graced

the cover of the first issue, which also included

52 Black Issues Book Review (BIBR)

a memorial to MARGARET WALKER ALEXANDER

(1915–1998); an interview with CHARLES JOHN-

SON, the author of MIDDLE PASSAGE, “The Politics

of African American Scholarship,” an essay by

the coauthor of Africans in America HENRY LOUIS

GATES, JR., and book reviews of works by Carib-

bean writer EDWIDGE DANTICAT and TREY ELLIS, the

author of Platitude. BIBR’s breadth was further

validated with articles on MARTIN LUTHER KING,

JR., Thurgood Marshall, JUNE JORDAN’s Affirmative

Acts: Political Essays (Anchor Books, Doubleday

1998), and Ruby Dee and OSSIE DAVIS, who cel-

ebrated their 50th anniversary with the publica-

tion of With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together

(New York: William Morrow and Company, 1998).

Other book articles of interest included one on

The Tribal Art of Africa and one on black bookstore

owner Clara Villanova, who had moved her Hue

Man Experience Bookstore from Denver, Colo-

rado, to Harlem, New York.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Black Nationalism

As defined by many scholars and critics, Black Na-

tionalism refers to the belief that black people share

a common culture and worldview, have a common

destiny, and have a common experience. The con-

cept of a self-defined, self-sufficient state, which is

of the black politic and exists independently of any

other state, is also foundational to the ambitions

of Black Nationalism. The multiple aspects of this

brand of nationalism include economic self-suf-

ficiency, political sovereignty, and a social if not

cultural existence based on the identity and initia-

tive of the black politic. While overcoming the rac-

ism and discrimination of America is a goal, Black

Nationalism seeks to forge a state that embodies

collective thought, interests, and positive self-per-

ceptions of its people. Generally, these perceptions

include community-mindedness, spiritual affinity,

and brotherhood and sisterhood. This is the as-

pect of Black Nationalism that many black writ-

ers of the 1960s, and specifically those who aligned

themselves with the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT led by

AMIRI BARAKA, HAKI MADHUBUTI, and LARRY NEAL,

among many others, embraced as part of their de-

sire for black empowerment.

Historically, Black Nationalism advocated by

these writers had its roots in the emigrationist

and separatist ideas and activities popular among

19th-century black Americans and promoted by

MAULANA KARENGA in the mid-20th century. The

historic record of emigrationist thought in Amer-

ica includes a 1773 petition by blacks from Mas-

sachusetts to the state legislator expressing a desire

to be settled in some part of Africa. A similar pe-

tition requesting assistance in immigrating to Af-

rica came from Prince Hall, a Methodist preacher

during the same era. A 1789 letter from the Free

African Society (a black fraternal organization) of

Newport, Rhode Island, to its brother organiza-

tion in Philadelphia suggested the serious consid-

eration of a return-to-Africa movement. No action

ensued immediately after this correspondence, but

the idea was not lost.

In 1808, Paul Cuffee, an independently wealthy

merchant, captain, and shipbuilder from Massa-

chusetts, also conceived an idea of repatriation. He

had the support of many black New Englanders

who were interested in starting colonies in Africa.

In 1811 he became a cosponsor of an explor-

atory trip to Sierra Leone. Although temporarily

deterred by the War of 1812 until 1815, the idea

was realized when Cuffee financed the transpor-

tation of 38 black men, women, and children to

Sierra Leone at an expense of $3,000 to $4,000 to

himself.

Separatist and emigrationist thought was insti-

tutionalized by such organizations as the Haytian

Emigration Society and the American Colonization

Society (ACS) in addition to Cuffee. Blacks formed

the Haytian Emigration Society, with chapters in

Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, New York, and Phil-

adelphia, through which 6,000 blacks migrated to

Haiti in the 1820s. Similarly, established from De-

cember 1817 to January 1818, under the auspices

of Thomas Jefferson and other leading mainstream

politicians, the American Colonization Society’s

central goal was to repatriate Africans to Libe-

ria, a new American colony. This initiative was a

Black Nationalism 53

fund-raising organ that would finance the trans-

portation of people back to Africa and establish

colonies and Christian missions there. From 1821

to 1830, 1,420 blacks emigrated. The ACS took on

a diverse contingent of supporters and dissenters.

Major objections to its objectives came even from

blacks who favored emigration, such as Martin R.

Delany, who objected to white control of the orga-

nization. Nonetheless, from 1817 to 1865, 147 ships

set sail for Liberia, and 18,959 blacks emigrated.

Influenced by the emigrationist ideas of Lewis

Woodson, a former Virginia slave, several major

19th-century black leaders, including T. Holly,

Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet,

Alexander Crummell, and MARTIN R. DELANY,

among others, supported emigration and es-

poused Black Nationalist ideology. Delany, a phy-

sician, and a journalist, coined the phrase “Africa

for the Africans” in 1854. Although the Civil War

and black American aspirations of liberation led

Delany to change his stance on emigration, join

the Union forces, and recruit many blacks for

military service, Delany would once again re-

vert to the idea of emigration; he supported the

South Carolina–based Liberian Exodus and Joint

Stock Steamship Company after the reconstruc-

tion period. The Liberian Exodus and Joint Stock

Steamship Company acquired the Azors, which

made one voyage in 1878 before the company

went bankrupt. Another prominent figure in the

emigration scene of the mid- to late 1800s was Al-

exander Crummell, a missionary to Liberia whom

many critics consider the father of Pan-African-

ism. Crummell asserted that all people have a re-

lation and a duty to the land of their fathers, in

this case meaning Africa.

However, perhaps the most famous of Black

Nationalists by way of emigration was MARCUS

GARVEY. This Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist pro-

pounded the idea of “Africa for the Africans.”

Though he never spearheaded any emigration

movements directly, he did organize 6 million

Africans in 33 chapters of the Universal Negro

Improvement Association (UNIA). Although

20th-century black writers did not outright em-

brace an emigrationist agenda, they spoke in

terms of building a black nation—a black world,

as Madhubuti’s speaker demands in “We Walk the

Way of the New World,” that leads to morality and

cleanliness: “We walk in cleanliness / the newness

of it all / becomes us” (Randall, 309). Maulana

Karenga’s Pan-African holiday, Kwanzaa, a cul-

tural holiday of seven days of observation, and

his doctrine of Nguzu Saba, the “Seven Principles

of Blackness,” to guide Kwanzaa celebration, are

a clear example of the impact Black Nationalist

ideas continue to have not only on African Ameri-

cans but globally.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berry, Mary Francis, and John Blassingame. Long

Memory: The Black Experience in America. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred Moss, Jr. From Slav-

ery to Freedom: A History of African Americans,

Vols. 1 and 2. 7th ed. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Randall, Dudley, ed. The Black Poets. New York: Ban-

tam Books, 1971.

Gwinyai P. Muzorewa

Black No More George Schuyler (1931)

GEORGE SCHUYLER’s first novel, Black No More,

originally published in 1931 by Macaulay and re-

issued in 1989 by Northeastern University Press,

is generally considered the first full-length satire

by an African American and perhaps

the first Afri-

can-American science fiction novel. Moreover, its

satirical importance includes its open, yet humor-

ous, critique of the New Negro movement (dur-

ing which it was published) and the absurdities

of race matters from both sides of the color line.

Schuyler addresses the political issues for which

he was best known: America’s social stratification

based on race and its obsession with racial differ-

ences. While society searched for a solution to the

“race problem,” Schuyler, as a minority voice, in-

sisted that race was in fact not the problem at all.

His satire is aimed specifically at myths of racial

purity and white supremacy, presenting ways in

which the perpetuation of racism serves economic

purposes foremost; greed is the primary motiva-

tion of his characters, black and white. He presents

54 Black No More

caricatures of organizations, such as the NATIONAL

ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED

PEOPLE, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Urban League,

and their leaders as hustlers in different shades.

In the preface, Schuyler dedicates Black No

More to all of the “pure Caucasians” of the world,

setting up any such readers for a shock. He then

introduces Max Disher, a brown trickster; Bunny

Brown, his sidekick; and the racist environment in

which they live. Max is rejected by a racist white

woman, Helen, who is entertained by black cabaret

performers but is repulsed at the idea of dancing

with a black man. This rejection sends Max to Dr.

Crookman, founder and inventor of Black-No-

More, Inc., where all traces of blackness are re-

moved; here Max becomes Matt, “white” man. The

remainder of the novel traces Matt’s adventures as

a Caucasian: He marries Helen and, with Bunny

(also transformed), infiltrates the major racist or-

ganization of the country, extorting millions of

dollars and finally fleeing to Europe.

In addition to the exploits of Max/Matt, the

reader is also privy to the effects of the runaway

success of Black-No-More, Inc., on American so-

ciety. As the population takes advantage of this so-

lution to the race problem, black race leaders are

put out of the “leadership” business; as America

loses its cheap black labor, an increasingly violent

labor situation erupts; and lying-in hospitals are

created to secretly change the growing number of

mixed-race babies to white. In an attempt to deci-

pher a “proper” race hierarchy, scientists discover

that more than half of the Caucasian population

has “tainted” black blood, including those who

have most advocated racial purity. Just as Amer-

ica goes wild with frenzy, Dr. Crookman brings

order back to society by announcing that that the

“newly” white are actually two to three shades

lighter than “real” Caucasians. Suddenly white is

no longer right, and sales boom for skin-darken-

ing lotions; “normality” returns with the ideology

“black is beautiful.” Schuyler makes clear that there

are definite advantages to possessing white skin

in America, but human nature does not change

purely because of skin color.

Adenike Marie Davidson

Black Power

In 1966 Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture),

coined the term “Black Power” during a period of

incarceration in Greenwood, Mississippi. James

Meredith had been conducting his Walk Against

Fear from Memphis to Jackson that summer. A

sniper had shot Meredith, the first African-Ameri-

can student to integrate the University of Missis-

sippi, during his solitary march. MARTIN LUTHER

KING’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference

(SCLC), Floyd McKissick’s Congress of Racial

Equality (CORE), and Carmichael’s Student Non-

violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) decided

to continue the march. When they set up camp in

Greenwood, Carmichael was arrested. When he

emerged from custody, he said, “This is the 27th

time I’ve been arrested. We’ve been saying freedom

for six years. What we are going to start saying now

is Black Power.” He began to use the term in a se-

ries of speeches for his organization.

As a terminology, Black Power had been used

before by RICHARD WRIGHT and by the former

U.S. congressman Adam Clayton Powell, but it

was Carmichael’s fiery rhetoric that made it fa-

mous. Carmichael’s idea of Black Power implied

a rejection of and separation from the social and

economic systems into which African Americans

had sought to be integrated. He oversaw the redefi-

nition of what had been seen as a consensual na-

tional value system as a white value system, from

which African Americans, particularly the younger

generation, were alienated.

Carmichael’s Black Power slogan raised the

issue of the right of African Americans to define

their identity on their own terms. Carmichael

believed that asking blacks to appeal to the white

power structure as a vehicle for change was inef-

fective and demeaning. Real change, he argued, re-

quired that blacks develop the necessary economic

and political muscle themselves. Just as the CIVIL

RIGHTS MOVEMENT, under King’s leadership, was

achieving its greatest successes, militant blacks

like Carmichael and MALCOLM X were question-

ing the fundamental premises of nonviolent civil

disobedience. Integration, they concluded, must

no longer be viewed as a positive solution to rac-

ism and segregation, as whites and blacks had few

Black Power 55

interests in common and whites were unable to

speak for blacks.

King recalled that shortly after Carmichael’s re-

lease from jail in Greenwood he mounted a plat-

form and declared, “What we need is Black Power,”

and Willie Ricks, his SNCC colleague, shouted to

the crowd, “What do we want?” The crowd roared

back, “Black Power.” King said, “This call and re-

sponse continued over and over again for some

time as [Carmichael] strutted around the podium

thrusting his fist into the air” (34). His follow-

ers embraced the idea that power was the “only

thing respected in the world” (35). Carmichael

told them to “Begin building independent politi-

cal, economic, and cultural institutions that they

control and use as instruments of social change

in the US.”

Carmichael’s followers embraced the ideology

of Black Power and saw it as a call for African

Americans to unite, to recognize their shared

heritage, and to build a sense of community.

Carmichael began to convince them that “Be-

fore a group can enter society, it must first close

ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is

necessary before a group can operate effectively

from a bargaining position of strength in a plu-

ralistic society” (44). From the Greenwood rally

on, definitions of the precise meaning of Black

Power varied within the movement. It came to

encompass the black nationalistic and revolu-

tionary organizations and ideologies of the late

1960s and 1970s and marked a break from the

Civil Rights movement in rhetoric and organiz-

ing style.

Black Power also represented a rejection of the

conciliatory leadership style of King, Roy Wilkins,

and Whitney Young. More important, Black Power

became a rallying cry for young urban black males,

who felt increasingly isolated from King and his

mass movement, particularly his nonviolence and

nonconfrontational leadership style. They believed

that King’s Civil Rights movement’s main thrust

of eliminating racial segregation and winning the

right to vote in the South had largely ignored the

economic problems of vast numbers of African

Americans in the urban ghettoes of the rest of the

United States.

Although consensus on the meaning of Black

Power was never reached within the movement,

its articulation in 1966 by Carmichael and others

marked a shift in the U.S. black freedom strug-

gle. It quickly became associated with the more

militant and radical groups of the Black Social

Protest Movement that emerged after the assas-

sinations of Malcolm X and King. These more

militant and radical groups viewed the traditional

Civil Rights movement as too pacifist and slow to

anger. National conferences on Black Power

began

to be held in various cities throughout the United

States; delegates adopted a number of resolutions

including, among other things, a boycott of the

military by African-American men, self-defense

training for African-American youth, and the

division of the country into separate black and

white nations.

As a political idea, Black Power derived from a

long tradition of BLACK NATIONALISM dating back

to late 19th- and early 20th-century leaders, such

as Henry McNeil Turner and MARCUS GARVEY.

Black Power generally meant the empowerment

of African Americans and, in some cases, outright

separatism. Classical Black Nationalistic theory ar-

gues that blacks must unite, gain power, and liber-

ate themselves, not ask for freedom to be granted

to them from racist whites. Most of these black

militants and radicals of the late 1960s considered

themselves followers of the philosophical ideals of

Malcolm X, who argued eloquently that African

Americans should strive for self-determination

rather than integration and that they had the right

to defend themselves “by any means necessary”

against violent attacks from racist whites.

In Black Power (1967), which Carmichael wrote

with Charles Hamilton, professor of political sci-

ence at Columbia University, the author, explained

that Black Power was “A call for black people in this

country to unite, recognize their common heri-

tage, and build a sense of community. It is a call for

black people to define their own goals, to lead their

own organizations” (44). On his own, Carmichael’s

call became increasingly more provocative. He said

that “When you talk about Black Power, you talk

about building a movement that will smash every-

thing Western civilization has created.”

56 Black Power

Hamilton said that as civil unrest began to flare

in Detroit, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey,

Carmichael’s words eventually began to be asso-

ciated with race riots and guns and “burn baby

burn,” a slogan adopted by urban dwellers, who

called on blacks to riot, to burn down their often

less-than-human living spaces in ghettos (spaces

of hopelessness and despair) across America from

California to New York. Images of young people on

television singing “We Shall Overcome” began to

be replaced with pictures of angry young people in

black berets, with raised fists, and men with guns.

In 1966 and 1967 Carmichael lectured at campuses

around the United States and traveled abroad to

several countries, including North Vietnam, China,

and Cuba. He made perhaps his most provoca-

tive statement of all in Havana: “We are preparing

groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the

cities. It is going to be a fight to the death.”

Although Black Power quickly became associ-

ated in the eyes of the national media with violence,

the term mainly referred to African Americans’

self-reliance, racial pride, and economic and po-

litical empowerment. According to Carmichael,

We are on the move for our liberation. We’re

tired of trying to prove things to white people.

We are tired of trying to explain to white peo-

ple that we’re not going to hurt them. We are

concerned with getting the things we want, the

things we have to have to be able to function.

The question is, Will white people overcome

their racism and allow for that to happen in

this country? If not, we have no choice but to

say very clearly, “Move on over, or we’re going

to move over you.”

Many black writers, particularly proponents

of the BLACK AESTHETICS and BLACK ARTS move-

ments, such as AMIRI BARAKA, HAKI MADHUBUTI,

SONIA SANCHEZ, NIKKI GIOVANNI, SARAH WEBSTER

FABIO, and CAROLYN RODGERS, conceptually em-

braced Black Power. LARRY NEAL explained in his

now-classic essay “The Black Arts Movement” that

the movement was the aesthetic sister of the Black

Power movement. As the editor of Negro Digest/

BLACK WORLD, HOYT FULLER promoted Black Pow-

er’s fundamental ideals. DUDLEY RANDALL founded

BROADSIDE PRESS to publish works that promoted

and celebrated the political message, goals, and

objectives of Black Power.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carmichael, Stokeley, and Charles Hamilton. Black

Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York: Vin-

tage, 1967.

Gayle, Addison, Jr., ed. The Black Aesthetics. Garden

City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here:

Chaos or Community. New York: Bantam Books,

1968.

Raymond Janifer

Black World (Negro Digest)

At the height of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT no

other outlet celebrated “blackness”—with a global/

Pan-Africanist emphasis—more vociferously than

did the editors of Black World, a part of the pub-

lishing empire that John H. Johnson (1918–2005),

the grandson of slaves, successfully built in Chi-

cago, Illinois. In fact, Johnson began his pioneer-

ing journalistic and business venture of Negro

Digest, “A Magazine of Negro Comment,” with a

$500 loan, borrowed with his mother’s furniture as

collateral, on November 1, 1942. Founding Negro

Digest, Johnson, a recipient of relief during the

Great Depression, wrote in his autobiography, Suc-

ceeding against the Odds, was his means of achiev-

ing his dream of getting “some of the good things

of this life” (3).

Patterned after the mainstream’s Reader’s Di-

gest, Negro Digest opened, Johnson retrospec-

tively concluded, “a vein of pure black gold” (3)

and became the forerunner to the Johnson Pub-

lishing Company’s commercially successful sig-

nature magazines, Ebony (founded in 1945) and

Jet (founded in 1951). In his introduction to the

inaugural issue, Johnson explained, “Negro Di-

gest is published in response to a demand for a

magazine to summarize and condense the lead-

ing articles and comment on the Negro now cur-

rent in the press of the nation in ever increasing

Black World 57

volume.” Johnson further explained, “Negro Di-

gest is dedicated to the development of interracial

understanding and promotion of national unity.

It stands unqualifiedly for the winning of [World

War II] and the integration of all citizens into the

democratic process (Johnson, 122). Contribu-

tors to this first issue included WALTER WHITE and

LANGSTON HUGHES. Johnson discontinued Negro

Digest in 1951, at which time the magazine’s circu-

lation had been eclipsed by Ebony.

However, wishing to meet the needs of the

growing black political consciousness of the 1960s

post–CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, growing demands

for black power, and, as Johnson wrote, “to pro-

mote the works of Black writers and artists”

(Johnson, 288), Johnson Publishing Company

resurrected Negro Digest in the late 1960s. In 1970

its managing executive editor, HOYT FULLER, re-

named it Black World, illustrating his more global

and nationalistic perspective. Fuller’s support for

the BLACK AESTHETICS proposed by LARRY NEAL,

ADDISON GAYLE, and AMIRI BARAKA clearly stood

at the opposite end of the political spectrum from

Johnson and the position he articulated in the in-

troduction to his inaugural issue.

Fuller recorded his view on the direction of Af-

rican-American literature in his now-classic essay

“The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirma-

tion,” in which he wrote,

There is a revolution in black literature in

America. It is nationalistic in direction, and

it is pro-black. That means, in effect, that it is

deliberately moving outside the sphere of tra-

ditional Western forms, limitations, and pre-

sumptions. It is seeking new form, new limits,

new shapes, and much of it now admittedly is

crude, reflecting the uncertainty, the searching

quality of its movement. But, though troubled

and seeking, it is very, very vital” (Fuller, 327).

Above all, Fuller used the pages of each issue

of Black World not only to shape the direction of

this movement but to give its architects a venue for

their voices.

Under Fuller’s leadership, African-American

writers graced many of the covers of issues of

Negro Digest and Black World. For example, while

an image of a very young LeRoi

Jones (Baraka)

greets reader on the cover of Negro Digest Janu-

ary 1969, and pictures of CAROLYN RODGERS and

SAM GREENLEE appears on the cover of its June

1969 issue, an image of a more mature RALPH EL-

LISON is on the cover of Black World’s September

1970 special issue on Ellison’s literary work and

status. A smiling drawing of a graying, expatriate

CHESTER HIMES appears on the cover of the March

1972 issue of Black World. More important, Fuller

provided annual special issues on each genre: the-

atre, fiction, poetry; introductions and interviews

with emerging black writers such as MARI EVANS,

AUDRE LORDE, and JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN, and

SONIA SANCHEZ; and monthly features and sec-

tions such as “Perspectives,” “Commentaries,” and

“Books Noted” to provide readers with relevant

information about the direction of African-Amer-

ican literature, authors, new publications, confer-

ences, debates, and criticism. Black World was the

first magazine to publish the works of many of the

poets of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT. Critics and

scholars such as STEPHEN HENDERSON and Gayle

used its pages to debate and test their theories on

the Black Aesthetic.

As Clovis E. Semmes points out, “It is in Negro

Digest/Black World that we begin to see scholars

coin and develop the concepts of Afrocentric and

African-centered analysis. In fact, there is a sus-

tained effort to probe the epistemological foun-

dation of a Black perspective in numerous areas

of intellectual inquiry” (xii). Johnson Publish-

ing Company discontinued Black World in 1976,

at which time its circulation had dropped from

100,000 to 15,000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fuller, Hoyt. “The New Black Literature: Protest or

Affirmation.” In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Ad-

dison Gayle, 327–348. New York: Anchor Books,

1972.

Johnson, John H., with Lerone Bennett, Jr. Succeed-

ing against the Odds. New York: Warner Brothers,

1989.

Semmes, Clovis E., comp. Roots of Afrocentric Thought:

A Reference Guide to Negro Digest / Black World,

58 Black World

1961–1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,

1998.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Black Writers of America: A Comprehen-

sive Anthology Richard K. Barksdale

and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. (1972)

In 1972, coeditors RICHARD K. BARKSDALE and

Keneth Kinnamon, colleagues at the University

of Illinois–Urbana, introduced the first BLACK

AESTHETIC anthology, Black Writers of America:

A Comprehensive Anthology. This anthology was

instrumental in advancing the writings of major

20th-century writers through the early 1970s, pay-

ing particular attention to the social, political, and

cultural revolution of the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT,

the BLACK POWER movement, and the BLACK ARTS

MOVEMENT, which, in combination, led to the de-

mand for and validation of a well-defined Black

Aesthetics movement for African-American litera-

ture and culture.

