Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers (Two Volumes)

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS Volume 1 Edited by Yolan...

Author: Yolanda Williams Page

14 downloads 1319 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS Volume 1 Edited by Yolanda Williams Page

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of African American women writers / edited by Yolanda Williams Page. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-33429-3 (set : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-313-34123-0 (vol 1 : alk. paper)— ISBN 0-313-34124-9 (vol 2 : alk. paper) 1. American literature—African American authors— Encyclopedias. 2. American literature—Women authors—Encyclopedias. 3. American literature—20th century—Encyclopedias. 4. African American women authors—Biography— Encyclopedias. 5. African American women—Encyclopedias. I. Page, Yolanda Williams. PS153.N5E49 2007 810.9'896073—dc22 2006031193 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright # 2007 by Yolanda Williams Page All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006031193 ISBN-10: 0-313-33429-3 (set) ISBN-13: 978-0-313-33429-0 0-313-34123-0 (vol. 1) 978-0-313-34123-6 0-313-34124-9 (vol. 2) 978-0-313-34124-3 First published in 2007 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9

8 7 6 5 4

3 2 1

To my two favorite beaus, David and William

CONTENTS

Preface

xiii

List of Authors by Genre

xv

Chronological List of Authors

xix

Volume 1 Elizabeth Laura Adams (1909–1982) Hermine Pinson Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert (1853–1889) Iva Balic

1

7

Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen (?–?) Elizabeth Marsden

9

Mignon Holland Anderson (1945– ) Teresa Clark Caruso

11

Maya Angelou (1928– ) Joi Carr

13

Tina McElroy Ansa (1949– ) Tarshia L. Stanley

19

Doris Jean Austin (1949–1994) Imani Lillie B. Fryar

23

Nikki Baker (1962– ) Kimberly Downing Braddock

Joanne Braxton (1950– ) Tanya N. Clark

46

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) Bridget Harris Tsemo

49

Linda Beatrice Brown (1939– ) Teresa Clark Caruso

56

Annie Louise Burton (1858–1910) Gabriel A. Briggs

59

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1869–1944) Susan M. Stone 61 Octavia Butler (1947–2006) Keren Omry

64

Jeannette Franklin Caines (1938–2004) Eric Sterling

71

Bebe Moore Campbell (1950– ) Tenille Brown

74

Barbara Chase-Riboud (1939– ) Ginette Curry

76

Alice Childress (1916–1994) Carol Bunch Davis

79

26

Barbara T. Christian (1943–2000) Sharon L. Barnes

85

Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) Rochelle Spencer

28

Pearl T. Cleage (1948– ) Adrienne Cassel

88

Gwendolyn Bennett (1902–1981) Sue E. Barker

35

Michelle Cliff (1946– ) Lopamudra Basu

92

Marita Bonner (1898–1971) Sophie Blanch

39

Lucille Clifton (1936– ) Patricia Kennedy Bostian

94

Candy Dawson Boyd (1946– ) Bennie P. Robinson

43

Wanda Coleman (1946– ) Terri Jackson Wallace

101

viii

CONTENTS

Eugenia W. Collier (1928– ) T. Jasmine Dawson Kathleen Conwell Collins (1942–1988) Chandra Tyler Mountain

103

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) Denisa E. Chatman-Riley

174

106

Grace Edwards-Yearwood (1934?– ) Jasmin J. Vann

180

Zilpha Elaw (1790?–1846?) Nancy Kang

182

Mari Evans (1923– ) Jessica Allen

186

Sarah Webster Fabio (1928–1979) Richard A. Iadonisi

191

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) Joy R. Myree-Mainor

193

Carolyn Ferrell (1962– ) Alex Feerst

200

Julia Fields (1938– ) Jacqueline Imani Bryant

202

Julia A. J. Foote (1823–1900) Ann Beebe

204

Patrice Gaines (1949– ) Amanda J. Davis

207

Patricia Joann Gibson (1951– ) Sarah Estes Graham

209

Anna Julia Hayward Cooper (1858–1964) Gloria A. Shearin

112

J. California Cooper (?– ) Adrienne Carthon

116

Jayne Cortez (1936– ) Ruth Blando´n

121

Margaret Esse Danner (1910–1984) Claire Taft

127

Edwidge Danticat (1969– ) Jana Evans Braziel

132

Doris Davenport (1949– ) Denise R. Shaw

141

Angela Y. Davis (1944– ) Deirdre Osborne

145

Lucy Delaney (1830–1890) Dave Yost

149

Toi(Nette) Marie Derricotte (1941– ) Karen S. Sloan

151

Mercedes Gilbert (1889–1952) Marlo David Azikwe

211

Alexis De Veaux (1948– ) Bennie P. Robinson

155

Nikki Giovanni (1943– ) Jane M. Barstow

213

Marita Golden (1950– ) DaMaris Hill

218

Jewelle Gomez (1948– ) Josie A. Brown-Rose

223

Eloise Greenfield (1929– ) Elissa Gershowitz

227

Angelina Weld Grimke´ (1880–1958) Gloria A. Shearin

229

Rosa Guy (1925– ) Julie Ellam

235

Edwina Streeter Dixon (1907–2002) Kevin L. Cole and Katherine Madison Rita Dove (1952– ) Laura Madeline Wiseman Kate Drumgoold (1858?–1898) Karen S. Sloan Shirley Graham DuBois (1896–1977) Rebecca Walsh

161 163

169

171

CONTENTS

Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1946– ) Lynnell Thomas

237

ix

Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871) Joshunda Sanders

303

Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley (1867–1922) Lisa Pertillar Brevard

241

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813–1897) Mary McCartin Wearn

305

Virginia Hamilton (1936–2002) Myisha Priest

244

Amelia E. Johnson (1858–1922) Sathyaraj Venkatesan

309

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) Kelly O. Secovnie

251

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877–1966) Maria J. Rice

312

Helen Johnson (1906–1995) Wendy Wagner

317

Joyce Hansen (1942– ) Dorsia Smith

259

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) Valerie Palmer-Mehta

261

Gayl Jones (1949– ) Helen Doss

321

Juanita Harrison (1887–19??) Sarah Boslaugh

264

June Jordan (1936–2002) Roy Pe´rez

326

Safiya Henderson-Holmes (1950–2001) Shamika Ann Mitchell

266

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818–1907) Regina V. Jones

331

Carolivia Herron (1947– ) Rachelle D. Washington

268

Adrienne Kennedy (1931– ) Nita N.Kumar

334

Jamaica Kincaid (1949– ) Maria Mikolchak

341

Frenchy Jolene Hodges (1940– ) Katarzyna Iwona Jakubiak bell hooks (1952– ) Peggy J. Huey Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) (1859–1930) Jeehyun Lim

271 Volume 2 273

278

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) Warren J. Carson

283

Angela Jackson (1951– ) Judy Massey Dozier

292

Elaine Jackson (1943– ) Raymond Janifer

296

Mae Jackson (1946– ) Heather Hoffman Jordan

299

Mattie Jane Jackson (1843–?) Tabitha Adams Morgan

301

Pinkie Gordon Lane (1923– ) Julia Marek Ponce

347

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) Frank A. Salamone

350

Kristin Hunter Lattany (1931– ) David M. Jones

355

Andrea Lee (1953– ) Barbara Boswell

360

Helene Elaine Lee (1959– ) Lena Marie Ampadu

364

Jarena Lee (1783–?) Christopher J. Anderson

366

Audre Geraldine Lorde (1934–1992) Heejung Cha

369

x

CONTENTS

Naomi Long Madgett (1923– ) Shayla Hawkins

378

Pauli Murray (1910–1985) Christina G. Bucher

441

Paule Marshall (1929– ) Kalenda C. Eaton

382

Gloria Naylor (1950– ) Pratibha Kelapure

444

Sharon Bell Mathis (1937– ) Loretta G. Woodard

388

Barbara Neely (1941– ) A. Mary Murphy

449

Diane Oliver (1943–1966) Joseph A. Alvarez

451

Brenda Marie Osbey (1957– ) Trimiko C. Melancon

453

Pat Parker (1944–1989) Linda Garber

457

Suzan-Lori Parks (1964– ) Marla Dean

459

Ann Petry (1908–1997) Yolanda Williams Page

465

Ann Plato (1820?–1860) Tinola N. Mayfield

468

Connie Porter (1959– ) Tamra E. DiBenedetto

470

Victoria Earle Matthews (1861–1898) Heidi Stauffer

391

Colleen J. McElroy (1935– ) Roxane Gay

393

Patricia McKissack (1944– ) Rebecca Feind

397

Terry McMillan (1951– ) Yolanda Williams Page

399

Louise Meriwether (1923– ) Bridgitte Arnold

402

May Miller (1899–1995) Miranda A. Green-Barteet

406

Arthenia J. Bates Millican (1920– ) Rebecca Feind

411

Eliza Potter (1820–?) Karen C. Summers

472

Mary Monroe (1949– ) Freda Fuller Coursey

413

Mary Prince (1788–?) Babacar M’Baye

474

Anne Moody (1940– ) Meta Michond Cooper

416

Nancy Prince (1799–?) Dave Yost

477

Opal J. Moore (1953– ) Kellie D. Weiss

420

Aishah Rahman (1939– ) Joan McCarty

480

Toni Morrison (1931– ) Deborah M. Wolf

423

Alice Randall (1959– ) Louis M. Palmer, III

483

Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1849–1916) Megan K. Ahern

486

Gertrude Bustill Mossell (1855–1948) Amanda Wray

434

Harryette Mullen (1953– ) Ordner W. Taylor, III

436

Jewell Parker Rhodes (?– ) Tatia Jacobson Jordan

488

Beatrice Murphy (1908–1992) Judy L. Isaksen

439

Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1943– ) Adenike Marie Davidson

493

CONTENTS

xi

Mona Lisa Saloy (1950– ) Delicia Dena Daniels

495

Joyce Carol Thomas (1938– ) Elizabeth Malia

556

Sonia Sanchez (1934– ) Ben Fisler

497

Era Bell Thompson (1905–1986) Kevin L. Cole

561

Dori Sanders (1934– ) Chandra Wells

503

Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1870–?) Gerri Reaves

563

Ruth D. Todd (1878?–?) Amy L. Blair

567

Mary Elizabeth Vroman (1925–1967) Jean Forst

569

Gloria Wade-Gayles (1938– ) Cameron Christine Clark

572

Alice Walker (1944– ) Su-lin Yu

578

Margaret Walker (1915–1998) Aimable Twagilimana

589

Mildred Pitts Walter (1922– ) Gerardo Del Guercio

595

Marilyn Nelson Waniek (1946– ) Jacob Nelson Wilkenfeld

598

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) Joy. M. Leighton

601

Dorothy West (1907–1988) Pearlie Mae Peters

606

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) Pratibha Kelapure

610

Mary Seacole (1805–1881) Nanette Morton

508

Fatima Shaik (1952– ) Sharon T. Silverman

511

Ntozake Shange (1948– ) Cammie M. Sublette

514

Ann Allen Shockley (1927– ) Adriane Bezusko Amanda Berry Smith (1837–1915) Mary G. De Jong Anna Deavere Smith (1950– ) Yolanda Williams Page Ellease Southerland (1943– ) Kate Falvey Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) Rhondda Robinson Thomas Barbara Summers (1944– ) Firouzeh Dianat Ellen Tarry (1906– ) Kevin Hogg

522

527 529 532 536 540 542

Claudia Tate (1946–2002) Angela Shaw-Thornburg

544

Paulette Childress White (1948– ) Jessica Margaret Brophy

614

Mildred D. Taylor (1943– ) Shawntaye M. Scott

547

Brenda Wilkinson (1946– ) Tamara Zaneta Hollins

616

Susie King Taylor (1848–1912) Laura Gimeno Pahissa

550

Lisa Teasley (1962– ) Jeremy Griggs

Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944) Ted Morrissey

620

552

Lucy Terry (1730–1812) Debbie Clare Olson

554

Sherley Anne Williams (1944–1999) Gretchen Michlitsch

624

xii

CONTENTS

Harriet E. Wilson (1828?–1863?) Katie Rose Guest

629

Appendix: List of Awards and Authors

641

Bibliography of Works

647

Sarah Elizabeth Wright (1928–?) Althea Rhodes

633

Index

653

Shay Youngblood (1959– ) Samira C. Franklin

636

About the Editor and the Contributors

665

PREFACE

Since its inception, the African American literary tradition has been very vital to African American culture. Historically not only has the literature provided insight into various aspects of the African American experience, but it has also served as a source of activism. For example, during the colonial period it was used to prove that blacks, like writers of nonAfrican descent, could successfully produce a variety of belletristic and practical genres of writing; thus giving lie to the justification for the enslavement of black people. Later, during the reconstruction era the literature was used to emphasize African Americans’ similarities to other educated Americans and to protest their exclusion from the American mainstream. Today, it continues to serve as a political and social conduit, the majority of it being used to promote ideas, philosophies and causes, while the rest is simply written with the purpose to entertain or as a platform for the author to express himself. Although the preponderance of African American literature that exists is written by African American males, African American women writers have also produced an impressive body of the literature. In fact, the tradition began with a black woman, Lucy Terry whose ballad poem ‘‘Bars Fight’’ was recited for a century before it was published in 1855. Although some works by African American women were published near or at the turn of the twentieth century, when they enjoyed modest popularity, the vast majority of it was published during the Harlem Renaissance and in the years after the 1970s, as women writers, in general, gained increased access to the marketplace. The Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers provides a comprehensive reference to literature by African American women. One hundred sixty-eight writers are included in this sourcebook. While this work is by no means exhaustive, it does provide coverage of many African American women writers. Many of them are established and canonized, others are emerging, while some are obscure, forgotten writers that this author seeks to bring to the critical attention of contemporary students and scholars. This work is an extensive study of the well-known, not so known and unknown African American women writers from 1746 to present; it provides a thorough examination of their lives, major works and the critical reception of that work. While this sourcebook’s focus is writers of African American descent, Caribbean authors such as Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaica Kincaid have been included because they are closely identified with the African American literary tradition; the themes of their writing resonate aspects of African American life and experience. In addition, their inclusion iterates that the experience of the African Diaspora is not exclusive. The Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers is not the first work of its kind, but it fills an important information gap in that it is genre inclusive. That is, the entries include women who write in a variety of belletristic forms: autobiography, drama, essay, fiction and poetry. Also included are cultural/literary theorists and children/young adult writers.

xiv

PREFACE

The Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers has been written so that the user will find it helpful no matter his stage of research. Advanced high school students, undergraduates and users of community college and public libraries will all find the information accessible. The book includes an alphabetical list of authors as well as a chronological list of authors, a list of authors by genre, and a list of authors and awards. Too, graduate students and seasoned scholars in the initial stage of research will find this text useful, for each entry includes primary and secondary sources. Entries are written in chapter format and consist of five parts: (1) heading-which includes the writer’s name, year of birth and year of death (if applicable); (2) biographical narrative-which consists of a concise writer biographical profile; (3) majors works-which consists of a discussion of the writer’s works. Motifs and themes are also highlighted; (4) critical reception-which consists of critical response to the author’s work; and (5) bibliography which-consists of a list of the author’s work and a list of studies of the author’s work. Entries vary in length from 750 words to 5000 words. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many to whom I am indebted for the completion of this book. I thank George Butler at Greenwood Press for considering this a worthy project. Thanks to my Dillard University family for providing me a research award that allowed me to complete the preliminary work on this project. Thanks also to my undergraduate assistant, LaChandra Pye, for helping with the administrative aspects of this project. I especially express gratitude to the contributors of this book. Without you this project would not have come to fruition. Lastly, I thank my friends and family, especially my mother and my sister, for their words of encouragement and support.

LIST OF AUTHORS BY GENRE

Autobiography Maya Angelou Annie Louise Burton Lucille Clifton Angela Y. Davis Lucy Delaney Kate Drumgoold Zilpha Elaw Julia A. J. Foote Juanita Harrison bell hooks Mattie Jane Jackson Rebecca Cox Jackson Harriet Jacobs Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley Adrienne Kennedy Jarena Lee Audre Geraldine Lorde Anne Moody Pauli Murray Eliza Potter Mary Seacole Notzake Shange Amanda Berry Smith Susie King Taylor Era Bell Thompson Biography Elizabeth Laura Adams Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert Anna Julia Hayward Cooper Shirley Graham DuBois Pauli Murray Ann Plato Henrietta Cordelia Ray Children’s Literature Candy Boyd (Marguerite Dawson) Gwendolyn Brooks Jeannette Franklin Caines Lucille Clifton Alexis DeVeaux

Eloise Greenfield Virginia Hamilton Carolivia Herron bell hooks Amelia E. Johnson Sharon Bell Mathis Patricia McKissack Louise Meriwether Opal J. Moore Connie Porter Fatima Shaik Ellen Tarry Mildred D. Taylor Mildred Pitts Walter Brenda Wilkinson Criticism Joanne Braxton Barbara T. Christian Sarah Webster Fabio Beverly Guy-Sheftall bell hooks Toni Morrison Claudia Tate Gloria Wade-Gayles Drama Maya Angelou Marita Bonner Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Alice Childress Pearl T. Cleage Kathleen Conwell Collins J. California Cooper Alexis DeVeaux Rita Dove Shirley Graham DuBois Mari Evans Julia Fields Patricia Joann Gibson Mercedes Gilbert Angelina Weld Grimke´

xvi

LIST OF AUTHORS BY GENRE

Rosa Guy Lorraine Hansberry Zora Neale Hurston Angela Jackson Elaine Jackson Mae Jackson Gayl Jones June Jordan Adrienne Kennedy May Miller Suzan-Lori Parks Aishah Rahman Sonia Sanchez Ntozake Shange Anna Deavere Smith Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Shay Youngblood

Opal J. Moore Gertrude Bustill Mossell Gloria Naylor Ann Petry Ann Plato Ann Allen Shockley Ellease Southerland Maria W. Stewart Lisa Teasley Era Bell Thompson Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Alice Walker Margaret Walker Ida B. Wells-Barnett Fannie Barrier Williams

Essay Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Tina McElroy Ansa Doris Jean Austin Toni Cade Bambara Marita Bonner Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Octavia Butler Barbara Chase-Riboud Alice Childress Barbara T. Christian Pearl T. Cleage Eugenia W. Collier Anna Julia Hayward Cooper Edwidge Danticat Angela Y. Davis Rita Dove Mari Evans Nikki Giovanni Jewelle Gomez Angelina Weld Grimke´ Virginia Hamilton Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) Gayl Jones June Jordan Jamaica Kincaid Audre Geraldine Lorde Paule Marshall Louise Meriwether

Memoir Toi(nette) Marie Derricotte bell hooks Dori Sanders Era Bell Thompson

Etiquette Book Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley

Mystery Barbara Neely Novel Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Tina McElroy Ansa Doris Jean Austin Nikki Baker Toni Cade Bambara Candy Dawson Boyd Gwendolyn Brooks Linda Beatrice Brown Bebe Moore Campbell Barbara Chase-Riboud Alice Childress Pearl T. Cleage Michelle Cliff Kathleen Conwell Collins J. California Cooper Edwidge Danticat Rita Dove Grace Edwards-Yearwood Jessie Redmon Fauset Patrice Gaines Marita Golden

LIST OF AUTHORS BY GENRE

Jewelle Gomez Joyce Hansen Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) Zora Neale Hurston Angela Jackson Amelia E. Johnson Gayl Jones June Jordan Jamaica Kincaid Pinkie Gordon Lane Nella Larsen Kristin Hunter Lattany Andrea Lee Helen Elaine Lee Paule Marshall Terry McMillan Louise Meriwether Mary Monroe Toni Morrison Gloria Naylor Suzan-Lori Parks Ann Petry Connie Porter Alice Randall Jewell Parker Rhodes Dori Sanders Fatima Shaik Ann Allen Shockley Ellease Southerland Barbara Summers Lisa Teasley Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Mary Elizabeth Vroman Alice Walker Margaret Walker Dorothy West Sherley Anne Williams Harriet E. Wilson Sarah Elizabeth Wright Shay Youngblood Novella Ruth D. Todd Poetry Maya Angelou Gwendolyn Bennett Joanne Braxton

xvii

Gwendolyn Brooks Linda Beatrice Brown Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Barbara Chase-Riboud Pearl T. Cleage Michelle Cliff Lucille Clifton Wanda Coleman Eugenia W. Collier Jayne Cortez Margaret Esse Danner Doris Davenport Toi(nette) Marie Derricotte Alexis DeVeaux Rita Dove Alice Dunbar-Nelson Mari Evans Sara Webster Fabio Julia Fields Patrice Gaines Mercedes Gilbert Nikki Giovanni Marita Golden Jewelle Gomez Rosa Guy Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Frenchy Jolene Hodges Safiya Henderson-Holmes bell hooks Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) Angela Jackson Mae Jackson Amelia E. Johnson Georgia Douglas Johnson Helen(e) Johnson Gayl Jones June Jordan Audre Geraldine Lorde Naomi Long Madgett May Miller Arthenia J. Bates Millican Opal J. Moore Gertrude Bustill Mossell Harryette Mullen Beatrice Murphy Pauli Murray Brenda Marie Osbey Pat Parker

xviii

LIST OF AUTHORS BY GENRE

Ann Petry Ann Plato Henrietta Cordelia Ray Carolyn Marie Rodgers Mona Lisa Saloy Sonia Sanchez Ntozake Shange Ellease Southerland Lucy Terry Joyce Carol Thomas Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Gloria Wade-Gayles Alice Walker Margaret Walker Marilyn Nelson Waniek Phillis Wheatley Sherley Anne Williams Sarah Elizabeth Wright Science Fiction Octavia Butler Short Fiction Mignon Holland Anderson Tina McElroy Ansa Toni Cade Bambara Gwendolyn Bennett Marita Bonner Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Octavia Butler Michelle Cliff Wanda Coleman Eugenia W. Collier Kathleen Conwell Collins J. California Cooper Edwidge Danticat Edwina Streeter Dixon Rita Dove Alice Dunbar-Nelson Mari Evans Carolyn Ferrell Julia Fields Jewelle Gomez Angelina Weld Grimke´ Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Carolivia Herron Frenchy Jolene Hodges Zora Neale Hurston Amelia E. Johnson

Adrienne Kennedy Jamaica Kincaid Nella Larsen Kristin Hunter Lattany Andrea Lee Paule Marshall Victoria Earle Matthews Colleen J. McElroy Patricia McKissack Louise Meriwether Arthenia J. Bates Millican Mary Monroe Opal J. Moore Toni Morrison Barbara Neely Diane Oliver Ann Petry Carolyn Rodgers Ann Allen Shockley Ellease Southerland Barbara Summers Lisa Teasley Ruth D. Todd Mary Elizabeth Vroman Dorothy West Paulette Childress White Shay Youngblood Slave Narrative Harriet Ann Jacobs Lucy Delaney Mattie Jane Jackson Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley Mary Prince Travel Literature Juanita Harrison Andrea Lee Colleen McElroy Nancy Prince Mary Seacole Young Adult Literature Rosa Guy Joyce Hansen Sharon Bell Mathis Joyce Carol Thomas Mildred Pitts Walter Brenda Wilkinson

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AUTHORS

The dates to the right of the author’s name indicate the date of the author’s initial publication. Lucy Terry (1746) Phillis Wheatley (1767) Mary Prince (1831) Maria W. Stewart (1831) Jarena Lee (1836) Zilpha Elaw (1840) Ann Plato (1841) Nancy Prince (1850) Rebecca Cox Jackson (1857) Mary Seacole (1857) Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1859) Eliza Potter (1859) Harriet E. Wilson (1859) Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861) Mattie Jane Jackson (1866) Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1868) Julia A. J. Foote (1879) Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen (1885) Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert (1890) Amelia E. Johnson (1890) Lucy Delaney (1891) Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1892) Anna Julia Hayward Cooper (1892) Victoria Earle Matthews (1893) Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1893) Amanda Berry Smith (1893) Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1893) Gertrude Bustill Mossell (1894) Kate Drumgoold (1898) Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1899) Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1899) Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) (1900) Angelina Weld Grimke´ (1900) Susie King Taylor (1902) Ruth D. Todd (1902) Fannie Barrier Williams (1902)

Annie Louise Burton (1909) Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley (1916) Georgia Douglas Johnson (1918) May Miller (1920) Gwendolyn Bennett (1923) Jessie Redmon Fauset (1924) Helen(e) Johnson (1926) Dorothy West (1926) Marita Bonner (1927) Nella Larsen (1928) Mercedes Gilbert (1931) Shirley Graham DuBois (1932) Zora Neale Hurston (1934) Juanita Harrison (1937) Ann Petry (1939) Ellen Tarry (1940) Elizabeth Laura Adams (1941) Naomi Long Madgett (1941) Margaret Walker (1942) Gwendolyn Brooks (1945) Beatrice Murphy (1945) Alice Childress (1949) Rosa Guy (1954) Sara Elizabeth Wright (1955) J. California Cooper (1956) Pauli Murray (1956) Lorraine Hansberry (1958) Paule Marshall (1959) Margaret Esse Danner (1962) Julia Fields (1962) Adrienne Kennedy (1963) Pat Parker (1963) Mary Elizabeth Vroman (1963) Kristin Hunter Lattany (1964) Ellease Southerland (1964) Diane Oliver (1965) Louise Meriwether (1967)

xx

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AUTHORS

Alice Walker (1967) Mari Evans (1968) Sarah Webster Fabio (1968) Audre Geraldine Lorde (1968) Anne Moody (1968) Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1968) Lucille Clifton (1969) Jayne Cortez (1969) Mae Jackson (1969) June Jordan (1969) Sharon Bell Mathis (1969) Arthenia J. Bates Millican (1969) Sonia Sanchez (1969) Mildred Pitts Walter (1969) Maya Angelou (1970) Nikki Giovanni (1970) Toni Morrison (1970) Ann Allen Shockley (1970) Pearl T. Cleage (1971) Angela Y. Davis (1971) Patricia Joann Gibson (1971) Frenchy Jolene Hodges (1971) Elaine Jackson (1971) Toni Cade Bambara (1972) Eugenia W. Collier (1972) Pinkie Gordon Lane (1972) Aishah Rahman (1972) Paulette Childress White (1972) Sherley Anne Williams (1972) Jeannette Franklin Caines (1973) Alexis De Veaux (1973) Virginia Hamilton (1973) Mildred D. Taylor (1973) Joyce Carol Thomas (1973) Angela Jackson (1974) Barbara Chase-Riboud (1974) Ntozake Shange (1974) Gayl Jones (1975) Brenda Wilkinson (1975) Mignon Holland Anderson (1976) Octavia Butler (1976) Joanne Braxton (1977) Wanda Coleman (1977) Edwina Streeter Dixon (1977) Toi(nette) Marie Derricotte (1978) Eloise Greenfield (1978) Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1979)

Gloria Wade-Gayles (1979) Barbara T. Christian (1980) Michelle Cliff (1980) Kathleen Conwell Collins (1980) Doris Davenport (1980) Rita Dove (1980) Jewelle Gomez (1980) Joyce Hansen (1980) Marilyn Nelson Waniek (1980) bell hooks (1981) Andrea Lee (1981) Harryette Mullen (1981) Barbara Neely (1981) Gloria Naylor (1982) Marita Golden (1983) Jamaica Kincaid (1983) Brenda Marie Osbey (1983) Claudia Tate (1983) Linda Beatrice Brown (1984) Colleen J. McElroy (1984) Mary Monroe (1985) Bebe Moore Campbell (1986) Doris Jean Austin (1987) Candy Dawson Boyd (1987) Terry McMillan (1987) Fatima Shaik Grace Edwards-Yearwood (1988) Patricia McKissack (1988) Tina McElroy Ansa (1989) Opal J. Moore (1989) Suzan-Lori Parks (1989) Barbara Summers (1989) Shay Youngblood (1989) Safiya Henderson-Holmes (1990) Mona Lisa Saloy (1990) Dori Sanders (1990) Nikki Baker (1991) Carolivia Herron (1991) Connie Porter (1991) Anna Deavere Smith (1992) Jewell Parker Rhodes (1993) Edwidge Danticat (1994) Carolyn Ferrell (1994) Patrice Gaines (1994) Helen Elaine Lee (1994) Lisa Teasley (1997) Alice Randall (2001)

ELIZABETH LAURA ADAMS (1909–1982)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Biographer Elizabeth Laura Adams is remarkable for more than the fact that she converted to Catholicism in the early years of the twentieth century. It is remarkable that she recorded her experience as a spiritual biography that highlighted pivotal events of her life in the context of her spiritual awakening and her subsequent attempts to achieve a certain level of validation as an African American Catholic. Equally important is Adams’s tenacity and fortitude in the face of the obstacles of isolation and ignorance that she had to overcome as an African woman and a writer in order to bring attention to her struggles. Carla Kaplan, editor of the most recent reprint of Adams’s narrative and other works, provides a rich sociohistorical context in which to read Adams’s work and a valuable literary-critical overview. Kaplan rightly argues that Adams’s text demonstrates the same double-voiced strategy that is common in the African American narrative tradition. ‘‘[Adams’s] story of acquiescent, obedient girlhood is laced with private, sometimes coded rebellion. Her frailty and passivity mask resolve and determination. Even her use of the conversion narrative, an often formulaic genre . . . functions in coded, or doublevoiced ways’’ (xviii). Elizabeth Laura Adams was born on February 9, 1909, in Santa Barbara, California, to Lula Josephine Holden Adams, a teacher at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design, and Daniel Adams, a Los Angeles headwaiter. Upon her marriage to Daniel Adams, Lula became a full-time mother and homemaker. The eldest of two children, Adams became the only child after the death of her infant brother. The Adams family lived a comfortable, middle-class existence; however, they were careful not to encourage self-indulgence in their daughter. For example, in Dark Symphony, the author uses an analogy to describe the success of their discipline. ‘‘By the time I was nine years of age my parents had trained me to respond to their commands by a gesture. If they had placed me in a circus I would have won out in competition with a well-trained seal without the slightest effort’’ (Adams 60). They ‘‘trained’’ Adams to be self-sacrificing and an exemplary Christian. Adams came of age during the Depression years and, to some extent, records her experience in the context of that time of national economic depression. Her parents loved her, but they would not shield her from the hard facts of life. Adams experienced the deaths of her infant brother, great-grandmother, and grandparents, all within a short length of time. Her parents’ response to her significant emotional and psychological distress was to demand that she ‘‘face the cruel realities of life’’ (Adams 37). The Adams’s parental focus on discipline and restraint extended to the child’s encounters with racism, which started in grade school. Adams’s mother practiced a Christian refinement of Booker T. Washington’s strategy of accommodation, to the extent that her response to her daughter’s ‘‘awakening of racial consciousness’’ was to insist that if she could not ‘‘love [her] enemies,’’ then she would not openly rebel. Adams’s father was less ‘‘forgiving’’ and told his daughter that during his own youth he had physically fought

2

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

back when a white person had called him a ‘‘nigger’’; however, he bowed to his wife’s discretion and encouraged his daughter’s passivity. The Adams’s strict discipline was tempered by their encouragement of their daughter’s imagination and musical abilities. In her autobiography, Adams credits her teachers (and later friends and clergy) for recognizing and encouraging her propensity for dreaming and creativity. In junior high school, she began developing skills as a musician and a writer and had aspirations to become a concert violinist, but illness forced her to turn away from the physically demanding challenges of public music career. During this time, Adams had begun to attend the Catholic Church, but the premature death of her father influenced Adams’s turn to religion in earnest. After formerly rejecting Adams’s requests to join the Catholic Church, her mother granted permission for her to join the Church after her graduation from high school. However, even the Catholic Church was not immune to racial prejudice. In Dark Symphony Adams recounts one such instance when she took Holy Communion at the altar rail and noticed how the clergyman wiped the chalice before passing it to the white communicants. Having experienced prejudice in the Catholic Church, Adams reflects on prejudice in other churches: ‘‘I wondered: What about God—dogmas and creeds? . . . What sort of God would lay down a lot of rules and then not make a way for them to be observed’’ (126)? Despite these social issues and theological concerns, Adams converted to Catholicism and later enrolled in convent classes with the intention of becoming a nun. By the mid-1930s, Adams had made preparations to join the convent, but again, she had to relinquish this dream in order to aid her mother, who by this time had separated from her abusive second husband. Adams supported her mother until her death in 1952. During this same period, Adams began to publish poetry in the Catholic journal, Torch. She also published short ‘‘religious musings’’ in Sentinel of the Blessed Sacrament and poetry in the Westward. In 1940, she began publishing her ‘‘spiritual autobiography’’ in serial form under the title ‘‘There Must Be a God . . . Somewhere.’’ This series ran from 1940 to 1941. In 1942, she published the entire autobiography with a Catholic press under the title Dark Symphony. According to Kaplan, ‘‘the book became a best seller among Catholics and was translated into Dutch and Italian, in addition to being published in Great Britain. Adams sold nearly 15,000 copies and received over $5,000 in royalties. For a while, she even received fan mail that was published in the Catholic press’’ (xvii). Adams makes the point in her narrative that not all white people and not all Catholics were prejudiced or insensitive. ‘‘Her affiliations with the Catholic community, with publishers and editors of the Catholic publications like Torch and the Blessed Martin Guild may have provided Adams with not only ‘tranquillity,’ but also a way to fight for racial justice without seeming ‘controversial’ or ill-mannered’’ (Kaplan xli). During the mid-1930s, probably close to the publication of ‘‘There Must Be a God . . . Somewhere,’’ Adams became a ‘‘Franciscan Tertiary, a member of what is called The Third Order, one who while secular takes vows to live by moderation, temperance and daily prayer and to remain in his or her current state—whether married or unmarried’’ (Kaplan xix). She had long admired the work of Tertiaries such as the Sister of Social Services in Los Angeles, California, for their work in the community. Dark Symphony, published in 1942, was the literary high point of Adams’s public career. However, her sporadic illness and her mother’s illness and dependency after her divorce from her second husband made it difficult for Adams to pursue a full-time writing career. In the ten-year period following publication of the book, Adams spent much of her time caring for her mother and pursuing a variety of jobs, including that of a

ELIZABETH LAURA ADAMS

3

domestic worker, office worker, and service-industry employee. After 1952, Adams seemed to have faded from public view, with the exception of brief mention in The National Catholic Almanac in 1942 and 1943 under the listings of ‘‘contemporary authors’’ and ‘‘Recommended Books,’’ respectively, and mention (through 1959) in The Almanac’s ‘‘Gallery of Living Catholic Authors’’ section. Kaplan notes that Adams was ‘‘living in Santa Barbara, California as late as 1970 and perhaps as late as 1980’’ (Kaplan xxii). Recent findings reveal that Adams died on September 9, 1982. MAJOR WORKS Dark Symphony belongs to the tradition of spiritual autobiography, dating back to St. Augustine’s Confessions (sixth century) and including the conversion narrative of Olaudah Equiano’s eighteenth-century prototype for the African diasporic slave narrative. Within the tradition of African American women’s spiritual narratives, Adams’s narrative can be considered along with nineteenth-century evangelists Zilpha Elaw and Jarena Lee and twentieth-century writer Estella Conwill Majozo. Beyond the formal properties of the spiritual narrative (which may not strictly obtain), all of these writers believe they were ‘‘called’’ to serve God and spread the Gospel in some capacity, whether in the secular world or the religious world. To some degree they all express the conviction that their writing is an emancipatory act, in the sense that they use their voices and their ‘‘representative’’ lives for the purpose of enlightenment. Elaw, Lee, and Adams were all officially affiliated with the Church in some capacity, their differences in religion or denomination notwithstanding. Dark Symphony is conservative in tone, and, as Carla Kaplan has observed, not readily identifiable as a ‘‘New Negro’’ or ‘‘Harlem Renaissance’’ product, in spite of Adams’s identification as a member of ‘‘the New Negro’’ generation. The earlier serialized version, ‘‘There Must Be a God . . . Somewhere’’ (1940–1941), demonstrates a stronger racial and gendered identity, as evidenced by the explicit subtitle, ‘‘A Colored Convert’s Spiritual Autobiography.’’ According to Kaplan, in the earlier version, as well as Adams’s earlier work in general, there is an ‘‘interesting formal and imaginative playfulness.’’ On the other hand, there is also a ‘‘hard-edged grimness . . . which accords with the realism of the New Negro writing. Kaplan suggests that the deliberate blandness of the latter version can be attributed to the author’s acquiescence to the editorial staff and their concerns with commercial viability and avoidance of perceived controversy. The differences between the earlier version and the book-length version are apparent from the first line. The former opens: ‘‘The majority of newspapers and magazine articles about my people are written by authors of other races. Now and then a broadminded Caucasian editor permits a Negro to sketch the lives of our people, but most writers are men’’ (Adams 212). Compare this passage to the opening lines of Dark Symphony: ‘‘My life, as a very small child, was filled with happiness. I saw only the beauty of rose coloured dawns. No clouds were visible to darken my path’’ (Adams 7). Race pride and the sense of outrage against social and political injustices that are common to writings of the New Negro era are more apparent in the earlier narrative, as well as in earlier essays such as ‘‘She Talks Like We Do,’’ written in epistolary form and addressed to ‘‘Sister Aloysius’’ and the ‘‘Sisters of the Dominican Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary.’’ In the latter prose piece, Adams expresses her gratitude to the Sisters and explains why their continued support is necessary: ‘‘The Negro either becomes spiritual and decides to keep his or her vision upon the Compassionate Face of the Savior and tries not to mind

4

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

the stumbling blocks . . . the suffering and pain that living in this world brings . . . or the Negro loses faith’’ (261). For Adams, these ‘‘stumbling blocks’’ are often acts of insensitivity or ignorance. She cites the experience that provides the title for the essay. ‘‘I can recall how hurt I was one day while working in the home of one who was fair to hear her say to her guest (and nodding in my direction): ‘She talks like we do’ ’’ (263). Adams’s last known creative piece is a prose poem, ‘‘The Last Supper’’ (1943), ‘‘as told to her by a Caucasian priest’’ (266). Significantly, it features a ‘‘doomed’’ character who is identified as both a ‘‘convict’’ and a ‘‘Prince,’’ but perhaps most telling is the fact that the character is also a ‘‘New Negro.’’ The priest relates the story of his brief acquaintance with Joseph, an African American man, convicted of murder and condemned to die. As his counselor and Confessor, the priest is disturbed by Joseph’s seeming indifference to his fate. The warden’s description of this ‘‘convict’’ is significant for its contradiction: ‘‘Prince of Prisoners, and a Catholic strayed from his faith’’ (272). Given what he has learned about Joseph, the priest recollects what he knows about the race, and confesses that he can find no egregious fault with them and, in fact, admires the work of poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, ‘‘Singer of songs—dreamer of dreams’’ (270). In response to the priest’s recollection, the warden describes Joseph as ‘‘the type of Colored youth / Known today as The New Negro. / To no man has he confided the secrets of his soul.’’ The priest is therefore surprised when Joseph asks him to hear his confession. Joseph does not confess to murder, but he does confess the need to ‘‘forgive an enemy’’ and proves himself to be knowledgeable of the Holy Sacraments and by quoting ‘‘verbatim several passages from the Confessions of Saint Augustine’’ (276). After Joseph has been executed the priest learns the truth: ‘‘A year later a man of another race / Pleaded guilty to the murder charge / For which Joseph had paid / The penalty with his life’’ (281). As a kind of personal penance, the priest asks the Bishop to send him to a parish where he ‘‘can work among the Colored.’’ The poem is not didactic, even though the poet deliberately characterizes the unrepentant Joseph as representative of the New Negro who was no longer willing to acknowledge a kind of a priori guilt in order to be ‘‘accepted.’’ It is an object lesson on the tragedy that can result from racial prejudice or, in its contemporary manifestation, ‘‘racial profiling.’’ CRITICAL RECEPTION Critical responses to Dark Symphony were divided along racial lines. White critics praised the work for its cautious, conservative tone that seemed to urge cultural and racial rapprochement through Christian faith and perseverance. African American critics, especially those familiar with the ideological positions held by well-known New Negro writers, were of the opinion that Adams ‘‘fell short of being a Catholic Dunbar or Johnson’’ (xlix). The sometimes-stilted language and euphemistic representations of characters and events did not sound ‘‘authentic’’ as an African American woman’s voice. Kaplan remarks, ‘‘There was no natural or ready-made audience for her. Negotiations both divided audiences and controversies over African Americans and the Catholic church must have sometimes felt like ‘marching’ through land mines. No wonder that Adams’s African American contemporaries sometimes questioned whether she was truly up to the task and whether her voice came through, strongly and clearly as her own’’ (xlix). In Witness to Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography, Rebecca Chalmers Barton places several writers under the topic ‘‘Experimenters.’’ In support of this

ELIZABETH LAURA ADAMS

5

designation, she argues that these particular narratives of the 1930s and 1940s foreground the search for ‘‘individual self-expression. The value contained in being true to one’s self outweighs any considerations of race’’ (Barton 87). Barton’s observation does not appreciate Adams’s divided allegiances: her ideological allegiance to New Negro writers and rhetoric; her allegiance to the Catholic Church and within the Church, the Sisters with whom she identified and aspired to emulate; and African American women who worked as domestics and industrial workers in a nation that had historically and culturally devalued them. Even Adams’s identification of herself as a New Negro is complex. She cites Elise Johnson McDougal, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke, African American intellectuals who defined New Negro from a sociohistorical and political perspective. Adams also cites Edwin R. Embree, a white sociologist and author of Brown America, to support her arguments. His interpretation of ‘‘the New Negro’’ and his demand for ethical treatment of the ‘‘new race’’ is based, in part, on ‘‘blood admixture’’ that is a byproduct of the institution of slavery in the United States and accounts for the ‘‘Negro’s’’ mixed lineage. Adams interpreted New Negro as a ‘‘thinking Negro’’ by conflating the cultural and political definitions of Alain Locke and the cultural-biological-based theory of Embree. Though she was not alone in her opinion (W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston, in their writings, expressed similar views), Adams’s theories did not make her popular with African American critics of her day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Elizabeth Laura Adams ‘‘The Art of Living Joyfully.’’ Torch (December 1942): 29. ‘‘Children under Fire.’’ Torch (November 1943): 29. ‘‘Consecrated.’’ Westward (October 1936): 29–32. ‘‘The Country Doctor.’’ Torch (May 1942): 31. Dark Symphony. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942. ‘‘The Finding of Soul.’’ Sentinel of the Blessed Sacrament (October 1930): 97–101. ‘‘Hypocrisy.’’ Torch ( June 1942): 24. ‘‘The Last Supper.’’ Torch ( June 1943): 9–12. ‘‘Our Colored Servants.’’ Torch (September 1941): 16–17. ‘‘She Talks Like We Do.’’ Interracial Review (October 1940): 153–54. ‘‘The Summons.’’ Torch (May 1941): 16, 32. ‘‘There Must Be a God . . . Somewhere.’’ Torch (October 1940): 4–6; (November 1940): 19–20, 30; (December 1940): 9–10; ( January 1941): 16–18; (February 1941): 10–11; (March 1941): 23–24, 29. (Serialized.) ‘‘Until I Found You.’’ Westward ( July 1936): 30–31. ‘‘Yes, I’m Colored.’’ Westward (October 1938): 24–25.

Studies of Elizabeth Laura Adams’s Works Barton, Rebecca Chalmers. Witness for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948, 123–24. Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989, 140.

6

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Brignano, Russel A. Black Americans in Autobiography. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 1983, 3. David, Jay. Growing Up Black. New York: William Morrow, 1968, 60–70. Dwyer, Joseph. Rev. of Dark Symphony. Torch ( June 1942): 27. Kaplan, Carla. ‘‘Introduction,’’ ‘‘I Wanna March,’’ and ‘‘Dark Symphony and Other Works.’’ In African American Women Writers, 1910–1940, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jennifer Burton, xvii–lvii. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. LaFarge, John. ‘‘One God for All.’’ Rev. of Dark Symphony. A Catholic Review of the Week (May 30, 1942): 215. Lewis, Theophilus. Rev. of Dark Symphony. Interracial Review (May 1942): 20–81. Mathews, Geraldine O. Black American Writers, 1773–1949: A Bibliography and Union List. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975. Russell-Robinson, Joyce. ‘‘Elizabeth Laura Adams.’’ In African American Authors, 1745–1945, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Scally, Mary Anthony. Negro Catholic Writers, 1900–1943: A Bio-Bibliography. Detroit: Walter Romig, 1945, 19–23. Tarry, Ellen. Rev. of Dark Symphony. Catholic World ( July 1942): 504–5.

Hermine Pinson

OCTAVIA VICTORIA ROGERS ALBERT (1853–1889)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, biographer, was born to slave parents on December 24, 1853, in Oglethorpe, Georgia. The Reconstruction efforts enabled Albert to enter Atlanta University, where she studied to become a teacher. In 1873, she taught in Montezuma, Georgia; it was there she met Dr. Aristide Elphonso Peter Albert, a fellow teacher three years her senior and her future husband. They were married in 1874 and possibly had two daughters, Laura and Sarah (Gardner 16), although some sources refer to Laura as their only daughter (Ravi 7). In 1878, the Alberts moved to Houma, Louisiana. There, they opened their house to former slaves, providing not only food but also lessons in reading and writing and some solace through the readings of the Bible. The Alberts moved to New Orleans in late 1879. While living in Oglethorpe, Albert was a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church but converted to the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1875. She died on August 19, 1889. MAJOR WORKS Albert’s only book, The House of Bondage, was initially serialized in Southwestern Christian Advocate, a major regional Methodist Episcopal newspaper, where it first appeared in 1890, several months after her death. As her husband and daughter Laura indicate in the book’s preface, New Orleans received the stories with great enthusiasm and numerous letters flooded the editor’s office, insisting that the stories be published in book form. The House of Bondage is, in the words of Albert’s husband, ‘‘a panoramic exhibition of slave-life, emancipation, and the subsequent results’’ and ‘‘an unpretentious contribution to an epoch in American history that will more and more rivet the attention of the civilized world as the years roll around’’ (v). The book consists of first-hand accounts of several former slaves, Aunt Charlotte, Uncle John and his wife, Lorendo, Aunt Sallie, Uncle Stephen, Uncle Sephas, and Colonel Douglass Wilson, who relate not only their own experiences but also the experiences of many others. Two major themes can be discerned in the text: the suffering of slaves and the importance of religion. While Catholic religion undergoes uncompromising criticism in Albert’s book, ‘‘‘Merican or Protestant religion’’ is presented as a source of hope and resistance (38). The slaves’ narratives address spousal and family separation so common during slavery and the slaves’ brutal treatment in the hands of their masters and mistresses. Attention is drawn also to the issues related to the Reconstruction period, namely ex-slaves’ alcoholism, homelessness, lack of education, and continuing separation of their families as well as the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Codes of 1865, and the deficient assistance to the ex-slaves from the churches in the South.

8

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION While parts of Nanette Morton’s dissertation address Albert’s The House of Bondage, Frances Smith Foster offers the only extensive study of this collection of narratives. Foster outlines the similarities and connections between The House of Bondage and the works of other African American women authors, namely Frances Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life, placing Albert within the African American female literary context of the time. Foster also points to the black folk dialect preserved by Albert in her transcription, which contributes to the natural flavor and authenticity of the historical record. Stressing the book’s demythologizing character, Foster approaches Albert’s work as ‘‘an act of appropriation and redesign’’ (162) and juxtaposes it with Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia, whose sentimentality and romanticizing of slavery that Albert’s narrative directly challenges. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert The House of Bondage or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, Original and Life-like, as They Appeared in Their Old Plantation and City Slave Life; Together with Pen-Pictures of the Peculiar Institution, with Sights and Insights into Their New Relations as Freedmen, Freemen, and Citizens. New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1890.

Studies of Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert’s Work Foster, Francis Smith. ‘‘Confrontation and Community in Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert’s The House of Bondage.’’ In Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892, written by herself. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. ———. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The House of Bondage; or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, edited by Frances Smith Foster, i–xlii. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Furman, Jan. ‘‘Octavia V. Rogers Albert.’’ In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harries, 10–11. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Gardner, Eric. ‘‘Albert, Octavia Victoria Rogers.’’ In The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African America Literature, edited by Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, 16–17. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. McMickle, Marvin A. An Encyclopedia of African American Christian Heritage. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 2002. Morton, Nanette June. ‘‘Houses of Bondage, Loopholes of Retreat: Space and Place in Four African American Slave Narratives.’’ Ph.D. diss., McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 2003. Ravi, Geetha. ‘‘Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert.’’ In African American Authors, 1745–1945: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 6–12. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Iva Balic

CLARISSA MINNIE THOMPSON ALLEN (?–?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE The oldest of nine children, essayist Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen was the child of Samuel Benjamin Thompson and Eliza Henrietta Montgomery. Politically active, her father was a delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention, 1865. In addition, he served six years in the state legislature and eight years as a justice of the peace. Eliza Montgomery held a higher position in South Carolinian society and helped to elevate her husband’s social standing. Allen’s education consisted of attending the Howard School and South Carolina’s State Normal School. For a brief period, she was the first assistant at the Howard School. She also worked at the Poplar Grove School in Abbeville and Allen University in Columbia. The well-rounded young teacher taught every subject from history to algebra. No matter how many publications she had, her primary joy in life was educating. After teaching in her native South Carolina, she moved to Texas, teaching first in Jefferson, 1886, and then in Ft. Worth. MAJOR WORK Allen’s longest effort is titled Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune. Wanting her work to represent societal issues pertinent to African American families, Thompson created forty-one episodes relating to two aristocratic African American families. Giving Columbia, South Carolina, a fictitious name, Capitolia, her fiction takes place in the city in which the characters’ adventures unfold. A love triangle includes Doctor Will deVerne, Lenore ‘‘Gypsy’’ Tremaine, and Gertie Tremaine, the sister of Gypsy. The latter character is the protagonist. Mixed ancestry plays a roll in the plot, as does murder, insanity, and death. Concerning murder and death, Walter Tremaine, a priest and Will’s brother, is arrested for murder and found guilty. After all the suffering, Gertie spends her life as a Good Samaritan in Capitolia. Besides this work of fiction, Allen wrote poetry expressing her tea-totaling beliefs; ‘‘A Glass of Wine’’ appeared in the Texas Blade. The Dallas Enterprise accepted a novelette, Only a Flirtation, for publication. In 1892, an address to a teachers’ convention in Ft. Worth, ‘‘Humane Education,’’ was published in part in the Afro-American Encyclopaedia. CRITICAL RECEPTION Criticism of Allen’s work appeared after she published the first three chapters of her work, Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune, in a religious paper, The Christian Recorder. Those responsible for the newspaper felt her content went against the teachings of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Never published as a novel, the fiction was serialized in the Boston Advocate, 1885–1886. Ann Allen Shockley

10

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

refers to this serialized effort as ‘‘long drawn out episodes [that] spill over with unrequited love, murder, insanity, and death . . .’’ (145). Unfortunately, Allen is not well remembered as a fiction writer or poet. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune. Out of print.

Studies of Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen’s Work Shockley, Ann Allen. ‘‘Clarissa Minnie Thompson.’’ Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988, 144–50. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. ‘‘Clarissa Minnie Thompson.’’ Oxford Companion to African American Literaturem, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Elizabeth Marsden

MIGNON HOLLAND ANDERSON (1945– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Mignon Holland Anderson, short story writer, was born in Cheriton, Northampton County, Virginia. She earned her B.A. from Fisk University (1966) and her M.F.A. from Columbia University School of the Arts (1970). She began teaching English at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 1992. MAJOR WORKS Anderson’s short story, ‘‘In the Face of Fire I Will Not Turn Back,’’ affords the reader entrance into black female consciousness from her beginnings in Africa to midtwentieth-century America. The lower eastern shore of Virginia provides the setting for Anderson’s major works that depict the lives and deaths of African Americans struggling to survive the harsh realities of an overtly racist society. The structure of her short story collection, Mostly Womenfolk and a Man or Two—as indicated by the subtitle ‘‘Born a Child to Struggle and to Die’’ and reflected in the section headings—introduces the reader to several African American characters linked to one another through blood and/or community. The stories depict the loss of African culture and racial unity, resulting from the displacement caused by slavery, that turns the minds of many African Americans ‘‘as white and cold as the snows of late winter’’ (73), causing them to become ‘‘convinced that blackness was somehow an affliction because it was easier to think of it that way’’ (38), easier to appropriate white culture than to fight against racial oppression. Two of the characters from Mostly Womenfolk, the undertaker Turner Allen and his daughter Carrie, reappear in The End of Dying, the story of the Allens and their community that continues to depict the fear and degradation—the segregation, verbal abuse, mental and physical torture, even lynchings—experienced by African Americans. Anderson tells the stories of those who cannot speak for themselves, whose stories might otherwise remain untold—those who, like Earl Togan, were lynched, or who, like Carrie Allen, were rendered mute by unspeakable horrors. The End of Dying also explores the dangers of African Americans themselves falling victim to racist thinking as Stella Allen struggles with her life-long belief that her looks allow her and her children to be better off than those of her race who are darker skinned. Turner explains to his wife that her beliefs have been tainted by the view of white supremacy, that White people don’t really care about us, anymore than they care about any other coloured folks. ‘‘Good hair’’ and light skin don’t mean a thing when you get down to it, except that he’s managed to set us against one another, fighting our own little battles of racism within. We are all encouraged to hate ourselves, to be bigots for the racists. You’ve got to see that. We need unity if we’re going to survive. We have to love ourselves. (47)

12

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

The text conveys the idea that African Americans must listen to their own voices, not to the voice of white supremacy, and can effectively battle racism only by learning to love themselves, to embrace their history and their race, and to persevere with dignity, to stop the bloodshed as Carrie does when she hears Earl’s voice and buries the food intended for Shorty King that she has tainted with arsenic, ‘‘the slave’s remedy.’’ CRITICAL RECEPTION In his review of Mostly Womenfolk and a Man or Two, George Kent notes that the form realized by each piece is unique, and generally closer to the form of a tale with the power to ‘‘render folk values’’ than to that of the conventional short story. While Anderson’s tales ‘‘effectively [evoke] important moments in the emotional and psychological history’’ of African Americans, their strongest impact is attributable to her subjects’ abilities to ‘‘express inner beauty’’ and the ‘‘spiritual essence of humanity’’ even in the face of loss and destruction. Yet, despite her skill and capacity to depict fundamental issues important to African American history in an exceptionally engaging lyrical prose, to date there has been virtually no critical response to Anderson’s work. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Mignon Holland Anderson The End of Dying. Baltimore: America House, 2001. ‘‘In the Face of Fire I Will Not Turn Back.’’ Negro Digest 17 (August 1968): 20–23. Mostly Womenfolk and a Man or Two: A Collection. Chicago: Third World Press, 1976.

Studies of Mignon Holland Anderson’s Works Kent, George. Rev. of Mostly Womenfolk and a Man or Two. Black Books Bulletin 4.4 (1976): 52–53. Tarver. Australia. ‘‘Mignon Holland Anderson.’’ The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 103–4.

Teresa Clark Caruso

MAYA ANGELOU (1928– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE It is impossible to distill autobiographer, dramatist and poet Maya Angelou’s artistic contributions down to one particular genre. She is best known for her ability to create beauty out of bleakness; therefore, it is fitting that each of Angelou’s texts wrestles with the possibilities of the human soul. With lyrical imagery and insightful reflection, Angelou penetrates the umbrage of twentieth-century questions about black female existence by considering the most intimate aspects of her own experience in light of larger ideological, social, and political movements. Angelou proclaims that whenever she uses ‘‘the first person singular’’ she is really speaking ‘‘about the third person plural’’ (Russell 8). In fact Angelou’s life and career provide a palpable testament both to her ability to transcend prescribed notions of black existence and her own openness to human potential. She is a best-selling author, poet, singer, songwriter, actress, playwright, dancer, producer-director, civil-rights activist, historian, and educator. She is fluent in six languages including Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and West African Fanti. Her legendary odyssey has taken her around the globe—from racing cars in Mexico to teaching modern dance and drama at the Rome Opera House in Rome, Italy, and at the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv, Israel; from working as an editor of the Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, to writing and teaching in Ghana, West Africa, as a featured editor for the African Review, and as assistant administrator at the University of Ghana in West Africa. Her travels are matched equally by her many achievements. She is a woman of many firsts. As a young adult, she was the first African American to collect fare on the Market Street cable car line in San Francisco. In 1972, she was the first African American woman to write and score a major motion picture, Georgia Georgia starring Diana Sands. She is the first African American woman admitted to the Directors Guild of America. She is the first African American with the longest running book on the New York Times best-seller list for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (nonfiction paperback for two years). And in January 1993, Angelou became the first woman and second poet in U.S. history to write and perform an original work for a presidential inauguration, for William Jefferson Clinton the forty-second president of the United States. Yet, Angelou’s magnum opus is her six-volume autobiographical book series which explores her life from childhood to the inception of her critically acclaimed first novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She has also published six volumes of poetry among others: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Die (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer prize; Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975); And Still I Rise (1978); Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983); Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987); and I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), and The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994).

14

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Angelou experienced a tumultuous childhood. She is the daughter of Bailey Johnson, a naval dietician and doorkeeper, and Vivian Baxter, a realtor and nurse, who were divorced by the time she was three years old. As a result, Angelou and her brother Bailey lived in California, Missouri, and rural Arkansas shuffling between their mother and paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. She and Bailey finally returned to their mother in San Francisco when she was thirteen years of age and remained there until they were on their own. Her life can appropriately be described as being in constant flux. The popular and award-winning I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’s narrative primarily addresses the ten years she lived in Stamps, Arkansas. In this seminal work, Angelou reveals and explores her childhood experiences with racism in the south and her traumatic sexual assault by her mother’s boyfriend at the age of eight years. The latter experience changed the trajectory of her life. After her assailant was convicted and subsequently murdered by her uncles, she refused to speak for five years, retreating into silence and finding refuge in books. As a result, Angelou became an avid reader and observer. These writers and texts became her mentors and teachers. Her subsequent work, as a result, embodies a life-affirming ethos containing bitter honesty about the struggles in her life. In her revelation, she captures a truth that resonates with readers around the world. The arts became her avenue of expression. She has received numerous honors and awards from various humanitarian, artistic, and academic institutions including nearly fifty honorary degrees, and a lifetime appointment as the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Angelou has also written, produced, directed, and starred in several productions for stage, film, and television. However, it was not until she moved to New York in the late 1950s with the Harlem Writers Guild that Angelou discovered her literary voice. Interestingly, Angelou’s professional career began as a dancer. She studied dance with Pearl Primus in New York and in 1954 Angelou landed her first notable role. Sponsored by the U.S. State Department, Angelou was a featured cast member of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as Ruby. The production toured twenty-two countries in Europe and Africa through 1955. Subsequently, she soon became a noted actress in the Off-Broadway production of Genet’s The Blacks in 1960–1961, which won the Obie Award in 1961 for the Best Broadway play. In 1973, Angelou was nominated for a Tony Award for best supporting actress in her Broadway debut in Look Away. And in 1977, she received an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Nyo Boto (Kunta Kinte’s grandmother) in Alex Haley’s Roots. MAJOR WORKS Maya Angelou’s work and life are enmeshed. Her work is in essence a tapestry of lyrical language that engages an honest, provocative, and hopeful dialogue about ‘‘what it is like to be human’’ (Russell 8). Each novel functions as a large canvas for themes echoed in her poetry, plays, and screenplays. Her primary goal is to evoke critical selfreflection. Angelou openly embraces the beauty, loss, and contradictions of her past. She does this knowing that the little southern girl from Stamps could never have become the renowned Renaissance woman called Maya Angelou without triumphs and defeats. Angelou, in fact, wages her own revolution and dares her readers likewise to survive and transcend socially constructed ideology designed to control self-understanding and socioeconomic mobility. Her artistry raises important questions about self-creation.

MAYA ANGELOU

15

The opening volume of her autobiographical series introduces the unifying themes of black womanhood, motherhood, race, self-acceptance, survival, hope, and renewal. Angelou sees her work as an opportunity for her readers to peer into her world and reflect on their own worlds, a point of critical self-reflection that engages one to observe oneself and concomitantly to observe humanity. She believes autobiography is an act of writing about humanity: ‘‘So the person who reads my work and suspects that he or she knows me, hasn’t gotten the half of the book, because he or she should know himself or herself better after reading my work. That’s my prayer’’ (Russell 8–9). Subsequent volumes in the series continue to integrate several major themes introduced in the first text. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Angelou reveals the struggles of her childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, growing up doubly marginalized as a young African American female. The title of Caged Bird is an allusion to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem ‘‘Sympathy.’’ The poignant story begins as the three-year-old girl along with her fouryear-old brother are uprooted and shipped off from California to their paternal grandmother’s house in rural Arkansas when Maya and Bailey’s parents divorce. In Stamps, grandmother Annie Henderson, who is God-fearing and fiercely independent, raises the two with a stern southern hand. She owns a grocery store and rental property in the small cotton town. She rents to whites. Henderson’s strength and resolve in the community provide Angelou with a powerful early example of endurance. At the age of seven years when Angelou is sent to St. Louis to live with her mother, her childhood comes to an abrupt end. This happens a year later when her mother’s frustrated lover, Mr. Freeman, rapes her. After he is tried and convicted, an angry mob incited by his actions murders him. The whole incident summons forth tremendous pain for Angelou. She retreats into silence, a five-year self-imposed space. During this time, Angelou struggles with feelings of complicity, bitterness, anger, and shame. She is eventually sent back to Stamps and there, with the help of Momma Henderson and Mrs. Bertha Flowers, she not only speaks again but also finds her literary voice. Mrs. Flowers contributes to this by reading her literary classics. The children are then sent back to their mother in San Francisco. By the time Angelou is sixteen, however, she is pregnant and gives birth to her son, Guy. Her mother, Vivian Baxter, later becomes a central female figure in her life. Gather Together in My Name (1974) is the second novel in the series. Gather Together focuses primarily on Angelou’s journey from adolescence to young womanhood and her ability to survive against extenuating socioeconomic circumstances. The narrative begins in her late teens and continues through her early twenties. With the birth of her now two-month-old son, Angelou takes on the responsibility and challenge of providing for him. The story is an honest exploration of juvenile choices with men and a desire to reconcile those choices with an emerging and more mature self-understanding. The episodes follow her experiences as a singer/dancer, a Creole cook, a bordello madam, a prostitute, and a drug user. The third book, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), introduces Angelou as an artist who is deeply conflicted by motherhood. The story narrates the five years after Gather Together, following her into marriage with Tosh Angelos and onto the European stage in Porgy and Bess. After three years, her marriage dissolves, and she turns all her attention to the stage. Angelou, however, finds life as an artist too difficult to bear in the absence of her son. She eventually returns home. The Heart of a Woman (1981) introduces a more seasoned Angelou now nearing thirty. In this text, she explores woman as a self-conscious artist, emphasizing creativity.

16

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

The narrative chronicles the beginning of her writing career and her developing political activism. She joins the Harlem Writers Guild and becomes committed to her craft. As she enters the New York artistic community, she personally commits herself to the civil rights movement. Her efforts garner an appointment by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Angelou is now a stronger and more composed woman and mother, free of the self-doubt disclosed in previous texts. In her fifth installment, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), Angelou makes Ghana her home for four years as a writer and editor. She finds herself in a community of African Americans who have migrated to the new independent Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah’s rule. She integrates into the fabric of her new country and her new romantic relationship. Her journey is an exploration of blackness both as an African and an Afro-American. In the absence of the white/black dichotomy, which is indicative of the American experience, she finds herself coming to grips with her own notions of American racism and oppression. Here again her experiences as mother follow the trajectory of the life of her now maturing young son who is nearing adulthood. The novel ends with her leaving Guy in Ghana as she begins her journey back to the United States. Guy remains in Ghana to complete his college degree. A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002) is the sixth volume and culmination of the series that began in 1970. Here Angelou’s experience with grief and sadness over the climate in black America leads her to an important moment in her writing career. The story begins as Angelou returns to the United States from Ghana to work with Malcolm X. Upon returning to California to visit her mother, she is informed that Malcolm X has been assassinated. In an effort to cope with the devastating news, Angelou continues working in the arts, but soon takes a job and moves to Watts in Los Angeles, California. While in Watts conducting market research on African American women, she witnesses the Watts riots of 1965. Three years later Angelou is recruited by King to work on his campaign with SCLC; however, she is confronted with yet another moment of despair. King is assassinated. Angelou becomes inconsolable and isolates herself. It is only when her dear friend, James Baldwin, cajoles her into attending a dinner that she finds a moment of clarity. At this event emerges the idea for Caged Bird. This narrative ends with the opening lines of her now classic tale. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Angelou has gained a reputation as a popular poet with ‘‘And Still I Rise’’ and ‘‘Phenomenal Woman,’’ two poems that have become a part of popular consciousness, her poetry and screenplays are less well known. Most critics regard Angelou as one of the great voices in contemporary American literature and her work an important contribution to the American literary landscape. By far, critics study her work as a feminist and political text. Although, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is still the most critically studied and praised in the series. Some critics argue that the episodic nature of subsequent texts in the series lends itself to open dialogue (an evolution of self), while others have argued that the loose narrative development impedes understanding. Sondra O’Neale in ‘‘Reconstruction of the Composite Self: New Images of Black Women in Maya Angelou’s Continuing Autobiography,’’ suggests the seeming mendacity of the events recorded help create openness and continuity across the series with the reappearance of characters and themes (34). This

MAYA ANGELOU

17

openness empowers Angelou to fashion a new self. Pierre Walker likewise argues that the form of the text is the vehicle through which Angelou politicizes the text, both the form and content cohere, and the seeming episodic nature of the text includes valuable juxtapositions. He argues that ‘‘to ignore form in discussing Angelou’s book, therefore, would mean ignoring a critical dimension of its important political work’’ (92). Whatever conclusion one draws about Maya Angelou, the woman, it is clear that her life not only represents the journey of a woman but has major implications as well for the civilization in which she lived. She personifies the peculiar experience of a people. Moreover, because of the background of the civilization in which she lives, her heroic journey is a celebration of the human spirit. Her risky truth-telling, wrapped in poetic song, is a unique gift to the world, and her personal experience preserved in her novels will continue to tell the story why the caged bird sings. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Maya Angelou Fiction All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. New York: Random House, 1986. Gather Together in My Name. New York: Random House, 1974. The Heart of a Woman. New York: Random House, 1981. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1970. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas. New York: Random House, 1976. A Song Flung Up to Heaven. New York: Random House, 2002.

Poetry The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. New York: Random House, 1994. Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Die. New York: Random House, 1971. Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. New York: Random House, 1975. Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? New York: Random House, 1983. And Still I Rise. New York: Random House, 1978.

Plays Ajax, 1974. And Still I Rise, 1976. Cabaret for Freedom, 1960. Gettin’ Up Stayed on My Mind, 1967. The Least of These, 1966. Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, 1988.

Studies of Maya Angelou’s Works Bloom, Harold, ed. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Bloom, Lynn Z. ‘‘Maya Angelou 4 April 1928– .’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 38. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985, 3–11. Braxton, Joanne M., ed. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Christian, Barbara T. ‘‘Angelou.’’ In Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series, Detroit: Gale Research Company, vol. 19, 1987.

18

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Coulthard, A. R. ‘‘Poetry as Politics: Maya Angelou’s Inaugural Poem, ‘On the Pulse of Morning.’’’ Notes on Contemporary Literature 28.1 (1998): 2–5. Courtney-Clarke, Margaret. Maya Angelou: The Poetry of Living. Foreword by Oprah Winfrey. New York: C. Potter, 1999. Elliot, Jeffrey M., ed. Conversations with Maya Angelou. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Estes-Hicks, Onita. ‘‘The Way We Were: Precious Memories of the Black Segregated South.’’ African-American Review 27.1 (Spring 1993): 9–18. Gottlieb, Annie. ‘‘Angelou.’’ In Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series, Detroit: Gale Research Company, vol. 19, 1987. Jaquin, Eileen O. ‘‘Maya Angelou (1928– ).’’ In African American Autobiographers: A Source Book, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Juncker, Clara, and Edward Sanford. ‘‘Only Necessary Baggage: Maya Angelou’s Life Journeys.’’ Xavier Review 16.2 (1996): 12–23. Lupton, Mary Jane. ‘‘Singing the Black Mother: Maya Angelou and Autobiographical Continuity.’’ Black American Literature Forum 24.2 (Summer 1990): 257–75. ———. ‘‘ ‘Spinning in a Whirlwind’: Sexuality in Maya Angelou’s Sixth Autobiography.’’ MAWA Review 18.1–2 (2003): 1–6. McPherson, Dolly. Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Moallem, Minoo, and Iain A. Boal. ‘‘Multicultural Nationalism and the Poetics of Inauguration.’’ In Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem, 243–63. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. O’Neale, Sondra. ‘‘Reconstruction of the Composite Self: New Images of Black Women in Maya Angelou’s Continuing Autobiography.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 25–36. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Russell, Sandi. ‘‘Maya Angelou,’’ Women’s Review (December 1985): 8–9. Saunders, James. ‘‘Breaking Out of the Cage: The Autobiographical Writings of Maya Angelou.’’ Hollins Critic 28.4 (October 1991): 1–11. Smith, Sidonie. ‘‘The Song of a Caged Bird: Maya Angelou’s Quest after Self-Acceptance.’’ Southern Humanities Review 7 (1973): 365–75. Tangum, Marion, and Marjorie Smelstor. ‘‘Hurston’s and Angelou’s Visual Art: The Distancing Vision and the Beckoning Gaze.’’ Southern Literary Journal 31.1 (Fall 1998): 80–96. Tinnie, Wallis. ‘‘Maya Angelou.’’ In The History of Southern Women’s Literature, edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Walker, Pierre. ‘‘Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.’’ College Literature 22.3 (October 1995): 91–108.

Joi Carr

TINA MCELROY ANSA (1949– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Having been born in Macon, Georgia, it is no wonder that essayist, novelist and short story writer Tina McElroy Ansa is a southern writer. She is known for works of fiction that not only capture the imagination of her readers but also bear record of small town African American life from the 1950s through the twenty-first century. Each of her four novels is set in the fictional town of Mulberry which no doubt pays homage to her hometown and her home state of Georgia. Ansa was sent to Catholic school and then to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. It was at Spelman College under the tutelage of renowned scholar Gloria Wade Gayles that Ansa officially claimed her identity as a writer though her love and talent for narrative were established at the feet of her elders when she was a small child. Beginning in 1971 Ansa’s early journey as a writer marked her as a journalist and editor for newspapers like the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the Charlotte Observer. In 1978 she married filmmaker Jonee´ Ansa and the family later took up permanent residence on St. Simons Island, Georgia. In the early 1980s Ansa became a full time freelance writer and her work has appeared in magazines, journals, and anthologies of both fiction and nonfiction. Spelman College, Brunswick College, and Emory University are among the sites of her guest lectures and workshops. In 2004 Ansa established the Sea Island Writers Retreats. The Retreats are a series of workshops held on historic Sapelo Island, Georgia, and are designed to provide encouragement and resources for writers of African American literature. Ansa was named the 2005 recipient of the Stanley W. Lindberg Award. Named for the esteemed editor of the Georgia Review, the Lindberg award recognizes the author for her contribution to Georgia’s literary landscape. MAJOR WORKS Ansa’s most well-known work is her 1989 novel Baby of the Family. It has the distinction of being named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review in both 1989 and 1990. The novel also won the Georgia Author Series Award as well as the best book recommendation by the American Library Association in 1989. Baby of the Family establishes Ansa as a writer of southern gothic fiction. It depicts the birth and childhood of Lena McPherson, the only female child of a middle-class African American family in 1950s Georgia. Lena is born with a caul over her face which is an indication of psychic abilities. In fact, Lena is plagued with her ability to see ghosts and understand supernatural events. In her mother’s attempt to move beyond African American folk beliefs and traditions, Lena is ill equipped to handle her special abilities and suffers ridicule from her peers and a lack of understanding from her family. Although Lena’s family does not always embrace her uniqueness, they fill her life with love and she is basically well adjusted and grows up to be quite successful. In The Hand I Fan With (1996) the author revisits Lena who in her mid-forties is having a torrid affair with a

20

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

ghost. Prevalent in both books is love and respect for the agrarian nature of the south. Ansa spends a great deal of time detailing the ficitional town of Mulberry. Not only are its inhabitants vividly drawn but also the inanimate objects like the river or The Place (the juke joint owned by Lena’s father) become characters in their own right. Ugly Ways published in 1993, is Ansa’s second novel. Again set in the town of Mulberry it is the story of the Lovejoy sisters who go home to bury their mother. Unlike the McPherson family, the Lovejoys are dysfunctional. The three Lovejoy daughters have been emotionally abandoned by their mother and left to rear and nurture each other. Set in the last decade of the twentieth century, Ugly Ways is the antithesis of the strong black mother tale so common to writings by African Americans. It is possible in this novel to see the repercussions when the African American woman chooses not to lend herself to her family. This is particularly devastating for a trio of girls who have a father who is physically present but unable to bridge the generational and gender gaps to help rescue his daughters. When the reader meets the Lovejoy sisters they are burying not only their mother but also their past. Thematically Ugly Ways is typically Ansa as she chooses to have Mudear still present in the narrative as a spirit. While the girls arrange their mother’s funeral, Mudear is ever presenting commenting back as the girls work out their fears, frustration, and pain. However, Mudear’s ephemeral presence does little to endear her to the audience. Thus, Ansa is committed to depicting a variety of characters interacting in and reacting to a variety of circumstances. The novel does much to expand the African American literary canon’s possibilities for presentations. In 1997 Ansa published her third novel that continues the saga of Lena McPherson. In The Hand I Fan With Lena is a woman in her mid-forties who makes up in wealth and influence what she lacks in family and love life. As a middle-aged woman, Lena finds herself the only surviving member of the McPherson family. Her parents and her two brothers have died and Lena is single and without children. Lena’s penchant for seeing not only ghosts but also people’s true intentions has prevented her from finding true love and the novel opens as she staves off her loneliness with charity work and financial acquisitions. Tickled by breezes when there is no wind blowing and by invisible hands beneath the water of her pool Lena discovers love in The Hand I Fan With. Ansa’s fascination with the spiritual world and Lena’s connection to it is highlighted when Lena’s love turns out to be a ghost. Herman, who has been dead at least a century, is able to give Lena all that she has been missing. He is her friend, confidant, supporter, and, of course, lover. Herman connects Lena not just to the supernatural but also to the physical as he not only awakens corporeal passion but also ignites in her a zest for life. Herman teaches Lena to garden and encourages her at the end of the novel when she must deliver her favorite horse’s foal. The conflict of the novel, besides the fact that Lena is having a torrid affair with a ghost, comes in the way the townspeople respond to Lena’s new beau. Although no one has seen the new man, they feel the repercussions of Lena’s decision to live her own life. Seemingly written in response to the wave of disconnected, beauty- and consumercrazed young people driving the culture at the beginning of the new millennium, You Know Better (2002) is Ansa’s fourth novel. Again set in Mulberry it is the story of the three generations of Pines women, Lily, Sandra, and LaShawndra. Lily is the quintessential African American matriarch who, despite her own teenage pregnancy, manages to go to school, marry, and bring up her daughter. Sandra, too, has an out of wedlock

TINA MCELROY ANSA

21

pregnancy and instead of doting on her daughter, LaShawndra, she virtually ignores her and leaves the rearing of the child to Lily. Unsure of anything except a short skirt and a good time, LaShawndra is intent on hitching a ride out of Mulberry and away from the trouble she has caused. Once again the novel’s protagonists have close encounters with departed spirits. This time the ghosts of three former Mulberry residents intervene to help each Pines woman heal and move forward. Each ghost, Miss Moses, Nurse Bloom, and Liza Jane, acts as a mirror to help the women face their mistakes and is a catalyst to help them move past the painful experiences in their lives. In addition to Ansa’s signature ghosts in the machine is the idea that each woman must understand the past in order to move forward. Each woman seems to be missing a part of herself because she is missing some connection with the past. Ansa often returns to this theme of connectedness in her novels as a critique of what is problematic in African American personal and family life. CRITICAL RECEPTION Much of the criticism surrounding Ansa’s work places her firmly within the realm of the southern writer. Elena Shakhovtseva writes of Ansa, ‘‘among her clearly Southern themes . . . are . . . the interrelation of past and present, the importance of roots, family ties, and gender roles in black communities’’ (1). If southern writing and southern African American writing is defined by its love of the idiosyncrasies and idioms that form southern life, then Ansa’s writing definitively falls within the category. In addition to her fascination with the south and earth themes like seasons, water, soil, and vegetation is Ansa’s delight in the language of the African American south. Reared in the middle of the century, Ansa occupies a position that bridges the old and new south. She can hear the echoing voices of the grandchildren of slaves as well as the beat of the new millennium south, and the amalgamation is apparent in her writing. There is not yet an enormous body of criticism regarding Ansa’s work. As a Georgian who must share the state with writers like Alice Walker and Flannery O’Connor, her place in the pantheon of southern writers is yet to be seen. According to Carol P. MarshLockett, ‘‘Ansa’s work has been well received. Her works are widely read and taught and bear the hallmarks of enduring American classics’’ (22). Although Ansa’s work is not primarily concerned with the struggle of being black in America or even in the south, her novels still bear witness and record to African American existence. Acknowledging that not all African American families suffer financially or are in a constant battle against racisim, Ansa is concerned with what may be more subtle enemies. In each of her novels the spirits who come to deal with the living bring them news from the past. Whether the ghosts remind the protagonists of the fortitude and perseverance of their ancestors, or the strength and dignity that is their legacy, these intervening spirits preach a connectivity without which the African American family cannot survive. The tendency for Ansa to animate her novels with dead folk is symptomatic of the relationship many African Americans had and continue to have with those who have passed out of physical life. Harkening back to Afrocentric ideologies that extend connections between people beyond death, Ansa’s characters and her readers do not seem too terribly disturbed at the constant inference of the dead in the affairs of the living. In this sense the author’s work links her characters and her audiences with cultural roots that extend at least as far as slavery and arguably all the way back to Africa.

22

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Tina McElroy Ansa Baby of the Family. New York: Harcourt, 1989. The Hand I Fan With. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Ugly Ways. New York: Harcourt, 1994. You Know Better. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Studies of Tina McElroy Ansa’s Works Bennett, Barbara. ‘‘Making Peace with the (M)other By.’’ In The World Is Our Culture: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing, edited by Jeffery Folks and Nancy Summers Folks, 186–200. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Green, Tara T. ‘‘Mother Dear: The Motivations of Tina Ansa’s Mudear.’’ Griot: Official Journal of the Southern Conference on Afro-American Studies, Inc. 21.1 (Spring 2002): 46–52. Grooms, Anthony. ‘‘Big Bad Mudear.’’ Callaloo 17.2 (Summer 1994): 653–56. Shakhovtseva, Elena. ‘‘The Gothic in the Black South Novels of Tina McElroy Ansa.’’ Speaking in Tongues: The Magazine of Literary Translation. Online journal of the Institute for Foreign Languages, Far Eastern National University. Vladivostok, Russia. http://spintongues.vladivo stok.com?Shakhovtseva3.htm (accessed February 2005). Town, Caren J. ‘‘A Whole World of Possibilities Spinning Around Her: Female Adolescence in the Contemporary Southern Fiction of Josephine Humphreys, Jill McCorkle, and Tina Ansa.’’ Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 42.2 (Winter 2004): 89–108. Warren, Nagueyalti. ‘‘Echoing Zora: Ansa’s Other Hand in The Hand I Fan With.’’ CLA Journal 46.3 (March 2003): 362–83.

Tarshia L. Stanley

DORIS JEAN AUSTIN (1949–1994)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Doris Jean Austin was raised in Mobile, Alabama, until she was six years old in a household with her mother Tommie Letitia Austin and grandmother Rebecca Stallwork. Later, the family moved to Jersey City on Belmont Avenue where she attended School 12 and Lincoln High School. There, she received inspiration from her English teacher, Rev. Ercell F. Webb, who encouraged her to write and who also performed her first marriage ceremony. Her mother and grandmother fashioned her life perspective for family tradition of church attendance, church loyalty, and morality by being a part of the Monumental Baptist Church. It was also where she found the characters for her first book, After the Garden. This book was noted favorably by the New York Times Book Review. Another major work was an anthology Austin coedited, Street Lights: Illustrating Tales of the Urban Black Experience. Doris Jean Austin was a journalist, critic, news writer, and novelist and has published in fiction and essay collections internationally. She conducted workshops in Advanced Fiction at Columbia University’s School of writing from 1989 to 1994. Austin was a member of the famous Harlem Writers Guild, which she cofounded. According to Maya Angelou, the Harlem Writers Guild was a ‘‘loosely formed organization, without dues or membership cards, had one strict rule: any guest could sit in for three meetings, but thereafter, the visitor had to read from his or her own work in progress’’ (41). In 1984 Austin and fifteen other writers left this group and formed The New Renaissance Writers Guild, fashioned after the young writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Austin saw this group as a way to be a literary force, feeling supported, with members calling each other on a regular basis, borrowing money and other amenities that served to make a close knit community with fellow writers like Arthur Flowers and Terry McMillan. Like the Harlem Renaissance young writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others who created the journal Fire!! they felt that they had to venture out on their own to prove their convictions: ‘‘There has to be a criterion of excellence: we have to make sure we have some power’’ (Interview 107). During that same time, Austin received a PEN Writer’s Fund grant and the DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship Award, among other honors, and spent a highly productive two months at the McDowell’s Artist’s colony. Doris Jean Austin was also a newscaster for NBC radio, but felt that it was ‘‘quick and chilly’’ and eventually harmful for a writer of fiction (Interview 107). Austin was a writer for Amsterdam News, Essence, and New York Times Book Review. She died of liver cancer in 1994. MAJOR WORKS Austin’s only novel, After the Garden, is a tightly woven work of fiction that dares its audience not to feel its deep reverberations of wicked idealism and tainted relationships of its main character, Alzina, as she struggles to balance her need for true love and loyalty to her grandmother who has shaped her point of view in the garden. In the novel Austin

24

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

develops authentic characters who draw the reader into their lives because the reader understands them. The main character, Elzina, is interesting because she is complex and ambivalent. On one hand, she loves Jessie, but she does not love who he is because who he is goes against everything for whom her grandmother has programmed her. However, her emotional well-being is tied up with loving Jessie. Like so many grandmothers, Rosalie Thompkins also wants so deeply for her grandchild that everything she lives and breathes is for her. She bargains with God, ‘‘Safe passage home to Alabama ’fore I die, and let me see Elzina grown . . . and graduated from a good southern college, please Lord. Amen’’ (12). This statement, along with Rosalie’s resistance/compliance is the underlining principal affecting all of her relationships. Elzina believes she is destined for better things in life; even though she marries Jesse, they continue to live with her grandmother where their lives are tainted daily by this unanswered prayer. Jesse cannot access entry to his manhood: money to open up his own business, even though it is available. Having a child does not add to the marriage, either; Elzina is obsessed about the safety of her son, not that different from how her grandmother expressed concern about her. So, when one of Jesse’s sisters, Ollie Mae, is late coming back with the child, it gives Elzina a chance to tell the James family how she really feels, ‘‘. . .A James ain’t shit’’ (186). This pinnacle moment in the novel sends the rest of the events into a tailspin: Jesse’s indiscretion resulting in the birth of a daughter, his accidental death, and Elzina’s nervous breakdown. Her education/renewal begins when she discovers this illegitimate daughter and understands that their connection is what both of them need to survive through life’s pains. Austin’s style of writing is not storybook, idyllic metaphors, but journals of struggles, tough choices, and disappointments, laced with reality and hope. Part of the grandmother’s story is excerpted from After the Garden in the anthology, Black Southern Voices, titled ‘‘Heirs and Orphans.’’ Early in the story, as a child, Rosalie witnesses her house being burned down with her parents in it. Nevertheless, she and her cousin Moses escape the wicked men seeking their lives; throughout her life she is motivated by constantly hearing her father’s voice urging her, ‘‘Run baby. You run away from here’’ (197). Although upon first impression it appears the theme is children’s lives altered tragically by the whim of evil men who deny them the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is really about the memory of the father’s voice urging Rosalie to find another path. ‘‘Room 1023’’ which appears in the anthology edited by Austin, Street Lights: Illuminating the Tales of the Urban Black Experience, captures the dire plight of Lelah Vanessa Frederick (Alexander) who is in a woman’s hotel, waiting on a check from her soon-to-be ex-husband so that she will not be evicted from her room. She tries to tell the manager that the check is in the mail, but he is not convinced. This tale also shows glimpses of females in contemporary urban America. There is a Cantonese woman who feels that American women are living less than they should be living, while she fails to see that she has assimilated and is less than she was in her culture. There is a clerk in the hotel held together by her sponsors (hotel manager and wife) and can only see her way to being a good citizen. Leland’s situation is augmented by the lives of these woman; it may be a man’s world, but she takes control momentarily by defying the eviction notice as she defied her husband’s demand not to leave; she had all of the comforts of home with him, except she had lost herself. As she lays in waiting under the bed, with no where to go, room 1023 represents the womb where life is enclosed from the outside world temporarily, but her birth is imminent and seems to be beyond her control. Facing the outside world can be painful; however, it is also the consequence of birth, living, and rebirth.

DORIS JEAN AUSTIN

25

CRITICAL RECEPTION The Library Journal’s review of the anthology Streetlights recommends ‘‘Room 1023’’ as one of the best stories; the reviewer feels most of the others are not appealing. The Publishers Weekly, on the other hand, states that nearly every story is artful, sensitive to language, contains highly developed metaphors, and puts the aesthetics and the politics side by side. The two reviewers also assessed Austin’s major work, After the Garden. The Library Journal felt that it was graphic and realistic and should be highly recommended for all fiction collectors. The Publishers Weekly felt that even though the voices of the characters were convincing, ‘‘strong and appealing, the story line is too heavy for them to carry gracefully.’’ They add, however, that the story still has many virtues. The New York Times Book Review gives the book a most complimentary review. The reviewer feels that it is eloquent and has many other qualities, including a ‘‘very unfirst-novel-like control of technique.’’ He lauds Austin’s ability to make her audience see the characters as authentic inside and out. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Doris Jean Austin After the Garden. New York: New American Library Penguin Inc., 1987. ‘‘An Almost Perfect Romance.’’ Essence 21.10 (February 1991): 56. ‘‘Heirs and Orphans.’’ In Black Southern Voices, edited by John Oliver Killens and Jerry Ward, Jr., 192–98. New York: Penguin Group, 1992. ‘‘Looking for Home.’’ In Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction, edited by Terry McMillan. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. ‘‘The Men in My Life.’’ Essence 23.7 (November 1992): 44. ‘‘Mind: Taming the Demons.’’ Essence 23.1 (May 1992): 106. Street Lights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Studies of Doris Jean Austin’s Works ‘‘After the Garden,’’ Kirkus Review 55 (May 15, 1987): 739. ‘‘After the Garden,’’ Publishers Weekly 231 ( June 12, 1987): 72. Browne, Phiefer. ‘‘Doris Jean Austin.’’ The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. King, Christine. ‘‘After the Garden.’’ Library Journal 112 ( July 1987): 34. Masello, David. ‘‘Harlem Revival.’’ Interview 16 ( January 1986): 107. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Imani Lillie B. Fryar

NIKKI BAKER (1962– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Nikki Baker is a pseudonym for novelist Jennifer Dowdell. Although it is known that Baker was born in 1962, other biographical information is purposefully limited. Inquiries to the author requesting biographical information remain unacknowledged. However, interested readers will find readily that Baker’s chosen genre is African American lesbian detective fiction, showcasing African American characters in complicated personal and professional situations. MAJOR WORKS Baker’s major works include four detective novels, which form the Virginia Kelly Series: In the Game (1991), The Lavender House Murder (1992), Long Goodbyes (1993), and The Ultimate Exit Strategy (2001). Virginia Kelly, Baker’s protagonist in the four novels, is a successful professional working as a stockbroker at an investment firm located in the Midwest. Kelly is a savvy, sexy, well-educated lesbian African American sleuth whose accolades provide her with the social capital she needs to work effectively within the system to solve murder mysteries. An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture notes that ‘‘[c]rime fiction has a long tradition of female investigators, but the lesbian mystery novels that proffer an amateur investigator are unimaginable without the kinds of intervention into the workplace that feminism made in the 1970s[,]’’ of which Baker’s In the Game is given as an example of such fiction (Munt). In the Game explores the possibilities for an African American woman working from a position of elevated socioeconomic status. In fine, Baker’s female protagonist finds that she must intervene on behalf of close personal friends who are prime suspects in murder cases for which there seems to be little, if any, hope of genuine criminal investigation. Lesbian politics are central in Baker’s published fiction, and her characters interact romantically across racial, social, and economic boundaries. In addition, Baker has published two novellas in anthologies published by Third Side Press: ‘‘Film Noir,’’ published in Out for Blood: Tales of Mystery and Suspense by Women (1995) and ‘‘Negatives’’ in Out for More Blood: Tales of Malice and Retaliation by Women (1996). CRITICAL RECEPTION Baker’s body of work can be described as black, lesbian detective fiction. While scholarly responses to Baker’s writing are scant, academic interest is growing. Critical receptions to her writing may be found in academic critiques that discuss marginalized texts, but Baker is discussed more freely and frequently and openly in mainstream media sources. Diane Anderson, Editor of Curve Magazine, wrote about Baker while at Girlfriends Magazine prior to 1998, and there are Publishers Weekly critiques of Baker’s

NIKKI BAKER

27

fiction on Amazon.com. Within the genre of detective fiction, Baker’s writing exists in a narrow, highly specific space. Denise Hamilton’s announces Nikki Baker’s presence on the fiction scene in her essay from the Los Angeles Times titled ‘‘Black Women Writers Put Their Brand on the Suspense Genre.’’ When Hamilton states ‘‘[t]hen there is author Nikki Baker, whose sleuth is a [B]lack lesbian,’’ she is using Baker as an example of a writer whose characters stand apart from the cultural stereotypes that inform detective fiction on varying cultural levels (Hamilton). As a publishing interest, Baker has been well received and published by such notable feminist and lesbian presses as Third Side Press, Naiad, and Bella Books, Incorporated. At present, her novels are out of print but are available in both new and used editions from online booksellers, and her work is well known to writers of detective fiction. Given the cultural studies discussions in the early 1990s regarding the cloistered nature of gay and lesbian communities thriving at the same time Baker began publishing her novels, characters like Virginia Kelly are symbolic of lively, intellectual discussant groups. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Nikki Baker ‘‘Film Noir.’’ In Out for Blood: Tales of Mystery and Suspense by Women, edited by Victoria A. Brownworth, 23–58. Chicago: Third Side, 1995. In the Game. Tallahassee: Bella, 1991. The Lavender House Murder. Tallahassee: Bella, 1992. Long Goodbyes. Tallahassee: Bella, 1993. ‘‘Negatives.’’ In Out for More Blood: Tales of Malice and Retaliation by Women, edited by Victoria A. Brownworth and Judith M. Redding, 215–36. Chicago: Third Side, 1996. The Ultimate Exit Strategy: A Virginia Kelly Mystery. Tallahassee: Bella, 2001.

