Black Ink

by Stephanie Stokes Oliver

  There are as many ways to define a classic in the African American tradition as there are in any other tradition, and these ways are legion. So many essays have been published entitled “What Is a Classic?” that they could fill several large anthologies. And while no one can say explicitly why generations of readers return to read certain texts, just about everyone can agree that making a bestseller list in one’s lifetime is most certainly not an index of fame or influence over time; the longevity of one’s readership—of books about which one says, “I am rereading,” as Calvino puts it—on the other hand, most certainly is. So, the size of one’s readership (through library use, Internet access, and sales) cumulatively is an interesting factor to consider; and because of series such as the Penguin Classics, we can gain a sense, for our purposes, of those texts written by authors in previous generations that have sustained sales—mostly for classroom use—long after their authors were dead.

  There can be little doubt that Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), The Souls of Black Folks (1903), by W. E. B. Du Bois, and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston, are the three most classic of the black classics—again, as measured by consumption—while Langston Hughes’s poetry, though not purchased as books in these large numbers, is accessed through the Internet as frequently as that of any other American poet, and indeed profoundly more so than most. Within Penguin’s Portable Series list, the most popular individual titles, excluding Douglass’s first slave narrative and Du Bois’s Souls, are:

  Up from Slavery (1903), Booker T. Washington

  The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), James Weldon Johnson

  God’s Trombones (1926), James Weldon Johnson

  Passing (1929), Nella Larsen

  The Marrow of Tradition (1898), Charles W. Chesnutt

  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs

  The Interesting Narrative (1789), Olaudah Equiano

  The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Charles W. Chesnutt

  My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass

  Quicksand (1928), Nella Larsen

  These titles form a canon of classics of African American literature, judged by classroom readership. If we add Jean Toomer’s novel Cane (1922), arguably the first work of African American modernism, along with Douglass’s first narrative, Du Bois’s The Souls, and Hurston’s Their Eyes, we would most certainly have included many of the touchstones of black literature published before 1940, when Richard Wright published Native Son.

  Every teacher’s syllabus constitutes a canon of sorts, and I teach these texts and a few others as the classics of the black canon. Why these particular texts? I can think of two reasons: First, these texts signify or riff upon each other, repeating, borrowing, and extending metaphors book to book, generation to generation. To take just a few examples, Equiano’s eighteenth-century use of the trope of the talking book (an image found, remarkably, in five slave narratives published between 1770 and 1811) becomes, with Frederick Douglass, the representation of the quest for freedom as, necessarily, the quest for literacy, for a freedom larger than physical manumission; we might think of this as the representation of metaphysical manumission, of freedom and literacy—the literacy of great literature—inextricably intertwined. Douglass transformed the metaphor of the talking book into the trope of chiasmus, a repetition with a stinging reversal: “You have seen how a man becomes a slave, you will see how a slave becomes a man.” Du Bois, with Douglass very much on his mind, transmuted chiasmus a half century later into the metaphor of duality or double consciousness, a necessary condition of living one’s life, as he memorably put it, behind a “veil.”

  Du Bois’s metaphor has a powerful legacy in twentieth century black fiction: James Weldon Johnson, in Ex-Colored Man, literalizes the trope of double consciousness by depicting as his protagonist a man who, at will, can occupy two distinct racial spaces, one black, one white, and who moves seamlessly, if ruefully between them. Toomer’s Cane takes Du Bois’s metaphor of duality for the inevitably split consciousness that every Negro must feel living in a country in which her or his status as a citizen is liminal at best, or has been erased at worst, and makes of this the metaphor for the human condition itself under modernity, a tellingly bold rhetorical gesture—one designed to make the Negro the metaphor of the human condition. And Hurston, in Their Eyes, extends Toomer’s revision even further, depicting a character who can only gain her voice once she can name this condition of duality or double consciousness and then glide gracefully and lyrically between her two selves, an “inside” self and an “outside” one.

  More recently, Alice Walker, in The Color Purple, signifies upon two aspects of the narrative strategy of Their Eyes: first, she revisits the theme of a young black woman finding her voice, depicting a protagonist who writes herself into being through letters addressed to God and to her sister, Nettie—letters that grow ever more sophisticated in their syntax and grammar and imagery as she comes to consciousness before our very eyes, letter to letter; and second, Walker riffs on Hurston’s use of a vernacular-inflected free indirect discourse to show that black English has the capacity to serve as the medium for narrating a novel through the black dialect that forms a most pliable and expansive language in Celie’s letters. Ralph Ellison makes Du Bois’s metaphor of the veil a trope of blindness and life underground for his protagonist in Invisible Man, a protagonist who, as he types the story of his life from a hole underground, writes himself into being in the first person (in contradistinction to Richard Wright’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, whose reactive tale of fear and flight is told in the third person). Walker’s novel also riffs on Ellison’s claim for the revolutionary possibilities of writing the self into being, whereas Hurston’s protagonist, Janie, speaks herself into being. Ellison himself signified multiply upon Richard Wright’s Native Son, from the title to the use of the first-person bildungsroman to chart the coming to consciousness of a sensitive protagonist moving from blindness and an inability to do little more than react to his environment, to the insight gained by wresting control of his identity from social forces and strong individuals that would circumscribe and confine his life choices. Toni Morrison, master supernaturalist and perhaps the greatest black novelist of all, trumps Ellison’s trope of blindness by returning over and over to the possibilities and limits of insight within worlds confined or circumscribed not by supraforces (à la Wright) but by the confines of the imagination and the ironies of individual and family history, signifying upon Faulkner, Woolf, and Márquez in the process. And Ishmael Reed, the father of black postmodernism and what we might think of as the hip-hop novel, the tradition’s master parodist, signifies upon everybody and everything in the black literary tradition, from the slave narratives to the Harlem Renaissance to black nationalism and feminism.