Black Writers of America covers works by major

authors, beginning with the slave narrator OLAU-

DAH EQUIANO, who published his commercially

successful autobiography, The Interesting Narra-

tive of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus

Vassa, The African, Written by Himself during the

18th century, and continuing with such writers as

PHILLIS WHEATLEY, BENJAMIN BANNEKER, FREDERICK

DOUGLASS, DAVID WALKER, NAT TURNER, HENRY

HIGHLAND GARNET, FRANCES WATKINS HARPER,

CHARLES CHESNUTT, PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, W. E.

B. DUBOIS, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, JAMES WEL-

DON JOHNSON, CLAUDE MCKAY, LANGSTON HUGHES,

COUNTEE CULLEN, RICHARD WRIGHT, MARCUS

GARVEY, ALAIN LOCKE, ZORA NEALE HURSTON,

MARGARET WALKER, RALPH ELLISON, GWENDOLYN

BROOKS, JAMES BALDWIN, PAULE MARSHALL, ERNEST

J. GAINES, MARI EVANS, ETHERIDGE KNIGHT, Don

L. Lee (HAKI MADHUBUTI), SONIA SANCHEZ, NIKKI

GIOVANNI, NATHAN HARE, MARTIN LUTHER KING,

JR., and MALCOLM X.

Editors Barksdale and Kinnamon provide ex-

cellent biographical introductions for each author,

appropriately establishing the social and intellec-

tual context of their lives and works. Addition-

ally they provide useful, updated bibliographies

for each author. The anthology is divided into six

chronological periods: “The Eighteenth-Century

Beginnings,” “The Struggle against Slavery and

Racism: 1800–1860,” “The Black Man in the Civil

War: 1861–1865,” “Reconstruction and Reaction:

1865–1915,” “Renaissance and Radicalism: 1915–

1945,” and the “Present Generation: Since 1945.”

The editors identify the major African-American

writers for all except one of those periods, the Civil

War era of 1861–1865, where the emphasis is on

works that reflect African Americans’ involvement

in and response to the war.

Each chronological period is divided into

chapters, which precisely delineate the focus of

the works in the respective chapter, ranging from

JUPITER HAMMON and Banneker under the head-

ing “A Poet and an Intellectual” to King, and Mal-

colm X under the heading “Racial Spokesmen.”

These precise, descriptive headings may be used

to assist the teacher or scholar of the African-

American literary tradition in their selections and

instruction. Finally, each section closes with folk

literature, including tales, spirituals, work songs,

fables, and BLUES, carefully selected to reflect the

mood of the era.

Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive

Anthology’s holistic, inclusive structural and the-

matic depth and breadth has made it a classic in

African-American scholarship, as well as a model

for other anthologies in the rich tradition of Black

Aestheticism. It continues to be lauded by many

scholars in African-American literary studies,

including the editors of CALL AND RESPONSE: THE

RIVERSIDE ANTHOLOGY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN

LITERARY TRADITION, a more recent anthology that

continues its legacy.

Alexander Bell

“Blueprint for Negro Writing”

Richard Wright (1937)

Originally published in the short-lived left-wing

magazine New Challenge, RICHARD WRIGHT’s essay

“Blueprint for Negro Writing” has become, over

“Blueprint for Negro Writing” 59

the more than six decades since it appeared, one

of the most widely read and influential works of

African-American cultural criticism. In this essay,

Wright attempts to formalize what he considered

to be the appropriate ideological “perspective”

for African-American literature and to argue that

black creative writing should be accorded a nor-

mative centrality in the lives of African Americans.

Wright bemoans the fact that, for African Ameri-

cans, “the productions of their writers should have

been something of a guide in their daily living is a

matter which seems never to have been raised seri-

ously” (Wright, 37).

In one of the best known and most controver-

sial passages in the essay, Wright asserts that

Generally speaking, Negro writing in the

past has been confined to humble novels,

poems, and plays, prim and decorous

ambassadors who went a-begging to

white America. They entered the Court of

American Public Opinion dressed in the

knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show

that the Negro was not inferior, that he was

human, and that he had a life comparable

to that of other people. For the most part

these artistic ambassadors were received as

though they were French poodles who do

clever tricks (37).

Alternatively, Wright argues, “Negro writers

should seek through the medium of their craft to

play as meaningful a role in the affairs of men as do

other professionals” (47–48). Wright provocatively

suggests that it was just such meaningfulness that

African-American literature had failed to achieve

because of the insular and racially compromised

nature of the writings of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE,

or what he slightingly refers to as the “so-called

Harlem school of expression” (47).

Although the Marxist perspective that informs

much of the essay would diminish in the subse-

quent years of Wright’s career as a reflection of his

disillusionment with the Communist Party, the

call for a socially engaged literary practice that this

essay presents

would characterize Wright’s work

until his death in 1960.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bigsby, C. W. E. “Richard Wright and His Blueprint

for Negro Writing.” PN Review 19 (1980): 53–55.

Wright, Richard. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” In

New Challenge 2 (Fall 1937): 53–65. Reprinted in

Richard Wright Reader, edited by Ellen Wright and

Michel Fabre. New York: Harper and Row Pub-

lishers, 1978.

Terry Rowden

blues

Music is a focal point in African-American literary

traditions. The close relationship of music and lit-

erature has its beginning in both West African cul-

tural contexts that made music a part of daily life

and an American tradition of denying enslaved Af-

rican Americans literacy and thus restricting their

exposure to written communication. Within this

artistic and social framework, musical and oral ex-

pressions were the most accessible artistic forms

for enslaved African Americans.

As the blues emerged as an identifiable musi-

cal style around the end of the 19th century, black

communities were struggling to enter the wage

labor force with little, if any, support. Blues began

in the lives of formerly enslaved blacks, most with

experience as agricultural workers, in rural south-

ern portions of the United States. Work songs and

field hollers, with their respective focus on com-

munal and individual voices, were precursors of

this early, mostly unrecorded, rural/folk period.

At its outset, blues emphasized the articulation

of personalized experience, usually using the first

person, for individual or communal benefit. As

recordings and performances took musical art-

ists out of their home communities, the classic/

vaudeville blues period (at its height in the 1920s)

signaled the genre’s inclusion in the mainstream

American music industry. Blues songstresses such

as Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, and Bessie Smith

were catapulted into fame. Urban blues reflects

the lives of blacks firmly entrenched in industri-

alized post–Great Migration life and relies heav-

ily on electronic instrumentation. Urban blues

dominates the contemporary global music in-

60 blues

dustry, but styles from all of these periods are still

performed.

Each of these periods in blues development

continues to influence African-American litera-

ture, and across the various blues subgenres and

regional styles, several patterns in theme and phi-

losophy can be identified. Among them are

1. a belief that the artful rendering of painful

experience can be transforming;

2. an affirmation of the community, often

through the personal voice (e.g., “I” =

“we”);

3. a use of music for social criticism, fre-

quently in a covert manner;

4. an exploration of various aspects of adult

romantic and sexual relationships;

5. a willingness to dwell in stark reality;

6. a reliance on personal power in the face of

challenge;

7. an “acceptance of the contradictory nature

of life” (Kalamu ya Salaam); and

8. a sharp attention to the consequences of

travel and movement.

African-American writers, such as Jayne Cor-

tez, RALPH ELLISON, and STERLING BROWN, have

sought to define the blues and its importance to

African-American culture. Cortez addresses the

paradigmatic potential of the blues with her claim

that “The [b]lues talks about and has respect for

the struggles of the past and is definitely concerned

with the present and the future. It talks about Black

culture and reinvestigates the African experience as

encountered all over the world” (Taking the Blues

Back Home, 1). According to Ellison, “The blues

is an impulse to keep the painful details and epi-

sodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching

consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to

transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy

but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic

lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographi-

cal chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed

lyrically. . . . They at once express both the agony

of life and the possibility of conquering it through

sheer toughness of spirit (Shadow and Act, 78). As

an early critic of the blues, Brown sought to validate

its literary impact and importance. He noted, “The

images of the [b]lues are worthy of a separate study.

At their best they are highly compressed, concrete,

imaginative, original. . . . With their imagination

they combine two great loves, the love of words and

the love of life. Poetry results” (239).

Brown, as well poets such as LANGSTON HUGHES,

sought not only to define the blues and its impor-

tance to African-American culture but also to

incorporate the blues thematically and structur-

ally into his works. Brown’s poem “Ma Rainey”

(1932) provides an excellent example of how Af-

rican-American writers have borrowed from blues

themes and philosophies. Keen in his poem is the

idea that the blues artist speaks for his or her com-

munity. First, Rainey is able to draw people from

“little river settlements,” “blackbottom cornrows,”

and “lumber camps” to come together for her per-

formance. The singer and audience establish a real

sense of community through call and response,

perhaps the centerpiece of black orality:

O Ma Rainey

Sing yo’ song. . . .

Sing us ’bout de hard luck

Roun’ our do’:

Sing us ’bout de lonesome road

We mus’ go.

Critically important to her listeners’ sense of unity

and community is the cadence of Ma’s song; her

vocabulary and vernacular speak and reflect their

voice, allowing them to validate and empower

one another’s experience, despite the struggles

they have known individually and communally.

Ma Rainey’s song provides catharsis; it provides

listeners with the needed strength and determina-

tion to go forward in spite of whatever disasters,

natural or human, they might encounter along

their “lonesome road,” clearly a metaphor for life.

Indeed, the poetic quality of blues lyrics them-

selves has been a resource for nonmusical authors.

Poets have also mimicked the rhythms, repetition,

call and response, and AAB verse form of blues

songs from the “New Negro” HARLEM RENAISSANCE

era (e.g., Hughes’s first collection of poetry, The

Weary Blues), to poets of the BLACK AESTHETICS

blues 61

movement, to the collection of poetry titled Blues

Narrative (1999) by STERLING PLUMPP, a native of

Mississippi (considered to be central in the birth

of the blues). The blues has influenced all Afri-

can-American literary genres, as can be seen in the

works of JAMES BALDWIN, AUGUST WILSON, ED BUL-

LINS, ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Ellison, GAYL JONES,

Stanley Crouch, ALICE WALKER, ARTHUR FLOWERS,

TONI MORRISON, ISHMAEL REED, ANN PETRY, LEON

FORREST, SHERLEY A. WILLIAMS, and many others.

Given the dynamic and pervasive influence of

the blues in American and African-American lit-

erature throughout the major monumental shifts

in black people’s lives: enslavement, emancipation,

Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Civil

Rights movement, and the contemporary Informa-

tion Age, many African-American literary scholars

have attempted to identify, design, and define what

some have called a “blues aesthetic.” In doing so,

scholar-critics and writers such as ALBERT MURRAY,

Angela Davis, AMIRI BARAKA, LARRY NEAL, Sherley

A. Williams, HOUSTON A. BAKER, JR. and STEPHEN

HENDERSON illustrate that the blues has the power

to forge not only an individual’s voice but also a

community’s evaluation of what constitutes “art”

and “literature.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-Amer-

ican Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Brown, Sterling. “The Blues as Folk Poetry.” In Folk-

Say: A Regional Miscellany, edited by B. A. Botkin.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930.

Cortez, Jayne. Taking the Blues Back Home. Album.

1996.

Davis, Angela. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.

New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage

Books, 1972.

Jimoh, A. Yemisi. Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in

African American

Fiction: Living in Paradox. Knox-

ville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.

Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in Af-

rican American Literature. New York: Penguin,

1991.

Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White

America. New York: Morrow Quill, 1963.

Murray, Albert. The Hero and the Blues. New York:

Vintage, 1973.

Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Ur-

bana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

———. Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,

1999.

Ya Salaam, Kalamu. What is Life?: Reclaiming the Black

Blues Self. Chicago: Third World Press, 1994.

Kimberly N. Ruffin

Boles, Robert (1942– )

Although he has lived mostly in New England,

Robert Boles was born in Chicago in 1942. The son

of an architect who worked for the State Depart-

ment, Boles spent most of his early years outside

the United States. A medic for the U.S. Air Force

from 1960 to 1962, he worked for several years as

a reporter and photographer for the Yarmouth

inform the often-exhausting displays of cultural

capital and worldliness in both of Boles’s novels,

The People One Knows (1964) and Curling (1968).

Still, these novels stand as two of the most self-

assuredly cosmopolitan and discursively original

works in 20th-century African-American fiction.

The People One Knows (1964), loosely based

on Boles’s experiences as a medic, tells the story

of Saul Beckworth, the young biracial son of a

white father and an African-American mother, as

he recuperates under psychiatric observation in an

army hospital in France after a failed suicide at-

tempt. Beckworth’s account of this experience is

interspersed with surrealistic dreams and disturb-

ing memories of his experiences in the American

South, where he grappled with the complications

of what the jacket of the first edition describes as

“how it feels to cross the murky division of races.”

Boles’s second novel, Curling (1968), presents the

story of Chelsea Meredith Burlingame, a black man

who is adopted into a wealthy white New England

family as an infant. The novel follows the incongru-

62 Boles, Robert

ously named Chelsea as he attempts and often fails

to relate to the white members of his family; his

various white friends and lovers, including a sister

and a lover both named Anne; and the black people

who cross his path as both aliens and, as his buying

of a building in a Boston ghetto suggests, the bear-

ers of potential salvation. Over a series of increas-

ingly intense and frustrating encounters, Chelsea is

forced to find ways to integrate the privilege that

he has no desire to repudiate into his identity as

a black man in a society that can see him only as

an attractive but essentially threatening anomaly.

His condition is symbolized by the game that gives

the novel its title, a game played on ice, generally

in countries that have few blacks, in which heavy

stones with handles are slid toward a target.

Despite critical acclaim from figures as promi-

nent as Kurt Vonnegut, who declared The People

One Knows to be the most significant debut novel

since Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms,

Boles’s novels were too singular to be easily assim-

ilated into the black literary culture of the post–

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT era and stood little chance

of appealing to critics and readers whose tastes had

been shaped by the dictates of BLACK NATIONALISM

and the notions of a BLACK AESTHETIC that grew

from them. Although Boles has not published

another novel, he continued to publish short fic-

tion. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker,

Tri-Quarterly, LANGSTON HUGHES’s anthology The

Best Short Stories by Black Writers: The Classic An-

thology From 1899 to 1967, and Calling the Wind:

Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories,

edited by CLARENCE MAJOR.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Southgate, L. Black Plots and Black Characters: A

Handbook for Afro-American Literature. Syracuse,

N.Y.: Gaylord Professional Publications, 1979.

Terry Rowden

Bonair-Agard, Roger (1969– )

A native of Trinidad and Tobago who resides in

Brooklyn, New York, Roger Bonair-Agard has

emerged as one of the progenitors of what is being

heralded as a renaissance of black poetry and spo-

ken-word performance. Bonair-Agard immigrated

to the United States in 1987 to attend Hunter Col-

lege as a pre-law student and changed gears just

one week before his law school entrance exam. He

channeled his energies toward becoming a poet,

embracing poetry with a dedication to craftsman-

ship as well as an honesty and passion that made

him instantly recognizable as a new and enduring

poetic voice.

The intersections of his Caribbean heritage, his

American present, and his global awareness are

ever-present influences in his work, which reflects

on male-female relationships, family, island life,

and the sociopolitical issues facing the black dias-

pora. His most notable and frequently anthologized

poems are “How the Ghetto Loves Us Back,” “Love

in a Time of Revolution Is Hard Work (Poetz),”

and “Song for Trent Lott.” Though Bonair-Agard

is a prominent voice in the slam movement, which

emphasizes both the writing and performance of

poetry, he recognizes its limitations in determining

the best poet from a myriad of poetry perform-

ers. Along with Lynne Procope and Guy LeCharles

Gonzales, he founded the Louder Arts Project to

concentrate on the writing of poetry rather than

its performance. Louder Arts also seeks to foster a

sense of community awareness, conducting poetry

workshops for youths and homeless communities.

He is also affiliated with the Community-Word

Project and Youth Speaks, which are art-in-educa-

tion programs for younger poets.

Bonair-Agard’s poetic craft has received na-

tional and international recognition. Named Nuy-

orican Fresh Poet of the Year in 1998, he coached

the Nuyorican Poets Café’s team to its first na-

tional championship that same year and coedited

Burning Down the House (2000), an anthology of

the poems written by the championship team. He

has also appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, the

MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and CBS’s 60 Minutes.

His first full-length collection, Chaos Congealed,

was published in 2004.

Candace Love Jackson

Bonair-Agard, Roger 63

Bonner, Marita Odette (1899–1971)

Playwright, short story writer, and essayist, Marita

Bonner was one of the most interesting, versa-

tile, and talented figures in the theatre movement

during the Harlem Renaissance. An innovator in

form and thesis, she was ahead of her time; her

works would later influence such playwrights as

Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and

Ntozake Shange. Despite her small literary out-

put, particularly her lack of plays, Bonner used the

stage as a platform to address a wide range of so-

cial issues related to gender, class, and race.

Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on

June 16, 1899, to Joseph Andrew and Mary Anne

(Noel) Bonner. Younger than her three siblings,

Bernice, Joseph, and Andrew, she was educated

at Brookline High School, where she excelled in

musical composition and German and contrib-

uted regularly to The Sagamore, a student maga-

zine. Between 1918 and 1922 Bonner attended

Radcliffe College, where she studied English and

comparative literature and was admitted into the

highly competitive writing seminar of Charles T.

Copeland, who cautioned her not to be a “bitter”

writer. His reprimand, which she called “a cliché to

colored people who write” (Roses and Randolph,

181), further fueled her determination to become

a writer and to protest the social ills of America. In

her senior year at Radcliffe, Bonner began teaching

at Cambridge High School in Boston. After gradu-

ating, she taught at Bluefield Colored High School

in Bluefield, West Virginia, and at Armstrong Col-

ored High School in Washington, D.C.

While in D.C., Bonner attended poet and play-

wright

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s famous S

Street Salon, a weekly writers’ group, where she was

encouraged and inspired by other writers and play-

wrights, including May Miller, Zora Neale Hur-

ston, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Countee

Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, S. Randolph

Edmonds, Willis Richardson, and her close friend

and mentor Johnson. Although Bonner devoted

much of her literary career to writing fiction, she

began writing plays during this period. She used

her experimental plays to voice her concern with

the racial, class, and gender inequities she was con-

vinced blacks faced. She echoed this concern in her

1925 landmark autobiographical essay, “On Being

Young—A Woman—and Colored.”

Published in Opportunity and written in black

dialect, Bonner’s first play, The Pot Maker: A Play to

Be Read (1927), which suggests a strong influence

by Georgia Douglas Johnson, indicts, through the

main character, who feels “devalued” as a woman,

the infidelity often found in oppressive, poverty-

ridden environments. Praised as her masterpiece

and most ambitious work, The Purple Flower: A

Phantasy That Had Best Be Read (1928) takes place

in a fictional world that allegorically represents race

relations in America. The characters are convinced

that only a violent revolution in a racist America

will free them from their plight and ensure the

survival of the NEW MAN. Written three decades

before the turbulent 1960s, The Purple Flower, as

critics note, signaled Bonner’s prophesy of vast

changes in America, setting the stage for such writ-

ers as Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Sonia

Sanchez, and Ed Bullins (Brown-Guillory, 18).

In Bonner’s last known existing play, Exit, an

Illusion (1929), she probes the popular Harlem

Renaissance theme of “passing,” in which light-

skinned blacks deny their black identity to become

white-identified. Passing is a major theme for the

central characters in James Weldon Johnson’s The

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Alice

Dunbar-Nelson’s Gone White. Bonner’s later one-

act plays won the $200 first prize for best play in the

1927 Crisis magazine contest. Muddled Dreams, a

fourth play, has not been located. Bonner joined

the Washington Krigwa Players, but the company

did not produce her prize-winning plays.

As the subtitles of Bonner’s first two plays sug-

gest, she apparently intended them to be read,

which may explain why they were never produced

during her life. Some critics speculate that they

were considered too avant-garde, which not only

set them apart from the plays of her contempo-

raries but also necessitated numerous technologi-

cal challenges to stage them. Nevertheless, they

were read and appreciated by several artists of

the Harlem Renaissance and were most influen-

tial to later writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice

Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and

Gayl Jones (Roses and Randolph, 166).

64 Bonner, Marita Odette

After Bonner married accountant William

Almy Occomy, a Rhode Island native and Brown

University graduate, she moved to Chicago in

1930. Shortly after the marriage, Bonner ceased

writing drama to raise her family of three chil-

dren—William Almy, Jr., Warwick Gale Noel, and

Marita Joyce—and to focus exclusively on writing

fiction. For her work she received literary recogni-

tion in CRISIS and OPPORTUNITY. While her Chicago

stories from 1933 on reflect new subject matter,

those written between 1937 and 1941, “On the

Altar,” “High Stepper,” “One True Love,” “Stones

for Bread,” “Reap It as You Sow It,” and “Light in

Dark Places,” continue to center on prejudice and

oppression, as did her earlier plays and essays.

In 1941, Bonner stopped writing and began

teaching in Chicago’s public school system, includ-

ing Phillips High School and the Doolittle School

for educationally challenged children. Aside from

family commitments and teaching, as some crit-

ics note, Bonner abandoned her writing to devote

much of her time and energy to the Christian Sci-

ence Church. On December 6, 1971, Bonner died

in Chicago as a result of injuries she sustained in a

fire in her apartment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage:

Black Women Playwrights in America. Westport,

Conn.: Greenwood, 1988.

Burton, Jennifer, ed. Zora Neal Hurston, Eulalie

Spence, Marita Bonner, and Other Plays: The Prize

Plays and Other One-Acts Published in Periodicals.

New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Flynn, Joyce, and Joyce Occomy Stricklin, eds. Frye

Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita

Bonner. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

McKay, Nellie. “ ‘What Were They Saying?’: Black

Women Playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance.”

In The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, edited

by Victor A. Kramer, 129–147. New York: AMS,

1986.

Roses, Lorraine E., and Ruth E. Randolph. “Marita

Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers’ Gardens.”

Black American Literature Forum 21, no. 1–2

(Spring–Summer 1987): 165–183.

Loretta G. Woodard

Bontemps, Arna Wendell (1902–1972)

Arna Wendell Bontemps was born in Alexandria,

Louisiana, on October 13, 1902, to Paul Bontemps,

a bricklayer and musician, and Maria Pembroke

Bontemps, a schoolteacher. The older of two chil-

dren (his sister was named Ruby), he was named

Arnaud, but his name was later shortened to Arna,

probably because it was easier to pronounce. His

French surname came from his father, who was

born in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. Bontemps

grew up in Los Angeles, California, where the fam-

ily migrated when he was a small child. His mother

died nine years after their arrival.

During his early teenage years, Bontemps, who

had been the only African American in his kinder-

garten class, was sent to a white boarding school to

counteract the worldly influence his father believed

Bontemps’s great uncle, Buddy Jo Ward, was hav-

ing on his only son. In 1923, Bontemps graduated

from Pacific Union College, a parochial college op-

erated by the Seventh-Day Adventist church, with

which the family was affiliated.

Bontemps was an influential and significant

member of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE literati and

had a close relationship with his best friend and

collaborator, LANGSTON HUGHES. Many of the

themes of his work, his “integrative approach” to

African-American writing, his attitude toward folk

material and Africa, and his racial protest, reflect

the primary concerns of Harlem Renaissance lit-

erature. Generally, the thematic, structural and

writing style of his poetry, fiction, and nonfiction

demonstrate the depth of Bontemps’s feeling for

and commitment to celebrating the cultural sig-

nificance of African-American contributions to

American culture. Although Bontemps was physi-

cally removed from the South, he maintained a

longing and appreciation for his southern ethnic

heritage. This admiration formed the basis for his

collected work.