Studies of Nikki Baker’s Works Hamilton, Denise. ‘‘Black Women Writers Put Their Brand on the Suspense Genre.’’ Paula Woods’ Noir Wave, January 1, 2006, http://www.woodsontheweb.com/Bio/noir_wave.htm (accessed January 31, 2006). Klein, Kathleen Gregory. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Munt, Sally R. ‘‘Mystery Fiction: Lesbian, The Urban Dystopia.’’ GLBTQ, Inc.: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, January 6, 2006, http:// www.glbtq.com/literature/myst_fic_lesbian,4.html (accessed January 31, 2006).

Kimberly Downing Braddock

TONI CADE BAMBARA (1939–1995)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Novelist, short fiction writer and essayist Miltona Mirkin Cade, the author of Gorilla, My Love (1972), The Sea Birds are Still Alive (1977), The Salt Eaters (1980), If Blessing Comes (1987), Those Bones Are Not My Child (2000), and the editor of The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970) and Tales and Stories for Black Folks (1971), went through several name changes before finally deciding to call herself Toni Cade Bambara. Throughout her life she was referred to as Hanifa, Tonal Coda, or Karma Bene Bambara, but the story of how Toni Cade Bambara ultimately re-named herself exemplifies what it means to be an artist, particularly a female artist and artist of color, in America: Toni Cade Bambara—the minute I said it, I immediately inhabited it, felt very at home in the world. This was my name. It is not so unusual for an artist, a writer, to name themselves; they are forever constructing themselves, are forever inventing themselves. That’s the nature of that spiritual practice. (‘‘Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions’’ 206)

Born and raised in New York, Bambara often sought, with her art, as with her life, to show how important self-definition is for marginalized people. As a child, Bambara was comfortable expressing herself, in part because of her mother, a woman Bambara saw as having ‘‘a tremendous respect for . . . the activity of the mind and the privacy of imagination’’ (Chandler 346). At a young age, Bambara was also a frequent visitor at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, where she often encountered and was inspired by poet Langston Hughes (Goodnough D10). Bambara attended Queens College and received her B.A. in theater arts in 1959. Afterward, Bambara studied in Paris and Italy and received a master’s degree from City College of New York in 1964. Bambara served as director of the Colony Settlement House in Brooklyn and taught at several universities including Rutgers University, Duke University, and Spelman College. Over the course of her lifetime, she contributed to a wide variety of periodicals, including the Negro Digest, Prairie Schooner, Liberator, and the New York Times. Later in life, Bambara developed a strong interest in film. Bambara became a filmmaker and a film critic and lecturer. She worked with independent filmmaker Louis Massiah, on The Bombing of Osage Avenue, winner of a 1986 Academy Award for best documentary. Bambara’s final project was W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices, a documentary that was directed by Massiah and written by Bambara, Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka. In 1995, Bambara died of cancer in a Philadelphia hospital.

TONI CADE BAMBARA

29

MAJOR WORKS The Black Woman: An Anthology is a groundbreaking work that includes short stories by Alice Walker and Paule Marshall and poems by Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde. The Black Woman also contains three essays by Bambara herself: ‘‘On the Issue of Roles,’’ ‘‘The Pill: Genocide or Liberation,’’ and ‘‘Thinking about the Play: The Great White Hope.’’ The Black Woman explores a wide range of subjects, including sexism, motherhood, and education. The diverse material of the writers, who engage, enrich, and sometimes contradict each other, makes for a scattered but powerful collection. In the foreword to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a feminist anthology edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, Bambara writes that it is important that women of color ‘‘break through the diabolically erected barriers’’ and ‘‘hear and see each other’’ (vi). And, Bambara’s own anthology seems to reflect that belief, as The Black Woman seems a conscious effort to find women from wondrously varied walks of life. These black women define themselves as teachers, counselors, writers, opera singers, social workers, mothers, poets, wives, actresses, travelers, skienthusiasts, commercial artists, and cosmic forces (323–27). Moreover, these writers differ stylistically, and the tone often switches even when the writers are examining the same subject. For example, Gail Stokes’s ‘‘Black Man, My Man, Listen!’’ is addressed to black men and reads as a personal and impassioned plea to black men for ‘‘comfort’’ and ‘‘reassurance.’’ Stokes’s essay expresses emotions ranging from helpless frustration (‘‘I try to make you a man’’) to passionate anger (‘‘I told them you were now a man!’’). This work is immediately followed by a contrasting piece by Jean Carey Bond and Patricia Perry. While both Stokes and Bond and Perry explore black heterosexual relationships, Bond and Perry’s essay ‘‘Is the Black Male Castrated?’’ is the more analytical discussion, with its detailed exploration of the array of stereotypes that both black men and black women have had to face. Bambara is clearly comfortable with this juxtaposition of divergent voices: if there is any connection at all among Bambara’s selected writers, it is in their awareness of race, gender, and social class, and the sense of urgency that seems to inform through their work. These black women realize that they are in the midst of a historical moment, and they also recognize the importance of defining who they are and how they see the world. In all cases, the writers’ words are never mild and serve as clarion calls to action; these are women determined to ‘‘make revolution irresistible’’ (‘‘Foreword’’ viii). Told almost entirely in the first person and linked by a funny, tough-talking narrator, Hazel, Gorilla, My Love is an achievement. Although Gorilla, My Love features glimpses into the life of an adult or near-adult Hazel (‘‘My Man Bovanne’’ and ‘‘The Johnson Girls,’’ for example), most of the collection is told in the voice of a young African American girl. Keeping in mind Bambara’s deep love and appreciation of black dialect and culture, it is apparent that Bambara uses black English and African American nicknames to create a sense of community in her stories. In an article written for the New York Times about J. L. Dillard’s Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States, Bambara argues that Black English is . . . a fusion of a West African deep-base structure with an overlay of African retained and European absorbed and Asiatic and Indian borrowed features; a language that has structural affinities and historical profiles similar to Black French, Black Dutch, Black Portuguese

30

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

and other ‘‘bridge’’systems throughout the world; the language habitually used to perceive, record, remember, transmit, abstract, recall, and relate by at least 80 percent of black Americans . . . (‘‘Black English’’ BR3)

Thus, it is fitting that ‘‘Gorilla, My Love,’’ Bambara’s often anthologized title story, begins with a discussion on the significance of the name that the black community has given one of the characters: ‘‘That was the year Hunca Bubba changed his name. Not a change up, but a change back, since Jefferson Winston Vale was the name in the first place’’ (13). ‘‘Gorilla, My Love’’ examines life from the perspective of Hazel, a girl who constantly seeks truth in a confusing world of grown-up half-truths and lies, in a land where adults are continuously ‘‘playin change-up and turnin you round every which way so bad’’ (20). In ‘‘Gorilla, My Love,’’ Hazel, who lives in a vibrant African American community that gives everyone a nickname, actually experiences two forms of betrayal. First, Hazel’s uncle discards the community nickname. The uncle associates the community’s nickname with immaturity; and because he plans on getting married, he is ‘‘usin his real name now’’ (18). The community’s nicknames—‘‘Baby Jason,’’ ‘‘Big Brood,’’ and Hazel and her friends derisively call the movie matron ‘‘Thunderbuns’’—are not always complimentary, but they do reveal how people in the community see and identify with one another. Hazel, who attends a school with white teachers who ‘‘don’t like me cause I won’t sing them Southern songs or back off when they tell me my questions are out of order,’’ sees the importance of the community nicknames and refuses to view her uncle’s name change as progress. Hazel recognizes the community nickname as a way of knowing someone’s true and private self, of sharing a deeper spiritual connection with another. Therefore, the name change not only symbolizes a change in Hazel’s relationship with her uncle and the emergence of scary, unfamiliar adulthood, but also suggests a departure from the community and a movement toward a larger world that is dangerous, uncertain, and sometimes tragic. For Hazel, the rejection of the Hunca Bubba moniker is an abandonment of both her and the community in which they live. ‘‘I’m a new somebody’’ (20), proclaims Hazel’s uncle, the recently renamed Jefferson Winston Vale, and perhaps he is. Published in Redbook in 1971, ‘‘Gorilla, My Love,’’ seems to subtly explore, through the loss of the community nickname, the idea of African Americans becoming a ‘‘new somebody’’ in an era where the black pride of the 1960s mingled with the promises of integration. ‘‘Raymond’s Run,’’ which appeared earlier in Tales and Stories for Black Folks, centers around a race among the neighborhood children. In ‘‘Raymond’s Run,’’ Bambara allows the community to become a source of strength. Hazel, the narrator, known alternately as ‘‘Squeaky’’ and ‘‘Mercury’’ by members of her community, is determined to win the race. Although Hazel recognizes that she is a part of the community, she remains slightly at odds with it; Hazel partakes in frequent fights with the children in her neighborhood. Once again, Bambara demonstrates the role of the community through the community nickname. The community nickname suggests closeness and familiarity, and when an adult that Hazel does not like calls her Squeaky, her community nickname, she automatically challenges him: Then here comes Mr. Pearson with his clipboard and his cards and pencils and whistles. . . . We used to call him Jack and the Beanstalk to get him mad . . . ‘‘Well, Squeaky,’’ he says, checking my name off the list and handing me number seven and two pins. And I’m thinking he’s got no right to call me Squeaky, if I can’t call him Beanstalk. ‘‘Hazel Elizabeth Deborah Parker,’’ I correct him. (28)

TONI CADE BAMBARA

31

At the end of ‘‘Raymond’s Run,’’ we see the potential for friendship between two girls who were once competitors. Most likely, this potential arises due to a change within Hazel; while the majority of the story had been focused on Hazel’s desire for individual achievement, by the story’s end, Hazel understands the importance of helping her mentally retarded brother, and she finally moves outside the realm of the individual and into a holistic community space. Hazel’s heightened sensitivity to those around her allows her to recognize, finally, a connection between herself and another young female runner who belongs to the same neighborhood. Likewise, the opening lines of another story in Gorilla, My Love, ‘‘The Lesson’’ reveal the strength of the community: ‘‘Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup.’’ Sylvia, the narrator of this story, uses black dialect that shows that she knows, understands, and is a part of this community, while oddly, Miss Moore, the teacher with the ‘‘proper speech,’’ is somewhat separated from it. Miss Moore’s well-meaning attempts to connect with the children of the community are slightly complicated by her inability to belong to the community of adults. Also, Miss Moore does not belong to a church in the community, and this is ‘‘one of things the grownups talked about when they talked behind her back like a dog’’ (87–88). Yet it is Miss Moore’s longing to help the community and connect with it on some level that ultimately allows the black adults to grant her entry into their children’s lives. And the children do experience intellectual growth as a result of Miss Moore’s actions. After Miss Moore takes the lower-income neighborhood children on a visit to the expensive F.A.O. Schwarz toy store, they become aware of the lack of equality in their lives. They begin thinking revolutionary thoughts: ‘‘I think,’’say Sugar pushing me off her feet like she never done before, cause I whip her ass in a minute, ‘‘that this is not much of a democracy if you ask me. Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?’’ (95)

In ‘‘The Lesson,’’ black English plays an important role in that it ‘‘emphasizes the children’s distance from mainstream white bourgeois culture and power’’ (Heller 279). Furthermore, Bambara allows Sylvia to use black English to ‘‘express her selfconfidence, assertiveness, and creativity as a young black woman’’ (Heller 279). Interestingly, Bambara’s decision to have the characters who are most connected to the black community use black English but still have negative feelings about blackness (‘‘And she was black as hell’’) gives her characters a greater degree of complexity (87). Thus, Bambara’s use of black English helps to define her characters and suggests the multifaceted aspects of the black American experience. Still, Bambara explores the intricacies of black English not only in ‘‘The Lesson,’’ but also in nearly all of the stories in Gorilla, My Love. The characters in Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love continuously use black English and community nicknames to define themselves in relation to each other and to find their own individualized voices. And along with these unique voices, comes a certain expectation of truth: ‘‘Cause if you say Gorilla, My Love, you suppose to mean it’’ (17). The Salt Eaters, Bambara’s acclaimed novel, examines the life of Velma Henry, a Civil Rights Worker who attempts suicide due to her perception of hopelessness and a lack of unity within the black community. The novel itself seems to mock any idea of unity or wholeness. Told from a wide range of perspectives, the novel seems to ask, in

32

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

varying degrees: ‘‘Whatever happened to Third World solidarity?’’ (91). Minnie Ransom, the flashy ‘‘fabled healer of the district’’ tries to save Velma (1) and convince her of the need for wholeness and unity in her life. Minnie Ransom, a woman ‘‘known to calm fretful babies with a smile or a pinch of the thigh . . . to dissolve hard lumps in the body that the doctors at the county hospital called cancer’’ (113), represents the best of the black community and what can happen if marginalized communities try to heal themselves. Thus, it is ‘‘Minnie Ransom’s healing energy’’ that ‘‘is necessary to bring Velma back from fragmentation to wholeness’’ (Collins 39). Over and over again, Minnie asks Velma if she wants to face the world, if she can ‘‘afford to be whole’’ (106), and, at the very end of the novel, the answer appears to be yes. The novel ends with Velma making a crucial decision. Velma has ‘‘[n]o need of Minnie’s hands now so the healer withdraws them . . . just as Velma, rising on steady legs, throws off the shawl that drops down on the stool a burst cocoon’’ (295). The novel’s ending, while hopeful, also suggests that Velma has had and will have many battles ahead of her: Velma would remember it as the moment she started back toward life, the moment when the healer’s hand had touched some vital spot and she was still trying to resist. . . . And years hence she would laugh remembering she’d thought that was an ordeal. She didn’t know the half of it. Of what awaited her in years to come. (278)

The Salt Eaters is a book filled with characters who want to overcome boundaries of race, gender, and class, but who also acknowledge that this may be a near impossible task. Indeed, in The Salt Eaters, ‘‘Toni Cade Bambara fuses the poetics and politics of postmodernism to create a text exploding with power, yet with a message that is balanced precariously between despair and hope’’ (Collins 35). Those Bones Are Not My Child, Bambara’s posthumous novel, deals with the Atlanta Child Murders of the 1970s and 1980s. Described as a ‘‘masterly if not yet fully balanced work’’ (Birkerts 17), Bambara examines the lives of Zala and Spence Rawl when their child Sonny disappears. Zala and Spence embark on a desperate search to find their son, and the novel chronicles Zala’s ‘‘transformation from shocked mother to the empowered activist who confronts government agencies that trivialize Sonny’s disappearance’’ (Benjamin 338). Writer Shanna Greene Benjamin suggests that a ‘‘distressed tone’’ haunts the book, and Bambara admits that Those Bones Are Not My Child was a difficult work to write because of the subject matter and the fact that she had several other projects on hand: ‘‘In 1981 and 1982, I set the project aside several times’’ (673). Still, Bambara’s descriptions of her obsessions with this case . . . reveal the cost of acting as interviewer, investigator, journalist, essayist, and ultimately fiction writer, pushing herself to complete a work she did not want to write’’ (Taylor 259). Perhaps the most significant aspect of Bambara’s legacy is her work in the short story genre. In the essay ‘‘Salvation Is the Issue,’’ Bambara acknowledges her love for the short story: Of all the writing forms, I’ve always been partial to the short story. It suits my temperament. It makes a modest appeal for attention, allowing me to slip up alongside the reader on her/his blind side and grab’m. (43)

While Bambara was indeed a master of the short story, this might have been a mixed blessing. As Bambara herself explained, ‘‘. . . the major publishing industry, the

TONI CADE BAMBARA

33

academic establishment, reviewers, and critics favor the novel’’ (‘‘Salvation Is the Issue’’). Writing for the National Observer, Anne Tyler gives Bambara a mixed review that seems to arise partly from the nature of short story collections themselves. Tyler commends Bambara’s use of black English but observes that ‘‘collections of a single person’s stories are a dangerous business. You may, in fact, begin to find tedious a writer whose stories, taken singly, you’ve always admired. This is so with Toni Cade Bambara’s new collection The Sea Birds Are Still Alive’’ (23).

CRITICAL RECEPTION Most of Bambara’s critical praise arises from the way she uses black English to tell rich, believable, and often humorous stories. New York Times critic C.D.B. Bryan writes that ‘‘ ‘Toni Cade Bambara tells me more about being black through her quiet, proud, silly, tender, hip, acute, loving stories than any amount of literary polemicizing could hope to do’’’ (quoted in Goodnough). However, while Bambara’s use of black English creates lively, interesting narratives, some critics wonder if the vivid language masks her characters’ real anguish. Literary scholar Mary Helen Washington expresses appreciation for ‘‘the power of Bambara’s characters,’’ but she also wonders if there might not be ‘‘almost too much bravado in these first-person narratives—a blurring of the problems and the grief ’’ (353). Critics are also impressed by the way that Bambara intersperses an activist mindset into her writings. Critic Elizabeth Muther describes The Black Woman as a ‘‘pathbreaking, intimate, and incendiary’’ anthology (447) and she argues that Bambara’s female characters ‘‘are not diminutive characters, to be outgrown with the coming of age of the movement. Rather, through their precocious insight they anticipate the resistance strategies and forms of collective self-affirmation that will be essential to the survival of community’’ (449). Furthermore, Bambara offers a glimpse into everyday, working or middle-class black family life, and in these portrayals, Bambara’s writing is at its most human, its most complex. Hazel, the narrator of Gorilla, My Love, matures as a character in part because she exists in ‘‘the liberating and nurturing space of a harmonized and functional African American family’’ (Muther 449). And, in These Bones Are Not My Child, ‘‘Bambara creates a persuasive psychological ambiguity . . . in which the full intensity and complication of family life emerge’’ (Birkerts 17). In the preface to Deep Sightings Morrison writes, ‘‘I don’t know if she knew the heart cling of her fiction. Its pedagogy, its use, she knew very well, but I have often wondered if she knew how brilliant at it she was’’ (ix). Still, if Bambara was unaware of her brilliance, we certainly are. Bambara’s work allows us to see the beauty of ourselves, of our own communities, and the language that they exhibit. We are glad for a writer like Bambara, a writer who chose to write ‘‘straight-up fiction’’ that celebrated who and what we are.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Toni Cade Bambara ‘‘Black English.’’ New York Times, September 3, 1972, BR3. The Black Woman: An Anthology. 1970. Introduction by Eleanor Traylor. Reprint, New York: Washington Square Press, 2005.

34

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

‘‘Foreword.’’ In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1981. ‘‘Gorilla, My Love.’’ In Gorilla, My Love, 13–20. New York: Putnam, 1978. ‘‘How She Came by Her Name.’’ In Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, edited by Toni Morrison, 206. New York: Pantheon, 1996. ‘‘The Lesson.’’ In Gorilla, My Love, 87–96. New York: Putnam, 1978. ‘‘Raymond’s Run.’’ In Gorilla, My Love, 28. New York: Putnam, 1978. The Salt Eaters. New York: Vintage, 1992. ‘‘Salvation Is the Issue.’’ In Black Women Writers, 1950–1980, edited by Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1984. The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. New York: Vintage, 1982. Tales and Stories for Black Folks. New York: Doubleday, 1971. Those Bones Are Not My Children. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Studies of Toni Cade Bambara’s Works Benjamin, Shanna Greene. ‘‘Those Bones Are Not My Child.’’ African American Review 35 (2001): 338–40. Birkerts, Sven. ‘‘Death in Atlanta.’’ New York Times 7 ( January 2, 2000, late edition): 17. Chandler, Zora. ‘‘Interview with Toni Cade Bambara and Sonia Sanchez.’’ In Wild Women in the Whirlwind, edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Collins, Janelle. ‘‘Generating Power: Fission, Fusion, and Post Modern Politics in Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.’’ MELUS 21.2 (1996): 35–47. Goodnough, Abby. ‘‘Toni Cade Bambara, A Writer and Documentary Maker, 56.’’ New York Times, December 11, 1995, D10. Heller, Janet Ruth. ‘‘Toni Cade Bambara’s Use of African American Vernacular English in ‘The Lesson.’ ’’ Style 37 (2003): 279–93. Hull, Gloria T. ‘‘ ‘What It Is I Think She’s Doing Anyhow’: A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.’’ In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, 216–32. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Morrison, Toni, ed. ‘‘Preface.’’ In Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Muther, Elizabeth. ‘‘Bambara’s Fiesty Girls: Resistance Narratives.’’ African American Review 36 (2002): 447–59. Taylor, Carole Anne. ‘‘Post Modern Disconnection and the Archive of Bones: Toni Cade Bambara’s Last Work.’’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35.2–3 (2002): 258–80. Traylor, Eleanor. ‘‘Music as Theme: The Jazz Mode in the Works of Toni Cade Bambara.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980), edited by Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1984. Tyler, Anne. ‘‘Farewell to the Story as Imperiled Species.’’ National Observer, May 9, 1977, 3–4. Washington, Mary Helen. ‘‘Toni Cade Bambara.’’ In Black-eyed Susans, Midnight Birds, 353–55. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Rochelle Spencer

GWENDOLYN BENNETT (1902–1981)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Gwendolyn Bennett, poet and short story writer, was born on July 8, 1902, in Giddings, Texas, and came to adulthood as the Harlem Renaissance developed and flourished. Bennett made significant contributions to this emerging African American cultural scene as a poet, journalist, and artist, contributions that are now coming to be recognized as significant. Bennett’s parents were teachers and she spent her early years in Nevada and Washington, D.C., while they taught and furthered their educations. When Bennett was seven years old she was in effect kidnapped by her father in a custody dispute and did not see her mother for fifteen years, living meanwhile in Pennsylvania and then Brooklyn, where she graduated from Brooklyn Girls’ High School. There Bennett was the first African American to be elected to the school literary and dramatic societies, won art awards and was elected to write the class graduation speech. She began college in arts education at Columbia University and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1924, studying painting and graphic design; Bennett’s poetry often shows influence of her visual sensibility in its vivid imagery. As early as 1923 Bennett’s poems began appearing in African American periodicals such as Opportunity published by the Urban League, and Crisis, the house organ of the NAACP, both important journals in promoting African American cultural expression in the 1920s. Bennett became part of Harlem Renaissance networks with close ties of friendship and aesthetics to those of her own generation such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Helene Johnson while also receiving vital support from older figures like W.E.B. DuBois, Jessie Fauset, and particularly James Weldon Johnson and Charles S. Johnson, the publisher of Opportunity. These connections remained strong after she left New York to teach art at Howard University in 1924 and while she studied art on a scholarship in Paris from 1925 to 1926. Returning to Harlem for the summer of 1926, Bennett worked at Opportunity and began writing an arts news column she titled ‘‘The Ebony Flute.’’ Bennett also joined with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman in founding Fire!! a short-lived journal serving younger African American artists before returning to Howard that fall. In 1927 Bennett left Howard for what proved to be an unhappy marriage to Alfred Joseph Jackson. They moved to Eustis, Florida, where Jackson practiced medicine but from this culturally remote location Bennett found herself unable to continue with her ‘‘Ebony Flute’’ columns. She and her husband returned to New York area in 1930 but the Great Depression had muted the Renaissance and Bennett’s writing career never fully revived. Her next decades were spent in arts administration and education, first with New Deal arts programs and then progressive community schools. Charges of communist sympathies forced Bennett to leave several posts, and she spent her last years in Kutz-

36

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

town, Pennsylvania, as an antiques dealer with her second husband, Richard Crosscup. Bennett died on May 30, 1981. MAJOR WORKS Bennett’s most productive literary period coincided with the early years of the Harlem Renaissance and her writing engaged with its political and aesthetic issues, as well as those of Modernism. Pride in racial heritage and in African American forms of creativity show in her typically short lyric poems. The poems also often play with conventional forms, using a loosely structured free verse and take surprising turns, invoking the freedom of the new literary sensibilities. Bennett most frequently published in Opportunity and Crisis, and her artwork also occasionally appeared on their covers. Illustrating this new pride in African roots is ‘‘Heritage’’ (1923), whose speaker longs to experience Africa with all her senses and to feel deep connection to the palm trees, to the Nile, and to the people of Africa. ‘‘To a Dark Girl’’ (1923) unapologetically celebrates all aspects of African American beauty, the sources of which are traced to both African queens and African Americans’ troubled history in the United States. The conventional diction of ‘‘Song’’ (1925) bursts suddenly into African American folk dialect in its second stanza and celebrates the folk music culture of hymns and banjo music. ‘‘To Usward’’ (1924) was chosen as the dedication poem for the March 1924 Civic Club dinner for Harlem writers sponsored by Opportunity, and consequently became one of Bennett’s best-known poems. The dinner was an intergenerational gathering of Harlem Renaissance literary figures that launched New Negro literature and brought African American writers and white publishers together. ‘‘To Usward’’ celebrates this moment and the diversity of forms and tones of the younger artists of the Renaissance. A Chinese ginger jar is used as the poem’s central image, reflecting an orientalizing influence from modernism. ‘‘To Usward’’ was published in both Opportunity and Crisis shortly after presentation. Even Bennett’s most personal poems can often be seen as commenting on larger concerns. In the short lyric ‘‘Hatred’’ (1926) Bennett dissects the emotion using both strictly poetic diction such as ‘‘even-tide’’ and the conventional nature imagery of trees ‘‘etched’’ in a horizon, alongside the language of raw emotion. While presumably describing a personal relationship, Bennett’s poem can also be interpreted as expressing a more generalized social anger that would be difficult to express more directly as an African American female. Personal concerns are again combined with cultural commentary in Bennett’s ‘‘Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas’’ (1926), which pays homage to the black author while lamenting a lost love. Poems such as ‘‘Nocturne’’ (1923), ‘‘Street Lamps in Early Spring’’ (1926), and ‘‘Fantasy’’ (1927) use the free verse and imagism of modernist poetry, while their nocturnal themes link Bennett to other Harlem Renaissance poets in seeing this alternative sphere as suggestive of the rich but often masked and equivocal nature of African American experience. Bennett’s creative resistance to conventional poetic structure can be seen in poems such as ‘‘Quatrain 2’’ (1923) and ‘‘Sonnet 2’’ (1927). Both are self-consciously and pointedly titled with the names of poetic forms associated with ‘‘high’’ literature, which Bennett goes on to problematize. ‘‘Sonnet 2’’starts in Shakespearean sonnet form before suddenly turning to informal and folk diction and lines of varying lengths. The two

GWENDOLYN BENNETT

37

couplets of ‘‘Quatrain 2’’ are only loosely connected by their nature imagery and use irregular line lengths, meter, and punctuation. While not much known as a fiction writer, Bennett published two short stories including ‘‘Wedding Day.’’ The work centers on Paul Watson, an African American in 1920s Paris who overcomes his distrust of white Americans after falling in love with an expatriate. When Mary flees on their wedding day, leaving a note explaining that she ‘‘just couldn’t go through with it’’ the ‘‘surprise’’ ending is ironic, with Bennett’s work implying that this racist conclusion is no surprise at all. Bennett’s ‘‘Ebony Flute’’ columns represent a substantial part of her published work and offer a sense of the vibrant flowering of African American culture in many genres in the late 1920s, including African American centers beyond New York. Using her network of contacts and soliciting comment and opinion from her readers, Bennett produced the engaging monthly arts column for Opportunity from August 1926 to May 1928. Typically a series of brief notices relayed news of authors, dramatists, artists, and musicians, their publications, performances, and their works in progress. It also included informal reviews, literary group and contest news, and excerpts of correspondence, all interspersed with Bennett’s commentary and musings, conveyed with an inclusive and whimsical yet discerning tone. CRITICAL RECEPTION Bennett was recognized in her time as a versatile and significant artist and personality of the Harlem Renaissance. James Weldon Johnson and Charles S. Johnson actively mentored her, with the latter describing Bennett as ‘‘one of the most versatile and accomplished of the younger poets.’’ Her work appeared in many of the leading anthologies of African American literature of the era including Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927), and James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1931). Contemporary anthologies of African American women’s and Harlem Renaissance writing have continued to include Bennett, although a separate edition of her work has never been made available; Bennett’s relatively few published poems and her early retirement from literature have left her largely unknown. While the significance of Bennett’s work and career, including her ‘‘Ebony Flute’’ columns, has been increasingly recognized, contemporary criticism typically discusses her in relation to other Harlem Renaissance figures rather than taking her as solo focus. Sandra Y. Govan is the scholar most noted for her work on Bennett, including a planned biography that would correct a lack for this accomplished and interesting writer. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Gwendolyn Bennett ‘‘The Ebony Flute.’’ In Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cary D. Wintz, 103–37. New York: Garland, 1996. (Volume 3 of The Harlem Renaissance 1920–1940.) ‘‘Heritage’’ (1923), ‘‘To Usward’’ (1924), ‘‘Song’’ (1925), ‘‘To a Dark Girl’’ (1923), ‘‘Fantasy’’ (1927), ‘‘Secret’’ (1927), ‘‘Hatred’’ (1926), ‘‘Nocturne’’ (1923), ‘‘Quatrain 2’’ (1923), and ‘‘Street Lamps in Early Spring’’ (1926). In Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem

38

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Renaissance, edited by Maureen Honey, 103–8, 159–61, 222–24. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. ‘‘Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas’’ (1926), ‘‘Sonnet 1’’ (1927), and ‘‘Sonnet 2’’ (1927). In Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen, 159–62. New York: Harper and Row, 1927. ‘‘Wedding Day’’ (1926). In Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Nathan Huggins, 191– 97. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Studies of Gwendolyn Bennett’s Works Daniel, Walter C., and Sandra Y. Govan. ‘‘Gwendolyn Bennett.’’ In Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, edited by Trudier Harris, 3–10. Detroit: Gale, 1987. (Volume 51 of Dictionary of Literary Biography.) Jones, Gwendolyn S. ‘‘Gwendolyn Bennett.’’ In African-American Authors 1745–1945: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 18–23. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Witalec, Janet, ed. ‘‘Gwendolyn Bennett.’’ In The Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion, 1–34. 3 vols. Detroit: Gale, 2003.

Sue E. Barker

MARITA BONNER (1898–1971)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE One of four children born in Boston to Joseph and Mary Anne Bonner, essayist, short storywriter and dramatist Marita Bonner is increasingly cited as a pioneering and influential woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance. An essayist, short story writer, and playwright, Bonner was one of the first writers of her generation to confront the complex connections of race, gender, and class in the first half of the twentieth century. After excelling in the public school system of Boston’s Brookline district, Bonner enrolled at Radcliffe College in Massachusetts in 1918, where she majored in English and Comparative Literature. Bonner began her own teaching career while still a student at Radcliffe, taking a position at Cambridge High School in Boston. After her graduation in 1922 Bonner secured two teaching positions in Washington, D.C., first at Bluefield Colored High School and then at Armstrong High School, the first manual training school for African Americans in the city. While in Washington, Bonner lived at two addresses in the affluent, middle-class LeDroit Park, an area favored by writers, educationalists, and other professionals. Bonner was a frequent visitor to Georgia Douglas Johnson’s S Street Salon—an important base for Harlem Renaissance writers in Washington; other guests included Jessie Fauset, Angelina Grimke´, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. In 1925 Bonner’s autobiographical ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored’’ won the essay writing competition of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, under the editorship of W.E.B. DuBois. After the success of her first publication, Bonner produced a series of short stories and essays, which appeared in Crisis as well as in Opportunity, the official journal of the Urban League. Between 1927 and 1929 she also completed work on three original plays, The Purple Flower being the most notable and well received. In 1930 Bonner married accountant William Almy Occomy, and the couple moved to Chicago where they raised three children. Bonner continued to write under her married name, producing her Frye Street collection of short stories set against the backdrop of urban, multiethnic life in Chicago. In 1941 Bonner published her final short story, stopped writing, and returned to teaching. She died from injuries sustained during an apartment fire in 1971. After her death Bonner’s work largely disappeared from view, until, in 1987, a posthumous edition of her complete works was published under the title Frye Street and Environs. The book’s material, which includes previously unpublished writing, was taken from the writer’s notebooks which had been kept and preserved by Bonner’s daughter. MAJOR WORKS Following the publication of Marita Bonner’s complete works, it is her prize-winning essay of 1925, ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored,’’ that continues to be

40

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

regarded as her major contribution to African American literature. Its importance lies in the fact that it identifies and then challenges the dynamics that operate between race, class, and gender in Harlem society. Bonner highlights a crucial contradiction between the emancipatory promise of an ultimately masculine ‘‘New Negro,’’ and the disappointing reality of the female urban experience. For Bonner the moral impediments placed on the middle-class woman of all races ensured that her life continued to be defined by paralysis, frustration, and feminine confinement: For you know that—being a woman—you cannot twice a month or twice a year, for that matter, break away to see or hear anything in a city that is supposed to see and hear too much. That’s being a woman. A woman of any color. . . . You decide that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes; that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears and throat. (1)

After the success of her first essay, Bonner continued to explore ideas of racial and sexual empowerment in her essays, short stories, and plays, anticipating many of the central themes of more familiar writers, including Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston. However, Bonner’s literary preoccupation with racial ‘‘passing’’ as a potent mode of nonidentification suggests that she can be most closely associated with fellow urbanite, Nella Larsen. Bonner’s series of Frye Street stories, written throughout the 1920s and 1930s, mark a narrative shift away from the unfulfilled promises of a Harlem e´lite toward an increasingly degraded, racially conflicted urbanity. Stories such as ‘‘Nothing New’’ (1926), ‘‘Tin Can’’ (1934), and ‘‘The Whipping’’ (1939) openly reject Harlem’s insistence upon bourgeois ‘‘uplift’’ and aspiration. Instead, Bonner’s ability to express a sense of dispossession and discord in the urban North establishes her both as an important voice of the Depression era, and as a necessary critic of the mythology of the ‘‘New Negro.’’

CRITICAL RECEPTION The publication of Marita Bonner’s complete works in 1987 saw a gradual proliferation of scholarly interest in her writing and wider cultural significance. While Cheryl Wall’s Women of the Harlem Renaissance primarily focuses on the work of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, Bonner’s work is also illuminated and contextualized in this important study. In her introduction to an emergent tradition of women’s writing within Harlem, Wall identifies Bonner’s prize-winning essay of 1925 ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored’’ as a necessary counterpoint to Alain Locke’s seminal study of the same year, The New Negro. In Invented Lives, Mary Helen Washington pairs the work of Marita Bonner and Nella Larsen in an attempt to foreground the related racial, sexual, and class dynamics of ‘‘passing.’’ Maria Balshaw’s recent book, Looking for Harlem, provides a series of detailed analyses of Bonner’s short stories. In a chapter titled ‘‘Women in the City of Refuge,’’ Balshaw pays close attention to Bonner’s cycle of Frye Street stories, illuminating the writer’s critical observations of working-class, multiethnic urbanity. This chapter also makes clear Bonner’s removal of a Harlem aesthetic to other centers of black cultural life, in this case Chicago. Although in Color, Sex and Poetry Gloria Hull pays little close attention to the detail of Bonner’s work, her book does offer some invaluable insights into the personal and cultural dynamics that defined Georgia Douglas Johnson’s S Street Salon.

MARITA BONNER

41

Bonner’s work can also now be found in a number of critical anthologies. Most useful are Rita Dandridge’s Black Women’s Blues, Clarence Major’s Calling the Wind, and Bill Mullen’s Revolutionary Tales. While Major and Mullen focus specifically on Bonner’s importance as a short story writer, Katherine Kelly’s Modern Drama by Women introduces Bonner’s parallel status as a popular and critically acclaimed playwright. Until recently the range of scholarly articles and essays on Bonner’s work has been limited, often placing the writing on the margins of Harlem’s more familiar writers. However, there is now a growing body of critical argument directed at Bonner’s literary contributions of the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. Allison Berg and Merideth Taylor advance an elegant, theoretically informed account of Bonner’s most famous play in their article ‘‘Enacting Difference: Marita Bonner’s ‘Purple Flower’ and the Ambiguities of Race.’’ In contrast, Judith Musser’s article for Studies in Short Fiction explores the impact of Bonner’s dedication as a teacher and educationalist on her writing. A good example of an early response to Bonner’s critical re-emergence can be found in Sharon Dean and Erlene Stetson’s ‘‘Flower-dust and Springtime: Harlem Renaissance Women.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Marita Bonner Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner, edited and introduced by Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored.’’ Reprint in Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960, edited by Mary Helen Washington, 168–73. London: Virago Press, 1989.

Studies of Marita Bonner’s Works Balshaw, Maria. Looking for Harlem: Urban Aesthetics in African-American Literature. London; Stirling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000. Berg, Allison, and Merideth Taylor. ‘‘Enacting Difference: Marita Bonner’s ‘Purple Flower’ and the Ambiguities of Race.’’ African American Review (Fall 1998): 468–81. Chick, Nancy. ‘‘Marita Bonner’s Revolutionary Purple Flowers: Challenging the Symbol of White Womanhood.’’ Langston Hughes Review 13.1 (Fall/Spring 1994–1995): 21–32. Dandridge, Rita B. Black Women’s Blues: A Literary Anthology. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Dean, Sharon, and Erlene Stetson. ‘‘Flower-dust and Springtime: Harlem Renaissance Women.’’ Radical Teacher 18 (1980): 1–8. Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex and Poetry. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Kelly, Katherine E., ed. Modern Drama by Women, 1880s–1930s: An International Anthology. New York: Routledge, 1996. Major, Clarence, ed. Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African-American Short Stories. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. Mullen, Bill, ed. Revolutionary Tales: African American Women’s Short Stories, from the First Story to the Present. New York: Laurel, 1995. Musser, Judith. ‘‘African American Women and Education: Marita Bonner’s Response to the ‘Talented Tenth.’ ’’ Studies in Short Fiction 34.1 (Winter 1997): 73–85. Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph. ‘‘Marita Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers’ Gardens.’’ Black American Literature Forum 21.1–2 (Spring–Summer 1987): 165–83. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.

42

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960. London: Virago Press, 1989. Wilson, Sondra K., ed. The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry and Essays from the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine. New York: Random House, 1989.

Sophie Blanch

CANDY DAWSON BOYD (1946– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Candy Dawson Boyd is a children’s book author, an activist, an educator, and a literacy advocate. She was born Marguerite Cecille Dawson in Chicago, Illinois, on August 8, 1946. The eldest of three children born to Julian Dawson and Mary Ruth (Ridley), Boyd was raised by her divorced mother in an all black neighborhood in south Chicago. She attended segregated schools until high school and utilized a small segregated library stocked with books discarded from the white library. After graduating from high school in 1962, Boyd enrolled in Northeastern Illinois State University. Her commitment to social change started when she and several friends tried to stop blockbusting in a nearby Chicago neighborhood. In college her activist activities began to supersede her schoolwork, so Boyd withdrew from college and worked with the civil rights movement. A year later, she returned to college and pursued a degree in education. She graduated with a B.A. degree in 1967. After college, Boyd taught for several years as an elementary school teacher in her Chicago neighborhood. In 1971, Boyd moved to Berkeley, California, where she taught a multiethnic classroom of students for the first time. Instead of just holding one teaching position, Boyd held several positions simultaneously while she earned her M.A. degree in 1978 and later her doctoral degree in 1982. At the discovery of a paucity of appropriate literature for children, Boyd decided to write books for children. She prepared responsibly by taking classes in writing for children and by reading every children’s book in the Berkeley Public Library. She wrote six novels before committing herself almost exclusively to training teachers to teach. Boyd is director and professor of Reading and Language Arts Program in the School of Education at Saint Mary’s College of California. She has become renowned for her devotion to training teachers and developing programs that produce great readers. She lectures and writes articles challenging authors to provide accurate and quality multiethnic literature for all children.

MAJOR WORKS Unlike most children’s books at the time, written in demeaning language depicting African Americans and their neighborhoods negatively, Boyd has written books that are inspiring, positive, and realistic. Her novels focus on the universal themes of love, friendship, striving for excellence, broken dreams, death, rejection, and responsibility for self and others. Her books contradict the widely held perception by the dominant society that the black is lazy and violent. In her first novel Circle of Gold, young Mattie believes her widowed mother, who works two jobs, loves her twin brother Matt more. She tries to win her mother’s love by struggling to purchase her a gold pin.

44

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

At the loss of a best friend from a drunken driving incident in Breadsticks and Blessings Places, the major character, Toni, is consumed with grief. With her friend Mattie’s help, she is able to recover. Charlie, an entrepreneurial sixth grader in Charlie Pippin, has trouble following the school code elects to do her social science report on Vietnam. She discovers her stern father was a Vietnam War hero who lost his dreams after the experience. Chevrolet Saturdays deals with divorce and adjustment in a blended family. The protagonist Joey’s difficulty dealing with his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage affect his school performance. In Boyd’s books, schools are sites for learning and places for developing responsibility outside the family. Each of her works has episodes at school. CRITICAL RECEPTION Candy Boyd has written stories about children experiences in the home, at school, and in the community from the child’s perspective. She provides through stories how families survive and prevail despite setbacks and hardships. Her aim is to write realistic stories for children to see themselves and family positively and at the same time dismantle the dominant society’s stereotype of the African American. Boyd realized she has initiated that change when a young reader wrote her a letter saying the novel Fall Secrets touched her heart. Even though she did not share the character Jessie’s race ‘‘we are much the same. I feel as if it could be me. . . .’’ Although Breadsticks and Blessing Places was turned down for publication for nine years, the work is a reprieve from the gang violence, broken homes, and despair of many urban, adolescent novels, says reviewer, Gerry Larson. Jerry Flack, a reviewer for School Library Journal, says Charlie Pippin is a good novel about vital people and important issues. It informs children on the impact the Vietnam War has had on families and it addresses questions not well represented in books for children. Boyd comprehends the impact divorce has on children, says Frances Bradburn of Chevrolet Saturdays. Most of all she helps readers of all races and ethnic backgrounds understand the challenge. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Candy Dawson Boyd Breadsticks and Blessing Places. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Reprint, Forever Friends. New York: Puffin, 1986. Charlie Pippin. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Chevrolet Saturdays. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Circle of Gold. New York: Scholastic, 1984. Daddy, Daddy Be There. New York: Philomel, 1995. A Different Beat. New York: Puffin, 1996. Fall Secrets. New York: Puffin, 1994. ‘‘I See Myself in There: Experiencing Self and Others in Multiethnic Children’s Literature.’’ In The New Press Guide to Multicultural Resources for Young Readers, edited by Daphane Muse. New York: New Press, 1997. ‘‘Multiethnic Literature as Story.’’ Yearbook (Claremont Reading Conference), 1991, 24–39. School Library Media Annual (SLMA), 1991, 9, 49–59.

CANDY DAWSON BOYD

45

Studies of Candy Dawson Boyd’s Works Bradburn, Frances. Rev. of Chevrolet Saturdays. Wilson Library Bulletin 68 ( January 1994): 119. Cooper, Ilene. Rev. of Fall Secrets. Booklist 91 (September 15, 1994): 135. Flack, Jerry. Rev. of Charlie Pippin. School Library Journal 33 (April 7, 1987): 92. Larson, Gerry. Rev. Breadsticks and Blessing Places. School Library Journal 32 (September 1985): 142.

Bennie P. Robinson

JOANNE BRAXTON (1950– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Literary critic and poet Joanne ‘‘Jodie’’ Margaret Braxton was born in Lakeland, Maryland, on May 25, 1950, to Mary Ellen Weems Braxton and Harry McHenry Braxton, Sr. Braxton graduated from Northwestern Senior High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, earned a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and obtained a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her doctoral dissertation, ‘‘Autobiography by Black American Women: A Tradition Within a Tradition’’ (1984), is an early version of her ground breaking critical study Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (1989), which offers a trenchant analysis of the Afra-American experience as expressed in slave narratives, autobiographies, and subgenres of the field of autobiography. Braxton is a dedicated teacher, fruitful scholar, and an accomplished poet and playwright. She is currently the Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor in the English and American Studies Departments at The College of William and Mary. She has received several awards honoring her classroom performance, including the Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award, the William and Mary Alumni Teaching Fellowship, and The Outstanding Virginia Educator Award. Her scholarly writings and edited volumes include the aforementioned Black Women Writing (1989), Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance (with Andre´e Nicola McLaughlin) (1990), The Collected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1993), Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook (1998), and Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery and Memory (2004). She is a frequent contributor of poetry and reviews to magazines and periodicals such as Presence Africaine, Massachusetts Review, and the Journal of Black Poetry. Her creative works include a volume of poetry titled Sometimes I Think of Maryland (1977), and a play written in conjunction with her work with the Middle Passage Project at The College of William and Mary that celebrates the survival of African people in the New World, titled Crossing Deep River: A Ritual Drama in Three Movements. Braxton’s uncompromising efforts to enrich the lives of people of African descent have won her widespread recognition and numerous awards. She is currently writing two new plays. MAJOR WORKS While Braxton studied autobiography under Charles T. Davis and John Blassingame, her affinity and fascination with autobiography stemmed from her close relationships with the elders of her family, particularly her family’s matriarchs. Braxton’s love affair with autobiography began in childhood as she sat at her grandmother’s knee listening to ‘‘ghost stories and preacher tales, as well as lullabies and nursery rhymes’’ (Black Women Writing Autobiography, 3–4). Learning about her family history and genealogy in this manner paved the way for her intellectual study because she not only

JOANNE BRAXTON

47

listened to the stories but also came to understand her connection to them and used this knowledge to see the experience of black womanhood that was hidden behind a veil of race, gender, and color prejudice. Braxton’s childhood connection to black women’s stories as both outsider (because she would never live these particular experiences) and insider (because she is black and female) is reflected in the thesis of Black Women Writing Autobiography. Throughout the book, she argues that black American women enjoy a ‘‘confluence of culture and consciousness’’ (208) and a ‘‘mystic sisterhood’’ of shared language, frame of reference, and allusion (1). The three-part study traces this bond from accounts by nineteenth-century enslaved and freeborn women to ones by modern black women, examining the birth and development of the figure of the ‘‘outraged mother’’ who wields sassy language as a weapon against racial discrimination and gender oppression. In Wild Women in the Whirlwind, Braxton extends this argument in her role as editor and contributor. As editor, she gathered essays by and about women of African descent that analyze the Afra-American literary renaissance and acknowledge its rich cultural history, effectively continuing the matrilineal sisterhood established in her earlier work. As contributor, she proves the validity of black women’s written and oral traditions as she revisits the trope of the outraged mother. In recent years, Braxton’s love for and celebration of the Afra-American experience have been channeled into new scholarly and creative endeavors, especially through the establishment of The Middle Passage Project in 1995 at The College of William and Mary, which serves to explore the ‘‘history and memory surrounding the transatlantic slave trade, its resounding effects on Africans in the Americas, and its representation in literature and the humanities.’’ The Middle Passage Project is multifaceted and has components ranging from research and lectures to curriculum development, workshops, and artistic performances.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics of Braxton’s work praise her resolute call to correct black and feminist literary criticism by demanding a redefinition of African American autobiography to include images of women and their oral and written expressions, such as diaries, journals, reminiscences, and memoirs. Wilma King calls Black Women Writing Autobiography a pioneering contribution to African American feminist scholarship. When I Think of Maryland was released, Gwendolyn Brooks hailed it for its economy, courage and genuine expression of youthful energy. Her recent scholarship and work continues this quest, as it demands that the experiences of all people of African descent get the attention they deserve.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Joanne Braxton ‘‘Asserting Selfhood: The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (Book Review).’’ New Republic, November 4, 1972, 27–30. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

48

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

The Collected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. ‘‘Crusader for Justice: Ida B. Wells.’’ In African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by William L. Andrews, 90–112. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Work of the Afro-American Woman, edited by N. F. Mossell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ‘‘Living Down to Expectations: Schoolgirls (Book Review).’’ With Julia K. Brazelton. The Women’s Review of Books 12 (1995): 20–21. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery and Memory, edited with Maria Diedrich. Muenster, Germany: LIT, 2004. ‘‘Silences in Harriet ‘Linda Brent’ Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.’’ In Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, 146–55. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Sometimes I Think of Maryland. New York: Sunbury Press, 1977. ‘‘A Song of Transcendence: Maya Angelou.’’ In Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, edited by Harold Bloom, 93–110. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, edited with Andre´e Nicola McLaughlin. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1990.

Studies of Joanne Braxton’s Works Evans, Gaynelle. ‘‘Frustration over Sexual, Racial Oppression Unleashed in ‘Wild Women.’ ’’ Black Issues in Higher Education (April 1990): 22. King, Wilma. ‘‘Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition.’’ Rev. of Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition, edited by Joanne Braxton. Journal of Southern History 57 (1991): 523–24. Sadoff, Dianne F. ‘‘Black Women Writing Autobiography.’’ Rev. of Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition, edited by Joanne Braxton. American Quarterly 43 (1991): 119. Sundquist, Eric J. ‘‘Words Walking Without Masters.’’ Rev. of Wild Women in the Whirlwind, edited by Joanne Braxton and Andre´e McLaughlin. New York Times Book Review, February 25, 1990, 11. Wilentz, Gay. ‘‘Affirming Critical Difference: Reading Black Women’s Texts.’’ Rev. of Changing Our Own Words, edited by Cheryl A. Wall; and Wild Women in the Whirlwind, edited by Joanne Braxton and Andre´e McLaughlin. Kenyon Review 13 (1991): 146–51.

Tanya N. Clark

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917–2000)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet, novelist and short story writer Gwendolyn Brooks is known and celebrated as a wordsmith who embraced and experimented with words in her poetry in order, ultimately, to shape them so that others would clearly comprehend their import. This was not only the way that she did poetry, but also the way that she described herself; she did not mince words. When, for example, her biographer asked her in a 1990 interview if she would embrace the term ‘‘African American’’ in lieu of the term ‘‘Black’’ to describe herself, Brooks responded, ‘‘I am a Black,’’ because it was this term that made her both ‘‘African and American’’ alike and that connected her to blacks throughout the diaspora. Although Brooks makes a distinction between her earlier poetic ethos and the one that existed after her introduction to the Black Power Movement in 1967, the one trope that travels throughout all of her writing is her gift of responding to the human experience through black subjects. From the 1945 poem ‘‘The Mother,’’ which describes a black tenement mother’s relationship to her aborted child to the 1990 poem ‘‘Winnie’’ that describes Winnie Mandela’s relationship to her husband and his cause, Brooks has captured the desires and emotions of her subject in poetic form and has invited us into her creative world. Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, to Keziah Corinne Wims who went back to her hometown to deliver her first of two children because of her desire to give birth in the presence of her own mother. It was Brooks’s mother who taught both children eight basic tenets of successful living including being dutiful to others—it was Keziah’s wont to say, ‘‘If you know yourself, you know other people’’—and empathizing with other people. It was also Keziah who told Brooks that she was ‘‘going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar!’’ and insisted that her talented daughter approach both James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes when they separately visited local churches in Chicago, so that they could see Brooks’s work. Brooks’s father, David Anderson, rounded off Brooks’s loving household in that he was a humble and soft-spoken janitor who surrounded his children with edifying books and song and who encouraged his children to submit to the only church that mattered, that of simple kindness. There is no doubt that these wonderful nuggets of living spilled eloquently into Brooks’s poetry and her life. She was so grateful to his influence that by the time she wrote The Bean Eaters in 1960, she hurried and finished the collection so that she could dedicate it to her father before his death. In 1938, under the tutelage of Chicago socialite Inez Cunningham Stark, a reader for Poetry magazine, Brooks joined a group of up-and-coming Chicago artists and scholars, among them Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs who operates the African American Cultural Center in Chicago, William Couch, a scholar of African American drama and author of New Black Playwrights (1968), Margaret Danner a poet that Brooks describes as under-recognized, and poet Henry Blakely, whom Brooks married and had two children. Although Blakely never sent out his own work and therefore never experienced

50

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

fame as did Brooks, she points out that he always ‘‘encouraged me in my writing all along’’—a fact that she acknowledges even when they briefly separated in 1969. It was with these artistic comrades in a Chicago South Side Community Arts Center that Brooks honed some of her writing skills and much of the work she produced during this time ended up in her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Although Brooks’s first publication occurred when she was thirteen years old, a poem that was published in American Childhood magazine in 1930 when her influences were English and American romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Cullen Bryant, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, it was not until the 1940s that audiences began to see influences of modern poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. It was Brooks’s knowledge of all these forms that, no doubt, informed her own poetic style and form. In 1943, she won the Midwestern Writer’s Conference Poetry award but it was not until the creation of Annie Allen in 1949, that she garnered the Pulitzer Prize, the first ever awarded to a black person. Of this poem, Brooks is most proud, not so much the content as the form by acknowledging that she was ‘‘impressed with the effectiveness of technique’’ in this poem, which is written in precise iambic pentameter. In the midst of her creative production, Brooks met Emily Morrison, whose words helped shape the poet that some have defined as one of the greatest American poets. Morrison told Brooks ‘‘not to write disconnectedly about such things as love, death, and the mysteries of life, but to center [her] ideas in the background [she] really knew something about.’’ As a result, Brooks wrote a stream of books that focused on what she knew—namely people who fleshed out her life in Chicago: Maud Martha (1953), a fictional autobiography, and her only novel: Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), which was about those who lived in what was politically and commonly referred to as Chicago’s Black Belt; and The Bean Eaters (1960), which included one of her most anthologized and poignant poems, ‘‘We Real Cool.’’ Along with these publications came awards and teaching jobs that allowed her to reach the community she was building her entire poetic career upon—people and their experiences. This was also true in her later works as they were in her earlier works, even when she met some young, progressive black male poets who were committed to the revolution in 1967. While attending a conference at Fisk University, Brooks encountered, among others, Don L. Lee, who later changed his name to Haki Madhubuti. Although Brooks attributes her creative growth in part to him because he was one of the innovators who ushered her into a more black-centered conversation and consciousness, he along with others respected Brooks and her work and made that clear at the conference. Eventually, their influence was not only seen in the form and content of Brooks’s poetry—from structured form to free verse—it was also this group of artists who encouraged Brooks to subscribe and use black publishers for her work after 1967. It was this medium that allowed Brooks to reach the very people who informed her poems from the beginning— black people—and to explain the human experience as an extension of the black experience, a feature that makes her work relevant to all who read it today. Brooks died December 3, 2000, at the age of 83. MAJOR WORKS Keziah Brooks’s characterization of her daughter’s fate of being the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar should not be analyzed lightly. Though neither Brooks nor her mother elaborate on what that meant, it only takes reading Brooks’s poetry to see that, like

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

51

Dunbar, Brooks was invested in capturing the emotional upheaval, physical struggle, and material reality of black people. Brooks is able to take the form that Dunbar initiated and elevate it to another artistic level in that her poems present a more realistic view of diversity and complexity of black people and thus the human experience. Her women, for example, are more than the stereotypical matriarch, whore, or bitch that one expects. In ‘‘The Mother,’’ Brooks describes a woman who aborted multiple children but not without some regret and sadness. Though we never understand exactly why she decided to ‘‘kill’’ the children, we accept her pain of losing them. Where the mother is unapologetically flawed, Brooks gives us a heroine in characters like Annie Allen in the ‘‘Anniad.’’ The title very purposely reminds any literary scholar of Homer’s ‘‘Iliad’’ and Virgil’s ‘‘Aeniad’’ in that Brooks creates a war situation in which the eventual antagonist, Tan Man, is sent to fight. But in the midst of the poem, we see that the real war is Annie’s thoughts concerning Tan Man and her love for him that has eclipsed the love that she has for herself. We find that in the end, Annie trusts her construction of Tan Man as being a destructive force in her life so by abandoning her fantasies of Tan Man, she finds herself. In turn, she wins her own personal ‘‘war’’ by finding peace and fulfillment within herself. Brooks points out that her 1988 poem, ‘‘Song of Winnie’’ (from Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle), marked a ‘‘very significant change in my writing’’; it is one of Brooks’s longer poems that goes into the mind of a young Winnie Mandela. She thinks about the long years that her husband, Nelson, spent in prison cut off from so much and how she was left to uphold his image and political ideals. In the end, Winnie tries to put the love she has for her people ahead of the love she has for herself. Brooks also gives us insight into her own life by providing the autobiographical novel Maud Martha and her autobiography Report from Part One. What is most significant about both works is the strong detection of transformation that both heroines go through. In addition to dealing with the ugliness of racism, classism, and sexism, Maud Martha ultimately tells the story of a black girl who advances from romantic dreams to achieve completeness as a woman. When Maud Martha meets her future husband, Paul, she laments the fact that she has only one real feature that would make him marry her: ‘‘I am what he would call—sweet’’ (52). Her sister Helen, on the other hand, had beauty from the beginning. As a child, Maud realized that though Helen is only two years older and matches Maud in weight, height, and thickness, Helen has features that Maud could never match: ‘‘the lashes, the grace, the little ways with the hands and feet’’ (2, 3). Even as a teenager, one of the neighborhood boys looks past Maud’s ‘‘sweetness’’ for Helen’s beauty. He invites one of them into his car and when Maud mistakes his invitation as one meant for her, he replies, ‘‘I don’t mean you, you old black gal . . . I mean Helen’’ (34, 35). But despite her dark skin and indelicate features, when Paul meets Maud, he wants to marry her. Maud makes it through her marriage, her life, and her existence not because Paul finally comes around and recognizes her inner beauty but because of a kind of understanding that was fostered in her when she had to deal with her family’s awe of Helen’s beauty: Helen was still the ranking queen, not only with the Emmanuels of the world, but even with their father—their mother—their brother. She did not blame the family. It was not their fault. She understood. They could not help it. They were enslaved, were fascinated, and they were not at all to blame. (35)

But it is in her nonfictional autobiography that we are truly able to appreciate her transformation from one who did not know her own power in this world to one who

52

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

embraces it fully. The preface sets up the framework when she is quoted as describing this new, more confident black who responds to prejudices and discrimination with dignity and as far as Brooks is concerned, ‘‘Your least pre-requisite toward an understanding of the new black is an exceptional doctorate which can be conferred only upon those with the proper properties of bitter birth and intrinsic sorrow’’ (13). In this one statement, Brooks identifies power in those that had been previously rendered powerless. She acknowledges the possibilities in growing up black and disfranchised and not the drawbacks. As one flips through the book and encounters the photos that mark significant shifts in her life—from her childhood to those moments that mark the height of her artistic production—we view the flowering of a woman who has come into her own. Her prose celebrates what she always knew—that black is beautiful and it always was. Brooks’s approach to diversity also finds its way into her discussion of black men, whom she respectfully critiques in her work as well. In the Bean Eaters, Brooks uses one of her most infamous poems ‘‘We Real Cool’’ to give voice to a group of young men that society could forget about because they are not participating in mainstream America in traditional ways. Instead, they spend their time playing hard and dying young. The most poignant feature about this poem is that Brooks asserts their subjectivity by ending each line with the word ‘‘We’’ so as to show that even they matter. She also celebrated the uniqueness in other black men in her poems in In the Mecca, titled ‘‘Medgar Evers’’ and ‘‘Malcolm X.’’ Both depictions celebrate the incomparable contributions of the two important black men while staying true to the theme of rebirth that is suggested in the title of the collection. In her 1983 book she devotes her energy and time to the only black mayor of Chicago to date in ‘‘Mayor Harold Washington; and, Chicago, the I Will City.’’ The fact that she captures the strengths of such a varied group of men—each social actors but in different ways—highlights her desire to be both responsible and analytical of those blacks who are impacting society. Her work also reports the varied ills that plague black children. In ‘‘The Life of Lincoln West,’’ Brooks begins by chronicling the angst that the dark-skinned and ‘‘ugly’’ little boy encounters every time he is in someone else’s midst—whether they are black or white. His father cannot stand to look at him and his teacher both pities and is repulsed by him. But it is the comment of a white stranger that impacts Lincoln the most because it is he that identifies Lincoln as a ‘‘real’’ monkey and thus a ‘‘true’’ representation of blackness. When this stranger refers to Lincoln as a real black person, it is this moniker that comforts Lincoln and grants him the place that he most appreciates and covets. Brooks travels to Africa to depict another tragic tale of the boy in ‘‘The Near-Johannesburg Boy,’’ who recounts the anger of growing up in a country that he cannot call his own because of his despised skin-color. Although there are clearly many blacks in this poem and, thus, in this place outside of Johannesburg (perhaps Soweto, suggests Brooks in the introductory epigraph), they do not make up enough to combat the injustice system that is South Africa. CRITICAL RECEPTION While many of Brooks’s earlier critics as well as Brooks herself may view 1967 a year in which her political and social interests shifted to include ‘‘blacker’’ themes, one look at her work, demonstrates a writer who has always been aware of the political timber of her poems. In an interview with Claudia Tate in 1983, Tate says to Brooks that her ‘‘earlier works, A Street in Bronzeville and Annie Allen, don’t seem to focus directly on heightened

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

53

political awareness’’ suggesting that her later work does. To this Brooks responds, ‘‘Many of the poems, in my new and old books, are ‘politically aware’; I suggest you reread them. You know, when you say ‘political,’ you really have to be exhaustive.’’ When Tate follows up with the question later in the interview whether or not any of Brooks’s early work assumed ‘‘the blatant, assertive, militant posture we find in the ‘new black poetry’ of the early seventies,’’ Brooks with even more conviction than before shoots back, ‘‘Yes, ma’am. I’m fighting for myself a little bit here, but not overly so, because I certainly wrote no poem that sounds like Haki’s [Madhubuti] ‘Don’t Cry, Scream’ or anything like Nikki’s ‘The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black v. Negro,’ which begins: ‘Nigger / Can you kill / Can you kill?’ But I’m fighting for myself a little bit here because I believe it takes a little patience to sit down and find out that in 1945 I was saying what many of the young folks said in the sixties’’ (Conversations 106). Brooks advocates for her awareness and begins the conversation for critics to acknowledge that there exists more continuity in her work than earlier critics, like Tate, recognize. Joyce Ann Joyce extends the idea that Brooks’s evolution was in line with a developing sensibility that accentuates continuity in her essay ‘‘Gwendolyn Brooks: Jean Toomer’s November Cotton Flower.’’ In focusing on the strength of Brooks’s poetry to express herself creatively in the normally confining world of literary production, Joyce notes that ‘‘[having] bloomed under the light of Robert Hillyer’s First Principles of Verse, Brooks brought to modern American poetry her own peculiar sensibility which manifests at once the embodiments of both Wallace Stevens’s blue guitar and the African griot’s drum. Even though they have the visual and stylistic attributes of a EuroAmerican poetic tradition, her earlier ballads, free verse poems, and the sonnets reveal the same feelings of racial integrity and record the same malaises of racism as those poems published after 1967 when Brooks’s blackness confronted her ‘with a shrill spelling of itself ’’’ (On Gwendolyn Brooks, 246). In order to clarify her point, Joyce points to various early works such as ‘‘The Mother,’’ ‘‘When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story,’’ ‘‘Ballad of Pearl May Lee,’’ ‘‘To those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals,’’ ‘‘Horses Graze,’’ ‘‘Infirm,’’ and ‘‘The Near-Johannesburg Boy,’’ which all—old and new alike—fulfill ‘‘Africanist’’ criteria from which Joyce obtains her reference in her own book titled Warriors, Conjurers, and Priests: Defining AfricanCentered Literary Criticism (Chicago: Third World Press, 1994). This conversation gains even more momentum when white critics explore her work. In the 1996 essay ‘‘Whose Canon? Gwendolyn Brooks: Founder at the Center of the ‘Margins,’’’ Kathryne V. Lindberg notes that ‘‘Brooks did not radically change her poetic themes. Even obvious modulations in her line and other organizing musical techniques are, on the whole, unremarkable. . . . Certainly the texture of her poems, her palette of allusions and affiliations, has shifted from the white Anglo-American canon, but In the Mecca (1968), which Haki Madhubuti plausibly claims ‘‘‘blacked its way out of the National Book Award’’’ (RFPO 21), is as remarkable for its range of verse forms as for its direct treatment of race and class oppression’’ (Say That The River Turns, 285). She does a judicious reading of Annie Allen and Maud Martha as it relates to the later Primer for Blacks in order to prove that though Brooks may focus more on blacks in her later poetry, she ‘‘is always aware of ‘the People’ and her public; that is, of race, of being racialized, and of the need to seize the power and tools of representation’’ (288). In turn, white feminist critic Sheila Hassell Hughes writes in her article ‘‘A Prophet Overheard: A Juxtapositional Reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘In the Mecca’ ’’ that while ‘‘Brooks’ determination to write ‘to blacks’ ’’ leaves ‘‘no easy entrance for the white reader’’ in ‘‘In

54

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

the Mecca,’’ the poem speaks to so many more people because it is ‘‘much more than a depiction of a particular place [the black belt of Chicago’s South side]’’ in that Brooks issues ‘‘a call for liberation, represented as a communal construction out of that ruined place’’ (273), suggesting that it is the liberation that appeals most to the whole of Brooks’s audience—even whites. Many critics make strong arguments to recognize Brooks’s early poetry as less selfaware than her latter poetry as did Claudia Tate. One of the most interesting is the recent article by James D. Sullivan titled ‘‘Killing John Cabot and Publishing Black: Gwendolyn Brooks’ Riot,’’ where he makes the assertion that by moving out of the white publishing arena into a specifically black one, Brooks’s Riot should be viewed differently because ‘‘[the] material qualities of the artifact, therefore, are designed to establish an African American context for both interpreting and judging the poem’’ (562) in ways that differ from her earlier work. Though Sullivan’s argument warrants further investigation, it seems more accurate to view all of Brooks’s work as connecting to anyone who is invested in promoting a political agenda that brings out the best of any destructive, racialized situation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Gwendolyn Brooks Aloneness. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. Annie Allen. New York: Harper, 1949. The Bean Eaters. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960. Beckonings. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975. Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali (1971). Blacks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. A Broadside Treasury. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. Bronzeville Boys and Girls. Reprint, New York: Amistad, 2007. Children Coming Home. Chicago: David Co., 1991 Family Pictures. Chicago: Broadside Press, 1971. Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle. Chicago: Third World Press, 1989. In the Mecca. New York: Harper Collins, 1968. Jump Bad. Reprint, Detroit: Broadside Press, 1991. Maud Martha. Reprint, Chicago: Third World Press, 1992. Mayor Harold Washington and Chicago, the I Will City. Chicago: Brooks Press, 1983. Primer for Blacks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1991. Report from Part Two. Reprint, Chicago: Third World Press, 1993. Riot. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969. Selected Poems. New York: Harper, 1963. A Street In Bronzeville. New York: Harper, 1945. The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, or What You Really Are, You Really Are. Chicago: Third World Press, 1974. To Disembark. Chicago: Third World Press, 1981. Very Young Poets. Chicago: Third World Press, 1992. The Wall. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1967. We Real Cool. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1966. Winnie. Reprint, Chicago: Third World Press, 1991. The World of Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper Collins, 1971.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

55

Studies of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Works Brown, Patricia L., Don L. Lee, and Francis Ward, eds. To Gwen, with Love. Chicago, Johnson, 1971. Colorado Review n.s. 19.1 (Spring and Summer 1989). Davis, Arthur P. ‘‘The Black and Tan Motif in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.’’ CLAJ 6 (December 1960). ———. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900–1960. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974. ———. ‘‘Gwendolyn Brooks: Poet of the Unheroic.’’ CLAJ 7 (December 1963). Gabbin, Joanne V. ‘‘Blooming in the Whirlwind: The Early Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.’’ In The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, edited by Joanne Gabbin. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Gayles, Gloria Wade. Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Hughes, Sheila Hassell. ‘‘A Prophet Overheard: A Juxtapositional Reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘In the Mecca’’’ African American Review 38.2 (Summer 2004), 257–280. Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Kufrin, Joan. ‘‘Gwendolyn Brooks.’’ In Uncommon Women, 35–51. Piscataway, NJ: New Century Publishers, 1981. Loff, Jon N. ‘‘Gwendolyn Brooks: A Bibliography.’’ College Language Association Journal 17 (September 1973): 21–32. Madhubuti, Haki R., ed. Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. Mahoney, Heidi L. ‘‘Selected Checklist of Material by and about Gwendolyn Brooks.’’ NALF 8 (Summer 1974). Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. ———. ‘‘Gwendolyn Brooks: Humanism and Heroism.’’ In Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Interviews and Interviews, 11–38. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Miller, R. Baxter. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1987. Shaw, Harry B. Gwendolyn Brooks. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Wright, Stephen Caldwell. The Chicago Collective: Poems for and Inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks. Sanford, FL: Christopher-Burghardt, 1990. ———. On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Bridget Harris Tsemo

LINDA BEATRICE BROWN (1939– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Novelist and poet, Linda Beatrice Brown was born on March 14, 1939, in Akron, Ohio, to Raymond R. and Edith Player Brown. She married Harold E. Bragg in 1962 and had two children, Willa B. (‘‘Lali’’) and Christopher P. Brown, before her divorce and subsequent marriage to Vandorn Ninnant. In 1961, Brown received her B.A. from Bennett College, a liberal arts college for women in Greensboro, North Carolina. She earned her M.A. at Case Western Reserve and completed her Ph.D. at Union Graduate School in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1970, Brown began teaching at the University of North Carolina; she moved to Guilford College in 1986, and in 1992 she took a position at Bennett College, her alma mater, where she held the Willa B. Player Chair in Humanities and served as a Distinguished Professor. Brown is the recipient of several awards, including Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities (1961), Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (1961–1962), Kent State Teaching Fellowship (1962–1964), Outstanding Young Women of America (1972), and various literary prizes. She was a contributing member at the 1975 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. A novelist, poet, and lecturer, Brown’s work is represented in several anthologies, including Beyond the Blues (1960), A Living Culture in Durham (1987), Edge of Our World (1990), The Rough Road Home (1992), O Henry Festival Stories (1995), and Store of Joys (1997). She has also contributed to numerous publications including Encore, Guilford Review, Ebony Junior, Writer’s Choice, Black Scholar, Cricket Magazine, and Religion and Intellectual Life. MAJOR WORKS Brown’s work, rich with metaphor and imagery, covers several genres. She first began writing poetry—her first poem was published when she was nineteen years old— turning to fiction many years later when she started writing her first novel while her composition students were taking an exam. Brown’s portrayal of internal conflict, drawn from various aspects of African American experience, reflects her belief that history has a profound effect on the individual story. In a 1976 interview, Brown noted that ‘‘one of the responsibilities of the black poet is to make political statements.’’ In addition to the political issues, other subjects of her poetry and fiction include African American culture, relationships between men and women, and the special strengths of African American women. Brown’s nonfiction addresses these same themes. The Long Walk tells the story of Willa B. Player, Brown’s maternal aunt, and her successful service as the first female African American president of a fully accredited four-year liberal arts college. In ForgetMe-Not, Brown provides text on the history and use of memory jugs and their commemorative role in African and African American culture. Just as The Long Walk was created from numerous interviews with graduates and faculty of Bennett College,

LINDA BEATRICE BROWN

57

memory jugs use fragments to create a story, an essential act that reflects Brown’s belief that ‘‘without memory we do not know who we are.’’ Brown’s first novel, Rainbow Roun’ Mah Shoulder, won a contest (with subsequent publication) sponsored by the North Carolina Cultural Arts Coalition for the best book by a North Carolina writer. Like many of Brown’s poems, Rainbow Roun’ Mah Shoulder celebrates African American women, their stories, and their efforts toward selfempowerment and freedom from oppression. The spiritual, intuitive side of the female is represented in Florice Rebecca Lentenielle’s knowledge of herbs, her sight or ‘‘knowing,’’ and her ability to heal others. Florice’s story is interspersed with biological remarks about Lepidoptera that begin to appear shortly into the first chapter: ‘‘Lepidoptera develop by a complete metamorphosis which is characterized by four distinct stages. The egg hatches into larvae which feeds grows and molts several times before transforming into a pupa.’’ These biological references serve as a parallel to Florice’s own transformation, the changes in her life, her initial reluctance to and eventual acceptance of her God-given powers of sight and healing. Like the caterpillar that molts, allowing for future growth, Rebecca Florice goes through many stages in her life: Mac leaves, she starts a new life with Alice Wine, she has an affair with Robert, Robert leaves. Like a butterfly, Florice grows out of her fear to embrace her powers, but in the end, like a moth flying into the fire, she extinguishes herself in giving life back to Robert. In Florice, Brown portrays the ultimate mother figure: gentle and nurturing—cooking and caring for all the girls at the college, saving Harriet, nurturing Maye and Alice Wine—yet strong enough to exact judgment by beating Ole Bubba. Florice’s powers, symbolized by the rainbow hanging on her arm, are both a burden and a comfort. She struggles with these powers, eventually accepting God’s dangerous, but wonderful gifts, and passes them on to Ronnie, who will carry the rainbow on her shoulder, keeping the ancestral link intact through female tradition. The importance of such links and of history’s effect on the individual can also be seen in Brown’s second novel, Crossing Over Jordan, the story of three generations of women, Story Temple Green, her mother Sadie, and her daughter Hermine, a family traumatized by Story’s father whose feelings of impotence and rage brought on by the effects of slavery and its lingering legacy of racism are visited upon the females. What first appears as a lack of love in both Sadie and Story is really a conscious withholding, a way to educate their daughters in an effort to allow those daughters freedom from the cycle of oppression. The women are bound to those who came before them and to each other like a pattern in a slave quilt. And, like the story in the quilt, whether they write it, like Sadie who wrote hers on the backs of recipes, or tell it, each woman’s story is essential for understanding, forgiveness, and freedom from the trauma born of oppression. Brown’s influences include the Romantic poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, Don Lee, Langston Hughes, Ralph Emerson, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. CRITICAL RECEPTION To date, Brown’s work has received little critical attention beyond mixed reviews. Critics were ambivalent about Brown’s poetry and the blend of poetic passages with narrative in Rainbow Roun’ Mah Shoulder. Though lauded for its portrayal of the manifestation of the devastation and scars of slavery through generations of African Americans, Crossing Over Jordan was heavily criticized for insufficient development:

58

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

the characters lack complexity and dimension, preventing readers from empathizing with her characters. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Linda Beatrice Brown Brown, Linda Beatrice. Video recording. Raleigh: North Carolina State University, 1991. Crossing Over Jordan. New York: Ballantine, 1995. ‘‘Holding Back the Nothing.’’ In Forget-Me-Not: The Art and Mystery of Memory Jugs, edited by Brooke Davis Anderson, Linda Beatrice Brown, and Robert Farris Thompson. WinstonSalem: Winston-Salem State University, 1996. The Long Walk: The Story of the Presidency of Willa B. Player at Bennett College. Greensboro, NC: Bennett College, 1998. A Love Song to Black Men. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974. Rainbow Roun’ Mah Shoulder. Chapel Hill, NC: Carolina Wren Press, 1984. (Reprinted by Ballantine in 1989.)

Studies of Linda Beatrice Brown’s Works Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 103–4. Brookhart, Mary Hughes. ‘‘Spiritual Daughters of the Black American South.’’ In The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, edited by Carol S. Manning. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1993. Edgar, Kathleen J., ed. ‘‘Linda Beatrice Brown.’’ Contemporary Authors 148 (1996): 62–63. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. ‘‘A Conversation with Seven Fiction Writers.’’ Southern Quarterly: A Journal of Arts in the South 29.2 (Winter 1991): 69–93. Smith, Virginia W., and Brian J. Benson. ‘‘An Interview with Linda Brown Bragg.’’ College Language Association Journal 20 (1976): 75–87. Weil, Eric. ‘‘Inner Lights and Inner Lives: The Gospel According to Linda Beatrice Brown.’’ North Carolina Literary Review 1.1 (1992): 106–14.

Teresa Clark Caruso

ANNIE LOUISE BURTON (1858–1910)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Daughter of a white planter and a slave woman, autobiographer Annie Burton was born circa 1858 on a plantation near Clayton, Alabama. When her mother ran away after being whipped in 1862, Burton spent the final years of the Civil War in the care of her mistress. Reunited with her mother in December 1865, Burton lived with her siblings and two children adopted by her mother on a plantation located just miles from the place of her enslavement. Although she had earned minimal wages selling fruit and picking cotton to help her family subsist, Burton’s first job came the following year as a nanny for Mrs. E. M. Williams, a music teacher and wife of a prominent attorney. It was during her time with this family that Burton was taught not only to cook and do housework, but also to read and write. Burton spent the next ten years of her life working in Eufaula, Alabama, and Macon, Georgia, where she attended school intermittently. Upon her mother’s death, Burton assumed the additional responsibility of caring for three small children, requiring her to pursue better employment opportunities in the north, where in 1879, she relocated to Boston. Despite the limitations of a domestic role that became a form of low-wage servitude for many, Burton cultivated her skills and used them as a foundation from which to achieve financial freedom. In 1884, Burton became a successful restaurateur and supplemented her income by transforming her residence into a boarding house. With money earned from these ventures, Burton was able to send her nephew to Hampton College in Virginia and return to Boston, where she married Samuel H. Burton in 1888. At the age of 43, Burton began taking classes at the Franklin Evening School where her headmaster, Frank Guild, requested that students begin an assignment that would later inspire Burton to write the story of her life, Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days. MAJOR WORKS Published in 1909, Burton’s Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days is an autobiographical narrative divided into eight sections. Although Burton’s first section ‘‘Recollections of a Happy Life’’ begins by describing ‘‘happy, care-free childhood days on the plantation,’’ her nostalgia is tempered by stories of pitiless hunger, separation of slave families, and the brutal lynching of African American men at the hands of vengeful whites. The remaining vignettes trace Burton’s developing understanding of self-worth, education, and pecuniary compensation, and record the unshakable determination of a woman unmoved by the societal conventions of gender, race, or class. Considered by Burton to be a sequel, her second segment is didactic in nature and emphasizes stories of Christian charity and benevolence. These themes reflect Burton’s spiritual conversion following a period of critical illness in 1875, when she promised to dedicate her life to God if He restored her health. Burton’s prose affirms her commitment to keep this promise, exuding optimism and providing solace and strength to her readers.

60

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Yet, she insists that her work is a product of divine inspiration, and that her role is ‘‘something of the type of Moses.’’ Accompanying these first two components are a composition on Abraham Lincoln, two shorter prose pieces, an essay by Dr. P. Thomas Stanford titled ‘‘The Race Question in America,’’ and a collection of her ‘‘Favorite Poems’’ and ‘‘Favorite Hymns.’’ These last pieces form tangible elements of selfrepresentation meant to inspire her readers and affirm her belief in education and spirituality as vehicles to achieve success. Burton also published a short biography of sixteenth U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1909. CRITICAL RECEPTION While Burton’s voice sustains the tenor of her literary forebears, she has not garnered the critical attention bestowed upon more recognized figures such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Lucy Delaney. Reading Burton alongside other postbellum slave narrative writers such as Kate Drumgoold, William Andrews notes the recurrence of themes extolling black motherhood and the virtuous, indomitable spirit of the African American woman. Yolanda Pierce views Burton’s work as a narrative of resistance that challenges proscribed social roles for African American women following Emancipation and one that defies stereotypical representations of black womanhood. These examinations reveal the depth of Burton’s work and provide a rationale for continuing research into the life and work of this unique entrepreneur. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Annie Louise Burton Abraham Lincoln. Boston: Ross Publishing Company, 1909. Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days. Boston: Ross Publishing Company, 1909.

Studies of Annie Louise Burton’s Works Andrews, William L. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Six Women’s Slave Narratives, xxix–xli. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pierce, Yolanda. ‘‘Her Refusal to Be Recast(e): Annie Burton’s Narrative of Resistance.’’ Southern Literary Journal 36.2 (2004): 1–12.

Gabriel A. Briggs

OLIVIA WARD BUSH-BANKS (1869–1944)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born on May 23, 1869, in Sag Harbor, New York, dramatist, essayist and poet Olivia Ward was the daughter of Eliza Draper and Abraham Ward, both from families of longtime free blacks. When Olivia Ward was nine months old, her mother died and her father remarried, sending her to Providence, Rhode Island, to live with her aunt, Maria Draper. While in high school, Ward began penning poetry, much of which reflects and lauds her mixed Montauk and African American heritages and the idea of biracial identity. In 1889, Ward married Frank Bush, and over the next few years she focused on raising and providing economically for her two daughters, Marie and Rosamund. In 1899, four years after her divorce, Ward published Original Poems, a small volume of verse praised by Paul Laurence Dunbar. A handful of the works from Original Poems appeared in the then leading paper for African Americans, Voice of the Negro, and others were reprinted in the Boston Transcript. By the turn of the century, Ward Bush was both contributing regularly to Colored America and serving as the official historian for the Montauk nation. She held the latter position, participating in pow wows and other tribal gatherings, until she married Anthony Banks and moved to Chicago. This move allowed her to concentrate on her writing in a more arts-oriented community. In 1914, she published her second, larger collection Driftwood. A mixture of poetry and prose, it was welcomed more enthusiastically by critics than her previous effort. While in Chicago, Bush-Banks became an advocate of the ‘‘New Negro Movement,’’ serving as a settlement house activist and exploring communism. She also instructed drama and developed her own ‘‘Bush-Banks School of Expression,’’ a nexus for writers, musicians, actors, and artists of color. In the 1930s, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks moved to New York, participated for three years in the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and accepted a position as arts editor for the New Rochelle Westchester Record-Courier. Her friends included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, Julia Ward Howe, and W.E.B. DuBois. She died in 1944. MAJOR WORKS In Original Poems, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks explores several recurring themes: the grand but ambivalent character of nature, the necessity of—and solace found in—faith in God, and a continuing quest for racial justice and harmony which would not preclude diversity. In many of her poems, the reader senses nostalgia for something lost—the language of the Montauk people, the purity of the agrarian way of life, or American opportunities for peace and equality. Her early writing is frequently romantic and pastoral, whereas her later writing is often satirical, socially critical, and politically charged. In Driftwood, she memorializes those who have fought for equality in the United States, including Crispus Attucks, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and in one prose piece, ‘‘Hope,’’ she disparages lynching and the denegration of persons of color. She dedicates ‘‘The Moaning of the

62

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Tide’’ to Paul Laurence Dunbar for uplifting African Americans, and in an unpublished one-act play, Shantytown Scandal, she explores the implications of the Depression Era on people of color. Other socially conscious stories from the 1930s which never received copyrights include her ‘‘Aunt Viney’’ tales, a series of humorous anecdotes about a dialect-using, advice-wielding Harlem wise-woman who predates and foreshadows Langston Hughes ‘‘Jesse B. Semple’’ character (Guillaume 34). Bush-Banks left over sixty works unpublished at her death, the majority of which appear in The Collected Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, a 1991 volume edited by her descendent, Bernice Forrest Guillaume. CRITICAL RECEPTION Very little criticism of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks’s work exists, especially from her time. Upon reading Driftwood, Paul Laurence Dunbar remarked that it ‘‘should be an inspiration to the women of our race.’’ A December 1938 letter from Carter G. Woodson, editor of the Negro History Bulletin, also praised her poetry. From the past century, only Bernice Forrest Guillaume and Marie Blue Bennis have explored Bush-Banks beyond biography, revisiting the themes of racial dualism, pride, and identity in—and the social and literary implications of—Bush-Banks’s writing. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Olivia Ward Bush-Banks The Collected Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, edited by Bernice Forrest Guillaume. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Driftwood. Providence, RI: Atlantic Printing Co., 1914. Memories of Calvary. Philadelphia: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1915. Original Poems. Providence, RI: Louis A. Basinet Press, 1899.

Studies of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks’s Works Altman, Susan. ‘‘Olivia Ward Bush Banks.’’ In The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage. New York: Facts on File, 1997. Bennis, Marie Blue. ‘‘Reclaiming a Multicultural Heritage: Race, Identity, and Culture in the Life and Literary Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks.’’ DAI, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 61.2 (August 2000): 607. Bush, Theresa G. Black American Writers Past and Present: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary, Volume One. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975. Daniels, John. In Freedom’s Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes. 1914. Reprint, New York: Negro University Press, 1968. Grant, Nathan L. ‘‘Olivia Ward Bush-Banks.’’ In American National Biography, Vol. 4. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Guillaume, Bernice F. ‘‘Character Names in Indian Trails by Olivia Ward Bush (Banks): Clues to Afro Assimilation in Long Island’s Native Americans.’’ Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 10.2 (1986): 45–53. ———. ‘‘The Female as Harlem Sage: The ‘Aunt Viney’s Sketches’ of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks.’’ Langston Hughes Review 6.2 (1987): 1–10.

OLIVIA WARD BUSH-BANKS

63

———. ‘‘Olivia Ward Bush: Factors Shaping the Social and Cultural Outlook of a NineteenthCentury Writer.’’ Negro History Bulletin 43 (1980): 32–34. Hatch, James V., and Omanil Abdullah. Black Playwrights, 1823–1977: An Annotated Bibliography of Plays. New York: Bowker Press, 1977. Matthews, G. S. Black American Writers 1773–1949: A Bibliography and Union List. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975. Porter, Dorothy B. North American Negro Poets: A Checklist of Their Writings. Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1945. Schomburg, Arthur A. A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry. New York: Doran Co., 1916. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.

Susan M. Stone

OCTAVIA BUTLER (1947–2006)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Often referred to as the ‘‘grand dame’’ of science fiction, Octavia Butler is the first, if not the only, successful female African American writer of science fiction and fantasy, making a dramatic change in the predominantly white male landscape of the genre. She has published twelve novels as well as a collection of short stories and critical essays. Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on July 22, 1947. Her father having died when she was very young, and herself an only child, Butler was brought up by her mother in a racially mixed community, one that was united by a common day-to-day struggle to make ends meet. Although not having to contend with the more formal and harsh aspects of segregation, Butler experienced the burden of racism through the experiences of her mother who worked as a housemaid and learned to recognize the required heroism of the so-called ordinary life, a recognition that becomes manifest in her fiction. Writing since she was ten years old, Butler is often quoted as ascribing her own turn to speculative fiction to an episode at the age of twelve, when her frustration with a particularly bad film on television led to the emerging conviction that she could do better. Described as a shy girl and often lonely, Butler increasingly turned to her writing for comfort and company. In 1968 Butler received her Associate of Arts degree from Pasadena City College. She went on to attend California State University, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Los Angeles, but attributes her growth as a writer mainly to independent programs such as the Open Door Program of the Screen Writers Guild of America and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. After publishing a number of short stories, Butler’s Patternmaster (1976) was published to significant critical acclaim, a text that became the first of five novels in her Patternist series. She has also published the Xenogenesis series, consisting of three texts, and two of an initially planned six Earthseed novels. In addition to these and to Bloodchild and Other Stories, a collection of shorter writing, Butler’s neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979) is possibly the most widely known novel, if arguably the least rigidly science-fictional of her work. In 2005, Butler’s final novel, Fledgling, was published. There, writing about vampires, she explores more explicitly the gothic traditions which were addressed subtly in her earlier works.