  This sort of literary signifying is what makes a literary tradition, well, a “tradition,” rather than a simple list of books whose authors happen to have been born in the same country, share the same gender, or would be identified by their peers as belonging to this ethnic group or that. What makes these books special—“classic”—however, is something else. Each text has the uncanny capacity to take the seemingly mundane details of the day-to-day African American experience of its time and transmute those details and the characters’ actions into something that transcends its ostensible subject’s time and place, its specificity. These texts reveal the human universal through the African American particular: all true art, all classics, do this; this is what “art” is, a revelation of that which makes each of us sublimely human, rendered in the minute details of the actions and thoughts and feelings of a compelling character embedded in a time and place. But as soon as we find ourselves turning to a text for its anthropological or sociological data, we have left the realm of art; we have reduced the complexity of fiction or poetry to an essay, and this is not what imaginative literature is for. Richard Wright, at his best, did this, as did his
signifying disciple Ralph Ellison; Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday achieved this effect in music; Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden achieved it in the visual arts. And this is what Wole Soyinka does in his tragedies, what Toni Morrison does in her novels, what Derek Walcott does in his poetry. And while it is risky to name one’s contemporaries in a list such as this, I think that Rita Dove and Jamaica Kincaid achieve this effect as well, as do Colson Whitehead and Edwidge Danticat, in a younger generation. (There are other writers whom I would include in this group had I the space.) By delving ever so deeply into the particularity of the African and African American experience, these authors manage, somehow, to come out the other side, making the race or the gender of their characters almost translucent, less important than the fact that they stand as aspects of ourselves beyond race or gender or time or place, precisely in the same magical way that Hamlet never remains for long stuck as a prince in a court in Denmark.

  Each classic black text reveals to us, uncannily, subtly, how the Black Experience is inscribed, inextricably and indelibly, in the human experience, and how the human experience takes one of its myriad forms in blackface, as it were. Together, such texts also demonstrate, implicitly, that African American culture is one of the world’s truly great and eternal cultures, as noble and as resplendent as any.

  New Black Scribe

  *

  TERRY McMILLAN

  In Afro-American Literature class, to discover that our lives held as much significance and importance as our white counterparts was more than gratifying, it was exhilarating.

  Novelist Terry McMillan was born in 1951 in Port Huron, Michigan. A journalism graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who became a tenured college professor at the University of Arizona at Tucson, McMillan experienced phenomenal success with her third work of fiction, Waiting to Exhale. Many in the book business credit her 1992 breakout bestseller and the following critically acclaimed How Stella Got Her Groove Back with serving as the catalyst for changing the face of publishing to a more expanded embrace of authors of color.

  Now the author of about a dozen books, McMillan states at the end of the following piece, “film school didn’t work out.” Fortunately to the contrary, since she wrote this essay for the introduction to her 1990 anthology Breaking Ice, she has put her Columbia University master’s program education in filmmaking to good use as the screenwriter or the script consultant for the movie adaptations of several of her bestselling novels.

  As a child, I didn’t know that African American people wrote books. I grew up in a small town in northern Michigan, where the only books I came across were the Bible and required reading for school. I did not read for pleasure, and it wasn’t until I was sixteen when I got a job shelving books at the public library that I got lost in a book. It was a biography of Louisa May Alcott. I was excited because I had not really read about poor white folks before; her father was so eccentric and idealistic that at the time I just thought he was crazy. I related to Louisa because she had to help support her family at a young age, which was what I was doing at the library.

  Then one day I went to put a book away, and saw James Baldwin’s face staring up at me. “Who in the world is this?” I wondered. I remember feeling embarrassed and did not read his book because I was too afraid. I couldn’t imagine that he’d have anything better or different to say than Thomas Mann, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, etc. and a horde of other mostly white male writers that I’d been introduced to in Literature 101 in high school. I mean, not only had there not been any African American authors included in any of those textbooks, but I’d never been given a clue that if we did have anything important to say that somebody would actually publish it. Needless to say, I was not just naïve, but had not yet acquired an ounce of black pride. I never once questioned why there were no representative works by us in any of those textbooks. After all, I had never heard of any African American writers, and no one I knew hardly read any books.