Bontemps published his works in the liter-

ary magazines CRISIS and OPPORTUNITY, winning

awards and honors. In 1931, Bontemps, by then

the father of two, published God Sends Sunday.

However, by then, feeling the pinch of the Great

Depression, Bontemps had left Harlem to find

employment, going to Oakwood Junior College,

Bontemps, Arna Wendell 65

the historically black college established by the

Adventist Church in Huntsville, Alabama, where

he had a heavy teaching load. Bontemps’s experi-

ence was further compounded by life in northern

Alabama, which had been affected by the Scotts-

boro trials. The case of the “Scottsboro boys” of-

fers a clear example of the injustices southern

blacks experienced under what RICHARD WRIGHT

called the “ethics of living Jim Crow.” When nine

innocent African-American youths, hitchhikers

(hobos) on an open freight train traveling through

Alabama, were arrested, accused, tried, and found

guilty of allegedly raping two white girls, also il-

legal passengers onboard the same freight train,

the black community, led by the NATIONAL ASSO-

CIATION FOR

THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE

(NAACP), vociferously came to their defense. The

young men’s convictions, which were in most cases

eventually overturned, were appealed all the way

to the Supreme Court. Recognized as important

spokespersons, African-American writers such

as Bontemps and particularly LANGSTON HUGHES

were often in the vanguard of protestors and chal-

lengers of the blatant injustices blacks suffered in a

world deemed “separate but equal.”

Nevertheless, Bontemps continued writing to

Langston Hughes and borrowing library books by

mail; this correspondence, along with his friend-

ship with Hughes and others who were consid-

ered revolutionaries, aroused the suspicion of

both blacks and whites. Considering Bontemps’s

reading material “race-conscious and provoca-

tive trash,” Oakwood’s president demanded that

he publicly burn his small library. At the end of

the following term, Bontemps returned to Califor-

nia, where he completed Black Thunder, which he

wrote while living in deplorable conditions.

Bontemps later moved to Chicago’s South Side

and began working at Shiloh Academy, another

Seventh-Day Adventist school from which he was

forced to resign for reasons similar to the ones that

lost him his job at Oakwood College. Bontemps

then began working for the Works Project Admin-

istration (WPA). In Chicago, Bontemps was well

received. The Chicago Chapter of the National

Negro Congress featured a symposium on Black

Thunder and hosted a reception for him at Lincoln

Center. While there, he and COUNTEE CULLEN col-

laborated on the drama St. Louis Woman; in 1937

he published Sad Faced Boy, a children’s novel.

An award to the Graduate Library School of

the University of Chicago and a Julius Rosen-

wald Fund Fellowship for creative writing turned

Bontemps’s life around. He traveled to the Carib-

bean and later produced Drums at Dusk (1939), a

historical romance about the Haitian revolution.

Although he briefly returned to Harlem to live in

1942, Bontemps moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to

become librarian at Fisk University. Six months

later, he received his M.S. degree from Chicago’s

Library School. Bontemps remained at Fisk from

1943 to 1966, publishing a novel, Chariot in the

Sky: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1951).

Fisk provided emotional solace and an environ-

ment where his craving for cultural identity and

roots could be satisfied. His correspondence with

CARL VAN VECHTEN resulted in Fisk’s acquiring the

George Gershwin Collection, which became the

first significant acquisition to the famous “Negro

Collection” Bontemps built during his tenure as

chief librarian.

At age 64, Bontemps took a sabbatical from Fisk

and went to the University of Illinois’s Chicago

Circle campus, which offered him a tenure-track

position as an associate professor in American lit-

erature at a salary three times his highest pay at

Fisk. In 1969 he went to the University of Wiscon-

sin at Madison and later was named curator of the

James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale Univer-

sity. While at Yale he taught courses in African-

American literature, including one on the Harlem

Renaissance; he also published the anthology The

Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972), as well

as a collection of short stories, A Summer Tragedy

and Other Stories (1973).

In 1971 he was asked to serve as “Writer in Resi-

dence” at Fisk University. In 1972 he was invited

to speak by the library section of the Louisiana

Education Association in Alexandria, his birth-

place. He accepted, since he had plans for an auto-

biography, “A Man’s Name,” which he had already

outlined, and he wanted to do research there and

in surrounding towns. On May 27, 1973, Berea

College bestowed upon him his second honorary

66 Bontemps, Arna Wendell

doctoral degree; the first was awarded by Morgan

State University. Bontemps died on June 4, 1973;

his funeral was held in the Fisk University Chapel.

After his death, Alexandria, Louisiana, honored

him by restoring his family home and establishing

the Arna Bontemps Museum.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bontemps, Arna W. Black Thunder. New York: Mac-

millan, 1936.

———. God Sends Sunday. New York: Harcourt,

1931.

Bontemps, Arna W. and Langston Hughes, eds. The

Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949: An Anthology. New

York: Doubleday, 1949.

———, eds. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York:

Knopf, 1958.

Betty Taylor-Thompson

Boyd, Melba Joyce (1950– )

One of the major figures of the Detroit School of

African American poets, which emerged from the

BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT of the 1960s, Melba Joyce

Boyd was born on April 2, 1950, to parents Dor-

othy Wynn Boyd and John Percy Boyd, Sr. Boyd

grew up and was educated in Michigan, receiving

her B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and commu-

nication from Western Michigan University (1971

and 1972) and her doctor of arts (D.A.) from the

University of Michigan (1979).

Boyd has produced a prodigious body of work

since her first book, Cat Eyes and Dead Wood

(1978), which was followed by five other volumes

of poems, including Song for Maya (1983) (pub-

lished in Germany as Lied fur Maya [1989]), Thir-

teen Frozen Flamingoes (1984), The Inventory of

Black Roses (1989), Letters to Che (1996), and The

Province of Literary Cats (2002). Her poetry has

been translated into German, Italian, and Spanish.

Boyd edited, along with M. L. Liebler, Abandon

Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001.

In addition to her work as a poet, Boyd is also a

literary biographer. Her first offering in this direc-

tion was Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the

Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (1994). An

internationally known poet and novelist, FRANCES

HARPER played a significant role in the abolition-

ist and feminist movements of the 19th century.

Boyd’s pioneering work on this important author’s

novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), one of

the earliest best-selling novels by an African-Amer-

ican author, revived research on Harper’s work and

helped restore her to her rightful place along with

William Wells Brown, Martin Delaney, SUTTON

GRIGGS, and BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. Boyd intro-

duces and exposes Harper’s work to a new gen-

eration of readers. As Ann DuCille, writing in The

Women’s Review of Books, observes, “Boyd proves

herself a literary historian of the first order in this

scrupulously researched biography” (15).

In 2003, Boyd published another pioneering

work, Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and

Broadside Press. As she does in her work on Harper,

in this text Boyd uncovers a neglected but impor-

tant aspect of American and African-American

literary history. DUDLEY RANDALL (1914–2000) was

the founder of the most significant poet’s small

press of the 1960s. The Detroit-based BROADSIDE

PRESS published, over the course of two decades,

some 95 titles and introduced such important

20th-century African-American poets as HAKI

MADHUBUTI, NIKKI GIOVANNI, SONIA SANCHEZ,

AUDRE LORDE, and ETHERIDGE KNIGHT to the read-

ing public. Each poet became an important voice

of the Black Arts Movement. In addition, in 1995

Boyd produced a documentary film on Randall’s

life, The Black Unicorn, which complemented her

published biography. Boyd, a former assistant edi-

tor at Broadside Press, brings firsthand knowledge

and legitimacy to her work on Randall and Broad-

side Press. According to biographer Arnold Ramp-

ersad, Wrestling with the Muse is “a richly creative

exploration” of Randall’s “remarkable life as a poet

and creative visionary.”

In her poetics, Boyd employs a spare, sharp

verse whose vernacular style and generally short

lines are informed by a wide-ranging sensibility

that is rooted in American contemporary urban

experiences. Boyd’s declarative sentences are made

powerful through her jagged, fragmented, style.

Her poems often praise the urban landscape for

just those things that seem most unexpected. The

Boyd, Melba Joyce 67

grittiness, the anonymity, and the visual

and aural

noise of this environment find their way into her

poems as monumental icons; “the crowd wears

sunglasses” offers an excellent example, describing

“the city” as a complicated place where

. . . the need

for greed

weaves pain

into fear

into a slow

kill.

Despite its complexity, the vibrant and electrify-

ing city must also be associated with fear and slow

death.

Equally important, as observers and commen-

tators, Boyd’s speakers are deeply informed about

the endemic class and racial conflicts in modern

America. Consequently, through her speakers

Boyd often directly and unabashadedly addresses

the ills of American modernity and the African-

American community, such as drugs, homeless-

ness, police brutality, disfranchisem*nt, and white

privilege in a racialized society, as she does in “We

Want Our City Back”:

We don’t want police

harassing the homeless

for being without a lease.

Mock-irony, a distinct feature of African-Ameri-

can modernism, creates the tension that drives this

poem forward, successfully creating the cacophony

that marks inner city life.

Boyd’s poetics are grounded in the primacy of

the images she creates that seem to mount up like

skyscrapers in an urban skyline. Boyd draws these

images from the rich diversity found in the mod-

ern urban environment, juxtaposing them against

one another to produce unexpected, exciting, and

rich associations. This is true in poems that deal

with both public and private subjects, such as

“passion. joy. peace”:

your gift of

3 words

etched in gold

on 3 pastel

stones.

Since receiving her doctor of arts in English

from the University of Michigan in 1979, Boyd

has taught at the University of Iowa, Ohio State

University, and the University of Michigan–Flint.

She joined the faculty of Wayne State University in

1996 and is currently a professor in the department

of Africana studies. She is also an adjunct professor

at the Center for Afroamerican and African Stud-

ies at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Boyd

continues to publish poetry and scholarly articles

widely, both in the United States and in Europe,

and has received numerous awards. She lives with

her family in Detroit.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyd, Melba Joyce, and M. L. Liebler, eds. Abandon

Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001. Detroit:

Wayne State University Press, 2001.

———. The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and the

Broadside Press. (Film) 1995.

———. Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the

Life of Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911). Detroit:

Wayne State University Press, 1994.

———. The Province of Literary Cats. Detroit: Past

Tents Press, 2002.

———. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and

Broadside Press. New York: Columbia University

Press, 2003.

DuCille, Ann. “Trials and Triumphs of Reconstruc-

tion.” Women’s Review of Books (Autumn 1994):

13–15.

Rampersad, Arnold. “Wrestling with the Muse.”

Columbia University Press Web site. Available

online. URL: www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/

data/023113/0231130260.htm. Accessed Septem-

ber 29, 2006.

Geoffrey Jacques

Boykin, Keith (1965– )

Activist author and lecturer Keith Boykin was born

in St. Louis, Missouri, to William Boykin, a small-

68 Boykin, Keith

business owner, and Shirley Hayes, a federal gov-

ernment employee. A 1992 graduate of Harvard

Law School, Boykin served two years as special as-

sistant and director of specialty press for President

Clinton, acting as the principal liaison and spokes-

person between the White House and the minor-

ity media, including the African-American and gay

media. Currently, he serves as executive director

of the National Black Gay & Lesbian Leadership

Forum. He lives in New York City.

In 1992 Boykin worked on the Democratic pri-

mary in New Hampshire for Governor Bill Clinton

and, later that year, moved to Little Rock to work

on the presidential campaign. Boykin continued

to work in Little Rock on inaugural functions

after Clinton was elected president of the United

States until 1993, when the president brought

him to Washington, D.C. as special assistant to

the president, first as the director of news analysis

and then as director of specialty press. Boykin left

his post in 1995 to write One More River to Cross

(1997), his autobiography, which chronicles his

struggles with being black, middle class, and gay

in America.

One More River to Cross presents a strong social

commentary on the complex realities black lesbi-

ans and gay men face within gay white and straight

black communities. Boykin introduces himself as

an imaginative and intuitive child raised in a typi-

cal middle-class St. Louis suburb in a strong, sup-

portive family. However, he is made to confront

the dichotomy of being black and gay in America

when he attends predominantly white elementary

and middle schools. The Boykin family lives in a

white suburb, while the black children who attend

the public schools are poor and are bused from

the outskirts of the city. On fitting in, he recalls

that, although he was not certain what made him

different, he knew it was something more in-

grained and impenetrable than the exterior of his

skin and class.

Boykin graciously fumbles through sexual

growing pains, dating a few girls in high school

and allowing them to temper his effeminate man-

ners. More important, arriving at high school

in Clearwater, Florida, he noted that white girls

would not befriend with him because he was

black, and black girls would not because he was

not black enough. These social commentaries and

nuances in the fabric of accepted American norms

gain even greater credibility when Boykin points

to the black stereotypes in popular television

shows and other media. Further, while chroni-

cling his own experiences, he researches history,

the language of the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT,

and speeches, testimonies, and quotes made by

prominent black figures, such as historian Roger

Wilkins and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, for no-

tions of stereotypes and their perpetuating ability

to create a false sense of black identity in America.

He canvasses church leaders, gay political lead-

ers, and other black gays and lesbians on issues of

faith, family, and discrimination, using their views

to determine what discrepancies, both real and

imagined, prevent a coalition of blacks and gays.

While Boykin’s research suggests that blacks are

less hom*ophobic than whites, despite the coarse

rhetoric of rap lyrics and ardent doctrines, he sug-

gests that both conservative political and religious

forces equally perpetuate tolerance for racially

motivated hom*ophobia in America.

Boykin’s portrayal of what it means to be black

and gay offers an extraordinary insight into a

community that challenges America’s acceptance

of its minorities, both racial and sexual. A black

hom*osexual remains invisible to or is unaccepted

by both black straight and white gay groups. One

More River to Cross explores historical and contem-

porary political and religious themes to gain access

into roles of black leadership, cultural function,

tolerance, domination, and racial marginalization

in America. His second nonfiction publication,

Respecting the Soul: Daily Reflections for Black Les-

bians and Gays, received the prestigious Lambda

Literary Award.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Greene, Beverly, ed. Ethnic and Cultural Diversity

among Lesbians and Gay Men: Psychological Per-

spectives on Lesbian and Gay Issues. Vol. 3. Thou-

sand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997.

Hawkeswood, William G. One of the Children: Gay

Men in Black Harlem. Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1996.

Boykin, Keith 69

Reid-Pharr, Robert F., ed. Black Gay Man: Essays. New

York: New York University Press, 2001.

Lawrence Potter

Bradley, David (1950– )

Like many African-American writers, David Brad-

ley centers his work on essential questions per-

taining to family, community, history, and racism.

Bradley’s work is distinguished by its immediacy

and the

profound effect of his awareness and treat-

ment of the intersection between the burdens of

history and the difficult promises of individual

existence. His first book, South Street (1975), writ-

ten while he was an undergraduate, went out of

print soon after publication. His second novel, The

Chaneysville Incident (1981), winner of the PEN/

Faulkner Prize and a Book-of-the-Month Club

Alternate Selection, quickly established Bradley’s

reputation as a major 20th-century African-

American author.

David Bradley, the only son of Reverend D. H.

Bradley and Harriet M. Jackson Bradley, was born

and raised in Bedford, Pennsylvania, where he

attended public school. He graduated from Bed-

ford Area High School in 1968 and attended the

University of Pennsylvania as a creative writing

and English major, graduating summa cum laude

in 1972. He attended the University of London,

studying at the Institute for United States Stud-

ies; in 1974, he received his M.A. in area studies,

United States, from Kings College, London. Brad-

ley had begun in earnest his study of 19th-century

American history, laying the foundation for what

would become The Chaneysville Incident, a novel

he planned to center around the local legend of 13

runaway slaves he had heard in Bedford.

Bradley became interested in this legend when

his mother, while researching the history of Bed-

ford’s black community for the local bicentennial,

came across the story and then found the actual

graves of the fugitive slaves in Bedford County.

Mrs. Bradley’s discovery confirmed the well-

known legend: While making their way to freedom

through Bedford on the Underground Railroad,

13 fugitive slaves asked to be put to death to avoid

their impending recapture. Although Bradley first

recorded the story of their tragic choice in his un-

published collection of short stories, written while

he was in college, his interest in this legend did not

end there. He would make it central to the narra-

tive of The Chaneysville Incident.

Bradley wrote four versions of The Chaneysville

Incident over a 10-year period. The final version is

a compelling story of a young black man’s search

for meaning in the history of his family, particu-

larly his father, and his community. The protag-

onist, John Washington, a young black history

professor living in Philadelphia, returns home to

Chaneysville to care for and then bury his surro-

gate father, Jack Crawley. While home, John visits

his parents’ house, where he examines the his-

torical documents, papers, and journals of his late

biological father, Moses. Through this research,

John works toward a better understanding of his

father’s suicide and its connections to the death of

the 13 fugitive slaves many years before. Through

a process of self-discovery and examination, in-

volving Judith, the white psychiatrist he is dating,

John comes to a deeper understanding of the true

meaning of communal and personal history. By

comprehending what led the fugitive slaves to for-

feit their lives, John comes to understand why his

father, Moses, chose to take his own life.

In The Chaneysville Incident Bradley weaves

numerous stories together into a central narra-

tive thread. Central characters John and Jack are

storytellers, weavers of a good yarn. John’s return

home begins a series of memories and flash-

backs—to his own childhood and adolescence

and to other stories told by Jack. In a multiplic-

ity of telling and remembering, Bradley weaves

together John’s memories, Jack’s stories, Moses’

history, conversations with Judith, and John’s vi-

sion of the Chaneysville incident into a narrative

tapestry depicting the violence and cruelty that

not only often typified slavery but also typifies life

within a racist culture.

A former Temple University professor and

currently a visiting faculty member at the Uni-

versity of Oregon, Bradley has also written eight

70 Bradley, David

screenplays. Frequently writing on topics pertain-

ing to the African-American experience, Bradley

has been a consistent contributor to The New

Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Los

Angeles Times, Esquire, the Philadelphia Inquirer

Magazine, and The Village Voice. In addition to his

PEN/Faulkner, Bradley has been awarded a Gug-

genheim Fellowship for fiction and a National

Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for

nonfiction; he was a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest

Visiting Writer Fellow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blake, Susan L., and James A. Miller. “The Business of

Writing: An Interview with David Bradley.” Cal-

laloo (Spring–Summer 1984): 19–39.

Ensslen, Klaus. “Fictionalizing History: David Brad-

ley’s The Chaneysville Incident.” Callaloo (Spring

1988): 280–296.

Janet Bland

Braithwaite, William Stanley Beaumont

(1878–1962)

Boston-born William Braithwaite, whose parents,

Emma DeWolfe and William Smith Braithwaite,

were West Indians, was best known as an editor,

critic, and anthologist. Left practically destitute

at age 12 by the death of his father, having pre-

viously grown up in a fairly prosperous home

where he was tutored in French, Braithwaite, who

was forced to seek employment to help meet the

daily needs of the family, was self-educated for

the most part, although he later received honor-

ary degrees from Atlanta University and Talladega

College and held a chair as professor of creative

literature at Atlanta University. Braithwaite’s in-

telligence, brilliance, and scholarly productivity

placed him among peers W. E. B. DUBOIS and

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, although not necessarily

in the vanguard with such pioneering turn-of-the

century black writers as PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

and even CHARLES CHESNUTT, who, at first, dis-

tanced himself from his black identity in order

to publish. Preceding the younger generation of

HARLEM RENAISSANCE writers such as LANGSTON

HUGHES, ZORA NEALE HURSTON, and WALLACE

THURMAN, who were, as Hughes notes in “The

Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” interested

in embracing and celebrating the complete spec-

trum of black identity and culture in their works,

Braithwaite did not wish to be viewed as a “Negro

poet”—a “race poet.” In fact, he encouraged the

younger poets of the Harlem Renaissance, spe-

cifically CLAUDE MCKAY, to submit for publication

only works that did not signal their racial iden-

tity. Braithwaite, whom Robert Bone identified,

along with DuBois, as a member of the conserva-

tive black faction, accused Hughes and his peers,

with the exception of JEAN TOOMER, the author of

Cane, of “glorifying the lowest strata of Negro life,

pandering to sensationalism, and succumbing to

the influence of white Bohemia” (95).

Becoming familiar with British lyricist poets

while working in a printing shop, Braithwaite

began to value and to write poetry in that tra-

dition, bemoaning the legitimatization of the

minstrel’s mask and voice, black dialect, imposed

on Dunbar, Johnson, and Chesnutt. Braithwaite

became editor of the New Poetry Review and a

regular contributor to such mainstream journals

as the Forum, Century, Scribner’s, and Atlantic

Monthly. He was, for many years, the leading book

reviewer for the Boston Transcript. His most sig-

nificant literary contributions, however, were his

annual Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook

of American Poetry, published from 1913–1929,

which included not only poems focused on such

traditional themes as truth and beauty but also his

critical literary analyses and reviews. He published

the work of many American modernist poets, in-

cluding Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, before

they became well known.

His personal work includes three volumes of

poetry: Lyrics of Life and Love (1904), The House

of Falling Leaves (1908), Sandy Star (1926), and

Selected Poems (1948). In addition, he wrote his

autobiography, The House under Arcturus (1940),

and a biography of the Brontes, The Bewitched

Parsonage (1950). His celebration of Keats’s birth-

day, “October XXIX, 1795”

Writings. New York: Library of America

College Edition, 1986, 357–546.

Ellison, Ralph. “The Art of Fiction: An Interview.” In

Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1972,

167–183.

Fuller, Hoyt. “Contemporary Negro Fiction.” South-

ern Review 50 (1965): 321–335.

Hogue, Lawrence W. The African American Male,

Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach

to African American Literature, Criticism and His-

tory. Albany: State University of New York Press,

2003.

hooks, bell. Salvation: Black People and Love. New

York: William Morrow, 2001.

Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken:

The Afro-American Presence in American Litera-

ture. In Toni Morrison, edited by Harold Bloom,

201–230. New York: Chelsea House Publishers,

1990.

Neel, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” In The Black

Aesthetics, edited by Addison Gayle, 256–274.

New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972.

Turner, Darwin T. “The Negro Novel in America: In

Rebuttal.” College Language Association Journal 10

(1966): 122–134.

��

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I began this project, family members,

friends, and colleagues lauded me for taking on

such a monumental task. In fact, while some

profusely wished me good luck and best wishes,

others candidly warned that I was taking on a her-

culean task. This was indeed a challenging project.

However, it was also a rewarding one.

First of all, the associate editors and I complet-

ed the journey with the encouragement, support,

and, above all, patience of our editor Jeff Soloway,

without whom we would never have crossed the

finish line.