MAJOR WORKS Butler’s contribution to the domain of speculative fiction goes far beyond her racial or gendered identity. Butler’s rich oeuvre singularly participates in the generic discourse while simultaneously challenging many of its defining characteristics. Herself wary of rigid stylistic categorizations, Butler comments that

OCTAVIA BUTLER

65

A good story is a good story. If what I’m writing reaches you, then it reaches you no matter what title is stuck on it. The titles are mainly so that you’ll know where to look in the library, or as a marketing title, know where to put it in the bookstore so booksellers know how to sell it. It has very little to do with actual writing. (Sanders)

While refraining from any overt focus on purely generic concerns (preferring a tight narrative to extraneous descriptions of the alternate realities she creates, for example), Butler’s texts manipulate the imaginative foundation of her narratives to contend with key individual, social, and cultural paradigms. Although rarely political in any dogmatic or didactic sense, it is precisely through her subtly understated concern with issues of genre, gender, and race, and their constant thematic presence throughout, that illuminates Butler’s particular literary treatment of them. In her Patternist series Butler explores different patterns of evolution for the human race. She imagines a possibility of apparent regression, through the aggressive and animallike Clayarks in Patternmaster. This model of gradual but extreme degeneration becomes complicated as Butler offers a redeeming quality both in the underlying humanity of the Clayarks’s early days, described in Clay’s Ark (1984), and in their rather desperate intelligence with which they survive and exist in constant contest with the ‘‘mutes’’ and telepaths. Allegorizing the processes of othering, which characterize the history of American racism, Butler further disrupts the fundamental presumption of human supremacy (a supremacy based on the defining capacity of the human mind and spirit), in Survivor (1978). Describing a culture of racist intolerance and fear within the human community of religious missionaries that has established a colony among an alien species, Butler demonstrates the possible limitations and dangers of such psychosocial patterns. The imagined progress possible in human evolution is described in Mind of My Mind (1977). The narrative describes the development of a telepathic matrix, the urpattern, which links the members to one another and to the patternmaster. The progress associated with these enhanced mental capabilities (powers which overpower physical ones, as healers can control the body with their minds) is challenged, however, as Butler illuminates the devastating price of their development, a price exacted through violence and articulated through models of hierarchy and subservience. Wild Seed (1980) tells the story of Anyanwu and Doro, the two forebears of a new race. Anyanwu is a maternal figure and a healer whose body can take the shape of virtually any living being. Doro, on the other hand, is an autocratic character who must feed by killing as he appropriates the body of his opponents. The narrative follows the progress of Doro’s long-lasting project to create a new race, a project whose power structures unmistakably echo the sociocultural history of slavery. Thus Butler demonstrates the inevitable abuse of power concomitant with its progressive possibilities. The shifting relationship between these protagonists through the generations manifests the primary tension of a mind-body binary, a binary that informs all of these humanoid races, and serves as the conceptual and thematic crux of the Patternist series. The aforementioned paradigm of a tangible psychology, as manifest in a physically binding telepathic pattern, and an intangible physicality, as it is literally translated into an alien form, is reconfigured in Kindred (1979). Apparently moving away from the style and content characteristic of Butler’s other texts, Kindred can be read as a neo-slave narrative as it renegotiates the tropes and structures central to this form. This move into other literary forms notwithstanding, the reader soon learns that time-travel is the

66

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

essential premise of the narrative. In the novel, Dana Franklin, a young African American woman newly married to Kevin, a white man, is transported back and forth from Los Angeles, in 1976, to a nineteenth-century slave plantation in Maryland. Dana quickly discovers that her journey through time is directly related to the life of Rufus Weylin, a slave owner and distant ancestor. The link between them is an absolutely vital one as she is called back through time and space at moments when his life is endangered and moves forward when her own is threatened. Dana’s own crucial role in ensuring the beginning of her own family line must be fulfilled before her return to 1976 can become permanent, a role that comes at a costly physical and ideological sacrifice. Explaining this decision, Butler comments that ‘‘I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole . . . Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole’’ (Kenan 498). Butler never explains the mechanism for time travel but develops it as a literary conduit which links twentieth-century African American experience not only to the horrors but also to the complexities (personal, social, economic, and cultural) of slavery. The parallel existence that Dana begins to experience demonstrates the ‘‘contemporaneity of history’’ (McKible), on one hand, but also the impossibility of historical representation, on the other. Finding herself at a public whipping, Dana is profoundly distressed and genuinely surprised by this gap. ‘‘I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying shamed before their families and themselves’’ (36). The protagonist must take an active role in conceiving her past for her present to be at all possible or for this past to be real in any true sense. Thus, embracing the literary freedom afforded her by the genre of science fiction in which she participates, Butler stretches the realism of her narrative to include a literal temporal journey so that she may be able to depict the reality of a virtually unimaginable experience of slavery, and to contend with its contemporary reverberations. The rigid political economy of reproduction during slavery and its implications on gendered roles, identities, and definitions become reconfigured in Butler’s awardwinning short story ‘‘Bloodchild’’ and in her Xenogenesis series. Reprinted as Lilith’s Brood (2000), the three novels take place in a postapocalyptic universe, centuries after a war that killed most of Earth’s inhabitants and made it virtually uninhabitable. Into this setting Butler introduces the Oankali, powerful alien beings who survive symbiotically through genetic exchange with primitive peoples. Traveling across the galaxies, through time, the Oankali are in perpetual flux: by collecting and combining genetic structures of indigenous populations with those of their own, they gradually alter each irrevocably and continue evolving, a pattern they impose on humans for the duration of the novels. In Dawn (1987), the first of the series, to ensure optimal cooperation in a procreative project that cloaks the disturbing resonance of the political economy of slavery with evolutionary concerns of survival, the Oankali select and train Lilith Iyapo, an African American woman who lost her husband and son in the war, to mediate between other humans and themselves. Significantly named after the mythologically subversive feminine archetype, a mother of demons, Butler’s Lilith eventually becomes the human progenitor of a mixed species. Depicting the gradual emergence of this new species in Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989), Butler’s Oankali embody a dramatic transgression of expected boundaries of gendered identities. Not only do they become identified with a particular gender only as they grow into procreative maturity, but they have a third gender—the

OCTAVIA BUTLER

67

ooloi, who are neither male nor female. In ‘‘Bloodchild,’’ Butler similarly depicts a humanalien coexistence that relies on altered cultural and physical (as well as political) roles, which defined by reproductive processes. In exchange for protection and relative autonomy, and in what gradually approximates a nurturing symbiotic relationship, the alien Tlic population exacts a price of at least one son from each human family. These boys serve as host bodies for alien eggs that are torn out by a female Tlic in a ‘‘blood ritual.’’ Through these disruptions of normative cultural expectations and through their echoes in the changing sexual and social behavior of the humans in these texts, Butler explores the possibilities theorized in contemporary gender discourse. In her Earthseed series, Butler constructs a dystopian vision of the near future in America. Depicting a social, economic, political, and cultural apocalypse and its aftermath, in her two parables, respectively, Butler has moved from the alien constructs of her earlier works to a narrative scope that is more grounded in a naturalist tradition. Positioning herself in the tradition of dystopian fiction, this nearly recognizable context serves to highlight those destructive themes of human behavior being explored. Butler’s parables retain the strong African American female protagonist characteristic of Butler’s writing but her vision focuses on a much nearer and bleaker future. Participating in current critical ecological, urban, and sociological discourses, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) envision a war-torn, violence-ridden earth and a community of people who struggle to survive. Guiding this community is Lauren Olamina, a young woman who, across the two novels, is transformed into a messiah figure, leading her people to salvation. The Earthseed texts resonate scriptural writing as they narrate Olamina’s growth into maturity as a woman and as a leader, and her gradual development of the Earthseed religion. The theological premise of the texts is a relatively straightforward humanist one that, although it ultimately promises a destiny in the stars, is firmly grounded in the practicalities of life. Through this destiny of displacement, Butler’s novels investigate constructs of self and community, examining alternate models of behavior under conditions of distress and emergency. Moreover, reminiscence of the relationship of the Oankali to their environment, Earthseed demonstrates the absolute imperative to achieve a balance of coexistence with the landscape (physical as well as cultural). Finally, both texts are narrated through a series of journal entries by various characters, a decision which lends an autobiographical tone to the texts. By introducing these intradiegetic narrators in a process that is simultaneously personal and private—in the journals and public—in their implicit publication, Butler thematizes the very structure of the novels and reflects on the effects which sociopolitical crises can have on the very notion of self as well as on the narratives of history. Examining the narrative structure of the novels inevitably reveals the combined influence of journals with travel narratives, while simultaneously revisiting the tradition of the slave narrative. Through the quintessential American version of the journey and the travel narrative, Butler’s novel repositions the function and nature of some of the central themes of modern American literature: family, religion, society, home, politics, love, and death. Butler returns to these themes in Fledgling, the last novel published before her untimely death. This first-person narrative follows Shori Matthews, a pre-pubescent 53year-old vampire with the appearance of a human child, as she recovers from a near-fatal injury and must contend with complete memory loss to rediscover her past and understand who is trying to kill her. As Shori learns to survive by reuniting with her people, the Ina, and by establishing symbiotic relationships with humans around her, relationships

68

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

that become fital for her and for her symbiants, it becomes clear that she is the successful product of genetic experiments, combining Ina with African American blookdlines, to adapt the Ina to the changing needs of their environment. Blood, which so often serves metonymically to signal both race and history, becomes—through the vampire romance genre—a literal means through which Butler reconfigures the bases of contemporary western society. Here, family, community, history, and biology are explored, not as static or predetermined objects, but as dynamic variables that open new possibilities for human interaction.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Butler’s first published story ‘‘Crossover,’’ in 1971, received limited critical notice. Patternmaster, her first published novel, on the other hand, established her as a serious writer of science fiction. Butler has received numerous awards recognizing the importance of her work in the field of science fiction and in literature. In 1984, Butler’s short story ‘‘Speech Sounds’’ won the prestigious Hugo Award as best short story of that year. The following year Butler’s ‘‘Bloodchild’’ won both the 1985 Hugo and the 1984 Nebula awards as best novelette—two of the most valued awards in the genre. Butler received widespread recognition in 1995 when she became the first writer of science fiction to be awarded the five-year MacArthur Fellowship which rewards creative people who push the boundaries of their fields. The second novel in her latest series, Parable of the Talents, won the 1999 Nebula for Best Novel, and in the year 2000 Butler was awarded the PEN Center West Lifetime Achievement Award. Despite her unquestioned standing in the field of speculative fiction, there is an astonishing dearth of full-length critical work published on Butler’s writing. Ruth Salvaggio’s important 1984 article, ‘‘Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine,’’ on the Patternist novels focuses on identity constructs, arguing that Butler’s fiction not only challenges preexisting hierarchies but also, through the empowered black female protagonists, disrupts the very structure of systemic hegemony. This hierarchical infrastructure is further eroded in Elyce Rae Helford’s 1994 essay. Concentrating primarily on ‘‘Bloodchild,’’ Helford illuminates the power structures intrinsic to processes of labeling and identity constructions, and examines how—and to what end—Butler’s texts are located on the intersection of high art and popular culture. Helford’s article offers a significant precursor to Madhu Dubey’s ‘‘Books of Life: Postmodern Uses of Print Literacy,’’ in Signs and Cities, one of the most recent and more acute readings of Butler’s first Earthseed novel. Here Dubey meticulously positions Butler’s work within a critical African American literary tradition, which she then reinserts into a postmodern discourse on modern humanism and print culture. Dubey demonstrates how Butler reconfigures the printed text as a rehabilitative force that engages in a productive (and empowering) dialogue with the possibilities and the problems of postmodern cultural and political contexts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Octavia Butler Adulthood Rites. New York: Questar, 1988. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1995.

OCTAVIA BUTLER

69

Clay’s Ark. New York: Aspect, 1984. Dawn. New York: Aspect, 1987. Imago. New York: Aspect, 1989. Kindred. 1979. Reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Mind of My Mind. New York: Aspect, 1977. ‘‘The Monophobic Response.’’ In Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from The African Diaspora, edited by Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Aspect, 2001. First published, Journeys PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Rockville, MD: Quill & Brush, 1996. Parable of the Sower. London: The Women’s Press, 1995. First Published, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. Parable of the Talents. London: The Women’s Press, 2001. First Published, New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998. Patternmaster. New York: Aspect, 1976. Survivor. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Wild Seed. New York: Aspect, 1980.

Studies of Octavia Butler’s Works Allison, Dorothy. ‘‘The Future of Female: Octavia Butler’s Mother Lode.’’ In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 471–78. London: Penguin Books, 1990. First published, Village Voice, December 19, 1989, 67–68. Barr, Marleen S., ed. Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Crossley, Robert. ‘‘Critical Essay.’’ In Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Doerksen, Teri Ann. ‘‘Octavia E. Butler: Parables of Race and Difference.’’ In Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic, edited by Elisabeth Anne Leonard, 21–34. London: Greenwood Press, 1997. Doughton, Sandi. ‘‘Octavia Butler—Science Fiction Author.’’ Seattle Times (May 16, 2004). Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Govan, Sandra Y. ‘‘Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler’s Fiction.’’ Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984): 82–87. Helford, Elyce Rae. ‘‘ ‘Would You Really Rather Die Than Bear My Young?’: The Constructions of Race, Gender, and Species in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Bloodchild.’ ’’ African American Review 28.2 (1994): 259–71. Kenan, Randall. ‘‘An Interview with Octavia E. Butler.’’ Callaloo 41.2 (Spring 1991): 495–504. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘‘ ‘Going Postal’: Rage, Science Fiction, and the Ends of the American Subject.’’ In Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation, edited by Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon, 142–56. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. McKible, Adam. ‘‘These Are the Facts of the Darky’s History: Thinking History and Reading Names in Four African American Texts.’’ African American Review 28.2 (Summer 1994): 223–35. Roberts, Robin. ‘‘Gender and Science Fiction.’’ MFS (Modern Fiction Studies) 50.3 (2004): 734–39. Salvaggio, Ruth. ‘‘Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine.’’ Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984): 78–81. Sanders, Joshunda. ‘‘The Africana QA: Octavia Butler.’’ AOL Black Voices, February 24, 2004, http://archive.blackvoices.com/articles (accessed February 25, 2004). Shinn, Thelma J. ‘‘The Wise Witches: Black Women Mentors in the Fiction of Octavia E. Butler.’’ In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 203–15. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

70

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Weixlmann, Joe. ‘‘An Octavia Butler Bibliography.’’ Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984): 88–89. White, Donna R. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics. New York: Camden House—Boydell & Brewer Inc., 1999, 1–6.

Keren Omry

JEANNETTE FRANKLIN CAINES (1938–2004)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Author of acclaimed books about children and their families, Jeanette Caines was born and raised in Harlem and attended school in New York City. She grew up in a religious Baptist family, joined the Lutheran church, but then returned to the Baptist church. Her husband’s name is Alan, and her children are Kevin and Abby (who are also the main characters in her book titled Abby). Caines was inspired to read and write after she read Jesse Jackson’s book Call Me Charley. She worked for many years in Harper & Row’s Juvenile Book Department. Caines has also been a member of the Coalition of One Hundred Black Women’s Council for Adoptable Children and the Negro Business and Professional Women of Nassau County (New York). She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Salvation Army and the Council of Christ Lutheran Church in Nassau County. Caines resided in Freeport, Long Island (New York), before moving to Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2004, the year of her death, Caines received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Motheread and Fatheread of the Virginia Foundation. MAJOR WORKS In Caines’s first book, Abby (1973), the title character, Abby, reads her baby book with her older brother, Kevin, and her mother. She learns that she was born in Manhattan and was adopted when she was eleven and a half months old. Reading her baby book gives Abby a sense of belonging within her family, and her mother’s compilation of Abby’s baby book makes the girl feel welcome and part of the family. She accepts adoption and even wants the family to adopt a brother for her and Kevin. Kevin takes pride in his sister and wants to bring her to his class for show and tell. Caines manifests how this adoption leads to a cohesive family unit. Just Us Women (1982) concerns a road trip to North Carolina that the narrator will take with her Aunt Martha. In a segment, the young narrator mentions that she remembers things for her forgetful aunt, who absentmindedly takes two road maps with her in case she loses one and who forgot the map and their lunch on the kitchen table last time. This is a road trip for females only; they can take their time and shop or look around without men telling them to stop dawdling. The story embraces sisterhood and camaraderie between the females, who gain autonomy by leaving the controlling men home. She anticipates that the men will be jealous and will demand, upon their return, to know what took them so long; she conjectures, ‘‘we will just tell them we had a lot of girl talk to do between the two of us. No boys and no men—just us women’’ (32). Chilly Stomach (1986), an important and progressive children’s book, concerns a girl, Sandy, who experiences a chilly stomach whenever her Uncle Jim visits. Uncle Jim tickles Sandy and kisses her on the lips. As an adolescent, the narrator distinguishes between the loving kisses of her parents and the inappropriate kisses of her Uncle Jim, causing her to ask to sleep over at her friend Jill’s house. Sandy confides in Jill that her

72

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

uncle is acting inappropriately toward her, and Jill indicates that she will tell her mother and that Sandy should confide in her own parents. Sandy has been reluctant to tell her parents because she is afraid that they will dislike her for telling on her uncle. At the conclusion, Sandy makes the right decision—to tell her parents what her Uncle Jim has done to her. This action suggests that Caines is directing her young readers who are experiencing the same dilemma to come forward and help themselves. In I Need a Lunch Box (1988), the nameless narrator is jealous because his older sister, Doris, is getting a lunch box because she will be entering the first grade, while he, who is too young for school, will not be receiving one. He contemplates that he would put his crayons, marbles, bug collection, or toy animals in it, indicating that he is perhaps not ready for one because he does not understand its purpose. In a beautiful and imaginative touch, Caines shows the narrator dreaming of having five lunch boxes, each of a different color, for each day of the week; the lunch boxes walk in a parade. His father, understanding his desire (he calls it a need) for a lunch box, buys him one so that he can be like his sister. The story deftly covers a significant theme in childhood development—the pangs of frustration and hurt that young children experience when their older siblings can acquire things and do activities that they, because they are too young, cannot.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Critical reception of Caines’s work has been positive. Critics like the sensitive way that she handles touchy issues, such as adoption and divorce. For her excellent work, Caines has received the National Black Child Development Institute’s Certificate of Merit and Appreciation. Caines books have, unfortunately, not received the attention that they deserve. The books have received good reviews (aside from Chilly Stomach) and portray positive African American role models and portray African American culture in a positive light. Maia Angelique Sorrells enjoys the open endings: ‘‘Often Caines’ books end without a resolution to the problem. This encourages thought and discussion and facilitates effective communication and problem solving between parents and children’’ (116). Some critics have complained, however, that Chilly Stomach should not be read by young children because of the subject matter (sexual abuse of a little girl) and because the ending lacks a clear resolution to Sandy’s dilemma. The other books have received positive reviews for the author’s gentle humor, the healthy relationships between parents and children, tackling serious subjects (such as adoption, divorce, and the pangs of being unable to do what older siblings do), and for being excellent role models for African American children. Caines says, ‘‘I think it’s important that I’m listed as a black writer, that the illustrations in my books are of black children. There aren’t many books about black kids, there aren’t many black authors going around talking to kids’’ (Raymond 25).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Jeannette Franklin Caines Abby. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Chilly Stomach. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

JEANNETTE FRANKLIN CAINES

73

Daddy. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. I Need a Lunch Box. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Just Us Women. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Window Wishing. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Studies of Jeannette Franklin Caines’s Works Commire, Anne, ed. ‘‘Jeanette Caines.’’ In Something about the Author: Facts and Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People, vol. 43. Detroit: Gale, 1986, 52–53. Hile, Kevin S., ed. ‘‘Jeanette Franklin Caines.’’ In Something about the Author: Facts and Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People, vol. 78. Detroit: Gale, 1994, 23–25. Raymond, Allen. ‘‘Jeannette Caines: A Proud Author, with Good Reason.’’ Early Years 13.7 (March 1983): 24–25. Rollock, Barbara. ‘‘Jeannette Franklin Caines.’’ In Black Authors & Illustrators of Children’s Books: A Biographical Dictionary, 2nd ed., 32. New York: Garland, 1992. Sorrells, Maia Angelique. ‘‘Jeanette Franklin Caines.’’ In Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 116. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Ward, Martha, et al., eds. ‘‘Jeantte Franklin Caines.’’ In Authors of Books for Young People, 3rd ed., 105. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990.

Eric Sterling

BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL (1950– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Novelist and playwright Bebe Moore Campbell has also authored children’s books. Her essays, articles, and excerpts appear in many anthologies. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1950, the only child of Doris and George Moore. After her parent’s divorce, she grew up in both the north and the south, spending school months with her mother and grandmother, and summer months with her father. Campbell attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1972 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education. She taught school for five years before becoming dissatisfied with her chosen career, and began attending writing workshops where she nurtured her love of writing. Campbell gained her first publication when a fiction piece appeared in Essence magazine. She went on to write a nonfiction book, Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage (1986), and followed up with her memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and without My Dad (1990). Campbell published her first novel, the critically acclaimed Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, in 1992. She has since penned three best-selling novels: Brothers and Sisters, one of New York Times’s most notable books of 1992; Singing in the Comeback Choir; and What You Owe Me, Los Angeles Times’s ‘‘Best Book of 2001.’’ Campbell’s first children’s book, Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry, won the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Outstanding Literature Award for 2003. Several of her essays and articles have appeared in such publications as Ms. Magazine and the New York Times. She is also a regular morning commentator on National Public Radio. The mother of two currently resides in Los Angeles with her husband. MAJOR WORKS Campbell’s fiction is heavily influenced by her personal experiences and displays her fascination with human relations. Having grown up in both the north and south, the author witnessed firsthand the effects of racial segregation. The Emmett Till murder happened when she was just five years old and inspired Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, which chronicles the events following and a racially divided community’s reaction to the brutal murder of fifteen-year-old Armstrong Todd, an African American. Watching the fallout of the Rodney King beating and the LA riots that ensued was the basis for her second novel, Brothers and Sisters, about the blossoming friendship between Esther, a black woman, and Mallory, a white woman, in the midst of LA’s racial tension. Campbell focused more on healing with the novels Singing in the Comeback Choir, where a woman deals with the aftermath of her husband’s affair, and What You Owe Me,

BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL

75

where the descendant of an African American entrepreneur fights to receive what was stolen from her mother in a bad business venture years prior. Having watched a close loved one suffer from mental illness, Campbell was moved to address the issue in her most recent works. The children’s book Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry is about a little girl whose mother is mentally ill, and 72 Hour Hold, Campbell’s most recent novel, focuses on a single mother whose daughter struggles with bipolar disorder. Campbell’s stage play Even with the Madness also explores the theme of mental illness, debuted in New York in 2003. CRITICAL RECEPTION Campbell’s most critically acclaimed novels are her first two, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine and Brothers and Sisters, both of which focus heavily on race relations. Much of this acclaim, however, is from reviews. A few academic analysis of her work exist. Although most of the reviews praise Campbell’s ability to write about the delicate issue of race, Clyde Edgerton of the New York Times finds merits in Campbell’s use of point of view. In 1992, about Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, he writes, ‘‘[m]uch of the power of this novel results from Ms. Campbell’s subtle and seamless shifting of point of view.’’ About Brothers and Sisters, Publishers Weekly said in 1994 that ‘‘[a]droitly using the great racial divide of Los Angeles, this absorbing novel explores the intricacies of experience, knowledge and bias which perpetuate inequalities and segregated lives.’’ In addition to various recognition and awards, Campbell has also received praise for her other novels, a children’s book, and a recent stage play. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Bebe Moore Campbell Brother and Sisters. New York: Berkeley Books, 1994. 72 Hour Hold. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2005. Singing in the Comeback Choir. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998. Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry. Illustrated by E. B. Lewis. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003. Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1986. Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and without My Dad. New York: Berkeley Books, 1990. What You Owe Me. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

Studies of Bebe Moore Campbell’s Works Peacock, Scot, et al., eds. Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series 81. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 1999, 83–85. Russell-Robinson, Joyce. ‘‘Bebe Moore Campbell (1950– ).’’ In Contemporary African-American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographic Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 76–81. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Tenille Brown

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD (1939– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Barbara Chase-Riboud is an artist as well as a poet and novelist. She was born on June 1939 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only daughter of Charles Edward Chase and Vivian May West. In 1946, she enrolled at the Fletcher Memorial Art School. Then, she became a student at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. She also attended the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Chase-Riboud began writing poetry in 1950, enrolled at the Philadelphia High School for Girls and finally graduated summa cum laude. In 1957, she graduated from Tyler School of Fine Arts in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. One year later, she studied at the American Academy in Rome. Moreover, during her stay in Italy, she decided to spend three months traveling and studying art in Egypt. Chase-Riboud returned to the United States in 1959 and attended Yale University where she studied design and architecture. After receiving her master’s degree, she moved to London in 1960. She arrived in Paris in 1961. There, she married French photographer Marc Riboud. She traveled throughout Europe and, in 1963, she made a trip to the Soviet Union. Her first son David Charles was born in 1964, and the following year she visited the People’s Republic of China. Her poems written at that time reflect her previous visits to China as well as Egypt. Her second son Alexis Karol was born in 1967. Later, ChaseRiboud divorced her first husband in 1981 and married Sergio Tosi, an Italian publisher, art expert/historian. MAJOR WORKS Chase-Riboud’s literary career started with a book of poetry, From Memphis to Peking (1974). In the 1960s, she exhibited her works not only in Europe but also in West Africa. Thereafter, throughout the 1970s, her art pieces were displayed in the United States and Europe. Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (1979) propelled her to the front stage of the literary scene. She published Valide: A Novel of the Harem in 1986. Her third novel Echo of Lions (1989) was inspired by the story of a former African slave. The prequel to Sally Hemings, The President’s Daughter was completed in 1994. Most recently, Riboud’s Hottentot Venus: A Novel (2003) tells the tragic story of South African Sarah Baartman who was taken to London by an English surgeon. The idea of writing Sally Hemings came from her interest in the story of an African American slave who became romantically involved with Thomas Jefferson. In Valide: A Novel of the Harem, she relates the enslavement of an American Creole girl by Algerian pirates in 1802. Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987) uses Plutarch’s description of Cleopatra and the events in her life. Riboud’s poem is a melologue, a combination of both male and female voices imitated by one person and a recitation with musical accompaniment.

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD

77

CRITICAL RECEPTION Following the publication of Sally Hemings (1979), Chase-Riboud received the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize for best historical novel. The text leads to Chase-Riboud being praised for the breadth of her historical research on the lives of African slaves, slave traders, and slave narratives in the nineteenth century. Specifically, she has received rave reviews for skillfully weaving fictional characters and scenes into her historical fiction. An article in the New York Tribune explains that ‘‘the sadness captured in the final pages of this novel is a testimonial to the sensitiveness of an important novelist.’’ Likewise, a review in the San Francisco Chronicle highlights that ‘‘Chase-Riboud is a scrupulous historical researcher who writes movingly of the horrifying, murderous brutality of the slave trade. Her descriptions of the starvation, mass suicides and insanity stir us in a way that a mere historical account could never match.’’ Essence magazine shows that ‘‘the historical backdrop gives . . . a rare glimpse into the lives of free Black men and women in the preCivil War era and a place for her brilliant depiction of John Quincy Adams.’’ In 1997, the film Amistad by Steven Spielberg was inspired by Chase-Riboud’s Echo of Lions (1989). Alex Haley wrote, ‘‘Echo of Lions is a brilliant dramatization of the most gripping, significant and epic saga that a century of slave ships ever produced.’’ Chase-Riboud won the Carl Sandburg prize for a book of poetry titled Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra. Furthermore, the French government awarded her the Knighthood in Arts and Letters in 1996. More recently, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association named Hottentot Venus: A Novel (2003) ‘‘Best Fiction Book of 2004.’’ Interestingly, Africa Rising (1998), her eighteen-foot bronze memorial sculpture, was also inspired from her desire to restore Sarah Baartman’s human dignity. Finally, Barbara Chase-Riboud has been the subject of a number of books published internationally from the 1970s until the late 1990s and she has also been featured in many periodicals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Barbara Chase-Riboud Echo of Lions. New York: Morrow, 1989. From Memphis to Peking: Poems. New York: Random House, 1974. HottentotVenus: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra. New York: Morrow, 1987. The President’s Daughter. New York: Random House, 1994. Sally Hemings: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1979. Valide: A Novel of the Harem. New York: Morrow, 1986.

Studies of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Works Cohen, Roger. ‘‘Judge Says Copyright Covers Writer’s Ideas of a Jefferson Affair.’’ New York Times (August 15, 1991). Davis, Thadius M., and Trudier Harris, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, vol. 33. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 1984. Farris, Phoebe, ed. Women Artists of Color: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

78

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Jansen, Anthony, and Peter Selz, eds. Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sculptor. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. McKee, Sarah. ‘‘Barbara (Dewayne Tosi) Chase-Riboud.’’ In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Witzling, Mara R., ed. Voicing Today’s Visions: Writings by Contemporary Women Artists. New York: Universe Publishing, 1994.

Ginette Curry

ALICE CHILDRESS (1916–1994)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Although Alice Childress enjoyed a career as a novelist, playwright, director, actress, and activist that spanned four decades, the details of her early life are elusive and Childress’s reticence in discussing her private life further obscures her personal narrative. Alice Herndon Childress was born on October 12, 1916, in Charleston, South Carolina, to Florence White, a seamstress, and Alonzo Herrington. After her parents’ separation, her maternal grandmother, Eliza Campbell White became her legal guardian and Childress subsequently moved from Charleston to Harlem in 1925. She would later emphasize the significance of this move and of White’s influence on her life in an interview with Elizabeth Brown-Guillory identifying the change as ‘‘a very fortunate thing that happened’’ (Brown-Guillory 67). Even as Childress’s mother continued to play a limited role in her life until her death in the early 1930s, her grandmother was her primary caregiver and teacher. White introduced her to a variety of experiences at a young age including giving her walking tours of the city and churches in Harlem as well as exposing her to art galleries as she continued her early education at P.S. 81, Julia Ward Howe Junior High, and Wadleigh High School. White encouraged her granddaughter to use her imagination and Childress linked the use of imagination to writing. In interviews with Roberta McGuire and Clayton Holloway, Childress recounts how she and her grandmother would look out from their apartment window, choose a person on the street and create an oral narrative about that person—who he or she was, where he or she lived, what his or her family was like, what he or she did for a living. Childress would then write the narrative, and she credited these childhood experiences with her grandmother or getting ‘‘involved in the life of people’’ as one of the significant influences on her career as a writer (Maguire 33; Holloway 8). In addition to writing, she was beginning to act in plays at school, demonstrating an interest in acting that she would continue throughout her life (Maguire 34). The promising changes in Childress’s life that began in 1925 came to a halt in the early 1930s when both her mother Florence and her grandmother Eliza died. Ultimately, their deaths meant the end of her formal education and the beginning of work to support herself. It is during this period following the deaths of her mother and grandmother around 1933 through 1941 that enormous changes took place in Childress’s life. She met Alvin Childress, a Mississippi native who came to New York to find work in the theater, and married him. In November 1935 their only daughter, Jean, was born. Although she took on new responsibilities as a mother and wife, Childress continued to pursue her interests in both acting and writing, and the American Negro Theatre (ANT) served as the launching site for her long career in theater. Childress was central to the establishment of ANT along with cofounders Abram Hill, Frederick O’Neal, Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis. She made her first appearance as an actress as Dolly in Abram Hill and John Silvera’s On Strivers Row in 1940 at ANT, and appeared in several productions with the company alongside her husband. In 1944, they both

80

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

appeared in Philip Yordan’s Anna Lucasta, which moved to Broadway in August of that year and ran there for 957 performances, earning Childress a Tony award nomination for her performance (Dugan 147). Behind the scenes, she excelled in administrative work and served the company in every capacity with the exception of working as stage manager. However, by the late 1940s the Childress’s marriage encountered difficulties due in part to Alvin Childress’s move to the West Coast to begin work on the television situation comedy Amos ’n’ Andy which was the first to have an all-black cast. The development of the program from radio to television and the airing of the controversial show reignited an ongoing debate within the African American community about race and representation. Organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) maintained that the narrow representations of black identity in the show were stereotypical, demeaning, and ultimately detrimental to political and social change, while others, particularly the program’s actors including Alvin Childress, did not believe that the representations were harmful. This ideological difference seemingly influenced the eventual dissolution of their marriage. Though Childress would later challenge the black middle-class ideologies of groups like the NAACP that sought in some instances to distance itself from such images, she was also disturbed by the reading of the images as representative of all definitions of black identity and this perspective on representations of African American identity clearly influenced her work. Ironically, in 1949 Alvin Childress won the title role of Amos and, during the same year at ANT, she staged, directed, and starred in her first play, Florence, which contests stereotypical images of black domestic workers. By 1957, she divorced Alvin Childress and married composer Nathan Woodard on 17 July of the same year. The early 1950s to the mid-1960s marked a writing boom for Childress. She staged three more plays: Just a Little Simple in 1950, Gold through the Trees in 1952, and Trouble in Mind in 1956 which won an Obie Award for Best Original Off Broadway Play, making Childress the first woman to win the award. Even as she wrote and produced plays, she also penned a column for Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom where she worked with Lorraine Hansberry who wrote Childress’s first stage review for the paper. Selections from Childress’s column called ‘‘One a Month’’ were later collected for her book Like One of the Family published in 1956 and it was excerpted in the Baltimore Afro-American for sixty-two weeks in 1956 and 1957. Over the next two decades, she staged eight plays including Wedding Band in 1966 and published the novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich in 1973, for which she is best known, which garnered several awards recognizing the best in young adult fiction. In the last twenty years of her life, Childress continued to write, staging three plays and publishing two novels. Her last completed work Those Other People was published in 1989 and the following year her only child, Jean, died of cancer. Childress was working on a book about the life of her grandmother when she died of cancer in Queens, New York, on August 14, 1994. MAJOR WORKS The realist mode of representation that drives all of Childress’s work draws upon characters whom she described in a 1984 essay as ‘‘the have-nots in a have society, [who are] seldom singled out by mass media, except as source material for derogatory humor and/or condescending clinical, social analysis’’ (Childress 250). Focusing primarily on representations of African American women, many of the characters in her work recuperate

ALICE CHILDRESS

81

standard racial stereotypes, challenge gender roles, and raise questions about class status and class mobility within the African American community through themes of race and racial discrimination, gender equity, regional stereotypes, and class stratification. In Florence, a play that was written in one night and grew out of Childress’s frustration at the scarcity of roles for African Americans that portrayed more than onedimensional stereotypes, Mrs. Whitney, the mother of two adult daughters, Florence and Marge, meets out of work white actress Mrs. Carter en route to New York to bring her daughter Florence back home to the south and to discourage her from attempting to become an actress. After two exchanges between the women in a segregated train station and Mrs. Carter’s refusal to grant the legitimacy of the multiple facets of African American identity that Mrs. Whitney attempts to detail for her, Mrs. Whitney decides to support her daughter’s decision to pursue an acting career in New York because as she tells the porter, Mr. Brown, Florence ‘‘can be anything in the world she wants to be! That’s her right.’’ Childress’s Obie-award-winning Trouble in Mind raises related questions around African American identity and what constitutes that identity. The plot hinges on the production of a play called Chaos in Belleville and how the actors who will appear in the play negotiate their need for gainful employment alongside the racial politics and representations put forth in the play. Written, produced, and directed by white men, the play trades in standard racial, gender, and regional stereotypes. However, Willetta Mayer, the play’s protagonist, refuses to play the role as it is written and her confrontation with the play’s director lays bare how deeply his own notions of African American identity are informed by stereotypes. An interracial relationship set in early twentieth-century Charleston drives the plot of Wedding Band. It is the story of Julia (a black seamstress) and Herman (a white baker) who have maintained a long-term relationship but are prohibited by law from marrying. As Herman falls ill and is dying, Julia is forced to confront Herman’s racist mother, members of a black community who question her commitment to it due to her relationship with Herman, and her own relationship to both her racial and regional identities. Rather than continuing to view their relationship as one that transcends or is blind to racial difference, by the end of the play she acknowledges the weight and significance of their respective histories and what they bring to bear on their relationship. CRITICAL RECEPTION Though generally Childress’s work was well received by critics, one recurring issue in much of the criticism of her work is the concern that the social protest flattens characterization and style in her work. While on one hand critics appreciate the significance of the social problems her texts underscore, on the other, they are concerned with the ‘‘sermonizing’’ of her work. Critics of the original production of Trouble in Mind applauded the play for its themes of racial stereotypes and racial identity. Harry Raymond argued in the Daily Worker that the play had ‘‘an important point of view about the problems of the Negro in the theatre’’ and further that Childress provides the audience with ‘‘some sound thoughts on one of the major social problems in the field of American culture (Raymond 48). Characterization was also often a noted strength of much of her work and in this play Willeta was viewed as exemplary in troubling both racial and gender stereotypes. Gayle Austin asserted in ‘‘Black Woman Playwright as Feminist Critic’’ that Childress had

82

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

sketched ‘‘some alternative images of black women, three dimensional characters with weaknesses and strengths’’ (Austin 53). Despite these accolades, for some critics there were concerns that detracted from the play’s strengths. Doris Abramson argued that the play has ‘‘interesting characters and dialogue, though both tend to ring false whenever they are saturated with sermonizing’’ (Abramson 49). However, several critics found that the play’s themes were relevant years after its original production. In her assessment of it in a 1979 Village Voice article, Sally R. Sommers suggested that the play speaks to both U.S. social history and the history of African American drama, ‘‘the best parts of the play, its multi-leveled language and seething, funny role reenactments, prefigure the tough black style of the ’60s plays naturalistic dramas that hit hard, inset with sermonlike arias for solo performers’’ (Sommers 17). Linda Armstrong praised the play’s ideological perspective and Childress’s efforts to complicate African American identity in her review appearing in the New York New Amsterdam News in April 1998 saying, ‘‘[she] is careful to present a variety of views and justify them’’ (Armstrong 30). The critics who dared to review Wedding Band had similar impressions of the play. It was widely disregarded by critics and producers when it was written because its controversial themes of interracial marriage and miscegenation were still illegal in some states. When a production of the play was aired on ABC in 1973, the several Southern affiliates banned its broadcast and it was nearly three years before the play’s first stage production at the University of Michigan. Like Childress’s Florence and Trouble in Mind, Wedding Band was optioned for production on Broadway, but was never staged there. Despite the controversy, the New York Times’s Richard Eder found the characters particularly compelling, calling them ‘‘rich and lively’’ and he further made a case for the power of the plays themes stating that the play poses what he terms the old question of whether or not race is a category or humanity or a division of it. In response, he contends that while that question is old, ‘‘it takes on the freshness of new life in the marvelous characters that Miss Childress has created to ask it’’ (Eder 14). Harold Clurman reiterated the strength of Childress’s characterization and its timeliness in his 1972 review in the Nation that ‘‘[t]he fact that black and white interrelationships have somewhat changed since 1918 does not make the play less relevant to the present. Constitutional amendments and laws do not immediately change people’s emotions; the divisions and tensions which Wedding Band dramatizes still exist to a far more painful extent than most of us are willing to admit’’ (Clurman 475). Though prolific during her long career, there has been limited academic critical inquiry into Childress’s work. As critic Olga Dugan and others have argued, Childress’s oeuvre necessitates reconsideration in terms of its contribution and significance to the ‘‘literary and theatrical histories of how drama functions in American culture and society’’ (Dugan 146).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Alice Childress Black Scenes. New York: Doubleday, 1971. ‘‘Florence.’’ In Wine in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990.

ALICE CHILDRESS

83

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich. London: Coward, 1979. Let’s Hear It for the Queen: A Play. Music by Woodward. Illustrated by Charles Lilly. New York: Coward, 1975. Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Many Closets. New York: Coward, 1987. Mojo and String: Two Plays. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1971. Rainbow Jordan. New York: Coward, 1981. A Short Walk. New York: Coward, 1979. Those Other People. New York: Putnam, 1989. ‘‘Trouble in Mind.’’ In Black Theatre: A Twentieth Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights, edited by Lindsay Patterson. New York: Dodd, 1971. Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. New York: Samuel French, 1973. When the Rattlesnake Sounds: A Play. Illustrated by Charles Lilly. New York: Coward, 1975. Wine in the Wilderness: A Comedy-Drama. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1972.

Studies of Alice Childress’s Works Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1959. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Armstrong, Linda. Review of Trouble In Mind. New York: New Amsterdam News, 1998. Austin, Gayle. ‘‘Alice Childress: Black Woman Playwright as Feminist Critic.’’ Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring 1987): 53–62. Billingslea-Brown, Alma Jean. ‘‘The Blight of Legalized Limitation in Alice Childress’s Wedding Band.’’ In Law and Literature Perspectives, edited by Bruce L. Rockwood and Roberta Kevelson, 39–51. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Brown, Janet. Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979, 56–70. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. Burke, Sally. American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History. New York: Twayne/London: Prentice Hall, 1996, 144–52. Clurman, Harold. Review of Wedding Band. The Nation, 1972. Curb, Rosemary. ‘‘An Unfashionable Tragedy of American Racism: Alice Childress’s Wedding Band.’’ MELUS 7 (Winter 1980): 57–68. Dugan, Olga. ‘‘Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright.’’ Journal of Negro History 81 (Winter–Fall 1996): 123–36. ———. Useful Drama: Variations on the Theme of Black Self-Determination in the Plays of Alice Childress. New York: University of Rochester Press, 1998. Eder, Richard. Review of Wedding Band. New York Times, 1973. Ely, Melvin Patrick. The Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. New York: Free Press, 1991. Holloway, Clayton. ‘‘The Alembic of Genius: An Interview with Alice Childress.’’ Xavier Review 17.1 (1997): 5–22. Jennings, La Vinia Delois. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Maguire, Roberta S. ‘‘Alice Childress.’’ Twentieth Century Dramatists. Ed. Christopher Wheatley. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002: 30–39. Reuben, Paul P. ‘‘Chapter 8: American Drama.’’ Alice Childress. PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—A Research and Reference Guide. http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/ chap8/childress.html (accessed February 2003). Raymond, Harry. Review of Trouble in Mind. Daily Worker 1955. Schroeder, Patricia R. ‘‘Re-Reading Alice Childress.’’ In Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, edited by Marc Maufort, 323–37. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

84

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Sommers, Sally R. Review of Trouble in Mind. Village Voice, 1999. Turner, Beth. ‘‘Simplifyin’: Langston Hughes and Alice Childress Re/member Jesse B. Semple.’’ Langston Hughes Review 15 (Spring 1997): 37–48. Vojta, Barbara Rothman. In Praise of African-American Women: Female Images in the Plays of Alice Childress. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Wiley, Catherine. ‘‘Whose Name, Whose Protection: Reading Alice Childress’s Wedding Band.’’ In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter, 184–97. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.

Carol Bunch Davis

BARBARA T. CHRISTIAN (1943–2000)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Barbara T. Christian was author and editor of several books and published many articles and reviews in scholarly journals and magazines. She was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, in 1943. At fifteen, she attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, graduating cum laude in 1963. While earning a Ph.D. from Columbia University in contemporary British and American Literature, Christian taught at the College of the Virgin Islands, Hunter College in New York City, and City College of New York, in the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) program for talented underprivileged students. Completing her Ph.D. with distinction in 1970, Christian joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, where she spent her entire career. She was key in founding the Department of Afro-American Studies, serving as chair from 1978 to 1983; she was also instrumental in forming the Ph.D. program in Ethnic Studies, which she chaired from 1986 to 1989, and the alternative University Without Walls that served people of color, from 1971 to 1976. In a career of ‘‘firsts,’’she was the first African American woman awarded tenure at Berkeley in 1978 and full professorship in 1986. She was the first African American to win the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991, and she was also awarded the prestigious Berkeley Citation for achievement and service in 2000. MAJOR WORKS Considered a groundbreaking and influential scholar of black women’s writing, an outstanding and generous teacher and mentor, and an exceptionally committed contributor to her academic and civic community, Christian is perhaps best known in academic circles for two books of literary criticism, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (1980) and Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (1985). The first volume appeared at a time when few critics had acknowledged the renaissance of African American women writing in the 1970s. Christian described and discussed the origins of black women’s writing and traced stereotypes of black women in literature from 1892. The work included a close examination of the work of Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Alice Walker, and is considered a significant piece of American literary history and one of the cornerstone texts of black feminist literary scholarship; in fact, many consider this work not just the first of its kind but the genesis of the field as well. Black Feminist Criticism, a collection of essays analyzing the writing of African American women from nineteenth to the late twentieth centuary was equally significant, creating the academic ground upon which much criticism of African American women writers is based. Perhaps equally significant was her much cited and frequently anthologized essay ‘‘The Race for Theory,’’ which urged scholars to maintain their focus on the writing itself, because, she insisted, ‘‘I know from literary history that writing disappears unless there is a response to it’’ (77). In

86

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

addition to her analysis and promotion of the black female literary tradition, Christian’s investigation of the intersections of race, class, and gender in black women’s lives and writing has been useful to literary and cultural critics. Her efforts to elucidate and foster African American literature and research have had a lasting impact on the evolution of the disciplines of African American and feminist literary history and scholarship. CRITICAL RECEPTION Because of the significance of her academic work, which included, in addition to the major books, nearly 100 published articles and numerous speeches at national and international conferences, Christian was highly sought after as a mentor by aspiring students of African American literature and culture. Tributes to her work at University of California at Berkeley indicate that she was beloved by students, who flocked to her classes in droves and sought support at her home in Berkeley, which they report was a comfortable gathering place for scholars, students, admirers, progressives, and artists. They note that Christian’s intellectual passion crossed disciplines and produced significant work, such as the book Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997), which she edited with Elizabeth Abel and Helen Moglen. Christian was recognized outside of the university as well; she worked in the local community on issues ranging from police brutality to American foreign policy. She twice won the Louise Patterson African American Studies Award in 1992 and 1995; she was awarded the City of Berkeley Icon award for her community service in 1994, the Modern Language Association MELUS award for her contributions to ethnic and African American scholarship, and the Gwendolyn Brooks Center award in 1995. Her intellectual rigor, combined with her political commitment and interpersonal generosity made her a much beloved community member, mentor, and colleague. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Barbara T. Christian Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. ‘‘But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of a Little Bit of History.’’ In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl Wall, 58–74. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel and Helen Moglen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. ‘‘The Race for Theory: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.’’ In Feminisms, edited by Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, 69–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Studies of Barbara T. Christian’s Works ‘‘Barbara Christian, 56, Leader in Modern Literary Feminism.’’ New York Times 1 ( July 9, 2000, late edition): 31. ‘‘Barbara Christian.’’ University of California: In Memoriam (2001). Available from the Online Archive of California: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb987008v1 (accessed March 30, 2005).

BARBARA T. CHRISTIAN

87

‘‘Barbara T. Christian.’’ Contemporary Authors Online (May 23, 2001). Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2005. http://galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (accessed March 30, 2005). ‘‘Barbara T. Christian.’’ Contemporary Black Biography. V. 44. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2005. http://galegroup.com/servlet/ BioRC (accessed March 30, 2005). ‘‘Barbara T. Christian.’’ Feminist Writers. St. James Press, 1996. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2005. http://galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (ACCESSED March 30, 2005). Bowles, Gloria. ‘‘Tribute: Barbara T. Christian (1943–2000).’’ NWSA Journal 13.2 (Summer 2001). Goldberg, David Theo. ‘‘Obituary: Barbara Theresa Christian, 1943–2000.’’ Social Identities 6.4 (2000). Spencer, Suzette. ‘‘Introduction to Barbara Christian’s ‘The Past Is Infinite.’ ’’ Social Identities 6.4 (2000).

Sharon L. Barnes

PEARL T. CLEAGE (1948– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright Pearl T. Cleage was born on December 7, 1948, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Doris Graham Cleage, a teacher, and Albert B. Cleage, Jr., a minister and civil rights activist. When she was a young child, her family moved to Detroit, Michigan, where her father started his own church. Cleage considers her childhood home a writer’s paradise. Scattered throughout the house were books by Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ossie Davis alongside works by Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Sanger, and Arthur Miller. From an early age, Cleage found herself engaged in lively political debates with her parents and their friends. Further, her parents often took her to museums, the theater, and other live cultural events that spurred Cleage’s love for language and performance. In 1966, Cleage graduated from Detroit public schools and began her college education at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in playwriting and dramatic literature. In 1969, she married Michael Lomax, an Atlanta politician, and moved from D.C. to Atlanta. She enrolled in Spelman College while in Atlanta and graduated in 1971 with a degree in drama. Later she joined the faculty there as a writer and playwright. Cleage and Lomax have one child, Deignan Njeri. They divorced in 1979. In 1994, Cleage married Zaron W. Burnett, Jr., a writer and director for the Just Us Theater Company, where Cleage serves as artistic director. She currently resides in Atlanta’s historic Southwest neighborhood with her husband and her cat. MAJOR WORKS Cleage’s first love is playwriting. ‘‘I still believe that theatre has a ritual power to call forth the spirits, illuminate the darkness and speak the truth to the people’’ (in Preface, Flyin’ West and Other Plays). Her most often produced plays, Flyin’ West and Blues for Alabama Sky, were commissioned by the Atlanta-based Alliance Theatre, Flyin’ West in 1992 and Blues for Alabama Sky in 1995. Flyin’ West takes its story from an historical fact. According to the Playwright’s Note, in 1860 The Homestead Act offered 320 acres of ‘‘free’’ land to U.S. citizens willing to settle in the Western states. By 1890, a quarter of a million unmarried or widowed women were running their own farms and ranches, many of them African American (Flyin’ West 6). Flyin’ West tells the story of two sisters who have acquired the deeds to their land, but who must rescue a third sister who is being physically abused and swindled out of her land by her free-loading, mulatto, passing husband. The play ends happily, and so more than just providing exposure of this little-known aspect of African American women’s history, Flyin’ West demonstrates how women can come together to provide strength and protection to each other, one of Cleage’s favorite and recurring themes.

PEARL T. CLEAGE

89

Cleage explains in ‘‘Why I Write: An Introduction’’ that she came to this raison d’etre on the morning of her forty-first birthday when she heard the news about a misogynist lone gunman in Montreal who had killed fourteen women and wounded thirteen others. Coming after a series of encounters with students, friends, and colleagues all suffering the wounds of domestic violence, the news about the gunman clarified for Cleage that in order to maintain hope, all of her writing must be about combating the growing despair she saw in herself and her African American sisters. ‘‘I am writing,’’she says, ‘‘to understand the full effects of being black and female in a culture that is both racist and sexist . . .’’ (Deals with the Devil 7). She has never strayed from this commitment. From her earliest plays to her latest novel, Pearl Cleage tells the hard truths about life for African American women, and more importantly provides a vision for sisterhood and survival. But Cleage’s message does not always come with a happy ending. In Blues for Alabama Sky, the protagonist Angel Anderson, a blues singer turned prostitute during the depression, has given up all hope of ever escaping Harlem and its poverty until she meets Alabama, a religious zealot who falls in love with her because she looks like his dead wife. Angel agrees to marry Alabama in order to escape the city and her desperate economic plight, even though she does not love him. But Alabama is not the savior that Angel imagined, and, instead of providing escape, Alabama murders Angel’s best ally and leads her to spiritual and emotional destruction. Although at the end of the play Angel is worse off than in the beginning, the play still reinforces one of Cleage’s most important messages: women need each other. Women who are isolated will have to compromise their principles and their lives, something which can never be an option. Although a prolific and successful playwright, in the mid-1990s, Cleage turned from playwriting to fiction. On April 25, 2005, at a reading at Books and Company in Dayton, Ohio, Cleage explained that she made the shift because she had a specific story that she wanted to tell, and the story did not fit within the parameters of a dramatic production. ‘‘There were too many characters, too many scenes, and the story would take longer than two hours to tell,’’ she explained. Cleage’s first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was published by Avon Books in 1997. It tells the story of successful business woman Ava Johnson, who when she finds out she is HIV positive, decides to return to her hometown of Idlewood, Michigan, before heading off to a new life in San Francisco. What she thinks is a quick visit turns into a life-long commitment. Although the novel tackles some heavy issues such as AIDS, teenage motherhood, crack, joblessness, and low self-esteem, it remains surprisingly upbeat and funny. The successful first novel was followed by a less successful second and third novel, I Wish I Had a Red Dress and Some Things I Thought I’d Never Do. But Cleage’s fourth and latest novel, Babylon Sisters, finds Cleage reconnected with her gutsy genius. Babylon Sisters explores the power of truth through the character of a single mother, Catharine, and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Phoebe, who is bent on finding her father. Catharine, who runs a successful business helping immigrant women find jobs, has kept the truth about Phoebe’s father from her daughter for too many years to give it up now. But the truth is inevitably going to come out, and in this story the outcome is as surprising as the secret.

90

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Mark Marino of offoffoff.com in a review of Hospice, one of Cleage’s first plays, said, ‘‘The themes are heavy but the show is a joy to watch.’’ This sentiment has been repeated extensively in the reviews of Cleage’s work. ‘‘Though there are some potentially over-the-top emotional moments, the integrity of the characters and the world of the play are held,’’said Freda Scott Giles in a 1997 review of Bourbon at the Border, a play about the devastating effects of Freedom Summer on an African American couple still struggling with the horrendous emotional repercussions of their experience twenty-five years later. Cleage gained national attention as a playwright beginning in 1992 with the production of her play Flyin’ West, which premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and has subsequently been produced at a number of regional theatres across the country and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Flyin’ West was followed by Blues for Alabama Sky and Bourbon at the Border which have added to her reputation and popularity as a playwright. When her first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was chosen by television personality Oprah Winfrey as her first on-air Book Club selection, Cleage gained national acclaim as a fiction writer. What Looks Like Crazy became a New York Times best seller and won the BCALA Literary Award. Cleage has received numerous other awards in recognition of her work, including the Bronze Jubilee Award for Literature in 1983 and the outstanding columnist award from the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists in 1991. Cleage’s success manifests from her self-proclaimed mission as a writer to tell the truth. From her earliest plays through her latest novel, she does just that with ‘‘passion and humor, anger and wit, idealism and dignity’’ (Monroe).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Pearl T. Cleage Babylon Sisters. New York: One World/Ballantine, 2005. The Brass Bed and Other Stories. Chicago: Third World Press, 1991. Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot. New York: Ballantine, 1993. Flyin’ West and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999. Hospice. New Plays for the Black Theater, edited by Woodie King, Fr. Chicago: Third World Press, 1989. I Wish I Had a Red Dress. New York: William Morrow, 2002. Mad at Miles: A Black Woman’s Guide to Truth. Southfield, MI: Cleage Group, 1990. Some Things I Thought I’d Never Do. New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 2003. We Don’t Need No Music. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972. What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day. New York: Avon Books, 1997.

Studies of Pearl T. Cleage’s Works Giles, Freda Scott. ‘‘The Motion of Herstory: Three Plays by Pearl Cleage.’’ African American Review (Winter 1997): 709–12. Marino, Mark. ‘‘Death of a Diva.’’ May 30, 2002. www.offoffoff.com. Monroe, Steve. ‘‘Black Women as Pioneers.’’ American Visions October/November 1994.

PEARL T. CLEAGE

91

Paige, Linda Rohrer. ‘‘Pearl Cleage.’’ In Significant Contemporary American Feminists: A Biographical Sourcebook, edited by Jennifer Scanlon, 67–72. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. ‘‘Pearl Cleage.’’ Essence (March 2005): 135. Peterson, Jane T., and Suzanne Bennett. ‘‘Pearl Cleage.’’ In Women Playwrights of Diversity: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook, 90–93. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Robert, Tara. ‘‘Pearls of Wisdom.’’ Essence (December 1997). Washington, Elsie B. ‘‘Pearl Cleage.’’ Essence (September 1993).

Adrienne Cassel

MICHELLE CLIFF (1946– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Michelle Cliff has penned three novels as well as several books of poetry and a collection of short stories. She was born in Jamaica on November 2, 1946. Her family migrated to the United States and moved into a Caribbean neighborhood in New York City during her childhood. Cliff traveled back and forth to Jamaica and was educated in Jamaica, the United States, and Britain. She attended Wagner College in New York and Warburg Institute of the University of London, where she wrote a dissertation on the Italian Renaissance. Cliff ’s novels are Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, and Free Enterprise. MAJOR WORKS Michelle Cliff ’s primary literary preoccupation is with the recovery and rewriting of the lost histories of slavery, colonization, and women’s resistance in the Caribbean islands and the United States from the perspective of the African diaspora. The project of rewriting black women’s histories is inextricably linked to the quest of rearticulating black female identity, a theme evident in the tribulations of Clare Savage, Cliff ’s lightskinned heroine in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven. Cliff attempts to locate black women’s identity at the shifting intersections of race, color, class, and sexual orientation. Clare Savage, Cliff ’s heroine, comes to terms with her identity as the racially mixed, descendant of African slaves and white plantation owners. However, as she grows into womanhood Clare identifies herself with her grandmother and her mother’s relatives in the Jamaican countryside, the rhythms of agricultural life, and the African rituals, persisting in the pre-Christian folk memories of the island, rather than her urban, lighterskinned, paternal relatives. Clare’s adolescence in New York allows her to establish solidarity with civil rights and the anti-Vietnam movements in the United States and connect these to the struggles against poverty and underdevelopment in postcolonial Jamaica. In Cliff ’s novels the personal questions of identity get explored in the context of the history of African slavery and colonization as well as the contemporary realities of neocolonialism and global poverty. In representing women like Nanny in Abeng and Mary Ellen Pleasant in Free Enterprise, she attempts to re-inscribe women who participated in armed resistance to slavery into the archives of history, at a time when globalization is erasing the lived history of slavery from the islands and fetishizing these places and histories. Michelle Cliff employs a variety of narrative linguistic methods to achieve her complex literary and philosophical project. She is particularly skilful in her use of multiple perspectives, which fracture a teleological time sequence and constantly juxtapose the present with the past. She is also very effective in mingling Jamaican dialect with standard English, succeeding in giving voice to marginalized languages in the AfroCaribbean novel.

MICHELLE CLIFF

93

CRITICAL RECEPTION Michelle Cliff ’s literary oeuvre has received widespread and enthusiastic critical attention. Her works have been studied from a variety of critical approaches including those of transnational feminism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and African American and African diaspora studies. Her work has inspired many critical articles in scholarly journals and critical anthologies as well as a monograph. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Michelle Cliff Abeng. New York: Plume, 1984. Bodies of Water. New York: Dutton, 1990. Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise. Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1980. Free Enterprise. New York: Dutton, 1993. The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1985. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Dutton, 1987. The Store of a Million Items: Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Studies of Michelle Cliff ’s Works Agosto, Noraida. Michelle Cliff’s Novels: Piecing the Tapestry of Memory and History. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Edmondson, Belinda. ‘‘Race, Writing, and the Politics of (Re) Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff.’’ Callaloo (Winter 1993): 180–91. Lionnet, Francoise. ‘‘Of Mangoes and Maroons: Language, History, and the Multicultural Subject of Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng.’’ In De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 321–45. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Macdonald-Smyhte, Antonia. Making Homes in the West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Routledge, 2001. Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. Using the Master’s Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South Asian Diasporas. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Raiskin, Judith. ‘‘Inverts and Hybrids: Lesbian Rewritings of Sexual and Racial Identities.’’ In The Lesbian Postmodern, edited by Laura Doan, 156–72. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Lopamudra Basu

LUCILLE CLIFTON (1936– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Author of more than twenty children’s books and over 100 anthologies of poetry, Thelma Lucille Sayles Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936. Her family migrated North to find work, but their lives in the South were not forgotten. Lucille grew up with stories of her southern heritage, including tales of her great great grandmother Caroline, a slave brought to America from Dahomey, West Africa. Lucille’s parents, although not well educated, provided their children with books and instilled a love of the learning process in their offspring, especially in Lucille. She was the first of her family to attend college. At Howard University, on a full scholarship, Lucille met notable African American authors Sterling Brown, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and Toni Morrison, who would later become her editor at Random House. After losing her scholarship due to poor grades, Lucille returned to New York and attended Fredonia State Teachers College but did not graduate. In 1958, she married Fred Clifton, a yogi, who went on to receive his Ph.D. and establish an ashram. During the early years of their marriage, Lucille worked as a claims clerk, gave birth to six children, and wrote poetry. The death of her mother in 1959 at the early age of forty-four affected Clifton greatly and became a catalyst for many of her later poems. In 1969, Clifton asked poet Robert Hayden to help her publish her poetry. He passed Clifton’s poems on to poet Carolyn Kizer, who entered them in the YMCA Poetry Center Discovery Award Contest. Clifton won the award and her volume Good Times was published by Random House. Also an author of children’s books, Clifton saw her Some of the Days of Everett Anderson published the next year. The next decade was an active time for Clifton. She published An Ordinary Woman in 1974, which along with Two-Headed Woman (1980), explores the spirituality of her world. A memoir based on the stories her father told her of their ancestors, Generations, was published in 1976. Clifton served as Maryland’s Poet Laureate from 1979 to 1982. A quiet period ensued after the death of her husband at age forty-nine in 1984. It was not until 1987 that two more volumes of poetry were published: a retrospective collection, Good Woman, and Next, a collection of lamentations and dirges for those who have been lost. Between 1994 and 2004, Clifton has faced numerous challenges and losses. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1994, underwent a kidney transplant; lost her daughter, Fredrica, to a brain tumor; and her son, Channing, to heart failure. Her personal journey has always been a central theme in her work. Her journey to self-awareness along with a concern for ‘‘social justice, African American history, and the innate strength of womanhood’’ (Holladay, Wild Blessings, 13) inform most of Clifton’s most recent poetry in Quilting (1991), The Book of Light (1993), The Terrible Stories (1996), and Blessing the Boats (2000). Clifton has taught at many institutions including the University of California at Santa Cruz and Columbia University. She taught at Duke University as the William Blackburn Distinguished Visiting Professor, and in 1999 was appointed to the Hilda

LUCILLE CLIFTON

95

C. Landers Chair in the Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Clifton has also received much recognition for her poetry. Her awards include several Pulitzer Prize nominations, a lifetime achievement award from the Lannan Foundation, being named a fellow of the Academy of American Poets, and many book awards. MAJOR WORKS Best known for her poetry, Clifton is also a respected author of children’s books. Her series of books based on the life of a young African American boy named Everett Anderson begins with the 1970 Some of the Days of Everett Anderson. Everett Anderson, always referred to by his full name, is a six-year-old boy who lives with his mother in an inner city neighborhood. The eight books that form the series are told in verse and demonstrate many of the themes present in Clifton’s poetry: the strength of family, selflove, and pride. The child and his mother have very little, but who they are is not based on what they have—another persistent motif. The 1984 Everett Anderson’s Goodbye won the Coretta Scott King Award. Other children’s titles include The Black BC’s (1970), an alphabet book that praises the contributions of African Americans, and Sonora Beautiful (1981), whose protagonist is a white girl. Clifton’s first volume of poetry, Good Times, expands upon the motifs of her children’s books, and addresses themes that appear in later volumes: spirituality, details of the lives of African American women and their bodies, and the importance of family and identity. The often-anthologized ‘‘Good Times’’ sets the celebratory tone of the volume. ‘‘I wish to celebrate and not be celebrated,’’ Clifton has frequently told interviewers. The poem is representative of the celebration of the small events that make for celebration in the inner city—paying the weekly insurance premium, hitting it big in the numbers game, paying the rent. Good News about the Earth was Clifton’s second poetry collection. Three sections make up the book: ‘‘About the Earth’’ and ‘‘Heroes’’ are devoted to poems addressing race and racism. In these poems, Clifton apologizes for her ‘‘whiteful ways’’ and joyfully accepts her black identity. The final section is titled ‘‘Some Jesus’’ and contains a series of biblically inspired poems that are Afrocentric. Later, Two-Headed Woman presents a series of poems about Mary, and Book of Light contains the Lucifer poems. An Ordinary Woman and Two-Headed Woman are often paired in critical assessments of Clifton’s work. In these two volumes, the themes introduced in earlier works become the touchstone of the books. The often-autobiographical poems explore Clifton’s growing awareness of herself as a spiritual black woman. Poems about female bonding between African American women in Ordinary Woman (‘‘Sisters’’ and ‘‘Leanna’s Poem’’) are countered by several poems, such as ‘‘Ms. Ann,’’ that demonstrate the divide between black and white women, making bonding between them nearly impossible. In the second section, ‘‘I Agree with the Leaves,’’ Clifton introduces Kali, a Hindu goddess who is depicted as a black female with four arms carrying implements of both creation and destruction. The narrator of the Kali poems identifies with the goddess, acknowledging that they are sisters. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Two-Headed Woman continues the themes found in Ordinary Woman and includes many poems about Clifton’s mother, Thelma, who died when Clifton was pregnant with her first child. Like the terrifying image of Kali, the two-headed woman is a weird, Janus-like figure whom the narrator must claim as sister. The first part of the book focuses on ‘‘Body Poems,’’ such as ‘‘Homage to My Hips’’ and ‘‘Homage to My Hair.’’ The poems are light in tone and

96

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

celebratory of the joys of being a woman. The second section, ‘‘I Was Born with Twelve Fingers,’’ is more mystical and includes the Mary poems. Clifton’s Next was released at the same time as the collection Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980, which was considered for a Pulitzer and included the memoir Generations. Many of the poems in Next are more global in nature, exploring defining moments in history and identifying with the participants. Clifton writes about the Jonestown massacre, Gettysburg, and Nagasaki. Other poems in the volume address issues closer to home with a section of elegies told from the deceased’s point of view. In 1991, Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 appeared. Each section of the book is given the name of a quilting pattern. Leslie Ullman said in her review of Quilting that the section titles ‘‘supply a visual metaphor for the vibrant wholeness of vision the book achieves through its many patterns of speech and points of focus’’ (quoted in Holladay, Wild Blessings, 49). The poems utilize the black vernacular and poetic patterns of sermons, folk tales, and slave spirituals. The section ‘‘Log Cabin’’ laments the struggles and celebrates the triumphs of both the unknown and well known. A poem on an unidentified slave rubs shoulders with one on Nelson and Winnie Mandela. Two companion poems based on plantation visits fill in the gap that surrounds a reference to aunt Nanny’s bench in ‘‘Slave Cabin, Sotterly Plantation, Maryland, 1989.’’ Clifton offers a life for aunt Nanny that corrects the omission made by the plantation docent of details of the lives of the slaves whose work made the plantation possible. Three sections comprise the Book of Light. The first, ‘‘Reflection,’’ continues the themes introduced in Quilting of the poet’s identity as an aging woman, gaining in wisdom what she is losing in physicality. The final section, ‘‘Splendor,’’ contains the sequence of Lucifer poems that present Lucifer, not as a devil, but as a humanized figure who has been separated from his brother, God (Holladay, Wild Blessings, 56). The Terrible Stories, which followed Book of Light, is colored by her experiences of breast cancer. The mood of the volume is darker and more introspective than her earlier works. A shamanic figure of a fox appears in a sequence of poems with whom the speaker identifies in ‘‘all its beauty and vulnerability’’ (Holladay 58). Clifton’s most recent volume, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988– 2000 was a National Book Award winner. The first section of new poems includes ‘‘Jasper, Texas,’’ an account of James Byrd’s death as he is dragged behind a truck. The section ends with a retelling of the founding of the United States in a less than glorious manner. The volume is praised for its continued demonstration of the African American oral tradition. CRITICAL RECEPTION Much has been made of Clifton’s simple style of writing. Alicia Ostriker calls her a ‘‘minimalist poet.’’ Helen Houston is among those critics who liken Clifton to Gwendolyn Brooks, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson in her style. ‘‘Her poems are spare in form, deceptively simple in language, complex in ideas, and reflective of the commonplace, the everyday.’’ Influenced by the Black Arts Movement of her early writing career, Clifton developed such stylistic features as ‘‘concise, untitled free verse lyrics of mostly iambic trimeter lines, occasional slant rhymes, anaphora and other forms of repetition, puns and allusions, lowercase letters, sparse punctuation, and a lean lexicon of rudimentary but evocative words’’ (Oxford Companion to African American Literature). Mari Evans remarks that her poetry ‘‘reflects optimism, an emphasis on the ‘qualities

LUCILLE CLIFTON

97

which have allowed us to survive,’ and the belief that we have the ability to make things better.’’ Evans also cites Clifton as saying, ‘‘I use a simple language. I have never believed that for anything to be valid or true or intellectual or ‘deep’ it had to be first complex.’’ Audrey McCluskey also praises Clifton’s language as simple and avoiding abstractions (138). Joyce Johnson believes the success of the ‘‘leanness’’ of Clifton’s poetry depends on what critic Stephen Henderson defines as mascon images: compressed images that offer African American archetypes ‘‘which evoke a powerful response in the [reader] because of their direct relationship to concepts and events in the collective experience’’ (quoted in Joyce 71). Terms like ‘‘inner city’’ evoke a positive sense of home that is defined by all the experiences of the people who have lived there in a way that the negative term ‘‘ghetto’’ does not. Preeminent Clifton scholar Hilary Holladay has noted that although Clifton was born in New York, she has spent most of her life in Maryland. The influence of living in the South, along with the stories of her ancestors who lived in Virginia, informs her poetry (‘‘Black Names’’). The subjects of her writings include a deep exploration of her own ancestors, slave and free, and those nameless African Americans whose contributions to the building of the South have been marginalized or even forgotten. The companion poems, ‘‘At the Cemetery, Walnut Grove Plantation, South Carolina, 1989’’ and ‘‘Slave Cabin, Sotterly Plantation, Maryland, 1989’’ published in Quilting, are attempts by Clifton to right the injustice of not only slavery but the erasure of the lives of the slaves altogether. In both the poems, tour guides at two plantations Clifton is visiting are ignorant about the presence and the day-to-day lives of those blacks who were an intrinsic part of the plantations. In ‘‘At the Cemetery’’ the narrator discovers that although there is a record of the names of male slaves, the female slaves were not considered valuable to have been recorded. This namelessness offends Clifton and in both poems she draws attention to how names that others call us do not define us as long as we can remember our own names. Names and what they signify is a frequent theme in Clifton’s work. In her memoir Generations, great great grandmother Caroline refuses to reveal her Dahomey name; like Aunt Nanny in ‘‘Slave Cabin,’’ she keeps her true name to herself and is known publicly by the name she is given by her white owners. In a sequence of poems about Lucifer, in The Book of Light, Clifton explores the character of Lucifer, but also ponders the nature of his name, which like Lucille, means ‘‘light.’’ Jean Anaporte-Easton comments that ‘‘the distinctive quality of Clifton’s voice comes from her ability to ground her art in an imagery of the body and physical reality.’’ Clifton has many poems that celebrate her body, in all of its manifestations from youth to middle age. In a discussion of Clifton’s lyric poetry, Mark White applauds Clifton’s refusal to denigrate the beauty of a womanly African American body to conform to the ‘‘Euro-American obsession with boniness, girlishness, and female frailty.’’ She also does not pull back from confronting the devastating toll breast cancer and kidney failure have had on her body. In Terrible Stories, a sequence of poems forms the section ‘‘From the Cadaver.’’ Audrey McCluskey and Edward Whitley both agree that Clifton’s memoir, Generations, is imbued with the spirit of Whitman. McClusky’s discussion of the memoir foregrounds the celebratory, self-discovery of the work; Whitley concentrates on how Clifton replaces the individuality that is at the heart of ‘‘Song of Myself ’’ with the more ‘‘generational sense of self based around an expanding African American family’’ (37).

98

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Clifton’s almost psychometric ability to understand allows her to write poems that, though centered in the world of an African American woman, exhibit an awareness of the struggles and triumphs of all people, not only of this generation but also of those which have come before. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Lucille Clifton All Us Come Cross the Water. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. Amifika. New York: Dutton, 1977. The Black BC’s. New York: Dutton, 1970. Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 2000. The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring. New York: Dutton, 1973. Dear Creator: A Week of Poems for Young People and Their Teachers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1997. Don’t You Remember? New York: Dutton, 1973. Everett Anderson’s Christmas Coming. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971. Everett Anderson’s Friend. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976. Everett Anderson’s Goodbye. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983. Everett Anderson’s Nine Month Long. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978. Everett Anderson’s 1-2-3. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977. Everett Anderson’s Year. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974. Generations. New York: Random House, 1976. Good News about the Earth: New Poems. New York: Random House, 1972. Good, Says Jerome. New York: Dutton, 1973. Good Times: Poems. New York: Random House, 1969. Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980. Brockport, NY; St. Paul, MN: BOA Editions, 1987. The Lucky Stone. New York: Delacorte, 1979. Mercy. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 2004. My Brother Fine with Me. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975. My Friend Jacob. With Thomas DiGrazia. New York: Dutton, 1980. Next: New Poems. Brockport, NY; St. Paul, MN: BOA Editions, 1987. One of the Problems of Everett Anderson. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 2001. An Ordinary Woman. New York: Random House, 1974. Quilting: Poems, 1987–1990. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 1991. Some of the Days of Everett Anderson. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Sonora Beautiful. New York: Dutton, 1981. The Terrible Stories: Poems. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 1996. Three Wishes. New York: Viking, 1976. The Times They Used to Be. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974. Two-Headed Woman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

Studies of Lucille Clifton’s Works Anaporte-Easton, Jean. ‘‘Healing Our Wounds: The Direction of Difference in the Poetry of Lucille Clifton and Judith Johnson.’’ Mid-American Review 14.2 (1994): 78–87. Bernard, Mark. ‘‘Sharing the Living Light: Rhetorical, Poetic, and Social Identity in Lucille Clifton.’’ CLA Journal 40.3 (March 1997): 288–304.

LUCILLE CLIFTON

99

Bryant, Thelma. ‘‘A Conversation with Lucille Clifton.’’ SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 2.1 (Spring 1985): 52. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. Glaser, Michael. ‘‘I’d Like Not to Be a Stranger in the World: A Conversation/Interview with Lucille Clifton.’’ Antioch Review 58.3 (Summer 2000): 310–29. Holladay, Hilary. ‘‘Black Names in White Space: Lucille Clifton’s South.’’ Southern Literary Journal 34.2 (Spring 2002): 120–34. ———. ‘‘‘I Am Not Grown Away from You’: Lucille Clifton’s Elegies for Her Mother.’’ CLA Journal 42.4 ( June 1999): 430–44. ———. ‘‘‘Our Lives Are Our Line and We Go On’: Concentric Circles of History in Lucille Clifton’s Generations.’’ Xavier Review 19.2 (1999): 18–29. ———. ‘‘Song of Herself: Lucille Clifton’s Poems about Womanhood.’’ In The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, edited by Joanne V. Gabbin, 281–97. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. ———. Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Houston, Helen R. ‘‘Lucille Clifton.’’ In The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hull, Akasha. ‘‘Channeling the Ancestral Muse: Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick.’’ In Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, 330–48. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. ———. ‘‘In Her Own Images: Lucille Clifton and the Bible.’’ In Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, edited by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber, 273–95. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Johnson, Dianne. ‘‘The Chronicling of an African-American Life and Consciousness: Lucille Clifton’s Everett Anderson Series.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 14.3 (Winter 1989): 174–78. Johnson, Joyce. ‘‘The Theme of Celebration in Lucille Clifton’s Poetry.’’ Pacific Coast Philology 18.1/2 (November 1983): 70–76. Kallet, Marilyn. ‘‘Doing What You Will Do: An Interview with Lucille Clifton.’’ In Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Judith Ortiz Cofer, 80–85. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Lazer, Hank. ‘‘Blackness Blessed: The Writings of Lucille Clifton.’’ Southern Review 25.3 (Summer 1989): 760–70. ‘‘Lucille Clifton.’’ The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William M. Andrews et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Mance, Ajuan M. ‘‘Re-Locating the Black Female Subject: The Landscape of the Body in the Poems of Lucille Clifton.’’ In Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson, 123–40. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. McCluskey, Audrey T. ‘‘Tell the Good News: A View of the Works of Lucille Clifton.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 139–49. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. Miller, James. ‘‘Lucille Clifton.’’ In Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol. II, 4th ed., edited by Paul Lauter, 2700–701. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Ostriker, Alicia. ‘‘Kin and Kin: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton.’’ American Poetry Review 22.6 (November–December 1993): 41–48. Peppers, Wallace R. ‘‘Lucille Clifton.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: AfroAmerican Poets Since 1955, 55–60. Detroit: The Gale Group, 1985.

100

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Rushing, Andrea B. ‘‘Lucille Clifton: A Changing Voice for Changing Times.’’ In Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, edited by Diane W. Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, 214–22. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Wall, Cheryl A. ‘‘Sifting Legacies in Lucille Clifton’s Generations.’’ Contemporary Literature 40.4 (Winter 1999): 552–74. White, Mark B. ‘‘Sharing the Living Light: Rhetorical, Poetic, and Social Identity in Lucille Clifton.’’ CLA Journal 40.3 (March 1997): 288–304. Whitley, Edward. ‘‘ ‘A Long Missing Part of Itself ’: Bringing Lucille Clifton’s Generations into American Literature.’’ MELUS 26.2 (Summer 2001): 47–64.

Patricia Kennedy Bostian

WANDA COLEMAN (1946– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A Los Angeles native, Emmy-award winner Wanda Coleman has written over 2,000 poems, 100 short stories, and given more than 500 dramatic performances. Coleman was born in Watts and raised in what she has depicted as a black, middle-class Ozzie and Harriet family. Her father was an entrepreneur and her mother worked for Ronald Reagan as a seamstress. Coleman’s occupations have varied. She has worked as a medical secretary, journalist, scriptwriter for the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives, magazine editor, and recording artist. Although Coleman has worn and continues to wear many hats, she is mostly known as a prolific poet. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 1999, Coleman was the winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. MAJOR WORKS Most of Coleman’s poetry is informed by her Los Angeles social, political, and economic surroundings. She writes about the oppression blacks have faced and are faced with in America. Themes of female persecution, alienation, exploitation, the inequitable class structure of America, male/female dichotomies, and internalized rejection are often discussed in her somewhat contemplative poetry. No matter the angle or critique she may proffer in her works, Coleman’s poetry and short stories quite often produce a cathartic effect on her readers. Her poetic language is simultaneously thought provoking, sensual, and violent as she draws attention to issues of power and subordination in both men and women—black and white. Her language often takes the form of the modernist stream of consciousness technique in which her words mimic the chaos and fluidity of the human thought process. Her poet personas encompass a plethora of characterizations, dilemmas, and voices from the rape victim to the rapist, from themes of intraracial prejudice to black empowerment interests of the radical Black Panther organization, and from the incessant cries of the crack baby to the black woman standing her ground in the racist and sexist society in which she lives. Whatever the predicament or social commentary she offers in her poetry, Coleman portrays these incidences honestly and sympathetically. In her frequently anthologized poem, ‘‘Women of My Color,’’ Coleman describes the physical act of fellatio in the first few lines. Often criticized for her explicit sexual language and imagery, this sexual act that she illustrates quickly turns into a discussion on sexual politics. ‘‘Going down’’ begins to signify more than a sexual act or performance of sexual favors. ‘‘Going down’’ symbolizes the inferior position women have been socially subjected to within patriarchal systems of oppression. In this poem, Coleman takes the reader through a variety of male gazes—both black and white— wherein black women are viewed stereotypically and stripped of any individuality or autonomy. Like the blues tradition in which problems are presented without proffering

102

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

a viable solution, the woman in the poem gives no method of solving her present situation, but she does intimate hope and optimism in an otherwise pessimistic poem. CRITICAL RECEPTION In many of Coleman’s poems, her language demonstrates her desire to eschew ‘‘professionalizing’’ poetry and her disdain for poetic convention, or restraints, that permeate academic writing. Although she has been heavily criticized for her explicit sexual imagery, derogatory language, and unconventional grammatical structure, Coleman still has not received the attention that her poetry merits. In ‘‘Doing Battle with the Wolf: A Critical Introduction to Wanda Coleman’s Poetry,’’ Tony Magistrale discusses the deficiency of scholarly and critical interpretations of Coleman’s works. Discussing Coleman’s past omission from the academic canon of black poets, he states: She is a radical feminist who produces poems that are not similar in tone, style, or subject matter to the technically elegant and solipsistic verse that is currently being produced by graduates of advanced writing programs. (539)

Coleman’s works are ‘‘technically elegant.’’ Her word configurations, double entendres, and keen articulation of empathy for her poet persona(s) reveal this elegance and her status as a valuable poet of and for the people. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Wanda Coleman Bathwater Wine. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1998. Hand Dance. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993. Mad Dog Black Lady. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1979. Mercurochrome: New Poems. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2001. A War of Eyes and Other Stories. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1988.

Study of Wanda Coleman’s Works Magistrale, Tony. ‘‘Doing Battle with the Wolf: A Critical Introduction to Wanda Coleman’s Poetry.’’ Black American Literature Forum 23.3 (1989): 539–54.

Terri Jackson Wallace

EUGENIA W. COLLIER (1928– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Eugenia W. Collier has written several articles, essays, short stories, and poems. Born on April 6, 1928, in Baltimore, Maryland, Eugenia Collier has spent much of her life in Baltimore. Her father, Harry Maceo, was a physician and her mother, Eugenia Williams, was an educator. Collier had three sons with ex-husband, Charles Collier. She graduated from Howard University in 1948, and later earned a Master of Arts from Columbia in 1950, then a Ph.D. from University of Maryland in 1976. Collier taught at the University of Maryland (Baltimore County), Howard University, and Atlanta University; she also taught and chaired in the English Department at Morgan State University before retiring in 1996. Earlier in her career, Collier worked as a caseworker for the Baltimore Department of Welfare. Collier’s articles, essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in such periodicals as African American Review, Callaloo, College Language Association Journal, the New York Times, and Phylon. In 1972 she coedited an anthology, Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, with Robert A. Long; in 1994 she wrote a book of short stories, Breeder and Other Stories, and wrote a one-act play, Ricky. Her short story Marigolds won the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction in 1969. Collier was also awarded the Outstanding Educators of America Award from 1972 to 1975 and the Distinguished Writers Award from Middle Atlantic Writers Association in 1970. She has been a member of the College Language Association, Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Middle Atlantic Writers Association, and the African American Writers Guild. MAJOR WORKS Most of Collier’s writings challenge the role of African Americans in literature. In her creative works and staunch critiques, she often raises tough questions. She writes passionately about language in her stories and addresses issues and concerns of poorer blacks, particularly urban blacks. In a moving tribute to mentor and friend Sterling Brown, she says he was the ‘‘liaison between [characters] and the unreachable world of artists, and scholars’’ (‘‘Sterling’s Way’’ 885). Collier acknowledges the disconnection between scholars and the world that exists outside of the institution. Many of her stories in Breeder bridge these notions of connectedness. In one short story, ‘‘Rachel’s Children,’’ a professor moves from the north to the south onto a haunted slave plantation and immediately notices the disparaging economic conditions. In another story, ‘‘Present for Sarah,’’ a retired professor slips into a state of depression and paranoia fueled by alcoholism and aging. Collier drew from her own experiences as a social worker in her short story, ‘‘Ricky’’ (also based on the one-act play). The main character, Vi, patterns a social worker and admonishes the bureaucratic, insensitive, and neglectful social system after she attempts

104

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

to care for a troubled young relative, Ricky. Collier writes, ‘‘. . . [judges, social workers, probation officers] seemed unrelated to the real trauma of the young lives whose direction was now in their hands’’ (Breeder 27). A failed justice system is also to blame in ‘‘Dead Man Running,’’ where an accused drug-dealing murderer is released from custody while on another side of town a toddler is gunned down playing in front of his home and a teenage girl is found killed execution style. In other stories, ‘‘Journey Through Woods’’ and ‘‘The Caregiver,’’ Collier addresses the overwhelming challenges of caring for ailing relatives and the damage and devastation that wreak havoc on the relative that feels the greatest sacrifice: the caregiver. CRITICAL RECEPTION In a 1972 essay written for the New York Times, Collier blasted the then-new television sitcom, Sanford & Son. She accused the popular television show of being more reflective of white contemporary culture than black culture and examined the roles of the main characters. The show perpetuated minstrel stereotypes under the guise of humor. The main characters, Fred and Lamont, were not reflective of real blacks and the show’s form of humor only depicted contemporary American culture. There was no tragedy behind the humor rather; selfishness, immaturity, and bigotry were depicted. In response to the essay, a critic accused Collier of being a separatist followed by a barrage of angry rebuttals sent to the editor. Collier was described as racist, banal, and ignoring advances that had been made in media with African American representation. She remained critical of misrepresentations of blacks and challenged readers to demand and expect more. In a 1974 review based on the film Conrack, Collier lamented the trite image of the white savior that comes to rescues ignorant blacks. She argued that the film avoided reallife depictions of the poor blacks in the Sea Islands and was culturally void. Collier always sought authenticity and honesty in work and believed in the power of serious writers. Breeder has been praised for showing the multilayered dimensions of black women: common themes such as dysfunctional family relationships, senility, poverty, failed social systems, and drug abuse. The title alone suggests that Collier was thinking beyond black and female as she repeatedly raised the notion that women indelibly hold families together by embracing the spoils of community despite repeated pitfalls. While one critic stated that Collier’s writing was flat and didactic, she charged that blacks have to take care of each other first. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Eugenia W. Collier Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, edited with Robert A. Long. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985. Breeder and Other Stories. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1994. Hurl. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974. Impressions in Asphalt: Images of Urban America in Literature. With Ruthe T. Sheffey. Southern Pines, NC: Scribner, 1969. ‘‘Sterling’s Way.’’ Callaloo 21.4 (Fall 1998): 884–87.

EUGENIA W. COLLIER

105

Studies of Eugenia W. Collier’s Works Kaganoff, Peggy. ‘‘Forecasts: Paperbacks.’’ Publishers Weekly 241 ( January 17, 1994): 427. Moore, Opal J. ‘‘A Bill of Wrongs: Stories for the Children.’’ Black Issues in Higher Education 14.2 (March 20, 1997): 34. Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. Contemporary Black American Playwrights and Their Plays. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988.

T. Jasmine Dawson

KATHLEEN CONWELL COLLINS (1942–1988)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Dramatist, novelist and short stry writer Kathleen Conwell Collins (also known as Kathleen Conwell or Kathleen Collins Prettyman) managed to change the face and content of black womanist film during the forty-six years of her short life. She was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on March 18, 1942, to Frank and Loretta Conwell. Her father, Frank Conwell, worked as a mortician and afterward became the principal of a high school that is now named after him. He later became the first African American state legislator in New Jersey. After graduating from Skidmore College in Sarasota Springs, New York, Collins followed her father’s political lead and became involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) thrust to help register voters in the South. After obtaining her degree in philosophy and religion in 1963, Collins furthered her education at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. There she became interested in telling stories through film. She received the Master of Arts degree in 1966 through the Sorbonne’s Middlebury graduate program. She then returned to the United States and began her writing career, while working on the editorial and production staff of WNET Radio in New York. Collins’s first short stories reflected her experiences in SNCC, France, and the dilemmas of a young married woman. In 1974, shortly after her marriage to Douglass Collins ended, Collins joined the faculty of City College at the City University of New York as a professor of film history and screenwriting. In fact, it was her students, particularly Ronald Gray, who encouraged her to pursue a script she had previously abandoned. Adapting Jewish writer Henry H. Roth’s fiction to film, Collins became the first African American woman to write, direct, and produce a full-length feature film. The screenplay turned film The Cruz Brothers and Mrs. Malloy, which is about the struggle of three Puerto Rican brothers to survive in a small country town, won first prize in the Sinking Creek Film Festival. Losing Ground followed in 1982 and won first prize at the Figueroa da Foz International Film Festival in Portugal. Other films to her credit include Madame Flor (1987) and Conversations with Julie (1988). Her films have been shown on the Learning Channel and the Public Broadcasting Station. Among her plays are In the Midnight Hour (1981); The Brothers (1982), which was a finalist for the Susan Blackburn International Prize in Playwriting and voted one of the Best Plays of 1982 by the AUDELCO Awards Committee; and The Reading, a one-act play about the conflict between white and black women, commissioned by the American Place Theatre (1984). She also penned Begin the Beguine (1985), a collection of one-act plays produced at the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Arts in New York, a play about the first Black aviatrix, Bessie Coleman; Only the Sky Is Free (1985); While Older Men Speak (1986); and Looking for Jane. In 1987, Collins married Alfred E. Prettyman and completed her screenplay Madame Flor. In spring 1988, Collins completed a novel,

KATHLEEN CONWELL COLLINS

107

Lollie: A Suburban Tale, and by the summer another screenplay, Conversations with Julie, which is about a mother and daughter coming to terms with separation. In 1983 Collins was reacquainted with Alfred Prettyman, whom she had met years earlier. The two married four years later. Within one week of their marriage, Collins learned she had cancer. She died in 1988, survived by her husband; her daughter Nina; her two sons, Asa Hale and Emilio; a stepdaughter, Meryl Prettyman; and a stepson Evan Prettyman. Although Collins wrote and produced a number of plays and films in her lifetime, one gets the feeling that she was only just beginning when she succumbed to cancer. Her influence extends to other black filmmakers such as Euzhan Palcy and Julie Dash who both honor her fearlessness and presence as a writer and filmmaker. Her work has been described as postmodern, iconoclastic, and experimental (Williams 39). MAJOR WORKS Many of Collins’s plays are no longer in print. Readily available at many university libraries are the screenplay Losing Ground and the dramas published in other anthologies, The Brothers and In the Midnight Hour. Her plays employ such themes as marital malaise, male dominance and impotence, freedom of expression, and the unglorified plight of the black middle class. Her protagonists are typically self-reflective women who move from a state of subjugation to empowerment. Collins’s plays followed the ‘‘Blaxploitation’’ era and a number of plays and films that focused on the rise of blacks from poverty or ‘‘ghetto’’ life. She met a great deal of criticism because many feel that her plays have not been black centered or have lacked the requisite positive representations of black life. Despite such disapproval, Collins continued to write about the complexities of black life, some of which has little, if anything, to do with race. In Reel Women Part 4 Collins commented: ‘‘I have a sense of going my own way, and I don’t really think much about whether it’s going against the grain. I don’t really want to spend a lot of time worrying about how I am perceived by other people’’ (quoted in Columbia World of Quotations Online). The original screenplay, Losing Ground, led to the first independent feature film by an African American woman filmmaker. The ‘‘comedy drama’’ as the author describes it, set in New York, centers around a married couple, Sara, a professor of Western philosophy, and her artist-husband, Victor. Sara is a consummate philosophy professor, fixated on examining ecstasy from a rational perspective while her husband Victor is more concerned about ecstasy in a more experiential manner. Sara’s students point out to her how lucky she is to have a husband in addition to her other good qualities. While Victor is a ‘‘genuine Negro success’’ (130), Sara struggles against becoming the stereotypical tragic mulatto. Sara is orderly, straightforward, practical, and logical. Victor counts on that. He is passionate, irreverent, and vulgar. Though Sara knows that her husband is a flirt and engages in extramarital affairs, she claims in conversation with her mother that she is jealous of his freedom, his ability to let go without inhibition and not the fact that he inserts his ‘‘thing’’ inside other women. This declaration is dismantled when Sara becomes annoyed by and then enraged by Victor’s flirtations with Celia, a young and vivacious Puerto Rican woman, in her presence. Sara’s students convince her to step out of her conventional box and play Frankie, in an archetypal reinterpretation of the Frankie and Johnnie story. It is through the drama that Sara begins to grapple seriously with her practical, rational, philosophical learnings and begins to seek in a realistic way the ecstasy that up until now she only writes about.