  And then things changed.

  It wasn’t until after Malcolm X had been assassinated that I found out who he was. I know I should be embarrassed about this, but I’m not. I read Alex Haley’s biography of him and it literally changed my life. First and foremost, I realized that there was no reason to be ashamed of being black, that it was ridiculous. That we had a history, and much to be proud of. I began to notice how we had actually been treated as less than human; began to see our strength as a people whereas I’d only been made aware of our inferiorities. I started thinking about my role in the world and not just on my street. I started thinking. Thinking about things I’d never thought of before, and the thinking turned into questions. But I had more questions than answers.

  So I went to college. When I looked through the catalog and saw a class called Afro-American Literature, I signed up and couldn’t wait for the first day of class. Did we really have enough writers to warrant an entire class? I remember the textbook was called Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America because I still have it. I couldn’t believe the rush I felt over and over once I discovered Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and rediscovered and read James Baldwin, to name just a few. I’m surprised I didn’t need glasses by the end of the semester. My world opened up. I accumulated and gained a totally new insight about, and perception of, our lives as “black” people, as if I had been an outsider and was finally let in. To discover that our lives held as much significance and importance as our white counterparts was more than gratifying, it was exhilarating. Not only had we lived diverse, interesting, provocative, and relentless lives, but during, through, and as a result of all these painful experiences, some folks had taken the time to write it down.

  Not once, throughout my entire four years as an undergraduate did it occur to me that I might one day be a writer. I mean, these folks had genuine knowledge and insight. They also had a fascination with the truth. They had something to write about. Their work was bold, not flamboyant. They learned how to exploit the language so that readers would be affected by what they said and how they said it. And they had talent.

  I never considered myself to be in possession of many of the above, and yet when I was twenty years old, the first man I fell in love with broke my heart. I was so devastated and felt so helpless that my reaction manifested itself in a poem. I did not sit down and say, “I’m going to write a poem about this.” It was more like magic. I didn’t even know I was writing a poem until I had written it. Afterward, I felt lighter, as if something had happened to lessen the pain. And when I read this “thing” I was shocked because I didn’t know where the words came from. I was scared, to say the least, about what I had just experienced, because I didn’t understand what had happened.

  For the next few days, I read that poem over and over in disbelief because I had written it. One day, a colleague saw it lying on the kitchen table and read it. I was embarrassed and shocked when he said he liked it, then went on to tell me that he had just started a black literary magazine at the college and he wanted to publish it. Publish it? He was serious and it found its way onto a typeset page.

  Seeing my name in print excited me. And from that point on, if a leaf moved on a tree, I wrote a poem about it. If a crack in the sidewalk glistened, surely there was a poem in that. Some of these verbose things actually got published in various campus newspapers that were obviously desperate to fill up space. I did not call myself a poet; I told people I wrote poems.

  Years passed.

  Those poems started turning into sentences and I started getting nervous. What the hell did I think I was doing? Writing these little go-nowhere vignettes. All these beginnings. And who did I think I was, trying to tell a story? And who cared? Even though I had no idea what I was doing, all I knew was that I was beginning to realize that a lot of things mattered to me, things disturbed me, things that I couldn’t change
. Writing became an outlet for my dissatisfactions, distaste, and my way of trying to make sense of what I saw happening around me. It was my way of trying to fix what I thought was broken. It later became the only way to explore personally what I didn’t understand. The problem, however, was that I was writing more about ideas than people. Everything was so “large,” and eventually I had to find a common denominator. I ended up asking myself what I really cared about: it was people, and particularly African American people.

  The whole idea of taking myself seriously as a writer was terrifying. I didn’t know any writers. Didn’t know how you knew if you “had” it or not. Didn’t know if I was or would ever be good enough. I didn’t know how you went about the business of writing, and besides, I sincerely wanted to make a decent living. (I had read the horror stories of how so few writers were able to live off of their writing alone, many having lived like bohemians.) At first, I thought being a social worker was the right thing to do, since I was bent on saving the world (I was an idealistic twenty-two years old), but when I found I couldn’t do it that way, I had to figure out another way to make an impact on folks. A positive impact. I ended up majoring in journalism because writing was “easy” for me, but it didn’t take long for me to learn that I did not like answering the “who, what, when, where, and why” of anything. I then—upon the urging of my mother and friends who had graduated and gotten “normal” jobs—decided to try something that would still allow me to “express myself” but was relatively safer, though still risky: I went to film school. Of course what was inherent in my quest to find my “spot” in the world was this whole notion of affecting people on some grand scale. Malcolm and Martin caused me to think like this. Writing for me, as it’s turned out, is philanthropy. It didn’t take years for me to realize the impact that other writers’ work had had on me, and if I was going to write, I did not want to write inconsequential, mediocre stories that didn’t conjure up or arouse much in a reader. So I had to start by exciting myself and paying special attention to what I cared about, what mattered to me.