As chief editor I must also express similar

thanks and appreciation to my incredible team

of associate editors, Mel Donalson, Tracie Guzzio,

and Loretta Gilchrist Woodard, who more than

rose to the occasion, going the extra mile to

ensure continued progress and the production of

the highest quality work. Equally important are

contributors G. Winston James, Lynda Koolish,

Howard Ramsby III, Beverly Tate, Terry Rowden,

Gloria Cronin, Warren Carson, Robert Dowling,

Keith Byerman, Kim Hai Pearson, Brian Jennings,

Jerry Ward, E. Ethelbert Miller, Julia Galbus, Cle-

nora Hudson Weems, Michael Poindexter, Wil-

liam Graves, Ronald G. Coleman, France Davis,

and librarians Curley Jones and Marie Paiva,

whose effusive support, commitment, and contri-

butions never lagged. They are living testimonies

to unconditional love, friendship, and enduring

collegiality.

Needless to say, I could not have accomplished

this project without the assistance I received with

the day-to-day tasks of managing it. I thank the

many student assistants who worked with me over

the past three years, including Kindra Briggs, Ryan

Dixon, Robyn Lemon, Christine Pak, Carlos Perez,

Rich Roberts, Edward L. Robinson, Brooke Shif-

fler, Erik Ludwig, and Rondell Nelson Richards,

who did everything from setting up and maintain-

ing grids to corresponding with contributors and

potential contributors, doing library work, and

typing. In other words, they served as my army

and navy. They deserve the medals.

��

A TO Z

ENTRIES

��

Aasim, Afrika Bambaataa (1960– )

Often called the “Godfather of Hip-Hop,” Afrika

Bambaataa Aasim, familiarly known as Bam, was

born in the Bronx, New York on April 10, 1960.

Many say his given name at birth was Kevin Dono-

van, but in an interview Bam states, “This Kevin

Donovan, they be wanting to swear that person is

me. That’s a Godfather of mine who used to be

in the gangs with me. But they don’t know what’s

what. So, they are caught up in their belief system”

(Banjoko). During his early teens Bam became in-

terested in music and became a D.J. He also be-

came a founding member of the Savage Seven, a

street gang based in the Bronxdale Projects. Bam’s

gang grew quickly and eventually became known

as the Black Spades.

Becoming fascinated with the warrior tradi-

tion of the Zulus, which he learned about from his

wide studies on African history, Michael Caine’s

film Zulu, and a trip to Africa, Bam took the name

Bambaataa Aasim, which means “affectionate

leader” in English. Bam’s leadership qualities and

potential were evident even in his childhood, but

the question was what direction would his lead-

ership take. The direction of gang leader was not

positive, but it was apparent that leadership was al-

ways in him; perhaps because of his Jamaican an-

cestry his legacies were tied to MARCUS GARVEY, the

leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Asso-

ciation (UNIA), which some historians consider

the largest black mass movement in 20th-century

America before Martin L. King, Jr.’s Southern

Christian Leadership Conference.

Around 1973, when Black Spades began to fade,

Bam started his own performing group, called

Zulu Nation. Although Bam established a differ-

ent direction for this organization from that of

the Black Spades, he designed objectives that were

fundamentally quite similar. For example, know-

ing that the gang life he had lived as a member of

Black Spades was essentially an outlet for young

people in the ghetto, Bam wanted his new orga-

nization to serve a similar objective; significantly,

however, instead of crime, he emphasized creativ-

ity. Well grounded in African history, Afrocentric

thought, spirituality, health-consciousness, and

the culture surrounding disk jockeying, which re-

mained dear to him, Bam identified five elements

of black culture he would later call hip-hop as the

centerpiece of the Zulu Nation. These elements

included the following: emceeing (rapping), disk

jockeying, writing (aerosol art/graffiti), dancing

(including several forms, breaking, up-rocking,

popping, and locking), and knowledge, particu-

larly knowledge of self, which held the other four

elements together.

Knowledge of self was to be the primary func-

tion of hip-hop; emceeing was to be used to com-

municate—to get a message across. Disk jockeying

was an equally important venue of communica-

tion as Bam and others used it to play speeches by

MALCOLM X, MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., and other

��

sociopolitical voices over the beat of the music

they were playing. Writing was used to express

some political or ideological message or as an ex-

pression of cultural creativity. Dance forms were

to be valued as cultural expressions as well, similar

to the way the Brazilian martial arts form capoeira

was used to celebrate the influences and retention

of African culture in South America.

Knowledge of self and the world that blacks

lived in was inspired by the society and culture in

which hip-hop was born. Bam’s transformation

from gang leader into the “Godfather of Hip-Hop”

was inspired by several sources of knowledge; he

credits in particular the Honorable Elijah Mu-

hammad and the Nation of Islam for introducing

him to knowledge of self and the significance of

the time he was living in. Consequently, it was not

surprising that demands for the emergence of new

civil rights and nationalist organizations, as well as

cries for black power prevalent during the 1960s

and 1970s, echoed in the world of hip-hop culture

within the black community.

The growth of disk jockeying in the late 1970s

laid the foundation for the new phenomenon of

“battles” between groups based solely on the loud-

ness of the music. Bam transformed the nature of

the D.J. battle when he began to have D.J.’s take

turns to determine who was the best. Each D.J.

would play for an hour, and then the listeners

would choose their favorite. This metaphoric bat-

tle and competition ran over into the other areas

of hip-hop as well, such as rap battles and break

dancing battles.

Bam began his recording career in 1980 with

Paul Winley Records. However, the experience

proved to be an unhappy one, and he decided to

leave the company. By 1981 Bam had moved from

doing house and block parties, where he would

connect his equipment to the streetlight, to shows

at the Audubon Ballroom. In 1982 Bam released

the hip-hop

(1908), is exemplary of

Braithwaite, William Stanley Beaumont 71

his nonracial, more traditional themes, as seen in

its last stanza:

And with these blazing triumphs spoke one

voice

Whose wistful speech no vaunting did em-

ploy:

‘I know not if ’twere by Fate’s chance or

choice

I hold the lowly birth of an English boy;

I only know he made man’s heart rejoice

Because he played with Beauty for a joy!”

Perhaps Braithwaite, winner of the Spingarn

Medal in 1918, would have readily applied to him-

self his critique of Toomer in his “The Negro in

American Literature,” which Locke included in his

anthology The NEW NEGRO: “He would write just

as well, just as poignantly, just as transmutingly,

about the peasants of Russia, or the peasants of

Ireland, had experience brought him in touch with

their existence. . . . Jean Toomer is a bright and

morning star of a new day of race in literature.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.

Braithwaite, Benjamin Stanley. “The Negro in Ameri-

can Literature.” In The New Negro, edited by Alain

Locke, 29–53. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Broadside Press

Founded by the poet DUDLEY F. RANDALL, the edi-

tor and publisher, in Detroit, Michigan, in 1965,

Broadside Press, most critics agree, was vital to the

success the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT and its major

poets during the 1960s and 1970s. A librarian

who was aware of the importance of copyright-

ing as a means of protecting intellectual property,

Randall founded Broadside to protect his first

published work, “Ballad of Birmingham,” which

Jerry Moore, a folk singer, had also set to music as

“Dressed All in Pink.” The two poems formed the

beginning of the Broadside Series and the genesis

of Broadside Press. Although for the first five years

Broadside Press was a one-man operation, housed

in Randall’s basem*nt and study, Broadside Press

would become a company that kept outgrowing

its space.

In many ways, For Malcolm: Poems on the Life

and Death of Malcolm X (1967), which Randall

coedited with visual artist Margaret Burroughs

and which was inspired by MARGARET WALKER’s

poem “For Malcolm,” witnessed the true genesis of

Broadside Press as a viable and valuable publishing

vehicle. For Malcolm was the outcome of the radi-

cal and contentious debate among black writers

about the functional role of art and propaganda

that took place during the 1966 Fisk Writers Con-

ference at Fisk University, during which the more

traditionalist ROBERT HAYDEN (who described

himself as a poet first and foremost) and the sup-

porters of a black aesthetics clashed head on. The

symbolic importance of the life and death of MAL-

COLM X was the sole space in which the various

camps found common ground.

The response to Randall and Burroughs’s call

for works on Malcolm X, which would be pub-

lished in an anthology, was electric and eclectic.

Even Hayden submitted an entry, “El Hajj Malik,

El Shabazz.” The list of those who responded reads

like a “Who’s Who” list among black writers of the

1960s and 1970s: GWENDOLYN BROOKS, LeRoi Jones

(AMIRI BARAKA), Margaret Walker, OSSIE DAVIS,

CLARENCE MAJOR, TED JOANS, MARI EVANS, Julia

Fields, SONIA SANCHEZ, DAVID HENDERSON, and

LARRY NEAL, among many others. As MELBA JOYCE

BOYD notes, “The divergent political perspectives

and broad range of literary styles that character-

ized the anthology foreshadowed the profiles of

future Broadside Press authors” (144).

For Malcolm would also be instrumental in at-

tracting many of the poets who became the major

architects of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, par-

ticularly Don L. Lee (HAKI MADHUBUTI), NIKKI

GIOVANNI, James Emmanuel, and ETHERIDGE

KNIGHT, who was in Indiana State Prison when

he first contacted Randall. Madhubuti’s early

best-selling books were published by Broadside

Press, including Black Pride (1968), Think Black

(1968), and Don’t Cry, Scream (1969), which has

72 Broadside Press

the distinction of being Broadside’s first hardcover

publication. Randall also created an audio series,

Broadside Voices, of poets reading their own books

on tape.

Although the 1960s witnessed a proliferation

of black presses, including Lee’s (Madhubuti’s)

THIRD WORLD PRESS in Chicago and Baraka’s Jihad

Press in New Jersey, as Randall himself concluded,

“Broadside set the precedent” (quoted in Boyd,

235). As Randall further explained, “There was

something further in the air in the ’60s, and the

poetry was new too. . . . The political climate, the

sit-ins and the civil demonstrations focused atten-

tion on the black revolt. Poetry is more emotional

than prose, and it was time for emotions” (235).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley

Randall and the Broadside Press. New York: Co-

lumbia University Press, 2003.

Gayle, Addison, ed. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City,

N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Brooks, Gwendolyn (1917–2002)

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in

Topeka, Kansas, to schoolteacher Keziah Corinne

Wims and janitor David Anderson Brooks. The

family moved to Chicago five weeks later, where

she was raised. She graduated from high school

and completed her formal education at Wilson Ju-

nior College in 1936 and then worked for a short

time as a maid and secretary. Two years later she

joined Chicago’s NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE

ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE Youth Coun-

cil, and a year later she married Henry Lowington

Blakely II. The young couple lived in a kitchenette

apartment (similar to the one described in her

novel MAUD MARTHA) at 63rd and Chaplain in

Chicago above a real-estate agency.

Like LANGSTON HUGHES and JAMES WELDON

JOHNSON, who would critique her work and men-

tor her, Brooks is best known for her poetry. Her

first poem appeared in American Child magazine

when Brooks was only 13. Three years later JAMES

WELDON JOHNSON had read and critiqued her

poetry. When she graduated from high school in

1935, she was already a regular contributor to the

weekly variety column of The Chicago Defender,

a black newspaper, in which she also published a

number of her poems.

Brooks studied poetry with Inez Cunningham

Stark at a community art center on the South Side

of Chicago. She would later teach creative writing to

one of the South Side’s best-known youth “gangs,”

the Blackstone Rangers. Winning the Midwestern

Writers’ Conference poetry award in 1943 led to

the publication of her first collection of poems, A

Street in Bronzeville (1945). Her other collections

include Annie Allen (1949), Maud Martha (1953),

The Bean Eaters (1961), and In the Mecca (1968).

In 1950 Brooks became the first black writer to

win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry (for Annie Allen).

She also published Bronzeville Boys and Girls

(1956), poems for children. During this period she

also wrote reviews and articles that were published

in the New York Times, Negro Digest, and the New

York Herald Tribune. She represented in a variety

of poetic forms the human condition from a black

perspective. Much of her work concentrates on the

people who live in a small Chicago community.

Brooks’s first book of poetry, A Street in

Bronzeville, celebrates the ordinary lives of a group

of ordinary urban dwellers who live in a commu-

nity that resembles Chicago’s South Side. Brooks

sacrifices overt protest in favor of focusing on

the everyday lives of preachers, gamblers, maids,

beauty shop owners, and other members of the

black community of Bronzeville. In “the mother,”

for example, she provides an extraordinarily sensi-

tive treatment of a woman’s afterthoughts about

having experienced multiple abortions. “The Sun-

days of Satin-Legs Smith” takes the reader through

a typical Sunday in the life of a Bronzeville man

who relishes that day in particular when he can

dress in his zoot suit and strut through the com-

munity. The poem tracks Satin-Leg Smith’s per-

sonal history

of social and economic deprivation

while celebrating the minor triumph represented

by his ordinary Sunday pleasures—from his cof-

fee and rolls for breakfast, to the BLUES he hears as

he strolls through the community, to an evening

Brooks, Gwendolyn 73

capped by a completely satisfying date with a soft,

willing woman.

Annie Allen (1949) renders the story of an or-

dinary black woman in four parts: “Notes from

the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad,”

“Appendix to the Anniad,” and “The Woman-

hood.” Set in Chicago, the centerpiece of the col-

lection, “The Anniad,” is a mock epic that alludes

to Homer’s The Iliad and Virgil’s The Aeneid.

Through Annie’s urban black female conscious-

ness, Brooks takes the reader from Annie’s early

life through the disillusionment of marriage and

other life experiences. Annie’s search for self and

for romantic love unfolds in the form of a ballad

of desire and experience that culminates a lesson

of self-esteem and self-reliance in the final section,

“The Womanhood.” The mock epic and, indeed,

the entire collection cover many of the same con-

cerns that Brooks later tackles in her only novel,

Maud Martha.

Maud Martha deals with the developing con-

sciousness of a young girl living in a northern city

during the period before, during, and after World

War II. Composed of 34 very poetic sketches, the

novel provides an application of double-conscious-

ness, which Brooks expands by presenting a title

character and protagonist who must overcome her

feelings of rejection in a world that values white-

ness (light skin), maleness, European features, and

“good hair” over blackness (dark skin), femaleness,

African features, and coarse hair. In effect, Maud

experiences and exhibits “multiple consciousness.”

In some ways Maud Martha is akin to the realism

of ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s classic THEIR EYES WERE

WATCHING GOD (1937) in its focus on a woman’s

journey of self-discovery and her growing aware-

ness of her own agency.

Brooks’s literary career took a decided turn after

she attended a Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk

University in 1967 and interacted with a number

of artists involved with the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT.

She credits these younger artists with helping her

gain greater awareness about American society

and about herself. In the 1970s she became a con-

sultant in American literature for the Library of

Congress and was named poet laureate of Illinois.

Brooks taught in a number of colleges and univer-

sities, including Chicago’s Columbia College, the

University of Wisconsin at Madison, and City Uni-

versity of New York. Her career as author, teacher,

and community activist spanned almost 70 years.

She died on December 3, 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloom, Harold, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks. Philadelphia:

Chelsea House, 2000.

Bolden, Barbara Jean. Urban Rage in Bronzeville:

Social Commentary in the Poetry of Gwendolyn

Brooks, 1945–1960. Chicago: Third World Press,

1999.

Bryant, Jacqueline, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud

Martha: A Critical Collection. Chicago: Third

World Press, 2002.

Gayles, Gloria Wade. Conversations with Gwendolyn

Brooks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,

2003.

Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexing-

ton: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and Heroic

Voice. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,

1987.

Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Dis-

tilled: Gwendolyn Brooks: Her Poetry and Fiction.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Wright, Stephen Caldwell, ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks:

Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1996.

Lovalerie King

Brothers and Keepers

John Edgar Wideman (1984)

Following the arrest of his brother, Robby, for

murder, novelist JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN began tak-

ing a new direction with his literary career. Seeking

to understand the reasons behind his brother’s de-

scent into a life of crime and eventually life impris-

onment, Wideman explored the intersections of

family, race, and history in America. The result was

the autobiographical account of his own journey

and Robby’s incarceration in Brothers and Keepers.

Wideman had drawn a fictional account of some

of these events in the short story cycle Damballah

74 Brothers and Keepers

(1981), published three years before Brothers and

Keepers appeared. Brothers and Keepers develops

some of the same themes of Damballah but further

extends Wideman’s critique of America, especially

his claim that the numbers of African-American

males incarcerated reveals the connection between

the past and the present: Slavery is the historical

equivalent of Robby’s prison life. Wideman reaches

this conclusion in his short story “The Beginning

of Homewood” in Damballah, when he imagines

the life of an ancestor, a slave, who committed a

crime by running away, juxtaposed with that of

Tommy (the fictional persona of Robby). Both the

slave and the prisoner are chained like outlaws, but

they are really the victims in a larger economic, so-

cial, and racial drama.

As Wideman traces the historical, cultural, and

personal forces that led to Robby’s downfall, he

reconciles himself to his own troubled past and to

the family and community that he fled as a young

writer and academic. This flight away from home

and racial identity marks Wideman’s own double-

consciousness in the work. And though Robby is

acknowledged by the society as being the “crimi-

nal,” Wideman discovers that he himself has been

the one that has acted like a “fugitive.” Turning his

back on his African-American community has

alienated Wideman from himself. John and Robby

both suffer from the limitations imposed on them

by a racist America. While it appears that Wideman

has beaten the system, he has sacrificed his per-

sonal history to do so. The promise of American

middle-class success has seduced him away from

his family and the Homewood neighborhood of

his youth. Robby stayed behind, a statistic of urban

desolation, impoverishment, drug use, and crime,

though Brothers and Keepers shows that this was

not always the life that Robby saw before him. Like

his brother, Robby had dreams, talent, and intelli-

gence—all ravaged by a society that refused to see

beyond the color of his skin.

While Wideman recognizes Robby’s own re-

sponsibility in the direction that his life ulti-

mately took, he cannot overlook the “keepers”

who resolutely refuse to acknowledge Robby’s

humanity. The keepers include the guards who

control Robby’s movements, but the keepers are

also the guardians of American institutions who

control the perceptions that this society holds of

black men and women. On a visit to the prison,

Wideman marks the way that the guards treat his

children, his wife, and his mother. Treated like

prisoners themselves, Wideman realizes his in-

ability to make the world see beyond race. His

mother also remembers Robby’s friend, Garth,

who died after a long illness. Unable to get ad-

equate health care because he was poor and black,

Garth lingers through terrible pain. Little is done

to comfort him, and the system seems to aban-

don him. It is the loss of young, black male lives

to a world that ignores them that embitters Wide-

man’s mother most.

The structure of the work embodies Wideman’s

commitment to the communal voice, to the no-

tion that “all stories are true”—the title of one of

his short story collections. The work is divided

into three sections; the voices of Wideman, his

mother, and Robby moderate the different sec-

tions. The three distinct points of view offer a

more complete observation of the circ*mstances

that brought Robby to prison. But the different

voices also remind us that there is no one singular

African-American experience, and until America

understands and accepts the humanity of African

Americans, the past will continue to haunt the

present.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wideman, John Edgar. Brothers and Keepers. New

York:

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.

———. Damballah. London: Allison & Busby, 1984.

Tracie Church Guzzio

Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black

Gay Men Essex Hemphill, ed. (1991)

Brother to Brother is an emotive journey of discov-

ery on what it means to be black and gay. In his

introduction, ESSEX HEMPHILL states that if there

had been a book about black gay men available

to him during his own youth, such as In the Life:

A Black Gay Anthology (1986), he would not have

had to create still another mask. The historical

Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men 75

communities of silence that reared black gay

men, silence’s accountability for the AIDS epi-

demic among blacks, and the misconstrued rep-

resentation of black hom*osexuals by the media

led Hemphill to publish a generous anthology as

an offering to others like him. He dedicates the

anthology to his lover, Joseph Fairchild Beam,

editor of In the Life, who died from an AIDS-

related illness in 1988. In Hemphill’s poem to

Beam, “When My Brother Fell,” his speaker says,

“it’s too soon to make monuments” for sons of

AIDS (111). Brother to Brother is greater than any

monument. The poems, short stories, interviews,

and essays are testimonies of love, strength, and

courage and give a powerful representation of

the black gay male amid self-discovery and the

development of a collective consciousness often

chastised by silence and deadly change.

“When I Think of Home,” Section I of the an-

thology, opens with “Sacrifice,” a metaphorical

birth of hom*osexuality in the black American race.

The title of Adrian Stanford’s poem alone is reso-

nant of the black man’s self-sacrifice to America

and all that is owing to his own loss of identity.

The poem is powerfully imagistic in its sense of

duality. The effeminate identity of the son could

be the father’s second sacrifice. The question is,

can the father choose to eliminate his gay son? Or

is the title’s image of sacrifice a forecast for the so-

cially imposed silence on the gay black son? Is a

strong sense of community possible for the black

hom*osexual?

Family is community for many African Ameri-

cans, who may not have a clear national identity.

Coming out represents an even greater challenge

for the African-American male, as he admittedly

sacrifices the very foundation that birthed and

strengthened his fortitude for becoming a man.

A touching story, “The Jazz Singer,” by Charles

Henry Fuller, illustrates the lonely awkwardness

of an adolescent discovering his hom*osexuality.

By personifying the jazz singers his parents listen

to, singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Billie

Holliday, Lena Horne, and Sarah Vaughn, the boy

adheres to the music of his family, yet he stands

in opposition to his father’s sense of masculinity.

The father does soften to his discovery of his son

dressed up in women’s clothing, but he sternly

warns his son that there are things in this world a

black man simply cannot be (6).

“Daddy Lied,” a somber poem by Rory Bu-

chanan, reconciles the silence and its irrational

sensibilities as belonging to the past. Buchanan’s

father raised him as his father’s father had done:

according to a silent code of manhood. Silence

serves as a refrain in the African-American com-

munity. Like music, the sustained pause is a som-

ber unspoken embrace. “Letter to Gregory” by Alan

Miller broadens the notion of community and its

quiet embrace in a moving eulogy for a young man

killed in “the unyielding appetite of the harshest /

light . . .” by a drive-by shooter (29). Miller’s use

of photographs offers an intimate remembrance

of Gregory and an emotive mourning over the de-

cline of the African-American community to vio-

lence and infighting.

Essex Hemphill challenges notions and repre-

sentations of family in his poem “Commitments.”

Like Miller, Hemphill uses photographs to show

the quiet legacy of the hom*osexual youth as he

stands among his relatives, seated beside them at

the picnic table and at holiday dinners. Hemphill

uses the poem to challenge his community, his

family, regarding their “conditional” commitment

to the child represented in those family photo-

graphs. He says, essentially, that the hom*osexual

has always been there among his family, but where,

father, mother, aunt, and uncle, have you been?

Self-empowerment finally seems to reign for the

gay black man in “At 36,” a story by Charles Harpe.

Here, Harpe is at the age he had always found cap-

tivating and secure in a hom*osexual. hom*osexual-

ity is no longer an issue for him, yet he is in a place

of forgiveness (53). The lack of love, the desire to

be loved, and low self-esteem are common traits in

the otherwise diverse community of gay men. The

desperate need for love continues “At 36,” as long

as a lack of understanding and stability in the Afri-

can-American community in general persists.