108

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

The philosophy Sara pursues in the classroom and in her scholarship undergirds the drama and the lessons the protagonist learns comes out of a realization that she has operated both in the classroom and in her home in a masculinist, limiting world. She resists both when she figuratively shoots Johnnie in the play within the play at the end of the drama. The Brothers, named by Theatre Communications Groups as one of twelve outstanding plays of the 1982 season, was first presented at the American Place Theatre on March 31, 1982, under the direction of Billie Allen. The temporal scheme of the drama runs from February 1, 1948, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, to April 5, 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The play opens with Gandhi’s assassination and the decision of thirty-one-year-old two-time Olympic champion Nelson, the youngest of the brothers, to remain in his bed forever. He declares that the ‘‘Negro life is a void’’ (302). The Edwards brothers, Lawrence, Franklin, Jeremy, and Nelson, and the one sister, Marietta, were reared to be proud and unlimited by the fact of their blackness. They were coached by their cruel and unrelenting father to pursue ‘‘whiteness’’ and white dreams. The Brothers is a complex drama centered on the Edwards men, but focused on the Edwards women. For although titled The Brothers, it is the women who take center stage and are involved in all the play’s action. The men are only glimpsed through the women’s comments and remembrances, and the men are so endowed with the speed, tenacity, and will of the Edwards men that their presence fills a room even though they are never seen on stage. The audience meets them off camera, in snatches of the others’ conversation, but knows them as intimately as their wives know them. The brothers are central and essential in the women’s lives. The wives’ and sisters’ conversations, actions, and attitudes are all restricted to the brothers’ needs, wants, and dispositions. One, Caroline, works as a maid to put her husband, Lawrence, through school. Lawrence is an unscrupulous real-estate agent who will stop at nothing to get the deal he wants. He treats Caroline no better for it. Their marriage is unstable and unpredictable, made worse by the loss of their child Laura. Lillie, Franklin’s first wife, dies from an unnamed disease; she wastes her potential sitting by the phone waiting for calls of death. At the time of her death, Franklin is a mortician studying to become a teacher; later, he becomes a politician. To avoid having his mother-in-law gain custody of his children, Franklin marries Letitia, a thirty-eight-year-old virgin when they meet, whom he belittles and embarrasses because she does not measure up to Lillie’s stature or grace. Witty Danielle, Nelson’s wife, used to the high life of partying and drinking, cannot forgive Nelson for breaking his promise to give her the world. The reader never meets Aurora, Jeremy’s wife, because as Letitia points out she is the only one who had the sense enough to get away from them. There is only one sister in the Edwards family, Marietta; she is unmarried because she believes her father would find her love interest too black in skin color and in aspiration. The brothers are so caught up in brooding over what being a Negro means, and Marietta is so caught up in her brothers, that they take no note of the history taking place all around them. They make little notice of Gandhi’s or King’s assassination, and one gets the sense that they have wasted the last twenty years on themselves. In the Midnight Hour is an unusual drama with a twelve-hour time span. Set in 1962, Harlem, New York, the drama focuses on the Daniels family members and their own personal dreams (literal and figurative). Each family member—Ralph, Lillie, Anna, and Ben—wishes to paint a canvass with his or her memories and hold forever with him

KATHLEEN CONWELL COLLINS

109

or her the good times in the family parlor where they talked, danced, entertained, and were entertained by their regular guests, Floyd, a rejected priest, turned itinerant philosopher, and Chips, the pianist. Ralph, the father, is obsessed with finding the truth. Recovering from years of depression and rage, he firmly believes, as his psychiatrist teaches, anger is the only truth. He carves figurines, tables, chairs, dollhouses, and so on with wood believing that one can carve out the right life in the same manner that he skillfully carves with a carving knife. Lillie, good-natured wife and mother, lives in the past of her own dreams, to an extent. She forgives Ralph for the years he psychologically absents himself from their marriage and determines to affect the perfect disposition for the perfect mother and wife for picture-perfect moments with her family and its closest friends. Twenty-year-old Anna, nurtured for greatness, has just been introduced to the civil rights movement and is enthralled by the idea of doing something magnanimous to help others. Ben, the eighteen-year-old son, rides an emotional roller coaster, possibly spun into action by his memories of racial awareness when he was a teenager, when he and his father were ‘‘ace boon coons’’ but he had not been taught that there were ‘‘Negro reasons’’ for some of the things he experiences. Ben and Anna marshal Christine, a young Barnard student from Boston, into their lives and she serves to balance out and lend something a little more grounded, mundane, and ordinary to the Daniels household. In the middle of the play—in the middle of the night—the playwright ushers us into a scene that takes place in both the present and the far future. In the illusory, derivative properties of dream, by the end of this scene the audience is slightly disoriented but is given insight to the future for this family of dreamers—Ralph’s therapist-god commits suicide and topples Ralph’s progress; Lillie loses her son, and as a result, the good times and perfect picture she wants to create fade away; Anna, in searching for the genuine trust and love she shared with her brother and in her quest to do something spectacular and different, goes through several marriages and babies to end up a lonely and cynical person. Each family member’s fate punctuates Ben’s ‘‘present’’ story to Christine about his experience with Bucky Rogers and Walter Duffy, his private school classmates, whose visit to Harlem when they were fifteen made him painfully aware of their differences. In the closing scene of the drama, after Ben upsets Christine by foolishly jumping from a pier, we are left with a sense that it is Ben’s anger that will ultimately lead to his and the family’s ruin in the future. Inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s aesthetics, Collins wrote life as she saw it and did not allow herself to be fettered by constraints placed on African American writers. She looked at African Americans as human subjects not race subjects. When her plays did focus on issues of race, she rendered what she felt were honest portrayals of black life and not portrayals which exaggerated or posed overly positive aspects of black existence in America while ignoring the often negative and daunting realities. Rather than seeing black problems as simple manifestations of white oppression, through her writing, Collins suggests that much of it has to do with the internal dialogue and pressures people impose on themselves. Her plays are deeply psychological in nature. She integrates certain elements of her personal life into her plays and invites audience members to go beyond the surface meaning of things and think about the values and the attitudes imposed on them by society and how they choose to deal with them.

110

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Though Collins’s plays deal with some of the deeper, psychological issues involved in individuals’ lives and though she has won numerous awards and fellowships for her work, there has been little critical commentary on her plays. There is no doubt that she is a pioneering African American filmmaker and playwright, ushering in an era of Black women filmmakers such as Julie Dash who was her student at CUNY and Euzhan Palcy. John Williams mentions her influence in his exploration and review of black women filmmakers in Cineaste, ‘‘Re-creating their media image: two generations of black women filmmakers’’ Williams points out that though critical reception was less than positive in regards to much of Collins work, she paved the way for a generation of black woman filmmakers. He contends that Collins wrote dramas and produced feature films that wrote against what she saw as the ‘‘phallocentric conventions of white Hollywood cinema’’ (38). He also writes that the few critics who ‘‘deigned to comment on [Losing Ground] were less than receptive to its originality (39). He further argues that most critics ‘‘simply did not know how to comment on Losing Ground’s subversive vision of black culture. Some even took issue with the very notion of a ‘‘black female philosophy professor’’ as entailing too much of a willing suspension of disbelief ’’ (39). In ‘‘Dialogic Modes of Representing Africa(s): Womanist Film’’ Mark A. Reid, like Williams, acknowledges Collins’s work and its influence. He reads Losing Ground as a womanist texts and notes that ‘‘Collins speaks of an ‘imperfect synthesis’ of the African American condition’’ (386). In the New York Times review of The Brothers, while commenting on the weaknesses of the play’s dialogue and limiting form, Frank Rich writes, ‘‘Miss Collins is a promising writer. She is capable of passions both tender and angry; she can be funny; she is also, to borrow a line form her text, ‘fond of the sound of words’’’ (C13). The fact that there has been little critical attention to Collins work does not diminish the quality of her work. She was a playwright writing life as she saw it, perhaps a bit ahead of her critical moment. In the words of actress-director and friend to Collins, Seret Scott, [we] cannot resolve [Collins’s] leaving. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Kathleen Conwell Collins Begin the Beguine (1985). No publication information available. The Brothers. In Nine Plays by Black Women, edited by Margaret B. Wilkerson, 293–346. New York: Mentor, 1986. In the Midnight Hour. In The Women’s Project, edited by Julia Miles, 35–83. New York: Performance Arts Journal Publications and American Place Theatre, 1980. Looking for Jane (1986). No publication information available. Losing Ground: An Original Screenplay. In Screenplays of the African American Experience, edited by Phyllis Rauch Klotman, 119–85. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Only the Sky Is Free (1985). No publication information available. The Reading (1984). No publication information available. While Older Men Speak (1986). No publication information available.

KATHLEEN CONWELL COLLINS

111

Studies of Kathleen Conwell Collins’s Works Brown, Janet. Taking Center Stage: Feminism in Contemporary U.S. Drama. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991. Campbell, Loretta. ‘‘Reinventing Our Image: Eleven Black Women Filmmakers.’’ Heresies 4.4 (1983): 58–62. Nicholson, David. ‘‘A Commitment to Writing: A Conversation with Kathleen Collins Prettyman.’’ Black Film Review 5.1 (1988–1989): 6–15. Reid, Mark A. ‘‘Dialogic Modes of Representing Africa(s): Womanist Film.’’ Black American Literature Forum 25.2 (Summer 1991): 375–88. Rich, Frank. ‘‘Theatre: Black Anguish in ‘Brothers.’ ’’ New York Times, April 6, 1982, C13. Williams, John. ‘‘Re-creating Their Media Image: Two Generations of Black Women Filmmakers.’’ Cineaste 20.3 (Summer 1993): 38–42.

Chandra Tyler Mountain

ANNA JULIA HAYWARD COOPER (1858–1964)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Anna Julia Hayward Cooper, biographer and essayist, was born in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Hannah Stanley, a slave, and George Washington Hayward, her white owner. In 1865, she entered St. Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institute and, by 1868, was tutoring fellow students. She married George A. C. Cooper in 1877. Following her husband’s untimely death in 1879, she earned a B.A. and an M.A. in mathematics from Oberlin College, excelling in the ‘‘gentlemen’s courses.’’ In 1892, Cooper published A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, a collection of essays, treatises, and reflections based largely on her personal experience. After teaching at St. Augustine’s and Wilberforce University, she joined the faculty of ‘‘M’’ Street School (later Dunbar High School) in Washington, and was named principal in 1901. She became a target for the Tuskegee Machine, however, and lost her principalship in 1906 when she refused to eliminate the school’s classical curriculum in favor of vocational training. Rehired in 1910, she remained at ‘‘M’’ Street until 1930 when she retired and became president of Frelinghuysen University, an evening school for working blacks. Cooper so believed in providing educational opportunities for the lower classes that when Frelinghuysen suffered financial reversals, she held classes in her own home. In 1925, at the age of sixty-seven, Cooper earned her doctorate from the Sorbonne, University of Paris, completing two theses: Le Pe`lerinage de Charlemagne: Voyage a` Je´rusalem et a` Constantinople (1925), a translation of a medieval tale, and L’ Attitude de La France a L’ Eˆgard de L’ Esclavage Pendant La Re´volution (1925), a historical study of French racial attitudes. Even in her later years, Cooper exemplified education as a lifelong process by writing, publishing, speaking, and participating in community outreach programs into the 1950s. Her later works included Equality of the Races and the Democratic Movement (1945), Personal Recollections of the Grimke´ Family (1951), and The Third Step (after 1945). Active in the Pan-African movement, black women’s clubs, and Colored Social Settlement efforts, Cooper also cofounded the Colored Women’s League and the Colored Women’s YWCA. In testimony to her scholarly work, Cooper was the only woman elected to the American Negro Academy. She died February 27, 1964, in Washington, D.C. MAJOR WORKS Throughout Cooper’s works appears a concurrent passionate sense of racial pride and a concern for equal treatment and equal opportunity, particularly in education. In A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892), the work that defines her as a feminist and racial theorist, Cooper identifies her ‘‘Raison D’eˆtre’’ as the silence of the Black Woman of America who has yet to speak about racial issues. The text’s two-part division (‘‘Soprano Obligato,’’ focusing on the individual black woman’s voice, and ‘‘Tutti ad Libitum,’’ concerning the larger black community) emphasizes the oppressed position

ANNA JULIA HAYWARD COOPER

113

of women, especially black women, in America and the factors that perpetuate that oppression. These thoughtful scholarly pieces, praising the progress of African Americans only one generation removed from slavery, illustrate her extensive knowledge of both history and contemporary society. Her well-reasoned arguments urge the black woman to take her rightful place as the social force upon which the fate of black society rests. Of particular interest is ‘‘Woman versus the Indian,’’ an essay in which Cooper challenges both black men and white feminists to participate in uplifting the black woman. In her 1925 dissertation, L’ Attitude de La France a L’ Eˆgard de L’ Esclavage Pendant La Re´volution (published in the United States as Slavery and the French Revolutionists), Cooper meticulously documents the horrors of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies, connecting conditions there with those in France and in the United States and recounting the rebellion to end slavery. She pictures all involved committing atrocities and engaging in intrigues without regard for the suffering of others, and she suggests that the evils of the slave system create similar evils within the slaves and that slavery could have been easily abolished if the desire to end it had existed. Le Pe`lerinage de Charlemagne: Voyage a` Je´rusalem et a` Constantinople (1925), a translation of a medieval text into modern French, garnered much praise from academics and quickly made its way into French language classrooms. It remained unpublished in the United States despite Cooper’s attempts to donate the copyright to Oberlin College. The two volumes of Personal Recollections of the Grimke´ Family (1951), a testimony to her long-lasting friendship with Charlotte Forten Grimke´, contain letters, poems, essays, and sermons by members of the Grimke´ family, interspersed with Cooper’s personal reminiscences and commentary. CRITICAL RECEPTION Controversy and disagreement characterize contemporary critical views of Cooper’s only readily accessible work, Voice: either Cooper is considered a pivotal figure in nascent African American feminist theory, or she is seen as too closely tied to the ‘‘Cult of True Womanhood’’ and, thus, not a majority voice. For Charles Lemert, despite its white feminist language, Voice is ‘‘the first systematic . . . insistence that no one social category can capture the reality of the colored woman’’ and prefigures contemporary discussions regarding the inadequacies of categories ‘‘to capture . . . the complexities of a woman’s social experiences’’ (14, 16). In her introduction to the Schoemberg edition of Voice, Helen Washington contends Cooper seems detached from ‘‘a black and female past’’ while identifying ‘‘black womanhood as the vital agency for social and political change in America’’ (xxxi). Washington attributes the ‘‘neglect’’ of Cooper’s ‘‘embryonic black feminist analysis’’ to its being ‘‘by and about women’’ and asserts that although Voice critiques both genders, Cooper is unable to identify with ‘‘ordinary black working women’’ (xxviii, xlvi). Likewise, Stephanie Athey argues that Cooper adopted the language of white female sovereignty arguments to construct her own arguments for racial ‘‘regeneration,’’ expanding the meaning of eugenic terminology, while inadvertently contradicting her purposes. In a similarly conflicted view, Elizabeth Alexander disdains Cooper’s ‘‘essentialist’’ approach, yet praises her for creating a ‘‘new space between . . . the slave narrative . . . and . . . political essays,’’ a communal voice that ‘‘conflates . . . single authorship with collective voice and responsibility’’ (65, 79, 62). At least partially because W.E.B. DuBois quoted Cooper without acknowledging her as his source, some critics compare the two. Hanna Wallinger deems them intellectual

114

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

equals and attributes Cooper’s lesser fame to gender restrictions. For Wallinger, the ‘‘scholarly and argumentative’’ essays in Voice provide ‘‘occasional glimpses at the author’s personal experience, and reveal a strong sense of irony and deep concern for the knowledge of the subject’’ (268). Recent criticism has also addressed pedagogy and rhetorical strategies. Cathryn Bailey grounds Cooper’s importance in her valuing a liberal education and insists that Cooper’s rhetorical skill allowed her to manipulate the language of white feminists to claim womanhood for African American women. Bailey attributes contradictory views of Cooper to strong convictions and sensitivity to audience. Both Karen Johnson and Frances Richardson Keller recognize Cooper’s impact on education theory and praise her for emphasizing lifelong learning. Indeed, Keller claims Cooper originated the community college concept of education for all, regardless of class and gender. Cooper’s self-publishing suggests the negative impact of her professional disagreements with the Washington, D.C., school system and has made her later works virtually inaccessible. Her dissertation, her reminiscences, and her later essays have thus garnered little critical attention, yet all remain important texts that reveal Cooper’s keen intellect, her view of racism as an obstacle to social progress and human happiness, and her determination to uplift her race, especially through educational opportunities. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Anna Julia Hayward Cooper Personal Recollections of the Grimke´ Family. 2 vols. United States: Privately printed, 1951. Slavery and the French Revolutionists (1788–1805). Translated from L’ Attitude de La France a L’ Eˆgard de L’ Esclavage Pendant La Re´volution by Frances Richardson Keller. Lewiston: Mellen, 1988. The Third Step. N.p.: Privately published, 1945(?). A Voice from the South. Introduction by Mary Helen Washington. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, edited by Charles C. Lemert and Esme Bhan. Lanham: Rowman, 1998.

Studies of Anna Julia Hayward Cooper’s Works Alexander, Elizabeth. ‘‘‘We Must Be about Our Father’s Business’: Anna Julia Cooper and the Incorporation of the Nineteenth-Century African-American Woman Intellectual.’’ In In Her Own Voice: Nineteenth-Century American Women Essayists, edited by Sherry Lee Linkon, 61–80. New York: Garland, 1997. Athey, Stephanie. ‘‘Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America: Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells.’’ Genders On-Line Journal 31 (2000). www.genders.org/. Bailey, Cathryn. ‘‘Dedicated in the Name of My Slave Mother to the Education of Colored Working People.’’ Hypatia 19 (2004): 56–73. Baker-Fletcher, Karen. A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Behling, Laura L. ‘‘Reification and Resistance: The Rhetoric of Black Womanhood at the Columbian Exposition, 1893.’’ Women’s Studies in Communication 25 (2002): 173–97. Gable, Leona C. From Slavery to the Sorbonne and Beyond: The Life and Writings of Anna J. Cooper. Northampton: Smith College Press, 1982.

ANNA JULIA HAYWARD COOPER

115

Hutchinson, Louise Daniel. Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1981. Johnson, Karen A. Uplifting the Women and the Race: The Educational Philosophies and Social Activism of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs. New York: Garland, 2000. Keller, Frances Richardson. ‘‘An Educational Controversy: Anna Julia Cooper’s Vision of Resolution.’’ NWSA Journal 11 (1999): 49–67. Logan, Shirley Wilson. ‘‘We Are Coming’’: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. May, Vivian M. ‘‘Thinking from the Margins, Acting at the Intersections: Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South.’’ Hypatia 19 (2004): 74–91. McCaskill, Barbara. ‘‘Anna Julia cooper, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, and the African American Feminization of DuBois’s Discourse.’’ In The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard, 70–84. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Wallinger, Hanna. ‘‘The Five Million Women of My Race: Negotiations of Gender in W.E.B. DuBois and Anna Julia Cooper.’’ In Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, edited by Karen L. Kilcup, 262–80. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.

Gloria A. Shearin

J. CALIFORNIA COOPER (19??– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Having published a total of six collections of short stories and four novels, Joan California Cooper entered the literary field as an award-winning playwright. She was born in Berkeley, California, in an undisclosed year, undisclosed because ‘‘a woman who will tell her age will tell anything.’’ She has one daughter, Paris Williams, and she now lives in Portland, Oregon. She is a self-proclaimed semi-recluse who is private to the point of eccentricity, choosing not to entertain visitors nor disclose such personal facts as her age. In a process that is described as organic, she listens to her characters and writes them in bed, in longhand, during the first hours of the morning. One of Cooper’s creative muses is history. Cooper also credits an active imagination from years of playing in an imaginary world of paper dolls and being fascinated with fairy tales as her other muses. In 1984 she published her first collection of short stories, A Piece of Mine. MAJOR WORKS By far, Cooper’s most frequently discussed innovation is her textual language. One finds her characters and, correspondingly, her readers on a porch shelling peas or shooting the breeze with a narrator who cajoles, orders, and tells tales. Her tales engage rape, racism, miscegenation, oppression, the joys and ills of marriage, the emptiness of wealth, and just plain old life while simultaneously balancing those topics with others: truth, love, happiness, satisfaction, the power of choice, the merits (and demerits) of family, and the universality of the human experience. The stories may end happily or not, but there is always justice at the end. Cooper’s narrative characters are predominantly females from a variety of backgrounds who act as the conduits through which the readers receive the story, and they are always aware of their audience. One example is the narrator in ‘‘A Shooting Star’’ who calls attention to herself and the role of her audience as active participants: ‘‘Now, you don’t know me. And, I know that you know that nobody knows everything. . . . But, it seems to me, and I already told you I don’t know everything, that nowadays sex is making the world go round’’ (The Future Has a Past 1). The italicized ‘‘you’’ expresses the text’s insistence that someone is listening as opposed to just reading, but the text is aware that it will be read as well. For example, in ‘‘Swimming to the Top of the Rain’’ and ‘‘Loved to Death,’’ Cooper uses a modernist technique that supplements the written text with symbols. In ‘‘Swimming,’’ the narrator says of her sister who does not attend their mother’s funeral, ‘‘Middle didn’t come, but sent $10.00’’ (Homemade Love 7). The use of similar symbolic representation in ‘‘Loved to Death’’ appears more logical since the narrator is addressing her notebook, but it is still a visual interruption of a profoundly oral and aural text that is enriched by being read aloud. In ‘‘Too Hep to Be Happy!’’ the eighty-one-year-old narrator, Ida Walker, actually invites the reader-listener into her home. Walker says, ‘‘Sit on down over there. Make yourself comfortable. I’m gonna roll out these rolls and pop them in the oven for us to

J. CALIFORNIA COOPER

117

make our acquaintance by. I’m a good cook!’’ (A Piece of Mine 79). This italicized address occurs early in the story, and it is a visual and aural divergence from the story in progress that Walker is already telling to her listener. The story is interspersed with Walker’s self-interruptions to comment on her rolls, and, by the story’s end, she and the reader are buttering up and eating her fresh baked rolls. Her pleasure in an element as simple and yet scrumptious as homemade rolls is juxtaposed against the moral of the story, which is that being afraid of life’s chances and guarding one’s self too closely can be the road blocks to a life filled with love and happiness. Walker’s subject, Lester, a man whose soul is quite depleted and empty, is outside of the rich culture that enjoys the hot butter of rolls and a good chat with a passerby. The story reminds the reader-listener of the words of the communal voice that narrates Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day: ‘‘Think about it: ain’t nobody really talking to you. . . . Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: the only voice is your own.’’ The difference with Cooper is that the reader is convinced that the only voice is not her own since the book really does talk. The innovation of an aural text is completely Cooper’s as it builds on the technique of Zora Neale Hurston’s speakerly text, so named by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. What Cooper creates, however, is a preacherly text best articulated through her novels. The interactive narrators of Cooper’s short stories also articulate the elements of didacticism that pervade and are characteristic of her stories. Though the didacticism of Cooper’s stories clearly draws on that of the early nineteenth-century sentimentalists, hers is clearly separated by its situation in the African American folk tradition of ‘‘mother wit.’’ The allegorical naming and mother wit of the narrators espoused through plain talk are the tools used to communicate a didacticism based on the Ten Commandments. In the now anthologized ‘‘He Was a Man! (But He Did Himself Wrong),’’ the narrator is a neighbor who tells the story of overweight Della and her skinny husband Smitty. Smitty is a verbally and physically abusive husband who treats his wife more like a mule of the world. One evening after an extremely difficult day for Della, Smitty comes home to find Della asleep when he expects to find his dinner done. She accidentally hits him when he beats her and he leaves. As a result of mourning her abandonment, Della loses weight and consequently attracts a man who comes to love her for who she is. In a whirlwind of events, Smitty ends up hanging himself in a noose similar to one he has previously prepared for Della, and she marries her new man and lives happily ever after as her weight increases back to her 200 pounds of joy. As all of Cooper’s stories have a moral, the narrator’s emphasis is not that Della finds a new life because she loses the weight that has intimidated Smitty but that Della is able to give the love and happiness that Smitty could have had to someone else because she is finally able to value herself. Another example of Cooper’s didacticism is in a story whose title signifies on Flannery O’Connor’s ‘‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own,’’ ‘‘The Life You Live (May Not Be Your Own).’’ Narrated by Molly, the story is of Molly and Isobel who grow up in different types of families but marry equally emotionally abusive men and become neighbors. The women are denied the possibility of friendship by the lies of Isobel’s husband Tolly. After Tolly dies and Molly’s husband abandons her, the ladies are free to pursue their friendship and discover themselves for themselves. They move onto land that Isobel has purchased with insurance money from Tolly’s death and become selfsufficient women who make wise choices for their own lives. Molly narrates the story while bestowing tidbits of wisdom on the reader like ‘‘People with plenty money don’t get peace just cause they have money’’ (Some Soul to Keep 61). However, financial security is a key factor that drives many of the choices of Cooper’s female characters, and

118

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

as Molly and Isobel attain it, they also learn the power of self-love that is a sign of liberation in Cooper’s texts. When Molly’s husband Grady returns after the younger woman he has left to pursue cheats on him, she tells the reader, ‘‘I didn’t WANT him. Nomore, ever again, in this life, or no other life. I didn’t love him. I loved me’’ (Some Soul to Keep 65). As Wolfgang Karrer points out, Cooper writes using a ‘‘womanist model,’’ and it appears in this story as Molly does not reject men at all. She says at the story’s end, ‘‘I know if I got a man there would be just that much more to love’’ (65). As in many of Cooper’s other short stories, the women in ‘‘The Life You Live’’ signify on literary ancestors like Alice Walker’s Celie and Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie in their presentation of alternative readings of the characters’ situations and what can be learned from them. Cooper’s link to Hurston is present in many ways. Hurston is cited as the literary foremother of many writers, but few match her wit, style, and love of dialect and folklore more than J. California Cooper. Cooper’s settings are typically Southern and ‘‘just outside the city’’ locales that are rich with remnants of folk culture. As Victoria Valentine records in her review, Cooper ‘‘could very well have begun In Search of Satisfaction with ‘Come sit on da porch; I gotta story tuh tell.’ ’’ This claim immediately calls up images of Hurston’s porch tale, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her capacity to recreate the oral in the literary is by far her strongest connection to Hurston. Cooper is undeniably linked to Hurston in her use of the speakerly text, the orality found in African American literature that convinces the reader that someone is actually speaking to her. One Cooper text that incorporates orality and a number of Cooper’s textual innovations and signals an important shift in her body of work is In Search of Satisfaction. Using a Greek chorus style of narration, the novel describes the interwoven lives of the allegorically named (a characteristic of Cooper’s short stories and novels) Krupt (corrupt), Befoe (suggesting a family cycle), and Josephus (like the biblical Joseph attacked by Potipher’s wife) families, families entangled by a web created in slavery. The characters are black, white, rich, poor, and all in search of some form of satisfaction. The novel is a revisionary text of the African American tradition and the American sentimental genre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The revision creates a mulatto text that blends two historically distinct cultures and their traditions into one text on the ironies of American racial politics. While redefining the tropes of sentimental literature, the novel also engages the liberatory themes of the African American experience in American history. As the text exposes the irony of America’s greatest shame, its legacy of slavery, it does so in the form and structure of a sermon. Just as the oral quality of the written word characterizes the speakerly text, Cooper’s In Search of Satisfaction is preacherly in its evocation of the oral and aural imagery of a heard sermon, an interesting point of irony since preachers are not revered in the novel. Cooper’s didactic theology is best portrayed through the character of Hosanna, whose allegorical name means ‘‘praise.’’ Hosanna begins without a belief in God, but by the novel’s end she has a firm belief in Him and His providence. Although the tendency would be to read Cooper’s work as a reinforcement of Christian values, it is more a critique of them. Most of the traditional Christians are characterized as hypocritical at best, while more value is given to the characters whose lives suggest that they live, rather than preach, the Christian dogma. Hosanna comes to the conclusion toward the novel’s end that it is not Christianity that is to blame for society’s woes but people’s failure of it. Cooper’s critique of failed morality revisits traditional values and challenges the characters and readers to rise above their common complacency and hypocrisy and live them.

J. CALIFORNIA COOPER

119

Although the characters are from different racial and economic backgrounds, Cooper clearly points out that the characters’ choices are what lead them to or away from any type of satisfaction. Cooper extends her critique and lesson in humanity in her latest novel as well. In Some People, Some Other Place, an unborn female child takes on the role of griot as she narrates the multigenerational story of her ancestors and the multiethnic neighbors that her mother, Eula Too, will meet in a town called Placeland on Dream Street. The story centers around Eula Too and opens with her family’s flight from the South in the years after slavery and the events that lead to Eula Too’s asexual employment in a brothel. As the novel shifts its focus from character to character who either lives or will come to live on Dream Street, it continually critiques American social and economic history while continuing to engage the themes and motifs for which Cooper is known. The stories surrounding Eula Too are well balanced in their engagement of the issues faced by different ethnicities and genders. However, the most remarkable element is the ancestral presence of the unborn narrator. Although Cooper joins other African American female writers in her use of a dead narrator in her first novel, Family, she separates herself with the use of the unborn narrative persona. As critics note the limitations of a dead narrator like Family’s Cora, the use of the child is a strategy that allows more narrative freedom and disrupts the paradigm of expected narratological practices. In an expression of her timelessness and freedom, the narrator states, ‘‘I have been able, almost in the twinkling of an eye, to look back through time, down upon the world and even at the ancestors I will have, if I decide to be born’’ (1). This narrative presence who is omniscient and omnipresent, decreasingly so as the novel leads to her conception, delivers didactive prose, suggesting a wisdom that is born in some ancient place, hence the first of many word plays on ‘‘some other place.’’ The narrator’s reliability is also unquestionable since she is unborn, and as she states, ‘‘incorruptible.’’ The narrative technique in her latest novel marks Cooper’s continual growth as a novelist and author. CRITICAL RECEPTION Critical commentary in the form of essays, articles, and books on Cooper’s work has been oddly scarce since she has been writing for over twenty-five years, but it is becoming increasingly more visible. In 1990, Cooper received only a passing mention in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. By 1992, Barbara Marshall publishes an essay that provides an Afrocentric analysis of Cooper’s first three collections of stories based on the work of Molefi Asante. She deals with female bonding, communal mothering, healing, and transcendence above adversity as correlatives to elements found in African culture. In so doing, she argues against Cooper’s own insistence on the intentional universality of her work, but Marshall is still one of the first to devote serious scholarship to Cooper’s texts, even to the extent that a chapter in her dissertation engages a number of Cooper’s stories. In the following year, Wolfgang Karrer publishes an essay that examines the structure of ‘‘When Life Begins!’’ which is most noted for its adherence to its self-announced structure in the shape of a ‘‘Y.’’ The beginning of Karrer’s essay provides a useful introduction to Cooper’s work and the characteristics of her short stories. Karrer’s analysis of the story focuses on the symmetrical structure and narrative control that Cooper wields throughout the story as well as the gendered aspects that underlie her use of a ‘‘womanist model.’’

120

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Following Karrer, both Trudier Harris (2001) and Angelyn Mitchell (2002) devote chapters in their books to Cooper’s Family, and Cynthia Bryant (2005) devotes a full study to much of Cooper’s body of work. Harris critiques the model of the strong black woman found in African American literature and culture, and she discusses the role that Cora plays in the novel as a woman so strong that her spirit remains after death to watch over her children. Cora is a mother trying to follow in her mother’s footsteps and commits suicide to avoid slavery. She tries to kill all of her children too, but fails, and her spirit remains and tells the reader their story. Cora’s daughter, Always, emerges as the protagonist who eventually subverts the slave system in a way that is beneficial to her community and realizes alternative possibilities that her mother could not see. Always’s acts of subversion lead Mitchell to critique the novel as a liberatory novel that challenges history through its focus on the family. Incorporating the ideas of Harris, Mitchell, and others, Bryant provides an in-depth analysis of Cooper’s texts as healing narratives. Bryant’s close readings of four of the short story collections and the novels Family and The Wake of the Wind are thorough and useful in providing a functional paradigm for understanding the texts. The anthologizing of some of Cooper’s stories and the recent publication of the studies of Harris, Mitchell, and Bryant represent a growth and increase of critical interest in Cooper’s work that will hopefully continue. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by J. California Cooper Family. New York: Doubleday, 1991. The Future Has a Past. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Homemade Love. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. In Search of Satisfaction. New York: Doubleday, 1994. The Matter Is Life. New York: Doubleday, 1991. A Piece of Mine. 1984. Reprint, New York: Anchor, 1991. Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Some People, Some Other Place. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Some Soul to Keep. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. The Wake of the Wind. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Studies of J. California Cooper’s Works Bryant, Cynthia Downing. ‘‘Storytelling from the Margins: The Healing Narratives of J. California Cooper.’’ Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 2004. DAI 65.10 (2005): 3804. AAT3151822. Harris, Trudier. Saints, Sinners, and Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Karrer, Wolfgang, and Barbara Puschmann, eds. The African American Short Story, 1970–1990. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1993. Marshall, Barbara J. ‘‘Kitchen Table Talk: J. California Cooper’s Use of Nommo—Female Bonding and Transcendence.’’ In Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Mitchell, Angelyn. The Freedom to Remember. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Adrienne Carthon

JAYNE CORTEZ (1936– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet, activist, and musician Jayne Cortez was born in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, on May 10, 1936. While the Fort Huachuca army base where her father was stationed provided Cortez’s family with a close sense of community, it also afforded Cortez her first experience with segregation; she went to school with African American and Native American children while white children ‘‘went to white schools’’ (Melhem, ‘‘Melus’’ 72). At the age of seven she and her family moved to San Diego, where they lived for a year, and then to West Los Angeles where her classmates were African American and Japanese American children. Cortez and her family later moved to Watts in South Los Angeles. Of her integrated and predominantly white junior high school, Cortez states, ‘‘We had integration and segregation and domination at the same time. Blacks were a small minority. When a white kid called me ‘nigger,’ I had to jump up and beat the hell out of him or her. . . . My mother was always at the school’’ (Melhem, ‘‘Melus’’ 72). Cortez studied drawing, painting, and design at Manuel Arts High School in Los Angeles, as well as piano, bass, cello, and the music theory that would influence and permeate her poetry. She later attended Compton Junior College although financial difficulties forced her to drop out. Cortez married jazz musician Ornette Coleman in 1954 when she was eighteen years old. Two years later she gave birth to their son, Denardo Coleman, and divorced Ornette Coleman in 1964. In the 1960s she participated in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, an experience that has marked her work. Cortez herself has reflected: The Civil Rights Movement heightened my level of awareness, affected my work as a writer and helped expand my range of choices. It gave me a humanistic focus for my growth and development as a person and an artist. I learned how to transform material from that experience into art. The events of that time also connected me to other struggles, and to the language of struggle. I would say that those events have given me a lifetime of work. (Ballard 68)

In 1964, Cortez founded the Watts Repertory Theater. Cortez left California and moved to New York in 1967. Taking control of the publication of her own work, Cortez established Bola Press in 1972 where most of her books have been published. Sculptor Melvin Edwards, whom Cortez married in 1975, has illustrated all of her books, which have been translated into twenty-eight different languages to date. Apart from producing poetry, recording music and jazz-inspired renditions of her poetic works, and performing publicly, the prolific and steadfastly political Cortez has continued her public work that has consistently been politically inspired. In 1991 she founded the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) with Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo. This nonprofit organization concentrates on the literary advancement and development of women writers from Africa and the African diaspora, and also undertakes literacy projects for young people. Jayne Cortez currently serves as president of the OWWA.

122

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

MAJOR WORKS Jane Cortez emerged from the Black Arts Movement, a movement that broke from political strategies that employed protest and petition and made the revolutionary dash toward Black Power. While some critics such as Don. L. Lee have rightly cautioned that the ‘‘Black Aesthetic cannot be defined in any definite way. To accurately and fully define a Black Aesthetic would automatically limit it’’ (232), the language and form of the poetry that emerged from the Black Arts Movement has frequently been described as revolutionary and angry, a powerful outcry that reflected the rage of the time and gave voice to the human rights struggle through methods often described as ‘‘surreal.’’ Accordingly, Penelope Rosemont has included Cortez as a surrealist in her much-lauded 1998 international anthology, Surrealist Women. Although Cortez has been frequently described as a surrealist, she has described her work to critic D. H. Melhem as ‘‘superrealism,’’ which Melhem defines as a vision of reality that goes ‘‘beyond the intellectual and unconscious aspects of surrealism’’ and into ‘‘a divine and infernal realism’’ (Heroism 181). It is this black experience—its politics, its joys, its tragedies and the contradictions—both divinely and hellishly real so as to be read as surreal, that makes up the subject matter in Cortez’s work which has been recognized with the American Book Award, the International African Festival Award, and the Langston Hughes Award for Excellence in the Arts and Letters. The year 1969 marked the publication of Cortez’s first book of poetry, Pissstained Stairs and Monkey Man’s Wares, a work that was written for, originally performed by, and (when published as a collection) later dedicated to the Watts Repertory Theatre Company. Controversial for its homophobic poem ‘‘Race,’’ Cortez’s first collection of poetry nevertheless established her as a poet who seamlessly integrated African American musical traditions, black speech, black politics (and arguably, the controversial politics of the Black Arts Movement), with poetic experimentation. This first work contains several poems that pay tribute and respond to the works and musical contributions of artists such as Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Charlie Parker, among others. Of these important musicians as subject matters, T. J. Anderson III observes, ‘‘Cortez’s references to African American musicians are a means of acknowledging the critical role African American music has played in the spiritual and historical development of the black community’’ (124). The creative impetus for her 1971 collection Festivals and Funerals, Cortez noted to Melhem, was the subconscious, through which, she describes, she creates poetry that is ritual, festive, and transformative. These transformations, festivals, and rituals are accompanied by jazz-inspired rhythms that continue to drum out pan-Africanist observations. Cortez’s vision, Anderson III contends, makes ‘‘her less of a regional poet and instead one of a larger geopolitical constituency’’ (127). Cortez continues to scathingly reflect upon these pan-Africanist concerns two years later in Scarifications (1973). The poem ‘‘I Am New York City’’ has been one poem in this collection that has received attention for the way Cortez personifies the city and makes it markedly feminine, all the while injecting the jazz and blues for which Cortez, at this point, becomes known. By this time, Jayne Cortez is indeed regarded as a gifted and original jazz poet. Consider, for instance, Stanley Crouch’s thoughts on Cortez: ‘‘She’s got bop, boogie, blues and the new Black Music flowing through her lines—she achieves those sounds and rhythms and, thereby, comes up with a prismatic, swinging sound as varied in color as the everglades’’ (Fuller 340).

JAYNE CORTEZ

123

Given Cortez’s poetic musicality, it was inevitable that she would record her published poems in jazz arrangements. In 1973 Cortez recorded a version of ‘‘I Am New York City’’ with bassist Richard Davis, which was later released in the 1974 recording Celebrations and Solitudes. In 1977 Cortez published her next book of poetry, Mouth on Paper, a collection of poems that combines the physical and the visual, the spoken with the written, and includes music that gleans from the call and response tradition. The 1984 collection Coagulations contains poems from her three prior publications and also offers new poetry. Although Coagulations marked the first time that Cortez uses an outside publisher, she continued to release recorded work such as the 1986 Maintain Control and the 1990 Everywhere Drums through her company Bola Press. The poem, ‘‘Everywhere Drums’’ is found one year later in her next publication Poetic Magnetic (1991), in which she combines poetry, technology, music, and the Yoruba language. Cortez released the recording Women in (E) Motion the following year; it contains poems from her prior publications. Two years later she followed with the collaborative Fragments: Poetry of Jayne Cortez and the Sculpture of Melvin Edwards (1994) in which Cortez and husband Edwards combine the visual with the poetic—he with his steel sculptures and she with her poetic battle cry. This is followed by the 1996 collection Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, which contains many poems that, according to Anderson III, reveal ‘‘the complexity of being African American’’ (143). The 2002 publication Jazz Fan Looks Back is a collection of Cortez’s previously published jazz and music poetry that spans from 1968 to 2000. Some of the poetry from this collection is included in Cortez’s 2003 recording Borders of Disorderly Time, a work that offers contributions from musicians such as Ron Carter and James ‘‘Blood’’ Ulmer. While Cortez has been anthologized and presented primarily as a jazz poet, it is important to stress that the music and the poetry are necessarily political, for as Aldon Lynn Nielsen has noted, for poets such as Jayne Cortez, ‘‘moving to an avant-gard poetics was never motivated by the desire to evade the political imperatives of race and class. For them a radical politics and a radical poetics were virtually inseparable’’ (Black Chant 254). CRITICAL RECEPTION Reactions to the poetry, music, and performance of Jayne Cortez, while overwhelmingly positive, have ranged from the laudatory to the conspicuously silent. Cortez has frequently been called a revolutionary, brave, and a truth speaker. Penelope Rosemont, for instance, has called her ‘‘one of the strongest surrealist voices of our time . . . a brave example of the true poet in a period in which so much intellectual life is dominated by cowardice, confusion, hypocrisy, and shame’’ (358). Cortez’s unabashed and forthright writing has also been called ‘‘raw’’ and recognized as a breaking of the boundaries of both acceptable language and acceptable subject matter. Perhaps the tacit notion of the limits of acceptability and decorum are precisely the ‘‘hypocrisy’’ of which Rosemont writes, but the space between the acceptable and the outrageous has occasionally led to contradictory assessments of her poetic and political trajectory. Note, for example, Jon Woodson’s observation that Cortez’s poetry testifies ‘‘to her active participation, as an artist, in the struggle for human freedom’’ (71), while, a few sentences later, he describes Cortez’s poem ‘‘Race,’’ in the 1969 publication, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares as one of her most successful poems in the collection and a poem ‘‘which bitterly condemns black male homosexuality in unflinching detail’’ (71).

124

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

These contradictions in reading have for the most part gone unmentioned. On occasion, Jayne Cortez herself has gone unmentioned and has been conspicuously absent in articles about jazz poetry. To one such slight in a New York Times article, Ishmael Reed responded: ‘‘An article about jazz fiction-writing that fails to mention Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, Al Young, Xam Cartier, Sarah Fabio, Quincy Troupe, Ted Joans, Eugene Redmond, Yusef Rahman, Larry Neal, Charels Wright, Babs Gonzales, Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez is worthless. Worthless!’’ (2: 4). Writers such as Kevin Meehan have observed that when Cortez is anthologized in canonical collections such as the Norton Anthology, she is ‘‘cleaned up’’ for public consumption through the inclusion of a single and representative work such as ‘‘Trane’’ (a lament for John Coltrane), rather than a poem such as ‘‘Rape’’ that documents the rape of Inez Garcia and prison rape of JoAnne Little in the 1970s. ‘‘What really separates the two poems, in my view,’’ Meehan argues, ‘‘is the fact that ‘Trane’ mutes its institutional criticism, whereas ‘Rape’ calls attention to the jailhouse as a site of institutionalized racist and sexist violence’’ (46). The preference of Cortez’s jazz poetry over more political and violent works is seemingly established with the reception of her first publication Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares which tended to concentrate on Cortez’s musical subject matter. Nikki Giovanni pronounced in 1969 that Cortez could ‘‘wail from Theodore Navarro and Leadbelly to Ornette and never lose a beat and never make a mistake. She’s a genius and all lovers of jazz will need this book—lovers of poetry will want it’’ (35), and Eugene Redmond praised her work as ‘‘rich in its interweavings of music and indexes of struggle’’ (406). Festivals and Funerals received attention for Cortez’s ‘‘musical daring’’ and technical dexterity (Redmond 415), while Scarifications was recognized for treating ‘‘new subjects’’ such as the Vietnam War, the Attica revolt, and police brutality with irony, a technique that Jon Woodson observes, played down ‘‘the escalation of violence’’ (72). Mouth on Paper, Firespitters, and Poetic Magnetic are each lauded for Cortez’s ability to seamlessly combine musicality with poetry, and each collection is praised for Cortez’s further development as an artist by critics such as T. J. Anderson III. Kimberly Brown, however, illumines Cortez’s ability to write ‘‘in connection with—not in opposition or subordination to—her black male counterpart’’ in Coagulations (75). More recent criticism, while still immersed in the analysis of Cortez’s musicality within her poetry, has highlighted the political implications of Cortez’s words. David Mills advises in his review of Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere: Think of Cortez as a revolutionary hosting mutual of mau mau’s wild kingdom. But the kingdom is The World Bank. Or think of her as an urban shaman imbuing her poetry with the magic realism of Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqi Indian adventures in an attempt to liberate people from oppression of the flesh. (31)

Kimberly Brown posits a theory of scarification that borrows from Cortez’s publication Scarifications. Cortez’s poetry, Brown explains, ‘‘serves as an excellent example of how one can theorize through scars,’’ because she creates an ‘‘ethnopoetics that blurs the lines between lived experience and theory’’ (69). Brown’s theorization of Cortez’s poetry perhaps predates the 2002 Publishers Weekly review of Cortez’s Jazz Fan Looks Back foretelling the academic attention that Jayne Cortez’s work has been receiving.

JAYNE CORTEZ

125

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Jayne Cortez Borders of Disorderly Time. New York: Bola Press, 2003. Celebrations and Solitudes. New York: Strata East, 1974. Coagulations: New and Selected Poems. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1984. Everywhere Drums. New York: Bola Press, 1990. Festivals and Funerals. New York: Bola Press, 1971. Find Your Own Voice. New York: Harmolodic/Verve/Polygram, 1998. Firespitter. New York: Bola Press, 1982. Fragments: Poetry of Jayne Cortez and the Sculpture of Melvin Edwards. New York: Bola Press, 1994. Jazz Fan Looks Back. Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 2002. Maintain Control. New York: Bola Press, 1986. Merveilleux Coup De Foudre: Poetry of Jayne Cortez & Ted Joans. France: Handshake Editions, 1982. Mouth on Paper. New York: Bola Press, 1977. Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares. Los Angeles: Phrase Text, 1969. Poetic Magnetic. New York: Bola Press, 1991. Scarifications. New York: Bola Press, 1973. Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere. New York: High Risk Books, 1996. Taking the Blues Back Home. New York: Harmolodic/Verve/Polygram, 1996. There It Is. New York: Bola Press, 1982. Unsubmissive Blues. New York: Bola Press, 1979. Women in (E) Motion. Schauburg, Bremen: Radio Bremen Jazzredaktion, 1992.

Studies of Jayne Cortez’s Works Anderson III, T. J. ‘‘Hot House: Jayne Cortez and the Music of Illumination.’’ In Notes to Make the Sound Come Right—Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Ballard, Audreen. ‘‘Voices of the 90s.’’ New Crisis 106.1 ( January/February 1999): 68–73. Bolden, Tony. Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. ———. ‘‘All the Birds Sing Bass: The Revolutionary Blues of Jayne Cortez.’’ African American Review 35.1 (Spring 2001): 61–71. Boyd, Herb. ‘‘Everywhere Drums.’’ Black Scholar 21.4 (Fall 1991): 41. Brown, Kimberly N. ‘‘Of Poststructuralist Fallout, Scarification, and Blood Poems.’’ In Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color, edited by Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, 63–85. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Chrisman, Robert. ‘‘Jayne Cortez & the Firespitters: Taking the Blues Back Home.’’ Black Scholar 27.1 (Spring 1997): 65–66. Feinstein, Sascha. ‘‘From ‘Alabama’ to a Love Supreme: The Evolution of the John Coltrane Poem.’’ Southern Review 32 (Spring 1996): 315–27. Fuller, Hoyt W. ‘‘The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation.’’ In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., 327–48. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972. Giovanni, Nikki. ‘‘Pisstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares.’’ Negro Digest, December 19, 1969, 35. ‘‘A Jazz Fan Looks Back.’’ Publishers Weekly 249.17 (April 29, 2002): 66.

126

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Lee, Don L. ‘‘Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties.’’ In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., 222–33. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972. Macnie, Jim. ‘‘Jazz Blue Notes.’’ Billboard, August 31, 1996, 87. Meehan, Kevin. ‘‘Spiking Canons.’’ Nation, May 12, 1997, 42–46. Melhem, D. H. Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. ———. ‘‘MELUS Profile and Interview: Jayne Cortez.’’ MELUS 21.1 (Spring 1996): 71–79. Mills, David. ‘‘Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere.’’ Black Book Review, February 28, 1997, 31. Newson-Horst, Adele S. ‘‘Jazz Fan Looks Back.’’ World Literature Today 77.2 ( July–September 2003): 102. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. ‘‘Capillary Currents: Jayne Cortez.’’ In Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation,edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen, 175–93. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. ———. ‘‘Capillary Currents: Jayne Cortez.’’ In We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, 227– 36. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Poetry in Motion. Dir. Ron Mann. Perf. Jayne Cortez. Sphinx Productions, 1985. Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1976. Reed, Ishmael. Letter. ‘‘Names of the Missing.’’ New York Times 2 (September 19, 1999, late edition): 4. Rosemont, Penelope. ‘‘Jayne Cortez.’’ In Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont, 358–63. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Ruffin, Kimberly N. ‘‘ ‘Freedom of Expression’ Meet Jayne Cortez.’’ Footsteps 7.2 (March–April 2005): 27. ‘‘Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere.’’ Publishers Weekly 243.23 ( June 3, 1996): 74. Woodson, Jon. ‘‘Jayne Cortez.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 69–74. Detroit: The Gale Group, 1985.

Ruth Blando´n

MARGARET ESSE DANNER (1910–1984)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Margaret Esse Danner, poet and community activist, author of five volumes, two recordings, editor of two volumes, and widely anthologized, uses strong visual images to introduce the art and culture of Africa and African Americans to her readers. In bridging the past, present, and future in her poems, Danner shows a relation to Western poetic tradition. Later in life, Danner wrote that ‘‘Down through the years, differing cultural life has been most successfully introduced through poetry. Kipling’s Gunga Din and Longfellow’s Hiawatha are famous examples. The interest in my published poetry proves that this can still be the case.’’ Ahead of her time, Danner introduced the beauty of African art and culture, long obscured by Western civilization as ‘‘primitive and exotic,’’ that she might ‘‘reawaken’’ African Americans ‘‘to reclaim another spark of [their] incomparable heritage’’ (‘‘Chicago Art Scene 1967’’), that all her readers might cherish and celebrate the value and significance of African culture and arts. Danner records her birthplace in ‘‘Chicago Art Scene 1967 Just as Our African Ancestors Did,’’ writing ‘‘here, in Chicago, about five blocks from where I was born’’ (Iron Lace 1968). Detroit also claims her. Certainly, Danner enjoyed rebirths of her spirit in both places. In a personal letter to a spiritual advisor, Danner writes, ‘‘I, Margaret Danner, was born January 12, 1910, at night, or early morning before sunup.’’ Her parents, Caleb and Naomi Esse Danner, followed the Great Migration north from their home in Pryorsburg, Kentucky, where some say Danner was born, perhaps even before 1910. Danner married Cordell Strickland, with whom she had her daughter Naomi. Later, Danner married Otto Cunningham. Sterling Montrose Washington, Jr., Naomi’s son, inspired Danner’s ‘‘Muffin’’ poems. Danner died in Chicago on January 1, 1984. Memorial services were held on February 5, 1984, at the DuSable Museum in Chicago, with her family in attendance. Memorials were also held in Detroit, Memphis, and Richmond, cities where Danner had held the position of artist-in-residence, and in Los Angeles, where her sister lived. MAJOR WORKS Danner won her first poetry prize in the eighth grade for ‘‘The Violin.’’ Danner said, ‘‘I wrote a poem about wanting to be a violin. The teacher was so impressed that she gave me a violin. But I didn’t want one; I wanted to be one.’’ Images of the Stradivarius and Guarnerius violins appeared in later poetry. Continuing with her writing, Danner joined the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) in Chicago and met there with the Writers’ Group, which included Margaret Goss Burroughs and Gwendolyn Brooks. SSCAC participants brought and read their poetry to one another and criticized each other strongly. Burroughs recalls that she and Danner ‘‘were sisters in creativity. Always, she encouraged the development and preservation of black culture from the founding of the South Side Art Center in 1941 to the

128

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

founding of DuSable Museum twenty years later. . . . She was the first life member of the S.S.A.C.’’ Burroughs reminded me that the poetry workshops were conducted by Inez Cunningham Stark, a wealthy poet and editor of Poetry magazine. Perhaps this connection with Stark influenced Danner’s opportunity to work at Poetry later. Also influential in opening doors for Danner was the second prize she won in the 1945 Poetry Workshop of the Midwestern Writers Conference held at Northwestern. Gwendolyn Brooks had won first prize in the 1943 conference; Danner’s prize in 1945 set up a spirit of friendly competition between them that encouraged their writing. Under editor Paul Shapiro, Danner worked on Poetry, a magazine of modern poetry, appearing first as Margaret Cunningham, editorial assistant, in October 1952 (Vol. LXXXI). This volume contains three of her ‘‘Far from Africa’’ poems: ‘‘1. Garnishing the Aviary’’ (176), ‘‘2. Dance of the Abakweta’’ (177–78), and ‘‘3. The Visit of the Professor of Aesthetics’’ (178–79), published under the name of Margaret Danner. The star next to Danner’s name indicates this is her first appearance in the magazine: a brief biographical sketch under ‘‘Contributors’’ identifies Danner as a student of arts and archaeology at Roosevelt College (220). In Volume LXXXIV, Shapiro is still editor and Margaret Cunningham editorial assistant; in this volume, the fourth ‘‘Far from Africa’’ poem, ‘‘Etta Moten’s Attic,’’ appears (320–21) under the name of Danner. In the next volume, Danner, not Cunningham, is listed as editorial assistant under Shapiro. She continued as editorial assistant under Shapiro and then under editor Henry Rago in October 1955. In December 1955, she became assistant editor and continued through June 1956, marking a first for an African American in this position of the avant-garde magazine, which published the modern poets of the time. The four ‘‘Far from Africa’’ poems gave Danner the recognition and awards that enabled her to see the Exhibition of African Art in Paris and to read her poetry at the World Festival of Negro Art in Dakar, Senegal, Africa, in 1966. In 1950 Danner received grants from the Women’s Auxiliary of Afro-American Interests and the African Studies Association, and a John Hay Whitney Fellowship. She won the Harriet Tubman award in 1951, the Native Chicago Literature Prize in 1956, and a grant from the American Society of African Culture in 1960. In 1956, in its ‘‘Contribution of the Negro’’ in ‘‘Patterns in American Culture,’’ the University of Michigan chose Danner as one of the ten top African American poets. Her poetry appeared in Poetry, Chicago Magazine, Negro Digest, Voices, The Negro History Bulletin, Black World, Clear Views, World Order, and South and West. According to Danner, she worked at Poetry magazine ‘‘in order to master the techniques of poetry.’’ Dudley Randall credits Hayden, Brooks, Tolson, and Danner with bringing ‘‘black poetry abreast of its time by absorbing and mastering the techniques of T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound,’’ the modern poets published in Poetry. Danner uses both African and western symbols in her poetry, from the violin in her early work to the Ashanti stool, the sandalwood stork hairpin, and the iron Senufo bird, which becomes the iron lace lady. Her colors range from tangerine to western pastels, as Arthur Pfister notes in his roast of Danner. ‘‘Irony lace’’ is another chosen theme: ‘‘molded latticed,’’ ‘‘iron fences,’’ and ‘‘metal lace’’ in ‘‘The Small Bells of Benin.’’ ‘‘Life, to me, is a pattern of lace,’’ Danner says in ‘‘Valentine (nineteen sixty-six).’’ ‘‘Today Requires a Lace of Truths’’ includes ‘‘the lace that Truths / form,’’ and ‘‘I Welcome Lace’’ has ‘‘the power of lace,’’ ‘‘the clouds form lace patterns,’’ ‘‘many lace patterns,’’ ‘‘lacebranched,’’ and ‘‘lace has the strength / of immortality.’’ In ‘‘Inheritance for Muffin,’’ Danner leaves ‘‘eclectic laces and lattices of writings.’’ ‘‘The Slave and the

MARGARET ESSE DANNER

129

Iron Lace’’ blends intricate patterns. Finally, looking ‘‘into each different face,’’ in ‘‘Through the Varied Patterned Lace,’’ Danner is ‘‘exalted to recognize His Grace / shimmering through the varied patterned lace.’’ Danner also writes of the mask, as in ‘‘To a Mounted Ivory Masque Pin,’’ ‘‘The Bondman and My Senufo Masque,’’ ‘‘And He Carves These ‘Dudes,’’’ ‘‘And Through the Caribbean Sea,’’ and ‘‘To the Bronze Masque.’’ As Barksdale points out in ‘‘Margaret Danner and the African Connection,’’ Danner is concerned with the African continuum but writes with ‘‘a verbal brilliance that is both bedazzling and enlightening’’ and has a ‘‘superb gift of imagery.’’ Also, he tells that her concern ‘‘goes beyond her colorful imagistic description of African art and sculpture’’ to ‘‘historical events and the monumental ironies and gaping inequities that powered those events.’’ Marked-up proofs of some of her poems and correspondence in 1959 with Rago and his secretary, discussing her offer of a trip to Africa from the John Hay Whitney Fellowships Committee, are held in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library. Danner called her association with Poetry one of the most rewarding experiences of her life. The four ‘‘Far from Africa’’ poems are the most often anthologized of her work. Danner felt obliged to leave her sixteen-year-old daughter and husband Otto Cunningham to take a Poet-in-Residence position at Wayne State in Detroit in 1961–1962, the first of several positions she held as Poet-in-Residence. Not having a degree in higher education, the only teaching positions open to her were poet-in-residence, which Danner considered a great honor. Finances were always a problem; however, her husband was supportive of her work and assisted with a stipend while she was in Detroit. An article in the Detroit Free Press noted that ‘‘After a series of July lectures at McGregor Memorial Building, she will sail for Africa,’’ but that trip would be put off until later. Instead, seeking a place to live and write, Danner approached Rev. Theodore S. Boone, pastor of King Solomon Church, and persuaded him to let her use an empty parish house to establish a community arts center, which she did from 1962 to 1964. Five or six poets came to the monthly meetings on Sunday evenings to read their work to each other. The late Ron Milner shared the house for awhile. Danner and Dudley Randall often worked together there on their poems for Poem Counterpoem. Others regularly there included poet Naomi Long Madgett and Arthur and Carolyn Reese, teachers and civil rights activists. In her unpublished memoirs, Madgett tells that the lovely old house was beautiful but in need of repairs, including a furnace, but they ‘‘were glad to have this meeting place and to huddle together good-naturedly in front of the fireplace in cold weather.’’ Poets that came to visit Danner include Robert Hayden, Hoyt Fuller, and Owen Dodson. Two special guests at Boone House were the Dutch author Rosey Pool on May 11, 1963, for a lecture and reading celebrating the publication of her Beyond the Blues, and Langston Hughes on February 8, 1964. Later that year, Ron Milner encouraged Danner to go to New York to record poetry with Hughes. Hughes had published much already and was given widespread recognition as a poet before he met Danner, then in the early stages of her career. However, he was not condescending but kind and agreed to record the poetry with her. Because Milner was interested in getting to New York to see some plays he rode to New York with Danner and sat in Hughes’s hotel room with her to do the recording. After the second session, Danner felt sabotaged as Hughes had used more time to read than she had. But back in Detroit, Motown did all of the editing, adding music that changed the aesthetics of the reading. The recording was not published until

130

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

after the death of Hughes. Motown Record Corporation published Poets of the Revolution in 1970 on the Black Forum label BB 453. Danner’s poems for the recording are now archived with those of Hughes at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature. Hughes also visited Danner’s home in Chicago and included her ‘‘Far from Africa’’ poems in New Negro Poets: USA. Danner later responded to Hughes’s kindness by writing several poems featuring him. After returning from Africa and France, Danner became the poet-in-residence at Miles College in Birmingham in 1967, at Virginia Union University in Richmond in 1968–1970, and LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis from 1971 to 1975. Always interested in encouraging the arts, Danner also joined the Memphis branch of the National League of American Pen Women, the Society of Afro American Culture, Contemporary Artists, Memphis Cable TV, the National Council of Teachers of English, and Poets in a Bottle. Danner wrote a lovely tribute to her friend in ‘‘Samuel Allen’s Soul Dances.’’ Allen recalls a poetry gathering in Atlanta where an extraordinary event with Danner occurred. No warning of stormy weather had been given. That night they were gathered inside, and immediately after Danner read the lines, ‘‘and God called forth thunder,’’ there was a loud roll of thunder. All were amazed. After the shock, they laughed a nervous laughter, wondering, ‘‘What powers does this poet have?’’ Allen wrote the ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Down of a Thistle, in which he warns that ‘‘In many of these poems, exquisite and complex, an image is established, deftly explored, paralleled or interlaced with another to establish, finally, a complex labyrinth through which the poet moves toward deviance and transcendence: to give the reader a succession of poems stamped with a central compelling image’’ (9). Danner layers her poetry, allowing her readers to savor slowly the complex meanings of her exquisite images.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Barksdale, Stetson, and Aldridge have given the most recent critical attention to Danner. Miller writes an extensive headnote on Danner in Call and Response and points out that Danner deserves additional critical attention. In her preface to her poetry in The Forerunners, Danner says, ‘‘I believe that my dharma is to prove that the Force for Good takes precedence over the force for evil in mankind. To the extent that my poetry adheres to this purpose it will endure’’ (48). In 2005, composer Valerie Coleman used Danner’s poems ‘‘The Painted Lady’’ and ‘‘Through the Caribbean Sea’’ in her The Painted Lady for Hartford Symphony for Soprano and Orchestra. Danner would have been delighted to know of her continuing contributions to the arts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Margaret Esse Danner Brass Horses. Richmond: Virginia Union University Press, 1968. The Down of a Thistle: Selected Poems, Prose Poems, and Songs. Waukesha, WI: Country Beautiful, 1976.

MARGARET ESSE DANNER

131

For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X. With Dudley Randall. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1967. Impressions of African Art Forms. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1960. Iron Lace. Millbrook, NY: Kriya Press, 1968. Not Light, Nor Bright, Nor Feathery. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1968. Poem Counterpoem. With Dudley Randall. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1966. Regroup. Richmond: Virginia Union University Press, 1969. To Flower. Nashville, TN: Hemphill Press, 1963. Writers of the Revolution. With Langston Hughes. Black Forum (BB 453), 1970.

Studies of Margaret Esse Danner’s Works Adoff, Arnold, ed. The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Aldridge, June M. ‘‘Benin to Beale Street: African Art in the Poetry of Margaret Danner.’’ CLA Journal 2 (December 31, 1987): 201–9. ———. ‘‘Langston Hughes and Margaret Danner.’’ Langston Hughes Review 3.2 (Fall 1984): 7–9. ———. ‘‘Margaret Esse Danner.’’ In Afro-American Poets Since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 84-89. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1985. Barksdale, Richard, and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Barksdale, Richard K. ‘‘Margaret Danner and the African Connection.’’ In Praisesong of Survival Lectures and Essays, 1957–89. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Breman, Paul, ed. You Better Believe It. Black Verse in English from Africa, the West Indies, and the U.S. Kingsport, TN: Penguin, 1973. Hayden, Robert, et al., eds. Afro-American Literature: An Introduction. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1971. Henderson, Stephen, ed. Understanding the New Black Poetry. New York: Morrow, 1973. Johnson, Patricia L. Brown, et al., eds. To Gwen with Love. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1971. King, Woodie, Jr., ed. The Forerunners Black Poets in America. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981. Miller, Ruth, ed. Blackamerican Literature 1760–Present. Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1971. Pfister, Arthur. Granny Blak Poet (in Pastel) for Mrs. Margaret Danner. Detroit: Broadside Press #35, 1970. Randall, Dudley, ed. The Black Poets. New York: Bantam, 1971. Stetson, Erlene, ed. Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746–1980. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Taft, Claire. ‘‘ ‘Her Blood Sings’: Margaret Danner’s Impressions of African Art Forms.’’ Langston Hughes Review 12.2 (Fall 1993): 45–49.

Claire Taft

EDWIDGE DANTICAT (1969– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE For novel, essay, and short story writer Edwidge Danticat, who was born in Haiti in 1969 and raised (like her protagonist, Sophie Caco, in Breath, Eyes, Memory) by her aunt and uncle until she was sent for by her parents in Brooklyn at the age of twelve, the valences of ‘‘home’’ are scattered, ambivalent, polylocal, and migratory. In a lecture presented at the Inter-American Development Bank’s Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., in 1997 (later published under the title ‘‘AHA!’’), Danticat notes that her family’s trajectory to the United States was mapped in several journeys by individual family members, but that this was a ‘‘somewhat typical migration pattern,’’ adding ‘‘typical for many people I know’’ (40). Danticat’s father, Andre´ Danticat, who migrated in 1971 when Edwidge was two years old, later sent for his wife Rose when the author was four. She was raised by an aunt and uncle in Haiti from the age of four until she was twelve, when she herself migrated to the United States. ( Joseph Dantica, an eighty-one-year-old Baptist minister and the uncle who raised his niece Edwidge Danticat, recently died while detained without cause by U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials in Miami as the elderly man tried to enter the United States through the Miami international airport after fleeing political violence during the Haitian crisis of 2004.) As a child growing up in Haiti in the late Duvalier period, and as a Haitian immigrant to the United States in 1981 (five years before the imposed exile of Jean-Claude Duvalier), Danticat’s narratives must be examined in the larger historical frames of Haitian-American relations and the Haitian diaspora. Danticat, like writer Dany Laferrie`re, is a ‘‘migratory subject,’’1 one whose haı¨tiennite´2 is mapped in diaspora, which forms a virtual—if not geographical—‘‘tenth department.’’ Though she initially felt ostracized by virtue of language and nationality from her peers in Brooklyn, Danticat went on to master the language (English) that she initially struggled to acquire, and her education has been a distinctly literary one: she finished a Bachelor of Arts in French literature from Barnard College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Brown University. An early draft of Breath, Eyes, Memory served as Danticat’s M.A. thesis. The public emergence and critical acclaim of Danticat as a Haitian American writer in the last decade marked a new point of (anglophone) crossing for Haitian diasporic writers. Unlike her literary predecessors—writers as diverse as Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Ste´phen Alexis, Marie (Vieux) Chauvet, Rene´ Depestre, Ge´rard E´tienne, Emile Ollivier, and even her older contemporaries, Lilas Desquiron and Dany Laferrie`re—Danticat writes and publishes in English. Though marked by the influences of French and Kreyo`l, Danticat’s texts are translations of neither. She is one of an emergent, but still small group of Haitian writers to depart from a literature written in Haiti’s mother tongues (Kreyo`l and Franc¸ais), one of the first, and certainly the most important, to write in English. In 1995, at the young age

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

133

of twenty-six, Danticat won the Pushcart Short Story Prize, became a finalist for the National Book Award for Krik? Krak! and received awards from the journal the Caribbean Writer, as well as Seventeen and Essence magazines, for her fiction. In 1999, she won the American Book Award. In January 2005, Danticat won the inaugural award for The Story Prize for The Dew Breaker, which was also a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Prize. That Danticat is such a critically lauded and precociously young writer only further speaks to her significance as a trans-American writer. Danticat published her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, in 1994, the year that the U.S. government began sending troops to Haiti in order to secure Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return to power after the democratically elected president was deposed by a brutal military coup led by Ge´ne´ral Raoul Ce´dras and was sent into exile only seven months after his election in September 1991. The period from 1991 to 1994 witnessed a massive exodus of Haitian refugees, referred to as ‘‘boat people’’ (boat peuples/bo`t pipol), an appellation that had earlier been used to describe Vietnamese refugees. Initially, the United States systematically returned the refugees to Haiti; later, however, the refugees were housed in camps at the U.S. military base on Guanta´namo Bay in Cuba while asylum cases were reviewed. Danticat’s second literary work, Krik? Krak! (a collection of short stories), was published in 1995, the year that also saw the beginning of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Haiti (although U.N. troops remained) and the democratic election of Rene´ Preval, Aristide’s successor and political ally. In 1998, Danticat published the novel The Farming of Bones, a historical novel that revisits the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic and the massacre of thousands of Haitian cane laborers under Generalissimo Trujillo’s command. In 2002, Danticat published a nonfiction travel narrative After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel and a young adult’s novel Behind the Mountains: The Diary of Ce´lianne Esperance. In 2004, Danticat published The Dew Breaker, a novel told through interwoven short stories, about a Duvalierist torturer who has found exile in Haiti’s diaspora in Brooklyn, and thus, escaped punishment for his crimes against the Haitian people. As editor, Danticat has also importantly contributed to the shifting landscapes of American literatures: in 2000, she edited The Beacon Best of 2000. Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures; and in 2001, she edited The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, the first anthology to focus exclusively on Haitian American literatures. Danticat’s literary texts uniquely reflect the trans-American experiences of Haitian refugees and dyasporas. Teacher as well as writer, Danticat has taught at the University of Miami and New York University. Cinematically, Danticat has also collaborated on filmic projects with directors Jonathan Demme and Patricia Benoıˆt, serving as associate producer for both Courage and Pain (1996), the documentary film about Haitian torture victims that was directed by Benoıˆt and produced by Demme, and the documentary film The Agronomist (2003), which was directed by Demme and which recounted the life and political assassination of Jean Dominique in 2000. Danticat has also been a visible activist within the United States to protest the impact of U.S. foreign policies, as well as state and local policies, on both Haitian Americans and on her home country Haiti, marching in New York, for instance, to protest police violence against Haitian American men (Patrick Dorismond, Abner Louima) by the New York City Police Department (NYPD). By doing so, Danticat participates in transnational

134

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

forms of social justice activism, organizing to protest U.S. action or inaction about Haitian political problems, using the media, community resources, and constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly to pressure federal, state, and local governments to alter policies and effectuate change both within the diasporic context and at home in Haiti. Glick Schiller and Fouron discuss such transnational forms of grassroots activism in Georges Woke Up Laughing, asserting that long-distance nationalists create subaltern political forms through participation in ‘‘transnational movements for global justice’’ (272). MAJOR WORKS Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, published in 1994, explores many themes common in American ethnic literatures—adolescent alienation, migration, traumatic uprooting from a childhood in the Caribbean (for Danticat’s protagonist Sophie Caco, in Haiti), and the challenges of establishing new relations in the United States. The novel recounts the difficult process of coming-of-age in diaspora; Sophie has a fractious relationship with her mother; she is in exile from her homeland; she remains haunted by an unknown paternal origin—Sophie is the fatherless daughter of a raped mother, a fact that she learns only later in life; she experiences recurrent dreams of being chased, captured, and confined; and through the protagonist, Danticat explores the ambivalent identifications and dis-identifications with mother, motherland, and diaspora through daffodils and other botanical forms. Danticat’s short story collection Krik? Krak! (1995) is comprised of nine short stories intricately woven together through recurrent characters and motifs such as violence, survival, hope, migration, terror, love, and hate; the collection ends with the poetic ‘‘Epilogue: Women Like Us,’’ like Haiti’s nine administrative departments and its diaspora or ‘‘tenth department.’’ The book opens with the short story ‘‘Children of the Sea,’’ a short story about love, loss, and violence in which two lovers are separated by political chaos and migratory flight; the book ends with the lyrical poetic prose of ‘‘Epilogue: Women Like Us,’’ in which the storyteller and writer pays homage to her ancestors, the ‘‘kitchen poets’’ who ‘‘slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it’’ (219–20). The book begins in Haiti with refugees taking flight for Florida’s coastal waters; it ends in the United States with Haiti’s diasporic daughters remembering their mothers and their motherland. In between fall eight interlocking stories—‘‘Nineteen Thirty-Seven,’’ ‘‘A Wall of Fire Rising,’’ ‘‘Night Women,’’ ‘‘New York Day Women,’’ ‘‘Between the Pool and the Gardenias,’’ ‘‘The Missing Peace,’’ ‘‘Seeing Things Simply,’’ and ‘‘Caroline’s Wedding’’—that sing of hope and despair, of love and loss, of faith and broken promises, and each weds its readers to Haiti’s history, culture, and politics. The Farming of Bones, Danticat’s second novel, explores the brutal 1937 ‘‘Haitian Massacre’’ of Haitian cane laborers working on sugar cane corporations in the Dominican Republic. In 1937, the Dominican dictator Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, or ‘‘Jeffe’’ as he was commonly known, ordered the slaughter of thousands (some scholars estimate scores of thousands) of Haitian cane laborers working in the Dominican Republic; as the massacre began, many fortunately had a narrow escape, fleeing the state military violence and crossing the Massacre River and Haiti’s eastern border. Within this historical narrative, Danticat weaves the love story of Amabelle De´sir and Sebastien Onius; the grief experienced by Amabelle as a small girl when she loses her parents as

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

135

they perilously assay crossing the Massacre River; the complicated daughter-and-sisterlike relationship of Amabelle first with Valencia and her father; the restave`k, or servant, relationship with Sen˜ora Valencia and her husband Sen˜or Pico Duarte; and the filial relationships between those who work on the sugar cane corporations and flee the massacre. The novel (a first-person fictional account of an historical event) echoes Jacques-Ste´phen Alexis’s Compe`re Ge´ne´ral Soleil (General Sun, My Brother) in its depictions of the 1937 Haitian Massacre. Danticat’s most recent book The Dew Breaker, published in early March 2004 (just days after the forced resignation and departure of President Aristide from the country on an American military jet), is a novel that also unfolds in short story form about a former member of the Volunteers for National Security (VNS), the Miliciens, more popularly known as the infamous tonton macoutes, who tortured political prisoners in the Casernes Dessalines Military Barracks and at the Fort Dimanche Prison, renowned for its crimes against humanity and its routine torture of Duvalier’s enemies, political prisoners, or dissidents. The character’s narrative biography thus parallels that of a contemporary exiled torturer, Emmanuel ‘‘Toto’’ Constant who was on the CIA payroll and who with CIA money created the violent death squad FRAPH, which tortured and killed Lavalas supporters during the defakto regime from 1991 to 1994. The nine individual stories comprising the novel reveal psychologically complex, nuanced, and often interrelated portrayals of the ‘‘Dew Breaker’’ and his family’s secretive, isolated life in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, since fleeing Haiti during the first Duvalier regime. The multilayered portrait of the ‘‘Dew Breaker’’ grows through haunting voices and multiple narrative perspectives, offering often oblique or indirect snapshots, as his survivors and those close to them give testimony in diaspora to unborn infants, dead aunts, answering machines, tape recorders, strangers, and ultimately, to Danticat’s readers. The plots of six stories—‘‘The Book of the Dead’’; ‘‘Seven’’; ‘‘Water Child’’; ‘‘The Book of Miracles’’; ‘‘The Bridal Seamstress’’; and ‘‘The Funeral Singer’’—all unfold in Haiti’s Tenth Department, or its diaspora, scattered from Brooklyn to Tampa, while three are set in Haiti (‘‘Night Talkers’’; ‘‘Monkey Tails’’; and the title story ‘‘The Dew Breaker’’). Even these three stories recount diasporic returns to Haiti (as in ‘‘Night Talkers’’), or exilic flights to the North American diaspora from Haiti (as in ‘‘Monkey Tails’’ and ‘‘The Dew Breaker’’) following traumatic experiences of violence (suffered or committed) or feared violence (retaliation). The nine stories also cover a wide time span—from the late reign of ‘‘Papa Doc’’ Duvalier (circa 1967) to the Dechoukaj, or uprooting, overturning the reign of his son ‘‘Baby Doc’’ Duvalier (1985–1986), to the post-1991 period with strewn references to the terror organization FRAPH, to its notorious leader ‘‘Toto’’ Constant (granted asylum by the U.S. government in 1994), and to victims of NYPD violence, Abner Louima (brutalized in 1997) and Patrick Dorismond (killed on March 16, 2000); perhaps unsurprisingly, or not, there are no direct references to either of the two Lavalas-affiliated and democratically elected Haitian Presidents of the contemporary era, Rene´ Pre´val (1995–2000) or Jean Bertrand Aristide (1990–1991; 1994–1995; 2001–2004). CRITICAL RECEPTION Danticat’s literary texts have been the focus of several dissertations: foregrounding the interrelations between Danticat’s, Julia Alvarez’s, and Michelle Cliff ’s literary writings, Ortiz (2000) positions the texts within a decisively Caribbean frame that

136

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

explores their writings as autoethnographic; Braziel (2000) places Danticat’s writings in conversation with other Haitian diasporic (notably, Dany Laferrie`re) and Vietnamese diasporic writers in the post–Vietnam War and post-Duvalier periods; Hewett (2002) examines Danticat’s texts within an African diasporic frame alongside the writings of Buchi Emecheta and Julie Dash; Robinson (2003) probes Danticat’s writings in relation to both other Caribbean writers and to the Caribbean landscape as traumatized or wounded; Rossi (2004) places Danticat’s literary texts within emergent black women’s writings in the United States; Schleppe (2004), however, locates Danticat within the category of postcolonial francophonie writing. As revealed in the dissertations, classification (whether by nationality, ethnicity, or language) of Danticat’s writings—as American, Ethnic American, African American, Haitian American, Haitian, Caribbean, Antillean, Anglophone, and Francophone—has remained problematic in scholarly criticism on her writings. Chancy (1997) and Dash (1998) were among the earliest of Danticat’s critics: while Chancy contextualizes Danticat within a tradition of Haitian women writers, Dash reads Danticat as an ‘‘other American’’ writer within the regional literary landscapes first charted in the writings of Martı´, Ce´saire, Glissant, Walcott, and others. N’Zengou-Tayo (1998, 2000), Kekeh-Dika (2000), the collaborative efforts of N’Zengou-Tayo and Wilson (2000), Larrier (2001), and Saint-E´loi (2001) all explore Danticat as a francophone Antillean writer, although these critics also openly acknowledge and pay close critical attention to her haı¨tiennite´ or Haitianness. Gyssels (2000, 2002), Poon (2000), Braziel (2000, 2003), Brice-Finch (2001), and Tabuteau (2002) explore Danticat’s writing through diasporic lenses, Haitian or comparative Caribbean. Poon (2000) and Braziel (2003) comparatively analyze Danticat’s and Jamaica Kincaid’s diasporic narratives. Tabuteau (2002) compares Danticat to George Lamming, a Caribbean diasporic writer of an older generation. Like Braziel (2000), Mardorossian (2002) and Anatol (2004) complicate the rubric of ‘‘exile’’ literature through a theorization of ‘‘migrant’’ literatures, the latter reading Caribbean migrants as ‘‘ex-isles’’ rather than ‘‘exiles.’’ Working largely within an American ethnic lens that examines Anglophone diasporic writings in the United States, Charters (1998), Shea (1999), Shemak (2002), Johnson (2003), Strehle (2003), and Ink (2004) provocatively analyze Danticat’s literary interventions in the history of Hispaniola—specifically the Haitian Massacre of 1937 and border wars between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the two countries on the island—although this conflict has also been examined by the Belgian-based scholar Kathleen Gyssels (2002). Ortiz (2000), Johnson (2003), and Ink (2004) explicitly compare Danticat’s and Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez’s literary portrayals of Rafael Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic. Gerber (2000), Cornejo (2000), Goldblatt (2000), Jurney (2001), Loichot (2004), Francis (2004), and Putnam (2004) all explore the feminist dimensions of Danticat’s writings. Horn (2001) explores Danticat as an ‘‘intimate reader,’’ as well as writer of literature. Samway (2003–2004) and Squint (2004), following the critical lead of Robinson (2003), examine landscapes in relation to questions of genre in Danticat’s literature. Shakleton (2003) adopts the story ‘‘Caroline’s Wedding’’ to articulate an anthropological study of Haitian transnationalism. For interviews with Danticat, see Shea (1996), Anglesey (1998), Wachtel (2000), Wucker (2000), and Alexandre and Howard (2002).

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

137

NOTES 1. Carole Boyce Davies uses migration to examine the transitory and mobile nature of diasporic subjectivities, while underscoring the subjective experiences of migration in her groundbreaking study Black Women Writers and Diaspora. 2. Myriam Chancy defines haı¨tiennite´ as textual inscriptions of Haitian identity within literary texts (Framing Silence).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Edwidge Danticat After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel. New York: Crown Publishing, 2002. ‘‘AHA!’’ In Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, 39–44. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Beacon’s Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Behind the Mountains: The Diary of Ce´lianne Esperance. New York: Orchard Books, 2002. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: SoHo Press, 1994. The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States. New York: SoHo Press, 2001. ‘‘Carnivalia.’’ Transition: An International Review 12.3 [93] (2002): 40–49. The Dew Breaker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. The Farming of Bones. New York: SoHo Press, 1998. Krik? Krak! New York: SoHo Press, 1995. ‘‘No Greater Shame.’’ Haitian Boston Reporter (May 2003). Reprint, In Haiti: A Slave Revolution, 200 Years after 1804, edited by Pat Chin, Greg Dunkel, Sara Flounders, and Kim Ives. New York: International Action Center, 2004. ‘‘Preface.’’ Special Issue: ‘‘Haiti, 1804–2004: Literature, Culture, and Art.’’ Research in African Literatures 35.2 (Summer 2004): iii–viii, 1–206.

Studies of Edwidge Danticat’s Works Alexandre, Sandy, and Ravi Y. Howard. ‘‘My Turn in the Fire: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.’’ Transition: An International Review 12.3 [93] (2002): 110–28. Anatol, Giselle Liza. ‘‘Caribbean Migration, Ex-Isles, and the New World Novel.’’ The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Ed. Maryemma Graham. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 70–83. Anglesey, Zoe. ‘‘The Voice of the Storytellers: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.’’ MultiCultural Review 7.3 (September 1998): 36–39. Bell, Beverly. Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Identity. Migrations of the Subject. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Braziel, Jana Evans. ‘‘Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations: Narrative Coming of Age in the Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid.’’ Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 3.2 (March 2003): 110–38. ———. ‘‘Nomadism, Diaspora and Deracination in Contemporary Migrant Literatures.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2000. Brice-Finch, Jacqueline. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat: Memories of Maa¨fa.’’ MaCome`re: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 4 (2001): 146–54.

138

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Chancy, Myriam J. A. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Charters, Mallay. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited.’’ Publishers Weekly 245.33 (August 17, 1998): 42–43. Cornejo, Josefina. ‘‘La afirmacion de la sexualidad femenina: Memoria y exilio en Breath, Eyes, Memory.’’ In Exilios Femeninos, edited by Pilar Cuder Dominguez, 355–64. Huelva, Spain: Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer—Universidad Huelva, 2000. Dash, J. Michael. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Francis, Donette A. ‘‘ ‘Silences Too Horrific to Disturb’: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.’’ Research in African Literatures 35.2 (Summer 2004): 75–90. Gerber, Nancy F. ‘‘Binding the Narrative Thread: Storytelling and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.’’ Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 2.2 (Fall–Winter 2000): 188–99. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Georges Fouron. Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Goldblatt, Patricia. ‘‘Finding a Voice for the Victimized.’’ MultiCultural Review 9.3 (September 2000): 40–47. ———. ‘‘The Implausibility of Marriage.’’ MultiCultural Review 10. 3 (September 2001): 42–48, 73. Gyssels, Kathleen. ‘‘Haitians in the City: Two Modern Day Trickster Tales.’’ Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7.1 (Autumn 2002): 34 paragraphs. ———. ‘‘ ‘Schild en vriend’ in de Dominicaanse republiek: Edwidge Danticat over het bloedbad van Massacre.’’ Streven 67.6 ( June 2000): 518–25. Hewett, Heather Anne. ‘‘Diaspora’s Daughters: Buchi Emecheta, Julie Dash, Edwidge Danticat and the Remapping of Mother Africa.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2002. Horn, Jessica. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat: An Intimate Reader.’’ Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 1.2 (Spring 2001): 19–25. Ingberg, Pablo. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat: La fiebre de contar.’’ Suplemento Cultura La Nacion, February 27, 2000, 8. Ink, Lynn Chun. ‘‘Remaking Identity, Unmaking Nation: Historical Recovery and the Reconstruction of Community in In the Time of the Butterflies and The Farming of Bones.’’ Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 27.3 (Summer 2004): 788–807. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. ‘‘Both Sides of the Massacre: Collective Memory and Narrative on Hispaniola.’’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36.2 ( June 2003): 75–91. Jurney, Florence Ramond. ‘‘Exile and Relation to the Mother/Land in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes Memory and The Farming of Bones.’’ Revista/Review Interamericana 31.1–4 ( January– December 2001). Kekeh-Dika, Andre´e-Anne. ‘‘Entre ville et village: Quelles destine´es pour le fe´minin chez Edwidge Danticat?’’ In La Ville plurielle dans la fiction antillaise anglophone: Images de l’interculturel, edited by Corinne Duboin and Eric Tabuteau, 59–67. Toulouse, France: PU du Mirail, 2000. Larrier, Rene´e. ‘‘ ‘Girl by the Shore’: Gender and Testimony in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.’’ Journal of Haitian Studies 7.2 (Fall 2001): 50–60. Loichot, Valerie. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History.’’ Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 5.1 (2004): 92–116. Mardorossian, Carine M. ‘‘From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature.’’ Modern Language Studies 32.2 (Fall 2002): 15–33. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-Jose´. ‘‘Children in Haitian Popular Migration as Seen by Maryse Conde and Edwidge Danticat.’’ In Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

139

Writers and Scholars, edited by Adele S. Newson and Linda Stong-Leek, 93–100. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. ———. ‘‘Le vodou dans la representation litte´raire de la migration des boat-people haı¨tiens.’’ In Haı¨ti: Le Vodou au troisie`me mille´naire, 143–64. Sous la direction de Frantz-Antoine LeConte. Montre´al: Les E´ditions du CIDHICA, 2002. ———. ‘‘Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!’’ MaCome`re: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 3 (2000): 123–40. ———. ‘‘Women, Literature and Politics: The Haitian Popular Migration as Viewed by Marie The´re`se Colina and the Haitian Female Novelists.’’ In Moving Beyond Boundaries, vol. 2, Critical Responses. edited by Carole Boyce Davies and ’Molara Ogundipe-Leslie. London: Pluto Press, 1995. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-Jose´, and Elizabeth Wilson. ‘‘Translators on a Tight Rope: The Challenges of Translating Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco.’’ TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction: Etudes sur le Texte et Ses Transformations 13.2 (2000): 75–105. Ortiz, Lisa Marie. ‘‘Modes of Autoethnography: Genealogical, Autobiographical, and Historical Recovery in the Novels of Alvarez, Cliff and Danticat.’’ Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, 2000. Poon, Angelia. ‘‘Re-Writing the Male Text: Mapping Cultural Spaces in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.’’ Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.2 (Winter 2000): 30 paragraphs. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/ (accessed February 28, 2005). Putnam, Amanda. ‘‘Mothering the Motherless: Portrayals of Alternative Mothering Practices within the Caribbean Diaspora.’’ Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme 23.2 (Winter 2004): 118–23. Robinson, Kim Dismont. ‘‘Probing the Wound: Re-Membering the Traumatic Landscape of Caribbean Literary Histories.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Miami, 2003. Rossi, Jennifer Christianna. ‘‘Souls across Spaces: Ambiguity as Resistance and a New Generation of Black Women Writers.’’ Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Buffalo, 2004. Saint-E´loi, Rodney. ‘‘L’Ecriture Bizango: Edwidge Danticat, le go-between.’’ Notre Librairie: Revue des Litte´ratures du Sud 147 ( January–March 2001): 58–61. Saint-Louis, Loretta. ‘‘Migration Evolves: The Political Economy of Process and Form in Haiti, the U.S. and Canada.’’ Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1988. Samway, Patrick S. J. ‘‘A Homeward Journey: Edwidge Danticat’s Fictional Landscapes, Mindscapes, Genescapes, and Signscapes in Breath, Eyes, Memory.’’ Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 57.1 (Winter 2003–2004): 75–83. Schleppe, Beatriz Eugenia. ‘‘Empowering New Identities in Postcolonial Literature by Francophone Women Writers.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2004. Shakleton, Mark. ‘‘Haitian Transnationalism: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Caroline’s Wedding’: A Case Study of Literary Anthropology.’’ Suomen Antropologi/Antropologi i Finland/The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 28.2 (May 2003): 15–23. Shea, Renee H. ‘‘The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat: An Interview.’’ Callaloo 19.2 (Spring 1996): 382–89. ———. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat.’’ Belles Lettres 10.3 (Summer 1995): 12–15. ———. ‘‘‘The Hunger to Tell’: Edwidge Danticat and The Farming of Bones.’’ MaCome`re: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 2 (1999): 12–22. Shemak, April. ‘‘Re-Membering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.’’ MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 48.1 (Spring 2002): 83–112. Squint, Kirstin. ‘‘Exploring the Borderland between Realism and Magical Realism in Krik? Krak!’’ Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 5.1 (Fall 2004): 116–22.