“Baby, I’m for Real,” Section II, chronicles the

voices of lovers and the development of a gay black

community. “Comfort,” a poem by Don Charles,

addresses the warmth of things familiar, the com-

fort of likeness, of history, and shared experience.

76 Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men

“Safe Harbour,” a poem by David Frechette, is a

metaphor for the rescue of a lover’s arms against

the “tidal wave of woes” the black hom*osexual

would face outside his lover’s embrace. “Names

and Sorrows,” a poem by D. Rubin Green, chron-

icles the myriad discrepancies and problems of

black-on-white gay love. All three poems are em-

blematic of the carving out of a new community.

Many black gay men are estranged from their fam-

ilies. The conciliatory tone of Charles’s “Comfort”

is tempting to a gay black male adrift from a com-

munity he had always known. Frechette’s poem

too draws a cold, unforgiving heterosexual world,

while Green goes deeper into blackness, address-

ing ostracism by chanting some of the taboos a

black man who loves a white man must turn over

in his mind.

The exterior world’s impression of the black

male preys on the identity of the black hom*osex-

ual. “Couch Poem” by Donald Woods juxtaposes

the complex mask a professional gay man wears

throughout his day, against his true personal

yearnings, sense of place, and comforts (64–67).

“Hey, Brother, What’s Hap’nin?,” a short story by

Cary Alan Johnson, further challenges the figura-

tive roles gay black men must play. By reestablish-

ing dominant and effeminate manners, Johnson

throws all the white definitions away and estab-

lishes the boy next door as the ideal. The boy next

store is both something to be and someone to pine

after. “Jailbait,” a poem by Don Charles, denies the

boy next store the ability to know what his needs

are and what he could be representing to the older,

wiser black hom*osexual.

“Hold Tight Gently,” Section III, broadens the

black hom*osexual community to include friends

and caregivers. “It Happened to Me,” a nonfiction

account by Roger V. Pamplin, Jr., shows the ratio-

nale and behavior that led Pamplin to be tested for

HIV and learn he is positive. Part of the rationale

seems to be a lack of communication filtering over

from the gay white community. Pamplin survives

PCP pneumonia and, at the time of his writing this

piece, owes his defeat of death to the support of

friends and his faith in God. He initially goes from

being angry with God to having an even greater

sense of purpose. Through Pamplin’s piece, oth-

ers can learn to be safe and the black gay commu-

nity can become strengthened. “The Scarlet Letter,

Revisited: A Very Different AIDS Story,” by Walter

Rico Burrell, follows a diary account of the author’s

AIDS-related illnesses. Caught between hostile,

fearful medical and pharmaceutical communities

and a tolerant and loving community of a doc-

tor and one friend, Burrell undergoes the trials of

AZT. Through the delirium of the drug, he tells his

family history, the dichotomy of his father’s sense

of place in

the world (black and economically suc-

cessful was rare), and the social constrictions of

being black. The physical and emotional closeness

he shares with his father is something he wishes

to pass on to his own children, especially to his

son. Burrell openly discloses his ex-wife’s hatred

for him and his lifestyle and his son’s rejection of

him, and he reconciles that he may just “leave this

life still longing for love” given the limited though

warm community in which he resides (135). “Re-

membrance,” a prose piece by Kenneth McCreary,

chronicles the love, dedication, and profound

aloneness that the caregiver experiences following

the loss of a lover or friend to AIDS. The sadness

is found in the fact that in the weeks following the

death, perhaps even in years to come, rediscovered

items belonging to the deceased will echo a life left

to be remembered.

“The Absence of Fear,” section IV, begins with

Adrian Stanford’s famous “Psalm for the Ghetto.”

Stanford’s emotive call for coalition within the

black culture for the survival of the black intel-

lect transitions into the essay “True Confessions:

A Discourse on Images of Black Male Sexual-

ity.” Here, Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer object

to laws against p*rnography for their overriding

white representation and its lack of libertarian ar-

guments. Julien and Mercer further discuss “black

male gender roles” and “a multiplicity of identi-

ties” to contribute to the coalition for a true black

intellectual and sexual identity.

Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam look to the

contributions of black literary icons LANGSTON

HUGHES and JAMES BALDWIN and to contemporary

artists’ depictions of their works in search of a

cornerstone to define the black hom*osexual intel-

lect. Roy Simmons discusses some of the social,

Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men 77

intellectual, and literary biases black gay intel-

lectuals face, while Charles Nero looks “Toward

a Black Gay Aesthetic” development in literature

with the premise of finding a positive black iden-

tity that renders the life of a black hom*osexual as

“visible” and “valid” (229). The search for a posi-

tive, true figure, one fully realized by family and

by the broader community, is what brings this

collection together. What the Hemphill collection

provides, beyond the search for community, is a

notable literary text for young gay men to read

and learn by.

Lawrence Potter, Jr.

Brown, Claude (1937–2002)

Writer and autobiographer Claude Brown was

born on February 23, 1937, in Harlem, New York.

He is best known for his novelistic autobiography,

Manchild in the Promised Land (1960), which, ac-

cording to Macmillan, its publisher, has sold more

than 4 million copies and has been translated into

14 languages. He is also the author of The Children

of Ham (1976), a children’s book.

By age eight Brown was already living the

troubled life associated with many urban poverty-

stricken blacks of his generation.

Brown spent most of his youth in and out of

juvenile detention centers and correctional schools

for boys, specifically Warwick and Wiltwyck, be-

cause of his delinquent lifestyle and street life of

stealing, fighting, and dabbling in drugs and al-

cohol. He was a charter member of a gang by the

time he was 10. At Warwick, he says, “I was ready

to stay there for a long time and live real good. I

knew how to get along there. I’d had a place wait-

ing for me long before I came. If I’d known War-

wick was going to be as good as it turned out to be,

I would never have been so afraid. As a matter of

fact, I might have gotten there a whole lot sooner.”

Brown’s criminal lifestyle was to be expected

given the often-negative consequences of inner

city life—the Harlem he grew up in was one of the

fiercest inner cities in the United States—but it was

also due to the choices he made. His father, a dock-

worker, frequently beat him and was by no means

a positive example or father figure. His mother, a

good-hearted woman, was always there for him,

but she seemed weak when he needed her the

most. However, his family had some sense of unity,

although there was little income and minimal op-

portunities for the young Sonny, as he was called.

Inevitably, to succeed, Brown turned to the streets,

where drugs, prostitution, and violence dominated

and contaminated the neighborhood, although

he was well aware of the potential consequences.

Brown’s illicit lifestyle took a deep turn when, at 13

years of age, he was shot in the abdomen during a

robbery. This incident became a turning point in

his life. Brown, with the encouragement of a friend

and a school psychologist, abandoned his criminal

behavior, completed high school, and enrolled at

Howard University in Washington, D.C., where the

award-winning novelist TONI MORRISON was one

of his teachers.

Brown wrote about what he knew best: his own

life experiences. He confessed, “I didn’t know any-

thing other than my own life, so that was what I

wrote. . . .” In Manchild in the Promised Land his

major themes run the gamut from the appeal of

the Nation of Islam (the Black Muslims) in the Af-

rican-American community to hom*osexuality and

the quest for masculine identity, the significance

of education to black liberation, and conflicts be-

tween southern values and urban inner-city life.

By the end of the book his main character has,

despite the many challenges he faces, empowered

himself, much like FREDERICK DOUGLASS and RICH-

ARD WRIGHT. Unlike “Pimp,” his younger brother

who became a drug addict, Brown transcended,

significantly through education, rather than sank

beneath the cracks and insurmountable odds of

ghetto life.

Not surprisingly, critics view Manchild in the

Promised Land as a 20th-century slave narrative.

According to Sidone Smith, “Manchild is an ex-

posé of the slave system as the slave narrative and

Wright’s Black Boy were exposés of the slave system

of the South. Brown . . . vividly portrays the brutal

reality of life in Harlem” (157). Brown returned to

Harlem after completing his formal education; he

78 Brown, Claude

lived there until his death. He also established and

operated a mentoring program for Harlem’s youth

and an intensive residential treatment program to

help turn young people’s lives around, much as he

had done for himself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyd, Herb. “Claude Brown-Tribute.” Black Issues

Book Review 4, no. 3 (May/June 2002): 80.

Smith, Sidone. Where I’m Bound. Westport, Conn.:

Greenwood Press, 1974.

Carlos Perez

Brown, Frank London (1927–1962)

Novelist, journalist, and activist Frank London

Brown was born in Kansas City, Kansas, to parents

Frank London Brown, Sr., and Myra Myrtle Brown

Frank London in October 1927. Brown, who grew

up in Chicago, graduated from Roosevelt Uni-

versity in 1951, after also attending Wilberforce

University. He attended Kent College of Law and

received a M.A. degree from the University of

Chicago in 1960. He pursued doctoral studies

at the University of Chicago with the Commit-

tee on Social Thought. Brown had various inter-

ests; he was a labor organizer and a jazz musician

who was closely connected with the Chicago jazz

music scene. He performed with such musicians

as Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Gene

Ammons.

Brown’s novels include Trumbull Park (1959)

and Mythmaker (1969). Brown was also known for

his short stories, which appeared in Chicago Maga-

zine, the Chicago Review, Down Beat, Ebony, Negro

Digest, Southwest Review, and the Chicago Review

Anthology.

Brown’s most famous work, Trumbull Park, is

based on true events. From the mid-1950s to the

mid-1960s, Trumbull Park Homes was a govern-

ment program designed to end segregation forc-

ibly. The resistance against black families moving

into a white residential area was “massive and in-

tractable” (Washington, 32), turning the area into

a war zone. Homemade bombs were lobbed into

the housing development every night, and

blacks

were prevented from using any of the neighbor-

hood churches, parks, or stores. In Trumbull Park,

when Buggy and Helen Martin move into Trum-

bull Park Homes, they are faced with malice and

violence. Rather than focus solely on the anger that

the Martins clearly feel about the ongoing hostil-

ity, Brown shows the strain and consequence on

his characters of having to face constant violence

with nonviolence. He shows the Martins’ day-to-

day life, further humanizing them. Brown’s great-

est skill in telling the Martins’ story is the authentic

representation of black life, dialogue, and idiom.

Brown depicts “thoroughly respectable” (79), “in-

telligent, hardworking, and stable” (79) black fam-

ilies. They are not merely interested in their ability

to imitate whites.

Mythmaker, Brown’s second novel (also his

M.A. thesis), which was published posthumously,

is set on Chicago’s South Side; it is less optimistic

than Trumbull Park. The main character, Ernest

Day, briefly escapes the ghetto, only to be forced

back to it in disillusionment and despair. Day’s

quest to find his identity and place to live in the

world is illustrated in his struggle against failure

and ruin.

Brown was awarded the John Hay Whitney

Award for Trumbull Park. He died of leukemia on

March 12, 1962, in Illinois.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fleming, Robert E. “Overshadowed by Richard

Wright: Three Black Chicago Novelists.” Negro

American Literature Forum 7, no. 3 (Autumn

1973): 75–79.

Washington, Mary Helen. “Desegregating the 1950s:

The Case of Frank London Brown.” Japanese Jour-

nal of American Studies 10 (1999): 15–32.

Kim Hai Pearson

Brian Jennings

Brown, Sterling Allen (1901–1989)

Intellectual, educator, mentor, folklorist, cultural

guardian, and poet, Sterling Allen Brown was born

Brown, Sterling Allen 79

in Washington, D.C., the son of Sterling Nelson

Brown, a former slave and a Howard University

professor of theology. A graduate of Dunbar High

School, where his teachers included novelist JESSIE

REDMON FAUSET, Brown was educated at Massa-

chusetts’s Williams College, where he received his

B.A. degree Phi Beta Kappa, and at Harvard Uni-

versity, where he received an M.A. degree in En-

glish. During the Great Depression, Brown, who

had been book review editor for OPPORTUNITY,

became the editor of Negro Affairs for the Federal

Writers’ Project of the WPA (1936–1939) and a

staff member for the Carnegie-Myrdal Study of

the Negro (1939). His work appeared in the New

Republic, The Journal of Negro Education, CRISIS,

Phylon, and the Massachusetts Review. Although

late in his career as an educator he became a visit-

ing professor at New York University and Vassar

College, Brown spent most of his academic life in

historical black colleges and universities, includ-

ing Lincoln University, Fisk University, and par-

ticularly Howard University, where he was on the

English faculty for 40 years.

Brown published his first collection of poems,

SOUTHERN ROAD, in 1932. His second collection,

The Last Ride of Wild Bill, was published more

than 40 years later, in 1973. His final collection of

poems, The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown,

was published by BROADSIDE PRESS in 1980. Given

Broadside’s association with the main poets of

the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, primarily Don L. Lee

(HAKI MADHUBUTI), SONIA SANCHEZ, and ETHER-

IDGE KNIGHT, this was quite a statement by the

senior poet and “dedicated genius,” as HOUSTON

BAKER called Brown (92).

Between publishing his collection of poems and

working for the WPA, Brown established himself

as an authority on the black writer in America and

on the subject of blacks as characters and stereo-

types in American literature in such now-classic

scholarly works as The Negro in American Fiction

(1937) and Negro Poetry and Drama (1937). As the

senior editor, Brown, along with Arthur P. Davis

and Ulysses Lee, compiled the pioneering compre-

hensive anthology on African-American literature

The NEGRO CARAVAN (1941).

As Baker has noted, during this period Brown

was mining the BLUES, a form indigenous to black

southern culture that was, ironically, deemed of

lesser importance by the black intelligentsia lead-

ers of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE, including ALAIN

LOCKE and W. E. B. DUBOIS. As the editors of CALL

AND RESPONSE noted, “Brown was in the acad-

emy but never completely of it” (993). Nor was

he a full-fledged member of the Harlem Renais-

sance, although Locke would eventually describe

Brown as a true Negro folk poet like LANGSTON

HUGHES and ZORA NEALE HURSTON, who wanted

to make the individuals Hughes called the “low

down folks” and “the so-called common element”

(900), the true representative of the “New Negro

Movement” and thus the most credible agent of

black culture. Brown, although himself a member

of DuBois’s “Talented Tenth” of the black middle

class, used his work to celebrate the “unwashed”

masses, whom, ultimately, he saw as his best

teachers.

As the poems in Southern Road reveal Brown

found more than humor and pathos in poetry

written in black dialect, the genre he embraced

after living in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he taught

at Virginia Seminary and College. In fact, as Cor-

nel West and Henry L. Gates, Jr., point out, Brown

“resuscitated dialect poetry, a genre that had been

confined to what one critic called ‘the waste-bins

of minstrelsy’ ” (119). It had been abandoned by

even JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, the distinguished

scholar and poet known best for his celebration of

black folk culture in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro

Sermons, who had also written in dialect. Brown

saw the black folk tradition as the foundation of

African-American literary tradition.

Brown’s poetry reveals his careful attention to

black speech, his validation of black folklore and

myth, and his preservation of black culture in its

multifaceted form, particularly music: spirituals,

jazz, work songs, and specifically the blues. The re-

cipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown was

given an honorary doctorate by Howard Univer-

sity, due, Gates and West claim, to the lobbying of

many of his students who had gone on to become

the leaders of the Black Arts Movement.

80 Brown, Sterling Allen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Re-

naissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1987.

Brown, Sterling A. The Collected Poems of Sterling

A. Brown, Selected by Michael Harper. New York:

Harper & Row Publishers, 1983.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Cornel West. “Sterling

A. Brown: The Vernacular Poet.” In The African

American Century: How Black Americans Have

Shaped Our Country, 119–121. New York: Free

Press, 2000.

Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial

Mountain.” In Call and Response: The Riverside

Anthology of the African American Literary Tradi-

tion, edited by Patricia Liggins Hill, et. al., 899–

902. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Brown Girl, Brownstones Paule Marshall

(1959)

PAULE MARSHALL’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

is regarded by many scholars as the beginning of

contemporary African-American women’s writ-

ing. According to BARBARA CHRISTIAN, in Brown

Girl, Brownstones, Marshall “dramatized the idea

that racism is insidious not only in its impact on

a person’s definition of self as black or white, but

also as male and female. . . . Because of the novel’s

insistence on the relationship of woman as self and

as part of a community, it prefigured the major

themes of black women’s fiction in the 1970s: the

black woman’s potential as a full person and nec-

essarily as major actor on the social, cultural, and

political issues of our times” (104–105).

Through her rich language, vivid characteriza-

tions, and unique social contexts, Marshall gave

voice to black women and the Caribbean im-

migrant community. Set in Brooklyn from the

late 1930s to World War II, this autobiographical

first novel chronicles the coming of age of Selina

Boyce. The daughter

of Barbadian immigrant par-

ents, Selina is bright and rebellious. Her mother,

Silla, is a hard-working, unsentimental woman

for whom the United States promises prosperity.

Subconsciously admiring her mother’s strength,

Selina rejects her materialism. Her father, Deigh-

ton, alternately fantasizes about instant American

success and returning home to the Caribbean.

Selina both adores her father and regrets his de-

lusional approach to life. In the novel, Selina and

the reader are educated about love, sacrifice, and

African-American history. Marshall’s focus on a

black girl as protagonist, her exploration of gender

dynamics within the black community, and her

celebration of black immigrant communities qui-

etly revolutionized American and African-Ameri-

can literature.

Though the novel was well received and earned

Marshall a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, it did

not become a commercial success until interest in

black women writers heightened in the early 1970s;

it gained widespread recognition only when it was

reprinted in 1981.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspec-

tive on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon

Press, 1985.

Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York:

Random, 1959.

Elizabeth McNeil

Bullins, Ed (1935– )

Ed Bullins (Kingsley B. Bass) was born in Phila-

delphia, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1935, to Edward

and Bertha Marie (Queen) Bullins. His mother,

a civil servant, tried to instill middle-class values

in her son. After attending a predominantly Euro-

pean-American elementary school, where he was

a very good student, Bullins, who spent his sum-

mers vacationing in Maryland farming country,

transferred to an inner-city school as a junior high

student. He soon became involved in street gang ac-

tivities. In one confrontation he was stabbed in the

heart and pronounced dead, but he was miracu-

lously resuscitated. Although he attended Philadel-

phia’s infamous Benjamin Franklin High School,

Bullins, Ed 81

he would drop out before graduating. He joined

the U.S. Navy, serving from 1952 to 1955. While

in the navy, where he won a lightweight boxing

championship, Bullins embarked on a self-educa-

tion program through reading. After his discharge

in 1958, he moved to Los Angeles; earned his grad-

uate equivalency diploma; began writing fiction,

essays, and poetry; and resumed his formal studies

at Los Angeles City College. In 1964 he moved to

the San Francisco Bay area and, while registered in

a college writing program at San Francisco State

College, he began writing plays because, as he later

explained, “I came to realize that only closed circles

of African Americans read fiction.”

Although he would later go on to earn a bach-

elor of arts from Antioch University in 1989 and

an M.F.A. from San Francisco State University in

1994, Bullins, in the late 1960s, emerged as one of

the leading and most prolific playwrights of the

BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, whose leaders sought to

define a genuinely BLACK AESTHETIC based on the

politics of BLACK NATIONALISM and a skillful re-

construction of African-American folklore. This

movement was spearheaded by ADDISON GAYLE,

LARRY NEAL, NIKKI GIOVANNI, SONIA SANCHEZ,

AMIRI BARAKA, and HOYT FULLER, among others.

In “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” Fuller explains that

during the 1960s black writers desired a system of

isolating and evaluating the artistic works of Afri-

can Americans that reflect the special character and

imperatives of their experiences. For Fuller, these

writers created, through the Black Arts Movement,

a way of perceiving African-American art forms

as containing more than aesthetic beauty, as de-

manded by European aesthetics. Their functional

art would be a liberating force through which Af-

rican Americans could reclaim their personal and

cultural beauty through their art. Neal argued, in

“Visions of a Liberated Future,” that drama was a

prime vehicle for achieving the specific goals of the

Black Aesthetic.

As a dramatist, Bullins was strongly influenced

by the major tenets and themes of the Black Arts

Movement, including beauty, love, power, and

revolution. He, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and

ELDRIDGE CLEAVER founded Black House, a mili-

tant cultural-political organization, and he briefly

aligned himself with the Black Panther Party,

where he was appointed minister of culture. Al-

though Bullins wanted to promote Kawaida, the

cultural nationalism championed by MAULANA

KARENGA, other Black Panther members wanted a

more revolutionary ideology promoted in African-

American art, one that called for armed rebellion.

In August 1965, Bullins made his theatrical

debut in San Francisco at the Firehouse Repertory

Theater with three one-act plays: How Do You Do,

Dialect Determinism or The Rally, and Clara’s Ole’

Man. Although he initially considered leaving the

United States following his philosophical disagree-

ment with Eldridge Cleaver, Bullins moved to New

York City to become playwright in residence and

associate director at Robert Macbeth’s New Lafay-

ette Theater in Harlem. He also headed the New

Lafayette’s Black Theater Workshop and edited its

Black Theater Magazine. For the next 10 years Bul-

lins became one of the most powerful and contro-

versial voices on the off-Broadway stage and, along

with Baraka and Neal, one of the most influential

playwrights of the Black Arts Movement. Later, he

also directed the Writer’s Unit Playwrights Work-

shop for Joseph Papp at the Public Theater and the

Playwrights Workshop at Woodie King’s New Fed-

eral Theater in New York City.

Bullins is perhaps best known for his first full-

length play, In the Wine Time (1968), which ex-

amines the scarcity of options available to African

Americans, especially the urban poor. It became

the first in a series of plays focused on a group of

young friends growing up in America in the 1950s,

which he called the Twentieth Century Cycle. The

other plays in this cycle are The Corner (1968), In

New England Winter (1969), The Duplex (1970),

The Fabulous Miss Marie (1971), Homeboy (1976),

and Daddy (1977). His other notable works in-

clude Goin’ A Buffalo (1968); Salaam, Huey New-

ton, Salaam (1991); The Hungered One (1971), a

collection of stories; and Reluctant Rapist (1973),

a novel. In Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography (1977),

Samuel Hay describes Bullins as a playwright with

a revolutionary bent who, despite this inclination,

became an artist who has displayed some of the

more deeply ignored representations of African-

American life.

82 Bullins, Ed

Beginning in 1975 Bullins received critical ac-

claim, including an Obie Award and the New York

Drama Critics Award for The Taking of Miss Janie,

a play about the failed alliance of an interracial

group of 1960s political idealists. He has also re-

ceived a Vernon Rice Desk Drama Award, Gug-

genheim fellowships, and Rockefeller Foundation

and National Endowment for the Arts playwriting

grants. True to his Black Nationalistic aesthetic

leanings, Bullins’s naturalistic plays incorporate

elements of African-American folklore, especially

“street” lyricism, and interracial tension.

In 1995 Bullins was appointed professor of the-

ater at Northeastern University in Boston. His most

recent work, Boy X Man, is a memory play about

a man looking back on his childhood and the pro-

cess of growing up. He strains to come to grips with

not ever having understood his mother and with

having failed to say thank you to a stepfather who

has been as much of a father to him as any man

could have ever been. Bullins remains continually

concerned with getting important themes across

to his audience through his plays, and he believes

that theater must be revolutionary in order for Af-

rican-American art to be successful.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Branch, William B., ed. An Anthology of Contempo-

rary African American Drama. New York: Penguin,

1992.