140

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Strehle, Susan. ‘‘History and the End of Romance: Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.’’ In Doubled Plots: Romance and History, edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden, 24–44. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Tabuteau, Eric. ‘‘American Dream, Urban Nightmare: Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin.’’ Alize´s: Revue Angliciste de la Re´union 22 ( June 2002): 95–110. Wachtel, Eleanor. ‘‘A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.’’ Brick 65–66 (Fall 2000): 106–19. Wucker, Michele. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat: A Voice for the Voiceless.’’ Americas 52.3 (May–June 2000): 40–45. ———. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999.

Jana Evans Braziel

DORIS DAVENPORT (1949– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born January 29, 1949, in Gainesville, Georgia, contemporary writer/performance poet Doris Davenport is an iconoclastic figure who resists being pigeonholed into a specific categorization of writers. Davenport, raised in the Appalachian foothills in the small town of Cornelia, Georgia, a place where ‘‘red Georgia clay sticks to everything inside and out,’’ experienced a rare type of ‘‘open-mindedness’’ in a 1950s grade school classroom in the South (quoted in Montgomery 155). Davenport attributes this openness and Cornelia’s lack of ‘‘visible boundaries’’ as an influence on her poetry. The oldest of seven children raised in a single-parent home, Davenport credits the guidance received from her beloved teacher, ‘‘Miz Cooke,’’ who taught her the importance of balancing the duties and responsibilities between home and schoolwork (156). Davenport attended Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, graduating cum laude with a B.A. in English in 1969. She acknowledges her experiences at Paine College as an influence in establishing her ‘‘value systems’’ and ‘‘love of learning and reading’’ (Montgomery 155). Davenport later received an M.A. in English from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1971 and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Southern California in 1985. In addition to writing, Davenport has taught as an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte and at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she presently resides. Davenport’s diverse ‘‘areas of academic expertise’’ include African American literature/multiethnic literature; contemporary critical theory (ethnic-feminist); pedagogy in/of education; women’s studies, and creative writing (poetry). Davenport has written several books of poetry, the first few being self-published as a result of being rejected by alternative presses (lesbian, feminist, African American) because of what has been described as the ‘‘bitter tone’’ of her poetry (Montgomery 156). Titles include, it’s like this (1980), eat thunder & drink rain (1982, second printing 1983), Managia Il Touna & Bebi La Pioggia (Italian translation of eat thunder & drink rain (1988), Voodoo Chile: Slight Return (1991), The Cornelia Book (1992), and Madness like Morning Glories (2005). In addition, her poems have been published in Black American Literature Forum and Callaloo. MAJOR WORKS Davenport’s works espouse both lesbian and feminist views and also chronicle the life of African Americans, particularly in ‘‘Affrilachia,’’ a term coined by poet Frank X Walker, ‘‘to convey the particular experiences of African Americans from the Appalachians’’ (Miller 97). Using both Affrilachia and also other places which chronicle her own biographical happenings, Davenport transports readers on an ‘‘odyssey’’ as she revisits sites of personal and collective memory and experience—an odyssey that leaves the reader spellbound by her eloquence (Miller 97).

142

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Most who read Davenport’s poetry are asked to confront complexities, whether historical, racial, sexual, or familial, while encountering mythological allusion and occasional nods to canonical poets as she reworks recognizable lines in paradoxical and clever approach. Themes in Davenport’s poetry include, but are not limited to, issues of lesbian sexuality in a predominantly heterosexual world, giving voice to those silenced (especially oppressed voices in her hometown region of south Georgia), and the ‘‘indignities of institutionalized slavery’’ and its lingering effects on blacks in the South (Montgomery 157). Davenport passionately explores ‘‘areas of deep aesthetic, cultural, and social / political aversion that often lead to antagonisms between black and white women’’—aversions resulting in a gulf that is not easily overcome because of ‘‘centuries of racial / psychological conditioning’’ (Miller 99). There is also a sardonic tone to some of her poetry that gives cause for an acknowledging chuckle to those who can relate to Davenport’s blunt treatment of certain themes. For example, in ‘‘Teaching Composition in California / With My Grandfather near Death in Georgia,’’ Davenport explores the conflict of dealing with the death of a loved one while confronting what becomes seemingly mundane and frustrating ordeals of daily life. Davenport writes, Today is rather cruel breeding students out of rubrics like flies out of summer and me with no raid . . . (5)

CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics note that Davenport’s poetry promotes healing by ‘‘removing illusion’’ and confronting the harsh realities of past injustices in a truthful, straightforward, and sometime uncomfortable manner for the reader (Montsomery 157). In ‘‘Coming Home to Affrilachia: The Poems of doris davenport’’ (from Her Words, 2002), James Miller notes that Davenport’s resistance to ‘‘easy classification’’ of her work has, at times led to ‘‘critical neglect’’ because of ‘‘her unwillingness to claim convenient, tailor-made identities’’ (96). It is indeed this ‘‘unwillingness’’ that makes Davenport’s persona enigmatic and her poetry exciting. In another biographical entry written on Davenport in Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States (1993), Helena Louise Montgomery notes that at that time ‘‘Davenport’s three self-published works ha[d] not received any formal critical attention to date’’ (158). This has not been the case in the twelve years hence. Davenport’s works have gone from scant recognition and rejection by editors to national exposure and publication by a major university press. Critics are taking note of her poetry; some calling her works ‘‘iconoclastic’’ (Miller 96). Montgomery argues that Davenport’s poetry ‘‘can transport her readers from a very painful time in history, make them feel the consequences of a particular event, and then take them right into the most private room of their homes,’’ a technique grounded in an honest approach to ‘‘past or present social ills existing within the lesbian or heterosexual communities’’ (158). Janet St. John notes of Davenport’s most recent work, Madness like Morning Glories: Davenport’s background in performance poetry comes through strongly in this unique collection highlighting the voices of Afrilacians, that is, African Americans in Appalachia. She re-creates the

DORIS DAVENPORT

143

voices of a Georgia community in a narrative of personal histories told from different perspectives. Each poem brings to life a person who adds insight into every facet of life, from family ties to family troubles, witchcraft to gossipy exchanges. Davenport is a storyteller who loves to wear the many hats of her characters as she weaves her embroiled tale. She understands true spoken language as well as poetic structure and technique.

St. John is just one of many critics who laud Davenport’s marriage of unique style and regional themes. In addition to poetry, Davenport’s critical essays and book reviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Azalea, Day Tonight / Night Today, Lesbian Studies: Present and Future, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, MELUS, Mid-American Review, Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, Out of the Rough: Women’s Poems of Survival and Celebration, and Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers. Some of these works have incited criticism, particularly one essay that critic James Taranto claims espouses ‘‘antiwhite’’ racist sentiments, especially in respect to Davenport’s depiction of the physicality of white ‘‘wimmin.’’ In ‘‘The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin’’ (from This Bridge Called My Back), Davenport’s description of white women as ‘‘esthetically . . . repulsive’’ has been the cause of outcry from some who bemoan not only because of what Davenport writes in the essay, but also because of the essay’s inclusion on college syllabi (Taranto). Taranto takes umbrage to one particular passage where Davenport writes, Esthetically (and physically) we frequently find white wimmin repulsive. That is, their skin colors are unaesthetic (ugly, to some people). Their hair, stringy and straight, is unattractive. Their bodies, rather like misshapen lumps of whitish clay or dough, that somebody forgot to mold in-certainareas (quoted in Taranto).

However, it should be noted that Taranto does not only decry Davenport’s ‘‘antiwhite racism,’’ he also denounces works by other authors that make their way into college curricula, especially essays that discuss feminist, environmentalist, and homosexual topics and issues. Doris Davenport is clearly a poet/activist who champions causes she is passionate about through her poetry, while at the same time is a chronicler of the voices and experiences of her hometown people. Davenport’s groundbreaking poetry, with its stylistic richness and ‘‘bitter tones,’’ will find a way into the college classroom, enriching those who allow themselves to journey with Davenport into her world to explore her passions and confront perhaps their own prejudices. In doing so, they will come to know the genius of Doris Davenport and become moved by the experience. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Doris Davenport ‘‘Black American Poetry in the Eighties: Book Reviews.’’ Black American Literature Forum 17.4 (Winter 1983): 177–79. ‘‘Black Lesbians in Academia: Visible Invisibility.’’ In Lesbian Studies: Present and Future, edited by Margaret Cruikshank, 9–11. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982.

144

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

‘‘Claiming Another Identity: Wimmin’s Spirituality.’’ Day Tonight/Night Today 3 ( June/July 1981): 15–18. ‘‘Dinner with the Orishas—Almost.’’ Callaloo 16 (October 1982): 125–26. eat thunder & drink rain. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1982. Second print, Iowa: City Women’s Press, 1983. it’s like this. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1980. Madness Like Morning Glories. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Managia Il Touna & Bebi La Pioggia (Italian translation of eat thunder & drink rain). Introduction and translation by Franco Meli. Milano: Cooperativia Libraria I.U.L.M. Scrl, Archipelago Edizioni, 1988. ‘‘Music in Poetry: If You Can’t Feel It/You Can’t Fake It.’’ Mid-American Review 10.2 ( June 1990): 57–64. ‘‘The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin.’’ In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrı`e Moraga and Gloria Anzaldu´a, 85–90. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1984. ‘‘Pedagogy and/of Ethnic Literature: The Agony and the Ecstasy.’’ MELUS 16.2 (1989–1990): 51–62. ‘‘A Signifying Short Story.’’ Azalea 3.3 (Fall 1980): 25. ‘‘Teaching Composition in California / With My Grandfather Near Death in Georgia.’’ Black American Literature Forum 18.1 (Spring 1984): 5. Voodoo Chile: Slight Return. Charlotte, NC: Soque Street Press, 1991.

Studies of Doris Davenport’s Works Miller, James. ‘‘Coming Home to Affrilachia: The Poems of Doris Davenport.’’ In Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry, edited by Felicia Mitchell, 96–106. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. Montgomery, Helena Louise. ‘‘Doris Davenport.’’ In Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States, edited by Sandra Pollack and Denise D. Knight, 155–59. London: Greenwood Press, 1993. St. John, Janet. Rev. of Madness Like Morning Glories. Booklist Online. April 17, 2005. http://www .amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0807129917/ref¼dp_proddesc_0/104-73180247799954?%5Fencoding¼UTF8&n¼283155 (accessed February 28, 2005). Taranto, James. ‘‘College Campuses Crawling with Crazies: a Report on Political Correctness, Back when It Was Still News.’’ New York City Tribune, July 13, 1990, http://home.nyc.rr.com/ taranto/crazies.htm (accessed April 10, 2005).

Denise R. Shaw

ANGELA Y. DAVIS (1944– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A political activist and philosopher, Angela Yvonne Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 26, 1944. Experiencing the Ku Klux Klan’s racist terrorism in close proximity she became politically active from high school onwards. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University (1965), was a graduate student at the Frankfurt Institute under Theodor Adorno, and gained her doctorate under Herbert Marcuse’s supervision, University of California, San Diego. By twenty-four, Davis was a philosophy professor at UCLA and an activist academic. Her commitment to communist revolutionary ideas, involvement with the Black Panther Party, and the politics of Black Liberation led to her dismissal by the University of College Regents in 1969. An active campaigner to free the Soledad Brothers, the police named Davis as an accomplice in Jonathan Jackson’s failed kidnapping attempt at Marin County Hall of Justice (August 7, 1970) as his gun was registered to her. Charging the defendants with the killings from police fire, Davis was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, accused of murder, conspiracy, and kidnapping. After two months underground and the biggest fugitive hunt in history she was captured on October 13, 1970. Her custody sparked the international Free Angela Davis movement and she formed the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression, which still exists today. The cold war cocktail of non-American communism and a Black Panther ‘‘anti-white’’ association consolidated Davis as a dangerous figure for the authorities and she potentially faced the death penalty. Cleared of the fraudulent charges by an all-white jury on June 4, 1972, Fidel Castro provided a Cuban base for her to write Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974). Her prison experiences led to a lifelong commitment to prison reform writing and public speaking, pioneering analyses of the oppressive interfaces of racism and capitalism in black history and the politics of sexism. Currently professor in the History of Consciousness (1994) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Californian Republican senators objected), Davis is a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center and a leading expert on penal institutional racism. She is on the boards of the National Political Congress of Black Women and the National Black Women’s Health Project. MAJOR WORKS The impediments to black people’s advancement characterizing American society and its institutions make the broad spectrum of Davis’s achievements all the more extraordinary. Anticapitalistic sentiment underpins her work. From her first challenges to the chauvinism of black liberation politics, ‘‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’’ (1971), to contemporary critique on the role the United States plays in globalized economic and ideological warfare, Abolition Democracy:

146

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Beyond Prisons, Torture and Empire (2005), she remains a powerful model worldwide for black consciousness and antiracist feminism. Davis’s writing is canonical in black studies and feminist thought. She works within a Hegelian-Marxist view of world history. Marxist ideology is her interpretative framework for addressing issues of postslavery black criminalization, feminism, aesthetics, and culture. As a political prisoner, she spearheaded If They Come in the Morning (1971) noting that the political prisoner’s threat is due to ‘‘his persistent challenging—legally or extra-legally of fundamental social wrongs.’’ Women, Race and Class (1981) retrieves black women’s achievements in the nineteenth-century Suffrage and Club movements. Debunking the shibboleth, ‘‘Am I not a woman and a sister?’’ Davis argues that gains by white women have been at the expense of black people’s franchise from slavery onwards. Foregrounding race and class she makes further distinctions between black and white women’s groups in relation to rape, birth control, and housework. The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998) places her alongside Wittgenstein, Hegel, Irigaray, and Lyotard in the Blackwell Publishers series, testifying to her status as one of the century’s preeminent theorists in Marxism, feminism, and antiracism. Selections reveal the trajectory of her philosophical thought. A lecture from her 1969 UCLA course, ‘‘Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature,’’ which is a Hegelian application to issues of black enslavement and freedom, can be read alongside ‘‘From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison’’ (1998), which identifies the ideological linking of criminality to blackness. In ‘‘Black Women and the Academy’’ (2004) she offers an uncompromising assertion that black women cannot define themselves in opposition to Latina, Asian, and Native American women and so reproduce forms of domination that were a template to their own oppression at the hands of white hegemony. In her critical commentary and activism regarding post–September 11 America, globalization, race, feminism, and the prison industrial complex of America, Davis continues to expand understanding of power in society. CRITICAL RECEPTION Huey Newton noted after her arrest in 1970, ‘‘Angela has given her energy and devotion to the people’s cause . . . in a way that sets an example for people everywhere’’ (Rhodes 357). This continues to inform her landmark contributions to race and social justice thinking, ‘‘a reminder of how dictatorial the Police State can suddenly become towards minorities if it is not vigilantly monitored by free patriots’’ (Burns 2001). Davis’s writing reorients thinking to identify uniquely black-centered concerns. She functions as a point of continuity in liberation politics between the 1960s to the new millennium as a chronicler and contributor to ‘‘progressive movements in radical philosophy and politics, emphasizing prison intellectualism, Marxism, antiracism, feminism, cultural studies and activism’’ ( James 20). A review of Women, Race and Class concludes, ‘‘Certainly her book should provide direction for resurgence and continuing momentum in both the women’s and civil rights movements’’ (Shields 361). While one reviewer of the Reader asks, ‘‘Would she have achieved her intellectual authority without her earlier political celebrity, the integration of elite universities, the growth of the black studies movement, and the academic development of cultural studies?’’ (Richards 132), Davis herself is not without self-irony regarding her status as

ANGELA Y. DAVIS

147

political renegade and icon. Decontextualized, depoliticized, and inserted into visual popular culture, ‘‘it is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo’’ (Davis, ‘‘Afro Images,’’ 37). As a public figure, Davis faces an ongoing iconographic representation, which overshadows her contributions to as a political intellectual. Her defence of affirmative action was denounced by a College Regent as ‘‘your record as a revolutionary is not merely disturbing but it may impair your effectiveness as a member of the faculty of one of this nation’s most highly respected academic institutions’’ ( James 22) thus revealing the full circle of conservative aversion to Davis’s politics and her continued defining, articulating, and legitimizing of black people’s concerns despite ideological restrictions. The scope of her polemic, ranging from the recognition of black Marxist and communist women activists, to correctives to the race hierarchies of feminism and the cultural contributions of black artists, to addressing female sexuality, abortion rights, the commodification of black popular culture, and reductive imaging of resistance struggles, reveal Davis’s substantial role in expanding ‘‘social thought and political theory’’ ( James 21).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Angela Y. Davis Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture and Empire. Open Media, 2005. ‘‘Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia.’’ Critical Inquiry 21.1 (Autumn 1994): 37–39, 41– 43, 45. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1974. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, edited by Joy James. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories, 2003. ‘‘Black Women and the Academy.’’ In The Black Studies Reader, edited by Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel, 91–99. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘‘Ma’’ Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. New York: Partheon Books, 1998. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. London: Orbach and Chambers, 1971. ‘‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.’’ Black Scholar 3.4 (December 1971). Women, Culture and Politics. New York: Random House, 1984. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 1981.

Studies of Angela Y. Davis’s Works The Angela Davis Case: The Legal Background. London: United States Information Source, 1972. Aptheker, Bettina. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. New York: International Publishers, 1975. Burns, Alex. Disinformation, http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id91/pg1/disinforma tion. March 4, 2001 (accessed February 15, 2005). Rhodes, Jane. ‘‘Black Radicalism in 1960s California: Women in the Black Panther Party.’’ In African American Women Confront the West 1600–2000, edited by Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, 346–62. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.

148

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Richards, Phillip M. ‘‘Brickbats in the Cause of Equality.’’ Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 22 (Winter 1998–1999): 132–34. Schiller, Naomi. ‘‘A Short History of Black Feminist Scholars.’’ Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 29 (Autumn 2000): 119–25. Shields, Portia H. ‘‘Review.’’ Journal of Negro History 51.3 (Summer 1982): 359–61.

Deirdre Osborne

LUCY DELANEY (1830–1890)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Autobiographer Lucy Delaney was born Lucy Ann Berry in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of slaves. Following the death of her first owner in a duel, her father was sold south, and her mother, Polly Berry, planned an escape for the remaining family. After Lucy’s older sister Nancy reached Canada, Polly attempted an escape of her own; though she reached Chicago, she returned for fear of reprisals against her daughter. Polly later successfully sued for her freedom by proving that she had been born free, but kidnapped in her childhood by slave-catchers. In 1842, Lucy showed herself to be increasingly defiant as well as unskilled at housework, and owner D. D. Mitchell threatened to sell her down the river. She fled to her mother, who filed suit in court for Lucy’s freedom on the grounds that the child of a freeborn could not be legally enslaved. After Lucy spent seventeen months in jail awaiting the outcome, the suit succeeded, freeing her at the age of fourteen. Lucy married Frederick Turner in 1845 while visiting Nancy in Toronto, and the couple moved to Quincy, Illinois. However, Turner died soon after in the explosion of a steamboat boiler. Ironically, the boat was named for the lawyer who had won Lucy’s freedom, future U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates. In 1849, Lucy married Zachariah Delaney and remained happily married to him for at least forty-two years. They had four children, none of whom lived to twenty-five. In her later years, Delaney was elected president of the Female Union, the first organization exclusively for African American women, and of the Daughters of Zion. MAJOR WORKS Lucy Delaney is chiefly remembered for her 1891 slave narrative, From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom. Delaney’s mother is overwhelmingly the dominant character, and the text takes its shape as much from her life story as from Delaney’s. Delaney’s father, by contrast, is scarcely described and never named. Delaney opens with her mother’s kidnapping and enslavement, and then discusses her own, initially happy childhood as a slave. However, with the death of her first owner and the selling of her father, Lucy’s family rebels against their increasingly strict masters. First Lucy’s mother, then Lucy herself, defies her owners at risk of being sold down the river. Roughly a third of the narrative is devoted to the trial, which releases Lucy from slavery, then movingly reunites her with her mother as a free woman. Like many postbellum slave narratives, Delaney’s work does not focus so much on the horrors of slavery, but rather on the strength and potential of African American people. Delaney’s mother continuously teaches her courage in the face of adversity. Upon the death of Delaney’s first husband, for example, her mother offers her no consolation but ‘‘cast your burden on [the] Lord,’’ arguing that he is better off in Heaven

150

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

than he would be in slavery like Delaney’s father. When Delaney’s four children die before adulthood, she remembers the same consolation despite her bitterness: they ‘‘were born free and died free!’’ By recounting her public accomplishments at the end of the narrative, Delaney shows that she has lived up to her mother’s vision of being an active participant in American democracy. In closing, she presents her narrative as an answer to the question, ‘‘Can the negro race succeed, proportionately, as well as the whites, if given the same chance and an equal start?’’ In light of her own accomplishments in the face of adversity, her answer is clearly ‘‘Yes.’’ CRITICAL RECEPTION Criticism on From the Darkness Cometh the Light remains scarce, as the work was only reissued in 1988. In William L. Andrews’s introduction to the edition, he discusses how Delaney’s narrative, like those of Mattie Jackson and Annie Burton, celebrates the ‘‘herculean efforts of slave mothers to keep their families together,’’ as well as how these mothers pass on ‘‘an empowering sense of self-respect.’’ P. Gabrielle Foreman describes the text as an attempt to recover ‘‘black female motive will and active desire,’’ and also suggests that the proto-feminist teacher ‘‘Lucille Delaney’’ in Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 Iola Leroy is based, in part, on the narrative of the real-life Delaney. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Lucy Delaney From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom. Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Studies of Lucy Delaney’s Work Andrews, William L., ed. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Barrett, Lindon. ‘‘Self-Knowledge, Law, and African-American Autobiography: Lucy A. Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light.’’ In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, 104–24. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. ‘‘ ‘Reading Aright’: White Slavery, Black Referents, and the Strategy of Histotextuality in Iola Leroy.’’ Yale Journal of Criticism 10.2 (1997): 327–55. ———. ‘‘Who’s Your Mama?: ‘White’ Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom.’’ American Literary History 14.3 (2002): 505–39.

Dave Yost

TOI(NETTE) MARIE DERRICOTTE (1941– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet Toi Derricotte was born on April 12, 1941, in Detroit, Michigan, the only child of Benjamin Sweeney Webster and Antonia Baquet Webster. Although she, her parents, and her paternal grandmother could pass for white, Derricotte was reared in a black community and has always considered herself African American. As she explains in her memoir, The Black Notebooks, blackness is less a skin color than ‘‘an attribute out of the body, slightly, like a halo’’ (182). Despite her own light complexion, an early childhood in an upscale Detroit suburb, and a private Catholic education, Derricotte quickly perceived that being white brought privileges to which she was not titled as a black person. ‘‘All my life,’’she writes, ‘‘I have passed invisibly into the white world, and all my life I have felt that sudden and alarming moment of consciousness when I remember I am black’’ (Black Notebooks 25). Derricotte’s early bonds were with women: her mother, her grandmother, and a favorite aunt who worked in a print shop and brought her the scraps on which she first experienced ‘‘the realness of marks on paper’’ (Derricotte, ‘‘Interview’’). Her father was an overbearing perfectionist and physically abusive alcoholic whom Derricotte has compared to the character in Sylvia Plath’s ‘‘Daddy’’; her ironfisted grandfather owned a funeral home where she spent many unsupervised hours ‘‘thinking about death’’ (Derricotte, ‘‘Interview’’). Derricotte began writing poetry as a child, motivated by Billie Holiday’s singing, her own mother’s made-up songs, the ritual and music of the Catholic mass, and a need to express repressed feelings of fear, depression, and anger. In her early teens, she shared her writing with an older cousin, who called her poems ‘‘morbid.’’ In high school and college, several Catholic nuns encouraged her poetic endeavors. Later, in graduate school, she was mentored by Pulitzer Prize–winner Galway Kinnell, whom she refers to as ‘‘the teacher I loved and respected the most’’ (Derricotte, ‘‘Interview’’). In 1961, Derricotte gave birth to her only child, Anthony, in a home for unwed mothers. A subsequent marriage to the father lasted only two years. In 1965, she completed her B.A. in special education from Wayne State University and began her career as a teacher. Her marriage in 1967 to a ‘‘recognizably black’’ bank executive, Bruce Derricotte, ended amicably after thirty years. From 1974 to 1988, Derricotte served as New Jersey poet-in-residence, published two books of poetry (1978, 1983), and completed her M.A. in English literature and creative writing at New York University (1984). Since then she has continued to publish award-winning prose and poetry and has filled academic posts at Old Dominion University (1988–1990), George Mason University (1990–1991), New York University (1992), Mills College (1998–1999), and Xavier University (the Delta Sigma Theta Endowed Chair, 1999–2000). Derricotte is currently a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the board of directors of Cave Canem, a highly successful

152

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

organization she cofounded in 1996 to establish a nurturing writers’ community for emerging and established African American poets. MAJOR WORKS In both her poetry and prose, Derricotte probes the vulnerability of a self shaped by family betrayal as well as larger social forces. Always in search of ‘‘the truth, however painful’’ (Black Notebooks 141), Derricotte translates her deeply personal conflicts as an African American woman into narratives about the human experience. Repeatedly woven into her interrogations of race, victimization, survival, motherhood, and sex is the trope of a lost or broken self, seeking truth through language. Derricotte’s major publications include four poetry collections and a literary memoir. The Empress of Death House (1978) frankly examines female sexuality, motherhood, and, ultimately, the nature of love. In the iconoclastic Natural Birth (1983; 2000), Derricotte revises the shame (in 1961) of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy into a paean to motherhood. The poet refers to her third volume, Captivity (1989), as ‘‘a lot of scary poems’’ exploring the psychological bondage of race, class, and family. In Tender (1997), Derricotte imposes a nonlinear but tightly controlled form on familiar subjects. Reviewing Tender for the Library Journal, Ellen Kaufman writes, ‘‘these poems probe being at its root—sexually, spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually—and recount how violence—both physical and mental—ravages the self ’’ (104). The most prominent emotions in Derricotte’s early poems are fear, loneliness, and anger. In ‘‘Poem for My Father,’’ a daughter remembers her father’s mind as ‘‘Blacker than burned-out fire. / Blacker than poison’’ (2–3). More recently, Derricotte has experienced a major shift from negative emotions to the positive force of love. ‘‘Something in me has flipped,’’ she says (‘‘Interview’’), and the opening lines of ‘‘my dad and sardines’’ (2004) seem to confirm a significant change in her perspective: ‘‘my dad’s going to give me a self / back. / I’ve made an altar called / ‘‘the altar for healing the father & child’’ (1–4). The Black Notebooks, Derricotte’s only published prose book to date, is the product of twenty-five years of journal writing, in which Derricotte tries to ‘‘unforget’’ fifty years of excruciating experiences that imposed a self so shameful she nearly committed suicide. Although other personal and social issues surface, it is Derricotte’s struggle to locate her true self within her racial identity that predominates. According to Derricotte, who considers herself primarily a poet, the driving forces behind her writing are an insistence on clarity—‘‘not only clarity in form and language, but clarity in embodying our human nature, our ‘truth’—and on the integral connection between beauty, function, and drama’’ (Black Notebooks 19). For her, ‘‘revision is what makes a poem a poem’’; and what makes a poem a great poem is ‘‘the [perfect] tension between subject and form’’ (Derricotte, ‘‘Interview’’). CRITICAL RECEPTION Derricotte’s international literary success is reflected in her numerous prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim (2004), the first Dudley Randall Award for National Contributions to Literature (2001), the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from United Black Artists (1993), two NEA fellowships (1985, 1990), the Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Book Award (1990), the Pushcart Prize (1989, 1998), and the Lucille

TOI(NETTE) MARIE DERRICOTTE

153

Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America (1985). In 2004, she was inducted into the African American Writers Hall of Fame at Chicago State University. Her biographical profile appears in African American Autobiographers (Greenwood), Contemporary Authors (Gale), Twentieth-Century African American Poetry (ChadwyckHealey), and Who’s Who among African Americans (Gale). Poet Sharon Olds has called Derricotte ‘‘one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American poetry today.’’ Derricotte’s literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (1997), was nominated for the Pen Martha Albrand Award and received both the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Nonfiction. It was also named a 1998 Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. A French edition was published in 2000. Her fourth volume of poetry, Tender, received the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize. Derricotte has been guest poet and reader at over a thousand universities and theaters. More than a thousand of her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines, and she is included on numerous professional Web sites. Her writing, anthologized as early as 1982, appears with increasing frequency in literary collections.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Toi(nette) Marie Derricotte ‘‘Aunt Carrie.’’ In Memory of Kin: Stories about Family by Black Writers, edited by Mary Helen Washington. New York: Doubleday, 1991. ‘‘Black Catholics: Cultural Exiles, Literary Exiles.’’ In Daily Fare: Essays from the Multicultural Experience, edited by Kathleen Aguero. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey. New York: Norton, 1997. Reprint, 1999. Captivity. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. Reprints, 1991, 1993, 1995. ‘‘Emergence.’’ In The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, edited by Patricia Dienstfrey and Brenda Hillman. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. The Empress of the Death House. Detroit: Lotus, 1978. ‘‘My Mother.’’ In Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters, edited by Patricia Bell-Scott. Boston: Beacon, 1991. Natural Birth. Crossing Press Feminist Series. Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1983. Repub. with expanded introduction, Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Press, 2000. Noire, la coleur de ma peau blanche. Translated by Phillippe Moreau. Kiron Editions du F, 2000. ‘‘A Sistah Outsider.’’ In Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women. New York: Norton, 1994. Tender. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

Studies of Toi(nette) Marie Derricotte’s Works Bennett, Juda. ‘‘Black by Popular Demand: Contemporary Autobiography and the Passing Theme.’’ A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 17 (2002): 262–75. DeMott, Benjamin. ‘‘Passing: A Black Poet and Teacher Chronicles Life in a White World.’’ New York Times (November 2, 1997). Hodges, John, ed. ‘‘Seers.’’ Videocassette 3 of Furious Flowers: Conversations with African American Poets. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1998. Kaufman, Ellen. Rev. of Tender. Library Journal 123 (1998): 104. Lee, Don. ‘‘Toi Derricotte: Contributor Spotlight.’’ Ploughshares 69 (1996): 208–11.

154

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Melnick, Patrice. ‘‘Interview with Toi Derricotte: Saturday, November 6, 1999.’’ Xavier Review 20 (2000): 12–20. Rowell, Charles H. ‘‘Beyond Our Lives: An Interview with Toi Derricotte.’’ Callaloo 14 (1991): 654–64. Samuels, Ellen. ‘‘My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.’’ GLQ 9 (2003): 233–55. Shanley, Katherine. ‘‘Distinct Traditions: Myths and Voices of the Many Americas.’’ PSA News: Newsletter of the Poetry Society of America 44–45 (1994): 18–23.

Karen S. Sloan

ALEXIS DE VEAUX (1948– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Alexis De Veaux, a playwright, poet, children’s author, journalist, activist, illustrator, artist, biographer, and educator, was born in New York City on September 24, 1948. She and her eight siblings were raised by her mother, Mae De Veaux who was supported by state aid. Her father, Richard Hill, was incarcerated for most of her childhood and died in 1975. Ruby Moore Hill, Alexis’s paternal grandmother, and James De Veaux, Sr., her maternal grandfather, assisted in the raising of De Veaux and her siblings. Together they formed a strong extended family for survival. When Alexis was fifteen her mother moved the family from Harlem to the South Bronx. De Veaux received a B.A. from State University of New York Empire State College in 1976. She earned both her M.A. (1989) and her doctoral degree (1992) in American Studies, specializing in Women’s Studies, at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Early in her career, De Veaux became involved in community-based work. She was an instructor of English for the WIN Program of the New York Urban League and a creative-writing instructor for the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in New York City. In 1972, she was a community worker for the Bronx Office of Probation and a reading and creative-writing instructor for New York City’s Project Create. In 1975, DeVeaux served as the cultural coordinator of Black Expo for the Black Coalition of Greater New Haven, Connecticut. The same year, she cofounded the Coeur de l’Unicorne Gallery and with actress Gwendolyn Hardwick formed the Flamboyant Ladies Theatre Company (1977–1984). De Veaux also created the Gap Tooth Girlfriends Writing Workshop (1980–1984), which produced two volumes of original poetry and fiction. After graduating from college, De Veaux taught at several colleges. She has held positions at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, Vermont College of Montpelier University in Vermont, the Owen Dutson Visiting Scholar in the Department of English and Theater at Wabash College in Crawfordville, Indiana, and later visiting assistant professor in Women’s Studies in the Department of American Studies at State University of New York at Buffalo where she currently is associate professor and chair of the Women’s Studies Department. From 1978 to 1990, De Veaux was a contributing editor and editor-at-large at Essence magazine and she continues to write for it regularly. As an activist, in her political essays published in Essence she reveals her support for the political and social liberation of black and third-world women. In ‘‘Zimbabwe: Women Fire’’ she chronicles the contributions of Zimbabwean women in the struggle for independence and the role they played in the establishment of Mugabe as president, but was outraged when, after the war, those women were alienated from the society they had helped to liberate. In her article ‘‘Blood Ties,’’ she attacks with a vengeance the government of Haiti and Papa Doc and son, Baby Doc Duvalier, over the extreme poverty that plagued the tiny island of Haiti. De Veaux pleads with black Americans to develop an active consciousness

156

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

toward the plight of the oppressed Haitians. Her interest in issues confronting black women appears not only in her political journalism and essays but in her fiction as well. MAJOR WORKS Love, self-identity, oppression, and the concept of sisterhood are the main focus of De Veaux’s work. Her writing style is unconventional. Her experiment with language is daring and original. She writes using slang, no capital letters, unexpected syntactical strategies, and unusual typography as well as prose that contracts into poetry and again expands into prose to communicate with her readers. The setting for De Veaux’s works is Harlem. Two of her short stories, ‘‘The Riddle of Egypt Brownstone’’ and ‘‘Remember Him a Outlaw,’’ have as their main character poor working-class black girls growing up in a harsh urban environment in Harlem. They are the narrators of the stories. They live in public housing enclosed by artificial parks and graffiti covered walls. They are preyed on by men. Both narrators experience a dual reality in their lives. Both Egypt of ‘‘The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone’’ and Lexie in ‘‘Remember Him a Outlaw’’ are collegebound women who have escaped the ghetto world they are talking about and at the same time still very much affected by that world. They are both insiders and outsiders. Egypt lives with her mother and she sees her father annually on her birthday when he buys her a present. Her story is dominated by two sexual encounters. The first involves her and insists on sexual favors in return for keeping the theft a secret. The second sexual encounter occurs in college when she accepts her French teacher, Madame duFer from Martinique, proposition to enter a lesbian affair and provides her luxurious apartment as a quiet place to study and live. Lexie of ‘‘Remember Him a Outlaw’’ has an $8,000 scholarship to college in up state New York. Her Uncle Willie is a survivor on the streets and very proud of Lexie. He is killed while delivering drugs for her father. She asks to remember him in both the first and the last sentence of the story. In both stories, neither Egypt nor Lexie has separated or dismissed their history. De Veaux personifies objects in both stories, describing cars and buildings as hung over, windows that give voice to lovers’desires, the rap of the ball against the pavement and the hospital wall, coins that run on the side walk when dropped, and coins that have freedom that is taken away when Uncle Willie squashes them under his boots. These suggest that all characters in both works are incapable of change except for Egypt and Lexie. In her other short story, ‘‘The Adventures of the Dread Sisters,’’ the setting is on a bridge between Brooklyn and uptown New York. The characters are stalled in a traffic jam on their way to a political rally. The bridge symbolizes her characters’ movements from stasis to action. The central character is not only the fifteen-year-old narrator but also a collective character of both the narrator and Nigeria. Nigeria, an artist and political activist, has rejected the conventional role of wife and mother, but adopted the fifteenyear-old narrator and her sister, Toni. Together they have created a family. Toni has a Hollywood name; she likes boys, likes straightened hair, and sleeps in late on Saturdays. The narrator and Nigeria have African names, Rastafarian hairstyles, chosen political work, and the love of women. They therefore declare themselves the dread sisters. The narrator and Nigeria’s choices suggest opposition to the dominant society. De Veaux uses a different narrative strategy. She tells her story through a collective protagonist; her plot displaces the accepted gender roles, and she verbalizes alternatives to the dominant institution’s concept of the traditional nuclear family. In Spirit in the Streets, a poetic

ALEXIS DE VEAUX

157

prose narrative, De Veaux captures the black experience in Harlem. This work portrays episodes in the lives of various poor people who endure multiple forms of exploitation. The author also recounts some historical events such as the Attica Prison rebellion. De Veaux’s illustrations, mixture of text and typography, is highly effective in this work. In the play The Tapestry, first performed in 1975 and broadcast on public television in 1976, De Veaux has reimaged the black female self in contrast to those of the dominant society. In protest against the practiced standards of imaging the black woman in literature as either a white man’s concubine, a prostitute, a domineering mammy who ruled the roost, the over-sexed, empty-headed floozy, or the tragic mulatto without a voice or self-identity, De Veaux has created a woman who is independent, makes her own decisions, and prepares herself for the future professionally. Jet, the heroine and law student studying for her exams, goes through the painful process of declaring her autonomy and defines herself on her terms. She rejects her lover Axis’s definition of her in relationship to his sexual needs. She also refuses to let her mother define her by not accepting her demand to leave school to help care for her siblings and to eventually become a wife and mother. Both choices are limited aims according to Jet. She resolves the conflict of duty to others and her fulfillment to self by moving away from that world of sexual double standards which stifles individuality and pursues a career as a lawyer. ‘‘Each generation must go beyond the previous generation’s aspirations,’’ she says to Lavender, her best friend who has an affair with Axis. Jet’s determination to proceed with her plans of a career as a lawyer to be able to leave her mark in the world in spite of the opposition she faced from her parents and Axis is her female stance (Paul 55). She plans to promote black equality after graduation. Jet refers to this intent as delivering to society a new set of rules (Splawn 519). Her wrestling with her conflict via her nightmares is cleverly portrayed in the scene with the chorus composed of Reverend Paradise, the parish priest, Jet’s parents, and the rest of the parish congregation. No is a collage of poems, music, and motion. Women in lesbian relationships are discovering themselves and expanding their avenues of self-expression. An Enchanted Hair Tale and Na-Ni are two juvenile books written by De Veaux. Na-Ni, also illustrated by De Veaux, is a child’s eye view of evil forces in the African American community. On the day welfare checks are delivered, Na Ni a nine-year-old girl sits on the stoop on 133rd street in Harlem waiting for the mailman. She is planning all the things she can do with a new bike, which do not ride but flies, her mother has promised to buy. A thief steals the check from the mailbox and Na Ni’s dream is thwarted. In her pain and disappointment, she poetically tells the thief that it is her he steals from, a child that, like him, is black. The illustrations are like wire sculptures that along with the poetics of the text in black English convey the feelings of loss and disappointment. In Enchanted Hair Tale a little boy named Sudan is ridiculed and ostracized by his friends for his strange hairstyle. He is unhappy until he accepts his difference and appreciates his hairstyle with a little intervention from an adult. This is an example of the author using the English language to take something considered derogatory and transforming it into something powerful, acceptable, and positive. Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday is a prose poem written for young adults who recounts the life of the jazz singer. Billie is always striving to improve her art of singing in spite of all her difficulties and hardships doing her troubled life. De Veaux’s latest work, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, is a story of survival and loss of an American literary icon. Lorde created a mystic identity for herself and De Veaux demystifies her iconic status. The book reveals that Lorde was an angry

158

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

woman who battled depression, racism, sexism, and later cancer. She is also a woman of contradictions. She loved white women and she hated them. She disliked white people, but dated a Jewish man before coming out as a lesbian and for seven years was married to a white gay man who fathered her two children. She chose a white female partner for seventeen years and later an African American partner in St. Croix whom she spent the last six years of her life with as she battled cancer. As a writer, Lorde was remarkable. She became the first African American and first woman to be designated the New York State Poet. CRITICAL RECEPTION In spite of a prolific career as a fiction writer, poet dramatist, and literary critic, and an international published author in Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, and Serbo-Croatian languages, Alexis De Veaux’s works have received little critical attention outside the gay and lesbian and black presses. The performance of No at the Henry Street Settlement Theater in 1981 ignited a series of competitive reviews. In the Amsterdam News, reviewer Salaam overlooked the dramatic quality of the play and attacked DeVeaux political position (36). However, Rhea Mandulo of the same paper urged the public to see the work. She found the play’s worth in its ability to deal poetically, dramatically, and soul searchingly with a very personal point of view (27). On the other hand, the most appreciative comments on No come from Mel Gussow of the New York Times. He states that No has the potential to be the successor to Shange’s outstanding production of For Colored Girls performed at the same theater (14). Warrior Poet reads like a suspense novel according to Martha Miller. De Veaux ‘‘draws on personal journals, private archives of Lorde’s estate, and interview members of Lorde’s family and friends, but does not analyze the material. She provides us with mundane events and leaves critical gaps. Although Lorde’s teaching is documented nothing is provided about the students she taught or her life at the university where she worked’’ (42). Ann Burns in Library Journal praised De Veaux’s treatment of Lorde. ‘‘She left no stone unturned’’ in delicately handling the life of someone like Lorde who has family and good friends left behind (77). Her Children’s book Na-Ni and The Enchanted Hair Tale were honorable mention on the Coretta Scott King Book Awards List. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Alexis De Veaux ‘‘Adventures of the Dread Sisters.’’ In Jo’s Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit, and Real Life, edited by Christine McEwen, 53–58. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ‘‘Alice Walker: Rebel with a Cause.’’ Essence (September 1989): 56–58. ‘‘Blood Ties.’’ Essence 13 ( January 1983): 62–64, 121. Blue Heat, Poems. Brooklyn, NY: Diva Publishing, 1985. ‘‘Bold Type: Renaissance Woman.’’ Ms 5 (May/June 1995): 73. Circles. New York: Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, March 1973; and Westchester Community College Drama Festival, New York, May 1973. ‘‘Creating Soul Food: June Jordan.’’ Essence 11(April 1981): 82, 138–50.

ALEXIS DE VEAUX

159

‘‘Dear Aunt Nanadine.’’ In Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, edited by Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney, 79–88. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. ‘‘Do Be Bo Wow!’’ Essence (October 1985): 54–65. Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. An Enchanted Hair Tale. New York: Harper & Row, 1987; paperback reissue, 1991. ‘‘Ethical Vegetarian.’’ In Streetlights: Illuminated Tales of the Urban Black Experience, edited by Doris Jean Austin and Martin Simmons, 83–92. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. ‘‘Forty Fine: A Writer Reflects on Turning Forty.’’ Essence (September 1990): 57. ‘‘Going South: Black Women and the Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement.’’ Essence (May 1985): 1. Li Chen/Second Daughter First Son. New York: Ba Tone Press, 1975. Na-Ni. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. ‘‘New Body, New Life: Dealing with Black Women’s Health Issues.’’ Essence ( June 1988): 57–58. ‘‘Nina’s Back!’’ Essence (October 1985): 72–73. No. New York City, New Federal Theater, 1981. ‘‘Out: Lighting the Path; Brave Lesbian Writers of an Earlier Era Made a Way Out of No Way for the Others Who Would Follow.’’ Black Issues Book Review ( January/February 2005): 48–49. ‘‘Remember Him a Outlaw.’’ In Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor, 152–62. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. ‘‘Renegade Spirit: Standing up for Gay and Liberation in the Reagan Era.’’ Village Voice ( June 1984): 8. A Season to Unravel, New York, St.May’s Playhouse, January 25, 1979. ‘‘Sister Love.’’ Essence 14 (October 1983): 83–84, 150, 155. Spirits in the Street. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Tapestry. New York City, Harlem Performance Center, May 1976; and KCET-TV (PBS-New York), 1976. The Tapestry. Nine Plays by Black Women Playwrights, edited by Margaret Wilkerson, 135–95. New York: New American Library, 1986. ‘‘The Third Degree: Black Women Scholars Storming the Ivory Tower.’’ Essence (April 1995): 68–70. ‘‘Walking into Freedom with Nelson and Winnie Mandela.’’ Essence ( June 1990): 47, 48–53. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. ‘‘Zimbabwe: Woman Fire.’’ Essence 12 ( July 1981): 72–73, 111–12.

Studies of Alexis De Veaux’s Works Barrios, Olga. ‘‘From Seeking One’s Voice to Uttering the Scream: The Pioneering Journey of African American Women Playwrights Through the 1960’s and 1970’s.’’ African American Review 37.4 (2003): 611–28. Burns, Ann. Rev. of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. Library Journal (March 1, 2004): 77. Enekwechi, Adaeze, and Opal Moore. ‘‘Children’s Literature and the Politics of Hair in Books for African American Children.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 24.4 (Winter 1999–2000): 195–200. Gomez, Jewelle L. ‘‘Alexis De Veaux, 1948– .’’ In Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Sandra Pollack and Denise D. Knight, 174–80. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Gussow, Mel. ‘‘No.’’ New York Times, June 6, 1981, 14:1. Kraft, Marion. ‘‘Alexis De Veaus: The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone.’’ In The African American Short Story 1970–1990, edited by Wolfgang Karrer and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, 75–88. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher, 1993. Mandulo, Rhea. Rev. of No. Amsterdam News, June 20, 1981, 27.

160

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Miller, Martha. ‘‘A Poet Who Saw Unity in Oppression.’’ Rev. of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (May/June 2004): 41–42. Paul, Lourdes. ‘‘Alexis De Veaux’s The Tapestry: a Female Stance.’’ In Literature and Politics in Twentieth Century America, edited by J. L. Plakkoottam and Prashant K. Sinha, 50–56. Hyderabad: American Studies Research Center, 1993. Ramsey, Priscilla R. ‘‘Alexis De Veaux.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, v38. Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatist and Prose Writers, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 92–97. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985. Salaam, Yusef A. Rev. of No. Amsterdam News, May 16, 1981, 36. Splawn, P. Jane. ‘‘Re-Imaging the Black Woman’s Body in Alex De Veaux’s The Tapestry.’’ Modern Drama 40.4 (Winter 1997): 514–26. Washington, Mary Helen. Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds: Stories by and about Black Women. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.

Bennie P. Robinson

EDWINA STREETER DIXON (1907–2002)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Currently, the life and work of Edwina Streeter Dixon, a short story writer, remain largely unexamined. Census records of 1920 indicate that Edwina Streeter was born in Chicago in 1907 and that she was according to the census notes, ‘‘mulatto.’’ Her father (whose name on the records is illegible) was born in Tennessee. Her mother, Abigail, was born in Ohio. According to the records, Dixon had two sisters—Gloria and Georgia—and one brother, whose name is also illegible. The 1930 census indicates that Streeter had by then married Albert Dixon and had had a daughter, Joyce. MAJOR WORK Dixon published ‘‘Pa Sees Again’’ in the Afro American. Because of limited access to microfilm, it is not known when she published this story in the Afro American. ‘‘Pa Sees Again’’ was republished in Ford and Fagget’s famous anthology Best Short Stories By Afro-American Writers (1925–1950). ‘‘Pa Sees Again’’ is the story of a married couple—the Stones—who, now in their sixties, confront a new conflict late in their lives. Sam, the husband, has gone blind. When the story opens, he has been blind for six months. His spouse—the nameless narrator—has suggested that he move to and attend a school for the blind. She has researched the school and believes it will help Sam cope with his blindness and help him discover new possibilities. Blindness has rendered Sam a broken, defeated man, and he is at first reluctant to leave his home and his spouse for the school. Eventually, however, he agrees with her. The next morning on the bus, as they make their way to the school, two more characters enter the story: a blind boy and his mother. They play a central role in the ensuing climax, Sam’s epiphany, and the denouement. ‘‘Pa Sees Again’’ is a compelling short story informed by a rich metaphor: blinding insight. CRITICAL RECEPTION Dixon has yet to receive critical attention. She is mentioned in one bibliography and only briefly—as someone who published a story in the Afro American—in a larger article about African American women short story writers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Edwina Streeter Dixon ‘‘Pa Sees Again.’’ In Best Short Stories by Afro-American Writers, 1925–1950, edited by Nick Aaron Ford and H. L. Faggett. Boston: Meador Pub. Co., 1969.

162

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Studies of Edwina Streeter Dixon’s Work Mullen, Bill. ‘‘ ‘Revolutionary Tale’: In Search of African American Women’s Short Story Writing.’’ In American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Julie Brown, 191–207. New York: Garland Pub., Inc., 1995. Potter, Vilma Raskin. A Reference Guide to Afro-American Publications and Editors 1827–1946. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993.

Kevin L. Cole and Katherine Madison

RITA DOVE (1952– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Rita Dove is the author of eight books of poetry, a book of short stories, a novel, and a verse drama. Her first two poetry books, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) and Museum (1983), received critical acclaim. Her third poetry collection Thomas and Beulah (1986) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, the second Pulitzer Prize for poetry awarded to an African American, after Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1993 Dove was the youngest poet to be named the United States poet laureate and the first African American. She held this post for two years from 1993 to 1995. Born on August 28, 1952, to a middle-class family in Akron, Ohio, Dove is the oldest daughter and second of four children of Ray A. Dove, the first black chemist at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and Elvira Elizabeth Hord, a housekeeper and housewife. In a family that encouraged education, Dove read many books as a child, studied music, and wrote. One of Dove’s favorite childhood memories includes writing a chapter a week on a novel she called ‘‘Chaos’’ which used her school spelling words chronologically from a list. Dove graduated high school in 1970 among the top 100 high school seniors nationally of that year. She visited the White House as a President Scholar, though President Nixon refused to shake hands with students that year because they protested the Vietnam War. At Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Dove considered studying pre-law or German, changed her major four times and finally stayed with English. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, and as a National Achievement Scholar with a B.A. in 1973. After graduation, she worked as a secretary at a construction firm. In 1974–1975, she attended the University of Tu¨bingen in West Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship studying modern European literature. She completed an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1977. Upon graduation, she was offered a tenure-track assistant professor position at Florida State University, but turned it down. Instead she followed fellow University of Iowa student, German novelist Fred Viebahn, to Oberlin College in Ohio where he taught German literature and directed plays. She took classes, sewed, wrote, and completed her first book of poetry The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). They married in 1979 and both began freelance writing in Berlin and Israel. In 1981 Dove taught at Arizona State University. In 1982 she became a writer-inresidence at Tuskegee Institute. Dove’s daughter, Aviva Chantal Tamu Dove Viebahn, was born in 1983. In 1987–1988, Dove was approved for sabbatical and with her family visited the Yugoslavian islands, Mexico City, and Berlin. In 1988 she had residency at Bellagio, Italy, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Also as a Mellon Fellow, she spent time at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Due to allergies and a longing for dramatic seasonal changes, Dove and her family moved to Virginia. In 1989 she began teaching at the University of Virginia. In 1993 the University of Virginia

164

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

appointed her to an endowed chair as Commonwealth Professor of English. Dove currently lives near Charlottesville, Virginia. She writes in a cabin in her backyard using two types of desks because she prefers to move around while she works. One desk is a standard sit-down desk. The other, built by her father, is a desk one utilizes while standing up (Alexander 13). In her spare time she sings, practices the viola da gamba, and ballroom dances with her husband. During her career, Dove has received numerous honors such as a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983), the Lavan Young Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets (1986), the General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers (1987), the Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah (1987), the Charles Frankel/National Humanities Medal (1991), the Ohioana Award for Grace Notes (1991), the Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa poetry award (1991), the Literary Lion citation from the New York Public Libraries (1991), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Great American Artist Award (1993), a Woman of the Year Award from Glamour Magazine (1993), named Poet Laureate (1993), the Distinguished Achievement medal from Miami University (1994), the Renaissance Forum Award for Leadership in the Literary Arts from the Folger Shakespeare Library (1994), the Carl Samberg Award from the International Platform Association (1994), the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (1996), the Charles Frankel Prize National Humanities Medal (1996), the Sara Lee Frontrunner Award (1997), the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award (1997), the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine (1998), a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On the Bus with Rosa Parks (2000), and the Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award (2001). She received with her husband the John Frederick Nims Translation Award from Poetry (1999). The governor of Mark Warner appointed Dove as the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2004). With Queen Noor of Jordan, Anderson Cooper, Mike Nichols, and John Glen, Dove was awarded the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service (2006). She has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Miami University (1988), Knox College (1989), Tuskegee Institute (1994), University of Miami (1994), Washington University in St. Louis (1994), Case Western Reserve University (1994), University of Akron (1994), Arizona State University (1995), Boston College (1995), Dartmouth College (1995), Spelman College (1996), University of Pennsylvania (1996), Norte Dame (1997), Northeastern University (1997), University of North Carolina (1997), and State University of New York at Brockport (2000). Dove has served in many literary and service capacities to promote the arts. For example, she worked with the National Endowment for the Arts and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. In 1987 she was the president of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP). In 1991 she served as judge for several poetry competitions including the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Award Poetry. She was reappointed as the Special Consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress for 1999–2000. She also holds editorial positions with Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, and TriQuarterly. MAJOR WORKS Rita Dove has written on numerous subjects and incorporated many themes. As she explains in an interview, ‘‘To me the scariest and the most essential thing about writing poetry is that there are a thousand ways to do it. And there are a thousand paths to

RITA DOVE

165

explore, each leading in a different direction’’ (Alexander 7). Her works have explored such directions as history, memory, myth, music, art, dance, autobiography, biography, and African American experience. Dove includes historical figures, religious individuals, archaeology relics, artists, musicians, and literary characters in her works. Perhaps more importantly, she incorporates individuals into her works who have been ignored by history due to their race, gender, or class. Thus, her works encompass reflections on the Great Migration, the Black Arts Movement, and the civil rights movement as well as what it was like growing up African American, female, and middle class in Akron, Ohio. Five-sectioned The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) focuses on themes of romance, travel, and slavery. For example, ‘‘David Walker (1785–1830)’’ discusses an abolitionist’s death due to his activism. Some poems in this collection focus on famous individuals like a ‘‘black arts’’ movement writer and a musician, ‘‘Upon Meeting Don D. Lee in a Dream’’ and ‘‘Robert Schumann, Or: Musical Genius Begins with Affliction,’’ respectively. Dove explains in an interview that the poem ‘‘Dusting’’ from this collection became the impetus for her next collection of poetry. Thomas and Beulah (1986) was written during Dove’s postpartum. In order to write and parent, Dove and her husband divided parenting in four-hour shifts. One parent would write during the first four-hour shift while the other would parent, then the family would come together for four hours, and finally the other parent would write for four hours while the first one watched their daughter. Thomas and Beulah is divided into two sections and is based on Dove’s maternal grandparents courtship and marriage while discussing the breakdown of public and private realms as well as the history of African Americans who moved from the South to the industrial Midwest. Dove’s grandparents migrated from Tennessee to Ohio in the 1920s to find employment. After Dove’s grandfather died when she was thirteen, Dove spent weekends listening to her grandmother reminisce. Many of those memories became the basis of this poetry collection. The twenty-three-poem Thomas section begins with the drowning of a best friend. The twenty-one-poem Beulah section covers themes of courtship, marriage, and widowhood. In this collection, Dove chronicles important events in Thomas and Beulah’s life such as family, employment, and death. Some poems are linked directly to U.S. history such as ‘‘The Event’’ and ‘‘The Zeppelin Factory.’’ Thomas and Beulah also utilizes details, symbols, and imagery to convey emotion and meaning. For example, the color yellow is used to connect both sections, a yellow scarf in the Thomas section and a yellow canary in the Beulah section. Grace Notes (1989) discusses Dove’s personal experience as a daughter and a mother of a daughter. Many poems are from a child’s perspective and experience, such as ‘‘Fifth Grade Autobiography’’ which captures a family moment while fishing. Both Grace Notes and her next collection of poetry, Mother Love (1995), discuss coming-ofage incidents and motherhood. Mother Love, complete with introduction on the ancient myth of Persephone and Demeter, focuses on maternal themes and images. In this work, Dove writes sonnets of the Shakespearean and Italian form from both Demeter’s and Persephone’s perspectives. Many of these works probe the bond between mother and daughter, such as ‘‘Persephone Abducted’’ and ‘‘Demeter Mourning.’’ On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), also the title of the last section, describes the atmosphere in Montgomery, Alabama, that led to Rosa Parks’s act. Several poems in this collection discuss innocence and discovery, often putting the poem’s revelation in the last few lines. ‘‘Claudette Colvin Goes to Work’’ tells the story of another woman who

166

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

refused to give up her seat on a bus. Other poems trace Rosa Parks’s life before and after her action, such as ‘‘Sit Back, Relax’’ and ‘‘In the Lobby of the Warner Theatre, Washington, D.C.’’ Dove’s newest collection of poetry is American Smooth (2004), which was listed on the New York Times’s 100 notable books for 2004. The title of the collection describes a particular type of ballroom dance. Divided into five sections, it interweaves literal and metaphorical ballroom dancing with history, emotion, and resistance. Many of the poem titles are dances themselves, like ‘‘Samba Summer,’’ ‘‘Bolero,’’ and ‘‘Fox Trot Fridays.’’ Other verses deal directly with twentieth-century African American experiences with dance. ‘‘The Castle Walk’’ expresses a 1915 black bandleader’s frustrations. ‘‘Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Lounge’’ tells of the Oscar-winning star’s observations in an all white club. CRITICAL RECEPTION Rita Dove’s work has begun to receive more critical attention. Within the scholarship, many themes are explored. Some works center on Dove herself and her search for imagination freedom (Rampersad). Others explore her representation of race (Baker), gender (Cook and Proitsaki), and class. The second most recent of three complete studies of Dove, Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism by Malin Perira, discusses Dove as part of the new black aesthetic poetics and examines her work in terms of the cultural mulatto, cosmopolitanism, and blackness. Writers have focused on other aspects within Dove’s work such as language and culture (Wallace), historical fragmentation and disclosure (Georgoudaki), enclosure (Wheeler), myth (McDowell), the public and private (Stein), forgotten historical events and individuals (Georgoudaki and Stein), and its universal appeal (Stein, Georgoudaki, Rampersad, Steinman, and Vendler). This is evident in the second comprehensive study of Dove, Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama by Therese Steffen. Focusing primarily on Dove’s works between the 1970s and 1990s like Thomas and Beulah (1986), Through the Ivory Gate (1992), and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), Steffen asserts that Dove moves beyond culture, race, geography, nationality, and genre because experiences described in Dove’s works are universal and cross-cultural. Other scholars have discussed the form of her works, for example, her cycle poems (Vender, Rampersad, and McDowell), her Shakespeare poems (Erickson), and her montage technique (McDowell and Costello). A third study of Rita Dove by Pat Righelato, Understanding Rita Dove, was released in 2006. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Rita Dove American Smooth. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. ‘‘A Black Rainbow: Modern Afro American Poetry.’’ With Marilyn Nelson Waniek. In Poetry after Modernism, edited by Robert McDowell, 217–75. Oregon: Story Line Press, 1991. The Darker Side of the Earth. Oregon: Story Line Press, 1994. ‘‘‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation.’ ’’ Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14.1 (1987): 49–76. Fifth Sunday. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1985.

RITA DOVE

167

Grace Notes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. Mandolin. Ohio: Ohio Review, 1982. Mother Love. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Museum. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1983. Oedipus Rex: A Black Tragedy. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1980. On the Bus with Rosa Parks. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. The Only Dark Spot in the Sky. Arizona: Porch Publications, 1980. The Other Side of the House. Photographs by Tamarra Kaida. Arizona: VARI Studios Pyracantha Press, 1988. The Poet’s World. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1995. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Seven for Luck. Wisconsin: Hal Leonard, 1998. The Siberian Village. Virginia: Alexander Street Press, 1991. ‘‘Telling It Like It I-S IS: Narrative Techniques in Melvin B. Tolson’s Harlem Gallery.’’ New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 8 (Autumn 1985): 109–17. Ten Poems. Iowa: Penumbra Press, 1977. Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon Press, 1986. Through the Ivory Gate. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. The Yellow House on the Corner. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1980.

Studies of Rita Dove’s Works Alexander, Elizabeth. ‘‘An Interview with Rita Dove.’’ Writer’s Chronicle 38.2 (October/ November 2005): 4–16. Baker, Houston A. ‘‘Rita Dove, Grace Notes.’’ Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990): 574–77. Booth, Alison. ‘‘Abduction and Other Severe Pleasures: Rita Dove’s Mother Love.’’ Callaloo 19 (1996): 125–30. Cook, Emily Walker. ‘‘‘But She Won’t Set Foot/In His Turtle Dove Nash’: Gender Roles and Gender Symbolism in Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah.’’ College Language Association Journal 38 (1995): 322–30. Corn, Alfred. Rev. of Grace Notes. Poetry 157.1 (October 1990): 37–39. Costello, Bonnie. ‘‘Scars and Wings: Rita Dove’s Grace Notes.’’ Callaloo 14 (Spring 1991): 434–38. Cushman, Stephen. ‘‘And the Dove Returned.’’ Callaloo 19 (1996): 131–34. Dungy, Camille. ‘‘An Interview with Rita Dove.’’ Callaloo 28 (2005): 1027–40. Edmundson, Mark, ed. ‘‘Rita Dove’s Mother Love: A Discussion.’’ Callaloo 19 (1996): 123–42. Erickson, Peter. ‘‘Rita Dove’s Shakespeares.’’ In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-visions in Literature and Performance, edited by Marianne Novy, 87–101. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. ———. ‘‘Rita Dove’s Two Shakespeare Poems.’’ Shakespeare and the Classroom 4.2 (Fall 1996): 53–55. Georgoudaki, Ekaterini. Race, Gender, and Class Perspectives in the Works of Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, and Audre Lorde. Greece: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1991. ———. ‘‘Rita Dove: Crossing Boundaries.’’ Callaloo 14 (Spring 1991): 419–33. Hampton, Janet Jones. ‘‘Portrait of a Diasporean People: The Poetry of Shirley Campbell and Rita Dove.’’ Afro-Hispanic Review 14 (Spring 1995): 262–76. Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Conversations with Rita Dove. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Jones, Kirkland C. ‘‘Folk Idiom in the Literary Expression of Two African-American Authors: Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa.’’ In Language and Literature in the African-American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire Belay, 149–65. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

168

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Kitchen, Judith, Stan Sanvel Rubin, and Earl G. Ingersoll, eds. ‘‘A Conversation with Rita Dove.’’ Black American Literature Forum 20 (1986): 227–40. Lofgren, Lotta. ‘‘Partial Horror: Fragmentation and Healing in Rita Dove’s Mother Love.’’ Callaloo 19 (1996): 135–42. McDowell, Robert. ‘‘The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove.’’ In Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, edited by James McCorkle, 294–302. Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Moyers, Bill, ed. ‘‘Rita Dove.’’ In Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, 109–28. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Pereira, Malin. Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. ———. ‘‘‘When the pear blossoms / cast their pale faces on / the darker side of the earth’: Miscegenation, the Primal Scene, and Incest Motif of Rita Dove’s Work.’’ African American Review 36 (Summer 2002): 1–17. Proitsaki, Maria. ‘‘Seasonal and Seasonable Motherhood in Dove’s Mother Love.’’ In Women, Creators of Culture, edited by Ekaterini Georgoudaki and Domna Pastourmatzi, 145–52. Greece: Hellenic Association of American Studies, 1997. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘The Poems of Rita Dove.’’ Callaloo 9 (Winter 1986): 52–60. Righelato, Pat. Understanding Rita Dove. South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Schneider, Steven. ‘‘Coming Home: An Interview with Rita Dove.’’ Iowa Review 19 (1989). Steffen, Therese. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Stein, Kevin. ‘‘Lives in Motion: Multiple Perspectives in Rita Dove’s Poetry.’’ Mississippi Review 23.3 (1995): 51–79. Steinman, Lisa M. ‘‘Dialogues between History and Dream.’’ Michigan Quarterly Review 26 (1987): 428–38. Van Dyne, Susan R. ‘‘Sitting the Poet: Rita Dove’s Refiguring of Traditions.’’ In Women Poets of the Americas: Towards a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Cha´vez Candelaria, 68–87. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Vendler, Helen. ‘‘The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate.’’ In Soul Says, 156–66. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995. ———. ‘‘Blackness and Beyond Blackness.’’ Times Literary Supplement (February 18, 1994): 11–13. ———. ‘‘A Dissonant Triad.’’ Parnassus 16 (1991): 391–404. ———. ‘‘An Interview with Rita Dove.’’ In Reading Black, Reading Feminist, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 481–91. New York: Meridian, 1990. ———. ‘‘Rita Dove: Identity Markers.’’ Callaloo 17.2 (1994): 381–98. Wallace, Patricia. ‘‘Divided Loyalties: Little and Literary and the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove.’’ MELUS 18 (1993): 3–19. Wheeler, Leslie. ‘‘Rita Dove: the House Expands.’’ In The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2002. Wiseman, Laura Madeline. ‘‘Rita Dove: A Woman of Many Words.’’ Empowerment4women (March/April 2005). Online, April 2005, http://www.empowerment4women.org/respect/ ma05_ritadove.html (accessed January 7, 2006).

Laura Madeline Wiseman

KATE DRUMGOOLD (1858?–1898)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Except for what can be gleaned from her autobiography, little is known about Kate Drumgoold. By her own report, A Slave Girl’s Story, she was born to married slave parents near Petersburg, Virginia, three years before the Civil War (4). Her earliest years were marred by two major events: the death of her ‘‘white mother’’ (5)—a childless, doting plantation mistress—and the sale of her natural mother to a Georgia planter. After the war, Kate’s mother returned to Virginia, collected her surviving children, and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where seven-year-old Kate became a live-in domestic. She also began attending night literacy classes at Washington Avenue Baptist Church where she first heard the Christian rhetoric that permeates her writing. Despite chronic health problems, Drumgoold was determined to receive a formal education. Through hard work, frugality, and the generosity of family and friends, she completed eleven years of schooling, including three years at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C. (1875–1878), and four years at a boarding school in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (1882–1886). After teaching in rural West Virginia for eleven years, Drumgoold had a ‘‘break down’’ (42) and moved back to Brooklyn, where she resumed her work as a domestic and began the ‘‘sketch’’ (3) that would become A Slave Girl’s Story. Her final manuscript entry, dated March 4, 1897, indicates that Drumgoold was in a precarious state of health. She died sometime in 1898 of unknown causes; neither the exact date of her death nor her burial place is known. MAJOR WORK Drumgoold’s only known work, A Slave Girl’s Story: Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold, includes the place and date of publication (Boston, 1898), but no publisher’s name or imprint, causing speculation that it may have been self-published. Elizabeth Wright classifies the text as ‘‘at once a literacy narrative, a slave narrative, and a migration narrative’’ because it incorporates accounts of Drumgoold’s formal education, her antebellum childhood, and a rambling travelogue. Conversational in tone and— according to its author—addressed to an antislavery audience, the memoir is an effusive apologia for ‘‘noble whites’’ (4), evangelical Christianity, and ‘‘the delightful study’’ of a slave girl’s history (24). Rather than chronologically organized, the autobiography is loosely structured by what Jennifer Fleischner has termed a ‘‘cycle of ‘loss / illness and recovery’ ’’ (143–44). Ignoring boundaries of space and time, the author optimistically addresses a number of paired themes: enslavement and liberation, desire and fulfillment, ignorance and knowledge, alienation and affiliation, and earthly bonds and heavenly rewards.

170

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Kate Drumgoold’s memoir has received little critical attention despite its inclusion in Six Women’s Slave Narratives (1988) as part of the Oxford University Press Schomburg Series. The first scholarly attention of any note is Jennifer Fleischner’s psychoanalytic reading in Mastering Slavery (1996), which interprets the narrative as Drumgoold’s failed attempt to accept the childhood loss of two ‘‘mothers’’ (147). Elizabeth Wright, in her dissertation (2000), proposes a more liberated Drumgoold using her ‘‘life book’’ to construct a ‘‘literate self ’’ (42). Also in 2000, an electronic edition was added to Documenting the American South and the Journal of Black Studies published results of a 1996 critical literacy experiment that included Drumgoold’s memoir. The study’s subjects, black university students, generally found Drumgoold’s text ‘‘too accommodating to whites’’ (205) and her ‘‘oral strategies’’ confusing. Despite its artistic flaws, A Slave Girl’s Story provides a worthwhile retrospective on an African American’s childhood memories of slavery, emancipation, and postbellum race relations. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Kate Drumgoold Drumgoold, Kate. A Slave Girl’s Story: Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. Boston: n.p., 1898.

Studies of Kate Drumgoold’s Work Andrews, William L. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Six Women’s Slave Narratives, edited by William L. Andrews. Schomburg Lib. 19th-c. Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Davis, Cynthia J., and Kathryn West. Women Writers in the United States: A Timeline of Literary, Cultural, and Social History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ———. ‘‘Memory, Sickness, and Slavery: One Slave Girl’s Story.’’ American Imago 51 (1994): 397–419. Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993, 356–57. Horne, Field. The Saratoga Reader: Writing about an American Village, 1749–1900. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004. Richardson, Elaine. ‘‘Critique on the Problematic of Implementing Afrocentricity into the Traditional Curriculum: ‘The Powers That Be.’ ’’ Journal of Black Studies 31 (2000): 196–213. Wright, Elizabeth J. ‘‘Leaving Home: Travel and the Politics of Literacy in United States Women’s Fiction and Autobiography, 1898–1988.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 2000.

Karen S. Sloan

SHIRLEY GRAHAM DUBOIS (1896–1977)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A playwright, Shirley Graham DuBois (also known as Shirley Graham and Mrs. W.E.B. DuBois) was born Lola Bell Graham in Indiana on November 11, 1896, to Etta Bell Graham and David A. Graham. Her father, an educator and a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, encouraged her interest in literature and music. Graham married Shadrach McCants in 1921. Upon their divorce in 1927, she made the difficult decision to leave their sons with her parents while she studied music at the Sorbonne, Howard University, and Oberlin College, where she received an M.A. degree. Graham DuBois led the Chicago ‘‘Negro unit’’ of the Federal Theater Project in the mid-1930s, producing several successful musicals. After making significant inroads as a producer, composer, playwright, and biographer, Graham married W.E.B. DuBois in 1951. The couple moved to Ghana in 1961, where W.E.B. DuBois died in 1963. Graham DuBois traveled the globe in support of leftist causes until she died of breast cancer in Beijing. MAJOR WORKS Graham DuBois transformed a one-act play, which she had written while she was a student at Oberlin, into Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro (1932), the first allblack opera to be performed on a large scale, while serving as Music Department head at what is now Morgan State University. While Voodoo Man, the opera’s protagonist, threatens to confirm white audiences’ associations between African Americans and primitivism, the tom tom that links the three settings—an African village during colonization, the plantation south, and 1930s Harlem—constructs a Pan-African consciousness. Graham DuBois produced a number of dramatic works between 1938 and 1941 while at Yale on a fellowship in creative writing: I Gotta Home, It’s Morning, Elijah’s Ravens, her radio play Track Thirteen, and Dust to Earth. It’s Morning is notable for dramatizing a slave woman’s desire to kill her daughter rather than see her sold into slavery. Her biographies are aimed to promote knowledge of African American history. They won her the Julian Messner Award for Best Book Combating Intolerance, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She founded Freedomways magazine in 1960, and in 1974 published her novel Zulu Heart. CRITICAL RECEPTION None of Graham DuBois’s theater work was published while she was alive, despite successful performances. Tom Tom, Track Thirteen, I Gotta Home, and It’s Morning can now be found in drama anthologies; additional plays are available in many libraries’ electronic databases of black drama. Her career suffered from her controversial support

172

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

of socialist and communist approaches to economic and racial oppression and from being overshadowed by her husband’s work, though critics have recently observed her attention to the complex challenges faced by black mothers (Meier and Perkins), her exploration of double-consciousness, and her modernist use of ambiguity (Horne 61). Gerald Horne’s careful biographical study paves the way for additional reevaluations. Graham DuBois’s goal was to preserve and celebrate the particularities of African American experience and culture through experiments with dialect and early Afrocentric use of myth, culture, and musical forms.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Shirley Graham DuBois Booker T. Washington, Educator of Hand, Head and Heart. New York: Messner, 1955. Coal Dust (1930), later Dust to Earth (1940–1941). No publication information available. Dr. George Washington Carver, Scientist. With George Lipscomb. New York: Messner, 1944. DuBois: Pictorial Biography. Chicago: Johnson, 1978. Elijah’s Ravens (circa 1940). No publication information available. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Son of the Nile. New York: Third, 1972. His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W.E.B. DuBois. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971. I Gotta Home (1939). In Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950, edited by Kathy A. Perkins, 211–24. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. It’s Morning (1940). In Wines in the Wilderness, edited by Elizbeth Brown-Guillory. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, Founder of Chicago. New York: Messner, 1953. Julius K. Nyerere. New York: Messner, 1975. Paul Robeson, Citizen of the World. New York: Messner, 1946. The Story of Phyllis Wheatley. New York: Messner, 1949. There Once Was a Slave: The Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass. New York: Messner, 1947. Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro (1932). In The Roots of African American Drama, edited by Leo Hamalian and James Hatch, 238–86. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Track Thirteen (1940). In Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940, edited by James Hatch and Leo Hamalian. Detriot: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Your Most Humble Servant. New York: Messner, 1949. Zulu Heart. New York: Third, 1974.

Studies of Shirley Graham DuBois’s Works Boehnlein, James, and Kevin Gladish. ‘‘Shirley Graham and the Drama of Cultural Identity.’’ MAWA Review 11.2 (1996): 69–75. Hamalian, Leo, and James V. Hatch. ‘‘Shirley Graham.’’ In The Roots of African American Drama, 231–37. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Hine, Darlene Clark. ‘‘Shirley Graham DuBois.’’ In Black Women in America, vol. 1, pp. 357–58. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993. Horne, Gerald. Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Meier, Joyce. ‘‘The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women’s Theater.’’ MELUS 25.3–4 (2000): 117–39.

SHIRLEY GRAHAM DUBOIS

173

Perkins, Kathy A. ‘‘The Impact of Lynching on the Art of African American Women.’’ In Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, edited by Perkins and Judith Stephens, 15–20. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. ———. ‘‘Shirley Graham.’’ In Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950, 207–10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Rebecca Walsh

ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON (1875–1935)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born Alice Ruth Moore on July 19, 1875. She was born in a house on Second Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city rich with ethnic and cultural fusions. Her mother Patsy (Patricia) Wright was an ex-slave who worked as a seamstress/ washerwoman. Her father, Monroe Moore’s occupation was listed on her birth record as a laborer, although according to some sources he was a merchant seaman. Primarily her mother Patsy and her maternal grandmother Mary Wright raised Alice in New Orleans along with her sister Mary Leila, who was five years older. Although not born into the most prosperous neighborhood in New Orleans, her family was middle class for the times. With her racially diverse heritage (a mixture of African, white, and Native American), which allowed her to pass for white, Alice was born into a life that afforded her a somewhat privileged view of her diverse community. There is little documentation available about her early life other than she attended public schools in Louisiana. As a teen, she attended Southern University’s high school division, graduating in 1889 at age fourteen. She then entered the teaching program at Straight University (later Dillard University), graduating in 1892. She immediately began teaching in the public school system in New Orleans. It was while teaching in the New Orleans public school system that she began her public career as a writer and civil rights activist. Shortly after her twentieth birthday in 1895, her first book Violets and Other Tales was published under the name Alice Ruth Moore. This fresh work by a young southern woman received generally enthusiastic reviews. Through the publicity surrounding her poetry and an accompanying picture in a Boston magazine, a long-distance epistolary relationship began with the soon to be famous African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar seeing her picture in the April 1895 issue of the Boston Monthly Review magazine began a correspondence that lead to their meeting in February 1897 and culminated with their elopement on March 6, 1898. The romanticism present in her early work is evidenced in her personal life as well, as after one face-to-face meeting with Dunbar, she agreed to become his wife. The next morning Paul Dunbar left for a yearlong trip to England. It was while engaged to Paul Dunbar that she subsequently moved to New York and helped to found the White Rose Mission, which later became the White Rose Home for Girls in Harlem. There she taught evening and Sunday classes as her writing career blossomed. After Dunbar returned from England and shortly after their secret wedding ceremony, the couple moved to Washington, D.C. It was while married to Dunbar that Dunbar-Nelson, under the name Alice Dunbar, published her second book The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899). When her marriage to Dunbar ended in 1902, she moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught at Howard High School. After her tumultuous marriage and separation from Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson chose to continue her education. She studied at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University majoring in psychology and educational testing. While at Cornell she wrote her master’s thesis on the influence of Milton

ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON

175

on Wordsworth, a portion of which appeared in Modern Language Notes (April 1909). In 1910, Dunbar-Nelson entered into a second short-lived marriage with Arthur Callis, a fellow teacher, divorcing a year later. Her third and final marriage was to Robert J. Nelson in 1916, a journalist, politician, and civil rights activist to whom she remained married until her death. MAJOR WORKS Dunbar-Nelson’s first book, Violets and Other Tales, containing poems, essays, and short stories was published in 1895 by the Monthly Review Press. The works in Violets and Other Tales are mostly sentimental in theme and reflect a Victorian mentality. The works of poetry and fiction reflect the romanticism prominent in the works of feminine writers of her time. These works illustrate the harshness of unrequited love, jealousy, envy, and the bittersweet taste of revenge. Dunbar-Nelson also displays a wide range of interests when she expounds upon the glory of Flaubert’s Salammbo. Moreover, she presents a feminist view that is not present in her later book as she asks in her essay ‘‘Women,’’ ‘‘Why should the well-salaried woman marry?’’ She eventually points out that the independence a woman achieves through education and being a fiscally responsible single person only enhances her value as a mate, a popular theme for turn-ofthe-century feminists. It is interesting to note that the themes within this book stay away, for the most part, from issues of racial inequality, focusing instead on the emotions of lost love and betrayal. This distance from racial issues is a reflection of Dunbar-Nelson’s personal fight with the perilous dichotomy of her own racial identity. There are various articles written about her struggles as a light-skinned beauty with hazel eyes and auburn hair, and her perceptions of and conflicts with those of her race with darker skin. DunbarNelson was capable of passing for white and did when it suited her purposes (usually to attend social and culturally uplifting functions). In addition, there is also documentation of her desire and attempts to escape classification as an African American artist, although she actively fought for African American rights throughout her life (Alexander 68–73). The dedication in her second book The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, published in 1899 reads, ‘‘To My Best Comrade, My Husband’’ who happened at that time to be Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her use of dialect and colloquialism reflects his influence; a tone that was for the most part absent from her first book. In this second book, the exotic Creole milieu of New Orleans and the Louisiana bayous are the principal motifs. One review for the book reads, ‘‘delightful Creole stories, all bright and full of the true Creole air of easy going’’ (Hull xxxii). In this work, a more mature authorial voice presents both new and revised stories. Most notably, in ‘‘Little Miss Sophie,’’ a story that appears in both books, Dunbar-Nelson presents a fuller, more descriptive view of the Third District setting; as well, she presents more fully developed characters in her revised work. The tale of ‘‘Titee,’’ also from Violets and Other Tales, is included in this book, but with an alternate ending. In the first effort, the young protagonist dies and goes on to claim his reward in heaven. In this revised work, despite having done a selfless act, the mischievous Titee not only lives but also returns to his normal behavior. In addition to these revisions, through invoking for the reader the atmosphere of New Orleans and the Creole culture, Dunbar-Nelson skillfully intersperses images of the mystical Creole spiritual beliefs with those of Catholicism, the predominant Christian religion in the region.

176

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Dunbar-Nelson’s depictions of Creole life link her with the author Kate Chopin (1850–1904), who was also writing about this unique culture at that time. There are further linkages between Dunbar-Nelson and Chopin’s writing in their depictions of women and their problems of understanding or misunderstanding the rules of Creole society. Their depictions of the resultant heartbreak and even disastrous consequences are also analogous. Following the publication of this book Dunbar was never able to put together another commercially acceptable manuscript of her work for a full-length book. Her work became more polemic and rejected at least once on the grounds that ‘‘the American public had a dislike for treatment of the ‘‘color-line’’ (Hull xxxvi). Despite these obstacles, Dunbar continued to write and submit articles for publication. In 1920, Dunbar-Nelson edited and published The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, Containing The Best Prose and Poetic Selections by and about the Negro Race, With Programs Arranged for Special Entertainments. In that same year, she, along with her husband Robert Nelson, founded and edited the Wilmington Advocate, a weekly newsletter promoting racial equality. Fortunately, her work continued appearing in the NAACP’s and the Urban League’s magazines and newsletters, the Opportunity, the Crisis, Ebony, and Topaz. In addition, Countee Cullen included three of her most popular poems, ‘‘I Sit and I Sew,’’ ‘‘Snow in October,’’ and ‘‘Sonnet,’’ in his collection of African American poets titled Caroling Dusk, published in 1927. During the 1920s and 1930s, Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s prominence was primarily as a political and social activist. Her life as a wife, daughter, and sister, as well as her career during that period, is documented and available for public scrutiny through the publication of her edited diaries, Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1984). While detailing her life and interactions with her husband, mother, sister, and assorted family members, these diaries also contain descriptions of her interactions with well-known African American public figures, some of whom became friends, like Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Mary Terrell. In addition, approximately 2,568 items including manuscripts, pictures, and correspondence are housed in 120 volumes at the Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson Collection located at the University of Delaware Morris Library Special Collections in Newark, Delaware. Throughout her life, Dunbar-Nelson played a prominent role in the women’s club movement, placing her in the ranks alongside such prominent African American women activists as Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells. Her works have been included in numerous anthologies and collections. Her short story ‘‘Summer Session’’ is included in Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction (1995). Her writings are also included in compilations of work by Southern writers, Southern women writers, and Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Her prose, poetry, and drama are important contributions to the legacy of African American literature. With the publication in 1988 of the Schomburg Collection of her Works, and Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson published in 1984, her works, including previously unpublished manuscripts, are now accessible to a new generation of readers. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a popular writer during her lifetime, twentiethcentury literary critics have largely ignored her work. In his essay ‘‘Local Color in Louisiana’’ published in 1985, Thomas Richardson writes, ‘‘Even among specialists in

ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON

177

Afro-American literature the memory of Alice Dunbar-Nelson has grown dim’’ (205). There has, however, been a resurgence of interest in her life and works in the late twentieth century, in part elicited by the work of scholarship connecting Dunbar-Nelson to her contemporary Kate Chopin as well as to African American and feminist issues. Initial reviews of Dunbar-Nelson’s work were racially directed. While generally well received, the criticism for her first book Violets and Other Tales (1895) was not so much about its content as for what it symbolized for the advancement of the African American race as a whole. ‘‘One reviewer declared the book ‘evidence of great intelligence among persons of African birth’ ’’ (Alexander 61). This impression of her work is observed in contemporary scholarship through her inclusion (when taught in the classroom) as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Later scholarship on Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s body of work locates it as that of a ‘‘local-color’’ writer. Encouraged early in their relationship by the popular Paul Laurence Dunbar to tell ‘‘those pretty little Creole stories,’’ Dunbar-Nelson’s short stories were particularly descriptive of the culture, social setting, history, and scenery of her New Orleans home. Unfortunately, this type of intimate view of any one particular landscape often serves to pigeonhole writers. In her essay ‘‘Varieties of Local Color,’’ Merrill Skaggs remarks, ‘‘the local-color label has occasionally been used to denigrate the exceptional fiction of several twentieth-century women’’ (219). Critics of this genre malign the work as having limited appeal. However, it is this same intimacy that allows Dunbar-Nelson to position the reader within the text. ‘‘Although subtly deployed, Dunbar-Nelson’s direct addresses to her readers—‘you must admit’ (‘‘Tony’s Wife’’ Works 1, 22) or ‘you could not understand’ (‘‘La Juanita’’ 199)—create a particular mediated relationship among narrator, characters, and readers’’ (3), as noted by Kristina Brooks who in writing on Dunbar-Nelson’s use of local-color also writes, ‘‘those whom Dunbar-Nelson directly addresses in her short fiction, are those who do not make their homes in New Orleans, the setting for Dunbar-Nelson’s stories in two published volumes, or the Upper East side New York neighborhood that serves as a setting for an unpublished volume of her short fiction’’ (4). Dunbar-Nelson’s coded depictions are interpreted by contemporary scholars like Gloria Hull as being racially ambiguous, and as ‘‘separating her from her black experience’’ (52). Violet Harrington Bryan in her essay, ‘‘Race and Gender in the Early Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson,’’ follows Hull’s lead, criticizing the apparent lack of racial themes in Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction because her characters’ racial identities do not always seem clear (71). In contrast, critics like Brooks feel that by bringing her reader into the setting, through her use of language, real events, and locales, Dunbar-Nelson, while not overtly attacking the inequality of the races, is nonetheless conveying the tragedy, frustration, and life of the Creole of color. Feminist readings of her work include Mattie Richardson’s proposal that DunbarNelson’s diary be used to ‘‘rethink the political work and effect of the Black women’s club movement’’ (63); Mary Loeffelholz’s commentary from Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900–1945, where she interprets ‘‘I Sit and Sew’’ as the dramatic monologue of a woman stifled by the ‘‘pretty futile seam she works on [ . . . ]. Adding that the poem’s ‘impassioned commentary on the narrowness of culturally defined sexual roles’ (Hull, 80) is clear, as is the connection it draws between those sex roles and militarism’’ (184); and Kristin Bloomberg’s examination of women’s dissatisfaction with their lot in the present and the future in Dunbar-Nelson’s ‘‘A Modern Undine.’’

178

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Additional perspectives on Dunbar-Nelson’s work and life continue to appear in prominent scholarly journals and important works of criticism. Dunbar-Nelson’s poetry and prose feature conventional form with unconventional depth while proffering critical historical, cultural, and social examinations. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Alice Dunbar-Nelson The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer; The Poet and His Song. Naperville: J. L. Nichols, 1920. The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. New York: Dodd Mead, 1899. The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, edited by Gloria T. Hull. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Violets and Other Tales. Boston: Monthly Review Press, 1895.

Studies of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Works Alexander, Eleanor. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore: A History of Love and Violence among the African American Elite. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Bloomberg, Kristen. Tracing Arachne’s Web: Myth and Feminist Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001. Boyd, Herb, ed. Autobiography of a People: Three Centuries of African American History Told by Those Who Lived It. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Brooks, Kristina. ‘‘Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Local Colors of Ethnicity, Class, and Place.’’ MELUS 23.2 (Summer 1998): 3–26. Bryan, Violet H. ‘‘Race and Gender in the Early Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.’’ In Louisiana Literature and Literary Figures, edited by Mathe´ Allain. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana, 2004. Hardy, Gayle J. American Women Civil Rights Activists: Biobibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825– 1992. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993. Hull, Gloria. Color, Sex & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. ———, ed. Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. ———. ‘‘Shaping Contradictions: Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the Black Creole Experience.’’ In Louisiana Literature and Literary Figures, edited by Mathe´ Allain. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana, 2004. ———. ‘‘Researching Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Personal and Literary Perspective.’’ Feminist Studies 6: 314–20. Hull, Gloria, Patricia B. Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. ‘‘Researching Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Personal and Literary Perspective.’’ In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982. Johnson, A. ‘‘Writing within the Script: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Ellen Fenton.’’ Studies in American Fiction 19 (Autumn 1991): 165–74. Johnson, P. ‘‘The Lives and Love of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.’’ Black Issues Book Review 4.2 (March/April 2002): 71–72. Kein, Sybil, ed. Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Lerner, Gerda. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.

ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON

179

Loeffelholz, Mary. Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900–1945. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992. Marable, Manning, ed. Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary History of the African American Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Richardson, Mattie U. Journal of Women’s History 15.3 (Autumn 2003): 63. Richardson, Thomas. ‘‘Local Color in Louisiana.’’ In The History of Southern Literature, edited by James D. Rubin, Jr. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1985. Skaggs, Merrill M. ‘‘Varieties of Local Color.’’ In The History of Southern Literature, edited by James D. Rubin, Jr. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1985. Staples, B. ‘‘She Was Hard to Impress.’’ New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1985, 20. Tylee, C. M. ‘‘Womanist Propaganda, African-American Great War Experience, and Cultural Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance: Plays by Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary P. Burrill.’’ Women’s Studies International Forum 20 ( January/February 1997): 153–63. Williams, Ora. ‘‘Works by and about Alice Ruth (Moore) Dunbar-Nelson: A Bibliography.’’ CLA Journal 19: 322–26.