Hay, Samuel. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. De-

troit:

Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Hatch, James V., ed. Black Theater USA: Plays by Afri-

can Americans. New York: Free Press, 1996.

Neal, Larry. Visions of a Liberated Future. St. Paul,

Minn.: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989.

Raymond E. Janifer

Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam

Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera, eds.

(2001)

Bum Rush the Page introduces the United States

and the world to recent African-American history

through the fresh, sometimes youthful, voices of

black poets, artists, literary thinkers, urban trans-

lators, musicologists, and revelers. The collection

offers the emotions of a community rocked by

high crime and violence, urban expressions of hip-

hop, and an emergence of class consciousness. The

poems are about the “politics of being Black, from

civil rights to Black Power, to the new sense of self”

and empowerment for future African-American

communities, as SONIA SANCHEZ writes in her in-

troduction to the collection (xvi).

In the introduction, Tony Medina contends

that the aggressive-progressive intrusion of the

media, its hyper-insensitivity, its ugly talk show

voyeurism, nearly lost the new African-American

poets to the slam; it nearly limited the form to the

“spoken word—that which lives in performance”

(xx). Medina’s argument is not new. RALPH ELLISON

presents it symbolically in the boxing ring scene in

the opening chapter of INVISIBLE MAN (1952). The

voices of Bum Rush belong to the page, to the sol-

ace of the written word. Through their more global

perspectives, the poets share social and political

concerns over race and gender; engage in struggles

over art, place, and self; and “celebrate life, lan-

guage, and poetry” and cultural creativity (xxi).

Whereas the poetic tones in Bum Rush are se-

ductive, prominent, and savvy, the voices form a

collective witness to artistic growth, political his-

tory, states of exile, and sexual and educational

liberation. They are, as YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA argues,

“textured by popular-culture references and mul-

tiple levels of diction—erudite and street-smart”

(xii). While steeped in colloquialisms, sometimes

to achieve poetic beat, the open and sometimes

genderless verse reveals an international youth

spawned by a global market. For example, in “New

York Seizures,” EUGENE B. REDMOND captures the

confused nature of the African American as sin-

gular amid globalization’s recipe for soup (a melt-

ing pot):

A Puerto Rican speaks Voodoo with an

African accent;

A European speaks African with a Spanish

accent;

A West Indian yawns in Yiddish and curses

in Arabic;

An African speaks English in silence. (184)

Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam 83

Like Redmond, Felice Belle narrows the hypocrisy

of having a global voice by revealing the absurd

sounds of a national voice. By listing the historical

lies and myths that cultivate such a crazy notion,

“Exceptions” regenerates cultural fads to demystify

the African American’s lack of participation in the

white global economy (163–166).

While AMIRI BARAKA testifies that the artist’s

blood courses naturally (perhaps fatedly) through

the African American (264), GWENDOLYN BROOKS

creates physical and tangible metaphors so readers

can envision the human and artistic challenge of

community development and extension in “Build-

ing” (xxix). Poet and dramatist Carl Hanco*ck Rux

simply turns contemporary artistic challenges on

their head. Turning phrases that are sometimes

maudlin, other times musical, Rux relies on the

universal language—music—to continue the col-

lection’s thematic thread of a media-developed

sense of place and its illusionary results. The ef-

fect of working with two artistic mediums—mix-

ing poetry and music—perhaps mimics blending

and the death of individual cultural esteem in

America:

am Belial . . .

Nostrils wide open, veins hungry, mouthing

incantations to Spanish Key on trumpet

reading Faust out loud

drunk on Moett. (116)

Many of the poems address such social and

political issues as drive-by shootings, the threat of

AIDS, and police brutality.

In Bum Rush, these contemporary problems,

attributable directly and indirectly to the history

of racism and discrimination, are often described

or attested to by the collection’s youngest, most

novice poets. However, the youthfulness of the

chorus does not detract from the literary potency

of the political verses. They address the upsurge of

gangs in the 1980s and 1990s in poems like “Bullet

Hole Man” and “Bensonhurst” (110, 243), offering

fresh insight into this intraracial class warfare in

black America. These brave poems are often som-

ber, morose, and emotional. Other poems, such

as “Complected” and “The Tragic Mulatto Is Nei-

ther,” address the struggle with cultural and artistic

identity, contributing to the poetic canon gener-

ated by “complected” American poets long ago

(154–158). Also, there are commemorative poems

that acknowledge, celebrate, and express appre-

ciation of social and literary icons who not only

influenced but also mentored the younger genera-

tion of poets.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braithwaite, Wendy. Motion in Poetry. Toronto: Wom-

en’s Press, 2002.

Komunyakaa, Yusef, Foreword. In Listen Up! Spoken

Word Poetry, edited by Zoë Angelesey New York:

Ballantine Publishing Group, 1999.

Lawrence T. Potter

Butler, Octavia E. (1947–2006)

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in 1947 to Laurice

Butler and Octavia M. Guy in Pasadena, Califor-

nia. She was an only child whose father died when

she was a baby. Her mother, grandmother, and

other close relatives raised her in a racially diverse

neighborhood that was nonetheless unified in its

fight for economic survival. Butler characterized

herself as an introspective daydreamer. She had

to overcome dyslexia, and she started writing at

a young age to deal with her boredom and lone-

liness. As a young teenager, she was interested in

science fiction because it appealed to her sense as

an alienated or “out kid.” In 1968 she earned an

associate of arts from Pasadena City College. She

then studied at California State University, Los An-

geles, and the University of California at Los An-

geles but did not study creative writing formally,

opting instead to take writing classes at night. She

received further creative writing training in the

Open Door Program of the Screen Writers Guild

of America in the 1960s and 1970s and the Clarion

Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop in 1970. Butler

also devoted time to researching biology, genetics,

and physical science.

Butler has written both novels and short sto-

ries. The Patternist series consists of Wild Seed

(1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Patternmaster

84 Butler, Octavia E.

(1976), Clay’s Ark (1984), and Survivor (1978).

Kindred (1979) was a departure from the Patter-

nist series exploring miscegenation, slavery, and

powerlessness. The Xenogenesis series includes

Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago

(1989); this trilogy was republished in 2000 as Li-

lith’s Brood. Her Parable series is made up of PAR-

ABLE OF THE SOWER (1994) and Parable of the Talents

(1998). Her short works are “Speech Sounds,” the

oft-anthologized “Bloodchild,” and a collection of

short works, Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Her best known novel, Kindred, is about a black

woman, Dana, who lives in the Los Angeles suburbs

with her white husband in the 1970s. She is pulled

out of her life and into the past by a white ances-

tor in great need. Many of Butler’s novels explore

complex issues of race, power, and gender. Most of

the characters in her novels have immense pow-

ers that they have to learn to control because the

powers are nearly as threatening as outside forces

are. In her Parable novels, Butler addresses drug

use and other factors that beset African-American

communities in the 20th century. Butler uses sci-

ence fiction as a vehicle to examine social issues,

relationships, identity, class, and gender with art-

istry and originality.

Butler won the Hugo award in 1984 for “Speech

Sounds.” She won a second Hugo in 1985, as well

as a Nebula in 1984, for “Bloodchild.” Butler was

awarded the MacArthur Foundation “genius

grant” in 1995. In 1999, she won the Nebula award

for best science fiction novel of the year for Parable

of the Talents. She received the PEN Center West

Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Jennifer. “Octavia Butler.” Voices From the

Gaps. May 17, 1997. Department of English,

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Available

online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/

entries/butler_octavia_estelle.html. Accessed Sep-

tember 29, 2006.

Kim Hai Pearson

Brian Jennings

Butler, Octavia E. 85

��

Cain, George (1943– )

Harlem-born George Cain attended public and

private schools in New York City. Although he at-

tended Iona College in New Rochelle on an ath-

letic scholarship, he left during his junior year and

traveled to California, Mexico, and Texas, where

he was imprisoned. After his release, he returned

to New York, where he wrote his autobiographical

novel, Blueschild Baby (1970), revealing his painful

and self-destructive life as a heroin addict and his

effort to become and stay clean.

Blueschild Baby begins with George, the protag-

onist, experiencing withdrawal while desperately

searching for a fix and fearing an encounter with

the police, as he is a parolee who has no desire to

return to prison. “A sickness comes over me in this

twilight state, somewhere between wake and sleep,

my nose runs and my being screams for heroin”

(1), announces the narrator at the beginning, set-

ting in motion the roller-coaster ride that lasts the

entire length of the novel. Through the narrator’s

eyes, the reader experiences firsthand the subter-

ranean labyrinth of Harlem’s drug world and its

concomitant illegal activities and behavior, includ-

ing robbery, rape, murder, exploitation, deception,

looting, and strains of animalistic instinct-related

behavior: Everyone struggles to be among the sur-

viving fit. In this “land of black people” (9), build-

ings are inhabited by “people trying to escape the

day. On every landing they sat. Men and women

alone, together, bowed heads, smelling of them-

selves and cheap wine” (22). Imprisoned by fate in

their jungle existence, these “dead people” some-

times rebel, as their history of riots reveals, in-

cluding the Newark riot of the 1960s, which Cain

chronicles.

In recalling his childhood, however, and par-

ticularly his love for his grandmother, Nana; his

close relationship with his parents, particularly his

mother; and his first love, Nandy, who “fired [his

life] with purpose” (150), George reveals that this

environment was not always a tomb for the living.

As he successfully navigates through several criti-

cal rites of passage that lead to young adulthood

and manhood, George attends the prestigious

and “very private” Brey Academy, proudly wear-

ing the school blazer, where he “loved the library

with endless volumes, furnished darkly, mahogany,

musty, and dim. Giant windows looking on the

street and park” (157). At Brey he excels in aca-

demics and sports. His proud black community,

which “watched and prayed” over him, consider

him “the chosen one” (160). When the building

he was born in burns for the second time, pre-

cipitating the death of his grandmother, George,

feeling defeated, abandons his near-stellar youth

and promising future and walks directly into what

seems like the inevitable: a life of drug abuse. He,

too, will become one of the “dead people.” How-

ever, convincing himself that he is “[t]rapped in a

��

prison of [his] own making” (116), George, with

the help of Nandy, embarks on the painful, three-

day process of detoxification. Liberated at the end

of the novel, he buys a necklace with a monkey’s

head from a street vendor. The jewelry reminds

him of the addiction that, he knows, will always

haunt him. “I buy it and throw it on. He hangs

round my neck and the hunger [for heroin] shall

always be a threat” (185).

Blueschild Baby and Cain were showered with

accolades. Reviewers compared Blueschild Baby

to Native Son and lauded its style for its blues

resonances. According to Houston Baker, “As a

fictional autobiography, it stands at the far end

of the tradition that begins with the narrative of

Briton Hammon, matures in the work of Frederick

Douglass, expands with James Weldon Johnson’s

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and received

acknowledgment during the early sixties in the

works of Claude Brown and Malcolm X” (89).

Cain, who continues to live in Bedford Stuyvesant,

never published a second novel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Houston A. Singers of Daybreak: Studies in

Black American Literature. Washington, D.C.:

Howard University Press, 1983.

Cain, George. Blueschild Baby. New York: Dell, 1970.

Michael Poindexter

Caldwell, Benjamin (Ben) (1937– )

Playwright, essayist, poet, and graphic artist,

Benjamin Caldwell was born in Harlem, New

York, on September 24, 1937, the seventh of nine

children. Encouraged by a junior high school

guidance counselor, he attended the School of

Industrial Arts in New York City to become a

commercial artist, but in 1954, after his father’s

death, he was forced temporarily to abandon his

dreams of an art career to help support his family

financially. While painting and drawing to sup-

plement his income, Caldwell also wrote plays

and essays. From 1965 to 1966, Caldwell lived in

Newark, New Jersey, where he was influenced by

AMIRI BARAKA and his repertory group, the Spirit

House Players. Though he returned to New York

City before the end of 1966, Caldwell’s “Newark

Period” was the beginning of his most prolific ca-

reer as a playwright.

A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for

playwriting (1970), Caldwell wrote more than 50

plays at the height of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT,

which have been performed all over Harlem as

well as by the Black Arts Alliance in San Francisco

and throughout the United States. Employing the

revolutionary rhetoric common to the period,

Caldwell’s one-act dramas, described as “agitprop

cartoons” or “parodic vignettes,” satirize not only

white racism but also African Americans who

emulated whites, were unduly materialistic, or an-

chored themselves to stereotypes. Critics note that

Caldwell’s greatest power is his ability to commu-

nicate racial issues with both a superb economy of

dramaturgy and mordancy (Grant, 117).

Caldwell’s critically acclaimed one-act com-

edy Prayer Meeting: or, the First Militant Minister

(1967) was first performed at the Spirit House The-

atre under the title Militant Preacher. It was later

retitled and performed off-Broadway in “A Black

Quartet: Four New Plays,” along with plays by RON-

ALD MILNER, ED BULLINS, and Baraka. Praised for

its satire, the play uses a comic premise to drama-

tize the political message that black people must be

willing to struggle actively for their rights and that

they should not expect an easy accommodation

within white society. Militant Preacher is about

the conversion of a passive, “UNCLE TOM” preacher

(see SAMBO AND UNCLE TOM). While praying to

God for assistance in dealing with a potentially

volatile congregation, angry over the murder of a

black teenager by the police, the preacher receives

an answer from God, in the form a thief hiding

in his home who pretends to be the voice of God.

The preacher adheres to God’s demand, becomes

a black militant, and leads his parishioners to City

Hall in protest.

Caldwell’s other plays, which examine such

themes as the exploitation of blacks, Christian-

ity, materialism, gullibility, entrapment, and birth

control, include The Job (1966), The Wall (1967),

Caldwell, Benjamin 87

Mission Accomplished (1967), Riot Sale, or Dollar

Psyche Fake-Out (1968), Top Secret, or A Few Mil-

lion After B.C. (1968), The Fanatic (1968), Recog-

nition (1968), Unpresidented

(1968), Hypnotism

(1969), Family Portrait (or My Son the Black Na-

tionalist) (1969), The King of Soul, or the Devil and

Otis Redding (1969), Runaround (1970), All White

Castle (1971), and Rights and Reasons (1973).

In 1982, Caldwell’s collection of skits and

monologues, The World of Ben Caldwell: A Drama-

tized Examination of the Absurdity of the American

Dream and Subsequent Reality, was produced off-

Broadway by the New Federal Theatre (NFT), fea-

turing Reginald Vel Johnson, Garrett Morris, and

Morgan Freeman. While Mel Gussow of the New

York Times reported that Caldwell showed such

deftness and caustic cleverness in these sketches

that he might well consider writing material for

Richard Pryor (13), Stanley Crouch noted that

“Caldwell’s strong suit is a great ability to stitch

together fabrics of rhetoric ranging from bureau-

cratic to black bottom barber shop” (104).

In addition to drama, Caldwell has written

essays and poetry; he served as a contributing

editor of the short-lived periodical Black The-

ater, published intermittently by the New La-

fayette Theatre in Harlem. Since the early 1980s,

Caldwell has turned his interest to the visual arts,

participating in New York’s Kenkeleba Gallery

exhibit in 1983, connecting the media of paint-

ing and jazz with such talented artists as Camille

Billops, FAITH RINGGOLD, Romare Bearden, and

Norman Lewis. Though a fire swept through

Caldwell’s Harlem apartment in 1991, destroying

more than four decades’ worth of manuscripts,

paintings, and memorabilia, he has returned to

writing monologues and sketches and has com-

pleted a series of portraits on African-American

men and women.

Labeling Caldwell a gifted playwright, DARWIN

T. TURNER credits him, along with ALICE CHILDRESS,

LORRAINE HANSBERRY, JAMES BALDWIN, DOUGLAS

WARD, ADRIENNE KENNEDY, and many others, with

bringing Afro-American drama “from minstrelsy,

apology, and defense to awareness and assertion”

(23). Caldwell’s short satirical plays, though not

in vogue today, delivered a powerful message that

reflected the nationalistic fervor that prevailed

among the architects of the Black Arts Movement

and many of his contemporaries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crouch, Stanley. “Satireprop.” Village Voice, 27 April

1982, p. 104.

Grant, Nathan L. “Caldwell, Ben.” In The Oxford

Companion to African American Literature, edited

by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and

Trudier Harris, 116–117. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1997.

Gussow, Mel. “Federal Office ‘World of Ben Caldwell.’ ”

New York Times, 10 April 1982, p. 13.

Turner, Darwin T., ed. Black Drama in America: An

Anthology. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1971.

Loretta G. Woodard

Callaloo: A Journal of African American

Diaspora Art and Letters

Callaloo has continually served as one of the pre-

mier publications for African Americans and

people of African descent throughout the African

diaspora. It is impossible to consider black artis-

tic concerns without referring to works published

in this acclaimed journal. CHARLES JOHNSON has

called Callaloo “a resource scholars and creators

will find crucial for understanding contemporary

black literary practice,” and THOMAS GLAVE sees

the journal “propelling our traditions into bril-

liancies far beyond the easy, the simple, [and] the

not-brave.”

Callaloo was founded in 1976 at Southern Uni-

versity at Baton Rouge by Charles Henry Rowell,

Jr., as a vehicle for raising artistic, critical, and

theoretical issues of the experience of blacks in

the South. Rowell writes in the inaugural issue,

“[Black South experiences] have meanings. And

as such they merit creative attention. They are

rich material for today’s Black South writers, who

more than our brothers and sisters in the North,

are closely fixed to our roots.” In 1977, the journal

became quarterly and moved to the University of

Kentucky, where it broadened its scope to include

a more comprehensive focus on African-American

88 Callaloo: A Journal of African American Diaspora Art and Letters

literature throughout the United States. With its

1986 move to the University of Virginia, the jour-

nal’s breadth again expanded to its current status.

Callaloo now sets out to address the whole of Afri-

can diaspora experience, including in Central and

South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. Now

housed at Texas A&M University, Callaloo is a

nexus for black artistic culture in the United States

and elsewhere.

The journal has a long history of devoting issues

to prominent writers, artists, critics, and genres.

Most issues have sections presenting poetry, fiction,

literary nonfiction, visual artwork, criticism, and

bibliography. Maryse Condé, RITA DOVE, ERNEST

J. GAINES, Nicolas Guillen, Wilson Harris, LANGS-

TON HUGHES, LARRY NEAL, JAY WRIGHT, RICHARD

WRIGHT, and dozens of other individual authors

have been comprehensively examined in Callaloo.

An example of the close examination the journal

publishes is a special section of a 1990 issue ad-

dressing the work of poet and professor MICHAEL

HARPER. Fourteen recent poems by Harper were re-

printed, followed by a lengthy interview conducted

by Rowell; essays written by Robert B. Stepto, Nic-

colo N. Donzella, Anthony Walton, Robert Dale

Parker, Herman Beavers, Suzanne Keen, John S.

Wright reflected on the various manners in which

Harper had influenced their work as scholars, poets,

and Americans. Closing the section is an extended

essay by John F. Callahan on Harper’s friendship

songs. Harper’s work is given a well-rounded and

multiperspective presentation.

Additionally, special issues have addressed

women’s poetry, Native American literature, Puerto

Rican women writers, postcolonial discourse, Ca-

ribbean literature, jazz poetics, and other literary

and theoretical concerns, both contemporary and

historical. Rowell continues to serve as editor, and

the contributing and advisory editors include some

of the most prominent talents in African-Ameri-

can letters: Thadious Davis, YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA,

Robert B. Stepto, Derek Walcott, and JOHN EDGAR

WIDEMAN, are among the many in the journal’s es-

teemed editorial community.

Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature, a

capstone book, was published in 2002. Edited by

Rowell, this is a collection of more than 50 of the

most important works published in the journal’s

first quarter century. RALPH ELLISON’s “Cadil-

lac Flamb” excerpt from his posthumous novel

Juneteenth and OCTAVIA BUTLER’s oft-read “The

Evening, the Morning, and the Night” are both re-

printed, as is a section of SAMUEL R. DELANY’s Shoat

Rumblin’. The book, a useful and valid representa-

tive selection, underlines Callaloo’s critical impor-

tance to black literary culture in the United States

and elsewhere today.

Keith Feldman

Call and Response: The Riverside

Anthology of the African American

Literary Tradition Patricia Liggins Hill,

et al., eds. (1997)

A signature publication for Houghton Mifflin

(Boston and New York), a major academic press,

Call and Response was edited by Patricia Liggins

Hill, general editor, Bernard W. Bell, Trudier Har-

ris, William Harris, R. Baxter Miller, and Sondra

A. O-Neale, with Horace A. Porter. Unlike the

more canonical, Eurocentric Norton Anthology

of African American Literature, Call and Response

is the first BLACK AESTHETIC–based anthology to

be published since BLACK WRITERS OF AMERICA:

A COMPREHENSIVE ANTHOLOGY (1971), edited by

RICHARD K. BARKSDALE and Keneth Kinnamon.

For the most part, its works and authors are com-

mitted to promoting a more authentic criterion

for black art.

Call and Response is structured both chrono-

logically and thematically. It is divided into six

parts. Each section focuses on a distinct feature of

African-American history and culture: 1619–1808

(Slavery as Racial and Religious Oppression),

1808–1865 (The Quest for Freedom), 1865–1915

(Escaping Slavery to Reconstruction and Post-Re-

construction), 1915–1945 (The

Harlem Renais-

sance and Reformation), 1945–1960 (Post–Harlem

Renaissance and Post-Reformation), and 1960 to

the present (Social Revolution, the New Renais-

sance, and the Second Reconstruction). This divi-

sion not only indicates the editors’ emphasis on

the history of oppression known by New World

Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition 89

Africans and their progeny but also celebrates Af-

rican Americans’ history of transcendence. Call

and Response comes with an accompanying CD,

which includes BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s original

1895 “Atlanta Exposition Address,” as well as “The

Message,” a rap song popularized by Grandmaster

Flash and the Furious Five.

Each section contains selections from both the

oral and written tradition, including proverbs, folk

tales, slave narratives, music, orations, fiction, po-

etry, and essays. A truly inclusive volume in refer-

ence to the contributors and their works, Call and

Response also presents both traditional and evolv-

ing theories. Contributors are vast; ideologies are

vast as well, ranging from OLAUDAH EQUIANO, who

signaled the earliest stages of the African-Ameri-

can literary tradition in the 18th century, to key

abolitionist orators of the 19th century, including

to Washington’s 1895 conciliatory speech at the

Atlanta Exposition, in which he advocates harmo-

nious racial segregation with white supremacy and

black subservience, to HARLEM RENAISSANCE writ-

ers, including CLAUDE MCKAY, who writes in the

spirit of the “New Negro,” the spirit of militancy

and rebellion, to the new Renaissance writings of

the 1960s, characterized as the BLACK ARTS MOVE-

MENT, led by AMIRI BARAKA and LARRY NEAL. The

range of writers since the 1960s is vast, including

notable black women fiction and nonfiction writ-

ers. TONI MORRISON, Pulitzer Prize–winning au-

thor of BELOVED, leads this category. In addition to

the informative and comprehensive introductions

to the various historical eras, Call and Response of-

fers valuable information about each author and

his or her theoretical persuasion.