Denisa E. Chatman-Riley

GRACE EDWARDS-YEARWOOD (1934?– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born and raised in a middle-class family in Harlem, New York, as Grace Faith Edwards, novelist Edwards-Yearwood began writing at the age of seven. The seventy-one-year-old creative-writing teacher now lives in Brooklyn and spends some time living in the Bronx. As one of forty-five African American published crime fiction writers, EdwardsYearwood’s novels are at the top of reading lists across America. This talented author penetrated the walls of the publishing market by meeting Terry McMillan’s agent, who heard an excerpt from In the Shadow of the Peacock and in turn put Edwards-Yearwood in contact with the publishers of McGraw-Hill, who published the novel in 1988. This connection led to a successful writing career that has been marked with book releases, tours, and signings, but her career has also distinguished Edwards-Yearwood as a crime fiction writer. MAJOR WORKS Edwards-Yearwood has a distinct knack for writing engaging and suspenseful mysteries that captivate her audience and leave them in a state of anticipation for the next novel. Mali Anderson, an astute sleuth who is the central character of the critically acclaimed four-novel Mali Anderson Mysteries, is a former police officer in the New York Police Department who uses her wit and smoothness to navigate through suspensefilled storylines. Edwards-Yearwood highlights Mali Anderson’s keen method of solving mysteries, which is an underlying and cohesive thread in the novel series, as well as tracks Mali Anderson’s personal development as a character, thus making her multidimensional and relatable. Edwards-Yearwood intrigues the reader by introducing new plots and twists that nurture the murder mystery theme. The plot-thickened storylines are not only centered around the gruesome crimes of the inner city, but the storylines also capitalize on and celebrate the richness of Harlem by intertwining the history of jazz and the nightclubs of years past. Edwards-Yearwood hopes that her discussion of the jazz and night clubs will help her readers gain a sense of what life was like in Harlem during the mid-1900s. Edwards-Yearwood’s novels include her first novel If I Should Die, which received an Anthony Award nomination for Best First Book; A Toast before Dying, which won the 1999 Fiction Honor Award from the Black Caucus of the American Literary Association; No Time to Die; In the Shadow of the Peacock, which is the result of her graduate thesis in the creative-writing program at Columbia University, New York; Do or Die; and The Viaduct, which deviates from her Mali Anderson Mysteries but contains elements of romance, her first writing that mixes love and murder.

GRACE EDWARDS-YEARWOOD

181

Except In the Shadow of the Peacock and The Viaduct, film and television rights have been sold to CBS for her novels. Edwards-Yearwood also contributed to Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African American Writers edited by Eleanor Taylor Bland and is completing a romance novel titled The Blind Alley. CRITICAL RECEPTION Despite the awards Grace Edwards-Yearwood’s work has received, very little critical attention has been given to it. One critic, however, does see merit in her work. Jessica Kimball Printz says Edwards-Yearwood’s writing ‘‘successfully captures the intricate powerplay in intersexual relationships against a backdrop of historical flux’’ (1066). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Grace Edwards-Yearwood Do or Die. New York: Doubleday and Company, Incorporated, 2000. If I Should Die. New York: Bantam Books, Incorporated, 1998. In the Shadow of the Peacock. McGraw-Hill, 1988. No Time to Die. New York: Bantam Books, Incorporated, 2000. A Toast before Dying. New York: Random House, 1999. The Viaduct. New York: Doubleday and Company, 2003.

Study of Grace Edwards-Yearwood’s Works Printz, Jessica Kimball. ‘‘Marketable Bodies, Possessive Peacocks, and Text as Excess: Edwards Yearwood’s In the Shadow of the Peacock.’’ Callaloo 15.4 (1992): 1066–84.

Jasmin J. Vann

ZILPHA ELAW (1790?–1846?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE An Afro-American Methodist preacher born around 1790, autobiographer Zilpha Elaw forms part of an antebellum tradition of black women evangelists, traveling missionaries, and lay spiritual leaders. Her religious peers of the nineteenth century include Jarena Lee, Julia A. J. Foote, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Amanda Berry Smith, and Sojourner Truth. A freewoman, Elaw is best known for her spiritual autobiography Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, published in London in 1846. A Pennsylvania native, Elaw was exposed to religion by her parents at an early age. After their untimely deaths, she grew up serving as a domestic in the Philadelphia household of a Quaker couple. At fourteen, having taken the Lord’s name in vain and suffered a vivid dream of retribution, she began an earnest course of meditation and prayer. She braved paralyzing anxiety, guilt, tears, and other emotions associated with affective piety. Shortly after her initial encounter with area Methodists, Elaw entertained her first vision of Christ while performing daily chores. This direct manifestation of divine love initiated her spiritual conversion. She joined the Methodist Episcopal Society in 1808. Disconnected from her surviving kin (an older brother and a younger sister), often gravely ill, and plagued by lingering doubts, Elaw was ‘‘upheld, confirmed, instructed, sanctified, and directed’’ by the Lord (Memoirs 60). As with other religious visionaries, she weathered temptations from Satan, her ‘‘unwearied adversary’’ (83). Through heavenly surrender to Christ, her vacillations of faith were transformed into a simultaneously active and contemplative life. Zilpha married a fuller, Joseph Elaw, in 1810. The pair encountered difficulties in conjugal life owing to a disparity in their level of religious commitment. Elaw portrays her husband as a nonbeliever and occasionally hostile critic of religion. Although fond of music and dancing, he was ultimately tolerant of his wife’s asceticism and exceptional religious fervor. The couple resided just outside of Philadelphia until economic circumstances compelled their relocation to Burlington, New Jersey. In 1812, a daughter, Rebecca, was born. The camp meeting of 1817 marked a seminal moment of Elaw’s religious ascent. Mass revivalism allowed Christians to share wisdom and atone for sins through collective witnessing. At one such event, Elaw was struck down by God and publicly sanctified (i.e., cleansed of sin and filled with the divine spirit). She then felt compelled to preach and administer pastoral care to individuals of both races and various classes. This special calling comprised her ‘‘family or household ministry’’ (71), more or less socially acceptable for churchgoing women of the time. While generally robust, her sense of mission had to be reiterated by both her dying sister and a mysterious voice in order for her to fully embrace the role of sanctified preacher and holy woman. Joseph’s death by tuberculosis in 1823 forced Elaw to revert to domestic work for survival. Awareness of white racism compelled her to open a school for black children

ZILPHA ELAW

183

where she taught despite poor health. It had been explicitly and repeatedly revealed that she must ‘‘preach the gospel and . . . travel far and wide’’ (82), but she still struggled with her vocation. Later, when sufficiently inspired, she closed the school and set off to preach in Philadelphia and New York, returning home in 1828. At this time, she received intimations through both a heavenly medium and a dream that she would one day visit London, England. This voyage would occur in 1840. In the decade or so prior, she made preaching pilgrimages to the Southern slave states (at risk of being arrested or kidnapped into bondage) and toured such northeastern locales as Baltimore, Washington, Alexandria, Annapolis, New Haven, Hartford, Boston, and Cape Cod. She also ministered throughout the states of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Elaw’s prayers helped restore the ailing and moribund on more than one occasion. She herself suffered a number of near-death episodes but regained her health through divine grace. Her public ministry, although unlicensed and largely unaffiliated, achieved much in the way of repentance, conversions, and spontaneous fellowship. Gospel rivalries, Presbyterian disapproval, and certain prejudiced individuals were her major stumbling blocks during her travels. Becoming a grandmother in 1834 did not deter her from leaving home again a year after returning to the Philadelphia area. A persistent cause for brooding, the trip to England finally materialized after a propitious encounter in Providence, Rhode Island. Despite another grave illness, Elaw managed to preach extensively for five years and produce a detailed account of her peripatetic life. While she planned to return to America in 1845, it is unknown whether she did or not. The time and circumstances of her death also remain a mystery. MAJOR WORK Elaw’s Memoirs comprise what is essentially a hybrid text. It illuminates an intensely personal journey for the purpose of public edification. The central character is a speaking subject liberated by means of strict conformity to Christian beliefs. Bondage takes the form of spiritual temptation and doubt, not the tangible chains of chattel slavery. Her discourse moves away from the primacy of the black body (traditionally the site of political struggle and material reification during the nineteenth century) to the immortal soul, colorless and priceless before the judgment of the Lord. In terms of literary history, Memoirs may interest those acquainted with the legends/ early autobiographies of medieval Christian mystics (among them, the serial traveler Margery Kempe). The same applies to those familiar with the Euro-American genre of Puritan spiritual autobiography. Characteristic similarities emerge in Elaw’s writing: intimate communications with the Lord; renunciation of sin and ‘‘worldliness’’; the (female) body as an index and agent of divine will; the prevalence of supernatural apparitions, voices, clairvoyance, and miracles; attempted corruption by Satan; and the triumph of the subject over nonbelievers, backsliders, and sinners. Written in elevated diction and with copious recourse to the Scripture, this document is less a sinful woman’s confession than a regional and trans-Atlantic travelogue. While politically cognizant (racial prejudice and patriarchal gender bias do arise in context), the work leans more toward meditatio Christi than proto-feminist or abolitionist manifesto. Because of its rhetorical sophistication, the ideal reader was educated, Christian, liberal-minded, and probably white, not one of Elaw’s colored and illiterate brethren.

184

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Inflected through a deliberate substructure of omissions, understatements, and amplifications, the subject moves almost seamlessly between black and white communities. She heals the sick, humbles the wicked, encourages Christian solidarity, and challenges the pervasiveness of Mammonism and moral flux. It is an intentional irony that the speaker is triply burdened—a ‘‘poor and ignorant . . . creature’’ (75), a ‘‘poor, coloured female’’ (89), and a ‘‘poor weak female’’ (104)—yet stands as one of the divine-elect. This trio of alterity had undeniable political implications, for surely such a choice of messengers subverted existing assumptions about black and female inferiority. Aside from its biblical allusiveness and metafictional sensitivity to the effects of language (‘‘Take heed of what you read’’ [52]), Memoirs demands critical attention for its portrait of an independent black female and early spiritual leader. At a time when slaves and the less privileged classes of women were virtual prisoners of the home, Elaw privileged her role as traveling evangelist above the more conventional and socially acceptable guises for women: obedient wife, doting mother, and men’s intellectual subordinate.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Declaring Elaw an avatar of ‘‘radical spiritual individualism’’ (3), William L. Andrews introduced his seminal edition of Memoirs in 1986 alongside writings by Jarena Lee and Julia Foote. It was after Sisters of the Spirit’s release that substantial contemporary scholarship began to emerge on Elaw. She only received perfunctory consideration, if any, in previous studies of black autobiography, likely overshadowed by more charismatic evangelists of her ilk. Furthermore, as has often been the case with early black women’s literary production, gaps in knowledge and accessibility were barriers to widespread exposure and study. Among the most recent monographs to treat Elaw is Yolanda Pierce’s Hell without Fires (2005). It examines such themes as the hermeneutics of biblical retelling, tropes of freedom as they relate to personal and collective spirituality, and generic conventions of Afro-American spiritual writing. Richard J. DouglassChin’s chapter in Preacher Woman Sings the Blues (2001) develops other pertinent issues: Elaw as a ‘‘subversive eunuch-subject’’ (35); her paradoxically healthy poverty (‘‘lack of whiteness, lack of riches, lack of social position’’ [55]); and the various pedagogical imports of the text. Helpful background into the genre of black spiritual autobiography may be found in Andrews’s To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) and Joanne M. Braxton’s Black Women Writing Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Zilpha Elaw Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, an American Female of Colour; Together with Some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America. 1846. Reprint, Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 49–160.

ZILPHA ELAW

185

Studies of Zilpha Elaw’s Work Douglass-Chin, Richard J. Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of NineteenthCentury African American Evangelists. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Haynes, Rosetta R. ‘‘Zilpha Elaw’s Serial Domesticity: An Unsentimental Journey.’’ In Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, edited by Kristi Siegel, 181–91. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Hunter, William R. ‘‘Do Not Be Conformed Unto This World: An Analysis of Religious Experience in the Nineteenth-Century African American Spiritual Narrative.’’ Nineteenth-Century Studies 8 (1994): 75–88. Moody, Joycelyn. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pierce, Yolanda. Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.

Nancy Kang

MARI EVANS (1923– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Mari Evans is an educator who has also enjoyed a long career as a writer of poetry, children’s books, nonfiction, and plays. She was born in Toledo, Ohio, on July 16, 1923. She grew up in the Toledo area and attended the University of Toledo. Although she initially studied fashion design, she eventually switched to creative writing—first short stories, then poetry. Her first professional writing job was as an assistant editor of information systems at a chain-manufacturing plant. Evans tends toward reserve when discussing details of her personal life, although she acknowledges she has been married and divorced and is the mother of two adult sons. Throughout her long career as an educator, she has taught at Purdue University, Indiana University, Northwestern University, Washington University, Spelman College, the State University at Albany, and Cornell University, where she was distinguished poet-in-residence and an assistant professor in their Africana Studies and Research Center. For her literary contributions she has been awarded many prizes, including the first poetry award presented by the Black Academy of Arts and Letters (1975), an Outstanding Woman of the Year Award (1976), the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Award (1981–1982), and the Alain Locke–Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Excellence in Literature (1995). Evans has also received many fellowships, including the John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1965), a Woodrow Wilson Grant (1968), and residencies at the MacDowell Colony (1975) and Yaddo (1984); she was the Copeland Fellow at Amherst College in 1980. From 1968 to 1973, she created, hosted, and directed a television show in Indianapolis called The Black Experience, one of just three on-air shows about African Americans in the United States at that time. Her film Remembering Langston: 1968, a documentary about Langston Hughes, is believed to be the first film by a black filmmaker to so honor the American poet. In 1997, the government of Uganda chose her image to adorn a postage stamp. In 1998, the Chicago State University inducted her into their National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, and in 1999 Martin University awarded her an honorary doctor of humane letters. After several years in Indianapolis, Indiana, Evans now resides in California, where she continues to write. MAJOR WORKS With the 1970 publication of I Am a Black Woman, Mari Evans received praise for her use of idiomatic speech to celebrate the strengths and document the struggles of African Americans. ‘‘Who Can Be Born Black,’’ perhaps her most frequently anthologized poem, closes the collection. In this poem, the speaker of the short, lyrical lines revels in the sheer bliss of being black, even while acknowledging that sometimes being black poses problems. The speaker concludes by wondering how someone could be black and not be

MARI EVANS

187

jubilant over his or her race. This celebratory tone of racial pride resonates throughout Evans’s work, which also includes prose, books for children, and plays. The celebration of African American identity reflects Evans’s participation in the Black Arts Movement, often considered the literary component of the black nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. This political movement proposed self-reliance, economic independence, and self-respect for African Americans; some members even aspired to a separate country for African Americans. Such slogans as ‘‘Black Is Beautiful’’ and ‘‘Black Power’’ demonstrate these core values. The Black Arts Movement developed after the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X and used all types of literary expression— writing, music, choreography, and drama—to explore the cultural history and contemporary experience of blacks in the United States (sometimes called the diaspora as a way of indicating that Africa was the true homeland). Much of the art produced had strong political foundations: it tried to instill a sense of pride in its audience by establishing connections to African art, clothing, and dance and by encouraging a community-based art, or the Black Aesthetic. Along with fellow writers such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni, Evans used verse to represent the African American struggle to overcome poverty and racism in Where Is All the Music? (1968). Poems like ‘‘If There Be Sorrow,’’ ‘‘I Would Encompass Millions,’’ and ‘‘into blackness softly,’’ from I Am a Black Woman, encourage their readers to express their common pain while coming together toward the revolutionary goal of empowerment. Along with the belief in the revolutionary possibilities of art comes the belief that artists have the power—and the obligation—to help their audience, another dominant theme of Evans’s work. In the poem ‘‘Speak the Truth to the People’’ (1970), the speaker extols the necessity of education: without learning, and without sage advice from their leaders, blacks will remain fragmented and victimized. Another poem, ‘‘The Schoolhouse’’ (1981), compares a school to a treasure so precious it must be guarded by armed forces. ‘‘[O]nce again the poets’’ (1981) imagines that verse writers, with their talent for observation, possess the ability to prophesize about potential disasters. ‘‘Let Us Be That Something’’ (1981) commends its readers to be role models for young people. Evans’s children’s books probe equally serious subjects in order to assist and educate. The epistolary Dear Corinne, Tell Somebody! (1999) helps children understand abuse by portraying a young girl helping her friend through a difficult time. It also explains what children should do if they are or someone they know is being sexually abused. To further empower readers, Evans writes in distinctly black idioms and cadences. Singing Black: Alternative Nursery Rhymes (1998) attempts to instill self-respect and racial dignity in its readers by telling stories from black history and culture. Nightstar: 1973– 1978 (1981) contains many poems whose rhythms are derived from the blues, including ‘‘Blues in Bb,’’ ‘‘Black Queen Blues,’’ ‘‘Cellblock Blues,’’ and ‘‘Tune for Two Fingers.’’ In A Dark and Splendid Mass (1992), Evans poeticizes everyday speech; two poems in this collection, ‘‘Oral History: Found Poetry’’ and ‘‘Found Poetry’’ come directly from ordinary language, from a story told by the speaker’s father and from a televised interview with Winnie Mandela upon her release from prison in 1988, respectively. Early poems from I Am a Black Woman, as well as Nightstar, employ variant spellings and pronunciations: ‘‘God’’ becomes ‘‘gaaahd,’’ ‘‘the’’ becomes ‘‘d’’ or ‘‘da,’’ and ‘‘to’’ becomes ‘‘t.’’ As she explains in her 1980 essay ‘‘My Father’s Passage,’’ Evans writes ‘‘for what will nod Black heads over common denominators . . . how it has been/is/must be, for us’’ (167). In ‘‘My Father’s Passage,’’ Evans also describes reading the poetry of Langston Hughes for the first time: she instantly recognized both a commitment to rendering black

188

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

experience and a commitment to style. Like her literary predecessor, Evans’s poems have a political agenda, as well as attention to traditional poetic concerns, including typography on the page, metaphor, and imagery. The poems in A Dark and Splendid Mass demonstrate Evans’s use of varying line lengths: some lines are indented and short; some are left justified and long; some poems consist of multiple stanzas; some consist of just one set of lines. She bases the visual layouts on the poems’ content and tonality. ‘‘Crystal,’’ a word that appears throughout the poems in I Am a Woman and Nightstar, symbolizes her desire for clarity, or the exact delineation of an idea or experience; indeed, she explores the importance of clarity in her work in her 2005 nonfiction book Clarity as Concept. ‘‘Let Me Tell You How to Meet the Day’’ (1992) moves from the abstract—attempts to define ‘‘life,’’ ‘‘love,’’ and the ‘‘self ’’—to the concrete concluding image of people raising their arms to welcome a new day. Here, as elsewhere throughout Evans’s poems, the precisely pinpointed image or experience stands in for optimism: articulation, thus, becomes the first step toward freedom and independence. CRITICAL RECEPTION Evans uses ‘‘My Father’s Passage’’ to explain her writing goals: ‘‘I try for a poetic language that says, ‘This is who we are, where we have been, where we are. This is where we must go. And this is what we must do’ ’’ (169). Scholarly work on Evans has focused primarily on the political themes and motivations behind her words. As a member of the Black Arts Movement, Evans believes that art is perhaps the best method of not only informing a people of their oppression but also providing the people with a means of escaping their political domination. Like many poets of this time, Evans took Amiri Baraka’s 1969 poem ‘‘Black Art’’ as a call to take up the pen and write her people out of their subjugation by white society. To this end, Evans writes primarily for a black audience and sees writing as a form of social resistance. David Dorsey, in ‘‘The Art of Mari Evans,’’ analyzes the didacticism inherent in Evans’s work: she imbibes her writing with messages so that her intended audience might benefit from her understanding of oppressive political institutions, including white-controlled media and educational facilities. Throughout her work, Evans teaches her audience to take pride in their cultural heritage. The musical River of My Song (1977) incorporates her poems, African music, and the lyrics of Langston Hughes. I Look at Me! (1974) portrays a community of black people—bus drivers, doctors, dentists, grocers, and so on—to teach simple vocabulary to young children. From an early age, therefore, children learn to associate blackness with possibility, not with impossibility. Solomon Edwards, in ‘‘Affirmation in the Works of Mari Evans,’’ focuses on the positive themes inherent within Evans’s poems, including inspiration, optimism, and celebratory assertions. In poems like ‘‘I Am a Black Woman’’ (1970) and in plays like Boochie (1979), Evans transforms the word black from a potentially negative racial epithet to a glorious label. Her poetic and dramatic speakers command respect through their very acts of self-definition: rather than let society define them, the speakers repeatedly identify their race as a way of controlling their identities. In this way, black becomes equated with strength, pride, respect, and positivity. As Edwards explains, Evans ‘‘affirms Black joie de vivre’’ (198). Some critics compare Evans to other important writers of the Black Arts Movement, including dramatists Ed Bullins and Ntozake Shange, as well as poets Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. Other critics, including Joyce Joyce and John Reilly, contrast Evans’s

MARI EVANS

189

poems to those of Gwendolyn Brooks, since both poets attempt to characterize blackness. Lucille Clifton also explores the multiple meanings of ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘woman.’’ Frequently, Evans links words together as a way of heightening their definitions: ‘‘saffronbrown’’ (‘‘Apologia,’’ 1970) and ‘‘fakefurred’’ (‘‘Maria Pina & The B & G Grill,’’ 1981). This avant-garde technique connects her to e.e. cummings, a modernist poet who also combined words for poetic effect. Her attention to the visual and tonal effects of her poems shows the inter-movement influence within Black Arts between Evans, Ishmael Reed, Welton Smith, and others. Like the writer Toi Derricotte, Evans prefers selfdefinition to societal definition, particularly in terms of race and gender, and like the poet Ai, Evans uses dramatic personae to explore universal emotions and common social conflicts. Borrowing rhythms from the blues and jazz has a long history within African American poetry, from Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to Evans to Michael S. Harper and Kevin Young. The versification of racial pride, rather than technical innovation, will be Evans’s lasting literary legacy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Mari Evans Children’s Books The Day They Made Biriyani (1982). Dear Corinne, Tell Somebody! Love, Annie: A Book about Secrets. East Orange, NJ: Just Us Books, 1999. I Look at Me! Chicago: Third World Books, 1974. J.D. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Jim Flying High. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Rap Stories (1974). Singing Black: Alternative Nursery Rhymes for Children. East Orange, NJ: Just Us Books, 1998.

Critical Work Edited by Mari Evans Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor, 1983.

Films and Television Shows The Black Experience (1968–1973). Remembering Langston: 1968 (1968).

Nonfiction/Prose ‘‘Blackness: A Definition.’’ Negro Digest 19 (November 1969): 19–21. Clarity as Concept: A Poet’s Perspective. Chicago: Third World Press, 2005. ‘‘Contemporary Black Literature.’’ Black World 19 ( June 1970): 4, 93–94. ‘‘Ethos and Creativity.’’ In Where We Live: Essays about Indiana, edited by David Hoppe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. ‘‘My Father’s Passage.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1983.

Poetry A Dark and Splendid Mass. New York: Writers, 1992. I Am a Black Woman. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1970.

190

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Nightstar: 1973–1978. Irvine: University of California Center for Afro-American Studies, 1981. Where Is All the Music? London: P. Breman, 1968.

Plays and Musicals Boochie (1979) Eyes (1979) Glide and Sons (1979) Portrait of Man (1979) River of My Song (1977)

Studies of Mari Evans’s Works Dorsey, David. ‘‘The Art of Mari Evans.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 170–89. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Edwards, Solomon. ‘‘Affirmation in the Works of Mari Evans.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950– 1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 190–200. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Joyce, Joyce, and John Reilly. ‘‘Mari Evans.’’ Heath Anthology Online Instructors Guide. http:// college.hmco.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/evans.html (accessed May 30, 2005). Peppers, Wallace M. ‘‘Mari Evans.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: AfroAmerican Poets Since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 117–23. Detroit: Gale Group, 1985. Reuben, Paul P. ‘‘Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century, 1945 to the Present—Mari Evans.’’ PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—A Research and Reference Guide. http://www.csustan .edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/evans.html (accessed May 21, 2005). Sedlack, Robert P. ‘‘Mari Evans: Consciousness and Craft.’’ College Language Association Journal 15 (1972): 465–76.

Jessica Allen

SARAH WEBSTER FABIO (1928–1979)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet, literary critic, and educator Sarah Fabio was born on January 20, 1928, in Nashville, Tennessee. She attended Fisk University, graduating in 1946. While there, she married Cyril Fabio, and the couple went on to have children and eventually the family settled in California. In 1965, Sarah earned a master’s degree from San Francisco State College. She then went on to a number of teaching positions, first at Merritt College in Oakland, a focal point of the seminal Black Power Movement. Her involvement in the movement led her to push for African American literature courses being part of the college curriculum. She would later teach at California College of Arts and Crafts, at the University of California at Berkeley (where she created the Black Studies department), and, following her 1972 divorce, at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she stayed until 1974. In 1976, while teaching and studying at the University of Wisconsin, she was diagnosed with colon cancer; consequently, she returned to California to stay with her daughter until her death on November 7, 1979. MAJOR WORKS Fabio’s most significant work is Rainbow Signs, her 1973 collection of poetry comprising seven volumes. Like many of her other works, Rainbow Signs addresses a key theme: the need for negotiating the gap between the language of the dominant culture and ‘‘the Black mother-tongue’’ which she feels is ‘‘a possible, effective, poetic language’’ that reflects the African American experience (‘‘A Black Paper’’ 76). Jujus:Alchemy of the Blues, the first volume of Rainbow Signs, emphasizes this struggle by placing two versions of the same poem on facing pages: one in standard English and one in dialect. She is also known for blending Western and non-Western literary metaphors and Western metaphors and the reality of black experience. In addition to her poetry, Fabio also wrote a play (M.L. King Pageant) and several essays. These works tend to focus on overcoming racism and the move from slave to self. In ‘‘Tripping with Black Writing,’’ for instance, she speaks of the need for writing to encompass ‘‘the Black man, his articulation of his experience, and his selfhood’’ (187). CRITICAL RECEPTION A very small body of critical response exists, as Fabio’s work was seldom reviewed or commented on. In a largely favorable review of A Mirror: A Soul, Johari Amini praises the poems for addressing ‘‘the blkexperience of blkpeople’’ [sic]; he further praises their aurality because they have been produced ‘‘to sound like [African Americans] sound’’ (74). In a tribute appearing in the Black Scholar following her death, Carl Mack, Jr., deems her a ‘‘dynamic force in the black studies and black poetry movements of the 1960s and 1970s’’ (84).

192

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Sarah Webster Fabio Black Back: Back Black. Oberlin, OH: n.p., 1973. ‘‘‘Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement.’ ’’ Black World 19 (December 1970): 102–4. Black Images/Black Resurrection. San Francisco: Julian Richardson, n.d. ‘‘The Black Intellectual and the Crisis in Education in the U.S.A.’’ In Black Writers and Their Writing 22–24 Jan 1971. The Ishmael Reed Papers. University of Delaware Library. Black Is/A Panther Caged. San Francisco: Julian Richardson, n.d. ‘‘A Black Paper: An Essay on Literature.’’ Negro Digest 18 ( July 1969): 27ff. ‘‘Black Writer’s Views on Literary Lions and Values.’’ Negro Digest 17 ( January 1968): 39. Boss Soul. Oberlin, OH: n.p., 1973. Boss Soul. Sound recording. Folkways, 1972. Dark Debut: Three Women Coming. N.p.: n.p., 1966. Dark Symphony in Duet: A Celebration of the Word; Seascapes, Love Poems, Tributes, Portraits, Black Talk, Africana. With Thomas L. Gayton. Seattle: University of Washington Black Studies Program, 1979. Ed. Double Dozens: An Anthology of Poets from Sterling Brown to Kali. N.p.: n.p., 1966. Jujus: Alchemy of the Blues. Oberlin, OH: n.p., 1973. Jujus: Alchemy of the Blues. Sound recording. Folkways, 1976. Jujus and Jubilees: Critical Essays in Rhyme about Poets/Musicians/Black Heroes. Oberlin, OH: n.p., 1973. ‘‘Language Arts and Black Bi-Lingualism.’’ Curriculum Study Commission, Central California Council of Teachers of English September 26–28, 1969. A Mirror: A Soul, a Two-part Volume of Poems. San Francisco: J. Richardson, 1969. M.L. King Pageant. N.p.: n.p., 1967. My Own Thing. Oberlin, OH: n.p., 1973. Night Sounds and Other Poems. M.A. thesis, San Francisco State College, 1965. No Crystal Stair: A Socio-Drama of the History of Black Women in the U.S.A. N.p.: n.p., 1967. Race Results, USA, 1966. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1967. Rainbow Signs. 7 vols. N.p.: Phase II, 1973. Saga of the Black Man. Oakland: n.p., 1968. Soul Ain’t; Soul Is: The Hurt of It All. Oberlin, OH: n.p., 1973. Soul Ain’t; Soul Is. Sound recording. Folkways, 1973. Together/To the Tune of Coltrane’s ‘‘Equinox.’’ Oberlin, OH: n.p., 1973. Together/To the Tune of Coltrane’s ‘‘Equinox.’’ Sound recording. Folkways, 1977. ‘‘Tripping with Black Writing.’’ In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., 182–91. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971. ‘‘Who Speaks Negro? What Is Black?’’ Negro Digest 17 (September–October 1968): 33–37.

Studies of Sarah Webster Fabio’s Works Jones, Meta DuEwa. ‘‘Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality.’’ Callaloo 25 (Winter 2002): 66–91. Mack, Carl, Jr. ‘‘In Memoriam Sarah Webster Fabio—1928–1979.’’ Black Scholar 11 (1979): 84. Rainbow Black: Poet Sarah Fabio. Berkeley: University of California Extension Media Center, 1993. Ward, Jerry W. ‘‘Reading South: Poets Mean and Poets Signify—A Note on Origins.’’ African American Review 27 (Spring 1993): 125–26.

Richard A. Iadonisi

JESSIE REDMON FAUSET (1882–1961)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born on April 27, 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey, Jessie Redmon Fauset, the youngest of seven children, was a writer, critic, editor, and teacher. Also a highly educated member of DuBois’s ‘‘Talented Tenth,’’ Fauset graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University and was fluent in French and well read in British, French, and African American literature. From 1919 to 1926, Fauset served as the literary editor of the Crisis, the journal of the civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She was hired as the Crisis’s literary editor to ‘‘promote this first flush of artistic endeavor [and] proved an astute and responsive advocate of others’ work. As [literary] editor, Fauset published (some for the first time) those writers who went on to become the most prominent figures of the Harlem movement— [including Claude McKay, Anne Spencer, and Langston Hughes]’’ (McDowell x). As a patron of the Harlem Renaissance, Fauset published other artists and helped develop ‘‘their literary careers by championing their work’’ (Knopf xxvii). Additionally, she was also known for hosting social gatherings in her home which facilitated discussions of poetry and literature and conversations in French. As a result of her ‘‘high-society’’ profile, contemporary impressions of Fauset’s birth and upbringing have erroneously described her as hailing from an aristocratic (or at least prosperous) family. However, Fauset came from a large and very poor family. Her parents, Redmon Fauset and Annie Seamon Fauset, had seven children and, after her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage to a widow with three children of her own, another three children were born to her father and stepmother. In spite of this, Fauset’s family was educated and cultured and her father, an outspoken Methodist Episcopal minister, instilled in her the desire to achieve success. With her family environment, combined with her own astuteness, Fauset performed very well in the Philadelphia Public School and the Philadelphia High School for Girls, which was well known for its high academic performers. An honor student in high school, Fauset applied to Bryn Mawr College which denied her admission because of her race, but the College sought out a scholarship on her behalf from Cornell University where Fauset attended and, in 1905, graduated with honors. After earning her B.A. degree, Fauset taught briefly in Baltimore and then in Washington, D.C., at the M Street High School from 1905 to 1919. In 1919, she earned an M.A. in French from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1919, Fauset began to focus on her literary aspirations when she moved to New York and worked as the literary editor of the Crisis magazine (1919–1926). She also started writing her own fiction and contributing reviews, stories, and essays to the magazine. During this time, she cofounded (with W.E.B. DuBois) and edited the Brownies Book: A Monthly Magazine for the Children of the Sun (1920–1921). This publication, which featured historical biographies of prominent black people and other educational articles, is noteworthy, as Fauset’s desire to teach children about their heritage also informs themes and characters in her novels. Additionally, beginning in 1924,

194

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

with her first novel, There Is Confusion, Fauset, who was the most prolific writer of the New Negro movement, went on to publish ‘‘more novels than any of the other writers and won the respect of the white literary establishment (they gave her an autograph party at Macy’s, the first Black to have this honor)’’ (Shockley 410). After the publication of her first novel, Fauset studied for six months at the Sorbonne, University of Paris beginning in 1925, and her interest in French literature and travel abroad can be seen in characters and settings in her novels, especially her female characters, who ‘‘journey through life, comparing the limitations put upon them as women of color with the comparable ‘‘freedom’’ they encounter in foreign settings’’ (Griffin 77). This tension is especially predominant in Fauset’s last novel Comedy: American Style (1933). Fauset also published two other novels, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1929) and The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931). After leaving the Crisis, Fauset taught mainly at DeWitt Clinton High School from 1927 to 1944, and then briefly at Hampton Institute from September 1949 to January 1950. During this time, she also lectured, traveled, and wrote poetry. In 1929, she married Herbert Harris, an insurance broker with whom she lived in Montclair, New Jersey, until his death in 1958, after which she moved to Philadelphia with her stepbrother Earl Huff until her own death on April 30, 1961. MAJOR WORKS There Is Confusion, inspired by the publication of T. S. Stribling’s Birthright (1922) which depicted a stereotypical account of the ‘‘tragic mulatto,’’ set out to convey a more realistic story of black life including light-skinned, educated blacks whom Fauset and other blacks felt were misrepresented in fictional accounts by whites. The novel is one of her most critically acclaimed, and, like all of her works, attempts to challenge prevailing sociopolitical myths about black people—including the belief in a monolithic black culture—and specifically focuses on women’s physical and psychological reactions to the dual oppressions of race and gender in their lives. The novel focuses on two families, the Marshalls of New York and the Byes of Philadelphia. The Marshall family represents a generation of blacks who have transcended slavery to become middle class, while the Bye family involves generations of freeborn Philadelphia blacks who possess merely a ‘‘strain of white blood.’’ In a reversal of the established racial order in other literary works, in Fauset’s novel, the ‘‘white blood’’ is depicted as being responsible for the faults of Bye family members, including Peter Bye, the man whom Joanna Marshall marries at the novel’s conclusion. Fauset uses these two families to stress the significance of racial heritage, including the interconnectedness between blacks and whites. As Thadious M. Davis suggests, ‘‘In tracing the complex connections between the black and white Bye families . . . [Fauset] dramatizes recurrent problems of miscegenation, obscured paternity, denial of birthright, and burdens of inherited guilt, which would preoccupy later novelists, such as William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom!’’ (xi). In There Is Confusion, Fauset, seemingly informed by her life experiences, revises the tale of the tragic mulatto and, moreover, expands roles for women through her female characters. For example, the plot reflects Fauset’s upbringing, as its protagonist, Joanna Marshall, desires independence and career success but, with the influence of her mother, does not do so at the expense of devaluing domesticity: Marshall is ambitious and determined—she wants to be an artist and an influential black person—but also chooses to marry at the novel’s conclusion. Thus, while the novel concludes with Joanna’s

JESSIE REDMON FAUSET

195

commitment to starting a family, as a young girl, when she requests to hear a ‘‘story’’ about ‘‘somebody great,’’she tells her father, ‘‘like I’m going to be when I get to be a big girl’’ (9). This focus on a black woman’s attempt to overcome obstacles of race and gender represents a theme in the work overall, wherein the narrative expresses more than just ‘‘a child’s individual desires; she expresses the long-suppressed dreams of her father, and by extension, of other former slaves’’ (Davis xi). Although a flawed character ( Joanna is both confident and elitist), she works to overcome obstacles and experiences a measure of success in a career as an artist and an influential individual: as the narrator explains, ‘‘Joanna was mightily interested in people who had a ‘purpose’ in life’’ (16). The novel also explores the experiences of and connections between black women across class lines as another woman, Maggie Ellersley, is the hardworking daughter of a laundress and boarding house operator, but desires to transcend what she perceives as a ‘‘dreary existence’’ of domestic work. Through her successful accomplishments as a working woman, Maggie also represents expanded career choices for black women as she uses her skills to become a bookkeeper for the Marshall family’s catering business, a manager of several beauty shops, and, later, a YMCA worker caring for injured soldiers in France. Eventually, Maggie abandons her career and marries Joanna’s brother Phillip, who has been portrayed as a DuBoisian character in his desire to play a leadership role in uplifting black people. His dreams are thwarted, however, after his injuries from serving in World War I leave him in a debilitated condition, from which he succumbs shortly after his marriage to Maggie. The marriage itself, nonetheless, reflects both characters’ desire for purposeful lives including Maggie’s need to care for others. For example, at one point in the narrative, Maggie expresses her desire for the respectability of home and marriage when she poses this query to another character: ‘‘‘can’t you see that I want to be safe like other women, with a home and protection?’ ’’ (193). Given this, while her marriage at first seems to suggest Fauset’s capitulation to impulses contrary to expanding gender opportunities for women, Peter’s death frees Maggie to return to her career in business while also giving her an opportunity to have a purposeful life. Overall, these African American women, from different socioeconomic classes, demonstrate the similar gender struggles that African American women experience in their attempts to overcome obstacles of racial oppression, with the additional component of class discrimination. In her second—and most popular novel—Plum Bun, Fauset uses the figure of the mulatto and the passing motif to explore the effects of passing, ultimately demonstrating its disastrous implications. As Jacqueline Y. McLendon argues, Fauset attempts to show that ‘‘[blacks’] very belief in the necessity of passing—of attempting to escape the racialized body—is a legacy of slavery’’ (29). Angela Murray, the protagonist of Plum Bun, influenced by her mother’s occasional passing for economic and social gains, develops the illusory belief that if she constructs herself to fit into ideals of the typical wealthy white man, she will succeed in gaining a secure and happy station in life. Accordingly, she desires to marry Roger Fielding, a white man, with whom marriage would represent the achievement of a fairy-tale life that her childhood experiences have nurtured in her. Ironically, her plan actually backfires, as her decision to follow this pattern actually closes opportunities for her to realize her desires of home and family. In the process, Angela experiences complete alienation from her family, particularly her dark-skinned sister Jinny. Moreover, Fielding ultimately betrays Angela, stealing her virtue without any consideration of marriage. His rejection, which correlates with

196

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Angela’s complete loss of all of her material comforts, brings her back to her race as the novel concludes with Angela’s exile to Paris where she works to be self-reliant and vows that ‘‘so far as sides are concerned, I am on the coloured [sic] side’’ (49). In The Chinaberry Tree, a novel with a smaller audience than her first two works, Fauset continues her exploration of race, gender, and class as this narrative focuses on female characters who seek to subvert the existing racial and sexual hierarchies which Fauset exposes as systems of oppression operating in black women’s lives. Set in the early twentieth century in Red Brook, New Jersey, the novel centers on protagonist Melissa Paul, who seeks upward mobility through the attainment of marriage and a ‘‘traditional’’ family. Her quest is complicated by her attempts at reconciling the sexual histories of her mother and other female relatives in the novel. Indeed, a major theme and strength of the novel is Fauset’s ability to bring together the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between black women’s sexual freedom and respectability as the novel explores women’s sexuality and their endeavors to maintain control over their bodies, a narratological move which critics have recognized as radical for the historical period in which the work appears. As Deborah McDowell argues, ‘‘Fauset introduced several topics into her novels that were hardly typical drawing room conversation topics in the mid-1920s. Promiscuity, exploitative sexual affairs, miscegenation, even incest appear in her novels’’ (‘‘The Neglected’’ 87). For example, in The Chinaberry Tree, Fauset depicts black women’s sexuality in ‘‘illicit’’ affairs with both white and black men while allowing characters such as Melissa to explore traditional, ‘‘respectable’’ relationships. Ultimately, although Melissa initially believes that a traditional relationship should be intraracial, she later understands the freedom associated with one’s ability to make decisions about sexual partners or husbands and realizes how racism and gender conditioning have historically oppressed black women in their control of their own bodies and destinies. In Fauset’s final and perhaps most neglected work, Comedy: American Style, the author expands her concern with the psychological effects of race and sex oppression on black women’s lives as this novel depicts its heroine, Olivia Cary, as the ultimate example of destructive self-hatred and classist behavior, for her intense color-mania brings about a series of events which culminate in her darker-skinned son’s suicide and the eventual loss of her entire family, including her own exile to Paris. In this way, the novel is the most poignant example of Fauset’s intraracial social commentary as it illustrates the tragic effects of the black community’s internalization of white racist beliefs. Indeed, rather than reflect the effects of white racial discrimination on the lives of blacks, Comedy focuses exclusively on the demise of the northern Cary family, brought about by their rejection of black cultural traditions and more democratic notions of uplift. Like her other novels, Comedy clearly demonstrates the inevitable deconstruction of the African American family when its members seek distinction based on hierarchies of color, class, and financial standing in an effort to assimilate and integrate into society with whites. Olivia’s reaction to the birth of her very-light-skinned daughter, Teresa, exemplifies Olivia’s obsession with white skin and desire to escape her race: ‘‘It seemed to her that the tenuous bonds holding her ever so slightly to her group, and its station in America, were perceptibly weakened. Every time she appeared in public with the little girl she was presenting the incontestable proof of her white womanhood’’ (37). A critique of the African American middle class’s obsessions with color and class, Comedy satirizes its heroine, depicting her as a villainous race-traitor who destroys her entire family in an attempt to escape her racial heritage.

JESSIE REDMON FAUSET

197

CRITICAL RECEPTION Initially, Fauset’s novels received mixed reviews, and although critical attention to the Renaissance has brought about more awareness of Fauset and her works, she was initially (and to some extent still) judged as conservative even by those critics who demonstrated interest in her work. Early critical readings, for example, concentrate narrowly on Fauset’s depiction of African American middle-class characters without attention to her more subversive motives. As Deborah McDowell has observed, ‘‘even Fauset’s most charitable readers have generally concluded that she was simply an apologist for the African American middle class, and that her most important role in the Harlem Renaissance was that of a midwife’’ (Introduction ix). Thus, in his From the Dark Tower: Afro American Writers 1900–1960 (1974), Arthur P. Davis’s criticizes Fauset, calling her ‘‘the most prolific, and in many ways the most representative of [the] glorifiers of the Negro middle class,’’ and There Is Confusion her ‘‘fullest and most representative novel’’ because it renders ‘‘more of the typical attitudes and shibboleths held by the New Negro middle class of the 1920s than any of her others’’ (92). Recently, scholars have begun to recognize and appreciate the political dimensions of Fauset’s work, exposing Fauset’s promotion of the African American middle class and her sentimental style as subversive, arguing for example, as does Marcy Jane Knopf, that ‘‘Fauset uses sentimentalism to do political work in her fiction . . . to mask a discussion of the plight of black women and to prove that blacks were just as cultured as whites’’; Knopf, moreover, praises Fauset for ‘‘master[ing] the conventions of the sentimental novel and disrupt[ing] them by examining the intersection of race and sex’’ (xi). Still, while current critics have begun giving Fauset’s works more positive critical attention, ambivalence still exists within the overall body of Fauset scholarship, as even Deborah McDowell, who places Fauset ‘‘among the early black feminists in Afro-American literary history,’’ writes that ‘‘a curious problem in Fauset’s treatment of feminist issues, however, is her patent ambivalence’’ (‘‘The Neglected’’ 88). She argues: ‘‘She is alternately forthright and cagey, alternately ‘radical’ and conservative on the ‘woman question.’ ’’ Similar to many Fauset scholars, however, McDowell’s critique is positive overall, particularly with regard to Fauset’s exploration of the double bind of race and gender for African American women. As McDowell ultimately concludes, Fauset was a ‘‘quiet rebel,’’ who had ‘‘strains of feminism’’ at work in her fiction but may have been constrained because of her awareness of gender discrimination in the publishing and critical arenas (‘‘The Neglected’’ 99). Other contemporary critics praise the feminist principles in Fauset’s works. As Carolyn Wedin Sylvander, whose work Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black American Writer (1981) is the first (and only) book-length study of Fauset and the most comprehensive study of Fauset’s life and writings has suggested, ‘‘Fauset’s strength may lie in her unobtrusive presentation of alternatives for defining the black American woman: more exploratory than dogmatic, more searching than protesting’’ (‘‘Jessie Redmon Fauset’’ 85). Importantly, following Sylvander’s work on Fauset, a small cadre of other booklength studies have included Fauset in their analysis of her and several other early twentieth-century women writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Thus, while no other book-length studies focus solely on Fauset, those that consider her alongside several of her contemporaries are recuperating Fauset and revising negative readings of her works. One example is the excellent study by Jacquelyn Y. McLendon (mentioned previously). Throughout her work, McLendon revises criticism of Fauset’s

198

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

uses of the mulatto figure, passing, and her focus on the middle class, which have often been read as negative and limiting. Instead, she explores, for example, the mulatto figure as a necessary device to oppose race, gender, and class discrimination. In this way, McLendon’s work offers a new paradigm to read Fauset’s works and expands the limitations imposed by repeated accounts of the author’s seeming conservatism, providing the type of insightful analysis of Fauset’s novels needed to continue sustained and substantial critical attention to this important author. Moreover, such literary scholarship helps refocus attention on Fauset’s use of the African American middle class as subjects, which is indeed timely in the context of current highly contested debates regarding the African American middle class’s seeming desire for class distinction in order to attain social and political equality. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Jessie Redmon Fauset ‘‘As to Books.’’ Review of Birthright, by T. S. Stribling. Crisis 24 ( June 1022): 66. The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1931. Reprint, College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing, 1969. The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life and Selected Writings. New Foreword by Marcy Jane Knopf. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Comedy: American Style. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1933. Reprint, College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing, 1969. Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929. Reprint, Boston: Pandora, 1985. There Is Confusion. N.p.: Boni & Liveright, 1924. Reprint, Boston: Beacon, 1989.

Studies of Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Works Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Maria Bonner. New York: Garland, 1998. Batker, Carol J. ‘‘‘An ‘‘Honest-to-God’’ American’: Patriotism, Foreignness, and Domesticity in Jessie Fauset’s Fiction.’’ In Reforming Fictions: Native, African, and Jewish American Women’s Literature and Journalism in the Progressive Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Calloway, Licia Morrow. Black Family (Dys)Function in Novels by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Fannie Hurst. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro American Writers 1900–1960. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974. Davis, Thadious M. ‘‘Foreword.’’ In There Is Confusion (1924), edited by Jessie Redmon Fauset. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. du Cille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Griffin, Erica L. ‘‘The ‘Invisible Woman’ Abroad: Jessie Fauset’s New Horizon.’’ In Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Women’s Literature, edited and introduced by Dolan Hubbard. Knoxville: Tennessee University Press, 1997. Johnson, Abbey A. ‘‘Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance,’’ Phylon 34 ( June 1978): 153. Jones, Sharon L. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

JESSIE REDMON FAUSET

199

Knopf, Marcy Jane. ‘‘Foreword.’’ In The Chinaberry Tree and Selected Writings, edited by Jessie Fauset. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Levinson, Susan. ‘‘Performance and the ‘Strange Place’ of Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There is Confusion.’’ Modern Fiction Studies 46.4 (Winter 2000): 825–48. Lewis, Vashti Crutcher. ‘‘Mulatto Hegemony in the Novels of Jessie Redmon Fauset.’’ CLA Journal 35.4 ( June 1992): 375–86. McDowell, Deborah. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1929), edited by Jessie Fauset. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. ———. ‘‘The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset.’’ In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1995. Miller, Nina. ‘‘Femininity, Publicity, and the Class Divisions of Cultural Labor: Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion.’’ African American Review 30.2 (Summer 1996): 205–20. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. New York: New American Library, 1989. Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. ‘‘Jessie Redmon Fauset.’’ In The Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 51, pp. 76–86. Detroit: Gale, 1987. ———. Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black American Writer. Troy, NY: Whitson, 1981. Tomlinson, Susan. ‘‘‘An Unwanted Coquetry’: The Commercial Seductions of Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree.’’ In Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s, edited and introduced by Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003.

Joy R. Myree-Mainor

CAROLYN FERRELL (1962– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Short story writer Carolyn Ferrell was born to an African American father and a German mother in Brooklyn, New York and raised on Long Island. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1984 with a B.A. in creative writing. Ferrell then moved to Germany, teaching high school with the support of a Fulbright Scholarship while playing violin in several orchestras. In 1988 she returned to New York City where she taught adult literacy in the South Bronx and earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. In 1994, Ferrell’s story, ‘‘Proper Library’’ was selected for The Best Short Stories of 1994 and was later reprinted in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Her first book, Don’t Erase Me, a collection of eight short stories, received the 1997 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, the Ploughshares Zacharis Award, and the 1998 Quality Paperbacks New Voices award. Her stories have appeared in Callaloo, Fiction, the Literary Review, Ploughshares, and Sojourner: The Women’s Forum and numerous anthologies. In 2004, she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for prose fiction. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the City University of New York (writing a dissertation on Caribbean, South African, and black German feminist writers), Ferrell teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and is at work on a novel set on Long Island. MAJOR WORKS The stories in Don’t Erase Me are a set of loosely connected, sparely contextualized vignettes each of which hugs the consciousness of a different teenage narrator. Many of the landscapes follow the trail of Ferrell’s own experience—the South Bronx, suburban Long Island, and Germany. The narrators include Lorrie Adams, a gay teenager who has been left back several times in school, even while he teaches younger children out of a math textbook for a class he has not been allowed to enter; an HIV-positive woman whose story unfolds through diary entries running backward in time; high school friends Toya and Bri who are deciding, ‘‘should we have babies or become junior-year cheerleaders?’’ (71); Glory, an alienated transfer student who endures bullying at a suburban school; Hannah, an almost teenager staying with her mother and siblings in a Laguna Beach hotel after her parents had fought; Florence, an African American woman (with one German parent) spending time with extended family in Germany, sent there after graduation by her mother to cut short a high school relationship. Generically, the dense and dreamy inner lives of Ferrell’s introspective teenagers mark a striking departure from the gritty realism frequently employed to represent urban life. Ferrell’s stories explore with great intimacy the everyday lives of ‘‘teenagers who usually don’t see themselves reflected in teen magazines or mainstream U.S. culture’’ (Dobosz 90).

CAROLYN FERRELL

201

CRITICAL RECEPTION Published to considerable critical acclaim, Ferrell’s stories have struck many critics for their subtle and sensitive characterization. ‘‘She inhabits her characters fully, body and soul,’’ writes Elizabeth Searle. Michelle Cliff describes the character-rich texture of Ferrell’s work as a ‘‘chorus of voices, each story with its own, unique soloist, presented on its own terms’’ (Cliff 65). Ferrell’s style, punctuated by graceful and resonant neologisms and orchestrated with a ‘‘keen ear and playful sense of speech rhythms,’’ is described by several critics as taking on the density of prose poetry generating a sense of immersion that ‘‘deftly drops her readers into another world’’ (Whitemore 26) and ‘‘allows the reader entry into her characters’ lives . . . making the reader listen to voices that speak with subtlety and clarity’’ (Cliff 65). BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Carolyn Ferrell Ferrell, Carolyn. Don’t Erase Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Studies of Carolyn Ferrell’s Work Cliff, Michelle. ‘‘Urban Renewal.’’ Village Voice 42.38 (September 23, 1997): 65. Dobosz, Ann Marie. Rev. of Don’t Erase Me. Ms 8.1 ( July–August 1997): 90. Lee, Don. ‘‘Carolyn Ferrell, Zacharis Award.’’ Ploughshares (Winter 1997–1998): 222–24. Mayo, Kierna. ‘‘Finding Spirit in Troubled Lives.’’ Emerge 8.8 ( June 1997): 84–85. Searle, Elizabeth. Rev. of Don’t Erase Me. Ploughshares 23.2/3 (Fall 1997): 226–27. Steinberg, Sybil. Rev. of Don’t Erase Me. Publishers Weekly 244.16 (April 21, 1997): 59. Whitemore, Katharine. ‘‘Phrasemaker in the City.’’ New York Times Book Review, September 14, 1997, 26.

Alex Feerst

JULIA FIELDS (1938– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A teacher, short fiction writer, poet, and dramatist, Julia Fields also wrote and produced a play titled All Day Tomorrow (1966). She was born in Perry County, Alabama. A preacher’s kid, she grew up on a farm. Nature and writers such as William Shakespeare and Robert Burns contributed to her early influences. At sixteen, she published her first poem in Scholastic Magazine. While at Knoxville College, two of her poems were published in Beyond the Blues (1962) (Burger 124). Julia Fields’s formal education included a bachelor’s degree in English from Knoxville College in Tennessee and a master’s degree in English from Middlebury College in Vermont. Following her residency with the racially mixed Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fields traveled to England and Scotland, where she studied at the University of Edinburgh (Burger 125). She later taught at several high schools and colleges, the latter of which included Hampton Institute and Howard University. Julia Fields’s volumes of poems include Poems (1968), East of Moonlight (1973), A Summoning, A Shining (1976), and Slow Coins (1981) (Burger 123). Fields also published the children’s book, The Green Lion of Zion Street (1988) (Behrmann 96). Like her poems, Fields published short fiction in Negro Digest, Black World, and Callaloo. Her poems also appeared in Langston Hughes’s New Negro Poets, USA (1964), Robert Hayden’s Kaleidoscope (1967), and R. Baird Shuman’s Nine Black Poets (1968) (Burger 125). This nonrevolutionary 1960s writer published a short story titled ‘‘Not Your Singing Dancing Spade’’ (1967), which elicited critical response. MAJOR WORKS Fields’s most well known works are the short story ‘‘Not Your Singing Dancing Spade’’ and the poem ‘‘High on the Hog.’’ ‘‘Not Your Singing Dancing Spade’’ examines challenges related to identity and color; while ‘‘High on the Hog’’ focuses on consumption and citizenship. In the poem the speaker uses food as an extended metaphor to suggest that having survived enslavement and its aftermath, she possesses the right to consume whatever she desires; that is, she possesses all the rights and privileges of American citizenship. CRITICAL RECEPTION Described as a little-known writer, Julia Fields’s works have received little critical attention (Redmond 318); however, her poems ‘‘High on the Hog’’ and ‘‘Testimonials’’ elicited positive responses. For ‘‘High on the Hog’’ and ‘‘Not Your Singing Dancing Spade,’’ Fields received the Seventh Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Fund Award in 1972 (Burger 127). Writer Clarence Major affirms that Fields’s work demands respect and praises her skillful use of imagery (42). Likewise, in their mixed review of The Green

JULIA FIELDS

203

Lion of Zion Street (1988), Christine Behrmann and Trevelyn Jones praise Fields’s use of imagery but suggest that her juxtaposing informal and formal diction creates an obvious tension in the work (96). Nevertheless, Fields’s works, overall, reflect a propensity for truth. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Julia Fields ‘‘August Heat.’’ Callaloo 4 (October 1978): 37–45. East of Moonlight. Charlotte: Red Clay Books, 1973. ‘‘The Green of Langston’s Ivy.’’ Negro Digest 16 (September 1967): 58–59. The Green Lion of Zion Street. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 1988. ‘‘The Hypochondriac.’’ Negro Digest 17 ( July 1968): 61–65. ‘‘No Great Honor.’’ Black World 19 ( June 1970). ‘‘Not Your Singing Dancing Spade.’’ Negro Digest 16 (February 1967): 54–59. ‘‘The Plot to Bring Back Dunking.’’ Black World 22 (August 1973): 64–71. Poems. Millbrook, NY: Kriya Press, 1968. Slow Coins. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1981. ‘‘Ten to Seven.’’ Negro Digest 15 ( July 1966): 79–81.

Studies of Julia Fields’s Works Behrmann, Christine, and Trevelyn E. Jones. Rev. of The Green Lion of Zion Street by Julia Fields. School Library Journal 34.9 (May 1988): 96. Broussard, Mercedese. ‘‘Blake’s Bard.’’ Rev. of A Summoning, A Shining by Julia Fields. Callaloo 1 (December 1976): 60–62. Burger, Mary Williams. ‘‘Julia Fields.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 41, AfroAmerican Poets Since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 123–31. Detroit: Gale, 1985. Hauke, Kathleen A. ‘‘Julia Fields.’’ In The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 140–41. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Major, Clarence. The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. New York: Third Press, 1974. Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: a Critical History. New York: Anchor Press, 1976. Rexroth, Kenneth. ‘‘New American Poets.’’ Harpers ( June 1965): 65–71.

Jacqueline Imani Bryant

JULIA A. J. FOOTE (1823–1900)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Autobiographer Julia A. J. Foote was born in Schenectady, New York, four years before that state abolished slavery in 1827. Her father was born free, but kidnapped and sold into slavery. Her mother was born a slave, and her stories of abuse had a profound impact on her daughter. Eventually Foote’s father managed to buy his freedom as well as the freedom of his wife and first child. Foote would be the fourth of eight children. Foote’s father, the only literate member of her family, taught her the alphabet using the family Bible. When she was ten, Foote was hired as a domestic servant by a nearby white family, the Primes. Foote initially regarded Mrs. Prime as a surrogate mother. However, when her mistress falsely accused her of stealing food and whipped her with a rawhide especially purchased for the task, despite her protestations of innocence, Foote angrily dissociated herself from such white hypocrisy. Foote remained with this family for two years and received her only extended formal education at a country school. She was greatly affected by the execution of her schoolteacher, John van Paten, for the murder of his fiance´e’s best friend. Foote later became an opponent of capital punishment. Foote returned to her parents in Albany to care for her younger siblings, and at age fifteen she was converted. At age eighteen Foote married a sailor, George Foote—her maiden name is unknown—and moved with him to Boston. By her early twenties Foote had received sanctification (a belief that she was free of sin and able to achieve spiritual perfection) and a call to preach. Both her mother and husband vehemently opposed her public preaching. Her mother told Foote she would rather hear of her daughter’s death than her exposure at the pulpit. Her husband threatened to commit her to an insane asylum. Foote persisted in her ministry, and her husband returned to sea. Having no children, the couple lived separate lives until his death in the mid-1850s. Foote traveled as a preacher from 1845 to the mid-1850s, covering territory ranging from Canada to Ohio. Troubles with her throat forced her into temporary retirement until the late 1860s. When her health improved she returned to the circuit, participating in the religious awakening that swept the Midwest after the Civil War. In 1879 and 1886, respectively, her spiritual autobiography, A Brand Plucked from the Fire, was published and reprinted. In 1894 she became the first woman deacon of the A.M.E. Zion Church and later its second woman elder. She died on November 22, 1900. MAJOR WORK Julia Foote is the author of only one work, A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879). It borrows from two distinct genres: the fiery rhetoric and politicism of the African American slave narrative (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano) and the

JULIA A. J. FOOTE

205

introspection and evangelism of American spiritual narratives (Michael Wigglesworth, Mary Rowlandson, Elizabeth Hudson, Ann Moore). Foote attacks America for its racism and harsh treatment of African Americans in the chapters ‘‘An Undeserved Whipping’’ and ‘‘Indignities on Account of Color.’’ However, Foote is primarily interested in defending her call to preach and encouraging other women who have a vocation. (See chapters 17 and 28: ‘‘My Call to Preach’’ and ‘‘A Word to My Christian Sisters.’’) Foote makes her goal clear in her Preface: ‘‘My object has been to testify more extensively to the sufficiency of the blood of Jesus Christ to save all from sin.’’ Foote’s autobiography is relatively spare; for example, little attention is given to her siblings or her marriage. Instead, Foote retains her focus on the events and people who influenced her development as a preacher. The title for her work comes from Zechariah 3:2. Chanta Haywood concludes that the title asserts Foote’s subjectivity and authority as a writer and preacher. She explains, ‘‘[b]y identifying herself as a brand, Foote portrays herself as a legitimate, self-acknowledged subject’’ (49–50). Thematically, this spiritual autobiography is chiefly concerned with persecution and salvation. As a woman writer, furthermore, Foote imbues her text with themes of woman’s place in a patriarchal society and the pursuit of identity. Her travels as a minister supply a questing motif to the text.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Foote’s autobiography has received a fair amount of critical attention. It is most often paired with other narratives by African American women, particularly The Life and Experience of Jarena Lee (1836) and Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels, and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw (1846). Fleischner pairs the book with Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story (1898) to explore the effect of slavery on the free children of former slaves. She reads Foote’s identification with her mother’s whipping as a slave with the treatment she received as a servant as the daughter’s attempt to repudiate her mother’s powerlessness and demand subjectivity. Moody is interested in the orality of the text and also highlights the mother-daughter relationship. She analyzes Foote’s protest of the oppression of women theologians by organized religion. Haywood studies the determined professionalism of women preachers of the nineteenth century and places Foote in a rich tradition of black women writers and ministers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Julia A. J. Foote A Brand Plucked from the Fire. 1879. Reprint in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, edited by William Andrews, 161–234. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Studies of Julia A. J. Foote’s Work Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

206

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Haywood, Chanta. Prophesying Daughters: Black Women Preachers of the Word, 1823–1913. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Moody, Joycelyn. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

Ann Beebe

PATRICE GAINES (1949– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Patrice Gaines, who is best known for her autobiographical works, was born on a military base in Quantico, Virginia, as the eldest of seven children. Although the insulated life on the base initially helped protect her from the harshness of racial discrimination, the family’s move to segregated South Carolina when she was ten incited increasing feelings of selfdoubt in the young Gaines. Her insecurity continued through her high school years and often informed her romantic relationships with men. Desiring to feel power in her own life, she often chose men who were engaged in lawbreaking or other negative behaviors, but who had reputations that she felt carried respect and weight. At eighteen she became pregnant with her daughter Andrea. Though Gaines’s love for her daughter would later cause her to want to drastically change her life, she began using heroin after Andrea was born and spiraled further down into near destruction before she decided to rebuild her life and discover her talent at, and passion for, writing. Gaines worked as a journalist for twenty-three years, sixteen of which were spent as a reporter for the award-winning Washington Post. Her decision to leave the publication in 2001 was motivated by her six-year investigation into a 1985 murder case that revealed many facts about the guilt and sentencing of eight young, black men to prison. She is now a freelance journalist, writing teacher, and public speaker, actively committed to restoring justice, reforming the U.S. judicial system, and changing the prison industry. In 2004 she cofounded The Brown Angel Center, designed to empower women and teenage girls by helping them with their financial, spiritual, and emotional needs and goals. MAJOR WORKS Gaines is best known for her riveting memoir, Laughing in the Dark: From Colored Girl to Woman of Color—A Journey from Prison to Power (1994). The text not only details her adolescent years trying to come to terms with her identity, feelings of selfhatred, and personal instability, but also chronicles the time she spent in a Charlotte, North Carolina jail on charges of drug possession with the intent to distribute. The book’s prologue opens dramatically with Gaines’s forehead pressed against the window of her jail cell looking out at her daughter who can neither come inside to visit her nor see her from where she waits outside. It was a pivotal moment for Gaines and also one that initiated her commitment to use her life more purposefully. Gaines’s autobiography is above all a dramatic telling of one woman’s desire to persevere against difficult, nearly self-defeating circumstances. It describes her experiences of being sexually assaulted and beaten by a boyfriend and abused repeatedly by a violent husband, her three marriages that ended in divorce, and her search for love from her emotionally distant father. Writing, however, became a refuge for Gaines and served as a place of safety and open communication. She began taking creative writing classes

208

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

at a community college and was later selected for a program for minority journalists that motivated her to build a career in writing and journalism. Gaines’s own transformation is mirrored in the conclusion to the text when she is accepting an award for ‘‘Best Commentary’’ from the National Association of Black Journalists. The award, like the autobiography itself, served as a beginning for the important work of restructuring justice and empowering others ahead. Gaines’s second book, Moments of Grace, Meeting the Challenge to Change (1997) documents the changes her own life has undergone as she has sought to redirect it, restructure relationships with family and friends, and stand upon her faith. The text addresses such areas as love, friendship, work, and the opportunities available to all for personal and spiritual growth. It also includes stories from a variety of individuals who chose to move forward with courage and self-love in order to alter the trajectories of their lives. CRITICAL RECEPTION Gaines’s work has garnered praise from such inspirational writers as Marianne Williamson and Iyanla Vanzant. Her poems ‘‘9/11’’ and ‘‘The Peacemakers’’ have been read on radio stations, and she has served as a commentator on National Public Radio and Pacifica Radio. Her numerous articles have appeared in such publications as Essence, Emerge, and Black Enterprise. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism, and in 1997 was named the Empatheia Award Winner by Volunteers of America for outstanding community service and excellence in reporting on social issues. She continues to share her work and her life story in detention centers, drug rehabilitation programs, schools, and prisons nationwide. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Patrice Gaines Laughing in the Dark: From Colored Girl to Woman of Color—A Journey from Prison to Power. New York: Anchor, 1994. Moments of Grace, Meeting the Challenge to Change. New York: Crown Press, 1997.

Study of Patrice Gaines’s Work Squazzo, Kelley A. ‘‘Patrice Gaines (1949– ).’’ In African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 143–46. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Amanda J. Davis

PATRICIA JOANN GIBSON (1951– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Patricia Joann Gibson, a well-known playwright and story writer, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lived with her grandparents until she was five. She has described her upbringing as that of an ‘‘only child raised by older people.’’ Though she only spent a short time in Pittsburgh, vivid memories of the landscape and her childhood there—such as being picked up in a nightclub by Nat King Cole while a little girl—shaped her later works. She spent the remainder of her childhood in Trenton, New Jersey. She received her B.A. from Keuka College in 1973. While an undergraduate, Gibson studied drama, religion, and English. While theater arts proved to be her primary genre, she continued her wide-ranging interests, producing works of poetry and short fiction. She obtained an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Brandeis University. Over the past thirty years, Gibson has written over thirty plays, which have been produced in the United States and as far a field as Europe and Africa. In addition, professor Gibson has taught creative writing at Boston College, the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, Rutgers and UC Berkeley, and has held guest lecturer positions at Yale University and the Sudan. She is currently an assistant professor of English at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Gibson has also been the recipient of numerous awards, including a playwriting fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Shubert Fellowship, two Audelco Awards, and the Bushfire Theatre of Performing Arts Seventh Annual ‘‘Walk of Fame’’ award among others. MAJOR WORKS While produced widely, many of Gibson’s thirty plays are not easily found in print. She is most known for her award-winning play, Long Time since Yesterday. The play premiered at the New Federal Theatre on October 10, 1985, under the direction of Bette Howard, and has since been produced more than sixty times. The play is set in New Jersey in the 1980s and examines the lives, recollections, and dreams of a group of old college classmates who have gathered at the funeral of a friend who committed suicide. Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets is arguably her second most well-known work, though Destiny’s Daughters: 9 Voices of P. J. Gibson was released in 2002 to great critical acclaim. Gibson’s plays appear in numerous anthologies of contemporary theater and contemporary African American drama. Her work is noted for the resonance and dignity she brings to black women’s voices. Her plays and stories often feature welleducated, successful black characters. The playwright has said that too often African Americans are portrayed as desperate, destitute, and even criminal. She strives to undue some of these stereotypes and create a more accurate and positive reflection of African American life.

210

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Gibson’s plays have been critically lauded as resonant and potent dramas with strong roles for African American women. Of her most recent work, Destiny’s Daughters, Gloria Naylor says, ‘‘P. J. Gibson writes of women with a passion and clarity that mesmerizes.’’ Given the contemporary nature of her work and the fact that she is still midcareer, a comprehensive treatment of her role and legacy in contemporary theater would be difficult. Certainly, she is an important figure in African American studies departments and black theater circles; like many playwrights her work and reputation are often limited to a circle of serious dramatists, producers, and students of literature. Of her pivotal role in the dramatic community, Woodie King J., producing director, New Federal Theatre, writes, ‘‘When this new anthology by P. J. Gibson arrives in bookstores, black theatres, black studies departments, and community theatres across America will rejoice. I know I will! Gibson is a major voice in black theatre in particular and American theatre in general.’’ Gibson has been a creative, daring, and potent voice in contemporary theater and continues to teach and contribute to the artistic community producing plays, poems, short fiction, and critical essays. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Patricia Joann Gibson Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets. Staged reading at Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center. 1981. Deep Roots. World Premiere at the Bushfire Theatre of Performing Arts (Philadelphia). 1998. Destiny’s Daughters: 9 Voices of P. J. Gibson. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2002. Long Time since Yesterday. Produced at the New Federal Theatre under the direction of Bette Howard. 1985.

Studies of Patricia Joann Gibson’s Works Bloom, Harold, ed. ‘‘Patricia Joann Gibson.’’ In Black American Women Poets and Dramatists. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996. Hay, Samuel A., ed. ‘‘Patricia Joann Gibson.’’ In African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis, pp. 45–6, 60, 121, 125–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Jordan, Casper LeRoy, ed. ‘‘Patricia Joann Gibson.’’ In A Bibliographical Guide to AfricanAmerican Women Writers, p. 96. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Sarah Estes Graham

MERCEDES GILBERT (1889–1952)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Mercedes Gilbert—novelist, poet, actor, songwriter, and cultural worker—was a daughter of the south who spent her career celebrating the culture of rural black America. Gilbert grew up in Jacksonville and Tampa, Florida, and was the daughter of two business owners. Well educated as a child, she attended Edward Waters College in Jacksonville and later trained as a nurse. Despite her middle-class upbringing, she acquired an affinity for the language of the folk and for writing from her mother, who was active in the church. Church life provided the spark that nurtured Gilbert’s interest in writing and performance. While completing her nursing instruction, Gilbert wrote plays and an unpublished book of poems called Looking Backward. She moved to New York in 1916 to work as a nurse, but ended up collaborating with songwriter Chris Smith, who put her poetry to music. She wrote a number of blues songs, including the hit ‘‘I’ve Got the World in a Jug’’ (1924). As her music career took off, Gilbert also began to perform in films and on stage. She appeared in several all-black silent films, including Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul alongside Paul Robeson. Then came a number of Broadway and Off-Broadway roles, including the female lead in Langston Hughes’s Mulatto (1936). During the forties, she toured the United States and Canada with a one-woman show of her original material. MAJOR WORKS Gilbert’s major literary works include three plays—of which only one survives, Environment—a collection, Selected Gems of Poetry, Comedy and Drama (1931), and a novel, Aunt Sara’s Wooden God (1938). All of these texts illuminate her interest in the vibrant culture of southern black folklife. In Selected Gems, many of her poems are in dialect, but she employed that literary voice to assert the intellectual agility not typically ascribed to speakers of black vernacular English. Her novel built on this theme. In Aunt Sara’s Wooden God, a celebratory and unapologetic story that revolves around a black community in rural Georgia, we find the hallmarks of the folk romance. Distinctive elements of black folk culture are central elements in the story, including spirituals, the blues, conjuring, superstition, church life, prayers, sermons, work songs, the dozens, dialect, and humor. Langston Hughes, in the foreword to Aunt Sara, places Gilbert’s work alongside that of Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and praises it for ‘‘its little pictures of the rural and small-town life of the South’’ (vii). CRITICAL RECEPTION Critical responses to Gilbert’s writing do not universally reflect Hughes’s enthusiasm. Few reviews or studies of her work exist, and one critic, John Lovell, Jr., panned the

212

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

novel in 1939 for its lack of political utility. Gilbert, like Hurston, protested against the New Negro aesthetic. According to Lovell, instead of involving herself in race politics as writers were expected to, Gilbert presented an idealized rural black community. Her text inverts the notion of what constitutes authentic black life and valuable black fiction, a significant move for a woman writer during that time. Since then, critical engagement with Gilbert’s texts remains scanty. A noteworthy essay is Susanne B. Dietzel’s introduction to the 1997 reprint of Selected Gems and Aunt Sara. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Mercedes Gilbert Aunt Sara’s Wooden God. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1938. ‘‘Environment.’’ Reprinted in Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance: 1920–1940, edited by James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. ‘‘I’ve Got the World in a Jug.’’ 1924. Viola McCoy: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Volume 2: 1924–1926. Document Records DOCD-5417.4. March 2003. http:// www.heptune.com/lyrics/ivegotth.html. Selected Gems of Poetry, Comedy and Drama. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1931.

Studies of Mercedes Gilbert’s Works Azikwe, Marlo D. ‘‘Mercedes Gilbert: Romancing the Folk.’’ In Folklore and Oral Culture in Black Women’s Fiction, 1925–1975. Masters thesis, Rollins College, 2003. Dietzel, Susanne B. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Mercedes Gilbert: Selected Gems of Poetry, Comedy and Drama/Aunt Sara’s Wooden God. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Gloster, Hugh. Negro Voices in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948. Lovell, John, Jr. ‘‘Excuses for Negro Novels.’’ Rev. of Aunt Sara’s Wooden God, by Mercedes Gilbert. Journal of Negro Education ( January 1939): 73–74. Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, eds. Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing 1900–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———, eds. Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers 1900–1945. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990. Schraufnagel, Joel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. DeLand, FL: Everett/ Edwards, 1973.

Marlo David Azikwe

NIKKI GIOVANNI (1943– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee, Nikki Giovanni was raised in a predominantly black suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. She graduated from Fisk University in 1967 and attended graduate school at both the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work and the Columbia University School of Fine Arts. While an undergraduate she became actively involved in the Black Arts Movement and in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By 1968 she had published her first book of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk and soon became a well-known lecturer on behalf of civil rights whose angry rhetoric and plain talk won her standing room only audiences on college campuses. Though she has consistently used her poetry to speak out against racism and to protest war and oppression, she is also known for her lyricism on love and family and for several volumes of children’s poetry, beginning with Spin a Soft Black Song published in 1971, two years after the birth of her son, Thomas. Giovanni has been called ‘‘the Poet of the black Revolution’’ and ‘‘the Princess of black Poetry.’’ She is, indeed, one of the most widely read African American poets in the United States and Europe. Giovanni began the twenty-first century as a cancer survivor, still writing, teaching, lecturing, and taking advantage of her celebrity to address issues ranging from inequalities in prison sentencing to NASA’s Mars mission. During a career spanning three decades, she has taught at a variety of institutions, including Rutgers, Ohio State, Texas Christian, and Virginia Tech, where she was named distinguished professor of black studies in 1987. She is the founder of a publishing cooperative, NikTom, Ltd. She is also an enthusiastic traveler, and a fan of the hip-hop movement, especially of Tupac Shakur, to whom she dedicated Love Poems (1997). Her nonfiction works include Gemini (1971), subtitled ‘‘an extended autobiographical statement,’’ Racism 101 (1994), and often-quoted dialogues with James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, and, most recently, Queen Latifah. Nikki Giovanni has made several recordings of her poetry set to gospel or jazz music and published an audio compilation of her collected poetry in 2003. In addition to her many literary awards and honorary doctorates, the CD of her collected poems was nominated for a 2004 Grammy. MAJOR WORKS Nikki Giovanni’s first two volumes of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgement (1969) contain her most famous militant poems that powerfully exhort black men to fight against oppression. After all, she notes ironically, black men have learned only too well how to die, why not then learn how to kill? These volumes also contain sensual love poems like ‘‘Seduction’’ and nostalgic family poems like ‘‘Nikki

214

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Rosa,’’ the source of the popular adage: ‘‘Black love is Black wealth.’’ Several of these poems catalogue the violence of the 1960s from the war in Vietnam to the decade’s many assassinations and murders. Others celebrate ‘‘Beautiful Black Men’’ or Giovanni’s own journey from a happy little girl sitting on her grandmother’s front porch to a twenty-fiveyear-old black female poet whose outspoken verse put her on an FBI watch list. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Giovanni continued to explore these same themes and to reflect on her experience as a mother and her extensive travels in Europe and Africa. The poems of My House (1972) and The Women and the Men (1975) are a bit more lyrical and personal than her earlier work. Many of these poems affirm the interrelationships between self and community and speak to the roles the poet plays inside and outside the home. Giovanni describes her persona as a woman in control, who cooks what she wants to cook and reigns supreme in her own kitchen. She also expresses her frustration at the failure of the black power movement fundamentally to change the consciousness of most black people. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978) marks a further move toward realism and introspection for Giovanni; despite the title, the poems are far from lighthearted. Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983) includes more of the long-verse stanzas she first used to express her anger at the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Black Judgement. These are pieces dedicated to Phillis Wheatley, Lorraine Hansberry, and Rosa Parks, and also to Billie Jean King, John Lennon, and Robert Kennedy. ‘‘Writers write from empathy,’’ Giovanni stated in an interview with Claudia Tate. ‘‘Experience,’’ she argued, would only provide a few poems, maybe one book. Love Poems (1997), a compilation of some of her most popular poems, includes explorations of sexual desire, friendship, and motherhood, some whimsical, some somber. Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (2002) includes poems dedicated to NASA and to new public figures, including the father of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. The title poem of this volume compares a trip to Mars with the Middle Passage, arguing that only African Americans can fully appreciate the hardships and significance of such a journey. Bringing together her fascination with space travel, her celebration of black people’s survival skills and heroism, and a political critique of persistent white racism from the Fugitive Slave Law to the war on terror, it is a poem that seems the culmination of many of Giovanni’s themes and interests. A full appreciation of Nikki Giovanni must also mention her several volumes of prose and poetry for children. The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni (2003) is a collection of many of her best known essays, including portraits of her grandmother’s courage in the face of racism (Gemini) and of Native American writer Sherman Alexie, for his frank depictions of Indian life (Racism 101). It also contains her perceptive descriptions of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Giovanni began writing poetry for children following the birth of her son. Spin a Soft Black Song (1971) and Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People (1973) include poems directed explicitly at the dreams of young black boys and their need for heroes and role models. Vacation Time (1980) focuses more on a child’s sense of discovery and adventure in a lighter, more rhythmic style. She has continued writing poetry for children throughout her career with the goal of providing parents with a positive and enjoyable way of instilling racial pride in their children while communicating the power of their love. Perhaps the best known of all Giovanni’s poems, the one that audiences

NIKKI GIOVANNI

215

recite with her at the end of her ever-popular public performances, is the exuberant ‘‘Ego-Tripping,’’ which claims the fertile crescent and the Sahara desert, Allah and Jesus, gazelles and elephants as the poet’s inheritance and legacy in a hyperbolic chant climaxing in mythic flight. Giovanni has recorded many albums of her poetry, most notably, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, HarperAudio, 2002. A television film, Spirit to Spirit: The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, was produced by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ohio Council on the Arts in 1986. CRITICAL RECEPTION Early in her career Nikki Giovanni was identified as one of the leading black poets of the new black renaissance, most notably by Roderick Palmer in ‘‘The Poetry of Three Revolutionists: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni’’ (1971). Much of this early criticism focused on her explicitly political poems that were often dismissed for being either too outspoken or too naive. Few critics commented on the growing lyricism of her poetry or its broadening thematic reach. Suzanne Juhasz writing in 1976 called for a more feminist reading of Giovanni’s poetry and noted that she had clearly matured as a poet from 1968 to 1972. Juhasz sees ‘‘power and love’’ as the great themes in both the political and more personal poems of these years. ‘‘Beautiful Black Men,’’ she notes, demonstrates how Giovanni makes good use of her ‘‘triple bind’’ as ‘‘poet and woman, poet and black, black and woman.’’ Juhasz also speaks of Giovanni’s ‘‘irrepressible humor,’’ her use of a ‘‘traditionally female vocabulary of cooking and kitchens to underscore her message,’’ and predicts that this young twenty-five-year-old poet will prove a worthy successor to Gwendolyn Brooks. Margaret B. McDowell writing in 1986 faults academic critics for ignoring ‘‘the relationships present between [Giovanni’s] poetry and Black speech or Black music’’ and political critics for underestimating her ‘‘affirmation of Afro-American culture and her realistic portrayals of individual Afro-Americans and their experience.’’ McDowell argues that Giovanni’s popularity reflects, in fact, ‘‘the immediate clarity of lines; the impact of tone, rhythm, and language; and the integrity of the realism’’ in her portraits. Beyond the ‘‘orality’’ for which she is famous, Giovanni deserves praise, according to McDowell, for the ‘‘rich ambiguities and ironies’’ in the best of her lyrics. Martha Cook writing in 1990 locates Giovanni in ‘‘a rich tradition of Southern poetry . . . in which place functions not only as a vehicle, but also a theme.’’ She praises the poem ‘‘Knoxville, Tennessee,’’ written at the height of the civil rights movement, for its effective imagery and for ‘‘the simple diction, the soothing alliteration, (and) the short lines’’ that combine ‘‘to create a feeling of love for this place and these people that transcends topical issues.’’ Cook also comments on Giovanni’s effective use of literal and metaphorical houses to convey the special significance of ‘‘home’’ to black women searching for a place of their own apart from the houses of patriarchy and bondage, which are their legacy. Despite the efforts of these scholars, Giovanni’s publications generally meet with mixed reviews, and her poetry is not often anthologized. Even so, the enthusiasm of her audiences, the strong sales of her books, and her popularity with young people keep her firmly grounded in the canon.

216

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Nikki Giovanni Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement. New York: Morrow, 1970. Blues: For All the Changes. New York: Morrow, 1999. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1969–1998. New York: Morrow, 2003. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: Morrow, 1978. A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973. Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1973. Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Love Poems. New York: Morrow, 1997. My House. New York: Morrow, 1972. A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974. The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni. New York: Perennial, 2003. Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. New York: Morrow, 2002. Racism 101. New York: Morrow, 1994. Re: Creation. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1970. Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles. New York: Morrow, 1988. The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, 1968–1995. New York: Morrow, 1996. Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children. New York: Hill & Wang, 1971. Those Who Ride the Night Winds. New York: Morrow, 1983. Vacation Time: Poems for Children. New York: Morrow, 1980. The Women and the Men. New York: Morrow, 1975.

Studies of Nikki Giovanni’s Works Boldridge, Effie. ‘‘Windmills or Giants? The Quixotic Motif and Vision in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni.’’ Griot 14.1 (Spring 1995): 18–25. Brooks, A. Russell. ‘‘Power and Morality as Imperatives for Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin: AView of the Dialogue.’’ In James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Therman B. O’Daniel. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1977. Cook, Martha. ‘‘Nikki Giovanni: Place and Sense of Place in Her Poetry.’’ In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Di Christina, S. J. ‘‘Tips for Young Readers on Two Poems by Nikki Giovanni.’’ ELF: Electric Literary Forum 4.3 (Fall 1994): 18. Fowler, Virginia. Conversations with Nikki Giovanni. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. ———. Nikki Giovanni. Boston: Twayne, 1992. Georgoudaki, Ekaterini. ‘‘Nikki Giovanni: The Poet as Explorer of Outer and Inner Space.’’ In Women, Creators of Culture, edited by Ekaterini Georgoudaki and Domna Pastourmatzi. Thessaloniki, Greece: Aristotle Press, 1997. Giddings, Paula. ‘‘Nikki Giovanni: Taking a Chance on Feeling.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950– 1980), edited by Mari Evans. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. Harris, William J. ‘‘Sweet Soft Essence of Possibility: The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980), edited by Mari Evans. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. Josephson, Judith P. Nikki Giovanni: Poet of the People. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2003.

NIKKI GIOVANNI

217

Juhasz, Suzanne. ‘‘ ‘A Sweet Inspiration . . . of My People.’’’ In Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. McDonald, Kathlene. ‘‘Nikki Giovanni.’’ In African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. McDowell, Margaret B. ‘‘Groundwork for a More Comprehensive Criticism of Nikki Giovanni.’’ In Studies in Black American Literary Criticism, II, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot. Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1986. Palmer, R. Roderick. ‘‘The Poetry of Three Revolutionists: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni.’’ College Language Association Journal 15 (1971): 25–36. Paul, Jay. ‘‘Nikki Giovanni: Overview.’’ In Contemporary Poets, 6th edition, edited by Thomas Riggs. Farmington Hills, MI: St. James Press, 1996. Tate, Claudia. ‘‘Nikki Giovanni.’’ In Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. White, Evelyn C. ‘‘The Poet and the Rapper.’’ Essence (May 1, 1999): 122ff.

Jane M. Barstow

MARITA GOLDEN (1950– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Novelist, essayist, educator, and activist Marita Golden was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Born on April 28, 1950, she is the only child of her mother. Her mother, a Greensboro, North Carolina native, was a cleaning woman who played the lottery and became wealthy enough to afford many properties. Her father was a taxicab driver. Neither parent had any formal education, but they were very smart people. Golden’s mother encouraged her writing talents. At age ten Golden had a letter published in the editorial section of the Washington Post and around age fourteen her mother told her that she was going to write books. This was surprising to Golden because she never saw her mother reading. Golden was inspired to write by her father’s bedtime stories about African American history and culture. In 1968 Golden graduated from Western High School and attended American University on a Frederick Douglass Scholarship, a scholarship that was developed as a result of the riots that occurred a year earlier upon the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The assassination of Dr. King ignited Golden’s revolutionary spirit. Convinced that Dr. King’s assassination was the manifestation of America’s reluctance to embrace equal rights, she was determined to continue the protests and activism of the civil rights movement. While at American University she was very active in the revolutionary fervor of the black power philosophies. She built lasting friendships with charter members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from Howard and other local universities. As a student at American University she sat on a panel to help develop an African American Studies program. Upon graduation Golden gained experience as a journalist by interning with the Baltimore Sun, and she later became a general assignment reporter there. She then attended Columbia University and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in journalism. Upon graduation she became an editorial assistant and wrote freelance articles in the evenings. By 1975 her articles appeared in large publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Essence Magazine. While in New York she met and married Femi Ajayi, a native Nigerian, and later moved to Africa with him. While in Nigeria she taught at the University of Lagos and Lagos Comprehensive Girls’ School. At age twenty-five, she began writing Migrations of the Heart: An Autobiography. After living in Nigeria for many years, she returned to the United States, residing first in Boston. There she taught English literature and journalism at Roxbury Community College and Emerson College. Longing to return home, Golden moved to Washington, D.C. Discouraged by the number of organizations and literary outlets available to the African American community, Golden founded the African American Writers Guild with friend Clyde McElevene. The organization became a forum in which African American writers could meet, write, and focus their efforts in order to establish a strong literary tradition in the Washington, D.C., area. She continued to stimulate aspiring

MARITA GOLDEN

219

writers by teaching creative writing at George Mason University, Antioch College, Spelman College, Wayne State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University. Determined to continue her work as an activist for African American literary traditions, Golden founded the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation in 1990. The foundation annually rewards talented college writers and encourages the documentation of the African American experience through literature. Although Golden cultivated positive literary and journalistic feats in District of Columbia, she could not help but become alarmed by the mortality rates among African American males within the district and the surrounding areas. Her spirit of activism was not solely committed to literature. In 1995 Golden wrote Saving Our Sons. The book reflects her emotional distress as a mother of a young African American male and her perceptions about the mortality rates of young black men in the District of Columbia. Golden has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Richmond and Distinguished Alumni Award from American University. She was honored with the 2002 Authors Guild Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community, which recognizes her writing and work as a ‘‘literary cultural worker.’’ She also received the Barnes and Noble 2001 Writers for Writers Award presented by Poets and Writers. She has been inducted into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University. She received the Woman of the Year Award from Zeta Phi Beta in 2003. In addition to her awards and prizes, Golden is on the advisory committee for the Mobil Pegasus Prize for literature. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Girl Scouts of America, the Authors Guild, and has served as a member of the PEN/Faulkner Board, where she has been a judge. Golden currently lives in a metropolitan area in Washington, D.C., where she is finishing another novel. She continues to be an activist for literacy and the accurate portrayals of the African American existence in literature as president and CEO of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. MAJOR WORKS Golden’s works are largely autobiographical, draped in exquisitely crafted prose, laced with vivid images, and saturated with metaphor. The characters within her works are purposeful and their actions and circumstances reflect the complexities of the modern American lifestyle. Her works remain true to the tenets of African American womanist literature, where the heroines seek to discover themselves and identify with some sense of self-fulfillment. Golden’s first work, Migrations of the Heart (1983), is sectioned in three parts: ‘‘Beginnings,’’ ‘‘Journeys,’’ and ‘‘Coming Home.’’ The story documents Golden’s journey toward self-actualization. In the first portion, ‘‘Beginnings,’’ Golden explores her childhood years, the context in which her parents and society defined her. It is in this section that she first rejects the definitions others have placed upon her; she begins to fashion her revolutionary fervor. She refuses to be another ‘‘little colored girl’’ or straighten her hair because it is more acceptable. In light of her political awakening and cultural awareness, she develops strong relationships with other student activists and Africans. Toward the end of the section, she marries Femi Ajayi and moves to Nigeria to pursue a life of love with him. ‘‘Journeys’’documents her travels to and in Africa, as her idealistic views of her new home begin to fade into the reality of conflicting cultural and personal views of her role as a woman, mother, and wife. Because of the turbulent

220

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

political climate of Nigeria, her husband is unable to find work. In turn, his masculinity is threatened by Golden’s success. The conflicts irrupt in arguments and physical violence within her marriage. She ultimately abandons her husband and returns to the United States. ‘‘Coming Home’’ examines Golden’s struggles while attempting to reconnect with herself, both professionally and personally. Although she avoids establishing relationships with men, she finds emotional fulfillment through motherhood and develops close friendships with women who serve as a support system through her difficult times. She acknowledges that there will be other migrations in her life and in the future she will address them with the same certainty and self-actualization that allowed her to succeed in the past. In 1986 Golden wrote A Woman’s Place, her first novel. It is a compelling story about a friendship between three African American women—Faith, Serena, and Crystal—to include their professional lives at an Ivy League university in Boston. The story depicts the bonds they share, and is interwoven with the professional challenges and personal decisions each of them makes during the 1960s. In search of personal fulfillment, Faith marries an older Muslim man, converts to Islam, and changes her name to Iesha, only to realize that the realities of gender inequality that she experiences within her marriage are just as pertinent as the race prejudices she experiences in her professional life. Serena commits to a life of social activism and moves to Africa in order to rescue the world from injustice, ignoring a personal means of fulfillment. The third character, Crystal, is a writer who chooses to wed a white man and is confronted with the complex issues of race and rejection in both the black and the white communities. Golden’s second novel, Long Distance Life (1989), tells the life of Naomi Reeves Johnson and her generations. The story begins in the 1920s and is laced with memories, history, and strong spiritual overtones. Again, Golden explores her heroine’s life as a journey, depicting painful conflicts and implicit determination of Naomi’s family. The story begins with Naomi’s migration to the north in search of a better life than the one the racially juxtaposed south promises her. Using her skills and wit, Naomi elevates herself into Washington, D.C.’s black middle class, a self-made woman. She marries and has a daughter, Esther. Her husband’s untimely death results in Naomi becoming a single, protective mother. Her efforts as an overprotective mother result in her daughter’s inability to recognize her self-identity or contribute to society purposefully. In an eager rush to establish her own self, Esther abandons her mother, lover, and child, and moves to the south to become a civil rights activist, whereby acquiring a sense of purpose in a changing society. Later, Esther returns to Washington, D.C., to her lover and the child she left behind. She becomes pregnant again, but her fiance´, Randolph, dies suddenly, leaving her to inherit her mother’s feelings of loss. Finally, the novel concludes with Naomi enduring another unexpected loss. Her grandson is murdered by a drug dealer within their community. Jessie Foster is the heroine of Golden’s third novel, And Do Remember Me (1992), which examines the self-discovery and reconnections with one’s past that are necessary for a more productive future. Jessie Foster escapes the restrictions and abuses that a young black girl experiences in the rural south to fall in love with a civil rights activist, Lincoln. She joins the fight for civil rights and builds a close friendship with Macon. Jessie moves to New York, where she becomes a professional actress, changing her name to Pearl Moon. She quickly discovers that neither her acting career nor her consumption of alcohol can heal the wounds of her childhood. Eventually, Jessie/Pearl stops drinking and builds greater bonds with Macon and Lincoln. She is forced to return to Mississippi to attend her father’s funeral and reconnect with the self she abandoned.

MARITA GOLDEN

221

Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World (1995) is Golden’s response to the horrifying realities that the black urban community faces. Although the book focuses largely on her son, Michael, growing up in Washington, D.C., during the late eighties, it was more of a commentary on the alarmingly high death rates of young African American males in the urban communities. The story questions the community’s inability to provide a safe atmosphere for the youth or to nurture two-parent families with both male and female role models. Golden again explores metrical relationships and identity in her fourth novel, The Edge of Heaven (1998). The novel focuses on rebuilding and establishing relationships that have been made distant by forced separation and imprisonment. Showing the love, struggles, and sufferings of three generations of women, Golden examines the issues of guilt, abandonment, and grief that pervade and strengthen bonds between women. A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers (1999) demonstrates the miracles of motherhood and the immense resources that children and mothers rely on individually. It shows the resources and strengths of mothers and children and the faith that connects them both. Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey through the Color Complex (2004) is Golden’s most recent work. It addresses the complexity of complexion, self-identity, and self-worth many young black women face in society. She explores her mother’s complex notion of beauty and skin color, along with her own journey to identify beauty and worth, despite society’s views and expectations. In addition to her novels and nonfiction autobiographical works, Golden has edited many anthologies. Among them are Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues, which is a collection of African American women’s literature that explores relationships, love, and sexuality through essay, prose, and testimony. Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write about Race is a collection of stories and essays from African American and white American women authors that explores the issues of race within the gender-related roles of mother, wife, and lover. Golden’s most recent anthology is Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing, coedited with author E. Lynn Harris. Gumbo is affectionately known as the ‘‘literary rent party.’’ Originally compiled to benefit the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the anthology encompasses previously published and new stories from writers ripe with the spirit and grandeur of African American literature. CRITICAL RECEPTION Most of Marita Golden’s works have received favorable reviews. She has been honored with a number of awards for her writings and lifeworks. These include the 2002 Distinguished Service Award from the Authors Guild, The 2001 Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award presented by Poets and Writers, an honorary doctorate from the University of Richmond, induction into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, Woman of the Year Award from Zeta Phi Beta, and a Distinguished Alumni Award from American University. Golden is an accomplished author of autobiographical texts and novels. In addition, she has gained acclaim as an editor for three anthologies. Her autobiographical works, Migrations of the Heart in particular, are described as ‘‘told in a prose that often seems possessed by some perverse genius’’ by Deane McWhorter. Mary Carroll refers to Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World as ‘‘a powerful and eloquent call to action on a critical social problem.’’

222

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Considering A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers, critics perceive Golden’s rebuttal to the social assumption that single-parent households breed social ills was received favorably and applauded for the research within. And the critical receptions of Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey through the Color Complex exceeded readers’ expectations. Jewell Parker Rhodes identifies Golden as ‘‘a healer, a griot attacking racism and self-hatred with wisdom, a lively spirit, and a generous heart.’’ The reviews for Golden’s novels have been just as favorable as her nonfiction texts. A Woman’s Place written in 1986 is viewed as a true depiction of the lives of African American women. Susan Wood explains, ‘‘Golden makes us believe in her characters and care about them.’’ Critics admire the development of the characters in her second novel, Long Distance Life. And Do Remember Me, Golden’s third novel, received slightly less favorable reviews, yet, according to Publishers Weekly, ‘‘Golden’s portrait of idealism and exhilaration of people coming together in a conflicted time is authentic and engrossing . . .’’ The Edge of Heaven, the fourth novel, is viewed in much the same way as the third and is deemed ‘‘compelling’’ by the same publication. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Marita Golden And Do Remember Me. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey through the Color Complex. New York: Doubleday, 2004. The Edge of Heaven. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing, edited with E. Lynn Harris. New York: Harlem Moon, 2002. Long Distance Life. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Migrations of the Heart: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1983. A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write about Race, edited with Susan Richards Shreve. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues. New York: Doubleday, 1993. A Woman’s Place. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

Studies of Marita Golden’s Works Carroll, Rebecca. I Know What the Red Clay Look Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1994. Davies, Carole Boyce., ed. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London/ New York: Routledge, 1994. Jackson, Edward M. Images of Black Men in Black Women Writers 1950–1990. Lima, OH: Wyndham Hall Press, 1993. Jordan, Shirley Marie., ed. Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

DaMaris Hill

JEWELLE GOMEZ (1948– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Jewelle Gomez, a poetess and story writer, was born in September 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts. When she was two years old, her parents separated and Gomez moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her paternal grandparents. At the age of eight, she returned to Boston to live with her maternal great-grandmother till the age of twentytwo. Much of Gomez’s work is influenced by the oral tradition of both the African American and Native American culture of her grandparents. Gomez attended Northeastern University on a full scholarship. While there, she was very active in addressing social issues on and off campus. She became involved in the civil rights movement, actively voicing her opinion on issues such as the Vietnam War as well as issues pertaining to race, gender, and sexuality. Moving to Greenwich Village in the 1970s, Gomez earned her master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism in 1973 on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. During this time she began to explore her lesbian identity, an element that is noticeable in much of her literary works. Jewelle Gomez was very influenced by the Black Arts Movement and particularly by the self-acclaimed ‘‘biomythographer’’ Audre Lorde. In 1993 Gomez honored Lorde in a memorial written for Essence magazine. Like Lorde, Gomez’s work reflects an attempt to present an image that embraces all of her identity, including but not limited to her race, gender, and sexuality. Her literature develops and reflects her identification with what she recognizes as her black, feminist, and lesbian self. Gomez’s work has been published in numerous periodicals, including the Advocate, Black Scholar, Essence magazine, Ms magazine, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Village Voice. Much of her work has also been anthologized. Gomez is not only a writer but is also very active in the literary and artistic community. She was one of the original staff members of one of the first weekly black television shows in the United States, Say Brother. She was also on the founding board of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD). Gomez has also served as a member of the national advisory of the National Center for Lesbian Rights; Poets and Writers, Inc.; and the Human Sexuality Archives of Cornell University. Currently, Gomez serves as an advisor for the Open Meadows Foundation, a grant funding organization geared toward the empowerment of women and girls. The foundation offers support for projects that are implemented by women and girls which also reflect a cultural and ethnic diversity while promoting social change. Gomez has made a name for herself both as an author as well as an activist. She was the director of the Literature Program and the New York State Council on the Arts. She was also the executive director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University. Gomez, who also works with films, has been active in the film industry, serving as a national advisory board member for Nancy D. Kates film ‘‘American Socrates: The Life of Bayard Rustin.’’

224

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Jewelle Gomez has lectured and made presentations at various colleges and universities, including Hunter College and the Ohio State University. She has established herself not only as a writer, activist, and scholar, but also her continuous contribution to the arts demonstrates her commitment to society. Her work has been acknowledged with a double Lambda Award, which recognizes and honors the best in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender literature. Her book, The Gilda Stories, has been adapted into an interpretative dance by the New York–based Urban Bush Women Dance Company. The stage adaptation, which featured original music by Toshi Reagon, was performed in thirteen U.S. cities. Gomez is currently working on new projects, including a novel that uses humor to look at black activists of the 1960s as they approach and deal with middle age. She has also begun work on a collaborative performance piece dealing with the life of author James Baldwin. MAJOR WORKS Jewelle Gomez’s most popular work is The Gilda Stories, a set of historical narratives that follow the life of a female lesbian vampire from the antebellum period to well into the future. Gomez’s visioning of the vampire is very different from traditional renderings. For Gomez the taking of blood does not lead to death; instead, it is a mutual exchange wherein the vampire takes blood and in return leaves the giver with a gift of life. This reimagining of the vampire character can be linked directly to the womancentered focus of the work, which not only highlights the relationship that women have with each other, but also portrays women as heroes in their own right who have helped to mold and create the world in which we live. The first narrative in The Gilda Stories functions very much like a neo-slave narrative, revisiting the experience of a young female slave who must decide on the value of her freedom. Gomez empowers the young girl, providing her with the agency to determine where her life will take her. This rewriting of the enslaved female is significant as Gomez allows her female character to take control of her own destiny as well as have an impact on the lives of others whom she encounters as she ‘‘travels’’ through America’s history. The Gilda Stories successfully highlights the diversity of experiences that one can have within American society. Gomez points out the connections between women’s experiences cross-culturally. Gomez draws a link between the relationship between Bird and the girl, and the marginalized experiences of groups of people who have been rendered ‘‘other’’ by mainstream society. As Bird teaches the girl to read, one of the most significant lessons she learns is that neither Bird’s experiences as a Native American woman nor her own as an African American woman are being recorded in the newspapers. This leads to an important question about how history is recorded and the stories and experiences that are often left out of history books. The Gilda Stories also highlights the experiences of women of different ethnicities, class, and race, showing the interconnectedness of women’s experiences in America. The first section of the novel focuses on the experience of a group of prostitutes who struggle to determine a place for themselves in American society, despite the economic pressures they face. Significantly, it is the girl’s experience as an enslaved person that is linked to the experiences of these prostitutes. When a man approaches her, thinking that she is a prostitute, the girl likens his gaze to that of slave plantation owners as they looked over

JEWELLE GOMEZ

225

slaves on the auction block. Gomez forces readers to make a connection between the limited access that slaves had during that time and the inadequate resources that were available to women. In the text, the girl becomes Gilda, and the text traces her movement through American history. In doing so, she celebrates the role that women have played in the development of traditions and movements throughout history. One significant moment in the text occurs in the 1920s, when Gilda finds herself amidst the roar of the Harlem Renaissance. In this section, Gomez draws attention to the significant roles women played during the renaissance. The character Eleanor reflects those women who were instrumental in creating an environment that promoted literary creativity. In her characterization of Eleanor, Gomez succeeds in rehistoricizing those women who have been written out of history. The Gilda Stories is an essential read as it not only refers to women as heroes but also locates those heroes historically, writing women back into a history that has not remembered them. Oral Tradition is a collection of poems that celebrate Gomez’s African American and Native American heritage. Written to be read aloud, these works reflect the oral tradition of each culture. The poems focus on women and their experiences, emphasizing the themes of home, love, and history. Included in this collection, the poem ‘‘Gilda Sings: Escape: A Performance Piece in Four Songs’’ stresses the importance of history and the past. Don’t Explain is a collection of novellas and short stories focusing on the realities of women’s lives and experiences. Much attention is paid to issues of sexuality and sexual relationships. The short story ‘‘Don’t Explain,’’ from which the title of the text comes, celebrates women’s communities and the way women support and maintain each other. Published in 1993, Forty-three Septembers reflects Gomez’s attempts to reconcile her gender, racial, and sexual identities. Central to the text is Gomez’s celebration of her heritage, focusing particularly on the strong influence the women in her life have had on her development as a writer and an activist. CRITICAL RECEPTION Jewelle Gomez has received some criticism for her work. Gomez acknowledges that her work attempts to deal with multiple issues, including feminist discourse, which she suggests can often be limited in its perspective. In 1997 Gomez made an appearance at Kalamazoo College, where she was picketed by feminist activists who questioned her use and presentation of sexuality in her literature. However, much of Gomez’s work has received positive reception. Her use of the vampire motif to discuss issues relevant to the social and political experience of women has opened doors for discourse that has often been left unaddressed. Her use of science fiction to perform social criticism has brought questions relevant to the lesbian-black experience to the forefront of academic discourse. Some scholars have characterized Gomez’s work as ‘‘genre’’ fiction, in effect minimizing both the literary and social impact of her work. Gomez uses the vampire novel to revision the historical experience of women, specifically lesbians. In critical responses, scholars have acknowledged that one of Gomez’s main accomplishments is that within her literature she returns women to their historical positioning, writing them back into a history that they not only witnessed but also helped create.

226

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Jewelle Gomez The Best Lesbian Erotica of 1997. San Francisco: Cleis, 1997. Don’t Explain. New York: Firebrand, 1997. Flamingoes and Bears (1986). Johnson City, TN: Grace Publications, 1996. Forty-three Septembers. New York: Firebrand Books, 1993. The Gilda Stories. New York: Firebrand Books, 1991. The Lipstick Papers (1980), self pubished. Oral Tradition: Selected Poem Old and New. New York: Firebrand Books, 1995. Swords of the Rainbow (coeditor). Boston: Alyson Publication, 1996. ‘‘Words.’’ Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture 7.2 (May 1991): 12–13, 24.

Studies of Jewelle Gomez’s Works Brinks, Ellen. ‘‘Unfamiliar Ties: Lesbian Constructions of Home and Family in Jeanette Witnerson’s Oranges Are Not the Fruit and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories.’’ In Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, edited by Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barens. New York: Garland, 1996. Brown, Wesley, and Amy Ling, eds. Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. New York: Persea Books, 2003. Carbado, Deveon W., Dwight A. McBide, and Donald Weise, eds. Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2002. Garber, Eric, Mel Keegan, Nina Boal, Tanya Huff, and Dorothy Allison. Swords of the Rainbow: Gay and Lesbian Fantasy Adventures. New York: Alyson Publications, 1996. Gates, Beatrix, ed. Wild Good: Lesbian Photographs and Writing on Love. Garden City, NY Doubleday & Company, Incorporated, 1996. Harris, Laura, and Elizabeth Crocker, eds. Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls. New York: Routledge, 1997. Karlsberg, Michele, and Karen A Tulchinsky, eds. To Be Continued. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1998. Keesey, Pam. Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998. McClune, Lindsay. On Our Backs: The Best Erotic Fiction. Boston: Alyson Publications, 2001. Meyer, Sabine. ‘‘Passing Perverts, After All?: Vampirism, (In)Visibility, and the Horrors of the Normative in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories.’’ FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal Dedicated to Critical and Creative Work in the Realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and Other Supernatural Genres 4.1 (2002): 25–37. Thomas, Sherelee. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books Inc., 2004.

Josie A. Brown-Rose

ELOISE GREENFIELD (1929– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Eloise Greenfield, who has received numerous awards for her biographies and picture books was born in Parmele, North Carolina. When Greenfield was a child, her family moved to the Langston Terrace Housing Project in Washington, D.C., which she has called ‘‘a good growing-up place’’ because of the warmth and kinship of the extended community. Her home was very close to the library, where Greenfield spent much of her time. Despite these comforting aspects of her early life, Greenfield grew up in a segregated community during the Great Depression and World War II. These factors contributed to her sense of social justice and equality. Greenfield attended Miner Teachers College. Her first children’s book was published when she was in her forties. MAJOR WORKS Bubbles (now called Good News) was published in 1972. It sets the tone for much of Greenfield’s later work: realistic portrayals of loving African American parents working hard to provide for their families, and the children who face life’s challenges with a positive outlook. Extended families and grandparents are prominent in her works such as Grandmama’s Joy and Grandpa’s Face. Greenfield also cowrote Childtimes: A ThreeGeneration Memoir, sharing stories of her own childhood and those of her mother and grandmother. Another theme in Greenfield’s work is the triumph of African American people throughout history. Her Coretta Scott King Award–winning picture book Africa Dream is dedicated ‘‘with love to all the children of African descent. May they find in their past the strength to shape their future.’’ The book is about a young woman’s dream of visiting ‘‘long-ago Africa.’’ The lyrical language reflects the story’s dreamlike state, before the scourge of slavery descended on Africa. Greenfield’s skill with descriptive, rhythmic language is also apparent in her works of poetry. Perhaps her best known work is Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems. This collection features sixteen poems, each addressing the daily lives and concerns of children. Their overwhelming feel is comfort, enveloping readers in the love displayed by the author. More recently, she published In the Land of Words: New and Selected Poems and the whimsical I Can Draw a Weeposaur and Other Dinosaurs: Poems. Greenfield has also written several biographies. In 1973, her biography of Rosa Parks won the first Carter G. Woodson Award for Social Education. She published a middle-grade biography of Paul Robeson, which focused not only on his brilliant career but also on his childhood and young adult life. More recently, her picture book For the Love of the Game: Michael Jordan and Me parallels the dreams of a twelve-year-old boy and girl with the life of Michael Jordan. Another unique biography is Alesia, a diary cowritten by Alesia Revius, who, at age nine, was paralyzed in a car accident.

228

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Eloise Greenfield has won more than forty awards and honors for her works. Many of her books have been recognized by the National Council for the Social Studies and the American Library Association. The National Council of Teachers of English gave her the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. In 1993 she received the Children’s Literature and Social Responsibility Award from the Boston Educators for Social Responsibility. She also holds an honorary Doctor of Education degree from Wheelock College, and has been the recipient of the Hope S. Dean Award from the Foundation for Children’s Literature, in addition to the North Star Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She has also been inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Eloise Greenfield Africa Dream. New York: HarperCollins, 1977. Alesia. With Alesia Revius. New York: Philomel Books, 1981. Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979. For the Love of the Game: Michael Jordan and Me. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Good News [formerly Bubbles]. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1972. Grandmama’s Joy. New York: Philomel Books, 1980. Grandpa’s Face. New York: Philomel Books, 1988. Honey, I Love, and Other Love Poems. New York: HarperCollins, 1978. I Can Draw a Weeposaur and Other Dinosaurs: Poems. New York: Greenwillow, 2001. In the Land of Words: New and Selected Poems. New York: Amistad, 2004. Paul Robeson. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975. Rosa Parks. New York: HarperCollins, 1973.

Study of Eloise Greenfield’s Works Willis, Eleanor Gervasini. American Women Who Shaped the Civil Rights Movement Explored Through the Literature of Eloise Greenfield. http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/ 1997/3/97.03.10.x.html.

Elissa Gershowitz

ANGELINA WELD GRIMKE´ (1880–1958)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born on February 27, 1880, in Boston, poet, dramatist, essayist, and short fiction writer Angelina Weld Grimke´ seemed destined from birth to a life of intellect, achievement, and activism. She was the daughter of Archibald Grimke´, biracial nephew of the noted abolitionists Sarah Moore Grimke´ and Angelina Grimke´ Weld (after whom she was named), and Sarah E. Stanley, writer and member of a prominent white Boston family. When Grimke´ was three, her parents separated. Although she initially lived with her mother, Grimke´ returned to her father when she was seven. Mother and daughter corresponded, but never saw each other again. Grimke´’s diary records the angst her mother’s absence caused, and her frequent treatment of motherhood is likely related to this trauma. Reared in liberal, upper-class Boston society, Grimke´ clearly felt psychologically pressured to contribute to her family’s heritage. Her relationship with her father, a loving but demanding patriarch, was especially close. Throughout her life, he pushed her to excel, berating her when she fell short of his expectations. Often isolated and lonely as a child, she remained reclusive throughout her life. Grimke´ was educated at exclusive schools—Carleton Academy in Northfield, Minnesota; Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts; and the Girl’s Latin School in Boston. While her father served as consul in Santo Domingo (1894–1898), she lived with her uncle and aunt, Francis and Charlotte Forten Grimke´. Although she loved her aunt—as witnessed in her later poem ‘‘To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimke´’’—this tense living arrangement led to Grimke´’s entering boarding school. She graduated from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (now Wellesley College) in 1901 with a degree in physical education. After teaching gym at Armstrong Manual Training School, she became an English teacher at ‘‘M’’ Street School (later Dunbar High School) in 1907. She supplemented her training by taking summer courses in English at Harvard and retired from teaching in 1926 when her father fell ill. While she never publicly acknowledged her sexual preferences, Grimke´’s poetry alludes to several lesbian relationships, and a letter documents a youthful affair with the writer Mamie Burrill. Likely her father’s disapproval and society’s homophobic attitudes caused her to suppress her homosexuality. Grimke´ wrote poetry that began appearing in newspapers in the 1890s and penned two race-propaganda dramas: Rachel (staged in 1916 by the NAACP Drama Committee, published in 1920) and Mara (unpublished). During the 1920s, her work was printed in magazines such as the Crisis and Opportunity and in several important anthologies, including Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk, but much of her work, especially her highly personal poetry, was never published and is available only in her papers at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.

230

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Devastated by her father’s death in 1930, Grimke´ moved to New York, ostensibly to write. Often ill, she lived there in virtual isolation until her death at the age of seventyeight. As she became unproductive and even more solitary, Grimke´ fell into relative obscurity as a writer. MAJOR WORKS Grimke´ wrote poetry, drama, short fiction, and essays and sporadically kept a diary, but her reputation rests largely on a few poems and Rachel. Her poetry includes ‘‘elegies, love lyrics, nature lyrics, racial poems, and philosophical poems about the human experience’’ (‘‘Under the Days,’’ Hull 137). Written in traditional Anglo-American forms such as the sonnet, triolet, and roundel and often told by a male persona, the poems are usually brief; for example, ‘‘Epitaph on a Living Woman’’ with its stark view of ashes is only four lines. Her imagery, which often involves body parts, may be poignantly beautiful (the child hitting the sunlight in ‘‘The Black Child’’), sensuous (the grass in ‘‘Grass Fingers’’), grim (the ‘‘black-hued gruesome something’’ in ‘‘Trees’’), or deadening (the ‘‘numbness’’ in ‘‘Ask of Life Nothing, Nothing’’). Many poems incorporate a wide palette of colors, some pastels such as lavender and saffron (‘‘Eyes of My Regret’’), but particularly black, white, gray, and gold as in ‘‘Under the Days.’’ Although most convey a sad, wistful tone, others, such as ‘‘Naughty Nan,’’ feature a light, rollicking rhythm. Some—‘‘A Mona Lisa,’’ for example—are covertly lesbian. ‘‘El Breso,’’ Grimke´’s first critically acclaimed love lyric, is probably addressed to a woman. In it, as elsewhere, Grimke´ omits third-person pronouns, doubtless to avoid gender identification. Although race poems constitute only a small portion of her work, two of the best known are ‘‘Tenebris’’ and ‘‘Beware Lest He Awake.’’ Several poems such as ‘‘To Clarissa Scott Delaney’’ honor famous people, but the majority of her poetry ponders the meaning of life and death. In contrast to most of her poetry, Grimke´’s drama and fiction explore controversial racial issues, especially black women rejecting motherhood, the effects of lynching, and the economic hardships resulting from racial bias. Rachel evoked so much criticism that Grimke´ publicly denied any intent to promote racial genocide and described her audience as white females and her purpose being to reveal the impact of racial violence on a sensitive young woman. Rachel combines Grimke´’s themes of motherhood and despair with recurring images in her poetry—notably roses, babies, and people as puppets of God. Rachel Loving, whose most fervent desire is to produce ‘‘little black and brown babies,’’ adopts Jimmy, a little boy whose parents have died of smallpox (143). Rachel’s awakened memories of racial discrimination, coupled with the trauma of learning about her father’s and brother’s lynching, make her question why God allows such oppression. Finally, understanding that black mothers cannot protect their children against the threat of racial violence, Rachel rejects her suitor and her dream of motherhood. Similarly, Mara, the genteel heroine of Grimke´’s other drama, denounces God for allowing racial discrimination. Grimke´’s small corpus of fiction is striking and controversial, especially the two stories that appeared during the early 1920s in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review. ‘‘The Closing Door’’ continues Grimke´’s exploration of lynching. In it, Lucy, a motherless young girl taken in by Agnes and Jim Milton, reconstructs the past, recalling the Milton’s idyllic marriage and Agnes’s subsequent degeneration into madness. While pregnant, Agnes learns her favorite brother has been lynched and gradually isolates

ANGELINA WELD GRIMKE´

231

herself from family and friends, silently moving away and closing doors. Eventually, unable to accept that she cannot protect her child from the risk of lynching even in the north, Agnes smothers her baby. She dies in a mental institution. Based, according to Grimke´, on an actual event, ‘‘Goldie’’ (rejected by Birth Control Rreview’s editor in its original form titled ‘‘Blackness’’) also reconstructs the past. Although the versions differ in details, both concern a man returning to the south to help a woman. In ‘‘Blackness,’’ the narrator (a lawyer) discovers his former lover and her husband lynched, her unborn child ripped from her body and mutilated. After strangling the lynch mob’s leader, the narrator flees north. His fate remains unknown, but Reed, the listener, believes he has escaped. In ‘‘Goldie,’’ Victor Forrest discovers his sister, Goldie, and her husband hanged in the backyard. Learning that Lafe Coleman, who has sexually assaulted Goldie is responsible, he kills Coleman, but is himself lynched. CRITICAL RECEPTION Contemporary critic Gloria Hull sees Grimke´’s poetry as an overt reflection of her ‘‘triply disfranchised’’ life as a homosexual black female who is ever aware of her mixedrace heritage, pressured to perform as one of the talented tenth, and ‘‘chained between the real experience’’ of her lesbianism and the ‘‘conventions that would not give [her] voice’’ (‘‘Under the Days’’ 77, 79; Color 108). Hull describes Grimke´’s lyrics as ‘‘delicate, musical, romantic, and pensive’’ but ‘‘transliterated . . . and double-tongued’’ (‘‘Under the Days’’ 77, 79). Jeanne-Maria Miller describes Grimke´ as a poet who ‘‘worked hard at her craft’’ and who wrote ‘‘carefully worded musical lyrics . . . [often] in free verse’’ (519). For Miller, Grimke´’s ‘‘instrospective’’ poems ‘‘turn to nature’’ to illustrate ‘‘life, love, and death’’ in a ‘‘dominant note’’ of sadness (519). Despite Grimke´’s race themes in drama and fiction, Miller labels her a ‘‘raceless’’ writer in the ‘‘genteel’’ tradition (522). Lamenting that much of Grimke´’s work has been ‘‘rigorously ignored’’ because it is ‘‘too lesbian and too sentimental,’’ Carolivia Herron considers Grimke´ the foremost realist prior to Richard Wright. She characterizes Grimke´’s racial poems as expressing ‘‘outrage . . . over racial injustice in general’’ and as examining ‘‘African-American cultural grief ’’ (5). In contrast to those who see motherhood as Grimke´’s primary theme, Herron thinks children are ‘‘almost as significant’’ (11). She also considers poems such as ‘‘To My Father upon His Fifty-fifth Birthday’’ and ‘‘As We Have Sowed’’ critical of Grimke´’s father and argues that, despite Grimke´’s Anglo-American style and rhythm, her depictions of ‘‘African-American heroic anguish’’ are a form of the blues (15, 16). Grimke´’s works appear in all three thematic categories of Maureen Honey’s Shadowed Dreams: Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance—protest, heritage, and love and passion. For Honey, women’s poetry of that era—Grimke´’s included—often used nature as ‘‘an objective correlative through which [poets] could articulate their gender oppression as well as that of race, for nature, like them, had been objectified, invaded, and used by men seeking power and wealth’’ (8). In the Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives, Elaine Upton connects Grimke´’s poems with Dickinson’s, asserting that both poets ‘‘tease and fascinate reality.’’ She cites especially the ‘‘tension between life in the body and death, in ‘‘A Winter Twilight.’’ Contrasting Grimke´’s poetic themes with the racial issues predominant in her fiction, nonfiction, and drama, most critics concurrently criticize and praise her skill in dramaturgy. Hull, for example, argues that Rachel succeeded because of its ‘‘novel and

232

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

competent treatment of an important topic,’’ but ‘‘like closet drama reads better than it acts’’ (Color 122). Jeanne-Maria Miller cites problems in Rachel: a too-obviously ‘‘contrived’’ plot, ‘‘artificial’’ language, and a character too ‘‘hypersensitive’’ for contemporary audiences to accept as realistic (576). James Hatch recognizes potential problems with staging and with using children as main characters, yet he urges modern readers to accept the play’s ‘‘sentimental style’’ (138). Despite its flaws, Rachel represents a milestone in African American drama: excluding musicals, it is the first play by an African American author to be performed by an African American cast. James Hatch and Ted Shine consider the play an ‘‘experimentation with . . . realism/ naturalism’’ in the style of Ibsen and Chekhov, two of Grimke´’s favorite authors (134). They note the ‘‘Chekhovian ‘inactivity’ of her characters’’ who also ‘‘demonstrate strong personal development through their internal motivation for change’’ and argue that the play effectively addresses issues of economics, race, and personal relationships, including motherhood (134). Although William Storm values Rachel as a ‘‘figure of considerable psychological intricacy and emotional volatility,’’ he contends the play is less racial and more an internal ‘‘battle’’ of ‘‘religious doubt and faith’’ (461, 463). Storm argues that when Rachel characterizes God as enjoying the suffering of African Americans, mocking laughter complicates her question of faith. Joyce Meier views Rachel as ‘‘somewhat idealistic’’ and ‘‘overdrawn,’’ but a significant ‘‘ironic counterpart to the eugenics movement’’ (125). Although others criticize Rachel’s ‘‘vacillation,’’ Meier sees the play’s tensions as its ‘‘strength,’’ for, through them, Rachel reaches her horrifying vision that the ‘‘Christian United States tolerates, even condones, racial violence’’ (122). According to Meier, the denial of full motherhood for African American women counters racial stereotypes, particularly the black mammy, of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 racist film, Birth of a Nation. Situating Grimke´’s work within a tradition that anticipates the rise of African American feminism, Will Harris argues that Rachel features ‘‘a dual liberation motif ’’ to emphasize racial problems and to create ‘‘substantive, independent African American female presences, and thus propose their sexual equality’’ (205). For Harris, the play invests significance in the domesticity of African American middle-class women, giving their skills economic power. In a technique used by other African American women playwrights of this period, Grimke´ pictures the home as insulating women from the outside world. Identifying significant parallels between Rachel and Grimke´ herself, Patricia Young believes Grimke´ wrote Rachel to continue her family’s history of activism (‘‘Shackled’’ 25). Calling Rachel a ‘‘cause celebre in the African-American theatrical community,’’ Patricia Schroeder asserts that the play highlights the opposing view African Americans held regarding the purpose of drama—Locke’s art for entertainment stance and DuBois’s propaganda approach (94). She traces Grimke´’s influence on later female playwrights and cites the importance of her work in reversing stereotypes and recovering ‘‘AfricanAmerican women’s unrecorded history’’ (94). Schroeder ties Grimke´’s techniques, especially the fourth-wall set and causal narrative chain, to those of Henrick Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Gerhart Hauptmann. Considering a strictly realistic view of Rachel too narrow, David Krasner views the plot in allegorical, rather than symbolic, terms. He effectively argues for reading the play through Walter Benjamin’s theory of mourning and allegory, citing ‘‘the opulence of

ANGELINA WELD GRIMKE´

233

[Grimke´’s] imagery, the overabundance of her passion, and the repetitiveness of her language’’ and pointing to the continuing mourning in response to racial discrimination (67). Judith Stephens identifies multiple purposes in Rachel: (1) to initiate an interracial dialogue by inviting white mothers to experience the trauma of African American mothers, (2) to criticize white women for their role in perpetuating white male dominance and racial oppression, (3) to highlight the peculiar problems of African American mothers who are excluded from the dominant gender ideology of the day, and (4) to upend the sacred view of motherhood by injecting race. In contrast, Elizabeth BrownGuillory argues that Rachel’s ‘‘key issue’’ is a lack of mothering (191). Jeanne-Maria Miller draws parallels between Rachel and Mara, noting that both plays use extensive dialogue, report action, include roses as symbols, denounce God for allowing racial discrimination, and use African American genteel characters to contrast racial mistreatment; she also considers Mara a ‘‘highly literary work, less overtly a protest play’’ (517, 578). Patricia Young agrees that Mara’s primary purpose is to refute the ‘‘stereotype of the African American woman as licentious and untutored,’’ but sees a ‘‘type of genocide’’ afflicting the Marston family who, by the end of the play, lose the last of their seven children (Mara 11, 20). Assessment of Grimke´’s place in the African American canon continues. Ericka M. Miller notes that, although Grimke´ was ‘‘prolific,’’ critical attention to her ‘‘complex and intriguing works’’ has been sparse and has generally concerned her poetry and Rachel (59). Miller’s own analysis focuses on Grimke´’s short fiction, the two short stories that appear in the Birth Control Review. These puzzle many critics including Hull, who considers that venue ‘‘somehow wrong’’ (‘‘Under the Days’’ 80). David Hirsch describes Agnes’s act of infanticide in ‘‘The Closing Door’’ as a ‘‘sacrifice’’ (466). He contends that Grimke´ demonstrates the silencing of a people, and a regeneration of their voice, and that ‘‘Goldie’’ repeats this theme. Emphasizing the importance of both stories, Miller says they ‘‘recast a slave narrative in a modern setting,’’ refute assumptions of African American women’s excessive fertility, and show black mothers keenly aware that even superior mothering cannot avert racial violence (83, 82). It is perhaps Miller’s and Hull’s assessments that suggest how Grimke´ will continue to be viewed. Miller contends that Grimke´’s stories ‘‘insist upon the inclusion of narratives by African American women in discussions of African American women in regard to presumed universally understood concepts such as ‘violence,’ ‘motherhood,’ and ‘freedom’’’ (97). Hull defines Grimke´ as ‘‘a versatile, socially conscious writer who was particularly concerned with the plight of black people in a racist society and the special problems that faced women’’ (Color 150). Likely, as more of Grimke´’s works become accessible, her reputation as a feminist, a race spokeswoman, and a writer skilled in multiple genres will continue to grow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Angelina Weld Grimke´ Rachel. In Black Theater, U.S.A.: Forty-five Plays by Black Americans, 1847–1974, edited by James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, 137–72. New York: Free Press, 1974. Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimke´, edited by Carolivia Herron. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

234

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Studies of Angelina Weld Grimke´’s Works Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. ‘‘Disrupted Motherlines.’’ In Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, 188–207. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Hirsch, David. ‘‘Speaking Silences in Angelina Weld Grimke´’s ‘The Closing Door’ and ‘Blackness.’’’ African American Review 26 (1992): 459–74. Honey, Maureen. Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick: Rutger University Press, 1989. Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. ———. ‘‘Under the Days: The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimke´.’’ In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, 73–81. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983. Krasner, David. ‘‘Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play: Allegory and Mourning in Angelina Weld Grimke´’s Rachel.’’ Text and Presentation 18 (1997): 64–80. Meier, Joyce. ‘‘The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women’s Theater.’’ Mellus 25 (2000): 117–39. Miller, Ericka M. The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Wells-Barnett, Grimke´, and Larsen. New York: Garland, 2000. Miller, Jeanne-Maria. ‘‘Angelina Weld Grimke´: Playwright and Poet.’’ CLA Journal 21 (1978): 513–24. Schroeder, Patricia R. ‘‘Remembering the Disremembered: Feminist Realists of the Harlem Renaissance.’’ In Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, edited by Wiliam W. Demastes, 91–106. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Stephens, Judith L. ‘‘Anti-Lynch Plays by African American Women: Race, Gender, and Social Protest in American Drama.’’ African American Review 26 (1992): 329–40. Storm, William. ‘‘Reactions of a ‘Highly-Strung Girl’: Psychology and Dramatic Representation in Angelina W. Grimke´’s Rachel.’’ African American Review 27 (1993): 461–71. Upton, Elaine Maria. ‘‘A Word Made Flesh Is Seldom: A Conversation between Certain Poems of Emily Dickinson and Angelina Weld Grimke´.’’ Dickinson Electronic Archives. 1999. http:// jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/titanic/upton3. Young, Patricia A. ‘‘Mara: A Tale of Seduction and Slaughter.’’ Literary Griot 6 (1994): 11–25. ———. ‘‘Shackled: Angelina Weld Grimke.’’ Women and Language 15 (1992): 25–31.

Gloria A. Shearin

ROSA GUY (1925– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Rosa Guy (ne´e Cuthbert), novelist, playwright, and editor, was born in Trinidad on September 1, 1925. In 1932 she and her family moved to the United States. Her mother died two years later and Guy and her sister were sent to live with their cousins. After their father died in 1937, Guy and her sister lived in an orphanage and then in foster homes in Harlem, New York. This upheaval in her childhood, and experiences in Harlem, is visible in many of her writings. After leaving school at age fourteen, she began working in factories. She married in 1941, and in 1942 had her only child, Warner. Guy’s involvement with civil rights and writing became more established due to her association with the American Negro Theatre during World War II and with her studies at New York University. As a founding member of the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1940s, along with Maya Angelou and Sarah Wright among others, Guy is an influential historical figure in the arts in the United States. She writes for adults, young adults, and children. MAJOR WORKS Her first novel, Bird at My Window (1966), is set in Harlem in the 1950s and offers an indictment of racism and poverty through the disintegration of its central character, Wade Williams. The reasons for his slide from being a brilliant school pupil to being unemployed and murderous at the age of thirty-eight are explained with his memories of the past. His wings are seen to have been clipped by institutional racism and poverty, and so, the novel critiques the influence of his environment and challenges his restricted freedom. Wade, who fought in World War II for the United States and helped to liberate France, is an emblem for the hypocrisy of racism. He is depicted as constrained throughout his childhood and adult life at home, and has yet fought for the freedom of others in Europe. The themes of racism and lack of choices are revisited by Guy repeatedly, as with The Disappearance (1979) and its sequel New Guys around the Block (1983). In these two novels, Imamu Jones survives in Harlem, and Guy, once again, exposes the devastation of an African American family through a central male character. The external influences of alcohol and drugs are vilified as available poisons. The taking of these is written of as the symptom (rather than the cause) of institutionalized inequality. In her paper, ‘‘The Human Spirit,’’ Guy reiterates her criticism of the United States, which she argues is a ‘‘playland’’ of greed. She explains this as such: ‘‘we play: society crumbles’’ (132). Guy’s faith in the human spirit is evident in her fiction and this paper, but she is also unafraid to make her readers face the harsh realities of urban living in latetwentieth-century United States.

236

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Considering Guy’s prolific output, relatively little has been written about her. She is, however, included in Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Critical reception of her work has been positive; for example, she was awarded the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award for The Friends. She has also received the Coretta King Award and an Outstanding Book of the Year citation in the New York Times. Furthermore, Once on This Island (which is the musical version of My Love, My Love) was nominated for eight Tony Awards. My Love, My Love is set on a Caribbean Island and is a reworking of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Rosa Guy And I Heard a Bird Sing. London: Gollancz, 1987. Billy the Great. London: Gollancz, 1991. Bird at My Window. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966. The Disappearance. London: Macmillan Education, 1979. Edith Jackson. New York: Viking Press, 1978. The Friends. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1973. ‘‘The Human Spirit.’’ In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Wellesley: Calaloux Publications, 1990. A Measure of Time. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1983. My Love, My Love or The Peasant Girl. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1985. New Guys around the Block. London: Gollancz, 1983. Paris, Pee Wee and Big Dog. London: Gollancz, 1984. Ruby. New York: Viking, 1976. The Sun, The Sea, A Touch of Wind. New York: Dutton, 1995. (First U.S. edition, 1985.)

Study of Rosa Guy’s Works Eastman, Beva. ‘‘Rosa (Cuthbert) Guy.’’ In Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Sandra Pollock et al. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Julie Ellam

BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL (1946– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Beverly Guy-Sheftall, an activist and a contributor to black feminism, was born in 1946 in Memphis, Tennessee. Growing up in the Jim Crow south has profoundly shaped her personal, professional, and civic life. Until her parents separated when she was eleven years old, Guy-Sheftall and her two younger sisters lived with both parents who worked, at least for part of their careers, as teachers. She credits both her parents and her maternal grandparents for providing a foundation for her progressive attitudes on race and gender, particularly her mother Ernestine Varnado Guy, whom Guy-Sheftall refers to as ‘‘the first feminist [she] ever knew’’ (Duplessis and Snitow, 485). Evidently, the value of education in nurturing individuality and self-reliance did not escape Guy-Sheftall who graduated from high school with honors before enrolling at Spelman College in Atlanta at age sixteen. While a student, Guy-Sheftall made her own efforts to understand and revise race and gender constructions. She earned a B.A. in English with a minor in secondary education from Spelman College in 1966. She completed a master’s thesis on Faulkner’s treatment of women at Atlanta University in 1970, and continued to pursue her growing interest in women’s studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University, where, in 1984, she completed her dissertation ‘‘Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women, 1880–1920.’’ She shared her interest and growing knowledge of feminist issues with her students, first at Alabama State University, then at Spelman College, where she has been working since 1971. She is now Anna Julia Cooper Professor of women’s studies at Spelman College and teaches graduate courses at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies. A prolific scholar, outspoken activist, and highly sought-after speaker, Beverly Guy-Sheftall has established herself as an authority on black feminist scholarship. In these roles, as well as in her capacities as coeditor of the now-defunct Sage (1983–1995), a scholarly journal addressing issues affecting black women, (cofounded with Patricia Bell-Scott), and as founding director of Spelman College’s Women’s Research and Resource Center, Guy-Sheftall has developed forums for a much wider audience to participate in the burgeoning field of black feminism. MAJOR WORKS Guy-Sheftall’s oeuvre includes many firsts: the first anthology on black women’s literature; the first anthology of African American feminist thought; and the first anthology of African American men’s writings on the subject of race, gender, and sexuality. Her consistency as a trailblazer springs from her resolve to write and speak forcefully and unapologetically about controversial issues, particularly those that challenge historical

238

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

and social constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her work has sought to offer alternative perspectives and to invite reexamination of entrenched views within academic and popular discourse. As a result, much of Guy-Sheftall’s work is directly involved with the recovery and reclamation of bodies of literature that have gone unacknowledged by the canon of African American and women’s writing or with the often contentious critique of an African American racial solidarity that neglects and negates issues of gender and sexuality. By the late 1990s, Guy-Sheftall had contributed several important works to the field of black feminism, including Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, coedited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye J. Parker (1979); ‘‘Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women, 1880–1920’’ (1990); Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991); and Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (1995). Guy-Sheftall’s most recent work is no less provocative. In 2001, she coedited Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. This anthology offers a broad range of articles that collectively redefine black masculinity by disrupting racial myths and sexual stereotypes. Similarly, Guy-Sheftall’s 2003 Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, coedited with Johnetta B. Cole, contests prevailing attitudes about and actions against black women within African American institutions and popular culture. Like her previous work, this most recent scholarship is grounded historically, situating these contemporary issues in their political, social, and cultural contexts. No subject is off limits for Guy-Sheftall, who writes about topics as diverse and prescient as the civil rights movement, black nationalism, the Million Man March, hip hop, violence against women and homosexuals, welfare rights, organized labor, healthcare, and AIDS. Guy-Sheftall’s attention to these subjects reflects her commitment to black feminism, which incorporates an analysis of gender and sexuality in addition to race and class. Using her platform as a scholar and activist, Guy-Sheftall implores black leaders ‘‘to seriously consider issues of gender and sexuality as they try to imagine what it would be like to liberate black people in the 21st century’’ (Potier 2004). Her body of works argues, in fact, that the discussion of gender and sexuality is as integral as the discussion of race and class to any understanding and revising of the nation’s history. Though having firmly established herself in the academic community, Guy-Sheftall has never been content to confine her research or her critical analyses to academic discourse. Instead, she invites and challenges a wide range of constituencies to recognize and rectify the hegemonic construction of Western feminism and the gender inequality between and within different racial, socioeconomic, and cultural communities. Often, this entreaty is made directly to African Americans. For example, although Guy-Sheftall acknowledges that ‘‘both Black women and Black men have been victimized by racism,’’ she adds that ‘‘Black people are programmed to focus on the external ways our safety is compromised . . . [b]ut Black women’s safety is often threatened by black men, and that’s something we don’t like to talk about’’ (Weathers 2003). These types of unsettling revelations have sometimes placed Guy-Sheftall in the midst of controversy, such as when she supported Spelman students’ proposed protest against African American rap star Nelly for his misogynistic song lyrics and degrading music videos. Yet, for GuySheftall, the conversation and debate that ensues from such controversy are critical to challenging and changing sexist and homophobic thinking and practices.

BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL

239

CRITICAL RECEPTION Because of her scholarship and activism, Guy-Sheftall has been recognized with numerous honors and awards, including the Kellogg and Woodrow Wilson fellowships and the Spelman College Presidential Award for outstanding scholarship. Her greatest accomplishment, however, may be her courage and skill in spearheading the longoverdue discussion of the intersecting roles of race, gender, class, and sexuality in this nation’s history. In the process, she has helped to rewrite that history. Criticism of her scholarship bears out this claim. Journalist Janice K. Bryant, in his review of Words of Fire in Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, laments that the anthology is not a more interesting read because it ‘‘showcases black feminist intellectuals, and that is it.’’ She also recognizes that the work is ‘‘a solid refutation of feminism as espoused by white women’’ (112). Most critics recognize this refutation as a remarkable and interesting feat in its own right. For instance, in her review of Sturdy Black Bridges for Library Review, Women’s Studies bibliographer Esther Stineman writes, ‘‘So little has been available on the work of black women writers and so much needs to be clarified about what black women have written and the images they have projected that this excellent collection of critical essays, overview articles, interviews and excerpts cannot help but be significant’’ (1339). Furthermore, critics applaud Guy-Sheftall’s scholarship for its appeal, relevance, and accessibility to a broad audience. Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies Audrey McCluskey praises the collection of poems, narratives, and essays included in Double Stitch as ‘‘one that crosses the needlessly rigid line between the truth of scholarship and the truth of personal experience, one that does not sacrifice complexity and depth for sociological formula’’ (123). Valerie Smith, director of the Program in African American Studies and Woodrow Wilson Professor of literature at Princeton University, refers to Guy-Sheftall as ‘‘a path breaking literary and cultural critic’’ who, along with Gender Talk coauthor Johnetta B. Cole, ‘‘interweave[s] astute analyses with accounts of their own public and private experiences’’ (43). In an American Visions’ review, Jonetta Rose Barras writes that ‘‘Words of Fire affirms that, as in the past, the 21st century will not find African-American women hiding behind pastel curtains but rather in the vanguard of the continuing movement for equal rights for all’’ (32). By all accounts, Beverly Guy-Sheftall is in that vanguard. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Beverly Guy-Sheftall ‘‘Black Feminism in the United States.’’ In Upon These Shores: African-American Experience, 1600 to the Present, edited by William R. Scott and William G. Shade. New York: Routledge, 2000. ‘‘The Body Politic: Black Female Sexuality and the Nineteenth-Century Euro-American Imagination.’’ In Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, edited by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. ‘‘Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women, 1880–1920.’’ New York: Carlson, 1991. Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters. With Patricia Bell-Scott. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

240

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

‘‘Elizabeth Catlett: Making What You Know Best.’’ In Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art, edited by Grant Hill and Alvia J. Wardlaw. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Finding a Way: The Black Family’s Struggle for an Education at the Atlanta University Center. Atlanta: African American Family History Association, 1983. Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities. With Johnetta B. Cole. New York: One World/Ballantine, 2003. ‘‘Preface.’’ In Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporary Black Women’s Activism, edited by Kimberly Springer. New York: New York University Press, 1999. ‘‘Sisters in Struggle: A Belated Response.’’ In The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, 485–92. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. With Roseann P. Bell and Bettye J. Parker. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979. Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. With Rudolph P. Byrd. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. ‘‘Where are All the Black Female Intellectuals?’’ In Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered, edited by Jerry G. Watts. New York: Routledge, 2004. ‘‘The Women of Bronzeville.’’ In A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, edited by Maria Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Women’s Studies: A Retrospective: A Report to the Ford Foundation. With Susan Heath. New York: Ford Foundation, 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press, 1995.

Studies of Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Works Barras, Jonetta Rose. ‘‘Feminist Fire.’’ Rev. of Words of Fire, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall. American Visions 11.1 (February/March 1996): 31–32. Bryant, Janice K. ‘‘Black Women Speak Their Minds.’’ Rev. of Words of Fire, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 10 (Winter 1995–1996): 111–12. McCluskey, Audrey T. Rev. of Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters, edited by Patricia Bell-Scott, et al. NWSA 5.1 (Spring 1993): 122–25. Potier, Beth. ‘‘Dangerous Silences: Panel Explores Sexuality in Black Communities.’’ Harvard University Gazette. April 29, 2004. Retrieved January 20, 2006. http://www.news .harvard.edu/gazette/2004/04.29/13-afamgender.html. Smith, Valerie. ‘‘Gender Politics in the Black Community.’’ Rev. of Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, by Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly GuySheftall. Crisis (March/April 2003): 42–43. Stineman, Esther. Rev. of Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Library Journal 104.12 (1979): 13–39. Weathers, Diane. ‘‘Black America’s Dirty Little Secrets.’’ Essence 1 ( July 2003): 161–63. Biography Resource Center. 2003. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale. Retrieved January 17, 2006. http://galenet.galegroup.com.eresources.lib.umb.edu/servlet/BioRC (accessed January 17, 2006).

Lynnell Thomas

MADAME EMMA AZALIA SMITH HACKLEY (1867–1922)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Classical singer, composer, journalist, and author Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley’s dual legacy is that of preserving the African American spiritual and African American women’s dignity. Born on June 29, 1867, to Corilla Beard Smith, a piano/ violin teacher, and Henry Smith, a blacksmith, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Azalia, as she was called, adopted her mother’s enthusiasm for teaching as a means of social uplift. Reared in the Protestant Episcopal Church, Azalia’s musical contributions especially emphasized the Episcopalian Church’s emphasis upon choral performance of the highest order. She also excelled in piano, voice and pipe organ, first studying under the direction of her mother, in Detroit (racial intolerance in Murfreesboro regarding Corilla Smith’s pioneering school for African American children forced the Smith family to relocate). While in Detroit, in 1883, Azalia gained an honors diploma via Central High School. In 1886, she graduated from Washington Normal School. In Detroit, in 1889, she met Edwin Henry Hackley (1859–1940), an African American attorney, politician, newspaper editor, and native Michigander. The couple eloped in 1894, making their home in Denver, Colorado, where they coedited the Denver Statesman (an African American political newspaper containing ‘‘The Exponent,’’ Madame Hackley’s column regarding women’s health and etiquette); joined the powerful Episcopal Church of the Crucifixion; hosted bridge parties and socialized with such African American luminaries as Madame C. J. Walker (who began her million-dollar hair preparations company in the city) and poet laureate Paul Laurence Dunbar. Also, while in Denver, the Hackleys created the Grand United Order of Libyans, a secret organization committed to achieving justice for African Americans through democracy and patriotism. In 1900, Madame Hackley, a coloratura soprano, became the first African American to graduate from the University of Denver with a Bachelor of Music degree. With their organization becoming a lightning rod for racial tension, the couple relocated to Philadelphia in 1901. Among Madame Hackley’s major Philadelphia achievements were creating the People’s Chorus, introducing a young Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes to their first audiences, and featuring a unique program of European classical music juxtaposed against arranged African American spirituals—a program format now commonplace in classical music. A pioneer in the area of African Americans in classical music, Madame Hackley’s travels paralleled those of African American performers, generally speaking: she nevertheless rode Jim Crow (‘‘Coloreds Only’’) cars by choice, as she easily could have passed for a white. In fact, she set down much of her writings during long train hauls and while waiting in train stations. Madame Hackley’s grueling touring schedule contributed to the dissolution of the Hackley marriage; by 1910, they were divorced.

242

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Following that, Madame Hackley kept her husband’s ‘‘good name’’ for protection and relocated to Chicago, the nation’s central railroad city. The Chicago years proved fertile for Madame Hackley. There she started the Hackley Music Publishing Company and the Vocal Normal Institute (1912–1916), a music settlement school for African Americans of modest means. In 1913, she appointed AfroCanadian composer Robert Nathaniel Dett to the position of director of music at Hampton, thus founding the Music Department at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). Between 1914 and 1915, she published an advice column for the New York Age, called ‘‘Hints to Young Colored Artists,’’ which addressed the special concerns of African American classical musicians, particularly with respect to scholarships, touring realities, and travel abroad. In 1916, she published The Colored Girl Beautiful. She also toured the United States, Canada, and Europe as vocalist/pianist (establishing herself as the first to arrange African American spirituals for solo voice) and lecturer regarding women’s empowerment. While in Paris, in 1918, she composed ‘‘Carola (A Serenade)’’ and appointed herself World War I correspondent, writing columns for the New York Age to tell African American readers the fate of their loved ones abroad. In 1920, Madame Hackley traveled to Tokyo, Japan, to introduce African American spirituals during the International Sunday School Convention—a first for Japan, African Americans, and women. In October 1921, while conducting an African American chorus in Oakland, California, Madame Hackley collapsed, never to regain her physical or mental strength. Transported to Detroit under the loving care of her only sibling, Marietta, she died on December 13, 1922, of a massive brain hemorrhage. Madame Hackley was buried, according to her wish, in an unmarked grave in Detroit. As Madame Hackley made no audio recordings (she refused lucrative recording contracts, as the ‘‘catch’’ was that she would have to betray her African American heritage by ‘‘passing’’ for white), her literary works, ironically, have become her ‘‘voice.’’ MAJOR WORKS Madame Hackley’s best known literary work, The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916), is the first etiquette book for African American women. Including such chapter titles as ‘‘Deep Breathing,’’ ‘‘Vibrations,’’ ‘‘Originality,’’ ‘‘The School of the Colored Girl Beautiful,’’ ‘‘The Religion of the Colored Girl Beautiful,’’ ‘‘The Colored Working Girl Beautiful,’’ and ‘‘The Colored Mother Beautiful,’’ the book advocates higher education, personal and public health initiatives, and the cultivation of inner beauty, through restraint and thoughtful application of such Christian ideals as purposeful industry, piety, and exalted motherhood. The Colored Girl Beautiful is based on lectures that Madame Hackley had given to women students at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama, at the request of Booker T. Washington. Hackley hawked the hardcover book during her tours, selling 1,000 copies, all below market price, to reach an underserved audience of African American women moving from plantation and domestic jobs to clerical and secretarial work. The Colored Girl Beautiful retains its relevance as a literary and historical document regarding the condition of, and possibilities for, African American women. CRITICAL RECEPTION The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916) was well received during its initial printing. In Homespun Heroines, Hallie Q. Brown mentions the book in her overview of Hackley’s

MADAME EMMA AZALIA SMITH HACKLEY

243

career, saying that Hackley ‘‘has also contributed to literature in her book titled The Colored Girl Beautiful. Madam Hackley’s life is a story of lofty purposes and brilliant achievements.’’ As the book’s author and primary promoter died only six years after its publication, it lay dormant until the late 1980s. Since that time, the world has witnessed a revival of interest in Madame Hackley’s life and works. In 2001, Lisa Pertillar Brevard published A Biography of E. Azalia Smith Hackley (1867–1922), African-American Singer and Social Activist, a biography and manuscript recovery project which she began at Smith College in 1989. In discussing The Colored Girl Beautiful (as informed by the published work of Brevard), Berg writes, ‘‘The popular writer and lecturer E. Azalia Hackley . . . fused Eugenics and New Negro discourses to define the black mother’s particularly pivotal role in race building.’’ Barbara Foley finds Hackley’s book useful for understanding the African American elite at the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘‘For the most part, the offspring of the Negro aristocracy were models of bourgeois conduct, taking their cues from texts such as E. Azalia Hackley’s The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916).’’ Moreover, the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program includes the book in its ongoing collection, ‘‘Women Working: 1870–1930.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley ‘‘Carola (A Serenade).’’ Detroit: E. Azalia Hackley, 1918. Reprint, New York: Handy Bros.Music Co., 1953. The Colored Girl Beautiful. Kansas City, MO: Burton Pub. Co., 1916. A Guide in Voice Culture. Philadelphia: n.p. 1909. ‘‘Hints to Young Colored Artists.’’ New York Age (December 7, 1914–March 4, 1915).

Studies of Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley’s Works Berg, Allison. ‘‘Fatal Contractions: Nella Larson’s Quicksand and the New Negro Mother.’’ In Mothering the Race: Women’s Narratives of Reproduction, 1890–1930. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Brevard, Lisa Pertillar. A Biography of E. Azalia Smith Hackley (1867–1922), African-American Singer and Social Activist. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. ———. A Biography of Edwin Henry Hackley (1859–1940), African American Attorney and Activist. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. ———, ed. Madame E. Azalia Hackley’s The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916). New Orleans: Monarch Baby Pub., 2004. Brown, Hallie Q. ‘‘Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley: Noted Lyric Soprano.’’ In Homespun Heroines, 236. Xenia, OH: Aldine Pub. Co., 1926. Catalog of the E. Azalia Hackley Memorial Collection of Negro Music, Dance and Drama at the Detroit Public Library. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979. Foley, Barbara. ‘‘Jean Toomer’s Washington and The Politics of Class: From Blue Veins to Seventh-Street Rebels.’’ Modern Fiction Studies 42 (Summer 1996): 289–321.

Lisa Pertillar Brevard

VIRGINIA HAMILTON (1936–2002)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Named after the state from which her grandfather escaped from slavery into freedom, essay and children’s writer Virginia Hamilton was born on March 12, 1936, and was raised on a small farm in Yellow Springs, Ohio, that has belonged to her family since the 1850s. She grew up in a large extended family of storytellers aware of the value of their personal experiences and Ohio’s centrality to the legacy of both slavery and freedom. Ohio was at the heart of the Underground Railroad; over 50,000 slaves passed through Ohio by crossing the Ohio River into freedom, or settled there after escaping. Her childhood was filled with the stories of escape and daring, and with the personal reminiscences of her family and community. For Hamilton, the ‘‘first story,’’ the tale of genesis from which all others proceed, is the story of her grandfather’s escape from slavery to freedom. ‘‘Every year he sat [his] ten children down and said, ‘Listen children, I want to tell you this story of when I ran away from slavery, so slavery will never happen to you’’’ (Mikkelsen 5). She grew up understanding storytelling as a natural and informal activity and one that was also fundamental to the wholeness of the soul, a way people had of ‘‘putting their own flesh and blood in proper perspective’’ (‘‘Rememory’’ 637). She became a ‘‘teller of tales’’ because of this legacy, and began writing at a very early age. Hamilton lived at the physical border between slavery and freedom, her knowledge of communal and personal history was grounded in familial myths about the passing on of freedom, and her language derived from a community of folk who learned to be free by ‘‘talking themselves into new states of mind’’ (Mikkelsen 2). Thus, the stories of those crossing the boundary between bondage and freedom—physical, spiritual, cultural, geographical, or political—define her work. Hamilton wrote throughout high school in Yellow Springs, and after graduation received a full scholarship to study writing at a nearby university, Antioch College. She transferred after three years to Ohio State University, landing finally in New York. There, intent on seeking her fortune, Hamilton focused on her writing and worked at a variety of odd jobs to support herself, including working as an accountant, singing in nightclubs, and playing the guitar for a performance group. She continued to write and study writing, this time at New York’s New School for Social Research. There she met her husband, poet Arnold Adoff, whom she married in 1960, and with whom she had two children, Leigh Hamilton Adoff and Jaime Levi Adoff. While at the New School, a classmate who was working at Macmillan Publishing encouraged her to submit one of her stories as children’s literature, and Hamilton’s first novel, Zeely (1967), was born. Hamilton wrote prolifically for the rest of her life, producing an average of one book a year. After living in New York and Europe for ten years, Hamilton returned to Yellow Springs with her husband and children, purchasing two acres of the family land, upon which she built the home that was her base for the remainder of her life. She was a pioneer in the field of children’s literature, consistently

VIRGINIA HAMILTON

245

producing works that challenged and expanded the form and substance of literature. She died of breast cancer, at her home in Yellow Springs in February 2002. MAJOR WORKS Hamilton’s work can be roughly divided into three categories: fiction, much of which is innovative, formally daring, and often experimental; her biographies and collections of folklore, what she has called ‘‘liberation literature’’; and her essays about literature and storytelling, her under-examined contribution to shaping African American literature and literary theory. Hamilton’s fiction makes living stories from the buried history of African Americans, an act of writing that she calls ‘‘Rememory . . . an exquisitely textured recollection, real or imagined, which is otherwise indescribable’’ (‘‘Rememory’’ 633). Privileging the act of recreation as heavily as the ‘‘facts’’ of history has been Hamilton’s most magical act. Her works pick apart and reconstruct familiar ideas and symbols, revealing the surprising, enlightening, and sometimes heartbreaking meanings behind the stories her readers think they already know. A story about her grandfather, whose hand was burned closed in a work-related fire, exemplifies this vein of disruption and reconstruction that runs throughout her work: ‘‘. . . his hand was a fist with burn scars hidden in the tightly shut palm. I would lace my fingers over his closed fist, and he would lift me up and up and swing me around and around—to my enormous delight. After that, the raised black fist became for me both myth and history, and they were mine. Grandpaw Perry was John Henry and High John de Conquer. He was power—the fugitive, the self-made, the closed fist in which I knew there was kept magic’’ (‘‘Rememory’’ 673). Claiming and building upon the familiar contemporaneous symbol of African American resistance, she links it to freedom struggle that is at once longer, more intimate, increasingly layered, bound by history, and released into current legibility by an act of reimagination. In her reimaginings, she is unwilling to relinquish the complicated legacy of African American subjectivity. She represents the pain that makes possible the triumph, and the injury at the heart of strength. Hamilton also claims that defiant and complicated symbol for the act of writing and for the work of the African American writer, the ‘‘humble crusader locked in a garret room’’ who ‘‘suffers for life, creating all purpose-prose with bruised and delicate hands’’ (‘‘Rememory’’ 638). This way of interrogating meaning defines her fiction, particularly the fantasy The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, her much-praised M.C. Higgins the Great, and The Justice Trilogy. Similarly, The Dies Drear Chronicles—The House of Dies Drear and its sequel The Mystery of Drear House—follow an African American family as they relocate from south to north, retracing the physical route of escape for the enslaved, and moving to a house that was a way station on the Underground Railroad. In these books, Hamilton figures the hidden history of escape as the mystery of a haunting that needs to be uncovered, exposing the reader to the hidden story of black leadership in the Underground Railroad, and by giving an old story an entirely new meaning, showing that history is the real mystery waiting to be solved. Though Hamilton’s writings do not explicitly identify her with the freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, they arrive on the tail end of those political movements to offer important critiques and revisions of African American subjectivity, and to interrogate ideas of freedom and cultural transformation. Her several essays not only examine intimate encounters with writing and storytelling, but also examine the roots of African American writing traditions, literature’s

246

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

cultural functions, and the new uses to which authors might put old fragments of material. Her work probes the ways in which African American lives are bound and shaped by a legacy of oppression and the ways in which those limitations are often exacerbated because histories are buried deep and often lost. In her 1981 essay ‘‘Ah, Sweet Rememory!’’she coined the term ‘‘rememory’’ as a fundamental strategy within African American writing—six years before the publication of Toni Morrison’s Beloved propelled that term into widespread use—in order to legitimize a necessary and willed recreation of the past that enables the articulation of what would be otherwise inarticulable. In her 1975 essay ‘‘High John Is Risen Again,’’she argues that reexamining the past might inspire innovations in creative forms, and widen avenues for self-creation. ‘‘We who hope to find alternatives to culturally prescribed ways of writing about black and white living,’’ she wrote, ‘‘must reach far back and learn to know again and trust the sensibilities of the slave ancestors’’ (160). One emblem of this rediscovery is the folk hero High John the Conqueror, in whom she sees the possibility of ‘‘self-assertion—not necessarily self-sacrifice and self-destruction—and through new art forms wherever possible’’ (161). Turning such knowledge inside out might reveal, like her grandfather’s closed black fist, vital and healing magic. In the same way that W.E.B. DuBois claimed that the artistic traditions of African America were the very essence of American art and, in fact, constituted its only truly indigenous art forms, Hamilton emphasizes that African American literature is American literature—hence the subtitle of her most revered collection of folklore, The People Could Fly: American Black Folklore. She does not make this distinction to reject connections with Africa (which she reverts as well as complicates throughout her work) but rather to foreground and valorize the history and contributions of African lives in the face of an irrevocable breach, and in that way mark the ‘‘progress of Black adults and their children across the American hopescape’’ (‘‘Rememory’’ 638). Works of reimagined folklore, her ‘‘liberation literature,’’ occupied much of her later writing. Her work in folklore is interested in the unique and unprecedented cultural invention that arose from the experience of African peoples in America, across the diaspora. By reclaiming folklore, and proclaiming the merit of ‘‘parallel cultures,’’ Hamilton has helped to destabilize the idea of greater and lesser cultures and contributions, and ‘‘promises,’’ writes her critical biographer Nina Mikkelsen, ‘‘to displace dichotomous thinking about ‘mainstream’ and ‘nonmainstream’’’ topics and traditions (147). CRITICAL RECEPTION Hamilton’s work was highly praised and critically successful from its initial appearance on the cultural landscape, and her thirty-five books have won virtually every major award a writer can win, including the Newberry Medal, for which she was the first African American recipient; the Hans Christian Andersen Award, which is the highest honor in children’s literature and which recognizes her outstanding body of work; and the National Book Award. In 1995 she became the first children’s author to receive the MacArthur Foundation ‘‘genius’’ grant. Her first book, Zeely, a young African American girl’s coming of age story, was quickly hailed as an important and radical departure from most books about African American children. In contrast to novels that imagine that the problems of segregation and prejudice could be eventually ameliorated by the discovery of the humanness of the African American child despite her color, Hamilton’s

VIRGINIA HAMILTON

247

work dared to assume an African American girl’s humanity and examine her growing understanding of her heritage. ‘‘Whereas White writers at this time were driven to show equality on terms of similarity,’’ writes Mikkelsen, ‘‘Hamilton dared to say that children could be different and still be equal’’ (10). Hamilton’s next two books, The House of Dies Drear, which received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best juvenile mystery of the year, and The Planet of Junior Brown, a dystopic novel of urban youth that won the Newberry Honor, cemented her status as an exciting and innovative literary voice and one of America’s foremost storytellers. In 1975, she won both the Newberry Medal and the National Book Award for M.C. Higgins, the Great, a book that also won more honors and awards than any single children’s book. Hamilton’s work has garnered attention in one book-length study, Virginia Hamilton, and in numerous scholarly articles and talks. Her work has also inspired and supported one of the largest and longest running conferences on multicultural children’s literature, The Virginia Hamilton Conference. Critics of her work cite Hamilton’s attention to the stories of African American girls; after the publication of M.C. Higgins, the Great, her next eight novels focused solely on African American female protagonists. Her attention to girls as the center of narrative impulse and shapers of modes of discourse and forms of narration has prompted several critical examinations of feminism and feminist theory in her work. Hamilton is widely credited with paving the way for other African American children’s authors, in terms of attracting positive critical attention and wider publication. Authors such as Mildred Taylor, Patricia McKissack, Sharon Bell Mathis, and Walter Dean Myers have succeeded her. Critics also point out affinities with Toni Morrison, in particular the formal strategies that focus on the recovery of what is unspoken and unremembered. Like Morrison, the impact of speaking the unspoken stories on Hamilton’s texts is visible within the work as it produces ruptures and discontinuities in time, and as it complicates the use of language. Like Morrison’s, Hamilton’s works are also deeply tied to a sense of place. Her opus manifests an abiding interest in the relations between African American subjectivity and place, a belief that for African American subjects, claiming a homeplace constitutes a radical political and social act. The year 1985 heralded a new direction in Hamilton’s writing. In that year she published The People Could Fly, an illustrated collection of stories from slavery and the first in a series of picture books, including In the Beginning: Creation Stories from around the World, The Dark Way, The All Jahdu Storybook, and Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom. These picture books were linked to Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave, and other late novels by their overt focus on liberation, which Hamilton describes as ‘‘portray[ing] the individual’s and a people’s suffering and growing awareness of self in pursuit of freedom’’ (‘‘Planting Seeds’’ 676). Her sources for these works were her own family stories, old manuscripts, and the stories told in the Work Progress Administration interviews. Perhaps it would be most accurate to understand that all of her work is liberation literature because such work, as she writes, ‘‘not only frees the subject of record and evidence but the witness as well, who is the reader, who then becomes part of the struggle . . . we suffer; and we triumph as the victim triumphs, in the solution of liberation’’ (‘‘Everything of Value’’ 375).

248

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Virginia Hamilton ‘‘Ah, Sweet Rememory!’’ Horn Book (December 1981): 633–40. The All Jahdu Storybook. Illustrated by Barry Moser. New York: Hartcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1991. ‘‘Anthony Burns.’’ Horn Book (March–April 1989): 183–85. Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave. New York: Knopf, 1988. Arilla Sun Down. New York: William Morrow, 1976. The Bells of Christmas. Illustrated by Lambert Davis. New York: Hartcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989. Bluish: A Novel. New York: Blue Sky Press, 1999. ‘‘Changing Woman, Working.’’ In Celebrating Children’s Books: Essays on Children’s Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland, edited by Betsy Hearne and Marilyn Kaye. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1981. Cousins. New York: Philomel, 1990. The Dark Way. Illustrated by Lambert Davis. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990. Drylongso. Illustrated by Jerry. New York: Hartcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992. Dustland. New York: Greenwillow Books, 1980. ‘‘Everything of Value: Moral Realism in the Literature for Children.’’ May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, Richmond, Virginia, May 4, 1993. Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 6 (Summer 1993): 363–77. ‘‘Further Notes on a Progeny’s Progress.’’ Speech delivered at the Children’s and Young People’s Meeting of the New Jersey Library Association, May 4, 1968. The Gathering. New York: Greenwillow Books, 1981. The Girl Who Spun Gold. New York: Blue Sky Press, 2000. ‘‘Hagi, Mose and Drylongso.’’ In The Zena Sutherland Lectures, 1983–1992, edited by BetsyHearne. New York: Clarion, 1992. Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales and True Tales. Illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. New York: Blue Sky Press, 1995. ‘‘High John Is Risen Again.’’ Horn Book (April 1975): 113–21. The House of Dies Drear. New York: Macmillan, 1968. In the Beginning. Illustrated by Barry Moser. New York: Hartcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988. Jaguarundi. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. New York: Blue Sky Press, 1995. Jahdu. Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. New York: Greenwillow Books, 1980. Junius Over Far. New York: Harper, 1985. Justice and Her Brothers. New York: Greenwillow Books, 1981. ‘‘The Known, the Remembered, and the Imagined: Celebrating Afro-American Folktales.’’ Children’s Literature in Education 18 (1987): 67–75. A Little Love. New York: Philomel, 1984. The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl. New York: Harper, 1983. Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom. Illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. New York: Knopf, 1993. M.C. Higgins, the Great. New York: Macmillan, 1974. ‘‘The Mind of the Novel: The Heart of the Book.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 8 (Winter 1983): 10–14. The Mystery of Drear House. New York: Macmillan, 1987. ‘‘On Being a Black Writer in America.’’ Lion and the Unicorn 10 (1986): 15–17. Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. The People Could Fly. Illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. New York: Knopf, 1985. Plain City. New York: Scholastic, 1993.

VIRGINIA HAMILTON

249

The Planet of Junior Brown. New York: Macmillan, 1971. ‘‘Planting Seeds.’’ Horn Book (November 1999): 674–80. ‘‘Portrait of the Author as a Working Writer.’’ Elementary English (April 1971): 237–40. A Ring of Tricksters; Animal Tales from America, the West Indies, and Africa. Illustrated by Barry Moser. New York: Blue Sky Press, 1997. Second Cousins. New York: Blue Sky Press, 1998. Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush. New York: Philomel, 1982. ‘‘Thought on Children’s Books, Reading, and Ethnic America.’’ In Reading Children’s Books and Our Pluralistic Society, edited by Harold Tanyzer and Jean Karl, 61–64. Newark: International Reading Association, 1972. Time-Ago Lost: More Tales of Jahdu. Illustrated by Ray Prather. New York: Macmillan, 1973. The Time-Ago Tales of Jahdu. Illustrated by Nonny Hogrogian. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Time Pieces: The Book of Times. New York: Blue Sky Press, 2002. ‘‘A Toiler, a Teller.’’ In Many Faces, Many Voices: Multicultural Literary Experiences for Youth: The Virginia Hamilton Conference, edited by Anthony Manna and Carolyn Brodie. Fort Atkinson, WI: Highsmith Press, 1992. W.E.B. DuBois. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1972. When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could Sing. New York: Blue Sky Press, 1996. A White Romance. New York: Odyssey Classics, 1987. Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed. New York: Greenwillow Books, 1983. ‘‘Writing the Source: In Other Words.’’ Horn Book (December 1978): 609–19. Zeely. Illustrated by Simeon Shimin. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Studies of Virginia Hamilton’s Works Apseloff, Marilyn. ‘‘Creative Geography in the Ohio Novels of Virginia Hamilton.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Spring 1983): 17–20. Dickman, Floyd C. ‘‘Virginia Hamilton, Conjurer of Tales.’’ Ohioana Quarterly (Summer 1985): 48–54. Dressel, Janice Hartwick. ‘‘The Legacy of Ralph Ellison in Virginia Hamilton’s Justice Trilogy.’’ English-Journal (November 1984): 42. Farrell, Kirby. ‘‘Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush and the Case for a Radical Existence.’’ Contemporary Literature (Summer 1990): 161–76. Lenz, Millicent. ‘‘Virginia Hamilton’s Justice Trilogy: Exploring the Frontiers of Consciousness.’’ African-American Voices in Young Adult Literature: Tradition, Transition, Transformation (1994): 293–310. Mikkelsen, Nina. ‘‘But Is It a Children’s Book? A Second Look at Virginia Hamilton’s The Magical Adventure.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 11.3 (Fall 1986): 134–42. ———. Virginia Hamilton. New York: Twayne, 1994. Moore, Opal, and Donnarae MacCann. ‘‘The Uncle Remus Travesty, Part II: Julius Lester and Virginia Hamilton.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 11 (Winter 1986–1987): 205–10. Moss, Anita. ‘‘Frontiers of Gender in Children’s Literature: Virginia Hamilton’s Arilla Sun Down.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Winter 1983): 25–27. ———. ‘‘Mythical Narrative: Virginia Hamilton’s The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl.’’ The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature (1985): 50–57. Nodelman, Perry. ‘‘Children’s Literature as Women’s Writing.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 13 (Spring 1988): 31–34. ———. ‘‘The Limits of Structures: A Shorter Version of a Comparison between Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins the Great.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Fall 1998): 45–48. Quinn, Alice. ‘‘Dancing in the Dark.’’ New Yorker (December 1995): 132–35; (1996): 132–35.

250

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Russell, David L. ‘‘Virginia Hamilton’s Symbolic Presentation of the Afro-American Sensibility.’’ Cross-Culturalism in Children’s Literature: Selected Papers from the Children’s Literature Association, Carleton University (May 1987): 14–17. Sobat, Gail Sidonie. ‘‘If the Ghost Be There, Then Am I Crazy?: An Examination of Ghosts in Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 20.4 (Winter 1995–1996): 168–74. Townsend, John Rowe. Written for Children. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. ‘‘I Double Never Ever Never Lie to My Chil’ren’: Inside People in Virginia Hamilton’s Narratives.’’ African-American Review 32.1 (Spring 1998): 147–56

Myisha Priest

LORRAINE HANSBERRY (1930–1965)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Lorraine Vivian Hansberry, the first African American playwright to have a play produced on Broadway, was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago. Her parents, Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry, reared their four children (of which Lorraine was the youngest) in a middle-class, black community in the segregated South Side of Chicago. Thus, Hansberry felt that she existed in a kind of in-between space: ‘‘The world in fact is divided in half as it is lived by me,’’ she wrote in her journal, ‘‘There are those who think me the liveliest of types. . . . And, still, there are the others, those latter-day images of the children of my youth who found me curious then—and still do. A serious odd-talking kid who could neither jump double dutch nor understand their games, but who—classically, envied them’’ (To Be Young 39). On the one hand, she lived, attended school, and socialized with other African Americans in her community on a daily basis, suffering similar discrimination, fighting for similar rights, and trying to survive white racism. On the other hand, the Hansberrys’s economic status as middle class set her apart from a number of their less-fortunate neighbors, who had to fight for every morsel—an experience that young Lorraine could not understand. To her, ‘‘they seemed like grownups . . . with their ability to fight back, their fierce independence, their streetsmarts. They had authority. She, on the other hand, was her family’s pet, dressed like a princess to show off her wealth’’ (Sinnott 22). This kind of upbringing led, perhaps, to a special awareness of the complexities of her own position, and that of other similarly positioned African Americans, in relation to both black and white America. In addition to the alienation Hansberry sometimes felt with her peers, she experienced alienation from white America, when, in 1938, her family attempted to move into an all-white neighborhood in Chicago, only to be greeted by a brick thrown through the family’s window and other harassment. Despite Carl Hansberry’s successful efforts to legally end this discrimination—he took his case, with the help of the NAACP, to the U.S. Supreme Court—the family was forced, after only a few months, to move back to the South Side, having been evicted from their home in Washington Park. Hansberry’s experiences shaped her understanding of racial discrimination and inequities that continued to plague black Americans in the 1940s and 1950s, even as opportunities for economic upward mobility expanded for some. After graduating from high school in 1948, Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she further developed her interest in both theater and politics. There she took classes in set design and participated in the Progressivist presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, among other political activities. In 1950, however, Hansberry decided to leave the university, finding that she was more interested in pursuing her career as a writer. Later that year, she moved to New York City, writing articles for Young Progressives of America magazine. In 1951, her success as a journalist led her to a full-time position at Freedom magazine, an alternative to the mainstream white-run presses that focused on informing the black community about things that were

252

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

of interest to them. In 1952, Hansberry was named associate editor of the magazine and at the same time became even more involved in activism for causes that included the peace movement, the black civil rights movement, and the movement for independence in Africa (a topic that she had studied since childhood). Hansberry retired from her full-time position with Freedom when she married fellow activist Robert Nemiroff on June 20, 1953, though she continued to contribute to the magazine. During the next few years, Hansberry continued to work, to write for magazines, and to participate in the life of Greenwich Village, where she and Nemiroff lived. During this time she also worked on what was to be her most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, which, after a good deal of struggle, opened on March 11, 1959, to rave reviews. Hansberry received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play on May 4, 1959. The play ran successfully for nine months on Broadway, and Hansberry was commissioned to write a screenplay for a film version of Raisin, which premiered in 1961. After her early success, Hansberry continued to work on several plays and projects, including a script completed for NBC-TV, called A Drinking Gourd. Ultimately, the play was never aired because the series was conceived to be too controversial and potentially alienating to southern viewers. Hansberry also began work on Les Blancs and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. During this time Hansberry became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement, becoming friends with James Baldwin and other artist-activists. She was part of a delegation of black artists and activists who met Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in May of 1963 to discuss the need for laws and policies that would reverse the continued discrimination against African Americans. With regard to the civil rights movement, Hansberry wrote: ‘‘Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps— and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities’’ (To Be Young 213–14). Hansberry’s commitment to the racial struggle in America was under way. Unfortunately, she would not live to see those struggles through, for, in June of 1963, Hansberry was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and was submitted to surgeries and radiation treatment over the next two years. In March of 1964, Hansberry divorced Nemiroff, though he continued as a presence in her life and became the literary executor of her estate. In October of that year, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened on Broadway to mixed reviews. The show was nearly forced to close down after its first week, but many rallied around the play, supporting it monetarily and ultimately enabling it to run 101 days. The play closed on January 12, 1965—the day that Hansberry died of cancer. Though Hansberry left no other completed plays after her death, she did leave drafts of several pieces that were later edited and (in some cases) completed by Robert Nemiroff. In 1969, Nemiroff produced the play To Be Young, Gifted, and Black along with a companion book that detailed some of the events and writings of Hansberry’s life, and in 1970 Les Blancs (completed and edited by Nemiroff) opened on Broadway. In addition, Nemiroff wrote and produced a musical version of A Raisin in the Sun (called Raisin) in 1973. A Raisin in the Sun has seen a number of new productions, which included a 1989 uncut television version with Danny Glover and Esther Rolle. In 2004, a fifteen-week revival of the play opened on Broadway. The revival earned Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Play and Best Featured Actress in a Play,

LORRAINE HANSBERRY

253

respectively. The persistent popularity of this play testifies to the fact that, though Hansberry’s life was short, the art she created continues to impact Americans into the twenty-first century. MAJOR WORKS Lorraine Hansberry’s major works consist of a handful of plays and a script written for television. The lack of quantity, however, is made up for in breadth and depth in the available works. Her two complete plays, A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), as well as her telescript A Drinking Gourd (1959), and her plays edited and completed by Robert Nemiroff, Les Blancs (1970) and What Use Are Flowers? (1972), cover a variety of topics and show a deep engagement with issues that include modern American racism, the need for intellectuals to commit to social change, a recognition of the realities of the American slave system, the need for African independence, and the need for enlightened humanism. Though each play functions independently, it is possible to see common themes and motifs that run through each. A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of the Younger family and their struggle to fulfill their ideals in the segregated and racist world of 1950s America. Lena Younger has recently received a 10,000 dollar life insurance check after the death of her husband and is trying to decide how best to use the money to help the family. Her son Walter wants to use the money to buy into a liquor store, while her daughter Beneatha could use the money toward medical school. The conflict of the play revolves around the various dreams held by members of the family and the ways those dreams become, as in Hughes’s poem that begins the play, deferred by the racist, classist, and sexist society that the Youngers inhabit. Lena eventually decides to give most of the money to her son Walter, knowing that he needs it to maintain his sense of dignity and manhood in the face of America’s oppression. He is to spend some of the money for his business and save the rest for his sister’s education. Meanwhile, Lena reserves the rest of the money for a down payment on a home for the family to move into. Unfortunately, the house she buys is located in an all-white neighborhood and the family must choose between being bought out by a member of the neighborhood ‘‘welcoming committee’’ who feels that the races would get along better by being separate, or maintaining their integrity and facing possible harassment by the community into which they will move. The play culminates with Walter, having been duped out of his and his sister’s money, standing up to the racism of Lindner and the welcoming committee. In the final scene, Walter tells Lindner, ‘‘We are very proud . . . and we have decided to move into our house because my father— my father—he earned it for us brick by brick. . . . We don’t want your money’’ (1075). Thus, the play ends on a note of pride and hope for the African American community working to achieve equality. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window focuses on the lives of Jewish intellectual Sidney Brustein and his ‘‘all American’’ wife Iris living in the bohemian world of Greenwich Village. Sidney’s struggle to find meaning in political struggle is the centerpiece of the play as is the sign that hangs in his apartment window, declaring ‘‘CLEAN UP COMMUNITY POLITICS Wipe Out Bossism VOTE REFORM’’ (34). An idealist who has lost his ideals, Sidney is a failed businessman and faces a slowly deteriorating marriage. Despite his failure, Sidney attempts to carry on with a newspaper, which he decides will be entirely apolitical. Nevertheless, when his friend Wally asks him for help on his Reform campaign, Sidney volunteers. He is soon disillusioned by his friend and

254

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

finds himself back where he started. The sign in his window, then, becomes ironic when Sidney realizes that his friend Wally will become corrupt just like the bosses he ran against. Hansberry dedicated the play partly to ‘‘the committed everywhere,’’ and this dedication highlights the conclusion that Sidney comes to at the end of the play, where he declares his belief that ‘‘men change every day and that rivers run and that people wanna be better than they are and that flowers smell good and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is—energy and energy can move things . . .’’ (142). This declaration signals Sidney’s willingness to commit himself to change, both politically and personally. Though the sign initially seems to mock Sidney, it later helps him to realize his duty to fight the status quo despite the problems of individuals like Wally who become corrupted by the system. Thus, the play ends on a hopeful note for the state of the intellectual, the one who will not give in to the demands of a corrupted society, but who sees the potential for change. Though Les Blancs is a lesser-known play, its dramatic focus is extremely important for understanding the kind of commitment that Sidney Brustein urges at the end of his play. Set in a fictional African nation, Les Blancs tells the story of Tshembe, an African man living in England who has come home to bury his father. When he arrives home, he finds that his brothers, Eric and Abioseh, have become embroiled in the movement for independence, though each expresses his resistance differently. Taking place mostly on the premises of a medical mission, the play juxtaposes not only the attitudes of the three brothers, but also the attitudes of the doctors working in the mission, their servants, and a visiting American newspaperman. The presence of the American journalist, constantly interested in ‘‘picking the brains’’ of Tshembe, also reveals the complicity of the socalled American liberals who purport to help and yet continue to be part of the imperial problems of Africa. Through these characters, the play explores the complexity of the African situation in which they must overthrow their colonial oppressors violently, while recognizing the ways that their lives are variously intertwined with the colonial culture from which they seek freedom. This duality is an issue that arises for Tshembe, a former revolutionary who, like Sidney Brustein, has become disillusioned with the political process and seeks only comfort and peace in his life in England with his European wife and his children. When he finds, however, that his brother Abioseh has devoted himself to becoming a priest for the colonial religion, and that Eric, a brother sired by a European officer and his own mother, has taken to alcoholism and inertia, he finds the courage to act on behalf of his people. Tragically, Tshembe is forced to kill Abioseh in an effort to protect the movement for independence. As in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, this play attempts to represent Africa and Africans in less stereotypical ways and shows Hansberry’s interest in the connections between the struggles of African Americans and Africans worldwide. Hansberry’s A Drinking Gourd, though never produced, emphasizes many of the themes picked up both in her writing and in subsequent works by other writers examining the slavery experience. Gourd studies the lives of slaves working on the Sweet plantation just before the Civil War. The play depicts various characters’ responses to the volatile situation facing the south with regard to its status in the Union and to its institution of slavery. By representing not only the points of view of the plantation owners of different generations (contrasting, for instance, Hiram’s view of slavery with his son Everett’s view), but also poor white farmers and black slaves, Hansberry is able to point to the complex forces that make the institution a part of southern life at the time.