Finally, the headnotes provided by Hill are both

detailed and scholarly, placing the African-Ameri-

can experience within a historical, sociopolitical,

and economic perspective. Call and Response has

emerged as a significant volume, documenting the

truly holistic African-American literary experience

from its humble beginnings to the present. Within

three months of its release in 1997, Call and Re-

sponse, a massive volume of 2,039 pages, com-

manded a second printing.

Clenora Hudson Weems

Campbell, Bebe Moore (1950–2006)

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

the daughter of George Linwood Peter Moore and

Doris Carter Moore, Bebe Moore Campbell, nov-

elist and freelance journalist, received a bachelor

of science degree in elementary education from

the University of Pittsburgh. Although known

nationally as an outstanding novelist, Campbell’s

memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and

Without My Dad (1989), was her first published

book. Her coming-of-age story details the sum-

mers she spent in the South with her father, a

paraplegic: “I was seven years old, sitting on the

front steps waiting for my daddy to come and

take me to summer. I can’t remember when this

waiting for my father began. . . . All I know is, it

became an end-of-June ritual, an annual event,

something I could set my clock by, set my heart

on.” The most poignant description in the novel is

when she tells her childhood friend, Carol, about

her father: “Didn’t she know that my father was a

royal king, plowed down by an enemy in the heat

of the battle? Didn’t she realize that he was good,

completely good, and that his survival was a tes-

timony to his nobility and fortitude?” Campbell’s

memoir is often lauded for its positive portrayal of

a black father-daughter relationship.

In 1999 Campbell published Your Blues Ain’t

Like Mine, her first novel in which, like her mem-

oir, the setting is the South and the North. It is

loosely based on the true story of Emmett Till,

a 14-year-old boy who was brutally murdered

in Mississippi in 1955. This powerful novel be-

gins during the early civil rights era, when a poor

white man, Floyd Cox, murders a black teenager,

Armstrong Todd: “Delotha [Armstrong Todd’s

mother] stared at the battered and swollen body of

her son, spread out on the funeral parlor table. A

strange odor she couldn’t place hovered in the air.”

The novel follows the lives of Delotha and Wydell

Todd from the South and to the North, as well as

explores how the small town of Delta handles the

murder of their son, Armstrong, as well as its own

racist past. Campbell’s exploration of the racism in

the South is contrasted with the story of the vast

black migration to Chicago, which the migrants

equate with going to heaven. However, Delotha and

90 Campbell, Bebe Moore

Wydell Todd discover that although racism is not

as overt in the North as it is in the South, it is vis-

ible through the prevailing violence: “He [Wydell]

passed the street where he and Delotha had rented

a kitchenette when they first moved to Chicago.

They’d shared a bathroom with three other fami-

lies who’d come up from Mississippi. The area had

been hit hard by the riots and had deteriorated

badly.” The cramped living quarters, the riots, and

their aftermath symbolize, as LANGSTON HUGHES

suggests in his signature poem, deferred dreams.

Campbell’s novel was voted New York Times no-

table book of the year, and it was the winner of the

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF

COLORED PEOPLE Image Award for Literature.

In her next two novels, Campbell explores the

complexity of black familial relationships and their

impact on communities. The theme of Singing in

the Comeback Choir (1999) is forgiveness. The

protagonist, Maxine McCoy, a popular talk show

host, returns to Philadelphia, the neighborhood

of her childhood, to become the caretaker of her

grandmother, Lindy. In the end Maxine must not

only deal with her grandmother’s addictions but

also face the hopelessness of the blighted commu-

nity in which she and her neighbors live. Campbell

next published What You Owe Me (2001), in which

the central focus is on parent-child relationships;

however, Campbell also explores the theme of the

complex and often contentious relationship be-

tween blacks and Jews.

In her children’s book, Sometimes My Mommy

Gets Angry (2003), Campbell turns her attention to

mental health as an issue in the African-American

community. She describes how a young girl, Annie,

copes with her mother’s frightening and depress-

ing mental illness. The book won the National As-

sociation for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Outstanding

Literature Award for 2003. In 2003 Campbell also

wrote her first play, Even with the Madness, which

also explores issues of mental illness and family.

Although known nationally for her novels,

Campbell has also written a nonfiction text, Suc-

cessful Women, Angry Men (1986), in which she

offers advice for men and women on coping with

relationships. To write this book, Campbell in-

terviewed more than 100 couples. A regular on

National Public Radio, Campbell has written

for the New York Times Book Review, and her ar-

ticles have been published in such well-known

black popular magazines as ESSENCE, Ebony, and

Black Enterprise. She has a daughter, Maia, and

was married to her husband, Ellis Gordon, Jr., for

more than 22 years. Bebe Moore Campbell (Gor-

don) died on November 27, 2006, from complica-

tions related to brain cancer.

Beverly A. Tate

Cavalcade: Negro American Writing from

1760 to the Present Arthur P. Davis and

J. Saunders Redding, eds. (1971)

Arthur P. Davis and J. Saunders Redding, the sea-

soned literary giants of the African-American

literary tradition who compiled this groundbreak-

ing anthology, made their objectives lucidly clear

in their general introduction. Although

album Planet Rock, which changed

not only hip-hop but also music in general. Bam

called the new sound electro funk. He gave credit

to James Brown, Parliament, and Sly and the Fam-

ily Stone, musical groups that were popular during

the 1960s and 1970s, the zenith of the BLACK ARTS

MOVEMENT, as the sources of his musical inspira-

tion. By 1986 Bam and the Zulu Nation became

global ambassadors, spreading hip-hop through-

out the world by taking their first trip to Europe,

where they performed in Paris and were eagerly

received by European youth. Two years later,

in 1988, Bam released the album The Light, on

which he performed with Nona Hendryx, UB40,

Boy George, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and

Yellowman.

In 1990, Life magazine named Afrika Bambaataa

one of the most important Americans of the 20th

century. During this time he and other artists were

hard at work fighting against apartheid in South

Africa. He played an instrumental role in this ef-

fort by putting on a concert in London, which

raised £30,000, for the African National Congress

in support of the release of Nelson Mandela. Seven

years later, in 1997, Bam founded his own record

label, Planet Rock, and began disk jockeying at Hot

97, a New York–based radio station.

For the past 20 plus years, Bam has released at

least one record every other year. He has been in-

fluential in the music careers of both hip-hop and

rhythm-and-blues groups, including New Edition,

QUEEN LATIFAH, MOS DEF, and many others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banjoko, Adisa. “The Godfather Speaks: Up Close

with Afrika Bambaataa.” Lyrical Swords. Available

online. URL: www.lyricalswords.com/articles/af-

ricabambaataa.html. Accessed February 14, 2007.

Alim BakenRa

Adams, Jenoyne (n.d.)

Dancer, poet, journalist, and novelist Jenoyne

Adams is a native Californian. Born the daughter

of Virgil Adams and Bertha Degan Adams, she was

raised in San Bernardino, California. She attended

California State University at Fullerton, where she

majored in political science, and she continued her

studies at St. Mary’s University, where she earned

her first degree. Adams established a career as a

journalist while working as a reporter for the San

Bernardino Reporter, one of the largest African-

American newspapers in Southern California.

4 Adams, Jenoyne

Adams received critical acclaim with the pub-

lication of her first novel, Resurrecting Mingus

(2001), which tells the story of Mingus Brown-

ing, a successful, young, beautiful lawyer whose

personal, romantic life falls apart simultaneously

with her parents’ marriage after 35 years. Mingus

must come to grips with the fact that her African-

American father is leaving her Irish mother for a

black woman. Mingus finds herself in a tripartite

family whirlwind that threatens to tear her apart,

as she must choose between the father she has al-

ways loved (she is a daddy’s girl) and the mother

she also loves and may have to defend during the

divorce proceedings; all the while she endures the

antics of her sister, Eva, with whom she has had a

lifelong sibling rivalry.

Thus, in Resurrecting Mingus, Adams explores

a variety of themes—including biracialism, sib-

ling rivalry, parental relationships, love, trust,

and infidelity—and the protagonist’s efforts to

confront these various issues directly as she at-

tempts to experience, at a critical juncture in her

own life when she must venture on a new quest

for romantic wholeness (i.e., should she date black

or white men), a variety of romantic relationships.

Though race remains central in each of Mingus’s

relationships, what ultimately matters is her own

psychological wholeness, which requires that she

maintain a positive sense of self. She must con-

front her life of liminality, due largely to her bira-

cial identity; find wholeness, including romantic

wholeness; and embrace her total self. Although in

this sense Resurrecting Mingus resonates themati-

cally with TERRY MCMILLAN’s novels, Adams was

lauded by critics for her raw images and poetic

prose. Describing it as a “stunning debut novel,”

the reviewer for Booklist praised Adams for her

“vivid and direct” (910) style.

Adams’s second novel, Selah’s Bed (2003), ex-

plores issues of reconciliation and forgiveness. The

story focuses on Selah Wells, who, though married

to a pastor, Parker, continues to seek confirma-

tion and fulfillment through sex. The victim of

childhood neglect and abuse, Selah clearly suf-

fers from issues of self-esteem. Her grandmother,

Mama Gene, raised her because Ruthelen Mae,

her biological mother, was addicted to drugs and

consequently was only a fleeting presence in young

Selah’s life. Selah’s need for affection leads to her

exploitation and rape by the time she is 14. When

she falls in love with Parker, a minister’s son, and

becomes pregnant out of wedlock, Selah struggles

with the issue of abortion, its moral and personal

implications. Although she turns to photography

as a vehicle of empowerment through art, Selah is

unable to transcend the childhood scars that leave

her with an unfinished sense of self and the need

for validation through sex. Although Selah’s Bed is

not as strong as Resurrecting Mingus, most critics

agree that Adams is well on her way to becoming

an important writer.

Adams is the recipient of the prestigious PEN

USA Fellow award. Currently, she is a writing con-

sultant for Voices in Harmony, an organization

that helps at-risk and underserved youths write

and produce plays on important social issues.

She is married to novelist MICHAEL DATCHER and

pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing in

the graduate program at University of Southern

California.

Beverly A. Tate

Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian

Writing (1995)

Edited by Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce De-

Laney and published by Doubleday and Co., Inc.,

Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing

brings together 20 selections of fiction, nonfiction,

and poetry from women writing in the United

States, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, and Eu-

rope. Afrekete weaves together these seemingly di-

vergent traditions and celebrates the multiplicity

of voices and experiences of black lesbians in all

their depth and variety while pointing critically to

complicated and ever-changing considerations of

black lesbian identity and experience.

The editors tease readers into remembering

that black lesbians, like other people, have complex

and remarkable stories in their lives. The notion

that real lives and real stories, unlike the politics

of identity, are not so simple that they can be told

from one point of view or one mind is crucial to

Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing 5

understanding this collection. Issues of race and

sexual orientation inform the selections as they do

life—unexpectedly but often joyously.

The title is taken from AUDRE LORDE’s “Tar

Beach,” an excerpt from her biomythography

ZAMI: THE SPELLING OF MY NAME, that introduces

the character Afrekete. Afrekete is the mythical

lover who is born in the South but migrates north

to Harlem, where she appears in the life of young

Audre, helping her collect the “journey-woman

pieces of herself”—the immediate intersections of

identity and experience—which allow her to chart

a life course.

Lorde’s work in this anthology—beginning

with the autobiographical “Tar Beach,” which

chronicles the arrival of Afrekete into Audre’s early

gay life, and ending with her poem “Today Is Not

the Day,” written just months before her death in

1992—offers both dynamic form and thematic

considerations to the 18 other voices speaking

their stories.

Other contributors include Michelle Cliff, Car-

olivia Herron, Alexis DeVeaux, Jacqueline Wood-

son, SAPPHIRE, the activist and publisher Barbara

Smith, Linda Villarosa (former executive editor of

ESSENCE), and the filmmaker Michelle Parkerson.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ball, M. Charlene. “Old Magic and New Fury: the

Theaphany

there

had been several collections of “Negro Ameri-

can Writing,” they argued, “none had served as a

pedagogical function for students,” even the most

recent ones. They wrote, “None shows the evolu-

tion of this writing as literary art. None provides

the historical context that makes meaningful the

criticism of this writing as the expression of the

American Negro’s special experience and as a tool

of social and cultural diagnosis” (xvii). The editors’

objective, therefore, was to offer a comprehensive

volume of more than 200 years of literary contri-

butions by African Americans.

Moreover, Davis, who had joined with Sterling

A. Brown and Ulysses Lee to edit the groundbreak-

ing forerunner, The NEGRO CARAVAN, three decades

before, and Redding made it explicitly clear that

they had sought to compile “a balanced and im-

partial account” in making their selections. They

assured that “No author has been left out because

we disagree with his critical attitude, or his politics,

or his stand on certain issues”; and, conversely, “no

author had been included because he happens to

think as we do” (xvii).

Davis and Redding found it important to ex-

plain their use of the term “Negro writing.” Al-

though most black writers, they argued, wrote out

Cavalcade: Negro American Writing from 1760 to the Present 91

of a DuBoisian “double consciousness”—Negro

and American—there were those, STANLEY BRAITH-

WAITE and FRANK YERBY, for example, who “write

like whites.” In fact, the anthologists conclude,

“the entire stock of their referent is white, Anglo

Saxon-American derived” (xvii). However, the

“twin rooted” majority finds that whereas “one

root is nourished by the myths, customs, culture

and values traditional in the Western world, the

other feeds hungrily on the experiential reality of

blackness” (xvii). The writers in this group have

a special vision and mission: “In their work they

combine the sermon and the liturgy, the reality

and the dream” (xvii).

Davis and Redding offered a new paradigm

for examining and discussing African-American

literature. Moving chronologically from slavery

to the 1970s, they divided their work into four

major periods: pioneer writers (1760–1830),

freedom fighters (1830–1865), accommodation

and protest (1865–1910), and integration versus

Black Nationalism (1954–present). They included

short stories, novels, essays, plays, biographies,

and autobiographies and prefaced each section

with a critical introduction and bio-bibliographi-

cal headnotes for each author. In designing this

specific format, Davis and Redding established a

paradigm that, with the exception of a few varia-

tions based on ideological perspectives or thematic

emphasis, continues to dominate the mapping of

the African-American literary tradition through

the publication of The Norton Anthology of African

American Literature (1997), edited by HENRY LOUIS

GATES, JR., and colleagues and CALL AND RESPONSE:

THE RIVERSIDE ANTHOLOGY OF THE AFRICAN AMERI-

CAN LITERARY TRADITION (1998), edited by Patricia

Liggins Hill and colleagues.

Despite their claimed impartiality and their cov-

erage of integration and Black Nationalism, Davis

and Redding registered, with their use of the word

“Negro” in the title of their pioneering work, their

association with ties to historically black colleges

and their commitment to a more academic and

Western aesthetic. Significantly, Cavalcade appeared

just when the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT and the BLACK

AESTHETICS movement were reaching their apothe-

osis among black writers and critics. However, the

editors chose not to use the labels “Afro-American

literature,” “black American literature,” or “black

American writers,” unlike succeeding compilers

such as RICHARD BARKSDALE and DARWIN T. TURNER.

Davis, University Professor at Howard University,

and Redding, Ernest I. White Professor of American

Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University,

aligned themselves more with white critic Robert

Bone, who, in his historically important work The

Negro Novel in America, divided writers of the black

literary tradition into two basic camps: assimila-

tionism and Negro nationalism (Bone, 7).

In 1992 Howard University Press added scholar-

critic Joyce Ann Joyce to the original compilers and

updated its now-classic text by issuing The New

Cavalcade: African American Writing from 1760 to

the Present, volumes 1 and 2. The first volume cov-

ers contributions through 1954, the second vol-

ume from 1954 to the 1980s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.

Davis, Arthur P., and J. Saunders Redding, ed. Cav-

alcade: Negro American Writing from 1760 to the

Present. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,

1971.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Cave Canem

Established by poets TOI DERRICOTTE and COR-

NELIUS EADY in 1996, Cave Canem began as a re-

treat and writer’s workshop for African-American

poets. According to the program’s Web site, it was

“designed to counter the under-representation

and isolation of African American poets in writers’

workshops and literary programs” (http://www.

cavecanempoets.org).

Derricotte, Eady, and Sarah Micklem, Eady’s

wife, found the name and symbol for the retreat

while on vacation in Italy. In Pompeii, at the en-

trance to the House of the Tragic Poet, they came

across the mosaic of a black dog and an inscrip-

tion that read: “cave canem,” Latin for “beware of

the dog.” They adopted the words and mosaic as

92 Cave Canem

their symbols that illustrated the most important

tenet of the retreat—it was to be a safe haven for

black poets.

At its onset, Cave Canem was an all-volunteer

effort. Its only component was the weeklong sum-

mer workshop, where fellows were invited to study

with reputable African-American poets while

completing an intensive writing regimen through-

out the week. Many notable poets have taught at

Cave Canem, including SONIA SANCHEZ, Elizabeth

Alexander, AL YOUNG, YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, and

LUCILLE CLIFTON.

Fifty-two fellows are invited to the workshop

each year. The founders decided early on to keep

the number of fellows to a minimum so that the

retreat would remain close-knit. The fellows at-

tend the retreat for three sessions and have a five-

year span in which to complete them. Cave Canem

does not adhere to any particular school of poetry;

its fellows are from various backgrounds and write

in numerous voices and styles.

Since 1996, with the help of volunteers and the

program’s director, Carolyn Micklem, the summer

retreat has flourished into the Cave Canem Foun-

dation. In addition to the original workshop, the

foundation holds numerous public readings as

well as regional workshops designed to reach writ-

ers who may not have the opportunity to attend

the summer workshop.

In 1999, Cave Canem began sponsoring a first-

book contest for African-American writers whose

work has not been published by a university or

commercial press. Each year, the directors also pub-

lish an anthology featuring the work of fellows and

faculty who attend the summer retreat. In 2006 the

Cave Canem Reader was published to commemo-

rate the organization’s 10th anniversary.

Remica L. Bingham

Celestine, Alfred Bernard (1949– )

Born in Los Angeles, California, to Alfred and

Irene Jane Celestine, Al Celestine graduated from

Sherman E. Burroughs High School in Ridgecrest,

California, in 1967. He attended Fresno State, the

University of California at Riverside (UCR), and

University of California, Berkeley, majoring in so-

ciology. During his undergraduate studies at UCR,

Celestine became a student activist. He led the

black student union in its effort to prevent UCR’s

chancellor from dismantling its pioneering, de-

gree-granting Black Studies Department. Totally

committed to validating and promoting black cul-

ture during the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, Celestine

produced plays, sponsored poetry readings, and

invited well-known writers,

of Afrekete in Audre Lorde’s ‘Tar

Beach.’ ” NWSA Journal 13, no. 1 (2001): 61–85.

Janet Bland

African American Review

African American Review is one of the leading

journals in African-American literary and cultural

studies. It was established in 1967 as Negro Ameri-

can Literature Forum, published by the Indiana

State University School of Education. Originally

a mimeographed newsletter, it had an initial au-

dience among teachers who were bringing black

writing into the classroom, often for the first time.

As John F. Bayliss, the founder and first editor, said

in the inaugural issue, “Perhaps one of the most

urgent features of Negro American Literature

Studies at the moment is that they be popularized

among teachers at all levels of education. At school

level, integration of material is a ‘must’; at college

level, this latter point may be debatable” (1). Since

Indiana State University was established as the

state normal school, it is surprising that the jour-

nal had a pedagogical emphasis.

What is perhaps more surprising is that the first

issue was oriented more toward an academic au-

dience than its sources and editorial stance would

suggest. In addition to a tribute to LANGSTON

HUGHES by DARWIN TURNER, it included a short

commentary by James A. Emanuel titled “The Fu-

ture of Negro Poetry,” two short articles on NATIVE

SON, a checklist of African-American periodicals

and journals, and a review by Blyden Jackson of

Seymour Gross’s Images of the Negro in American

Literature. The list of contributors suggests that

a group of scholars was already in place to help

shape the critical development of the field by

means of such a journal. Perhaps the most signifi-

cant piece in the issue was “Some Queries about

Negro American Literature” by J. S. Lowry. The

questions it posed were crucial ones for literature

that was often at that time associated with politics

and social critique: What determines the category,

the standards of evaluation, and the status within

literature generally? These, of course, continue

to be central issues for African-American literary

analysis.

As the journal developed into a large-format

publication under Bayliss and later Hannah Hed-

rick, it maintained its dual role as pedagogical re-

source and a site of professional criticism. The first

major shift came in the spring 1977 issue, when

Joseph Weixlmann became editor. He changed the

name to Black American Literature Forum, reflect-

ing a shift in perspective; moreover, all of the ar-

ticles were analytical pieces clearly designed for an

audience of literary critics. Academic book reviews

were included, and special issues were introduced

on CLARENCE MAJOR, fiction, and women writers.

In 1991, the journal received a Lila Wallace–

Reader’s Digest Foundation Grant to develop

strategies for expanding its readership. One result

was a change in name to African American Review,

designed to reflect an expansion of the emphasis to

6 African American Review

incorporate African-American expressive culture

generally. Out of this change came special issues

on black music, jazz, the black church, and theater.

In addition, the journal’s cover made full-color

use of the work of African-American visual art-

ists. In addition to the Lila Wallace grant, African

American Review has won three American Literary

Magazine Awards for editorial content and several

NEA grants, and it serves as the official publication

of the Black American Literature Division of the

Modern Language Association. In 2001, its base of

operations was moved to St. Louis University; in

2004 Joycelyn Moody became editor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bayliss, John F. “Editorial,” Negro American Literature

Forum 1, no. 1 (1967): 1.

Keith Byerman

Ai (Florence Anthony) (1947– )

Florence Anthony’s discovery of the poet within

herself began, she believes, at her birth on Oc-

tober 21, 1947, in Albany, Texas. While Florence

Anthony was aware of the unique cultural back-

ground she inherited from her African-American,

Choctaw, Irish, Dutch, and Southern Cheyenne

mother, she was 26 when she learned about her

Japanese father. As a result of this discovery and

her lack of affinity with either African-American

or white students at her integrated Catholic grade

school, Florence Anthony became Ai, which means

“love” in Japanese. To pursue her interest in and

validate her newfound heritage, Ai earned her B.A.

in Japanese from the University of Arizona in 1964

and developed her professional interest in poetry.

In 1971, she earned an M.F.A. from the University

of California at Irvine.

In her first collection of poems, Cruelty (1972),

Ai introduced the style, a series of dramatic mono-

logues, that continues to dominate her work.

Equally important, however, are her diverse speak-

ers, who deal with themes and subjects ranging

from abortion to domestic violence, generally con-

sidered social taboos. The one thing these speak-

ers have in common is their lower-class status and

struggle for survival. Ai’s honest portrayal of these

personas and their thoughts often forces readers

into the uncomfortable position of relating with

the child abuser, the battered wife, or the father of

an aborted child. Despite the harsh criticism she

received for the violent nature and language of her

work, Ai has not wavered from her use of graphic

representations of violence and her focus on the

body in her work for more than 20 years and seven

texts.

Although similar to Cruelty in style, specifically

in its use of dramatic monologues, Ai’s second

collection of poems, Killing Floor (1973), features

disparate narrators. Instead of focusing on the

voiceless, poverty-stricken, and socially ousted,

Killing Floor features speakers who are popular

cultural and historical icons: Marilyn Monroe,

Leon Trotsky, and Ira Hayes. Other characters—a

son who must deal with a senile father, a murder-

ous 14-year-old boy, and a crazy Indian bride—

have unusual qualities that color their experience

and portrayals. Ai’s use of genocide, cannibalism,

necrophilia, and murder to connect private evils

with public degradation continues in her next

collection, Sin (1986). The religious overtone of

the title draws together the diverse cast of speak-

ers, ranging from John F. Kennedy to an unnamed

priest, as each tries to justify his previous actions,

rooted in a desire for power, and the need to es-

cape the guilt associated with “sin.” Viewed as a

chorus, the speakers in Sin represent Ai’s critique

of the many institutions that she believes domi-

nate society, especially religion and politics. In Fate

(1991) and Greed (1993), Ai completes her unde-

clared objective of progressing from giving voice

to the unnamed to speaking for the idols of Ameri-

can culture. However, the characters in these two

collections, Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Jimmy

Hoffa, do not speak as individuals; instead, they

become the collective representation of American

values.

While Ai’s poetry has often earned harsh criti-

cism, her plain, direct style has brought her acco-

lades. Aside from winning the Bunting Fellowship,

an American Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellow-

ship, and the Lamont Prize, Ai’s Vice: New and Se-

lected Poems (1999) won the sought-after National

Ai 7

Book Award. Currently a professor at Oklahoma

State University, where she is researching the his-

tory of her relatives, members of the Choctaw

and Southern Cheyenne tribes in Oklahoma, Ai is

planning to use this material to write a memoir.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ingram, Claudia. “Writing the Crises: The Develop-

ment of Abjection in Ai’s Dramatic Monologues.”

LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 8, no. 2 (Oc-

tober 1997): 173–192.

Kilcup, Karen. “Dialogues of the Self: Toward a The-

ory of (Re)Reading Ai.” Journal of Gender Studies

7, no. 1 (1998): 16–21.

Cassandra M. Parente

AIDS

The presence of AIDS in black literature, thematic,

linguistic, and central to setting, can be read

part of a longer tradition of bearing witness to the

calamities that have affected black people dating

back to the transatlantic slave trade. Both contem-

poraneous autobiographical accounts of slavery

by such authors as OLAUDAH EQUIANO and FREDER-

ICK DOUGLASS and recent interpretations by TONI

MORRISON (BELOVED, 1987) and CHARLES JOHNSON

(MIDDLE PASSAGE, 1990) underscore the impor-

tance of understanding slavery as a test of black

survival. Similarly, given the high incidences of

AIDS in present-day black communities, texts in

black literature that examine AIDS are similar to

texts about slavery in speaking to the threat posed

to black individuals and the community at large.

Black literature about AIDS is a form of truth

telling. It involves being honest about a host of

ills, namely hom*ophobia, that are at the heart of

black culture and life today. It is not surprising,

then, that much of the black literature about AIDS

has sprung from the pens of black gay men. Be-

cause their community has been decimated by the

AIDS crisis, black gay men are determined to call

to public attention their experiences as HIV-posi-

tive subjects, as well as on their relationships with

individuals who have died from the disease.

Most writing about AIDS in black literature

constitutes a political act whereby the author as-

serts his, generally speaking, gay identity proudly,

in a fashion that does not detract from his black-

ness or his place in the black community. Authors

such as MELVIN DIXON, Joseph Beam, and MARLON

RIGGS have chronicled their efforts at successfully

being part of both communities. That these in-

dividuals have also claimed HIV-positive identi-

ties is significant as well, since HIV/AIDS can be

a taboo subject in black communities: A person

with AIDS is often encouraged not to speak, and

certainly not to write, about it. That these authors

and others have defied this ideology is a testament

not only to the viability of bearing witness to cri-

sis but also to the importance of speaking truth

to power.

AIDS in black literature takes many forms, from

fiction to autobiography. Author E. LYNN HARRIS,

whose work holds immense appeal in black com-

munities, includes an AIDS plotline in his novel

Just as I Am (1994). The entire second half of the

novel is devoted to the story of Kyle Benton, best

friend to the novel’s protagonist, who learns he

is HIV positive. Harris describes how Benton’s

friends care for him during his illness and up to

the moment of his death. Benton remains an in-

spiring figure in this series of novels by Harris,

even being reincarnated for a brief appearance

at the conclusion of Abide with Me (1999), a later

book in the series.

JAMES EARL HARDY is best known for the B-Boy

Blues series of novels, the tale of two men falling

in love in urban New York City. In The Day Eazy-

E Died (2001), Hardy integrates an AIDS plotline

into the narrative. The novel is set during two

weeks in March 1995, when the central character

Raheim, learns that one of his favorite rappers,

Eazy-E, has developed AIDS and is dying. While

Raheim grapples with this news, he is informed

that his former lover David is in a Bronx hospi-

tal, also stricken with AIDS. In response, Raheim

seeks HIV testing and counseling. This action mir-

rors that of many urban black youths, particularly

black males, following the real-life HIV diagnosis

and subsequent death of Eazy-E (Eric Wright).

8 AIDS

The B-Boy Blues series is distinguished by the

writing style Hardy uses, incorporating an abun-

dance of slang, specifically hip-hop vernacular, to

lend the books verisimilitude and street flavor. By

virtue of their identification as B-Boy’s (a term as-

sociated with break dancers in urban culture), the

characters in his novels most likely would use this

language; as a result, Hardy’s linguistic code shift-

ing is appropriate. Additionally, individuals who

might not be inclined to read literature written

solely in standard English are reading these books,

and in the case of The Day Eazy-E Died, they are

perhaps coming to a better understanding of AIDS

pathology. This is how AIDS in black literature is

an example of art that not only is political but also

can save lives.

The popular science-fiction author SAMUEL

DELANY also plays with the complexities of lan-

guage in an attempt to incorporate AIDS into

his work. For instance, in his novella The Tale of

Plagues and Carnivals, or: Some Informal Remarks

towards the Modular Calculus, Part Five (1985),

Delany writes, “AIDS is like . . . the wrath of Khan”

(187); Delany’s statement has dire and potentially

galvanizing meaning for fans of science fiction.

Perhaps no other black gay author has con-

tributed more to discussions of AIDS in black lit-

erature than ESSEX HEMPHILL. Hemphill, who died

from AIDS in 1995, wrote about the disease in a

variety of forms, including poetry, performance

pieces, and essays. In his poem “Now We Think,”

he details how the reality of AIDS has altered his

sex practices. In the landmark film “Tongues Un-

tied,” he freely discusses his thoughts not only as

a black gay man, but as a black gay man living

with AIDS. One of Hemphill’s more poignant

comments on the culture and reality of AIDS is

his essay “Does Your Mama Know About Me?,”

wherein he contends

Some of the best minds of my generation

would have us believe that AIDS has brought

the gay and lesbian community closer and in-

fused it with a more democratic mandate. That

is only a partial truth that further underscores

the fact that the gay community still operates

from a one-eyed, one-gender, one-color per-

ception of “community” that is most likely to

recognize blond before black but seldom the

two together.

Some of the best minds of my generation

believe AIDS has made the gay community a

more responsible social construction, but what

AIDS really manages to do is clearly point out

how significant are the cultural and economic

differences between us; differences so extreme

that black men suffer a disproportionate num-

ber of AIDS deaths in communities with very

sophisticated gay health care services. (40–41)

Although this essay was published more than a

decade ago, it maintains relevance and currency,

particularly in highlighting the socioeconomic

disenfranchisem*nt and racism prevalent in gay

communities.

Although the Norton Anthology of African Amer-

ican Literature concludes with excerpts from Essex

Hemphill’s poetry, the chosen excerpts focus more

on his black gay subjectivity than on his work on

AIDS or his status as HIV positive. The bibliog-

raphy prefacing those excerpts does not mention

that he died from AIDS. Such avoidance is indica-

tive of the silence surrounding AIDS in black com-

munities, a silence to which Hemphill’s work, and

that of others contributing to discussions of AIDS

in black literature, speaks.

Whether situated in a fictive narrative or dis-

cussed in the form of autobiography, AIDS in

black literature is an indication that blacks are

aware of the disease’s reality and are creating art

in response to it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Delany, Samuel R. The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,

or: Some Informal Remarks towards the Modular

Calculus, Part Five. Flight from Neveryon. Hanover,

N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The

Norton Anthology of African American Literature.

New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Hardy, James Earl. The Day Eazy-E Died. Los Angeles:

Alyson, 2001.

AIDS 9

Harris, E. Lynn. Abide with Me. New York: Double-

day, 1999.

———. Just as I Am. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Hemphill, Essex. Ceremonies. New York: Plume,

1992.

Chris Bell

Alexander, Will (1948– )

The poet, dramatist, essayist, and visual artist Will

Alexander was born in Los Angeles, California,

on July 27, 1948, to devout Christian parents Will

Alexander, Sr., an employee of the Department of

Water and Power, and Birdie Alexander.

Although

he was raised in the heart of South Central Los

Angeles, at 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard,

Alexander’s parents moved before that location

became the site of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Not

allowed to wander far from his mother’s watch

while his father was at work, Alexander spent a

good deal of time playing safely alone for hours;

perhaps this became the root of his steadfast, in-

dependent, and self-paced development as a fine

artist. A graduate of Los Angeles’s Washington

High School, Alexander studied sociology at Har-

bor College and earned a B.A. in English and cre-

ative writing from University of California at Los

Angeles, in 1972.

The Alexanders prevented Will, their only son,

from reading anything but the Bible during his

childhood. A slow learner, Alexander did not fully

grasp reading until he was eight and a half; al-

though he later discovered that this experience was

typical of many black males, by age 11 he doubted

his own intellectual ability. However, in his early

teens, Alexander, who had grown tired of his par-

ents’ restriction, was repulsed by what he consid-

ered the superficiality of the churchgoers he knew.

Left with a spiritual void, Alexander, like Arthur

Rimbaud, whose work influenced him, concluded

that he was being suffocated by his Christian be-

liefs. During his teenage years, Alexander became

an avid reader of leftist political writings, played

sports, and collected jazz albums. At 13, he first

heard what he called the “planetary power” of Eric

Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, John Coltrane, and Jackie

McLean. At 16, his jazz collection, which grew to

nearly 3,000 records over time, consisted of two

albums—Cannonball Adderly’s Nippon Soul and

Coltrane’s Olé.

Insatiably curious, Alexander educated him-

self by reading. His informal teachers were the

painter Chaïm Soutine and surrealist writers An-

tonin Artaud, André Breton, BOB KAUFMAN, Philip

Lamantia, and Octavio Paz. Listening to them,

Alexander built his own energy circle, found his

own voice, and wrote his first poem at 18. By the

time he entered the University of California, he

was writing daily. However, by the time he earned

his degree, he had ceased writing, unable to con-

sider himself a true writer. He chose instead to

study independently art, music, and literature

that, he was convinced, would provide him with

the self-respectable level of artistic development

he desired.

By 1987, when he published Vertical Rainbow

Climber, his first collection of poems and draw-

ings, Alexander had developed his own perspective

on language, which, he concluded, must be simul-

taneously grounded and take flight, a combination

that he could only achieve by working with palpa-

ble subject matter. He found support for this phi-

losophy in the African concept of animism, which,

grounded in the Nubian epistemology, teaches that

everything is alive. Alexander came to see language

as an agent of change that advances and heightens

individual and collective consciousness for spiri-

tual realignment to life.

Alexander has published, a collection of short

fiction, Arcane Lavender Morals (1994); a play, Con-

duction in the Catacombs (1997); a collection of es-

says, Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (1999);

and five collections of poetry: Vertical Rainbow

Climber (1987), The Stratospheric Canticles (1995),

Asia and Haiti (1995), and Above the Human Nerve

Domain (1999).

Early on, critics described Alexander as the

writer of “seeming nightmare idiom”; however, his

publication in such literary journals as CALLALOO,

Exquisite Corpse, Hambone, and Sulfur garnered

a wider general readership and brought broader

critical attention. In time, he would be called a sur-

realist, black postmodernist, neosurrealist, innova-

10 Alexander, Will

tive American poet, supra-pan-African surrealist,

experimental poet, a fine Black poet, and one of

the greatest living poets.

In his works Alexander explores language, the

transmutation of being through language, the

philosophy of mathematics, the transmutation

of leadership from adversarial to divine, dizzying

alchemical movement, and the states of break-

through, seepage, and blankness. In an introduc-

tion to Alexander’s Towards the Primeval Lightning

Field, Andrew Joron claims, “This pre-Romantic

idea of the imagination as ‘the link of links’ still

dwells in the thought and practice of Alexander.

Here, the energy of the imagination has not yet

been harnessed (as it would be in Romanticism)

to the goals of bourgeois subjectivization.”

Alexander’s subsequent works include three

collections of poems (Impulse & Nothingness

[Green Integer], Exobiology as Goddess [2005,

Manifest Press], and Sri Lankan Loxodrome

[2002, Canopic Press]); a trilogy of novels, Sun-

rise in Armageddon [2006, Spuyten Duyvil]); the

novella Alien Weaving (2002, Green Integer); and

a collection of essays, Singing in Magnetic Hoof-

beat. Alexander’s visual artistry includes covers

and illustrations for books and magazines, ex-

hibitions, and privately collected paintings and

drawings. In his hometown Los Angeles, as the

lead artist for Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, he

engages at-risk youngsters in finding their voice

through the arts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Caples, Garrett. “The Impossibility of Will Alexan-

der’s Prose.” Facture 2 (2001): 209–216.

———. “Is the Analysis Impure?” Lingo 7 (1997):

74–76.

Hejinian, Lyn, and David Lehman. The Best American

Poetry 2004. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Koolish, Lynda. African American Writers: Portraits

and Visions. Jackson: University Press of Missis-

sippi, 2001.

Marshall, Kerry James. Mementos. Chicago: Renais-

sance Society at the University of Chicago, 1998.

Mullen, Harryette. “A Collective Force of Burning

Ink: Will Alexander’s Asia & Haiti.” Callaloo 22,

no. 2 (1999): 417–426.

———. “Hauling up Gold from the Abyss: An In-

terview with Will Alexander.” Callaloo 22, no. 2

(1999): 391–408.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “Will Alexander’s ‘Trans-

mundane Specific.’ ” Callaloo 22, no. 2 (1999):

409–416.

Tuma, Keith. “Noticings.” Sulfur 39 (Fall 1996):

171–173.

Merilene M. Murphy

Allen, Jeffery Renard (1962– )

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Jeffery Renard Allen

earned a B.A. (1986), an M.A. (1988), and a Ph.D.

(1992), all in English, from the University of Illinois

at Chicago. Since 1992, he has taught at Queens

College of the City University of New York, where

he specializes in African-American literature and

creative writing.

In addition to a collection of poems, Harbors

and Spirits (1999), Allen has published a num-

ber of individual and as yet uncollected poems

in a number of magazines and journals, includ-

ing CALLALOO, AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW, and the

Literary Review. Allen has also published short fic-

tion in journals such as the Antioch Review and the

Notre Dame Review. In 2000, Allen published his

debut novel, Rails under My Back, to wide criti-

cal acclaim, garnering the Whiting Writer’s Award

(2002), the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for

Fiction (2000), and the Pioneering Achievements

in Fiction award from the African American Lit-

erature and Culture Society (2001). In addition,

Rails under My Back was named a New York Times

Notable Book (2000), was one of the Year’s 25 Best

Books in The Village Voice (2000), and was the

Chicago Tribune’s editor’s pick among the Year’s

Best 10 Books (2000). Rails was also a selection

of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality

Paperback Book Club for 2000. Subsequent works

include a collection of poems titled Stellar Places as

well as several fictional works.

Rails under My Back is a long family chronicle

that focuses on the younger generation of the

Griffith and Simmons families. However, it is more

than just a fictional life story in the usual sense, for

Allen, Jeffery Renard 11

it contains a variety of literary elements that are

frequently absent from much of the popular lit-

erature in contemporary America.

These elements

include storytelling in the black male tradition, a

narrative complexity that ranks Allen among the

best of the modern and postmodern literary styl-

ists, and a concern for character and place that

recalls some of the most significant works in the

American literary canon. At the same time, Allen

treads into the popular province of the comic and

the violent, showing that he knows well the con-

temporary dimensions of the lives of the people

about whom he writes.

The narrative voice is largely that of Hatch

Jones, a present-generation character who tries

to arrive at some sense of himself and his family

in the aftermath of a painful past and as a victim

of more recent familial fractures and dysfunc-

tion. Allen deals deftly with the Great Migration

of blacks from South to North and the resulting

changes in their economic and emotional fortunes.

He also deals with contemporary urban plagues

like drug abuse, intraracial crime and violence, and

neighborhood blight that have devastated so many

black families. What makes the devastation so in-

tense for this family is that members of the present

generation have received double doses of heritage:

Their fathers are brothers who married two sisters.

The tragedy associated with all these occurrences

is most clearly seen in the life of Hatch’s double

first cousin, Jesus Jones, a proverbial lost child in

the jungle of drugs, alcohol, and violence, reminis-

cent of CLAUDE BROWN’s character in Manchild in

the Promised Land.

Stylistically, there is a mélange of narrative styles

that are often complex and nonlinear. Sometimes

other characters intrude on Hatch Jones’s narra-

tion; at other times, a newspaper clipping, a page

torn from a Bible, or an obituary notice propels the

narrative. Often, an omniscient narrator provides

clarity or, more often than not, deliberately adds

greater confusion. Just as frequently, lines blur be-

tween people and places. Allen handles all of these

strategies with great skill. The text also confirms

that Allen is a lover of words and of storytelling in

its most artistic sense.

Thematically, Allen explores the results of de-

ferred dreams in the context of the African-Amer-

ican quest for America’s promise. Other themes

include the importance of the extended family,

suffering, reconciliation, and the journey toward

fulfillment. Moreover, the South as a touchstone

for African Americans figures prominently in the

novel. Allen is clearly aware of the African-Ameri-

can literary tradition, and he is deeply rooted in

the elements of the culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carson, Warren J. Review of Rails under My Back.

AALCS Newsletter 6, no. 1 (May 2002): 5–6.

Channer, Colin. Review of Rails under My Back. Min-

neapolis Star Review, April 2000.

Tate, Greg. Review of Rails under My Back. Village

Voice Literary Supplement, February 2000.

Warren J. Carson

Angelou, Maya (née Margeurite

Johnson) (1928– )

Acclaimed for her serial autobiographies, poetry,

and public performance lectures, Maya Angelou

was born Marguerite Johnson in Saint Louis, Mis-

souri, to Bailey Johnson, a navy dietitian, and Viv-

ian Johnson, a co*cktail hostess. In 1931 Maya and

her brother, Bailey, were sent to Stamps, Arkansas,

to live with their grandmother, Annie Henderson.

Later, in 1936, while living in St. Louis, Angelou

was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, who was

subsequently found kicked to death in a vacant

lot. Fearing her confession had literally killed him,

she became ill and was sent back to Stamps suffer-

ing from voluntary mutism. During this time she

read prodigiously and discovered poetry. In 1944

she dropped out of high school in San Francisco,

where she lived with her mother; worked as the

first black trolley car conductor; and gave birth to

her son, Guy. She married Tosh Angelou in 1949,

later worked as a singer at the Purple Onion night-

club in San Francisco, and soon thereafter dissolved

the marriage. She toured Europe from 1954 to 1955

with the Everyman’s Opera Company’s production

12 Angelou, Maya

of Porgy and Bess, joined the Harlem Writers Guild

in 1959, worked as the northern coordinator for

the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in

1960, and helped write and produce, in collabora-

tion with Godfrey Cambridge, the famous fund-

raiser Cabaret for Freedom.

In 1961 Angelou moved to Africa with Vusumzi

Make, an African freedom fighter; as that relation-

ship began to fail, she worked at the University of

Ghana, the Ghanaian Broadcast Corporation, and

eventually at the Ghanian Times. In 1970, after the

publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,

she became a writer-in-residence at the University

of Kansas, received a Yale University Fellowship,

and, in 1973, married Paul Du Feu. That marriage

ended in 1980. Maya Angelou has been a cook,

streetcar conductor, BLUES singer, dancer, madam,

actress, activist, teacher, playwright, writer, film

director, television writer, producer, acclaimed

public lecturer, autobiographer, poet, and writer

of children’s literature. She has produced six se-

rial autobiographies, numerous books of poetry,

recordings, film scripts, screenplays, essays, and

children’s books.

Beginning in 1970 with the acknowledged liter-

ary classic I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she

published more than 30 books, including Just Give

Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Die (1971), Gather

in My Name (1974), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna

Fit Me Well (1975), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Get-

tin’ Merry like Christmas (1976), And Still I Rise

(1978), Phenomenal Woman (1978), The Heart of a

Woman (1981), Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing (1983),

All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986),

Poems: Maya Angelou (1986), I Shall Not Be Moved

(1990), “On the Pulse of the Morning” (1993;

poem delivered at President Bill Clinton’s inaugu-

ration), Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

(1993), The Complete Collected Poems of Maya An-

gelou (1994), A Brave and Startling Truth (1995),

Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997), and A Song

Flung Up to Heaven (2003). In addition, Angelou’s

children’s stories include Mrs. Flowers (1986), Life

Does Not Frighten Me (1993), My Painted House,

My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kofi and

His Magic (1996).

Angelou has been a prolific film script and

screenplay writer. Her list of achievements in this

category include Cabaret for Freedom (1960; mu-

sical review written and produced in collabora-

tion with Godfrey Cambridge), The Least of These

(1966; two-act drama), Blacks, Blues, Black (1968;

PBS documentary), All Day Long (1974; film

script, American Film Institute), The Legacy (1976;

Afro-American Television Special), The Inheritors

(1976; Afro-American Television Special), I Know

Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979; with Leonora

Thuna, film), Sister, Sister (1982; drama for NBC-

TV), and Down in the Delta (1990; film director).

She also has a music CD, Music, Deep Rivers in My

Soul (2003).

Angelou’s poetics are informed by her public

persona and several uniquely African and African-

American models: the African griot who performs

public poetic utterance on behalf of the group,

the African-American preacher, and the civil and

women’s rights political apologists. Academicians

and purists who fail to understand her style con-

sistently devalue her poetry as too popular, too

propagandistic, and too public. Most have failed to

take seriously “On the Pulse of the Morning,” one

of her best-known poems, as a highly performative

postcolonial protest poem that speaks back pow-

erfully to the white male poet Robert Frost, her

predecessor, whose universal “We” she displaces

with her catalog of vastly different American audi-

tors such as “The Sioux” and “The Catholic.” The

poems most beloved by her readers and listeners

are “And Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman,”

now much anthologized and reprinted. Critics of

Angelou’s poetry who judge it from within the rhe-

torical traditions of African

african-americam literature - Anatomia (2024)