LORRAINE HANSBERRY

255

While Rissa (Hannibal’s mother) attempts to work hard to make a difficult life a bit easier for her son, Hannibal sees only the need to escape to the north. In order to follow this dream, Hannibal tricks the Sweets’s younger son Tommy into giving him reading lessons. Upon discovering the two studying in the woods, Everett orders Zeb Dudley, the poor white overseer, to cut out Hannibal’s eyes. When an ailing Hiram finds out about his son’s actions, he goes to Rissa in an attempt to gain her absolution. She refuses and he dies outside the slave quarters, vainly crying for help. In the end, Hannibal does escape the plantation with Rissa’s help, taking Sarah, his beau, and his nephew Joshua along. The play does not reveal their fate, but it is clear that, as Hiram states upon hearing that the south is going to war, ‘‘The South is lost. . . . A way of life is over. The end is here and we might as well drink to what it was’’ (213). The last major work written by Hansberry was the play What Use Are Flowers? a story of an elderly hermit, who, having taken off to the woods for twenty years in order to escape man’s folly, comes out only to find a wasteland populated only by a group of wild children. Setting about the work of teaching these children how to be civilized human beings, the hermit, a former English teacher, is forced to start from scratch, teaching them about speech, fire, and, eventually, beauty. In the end he finds this concept— beauty—most difficult to teach and despairs of ever civilizing the children. After his death, however, it seems that the children have gained some lessons about the ‘‘use’’ of flowers, which are, as he says in his final speech, ‘‘infinite’’ (261). The children, however, have yet to discover the infinite uses because they have yet to experience death, the end of infinity. The play is, in a way, highly philosophical, as it posits many important questions about the value of art to society. At the same time, it reflects a very real fear of the time—a fear that humankind would destroy itself in nuclear holocaust. Nonetheless, Flowers refuses despair and calls for a reevaluation of the status quo. Hansberry’s work is tied together by the theme of the need for understanding. In each play, the central conflicts revolve around a lack of understanding. A Raisin in the Sun’s emphasis on intergenerational lack of understanding (as between Mama and Beneatha and Walter) highlights the way that Hansberry will apply this lack of understanding into the larger circle of race relations in the United States. Just as Mama fails (at first) to see Walter’s point of view on the issue of race, white America has continually failed to understand the black American family. The play, then, tries to give the audience (both white and black) an understanding of the life situation of this particular group of black Americans struggling to make their way in a hostile situation. This kind of understanding is also vital to Hansberry’s second play, Sidney, which shows a series of characters, all of whom seem to have no knowledge of the lives of the others. Thus, misunderstandings constantly arise—between Sidney and Iris, between David and Alton, and between Wally and Sidney. All these misunderstandings lead to the ultimate change that will take place at the end of the play when Sidney finally understands what that sign in his window represents—commitment. Likewise, Les Blancs offers a tale of the white American journalist and the black Anglo-African who cannot, despite all their talking, come to a sense of a common understanding, even at the end of the play. In Gourd we find misunderstandings constantly near the surface. The fact that the poor whites and the enslaved blacks cannot band together to overthrow the mutually oppressive system that hurts them both shows the power of the kinds of misunderstandings that are deliberately cultivated to keep the rich in power. A notable motif in Hansberry’s work is the link that she makes among people of various cultures and backgrounds in terms of their oppression. That is, Hansberry is

256

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

willing to posit the oppression of women alongside the oppression of blacks as well as homosexuals. Before the term came into being, Hansberry was using the feminist concept of intersectionality. For instance, in Raisin, audiences may find themselves aligned not only with Walter, but also with the women in his life, who are forced to work and scrape in sometimes even more menial jobs than the men. Ruth, in particular, is a subject of sympathy, with her need to sacrifice for her family and her lack of time to develop her own talents and potential while often being held responsible for Walter’s state: ‘‘That is just what is wrong with the colored woman in this world,’’ Walter tells Ruth. ‘‘Don’t understand about building their men up and making ’em feel like they somebody. Like they can do something. . . . We one group of men tied to race of women with small minds!’’ (1044). Part of Walter’s journey by the end of the play is to gain some understanding of his wife and her situation in the world, and the play asks its audience to recognize the ways that each character struggles for his or her own humanity with obstacles that are overlapping but not identical. Hansberry’s work does not just stop with recognizing the multiple identities of the various characters, but also analyzes their problems not simply as personal but as a part of the larger institutions that maintain the status quo. An example of this is her work on Sidney as well as in Les Blancs and in Gourd. In each of these plays she highlights the ways that each member of the community under examination is subject to the larger forces of the societies in which they reside. Thus, Sidney’s aims for genuine political change get wrapped up in the corruption of the American political machine after his candidate, Wally, gets elected. Likewise, Les Blancs presents the problems of colonialism and imperialism as central factors in the conflicts among and within the characters represented, just as the institution of slavery shapes each of the characters in A Drinking Gourd, whether slave, master, or poor white. This kind of prescience, a quality that existed both in her literary works and in her nonfiction writings and speeches, makes the study of Hansberry relevant for scholars trying to understand the continued oppression of many groups of people throughout the world. CRITICAL RECEPTION Generally, critical reception of Hansberry’s work has been mixed and has changed over time. Though her first work was generally well received at the time of its opening and was undoubtedly a success as evidenced by its long run on Broadway, it too had its detractors. After the initial general critical reception that created the fame and prestige of the playwright, there was a backlash against her among critics who, citing her middleclass background, called her a sellout and not radical enough for the coming black freedom movement. The opening of Sidney did nothing to alleviate this criticism, since the play addresses a very select group of artists and intellectuals and touches only tangentially on the plight of black Americans. Later critics recognized the error of these characterizations, noting the civil rights work Hansberry involved herself in at an early stage in the movement as well as the complexity and commitment she brought to her plays, including the plays that were performed and published by her literary executor Robert Nemiroff after her death. In 1979 Freedomways magazine devoted a special issue to Hansberry’s work. Though often focused on Raisin, this issue contains articles on Hansberry’s aesthetics in relation to her political commitments, representing a revision of how she had been viewed by earlier black activists. In his introduction, Jean Bond writes:

LORRAINE HANSBERRY

257

[S]he did not believe that a sharp dichotomy exists between art and propaganda. She asserted that all plays have a message, despite the fact that those which uphold the validity of such conventional ideas as monogamy, capital punishment or militarism are rarely discussed as ‘‘message’’ plays. She felt that plays expressing radical views are stigmatized as propagandistic simply in order to derogate what they have to say. (188–89)

In addition to the praise heaped on Hansberry’s work by many critics within the pages of the magazine, we also find Adrienne Rich’s ‘‘The Problem with Lorraine Hansberry,’’ in which she questions the legitimacy of the versions of Hansberry’s plays and life that have been propagated. Using Hansberry’s possible lesbianism as a starting point, Rich questions how the writings of Hansberry, as a result of her shortened life, may have been modified to come across as less militant and openly feminist than they turned out to be under the guardianship of Robert Nemiroff. These issues have continued to be relevant in the evaluation of Hansberry’s work, as new generations of critics have attempted to grapple with Hansberry’s work and legacy. Full-length studies on Hansberry’s works are worth reading for their emphasis on her work as a whole rather than on her first and most famous play alone. In general, these works emphasize the ways that Hansberry was both of her time and ahead of her time, creating worlds on the stage that carefully balanced the need for realistic portrayals of life as it was for black Americans (and other oppressed groups) at the time with the need for a future-oriented and action-filled approach to the problems presented in the plays themselves. As Steven Carter notes, ‘‘However richly or unpredictably drawn . . . Hansberry’s characters are never viewed in isolation as singular or psychologically unique, but always as social beings interacting with society. And because of her respect for the complexity of both people and their society, she became keenly alert to the multiplicity of motives involved in each action’’ (15–16). This recognition of complexity led to calls for action on behalf of oppressed peoples in a number of Hansberry’s plays. In addition, later critics have focused on Hansberry’s place within the canon of American drama, noting her influence on future playwrights and the way she molded the protest play form to suit her particular aims. In most recent criticism of Hansberry’s work we find a greater appreciation for the talent she possessed as well as her prescience in understanding the coming of the black freedom movement, the decolonization of Africa, the feminist movement, as well as the continued problems that would beset Americans who have yet to understand some of the lessons she sought to teach.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Lorraine Hansberry A Drinking Gourd. 1959. In Lorraine Hansberry; The Collected Last Plays, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: New American Library, 1983. Les Blancs. 1970. In Lorraine Hansberry: The Collected Last Plays, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: New American Library, 1983. A Raisin in the Sun. 1959. In Stages of Drama: Classic to Contemporary Theater, edited by Carl H. Klaus, Miriam Gilbert, and Bradford S. Field, Jr., 1040–81. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. New York: Random House, 1964. To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Adapt. Robert Nemiroff. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969.

258

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Toussaint (A Work in Progress). 1961. In 9 Plays by Black Women, edited by Margaret B. Wilkerson, 51–66. New York: New American Library, 1986. What Use Are Flowers? A Fable in One Act. 1972. In Lorraine Hansberry: The Last Collected Plays, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: New American Library, 1983.

Studies of Lorraine Hansberry’s Works Bond, Jean Carey, ed. Lorraine Hansberry: Art of Thunder, Vision of Light. Freedomways 19.4 (1979, special issue): 183–304. Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment amid Complexity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cheney, Anne. Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Effiong, Philip Uko. In Search of a Model for African American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000. Gavin, Christy, ed. African American Women Playwrights: A Research Guide. New York: Garland, 1999, 61–127. Grant, Robert Henry. ‘‘Lorraine Hansberry: The Playwright as Warrior-Intellectual.’’ Ph.D. Diss., Harvard University, 1982. Sharadha, Y. S. Black Women’s Writing: Quest for Identity in the Plays of Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake Shange. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1998. Sinnott, Susan. Lorraine Hansberry: Award-Winning Playwright and Civil Rights Activist. Berkeley, CA: Conari, 1999.

Kelly O. Secovnie

JOYCE HANSEN (1942– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Joyce Hansen is a writer of young adult literature and historical fiction. She was born on October 18, 1942, in New York City to Austin Victor, a photographer, and Lillian Dancy Hansen. While growing up in the Bronx, she developed an affinity toward books and reading. Hansen’s interest in literature continued through her educational career, in which she earned a B.A. in English from Pace University in 1972 and an M.A. in English Education from New York University in 1978. In 1973, she became an English teacher in a New York City school. Through this teaching experience, she realized the positive effects literature has on students. Hansen then decided to write particularly for young readers and include characters with whom they could identify. Hansen married Matthew Nelson on December 18, 1982, and in 1987 became a mentor and teacher at Empire State College in Brooklyn, New York. She retired from the teaching profession in 1995, yet continues to write full time. Hansen lives with her husband in West Columbia, South Carolina. MAJOR WORKS Hansen wrote her first novel, The Gift-Giver, in 1980. It was quickly followed by two more novels, Home Boy (1982) and Yellow Bird and Me (1986), the sequel to The Gift-Giver. After Yellow Bird and Me, Hansen explored the new genre of historical fiction in Which Way Freedom? (1986), Out from This Place (1988), I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl (1997), The Captive (1994), and The Heart Calls Home (1999). Hansen continued her writing transition with the nonfiction text Between Two Fires: Black Soldiers in the Civil War (1993) and One True Friend (2001), the continuation of Yellow Bird and Me. Hansen frequently draws upon her experiences when writing her novels. In The GiftGiver, she reconstructs her positive upbringing by reinforcing the values of acting responsibly, self-determination, and showing commitment to one’s family. Although Hansen uses the actual murder of a New York City student by a young Jamaican boy as the basis for Home Boy, she returns to inspirational themes in Yellow Bird and Me and One True Friend by emphasizing the triumph of overcoming hardships and the importance of friendship. Hansen observes the history of slavery in the trilogy Which Way Freedom?, Out from This Place, and The Heart Calls Home by depicting the struggles of two slaves, Obi and Easter, before and after the Civil War. She describes the African Americans who fought in the Northern Army and Confederate Army in Between Two Fires: Black Soldiers in the Civil War. By using letters, speeches, and other documents from the time period, Hansen shows how African Americans fought against prejudice and fought for freedom. Her illustrations of slaves are also authentically incorporated in I Thought My

260

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl and The Captive. Both texts illustrate the lives of young slaves who yearn to be free. CRITICAL RECEPTION Joyce Hansen’s works have been highly praised by critics for her realistic characters and incorporation of historic events. She has won the Parents Choice award for Yellow Bird and Me in 1986 and the Coretta Scott King Award for literature four times. For her outstanding literary contributions, Hansen also garnered the Children’s Book Award by the African Studies Association in 1995. She continues to be the subject of numerous articles to the delight of her readers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Joyce Hansen Between Two Fires: Black Soldiers in the Civil War. New York: Franklin Watts, 1993. The Captive. New York: Scholastic, 1994. The Gift-Giver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. The Heart Calls Home. New York: Walker & Company, 1999. Home Boy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl. New York: Scholastic, 1997. One True Friend. New York: Clarion, 2001. Out from This Place. New York: Walker, 1988. Which Way Freedom? New York: Walker, 1986. Yellow Bird and Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

Studies of Joyce Hansen’s Works Berger, Laura Stanley, ed. Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers. Detroit: St. James Press, 1995. Moore, Opal, and Donnarae MacCann. ‘‘On Canon Expansion and the Artistry of Joyce Hansen.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 15.1 (1990): 32–37. Senick, Gerard J., ed. Children’s Literature Review. Detroit: Gale, 1990. Stone, James. ‘‘The Coming of Age of the Civil War Novel.’’ Social Studies 95.1 ( January/ February 2004): 40–45. Tolson, Nancy D. ‘‘Regional Outreach and an Evolving Black Aesthetic.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 20:4 (1995–1996): 183–85.

Dorsia Smith

FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER (1825–1911)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Harper, a poetess, novelist, and essayist, was born on September 24, 1825, to a free black mother in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother passed away when she was approximately three years old, and Harper subsequently became the ward of her uncle, Rev. William Watkins, a well-known and respected teacher and activist. Her uncle and the education that she received at the school he founded profoundly influenced her. Harper attended the William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth until the age of thirteen. She then took a domestic job with the Armstrong family, during which time she continued to educate herself and spent time developing essays, poetry, and prose. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of public or private documentation on Harper’s early years. Harper did not keep a diary and, consequently, much of what is known about her personal life is derived from William Still’s The Underground Railroad. References suggest that Harper’s early years were particularly difficult, though the exact nature of those difficulties is not specified. At the age of twenty, Harper published her first volume of poetry, Forest Leaves (1845). Sadly, there are no extant copies of this work. Harper received training as a seamstress and afterward took on various jobs teaching embroidery and sewing, which she ultimately did not find fulfilling. In 1854, she published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, which sold more than 10,000 copies. During the same year, she acquired a job with the Maine Anti-Slavery Society as a traveling lecturer, thus beginning her career as a public speaker. Her dedication to the antislavery cause was undoubtedly prompted by the sense of racial responsibility and political activism encouraged by her uncle and the discrimination that she faced. Additionally, she was provoked by the death of a man who violated a law passed in 1853 that prohibited free blacks from entering Maryland with the threat of enslavement. A free black man unwittingly broke the law and was enslaved. He attempted to escape, but was recaptured and died soon after. The incident contributed to her deep commitment to the cause. In 1860, she married Fenton Harper and subsequently mothered one child, Mary. Her husband died only a few years later, in 1864. Shortly after his death, Harper returned full time to her public speaking and writing careers. Harper spoke on behalf of and was active in numerous organizations and movements dedicated to progressive political change and social justice, including the Underground Railroad, the National Association of Colored Women, the American Equal Rights Association, and a variety of state AntiSlavery Societies. In 1909, Harper’s daughter, Mary, who had never married and lived with her mother, died. Harper died shortly thereafter, in 1911, from heart disease.

MAJOR WORKS Throughout her life, Harper published numerous volumes of poetry and prose as well as novels, including Forest Leaves (1845), Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects

262

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

(1854/1857), Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sketches of Southern Life (1872), Sowing and Reaping (1876–1877), Trial and Triumph (1888–1889), Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) and The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems (c. 1895). She was also a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines. Not surprisingly, the topics Harper wrote about dealt with the issues of social justice to which she had dedicated her life. She wrote extensively about the institution of slavery and, following abolition, her work reflected the Reconstruction era and the rampant racism that continued to plague the lives of African Americans. Biblical stories and allusions to Judeo-Christian values can be found throughout her work, and a frequent theme of her poems was the employment of moral integrity and perseverance to overcome the multiple oppressions plaguing the downtrodden in the United States. She also wrote about temperance and the struggles faced by women in U.S. society. Iola Leroy, for example, is a story about a freeborn mulatta who struggles to survive the racism and sexism that permeated nineteenthcentury American society. Additionally, Harper’s political essays, many of which were texts of speeches she had given during her speaking tours, were published in Christian, feminist and antislavery publications. For example, Harper’s speeches, ‘‘We are all Bound Up Together’’ and ‘‘Woman’s Political Future’’ were published in the Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention (1866) and The World’s Congress of Representative Women (1894), respectively. Harper’s work offers insightful critiques of the white patriarchal power structure that existed in nineteenth-century U.S. culture and its effect on African Americans, women, and biracial people.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Any consideration of the critical reception of works produced by nineteenth-century African American women must take into account white patriarchal hegemony and the double oppression that African American women faced during the period. These obstacles often relegated the work of African American women writers to the margins and to obscurity. Despite these barriers, Harper’s work enjoyed much popular success among African Americans and whites during her time period. Indeed, William Still states that she was the most prominent African American poet of the nineteenth century. Certainly, this was an amazing achievement during the period. Yet, the literary critics of the early twentieth century were not generous in remembering Harper’s work, reproaching her poetry for its sentimentality and errors of metrical construction, and consigning it to footnotes. Consequently, much of Harper’s work went out of print. However, recognizing the important cultural and historical yield of Harper’s literary contributions, feminist literary scholars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have begun the work of recontextualizing and restoring Harper’s literary legacy. Authors such as Frances Smith Foster, Shirley Wilson Logan, Melba Boyd, Hazel Carby, and Carla L. Peterson have made significant strides in the resurrection of Harper’s lifework. These authors have emphasized the important cultural work Harper’s writings achieved through their focus on political activism and social justice, their ability to speak directly to the needs of the audience, and their feminist underpinnings.

FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER

263

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Iola Leroy, edited by Hazel Carby. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels, edited by Frances Smith Foster. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Studies of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Works Boyd, Melba. Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper 1825– 1911. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Foster, Frances Smith, ed. A Brighter Day Coming: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1990. Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Logan, Shirley Wilson. We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. ———. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. Peterson, Carla L. ‘‘‘Whatever Concerns Them, as a Race, Concerns Me’: The Oratorical Careers of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Sarah Parker Redmond.’’ In ‘‘Doers of the Word’’: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880), edited by Carla Peterson, 119–45. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Still, William. The Underground Railroad. Medford, NJ: Plexus Publishing, 2005.

Valerie Palmer-Mehta

JUANITA HARRISON (1887–19??)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Juanita Harrison, autobiographer, was born into a working-class family in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1887. She left school at an early age to begin working and never completed her formal education. Harrison left Mississippi at the age of thirty and traveled throughout the United States, working at different service jobs. She saved her money and invested it wisely, until in 1927 her interest income was $200 a year. She used this income to travel around the world, supplementing it with work as a servant when necessary. Mildred Morris, daughter of an American family who employed Harrison in Paris, encouraged her to write about her travels and later served as her editor. Two excerpts from Harrison’s travel writings were published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1935, and were so well received that Macmillan published her collected travel writings in book form in 1936 as My Great, Wide, Beautiful World. This book chronicles Harrison’s travels throughout Europe, the Middle East, India and Ceylon, Japan and China. Harrison settled in Hawaii in 1936 but continued to travel; she made extensive journeys through Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s, but did not publish further about her experiences. Very little is known about Harrison outside the information contained in her writings, and almost nothing about her later years; even her date of death is unknown. The last certain information about Harrison is that she applied for a new passport in 1950, intending to travel to Bolivia, and that she was single and childless at that time.

MAJOR WORKS Juanita Harrison’s fame rests on her single book, My Great, Wide, Beautiful World and on excerpts from it published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1935. My Great, Wide, Beautiful World consists of more than 200 journal entries recording her impressions of the people, places, and things she observed during her travels. Harrison’s lack of formal education is evident in her nonstandard spelling and use of the English language, although her meaning is generally clear and her observations frequently pungent. For instance, this is her impression of London: ‘‘The 4 most popular things in London are Fogs bad weather bad colds and chilblains the most rarest thing is the Sun’’ (13). My Great, Wide, Beautiful World would be interesting if it were only a travelogue, but in fact it is much more. Because she was a working-class woman and continued to work as a servant from time to time while traveling, Harrison brought a seldomrepresented point of view to the great sights of the world, whether the Houses of Parliament in London or the Taj Mahal in India. Equally as interesting were her descriptions of how people reacted to her as an African American woman traveling alone. Because her appearance was racially ambiguous and she was multilingual, when traveling abroad Harrison was able to step outside the racial categorizations enshrined into

JUANITA HARRISON

265

law in her native Mississippi. Harrison, who is described in the introduction to My Great, Wide, Beautiful World as olive-skinned and as having braided black hair, was amused at the number of different racial/ethnic identities ascribed to her in different countries, including Arabic, Jewish, Chinese, Spanish, Anglo-Indian, Greek, and Cuban. She commented that she was not concerned about what ethnicity other people assumed her to be, but was ‘‘willing to be whatever I can get the best treatments at being’’ (75). CRITICAL RECEPTION My Great, Wide, Beautiful World was a popular success, going through nine editions in ten months. It was reissued with a new introduction in 1996 as part of the series African American Women Writers, 1910–1940, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. However, Harrison’s work has not attracted the academic or critical attention it deserves, perhaps because her life and work are so exceptional that they do not fit easily into the standard categories used to describe female and African American writers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Juanita Harrison My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, edited by Mildred Morris. New York: Macmillan, 1936. Reprint in, with an introduction by Adele Logan Alexander, African American Women Writers, 1910–1940. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.

Studies of Juanita Harrison’s work Alexander, Adele Logan. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In My Great, Wide, Beautiful World. Juanita Harrison. African American Women Writers, 1910–1940, xv–xxviii. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996. Halverson, Cathryn. ‘‘‘Betwixt and Between’: Dismantling Race in My Great, Wide, Beautiful World.’’ Journal x 4.2 (Spring 2000): 133–57. ———. Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900–1936. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

Sarah Boslaugh

SAFIYA HENDERSON-HOLMES (1950–2001)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born Sharon E. Henderson to Esther and Chet Henderson on December 30, 1950, in Bronx, New York, poet Safiya Henderson-Holmes was an alumna of New York University (B.A.), City College of New York (M.F.A.), and pursued post-Master’s work at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College. Henderson-Holmes was actively involved in Poets and Writers, Art Against Apartheid, MADRE, and National Council of American/ Soviet Friendship. She succumbed to cancer on April 8, 2001, and is survived by her husband, Preston Holmes, and daughter, Naimah.

MAJOR WORKS Henderson-Holmes’s objective of discussing the political realities in the lives of women is best expressed in her first publication, Madness and a Bit of Hope. Her collection Daily Bread also focuses on the marginalized, giving voice to those who are silenced by their status occupying society’s fringe, such as children in dysfunctional families, rape victims, and immigrant women. After attending a public reading of her work, in a 1995 Amsterdam News article, journalist Risasi-Zachariah Dias commented that Henderson-Holmes’s ‘‘eloquent yet stinging, poignant poetic words pierce souls. [Her] poems are electrifying and volatile, yet soothing.’’ Described by Dias as ‘‘positive, fiery, revolutionary,’’ both of HendersonHolmes’s poetry collections address the social conditions paramount in American society. While using her writing to deconstruct paradigms and ideologies, her poems are rife with symbolism, irony, and sarcasm, encouraging personal introspection, social change, and an enlightened sense of community consciousness. In a February 2000 New York Beacon article, famed writer/poet June Jordan comments that ‘‘Safiya Henderson-Holmes gives us spine and joy and the grace of laughter with the sweetness of spirit—with a surety of craft that cannot fail to swell and, rising, captivate the open political heart of America.’’ CRITICAL RECEPTION Critical analyses of Henderson-Holmes’s writings are quite scarce; however, she was quite popular in the New York City poetry community. Although her commercial notoriety can be arguably considered as obscure, in affirmation of her writing talents, Henderson-Holmes is widely anthologized and extensively published. In addition, she was the recipient of many awards and fellowships. During her career, she received two Goodman City College of New York Awards (1982), a Northstar Grant (1983), the CAPS Poetry Fellowship (1983), the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Poetry Fellowship (1986), the Fannie Lou Hamer Achievement Award (1987), a Summer Residency at the Blue Mountain Center (1988), a Summer Residency at the Cummington

SAFIYA HENDERSON-HOLMES

267

Colony and the Community School of the Arts (1989–1991), the Poetry Society of America (PSA) William Carlos Williams Award (1990), and a MacDowell Fellowship (1992). Henderson-Holmes’s collection Madness and a Bit of Hope garnered her the William Carlos Williams Award. In her ‘‘Essay About Triangle Fire Poetry,’’ Janet Zandy asserts that in Henderson-Holmes’s poetry, there exists ‘‘a genuine vein of contemporary working-class women’s literature.’’ In a 1997 book review, David Earl Jackson of the TriState Defender writes that Henderson-Holmes ‘‘can catch and stay in the groove of a poem . . . making the reader marvel at her display of the language, where the words and the feelings get all jumbled up in a tangled web of therapy and testimony.’’ The therapeutic and cathartic qualities of her writing are more prevalent in her later publications. Because of her diagnosis with a rare cancer, Henderson-Holmes’s later writings address the issues of body image, mortality, and the experience of illness. The most noteworthy of the works she created during her final years is ‘‘Seeing in Colors,’’ which is a series of intimate reflections inspired by her struggle with the cancer to which she ultimately succumbed. For this collection, in 1999, Henderson-Holmes won an NYFA Fellowship. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Safiya Henderson-Holmes Daily Bread. New York: Harlem River Press/Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1994. Madness and a Bit of Hope. New York: Harlem River Press/Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1990. Racing and (E)Racing Language: Living with the Color of Our Words, edited with Ellen J. Goldner. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

Studies of Safiya Henderson-Holmes’s Works ‘‘Safiya Henderson-Holmes: Patent Leather.’’ New York Beacon 7.7 (2000): 23. Dias, Risasi-Zachariah. ‘‘Newark Presents Series of Black Women Writers.’’ New York Amsterdam News 86.44 (1995): 21. Jackson, David Earl. ‘‘Poem Crazy All Over Again . . .’’ Tri-State Defender 46.32 (1997): 1B. Murray, Madeline. ‘‘Daily Bread.’’ Quarterly Black Review of Books 2.3 (1995): 10. Zandy, Janet. ‘‘Fire Poetry on the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of March 25, 1911.’’ College Literature 24. 3 (Oct. 1997): 33–54.

Shamika Ann Mitchell

CAROLIVIA HERRON (1947– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Carolivia Herron, poet and short fiction writer, was born in Washington, D.C., in 1947 and attended local public schools. Herron’s cultural interest and the traumatic experience of her brother’s death at age three inspire her artistry. She became active in events, programs, and initiatives involving African and Judaic heritage. She had her Bat Mitzvah in 1995 and is the founding member of Jews of African descent. Herron has taken her inquiry and investigation of cultural nuances into the halls of the academy. She received a B.A. in English from Eastern Baptist College (now Eastern College) in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English from Villanova University, an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught across a broad spectrum of institutions from New England to the Congo: Brandeis, Harvard, Hebrew College in Brookline, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe College, William and Mary College, Carlton College, Congo, Brazaville, and the Republic of Congo. Currently, Herron is engaged in projects that concretize her interests as a writer and developer of multimedia, including her work-in-progress, a multimedia book, Asenath and Our Song of Songs.

MAJOR WORKS Carolivia Herron’s works, fiction and scholarship, add to the corpus of African American women’s literature. She enters the circle of African American women focusing on themes such as family, cultural heritage, history, self-determination, hope, grief, and laughter offering universality. Her inquiry reproduces the sociocultural and sociohistorical experiences of her kin—real and fictive. Herron examines the richness of cultural traditions, specifically orality. Her cache of understanding for preserving rich, Africanist traditions, from ‘‘call and response’’ to ‘‘familial teasing’’ as demonstrated in Nappy Hair, invite inquiries that trouble assumptions within communities regarding the celebration of blackness. Herron’s work is a delicate yet punctuated intertexuality among the canonical wells of biblical, Western, and Africanist literary traditions. For example, Nappy Hair evokes childhood and adulthood memories—yet, hair stories transcend age, ethnicity, and even gender, while simultaneous investigation into subjectivities occurs. Likewise, investigations of patriarchal and feminist ideologies in Thereafter Johnnie and the ‘‘poetic canon’’ of Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimke´ contribute to critical discussions regarding race, gender, class, sexuality, and color. Carolivia Herron’s poignant attention to the lives, theories, and research of self and others captures and edifies the lived experiences of African Americans. Whether writing

CAROLIVIA HERRON

269

about elders, ancestors, or children or introducing homoerotic works, her authorship reveals a historical backdrop of experiences—some marginalized and some decentered. Herron’s use of multiple genres adds to the multiple dimensions and complexities of life experienced in her works. Through Herron, readers can transcend the boundaries of their community. Herron has contributed to multiple anthologies and written articles based on her cultural and experiential knowledge. CRITICAL RECEPTION Herron’s major works considered incendiary by some, or comical by others, contextualize ways black women examine and research their lives. That Herron contributes to the social, communicative, political, sexual, socioeconomic, philosophical, and cultural discourses of dual cultures—African and Judaic—offers dimensions from alternate vantage points. From Thereafter Johnnie to Nappy Hair created tenuous assumptions among and between those inside and outside of academe, she defends her book as a contribution to the canon of works celebrating blackness. Whether in response to Nappy Hair (or not), feminist scholar bell hooks wrote and depicted a different view to hair and dialect in Happy to Be Nappy. At the base of hooks’s scholarship is representation of African Americans, based upon her earlier work related specifically to hair and representation. Both books serve as a reminder that hair politics, like dialect and color, particularly in African American communities, produces a profusion of commentaries. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Carolivia Herron Early African American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Nappy Hair. New York: Knopf/Distributed by Random House, 1997. ‘‘The Old Lady.’’ In Afrekete, edited by Catherine E. McKinley and Joyce DeLaney. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimke´. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ‘‘That Place.’’ In Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor. Boston: Little, Brown Publishers, 1995. Thereafter Johnnie, 1st ed. New York: Random House. 1991.

Studies of Carolivia Herron’s Works Frazier, Kermit. ‘‘Heads of Joy.’’ New York Times Book Review (November 21, 1999). http:// www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/21/bib/991121.rv143629.html. Frost, Jennifer. Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution, by Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn. Journal of Social History 37.1 (Fall 2003): 235–38. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. ———. ‘‘Straightening Our Hair.’’ In Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing, edited by Diana George and John Trimbur, 290–99. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Lester, Neal A. ‘‘Nappy Edges and Goldy Locks: African-American Daughters and the Politics of Hair.’’ The Lion and the Unicorn 24.2 (2000): 201–24.

270

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

———. ‘‘Nappy Happy: A Review of Carolivia Herron’s Nappy Hair and bell hooks’ Happy to be Nappy.’’ Annotated Bibliography: Children’s Folklore Review 22.1 (1999): 45–55. Savery, Pancho. Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice, by Maryemma Graham, Sharon Pineault-Burke, and Marianna White Davis. African American Review 34.3 (Autumn 2000): 525–27. Tuhkanen, Mikko. ‘‘Of Blackface and Paranoid Knowledge: Richard Wright, Jacques Lacan, and the Ambivalence of Black Minstrelsy.’’ Diacritics 31.2 (2001): 9–34. Wiley, Ralph. ‘‘Racial Astigmatism is a Crossover Condition.’’ New Crisis 105.6 (1998): 34–35.

Rachelle D. Washington

FRENCHY JOLENE HODGES (1940– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Writer of poetry and short fiction, Frenchy Jolene Hodges, an exponent of folk values, was born on October 18, 1940, in Dublin, Georgia. She grew up on a farm in the rural south. At eighteen she left home to study at Fort Valley State College. After obtaining her B.S. in 1964, she worked for two years in Georgia, and then migrated north to Detroit, where she taught English and creative writing in the inner city high schools. In Detroit she established contacts with the influential Broadside Press, which published her first and best-known chapbook Black Wisdom (1971). When in 1972 she received Atlanta University’s fellowship to attend their master’s program in Afro-American studies, she used her contacts to write a master’s thesis on ‘‘Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press.’’ After becoming a mother of twins in late 1970s, she settled in Atlanta, where she continued her teaching career. During her early years in Detroit, Hodges was also an actress. Her most successful performances include ‘‘Who’s Got His Own’’ at Concept East Theater, ‘‘Little Old Ladies’’ at Detroit Repertory Theater, and ‘‘Mojo, a Black Love Story’’ by Alice Childress at DSACE Theater. Her acting influenced her poetry readings; in the 1970s she claimed to be the only Broadside author who performed her poems accompanying herself on a guitar. Hodges’s creative activity in the 1970s turned out to be at once the peak and the end of her artistic career. In 1975 she published two more chapbooks, Piece De Way Home and For My Guy, both with Tibi Productions. In 1979 Ms. magazine published her first and only short story, ‘‘Requiem for Willie Lee.’’ The story was later reprinted in a collection of best Ms. fiction and has since appeared in many anthologies of African American women writers. However, Hodges herself has withdrawn from the literary and artistic scene. MAJOR WORKS Hodges’s ‘‘Requiem for Willie Lee’’ is by far the most frequently anthologized of her works, and its title character is commonly compared to Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son. The story is a black schoolteacher’s account of an armed robbery she witnesses in a seaside resort. Although the black robber is as threatening to the teacher as to the resort’s white clientele, she alone seems to be able to recognize him as a wounded human being, and to discover through him the failure of her educational mission. Highlighting class differences between the teacher and Willie Lee, the story culminates in a scene of reconciliation, when the narrator’s and the robber’s fates become symbolically united. The second most anthologized of Hodges’s works, the poem ‘‘Belle Isle,’’ shares with ‘‘Requiem’’ the sense of care for communal values and mutual recognition, which help African Americans cope with unstable reality. Hodges describes Belle Isle, a park in

272

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Detroit, as a place that performs the same role for the city’s black population as the one played by front porches in the southern culture. Despite poverty, the communal ideals enable African Americans to transplant southern sensibility into the northern urban landscape. Many other poems by Hodges express her appreciation for the folk values and idiom. She frequently uses blues structures and explores poetic tensions, which are born from the juxtaposition of ‘‘proper’’ English with vernacular forms. A similar kind of juxtaposition can be found in her use of naive or uneducated speakers to articulate political criticism, for example, in the poems ‘‘Innocent Questions’’ and ‘‘Listen, I’se Talking to You, Lawd,’’devoted to Martin Luther King’s assassination. Some of Hodges’s poems convey criticism of the vernacular culture itself, describing the ways in which the culture limits a young woman’s identity (‘‘I Was a Good Kid’’ and ‘‘Portrait of My Father’’). CRITICAL RECEPTION Because the volume of Hodges’s work is modest, she has received scant critical attention. Still, the presence of her fiction and poetry in contemporary anthologies proves that many editors find her contribution to African American literature significant. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Frenchy Jolene Hodges Black Wisdom. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. For My Guy: Poems. Detroit: Tibi Productions, 1975. Piece De Way Home. Detroit: Tibi Productions, 1975. ‘‘Requiem for Willie Lee.’’ Fine Lines: The Best of Ms. Fiction, edited by Ruth Sullivan, 153–64. New York: Scribner, 1982.

Studies of Frenchy Jolene Hodges’s Works Donlon, Joycelyn Hazelwood. Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Sullivan, Ruth. ‘‘Frenchy Hodges.’’ In Fine Lines: The Best of Ms. Fiction, edited by Ruth Sullivan, 152. New York: Scribner, 1982. Washington, Mary Helen. ‘‘Frenchy Hodges.’’ In Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds, edited by Mary Helen Washington, 209–10. New York: Anchor Books, 1990.

Katarzyna Iwona Jakubiak

BELL HOOKS (1952– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE bell hooks, a well-known writer of poems and plays, was born Gloria Watkins in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the home of an unusual number of black intellectuals, thinkers, and Rhodes scholars. The middle one of seven children, hooks had power and privileges that none of her other five sisters had. That difference played a significant role in shaping hooks’s views about gender and patriarchy, especially in African American families. Her mother worked as a maid in white people’s houses in the segregated town—the Watkins family lived in an all–African American neighborhood near the mother’s parents, and the children attended all–African American schools until they went to the high school. Early on, school and the southern African American Baptist church that her family attended allowed hooks to find her public voice through talent contests and presentations. She formed her notion of being an intellectual in the racially segregated world she grew up in, largely because her teachers recognized that she was gifted and encouraged her to do something with her knowledge. Part of her never-ending search for knowledge has led her to explore Buddhism in her later life. After receiving a scholarship from her church, hooks graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in English literature in 1973, before moving to the University of Wisconsin to receive her master’s in 1976, followed in 1983 by her Ph.D. in American literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she wrote her dissertation on Toni Morrison. While at the University of California, she began a fifteen-year relationship with a tenured professor who nurtured her and encouraged her writing. She has taught at Yale as an assistant professor of African and Afro-American studies and English, and at Oberlin College as an associate professor of English and women’s studies. She was distinguished professor of English at the City College in New York City from 1993 to 2004. Currently, she has returned to her roots to teach at Berea College in the foothills of Appalachia as their distinguished professor in residence. MAJOR WORKS Part of understanding the writer involves addressing the pseudonym that she writes under. As hooks explains in an interview for Talking Leadership: Conversations with Powerful Women, she initially got the name ‘‘bell hooks’’ because she was an outspoken child who cursed a lot like her great-grandmother on her mother’s side, who was named ‘‘Bell Hooks’’ (White 102). An interview with hooks conducted by Sarah Liss for Now Online magazine parenthetically notes that hooks uses lowercase letters for her pseudonym ‘‘to challenge authorial authority.’’ The hooks entry for Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color supports this interpretation by stating that ‘‘both the decapitalization and the pseudonym itself are attempts to take the reader’s focus away from the author and place it on the content of the work’’ (Hua n.p.).

274

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

In an interview with the South End Press Collective, hooks describes Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin as her literary mentors, because both writers ‘‘were people who loudly proclaimed that there is no art that is politically neutral’’ (Talking about a Revolution 50). However, a 1995 interview on Booknotes also adds Emily Dickinson to her list of influences. In fact, although known today primarily as a feminist scholar, hooks started her career writing poetry and plays. Her first book, which bears the name ‘‘bell hooks’’ as author, was a collection of political poems called And Then We Slept published in 1978. She quickly shifted her focus to the feminist movement that, at the time, was claiming women would be liberated if they worked—an assertion that ran counter to her own observations of the women she had known while growing up. Over the intervening years, hooks’s writings have put the spotlight on many current social issues, including race, gender, sex, class, and sexual orientation, frequently addressing several issues at the same time because she believes them interconnected. This blend of concerns appears, for example, in her 1996 memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, among other works. Ever since her undergraduate years, hooks has been challenging the prevailing stereotypes about black women and the nature of their lives. The subtle sexism found in the black liberation movement, for example, provided the topic for her 1981 book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which positions the struggle within the feminist movement itself because, according to the publisher, ‘‘race, class and sex are immutable facts of existence.’’ This book had its genesis in her undergraduate work at Stanford, but it underwent eight years of refining and polishing before it was finally published. At the time, the book was not well received because feminists were not ready to recognize class and racial differences in women. In her 1995 book Killing Rage: Ending Racism, hooks uses the image of a flag created by Emma Amos, a black woman artist, for the front cover, even though hooks generally avoids nationalism and the dialogue associated with nationhood in her writing. This book is her attempt to deal with the pain caused by racism and white supremacy, allowing the female voice to enter into that discussion while imagining a world without racism, as hooks offers positive plans for the future instead of dwelling in the patriarchal models of the past. The book extends the ideas of her 1993 book Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery, which takes such a different approach that it reaches white women and black men as well. The book examines leadership and the stress that positions of leadership bring into lives. She uses a self-help approach to help readers unlearn racism and sexism as they strive to heal themselves. Since 1999, hooks has written four books for children, three of them in collaboration with Christopher Raschka as illustrator. These books portray African American children as they see themselves and as others see them. For example, Happy to be Nappy celebrates the beauty of nappy hair using joyful poetry that is meant to be read out loud, thereby reflecting, according to Liss, ‘‘a jazzy idiom that recalls Harlem Renaissance poets like Gwendolyn Brooks.’’ Similarly, Be Boy Buzz celebrates what it means to be a boy with all of the energy associated with boyhood. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although her work has been translated into Italian, Chinese, and Japanese, it has not been well received in segments of the African American male community. For example, Joseph Anderson’s editorial for the Black Commentator observes that hooks tends to focus on ‘‘Black (especially male) psychopathology’’ when she could be placing the

BELL HOOKS

275

focus on self-esteem, especially when she was promoting her 2003 book Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem. A significant portion of his argument centers on the premise that hooks asserts that the self-hatred she finds characteristic of black males has ‘‘widespread sexual abuse’’ at its core, although she would never make similar assumptions about sexism in various groups of white males having a basis in their feelings of inferiority. For these perceived shortcomings, Anderson finds hooks as detrimental to the African American cause. Considered by some critics as radical or antiwhite, hooks spells ‘‘Black’’ with a capital letter, yet spells ‘‘white’’ using the lowercase, especially when she is critiquing the capitalistic white patriarchs whose opinions have dominated so many of these current issues. She has been the subject of major theoretical reference for four dissertations over the past few years. Most of the critical use of her work has centered around using her ideas about race, gender, patriarchy, and education in support of the analysis that the critic is doing on the topic. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by bell hooks Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. All about Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000. And Then We Slept: Poems. Los Angeles: Golemics, 1978. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press/Norton, 1995. Be Boy Buzz. With illustrations by Christopher Raschka. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. With Cornel West. Boston: South End Press, 1991. Communion: The Female Search for Love. New York: William Morrow, 2002. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984. Happy to Be Nappy. With illustrations by Christopher Raschka. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 1999. Homemade Love. With Shane Evans. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation. New York: Routledge, 1994. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York: Routledge, 1996. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem. New York: Atria Books, 2003. Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: William Morrow, 2001. Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery. Boston: South End Press, 1993. Skin Again. With illustrations by Christopher Raschka. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2004. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge, 2003. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2004. Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge, 2000. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books, 2004.

276

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

A Woman’s Mourning Song. New York and London: Harlem River Press, 1993. Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.

Studies of bell hooks’s Works Anderson, Joseph. ‘‘Right Hook at the Bell! Bell Hooks’ Black Male-bashing.’’ Black Commentator 46.5 ( June 2003). Date accessed January 7, 2005, www.blackcommentator.com. Bauer, Dale M. ‘‘Professing Women and the Classroom Crisis.’’ Reader: Essays in ReaderOriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy 45 (2001): 58–72. Bauer, Michelle. ‘‘Implementing a Liberatory Feminist Pedagogy: bell hooks’s Strategies for Transforming the Classroom.’’ MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States 25.3–4 (2000): 265–74. Bowen, Barbara, and Anthony O’Brien. ‘‘Renewing Feminism: An Interview with bell hooks.’’ Found Object 2 (1993): 1–19. Butler, Judith. ‘‘Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion.’’ In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Cobb, Michael L. ‘‘bell hooks (1952–).’’ In African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Crawford, Ilene Whitney. ‘‘Out of the Heart of Darkness toward a New Rhetoric of Emotion.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2000. Donovan, Kathleen McNerney. ‘‘Coming to Voice: Native American Literature and Feminist Theory.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1994. Edelstein, Marilyn. ‘‘Resisting Postmodernism: Or, ‘A Postmodernism of Resistance’: bell hooks and the Theory Debates.’’ In Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color, edited by Sandra Kumamoto Stanley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Florence, Namulundah. bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. Fox, Tom. ‘‘Literacy and Activism: A Response to bell hooks.’’ JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 14.2 (1994): 564–70. Green, Kathleen. ‘‘Stress Management Ideology and the Other Spaces of Women’s Power.’’ In Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, edited by Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Hayes, Robin Donna. ‘‘Virginia Woolf ’s Treatise on Education: ‘Three Guineas.’’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2002. Hua, Julia. ‘‘bell hooks.’’ In Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color. Department of English, University of Minnesota, 2003. Accessed January 7, 2005, http://voices.cla .umn.edu/. Jones, Lisa. ‘‘Rebel without a Pause.’’ Village Voice Literary Supplement 109 (1992): 10. Lamb, Brian, ed. ‘‘bell hooks.’’ In Booknotes: America’s Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas, 62–65. New York: Random House-Times Books, 1997. Liss, Sarah. ‘‘bell hooks: African-American Feminist Icon Fights Fascism with Love.’’ Now Online Edition, May 13, 2004, http://nowtoronoto.com/issues/2004-05-13/cover_story.php (accessed January 7, 2005). McKee, Patricia. ‘‘Geographies of Paradise.’’ New Centennial Review 3.1 (2003): 197–223. Moore, Suzanne. ‘‘bell hooks Talks to Suzanne Moore.’’ Wasafiri: Journal of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures and Film 27 (1998): 12–16. Mussatt, David. ‘‘Re-Embodying the Disembodied: A Personal Reflection on Critical Pedagogy and the Use of Anthologies in the Classroom.’’ Schuylkill: A Creative and Critical Review from Temple University 3.1 (2000): 63–76.

BELL HOOKS

277

Olson, Gary A. ‘‘bell hooks and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation.’’ In Philosophy, Rhetoric, Literary Criticism: Interviews, edited by Gary A. Olson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Roux, Nicole Aime´e. ‘‘Combating Nihilism and Classism in the African-American Community from a Black Feminist Perspective.’’ In The Image of the Twentieth Century in Literature, Media and Society, edited by Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, University of Southern Colorado, 2000. Talking about a Revolution: Interviews with Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Peter Kwong, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Urvashi Vaid, Howard Zinn, 39–52. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998. Third World Viewpoint. ‘‘Challenging Capitalism & Patriarchy: Third World Viewpoint Interviews bell hooks.’’ Z Magazine 8.12 (1995): 36–39. Thomson, Clive. ‘‘Culture, Identity, and the Dialogic: bell hooks and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.’’ In Dialogism and Cultural Criticism, edited by Clive Thomson and Hans Raj Dua. London: Mestengo, 1995. Townes, Shawn Adrienne. ‘‘Black Woman Warrior: A Rhetorical Biography of bell hooks.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio University, 2000. Vega-Gonza´lez, Susana. ‘‘The Dialectics of Belonging in bell hooks’ Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood.’’ Journal of English Studies 3 (2001–2002): 237–48. Walker, Joseph S. ‘‘When Texts Collide: The Re-Visioning Power of the Margin.’’ Colby Quarterly 35.1 (1999): 35–48. Watkins, James Ray, Jr. ‘‘Hypertextual Border Crossing: Students and Teachers, Texts and Contexts.’’ Computers and Compositions: An International Journal for Teachers of Writing 16.3 (1999): 383–94. White, Deborah Gray, Charlotte Bunch, and Harriet Davidson. ‘‘bell hooks.’’ In Talking Leadership: Conversations with Powerful Women, edited by Mary S. Hartman, 99–116. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.

Peggy J. Huey

PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS (1859–1930)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A pioneer figure in African American women’s journalism and a notable novelist and essayist, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was born in Portland, Maine, in 1859 to free parents of color. Her mother, Sarah Allen, came from a Boston family that had brought forth ministers of repute, such as Nathaniel Paul and Thomas Paul, founders of Baptist churches in Boston. Not much is known about Hopkins’s biological father. In a brief autobiographical sketch that she published in the Colored American Magazine in June 1901, Hopkins says she moved to Boston when she was young, attended public schools there, and graduated from Boston is Girls’ High School. The pride she took in her mother’s side of the family and in their Boston heritage comes across in the sketch through her emphasis on the possible contacts her mother’s family might have had with such figures of renown as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The first extant record of Hopkins’s literary endeavor shows her receiving a tendollar prize at an essay contest sponsored by the Congregational Publishing Society of Boston and William Wells Brown when she was fifteen years old. The essay, ‘‘The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy,’’ is now held at the Fisk University Library Special Collections. In 1879, Sarah Allen married William A. Hopkins and Pauline started signing her works ‘‘Pauline E. Hopkins’’ instead of ‘‘Pauline E. Allen.’’ A native of Alexandria, Virginia, William Hopkins moved to Boston after having served in the Civil War in the Grand Army of the Republic. Hopkins’s first work that received public notice is a musical drama, Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad, which she copyrighted in 1879. The title was soon changed to Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad and was performed by Hopkins’s Colored Traubadours, which included Pauline Hopkins, Sarah Allen, William Hopkins, a chorus of jubilee singers, and singers such as Sam Lucas and sometimes the Hyers Sisters. The performance traveled to parts of the Midwest before returning to Boston. A few other plays, though they either went unpublished or fell out of circulation, also attest to Hopkins’s early aspirations as a playwright. One Scene from the Drama of Early Days, presumably written before Peculiar Sam, dramatizes the biblical story of Daniel in the lion’s den; Aristocracy or Colored Aristocracy, performed by the Hyers Sisters Concert Company in 1877, is lost; and only a few pages remain of Winona, a five-act play. In the early 1890s, while still performing at recitals and concerts and giving public lectures on black history, Hopkins also looked for a way to support herself. She studied stenography, passed the civil exam, and first found employment as a stenographer with Henry Parkman and Alpheus Sanford, both influential Republicans, in 1892. She was a stenographer in the Bureau of Statistics from 1895 to 1899. In her late years, she turned to stenography also for subsistence. The first installment of Hagar’s Daughter, dated 1891, indicates that Hopkins could have been writing as she learned stenography, but it was really with her involvement in the Colored American Magazine that she saw an increased opportunity to write and

PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS

279

publish. The five years from 1900 to 1904 were Hopkins’s most prolific years as a writer. The Colored American Magazine was published by the Colored Cooperative Publishing Company, which also published Hopkins’s first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, in 1900. The September, 1900 issue of the Colored American Magazine advertised the novel as ‘‘a race work dedicated to the best interest of the Negro everywhere.’’ Starting with the short story ‘‘The Mystery within Us’’ in the May 1900 issue, Hopkins published numerous essays, editorials, and short stories in the magazine. All three of her serial novels—Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901–1902), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and the Southwest (1902), and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–1903)—were serially published in the Colored American Magazine. Hopkins’s editorial position changed from the editor of the women’s column in 1900 to the literary editor of the magazine in 1903. She was dedicated to making the magazine a venue for colored writers, who have difficulty placing their works in the mainstream presses, to publish. Hopkins herself published frequently in the magazine, sometimes two or three pieces in a single issue, using the pen names Sarah A. Allen and Shirley J. Shadrach as well as her own name. The use of pen names was probably a strategy Hopkins adopted to avoid having her name appear too frequently in the magazine. In 1904, around late April and early May, the Colored American Magazine was bought by Fred R. Moore, who became the editor. His editorial policies were at variance with those of Hopkins and she was forced to leave the magazine. While Hopkins still lectured and published after leaving the magazine, the departure marked a turning point in her literary career. In late 1904 and early 1905, she published a couple of pieces in the Voice of the Negro, a leading African American journal in the south, including the serial piece, ‘‘The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century.’’ Though she was introduced as ‘‘one of our regular contributors’’ in the November 1904 issue of Voice of the Negro, Hopkins stopped publishing in the magazine after July 1905 for reasons unknown. In 1905, she self-published a historical treatise, A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants—with Epilogue. Hopkins attempted a comeback to the literary scene as the editor of New Era magazine with Walter Wallace, a former colleague from the Colored American Magazine, but the magazine ceased publishing after two issues. Hopkins’s later years, from 1916 to 1930, were spent in obscurity. The tragic accident that caused her death provides a sad finale to the toils of a talented colored woman who bravely strove to make a literary career for herself at a time when both her race and her gender placed limitations on her. Hopkins was brought in to the Cambridge Relief Hospital when the flannel bandages she was wearing because of her neuritis accidentally caught fire. She died on August 13, 1930, at the Cambridge Relief Hospital after suffering from severe burns and was buried in Garden Cemetery, Chelsea, Massachusetts. She was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a stenographer when she died. MAJOR WORKS Hopkins’s most well-known work is her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). The only work that was published in book form during her lifetime, Contending Forces contains an array of themes, motifs, and novelistic strategies that appear again and again in her works. The curt yet forceful

280

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

dedication of the novel, ‘‘for humanity,’’ conveys her lifelong dedication to better the conditions of the ‘‘proscribed race,’’ the term she often used to refer to African Americans. The mystery of veiled identities, which recurs in her serial novels, drives the plot and creates a map of relations among the characters. Though Hopkins has been criticized for focusing on light-skinned, mixed-race characters, light-skinned heroines function as the embodiment of racial violence and the means to expose racial prejudice in Contending Forces. The beautiful, light-skinned heroine, Sappho Clark, is abducted, raped, and sold into prostitution by her colored father’s half-brother, who is white. The drama of ‘‘contending [social] forces’’ in the strife for racial equality evolves around the figure of the female outcast who reenters the social world and acquires both the friendship of Dora Smith and the love of her brother, Will Smith (256). In many aspects, the novel speaks to a burgeoning middle-class black audience who were invested in improving their lives both economically and culturally. The Smiths, who run the boardinghouse where Sappho lives, represent an emerging black middle class. Debates over education and the right to vote that take place between Arthur Lewis and Will Smith reflect the debates of Hopkins’s time between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. While she is careful not to reduce the debates into a matter of choice between Washington and DuBois, Hopkins works into her novel the complex meaning of uplift for African Americans with a farsightedness that made it possible for her to weigh the immediate gains of an accommodationist politics against the long-term goal of achieving social equality on all fronts. The Sewing Circle led by Mrs. Willis parallels the black women’s club movement in its foregrounding of the women’s role for the advancement of the race. Resorting to the genre of romance and using the domestic sphere to reflect on social issues and political concerns are strategies Hopkins employed again in Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901–1902). With the first part set in Charleston, South Carolina, and the second part set in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., the novel likewise explores race prejudices that span the north and the south through the life of a mixed-race heroine and her daughter. Arguably the most driving mystery of Hopkins’s works, the novel runs through a breathless sequel of blackmail and murder to finally rescue the innocent that has been put on trial and bring together Hagar’s broken family. The fact that Jewel, Hagar’s daughter, loses her lover who has an ingrained sense of racial difference, indicates that Hopkins was skeptical to the question of whether romantic love transcends racial prejudices. In fact, Hazel Carby sees Cuthbert Sumner, Jewel’s lover, as Hopkins’s critique of ‘‘the ambivalence and limits of white liberalism and New England philanthropy’’ (xli). Hopkins explores the dynamics of interracial romance with a romantic triangle made up of a mixed-race woman, a black man, and a white Englishman sympathetic to abolition in Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and the Southwest (1902). The only novel by Hopkins that deals with the pre–Civil War period exclusively (Wallinger 190, Carby xliii), Winona also offers Hopkins’s first black male hero in the figure of Judah, the adopted son of Winona’s white father (Carby xlii). Stories of John Brown and the Free Soil Movement in Kansas are adapted in the novel as Hopkins uses abolitionism and a distant past to think about contemporary social and political issues. Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–1903) stands out as the only novel by Hopkins that has a mixed-race male protagonist passing for white and that has the protagonist travel out of the United States to Africa. Hopkins’s interest in black history, and more specifically in Ethiopianism, finds expression in the novel as Reuel Briggs

PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS

281

goes on an excavation expedition to the ancient city of Meroe in Africa only to find out that he is the chosen one to restore the former glory of the race. Historical imagination is infused with fantasy as the haunting legacy of slavery ultimately discloses all three characters involved in the romantic triangle—Reuel, Dianthe Lusk, and Aubrey Livingstone—as siblings. Hopkins probes the ideas of heritage and blood in all of her novels. In Of One Blood, though, the reflection takes a singular, transnational turn. CRITICAL RECEPTION Ann Shockley calls Pauline Hopkins ‘‘[o]ne of the most neglected early black women writers’’ in her short biographical essay of Hopkins (22). The subtitle of Shockley’s essay, a ‘‘biographical excursion into obscurity,’’ probably best characterizes the historical amnesia that Hopkins was faced with until recently. Richard Yarborough takes note of this when he compares the fate of Hopkins with those of her male contemporary writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt (xxviii). Despite the fact that she wrote no less and no worse than Dunbar and Chesnutt, Hopkins did not receive commensurate recognition from the literary circles in her time and for long after her death. Fortunately, there has been a significant recovery of African American women’s writing produced between 1890 and 1910 since the 1980s. Along with Anna Julia Cooper and Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins is one of the valuable women writers rediscovered in this process (Gates, ‘‘Foreword,’’ xvi). The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers has firmly put back into circulation The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins and Contending Forces. From 1985, when Claudia Tate called her ‘‘our literary foremother’’ and on, Hopkins has received ample critical attention from scholars and critics interested in African American journalism, domestic ideology, women’s narrative strategies, and changing definitions of race. The publication of Pauline Hopkins: A Literary Biography, the first critical biography on Hopkins, in 2005 may be taken as a sign that Pauline Hopkins now occupies an incontestable place in American literary history. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Contending Forces: Salem, NH: Ayer Co. Pub. 1900. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. A Primer of Facts. Appended in Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Studies of Pauline Hopkins’s Works Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Campbell, Jane. ‘‘Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth (1859–1930).’’ In Black Women in America: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. I, edited by Darlene Clark Hine et al., 577–79. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993.

282

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Carby, Hazel. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., xxix–l. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gillman, Susan. Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Gruesser, John Cullen, ed. The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Shockley, Ann Allen. ‘‘Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity.’’ Phylon 33 (Spring 1972): 22–26. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wallinger, Hanna. Pauline Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2005. Yarborough, Richard. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., xxvii–xlviii. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Jeehyun Lim

ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891–1960)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Zora Neale Hurston, a leading novelist, dramatist, folklorist, and short fiction writer, during the Harlem Renaissance, was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, the daughter of John and Lucy Potts Hurston. When she was very young, the family moved to the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, where Hurston grew up. Eatonville became a fixture in her artistic vision, and much of her work is set there. Many of her characters as well are based on Eatonville persons and many of her fictive situations are drawn from real-life occurrences there. As a child, Hurston lived a rather carefree and happy life surrounded by a large family, including her grandmother. Her father was a local minister and mayor of Eatonville; her mother was a schoolteacher. Hurston received her early education at the Hungerford School in Eatonville, a normal school patterned on the model of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Her later schooling took place at a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, until she left school altogether after her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage. For a time, Hurston lived with relatives, did a variety of odd jobs, and ultimately obtained work as a lady’s attendant in a traveling show. When the show reached Baltimore, Maryland, Hurston left the show and entered the high school department of the Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University). Upon completion of her high school diploma, Hurston entered Howard University in Washington, D.C. While a student at Howard, Hurston studied English with the noted scholar Lorenzo Dow Turner and took classes with Dr. Alain Leroy Locke, the first black Rhodes scholar who taught literature and philosophy at Howard and also advised the literary magazine. While it is not known exactly when Hurston began writing, she had managed to place several poems in Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World, and enjoyed the publication of her first short story, ‘‘John Redding Goes to Sea,’’ in the 1921 issue of Stylus, the Howard University literary magazine. In addition, Hurston published several works in the annual yearbooks for Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, which she joined while at Howard. Impressed by her creative abilities, Alain Locke brought her to the attention of Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity magazine, the official publication of the National Urban League. Opportunity, along with the NAACP’s the Crisis magazine, was instrumental in jumpstarting the Harlem Renaissance by sponsoring literary contests to identify and foreground young African American writers and provide them with publishing venues for their works. Hurston moved to New York, where she soon became a prize-winning author and one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated personalities. Throughout the remainder of the 1920s Hurston’s reputation grew. She published a number of important short stories, including two of her most well-known works, ‘‘Spunk’’ and ‘‘Sweat.’’ She also published several short plays and presented several ‘‘revues’’—programs that featured folk music, dance, and storytelling, told in dialect, in an effort to recreate and celebrate black folklife as she knew it from growing up in the

284

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

south. In addition, Hurston entered Barnard College, the women’s division of Columbia University, on a scholarship. There she studied anthropology with the famed Franz Boas and began her work as a collector of African American folklore. She became the institution’s first black graduate in 1928. In the early 1930s, Hurston turned to the novel as her preferred artistic form, beginning with the publication of Jonah’s Gourd Vine in 1934. The story, loosely based on her parents’ lives, confirmed Hurston’s mastery of dialect writing and further established her as a leading voice in African American fiction. In 1935, Hurston published Mules and Men, a collection of folklore she had collected during her expeditions to the south. Although it was an artistic rather than a scientific presentation of her research, the book nevertheless gained for Hurston an appreciative audience. In 1937, Hurston published her most important work, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. This novel, destined to become a classic in African American and women’s fiction, was published to mixed reviews, but even the stingiest reviewer had to acknowledge that Hurston was a master of her art. In 1938, a second collection of folklore, Tell My Horse, appeared. Unlike Mules and Men, Tell My Horse focused largely on folklore and folklife in Haiti. Hurston closed out the busy 1930s with the publication of a third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. A retelling of the Moses myth from an African American perspective, the novel often shows Hurston at her comic best. Hurston began the 1940s with the same energy that she closed the previous decade with by publishing an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, in 1942. An unconventional autobiography, it revealed little about her personal life, but did offer her opinions on any number of other matters. With the publication of Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948, Hurston’s career came to a painful and unfortunate close. Though she lived for more than a dozen years more, she was never able to recapture her own artistic energy or the interest of publishers in her work. Throughout the 1950s, Hurston’s life was in constant decline. She was discovered working as a maid in the early 1950s and wrote only occasionally, oftentimes for black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier. Though she continued to write, most of her work was rejected by publishers. Hurston soon began to suffer from the ravages of hypertension and advanced age and suffered a series of strokes. The last stroke, late in 1959, left her debilitated and she entered a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida, where she died penniless in 1960. After a funeral, paid for largely with solicited funds, Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce’s Garden of Heavenly Rest. A marker was erected in the early 1970s by Alice Walker, who called her ‘‘a genius of the South.’’ MAJOR WORKS Hurston came to critical notice during the 1920s with the publication of a number of short stories. These stories often had a southern setting; in fact, many of them were set in Eatonville, Florida, and were peopled with characters whom Hurston had known while growing up there. Her first published story was titled ‘‘John Redding Goes to Sea.’’ It appeared in Stylus, the Howard University student literary magazine, for 1921. It is the story of a young man, John Redding, who puts his dreams on hold while he lives up to the expectations of his mother and wife by staying at home and being the dutiful son and husband. The Florida setting, strong elements of folklore and folklife, and the prominence of a theme that Hurston was to use repeatedly make this an important first story.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

285

Although ‘‘John Redding Goes to Sea’’ has a predictable plot, the story does much to establish Hurston as an artist who has a keen ear for dialect speech patterns and a sharp eye for character traits. Two other stories published during the middle 1920s, ‘‘Spunk’’ and ‘‘Sweat,’’ are among Hurston’s finest stories. ‘‘Spunk’’ is the story of a bold, brassy, uncompromising individual, Spunk Banks, whom Hurston admires because he has spunk, an attitude toward life that Hurston herself held. Having been encouraged by her mother to ‘‘jump at the sun,’’ Hurston clearly admired those who dared to demand to be accepted on their own terms. Spunk Banks is by no means a positive character in the usual sense. Indeed, he is a philanderer who preys upon a weak Joe Kanty not only because Spunk wants Joe’s wife Lena, but also because he knows that Joe does not have the courage to challenge him. Spunk parades around town, even in Joe’s presence, with Lena on his arm, much to the displeasure of the townsmen. When Joe does muster up the courage to demand that Spunk leave Lena alone, Spunk kills Joe with a pistol. Spunk suffers revenge by being cut with a circle saw at the sawmill where he works. In his dying breath, he blames it on Joe’s making an appearance as a black bobcat and pushing him into the saw. This inclusion is more evidence of Hurston’s use of African American folk beliefs and how they inform the everyday lives of the people. As well, Hurston presents the vibrant community of Eatonville and foregrounds the interactions among its residents as they go about their individual and communal lives. ‘‘Sweat,’’ published in 1926, is arguably Hurston’s finest short story. It is the story of Delia Jones, a long-suffering washerwoman who suffers verbal, emotional, and physical abuse from Sykes Jones, her brutish husband of fifteen years. This story, too, is set in Eatonville, with the townspeople gathered on Joe Clarke’s store porch serving as a backdrop and moral voice for the story. Delia works all week long, including Sundays, to earn money by washing clothes for white customers. When the story opens on a Sunday evening following church services, Delia is sorting clothes to soak for the next day’s wash. Sykes, considering Delia and her work with great disdain, preys upon her fear of snakes by letting his bullwhip slither down her back. An argument ensues and Sykes makes his usual threats and insults. It soon becomes clear that Sykes wants to make Delia so uncomfortable that she will leave her home, but Delia firmly informs him that she has worked long and hard for that house and has no intentions of leaving it to him and his mistress, a large, dark woman aptly named Bertha. Sykes further resolves to frighten Delia into leaving by placing a large rattlesnake in a box just outside the door to the house, an act that the community clearly does not approve of. When Delia grows accustomed to the snake and its mere presence no longer frightens her, Sykes takes his determination to rid himself of his wife a step further by placing the snake in the clothes hamper where he knows Delia will reach to sort her wash. Delia, however, discovers this trap in time to save herself and escapes the house unharmed. Sykes, though, is not as lucky. In an ironic twist, Sykes stumbles into the house with a hangover from a night of carousing and falls into the clutches of the snake that bites him. Whether paralyzed from fear of the snake or hatred of her husband, Delia is unable or unwilling to come to Sykes’s aid. He dies, knowing that Delia is fully aware of his dying and that she is refusing assistance. ‘‘Sweat’’ offers a number of tragic dimensions, not the least of which is Delia’s transformation from an essentially good, Christian woman to one who refuses to offer compassion to the dying, although we certainly understand the reasons for her refusal.

286

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

‘‘Sweat’’ also plays on the folk adage that the trap you set for others may just as well ensnare you. This truism is particularly applicable to Sykes, a ne’er-do-well who is intent on destroying a good woman in favor of one who has few if any admirable qualities. The story further shows Hurston’s adept handling of a familiar setting, familiar characters, and familiar dialect. Although Hurston was sometimes accused of pushing off folklore as imaginative literature, ‘‘Sweat’’ demonstrates her growing expertise in developing dramatic characters and sustaining credible action throughout the plot. Another important short story is ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits,’’ published in 1933 in Story magazine. This story also pivots on the relationship between a black man and woman, but instead of pivoting on hatred as in ‘‘Sweat,’’ ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ posits the enduring and healing power of love. Joe and Missie May Banks are a young couple clearly in love as the story opens. They frolic in their youthful expressions of love and lust, and everything around them is clean, bright, and fresh. A trip to a newly opened icecream parlor, however, proves disastrous for the couple. Both Joe and Missie May succumb to their own naivete´ and are taken advantage of by a newcomer in town, Otis D. Slemmons, who seduces Joe emotionally and Missie May physically. One night Joe comes home early from work and discovers Missie May and Slemmons in a compromising position. Slemmons barely escapes with his life, and Missie May says in her own defense that she was doing it for Joe’s sake. Joe is both hurt and incredulous. Joe’s attitude toward Missie May changes dramatically. For a while, he acts as if nothing is the matter, and then in a moment of physical attraction they make love. Much to Missie May’s horror, Joe pays her for her services with the gold-plated coin that he snatched from Otis Slemmons on the night of their altercation. Missie May is devastated and, to add more to her fears of losing Joe, she discovers she is pregnant. In the conclusion of ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits,’’ Joe acknowledges that the child Missie May has borne is his; according to his own mother who served as midwife for the child, the child is the ‘‘spitting image’’ of Joe. Because they love each other, and because they now have a child that serves as a bridge between the two of them, Joe and Missie May are able to reconcile their differences and resume their lives together just as much as in love as before. Once again, Hurston shows herself as a clever manager of artistic detail. As well, she has drawn superb characters and has plotted the action with extreme care. ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ not only solidified Hurston’s reputation as a talented short story writer, but it also launched her career as a novelist. In response to an editor’s query as to whether she might have a novel in the making, Hurston, ever the opportunist, responded in the affirmative and set about writing what became her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). This novel is based loosely on the story of her parents, John and Lucy Potts Hurston (Pearson in the novel), and, as such, provided Hurston the opportunity to demonstrate that she could handle the longer narrative inasmuch as she had already mastered the short story. Also, writing the novel gave Hurston the opportunity to reconcile some of her feelings about her father’s philandering. Jonah’s Gourd Vine opens in southern Alabama shortly after slavery and concerns the coming-of-age of John ‘‘John-Buddy’’ Pearson, a mulatto field hand known for his physical prowess and his big voice. His father is not known, but is suspected to be the white landowner. This suspicion, coupled with his stepfather’s brutal treatment of JohnBuddy’s mother, causes considerable difficulty in the household. As John Pearson grows into a handsome young man, many young women seek him out, but he is attracted to Lucy Potts, the young daughter of the land-owning Potts family. After they marry, against the advice and preference of the Potts family, John-Buddy goes to Eatonville,

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

287

Florida, an emerging all-black town, and soon sends for his wife and children to join him. Although Pearson works to support his family, he is unable to contain his sexual appetite and is often involved with other women. Lucy is aware of his philandering but often suffers in silence. After a particularly pointed confrontation over his many affairs, John, in a fit of guilt, gives himself over to God and promises to do better. Assisted by his wife, he becomes the pastor of a local Baptist congregation. For a while, all seems to have changed, but then John Pearson falls victim to his previous sexual urges. Subsequently, his long-suffering wife becomes ill and dies, and his life and the lives of his children are thrown into greater turmoil. Shortly after Lucy’s death, John marries a woman with a questionable reputation and further damages what is left of his paternal relationship with his children. Sometime later, again responding to the guilt over the ill treatment of his now dead wife Lucy, and his less than supportive role as a father to his children, Rev. Pearson beats his new wife, blaming her for his many failures and shortcomings, and sets in motion his dismissal as the pastor of the church. He later leaves town, having felt the wrath of those whom he has betrayed. John Pearson travels to a neighboring city where he hires himself out as a carpenter. He meets a widow and they subsequently marry. With her assistance, John becomes the pastor of another church and grows into a powerful Baptist leader on both the local and statewide levels. For a time, all of his past indiscretions seem to have disappeared and John actually prospers in the company of his new wife and the people of Zion Hope Baptist Church. However, on a trip back to Eatonville to visit old friends, John finds himself enamored of a young woman who awakens in him those same old urges. Although he is warned against pursuing these feelings by one of his old friends, it is as if John cannot help himself. In the aftermath of the affair, however, as John Pearson is reeling from the guilt of betraying yet another good and supportive wife and, no doubt, remembering his betrayal of his first wife as well, he is struck and killed by a train. Besides being a compelling story, Jonah’s Gourd Vine demonstrates that Hurston can ably manage a longer narrative. The pace of the events is particularly well handled and she maintains a remarkable consistency in point of view, particularly when one considers that this must have been an especially difficult story to write. Of course, the fact that Hurston’s recounting of her parents’ lives was, at best, barely fictionalized gave critics reason to be stingy in their reception of her first novel. However, there is so much that is done well, including the handling of the dialect, the detailed presentation of the physical settings, the precise, nonjudgmental capturing of the lives of the black folk of the rural south, and the careful and refreshing placement of humor and pathos throughout the work that it made for a work to be reckoned with even by the most demanding of critics. In 1935, Hurston published Mules and Men, a book of folklore that she collected from throughout the south while she was a student at Barnard College and was employed briefly by Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s Association of the Study of Negro Life and History. Because she elected to present her findings artistically instead of from a social science perspective, Mules and Men is quite a different kind of collection of folklore. Because Hurston immerses herself in both the collection and the reporting of her findings, Mules and Men indeed reads like a collection of stories. In fact, Hurston was frequently criticized for presenting folklore as fiction. As narrator of the collection, Hurston establishes herself as part and parcel of the larger community from which she collects these

288

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

tales. This act gives her greater authority to comment on African American folklore and folklife as not just a subject for the social scientist, but as a vibrant entity deserving both attention and respect. Because Hurston was interested in the black disapora, she also forayed into Haiti, Jamaica, and South America to uncover African retentions and particular cultural phenomena of these native populations. These trips to the Caribbean and South America provided the material for her second collection of folklore, Tell My Horse, published in 1938. Their Eyes Were Watching God, without question Hurston’s most important and best-known work, appeared in 1937. Although it is a post–Harlem Renaissance work, it nevertheless captures Hurston’s lifelong concern with the presentation of the life of the folk, or, as she aptly phrased it, ‘‘the Negro farthest down.’’ Written in a very short time frame, as is most of Hurston’s best work, Their Eyes concerns the life of Janie Crawford and her quest for freedom and womanhood. The novel opens in West Florida in the years following the Emancipation. Janie Crawford, who never knew her mother and father, has been raised by her now aging maternal grandmother whom she refers to as Nanny. The narrative opens on a beautiful spring day. As Janie observes the business of nature, with honeybees pollinating pear blossoms, she experiences her sexual coming-of-age. In an attempt to divert her attention from the flirtatious young Johnny Taylor, Nanny announces that she has decided to marry Janie off to a much older man, Logan Killicks, who owns considerable property and his own house. Although Janie protests against the selection of her husband, she ultimately acquiesces in the face of a determined Nanny who tells her she wants her to have ‘‘protection.’’ These early episodes constitute the first of Janie’s accepting the dreams of others as her own and also set in motion her life of disappointment until she seizes the opportunity to live her own life according to her own terms. Janie’s marriage to Logan Killicks is doomed from the beginning. Janie has no intention of becoming a farm worker, and when Killicks goes to a neighboring town to purchase a mule for her to plow with, Janie knows that it is just a matter of time. In the meanwhile, Joe Starks enters the picture. He is from Georgia and is passing through West Florida on his way to Eatonville, Florida, where he has heard the residents are in the process of starting an all-black town. With little persuasion, he convinces Janie to join him, which she does, leaving Logan Killicks behind and casting her lot with Joe Starks who has dreams of his own. When Joe and Janie arrive in Eatonville, they find only the rudiments of a town, but this gives Joe the opportunity to put his considerable and varied business skills to work, and soon he becomes the ‘‘big voice’’ around town, indeed, the mover and shaker in Eatonville. He establishes a general store and a post office and goes about developing Eatonville into a real town. As Joe prospers and becomes more influential, he becomes mayor of the town and announces that Janie is now ‘‘Mrs. Mayor Starks,’’ an identity that she neither relishes nor understands fully. What Janie does realize is that this distinction separates her from the regular folk of the town and she begins to feel isolated. Then, too, there is no room for Janie’s own dreams in this scheme of things and she begins to feel unfulfilled. The years draw on and Joe continues to be financially successful even though his health begins to fail. Because Janie is considerably younger than Joe, she holds on to a degree of youth that Joe cannot appreciate and he takes all of his frustrations out on Janie by being both verbally and physically abusive. When he dies, they are estranged even though they still share the house. Janie goes through a brief period of mourning and then elects to move on with her life.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

289

Shortly after Joe Starks’s death, Janie is visited at the store by a much younger man, Vergible ‘‘Tea Cake’’ Woods, who begins to woo her. Despite her neighbors’ warnings that Tea Cake is only after her money, Tea Cake and Janie soon leave Eatonville for Jacksonville, where they are married, and later move to the Everglades to live and work among the migrant workers. Theirs is a youthful sort of love—they live fast, work hard, and love as hard as they work. When their lives are disrupted by a powerful hurricane, Janie learns the true meaning of love and loss. While trying to save Janie’s life, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog and descends into madness. In his derangement, he tries to kill Janie and she shoots him in self-defense. After she is acquitted by a jury of white men, Janie decides to return to Eatonville to live out the rest of her life. While she is met with scorn and derision from some of the older women of the town, her ‘‘kissing-friend,’’ Phoeby, receives her with open arms. It is to Phoeby that Janie tells the story that forms the novel. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a masterpiece of fiction. It is cleverly plotted and infused with emotion on every page. The characters are realistic, as are the situations, and Hurston handles both with exceedingly great care. In addition, the book is made great by many of the best elements of Hurston’s previous works—an expert rendering of dialect speech, a careful and precise inclusion of elements of black folklore, a heartfelt appreciation of the lives of black folk, a comfortable knowledge of setting and a deep sense of place, and a careful balance of humor, tragedy, and pathos that propel the narrative forward in a way that few have matched. In 1942, Hurston published Dust Tracks on a Road, an autobiography. While it did not meet the expectations that most readers have for autobiography, it is significant because it was one of very few autobiographical statements written up to that point by an African American woman. While it revealed very little about Hurston’s personal life, it did catalog her attitude toward a number of issues and concerns, including how black people are regarded by whites and by each other. The original manuscript of Dust Tracks also included Hurston’s critiques of America’s imperialist behavior, but these were removed from the book by the publisher in the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. The sections that were removed have since been restored and thus provide a more complete reflection of Hurston’s views. Even without these sections, though, Dust Tracks won the Anisfield-Wolf Award given by the Saturday Evening Post for the most significant work published in the area of race relations. Hurston published two other novels, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). Moses, Man of the Mountain continues Hurston’s interest in biblical lore and in an African presence in the Bible, while one of the most significant aspects of Seraph on the Suwanee is that its principal characters are white southerners. While these works round out Hurston’s canon, neither of them reaches the magnificence of Their Eyes Were Watching God and the early short stories. Although Hurston continued to write until her last years, she published very little after 1950. CRITICAL RECEPTION While Hurston was recognized as a leading personality by her contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance, there is not a large body of criticism available from the early period of her career. This is due in part to the fact that literary criticism, as we know it today, was still a fledgling industry; thus, many writers received only scant mention in an occasional review and received very little sustained study. Those critics and reviewers who did write

290

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

about Hurston were often ambivalent: they recognized her energy, but they were often unsure what to make of her use of dialect, her southern folk settings, her characters drawn from ‘‘the Negro[es] farthest down,’’ or her humor. Many were put off by her portrayals of characters and situations that they would just as soon forget in a time when they were trying to be recognized for their American-ness instead of their blackness. Richard Wright was particularly dismissive of Hurston’s talent, complaining that she seemed more of a minstrel type who was intent on entertaining white people instead of advancing the cause of African Americans. Likewise, Alain Locke was critical of her use of folklore. It is clear that whatever merit these two critics’ positions may have, they sought to diminish Hurston’s contributions because she would not follow their separate agenda for black writing. For many years following the 1930s, the critics were largely silent on Hurston. When she died in 1960, for example, her works were out of print and very little was known about her or her work. In the early 1970s, critic Larry Neal wrote a new introduction to Jonah’s Gourd Vine that attempted to rescue Hurston from oblivion, but it was not until a few years later that novelist Alice Walker launched a full-scale Hurston revival with an essay titled ‘‘Looking for Zora,’’ published in Ms. magazine. Over the span of the last three decades, not only has Hurston been rescued from oblivion, but she has also been afforded a prime seat at the table where the best of the world’s literature is served. It is difficult to imagine in this day and time that Hurston was ever forgotten or unheard of. Her works are centerpiece to any number of literary canons, from Harlem Renaissance literature to African American literature in general, to women’s writing, to American and world literature proper, to all points between and among these lines of demarcation. It is difficult to find a college literature course that does not include some Hurston material. This is particularly true of Their Eyes, now regarded as a classic novel of American literature. Another telling factor is the number of sustained studies of her work that are produced by graduate students in this country alone. For example, up until 1981, only ten doctoral dissertations focused on Hurston’s work; by the one-year period of 1993–1994, there were twenty-six such dissertations that focused on her work, and the numbers have remained consistently high for every year after that. Clearly, Hurston’s work has been scrutinized from every possible vantage point and has not come up lacking in critical regard. Similarly, there are a number of scholarly works that are published by academics and activists alike, and Hurston herself is celebrated in any number of ways, including an annual festival of the arts held in Eatonville each January, having her name attached to a foundation that supports young writers, being the subject of several plays, and so on. For a writer who came from rather humble beginnings, who struggled mightily to carve a place for herself in the world, and who died nearly forgotten, this recent restoration to a place of critical honor in the literary world certainly speaks volumes for her writing and for the person she was.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Zora Neale Hurston ‘‘Color Struck.’’ Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists 1.1 (1926): 7–14. The Complete Stories. Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Sieglinde Lemke. Afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

291

Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942. Reprint, 2nd ed., edited by Robert Hemenway. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. 1934. Reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Mules and Men. 1935. Reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Studies of Zora Neale Hurston’s Works Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea, 1986. Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2002. Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Chinn, Nancy, and Elizabeth E. Dunn. ‘‘‘The Ring of Singing Metal on Wood’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Artistry in ‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’’’ Mississippi Quarterly 49 (Fall 1996): 25–34. Crabtree, Claire. ‘‘The Confluence of Folklore, Feminism and Black Self-Determinism in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.’’ Southern Literary Journal 17.2 (1985): 54–66. Harris, Trudier. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hill, Lynda Marion. Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996. Jones, Evora. ‘‘Ascent and Immersion: Narrative Expression in Their Eyes Were Watching God.’’ CLA Journal 39.3 (March 1996): 369–79. Kaplan, Carla, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Lupton, Mary Jane. ‘‘Zora Neale Hurston and the Survival of the Female.’’ Southern Literary Journal 15.1 (1982): 45–54. Plant, Deborah. Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Warren J. Carson

ANGELA JACKSON (1951– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A twenty-first-century poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist, Angela Jackson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, as the fifth of nine siblings, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Before her discovery of her penchant for constructing urban paintings from a puzzle of words, a medical career seemed to be her destiny. Living on the southside of Chicago, Jackson traveled north once again to Northwestern University on a premedical scholarship. Surreptitiously, after meeting visiting professors Margaret Walker and Hoyt W. Fuller, she became captivated by African American literature and soon learned her own extraordinary ability to invent metaphors and similes. Stepping through the urban landscapes of the southside of Chicago, she began to paint word pictures of the surroundings and the people—allowing outsiders to view their inner longings, failures, dignity, and desires. In the summer of 1970, Jackson joined Fuller’s workshop, Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), the first African American writers workshop of its kind in the United States. This organization was intent on developing not only talented African American writers, but also critics of African American literature. Focused on the close adherence to a Black Aesthetic that used the language of the community in new ways, Jackson cites this workshop as the greatest influence on her growth as a writer. She explains: ‘‘Our work is in the Word. No place is more sacred or serious. . . . We speak the words. And that is why OBAC is. To consistently search for the clarity inside our experience, to seek the untouched magnificence, the rueful but striving imperfection of our moments in time. . . . We seek to identify and exalt the peculiar movement and music of our experience’’ (Nommo 26). According to Jackson, writers and critics were ‘‘workers,’’ employing their words in a way that would change things. As a guest contributor to Nommo, a collection of the works of OBAC members for twenty years, Houston Baker, Jr., explains, ‘‘The function of the artist and critic alike was to craft and to celebrate inspiring images of Black life’’ (317). Accepting this Black Aesthetic as a young member of OBAC, Jackson hails Hoyt W. Fuller as her mentor. Soon, one of the youngest writers in the workshop would become a sought-after reader of her work as she performed song and jazz rhythms in her readings. In the years following Fuller’s death, Jackson continued to share her talent and critiques in the workshop, becoming a guiding beacon of inspiration for countless writers. MAJOR WORKS Angela Jackson uses her lyrics to sing of the southside neighborhood she inhabits as she tells the stories of love, poverty, pride, and everyday life of the people who walk the streets. Her dedication to revealing these inspiring images often means highlighting and

ANGELA JACKSON

293

naming traditional ideas. Her collection of poetry The Man with the White Liver introduces a term used by the generation before her to describe a man with an enormous sexual appetite. Like Zora Neale Hurston, Jackson strives to document African American language and lies (as storytelling embellishments have been called) through the memoryhouse of her work. Only four years after joining OBAC, Jackson published her first poetry collection, Voodoo/Love Magic. Here Jackson reveals a keen interest in African tradition as divining sticks, Yoruba masks, ancestors, Nigerian oil, griots, and more parade across her lines as naturally as the tambourine sounds flowing from storefront churches and blues vocals bursting out of the doors of local taverns. Voodoo, or hoodoo (as it has been termed in the southern United States, where many of the African traditions still exist) define the ‘‘hex’’ as a magic potion, herb, or animal part that when combined with certain words could work magic. The opening poem of Jackson’s first collection, ‘‘Voodoo/Love Magic,’’ pledges such a hex as an African American woman’s personal mojo. Similarly, Jackson’s play Shango Diaspora presents a woman’s seduction cloaked in West African references and images. Jackson’s poems ‘‘In Her Solitude: The Inca Divining Spider’’ and ‘‘Arachnia: Her Side of the Story’’ portray the spider as a mystic weaver, tough and persistent in its ability to protect itself. The web it weaves becomes a place for renewal, chance, mystery, and cunning. Celebrating the physical beauty African American men were said to enjoy in the women they loved, she borrows from Haki Madhubuti and calls on the ‘‘Woman with Water/Melon Thighs’’ (Voodoo 16). Another poem, titled ‘‘A Summer Story,’’ witnesses the speaker’s actions as her cousin takes this little girl, dirty from exhaustive play, and shows her to herself. ‘‘[P]retty big dimples’’ accent her face and her cousin’s ability to create a new vision (Voodoo 9). Although strong women and positive men find their stories in Jackson’s poetry, she does not sidestep the negative threat of community disunity. In her poem ‘‘Because We Failed: For a Child Who Died from an Overdose of Heroin,’’she blames the community’s apathy for the loss of a child. In addition to six collections of poetry, Jackson has published chapters of a novel in progress, Treemont Stone. Through these peeks into a more sustained work of art, the narrator introduces the reader to the people in her neighborhood who sit outside on summer nights: ‘‘Mr. Rucker who was the drunkman, Uncle Blackstrap who was the junkman, Miss Ross who was Eddie’s mother and no one’s wife, Miss Wilson who was the head lady, my father who was the good man you better not mess with his kids, my mother who was the sun’’ (Chicago Works 93). Jackson vividly describes individuals within a collective of African American men, women, and children who share a precarious existence. Yet it is not their oppression that Jackson illuminates, but rather their dignity, individuality, and inventiveness. Young women play double Dutch, a game as affordable as the cost of a clothesline that serves as a jump rope. Jackson describes Halloween as a time when ‘‘[s]pirits were being loosed, crossing bridges into matter and climbing stairs’’ (Breaking Ice 353). And there was a ‘‘witch’’ who ‘‘rode no broom; she wore one, more or less, upon her head . . . blond hair [that lay on her neck] like Desdemona, the watermelon man’s horse’s mane’’ (353). African Americans living in housing projects and those in neighborhoods that surround them make their way through the cold winters of Chicago, ‘‘learn[ing] new walks that leaned against the Hawk,’’ as Chicago winds are named. But the children who were being raised in those housing projects, enduring the cold wind, ‘‘came out like

294

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

clear, separated cubes of ice—hard and harder’’ (Chicago Works 96). The ‘‘other boys boiled into manhood’’ (97). And all the children of the neighborhood had to deal with a child beaten and confined to a slow withering away as his oncoming death matures his two friends as they tenderly protect him from the insult of his demise. In the excerpts from her novel, Jackson tells this story through the eyes of children, using the subtle nuances that define their innocence. Yet this is not a book for children. Exceptionally skilled in the art of storytelling, Jackson leaves adults rubbing their chins, lost in contemplation. CRITICAL RECEPTION Jackson has been praised for the precision of her metaphors, her fresh rendering of Chicago’s southside community, and her fusion of southern roots and urban tenement life. She is described as a writer of enormous depth who incorporates jazz rhythms and pauses in original ways. In response to her collection of poems And All These Roads Be Luminous, reviewer Kalamu ya Salaam states, ‘‘Whether cleaning fish or dusting the furniture, catching a train or leaping across rooftops, Angela accurately reads what’s really going on inside of us’’ (http://aalbc.com/books/poems.htm). Angela Jackson has been the recipient of numerous awards, and her work has appeared in many literary magazines, such as First World, Triquarterly, Open Places, River Styx, and Callaloo. A prolific writer with an extraordinary talent, Jackson dedicates her vision to the people around her and a preservation of their everyday beingness. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Angela Jackson And All These Roads Be Luminous. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. ‘‘The Blue Rose.’’ In New Chicago Stories, edited by Fred Gardaphe`. Chicago: City Stoop Press, 1990. Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993. ‘‘From Treemont Stone.’’ In Chicago Works. Chicago: The Morton Press, 1990. The Greenville Club. Chapbook, 1977. The Man with the White Liver. New York: Contact II Publications, 1987. Shango Diaspora. A play. 1980. Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E. Chicago: OBAhouse, 1985. ‘‘Treemont Stone.’’ In Breaking Ice, edited by Terry McMillan. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Voodoo/Love Magic. Chicago: Third World Press, 1974. When the Wind Blows. A play. 1984. Witness! A play. 1978.

Studies of Angela Jackson’s Works Harris, Trudier, and Thadious M. Davis, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 41. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1985. Parks, Carole A., ed. Nommo: A Literary Legacy of Black Chicago (1967–1987). Chicago, IL: OBAhouse, 1987.

ANGELA JACKSON

295

Peacock, Scot, ed. Contemporary Authors, vol. 176. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research Co., 1999. Quashie, Kevin Everod, R. Joyce Lausch, and Keith D. Miller, eds. In New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America. Old Tappan, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001.

Judy Massey Dozier

ELAINE JACKSON (1943– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Elaine Jackson, a well-known playwright, was born in Detroit in 1943 to Essie and Charles Jackson. After graduating from Wayne State University, where she majored in speech and education, she moved to the West Coast to pursue an acting career. As an actress she eventually performed in more than forty plays in Michigan, California, and in Off-Broadway productions in New York, such as Douglass Turner Ward’s Negro Ensemble Company’s Liberty Call (1975). Jackson initially began writing plays as a means of creating roles for herself. However, she eventually turned to writing full time and won a Rockefeller Award for Playwriting in 1978–1979, the Langston Hughes Playwriting Award in 1979, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award for playwriting in 1983. She also served as playwright in residence at the Lake Forest College in Illinois in 1990 and at her alma mater Wayne State University in 1991. Currently, she lives with her husband and son in New York City, where she teaches high school theater and playwriting.

MAJOR WORKS Elaine Jackson’s plays—including Toe Jam (1971), Cockfight (1976), Paper Dolls (1979), Birth Rites (1987), and Afterbirth (1984)—articulate problems associated with African American females who must compare themselves to standards of white Eurocentric beauty designed to create self-hatred in them. Her work is a philosophical frontal assault on the white Eurocentric standards of beauty that dominate the American stage, as well as television and films. Her plays also speak passionately to the issues surrounding growing up black and female in the United States. Toe Jam’s protagonist is a young African American girl who is in search of her own identity. She tries to escape from the sordidness of ghetto life by dreaming of herself as a great actress-poet-playwright. While Cockfight on a surface level looks at the dissolution of a marriage, it actually closely examines the deeper conflicts that sometimes emerge in romantic relationships between black women and men in American society from a feminist point of view. Jackson’s most widely known play is Paper Dolls. The protagonists of Paper Dolls are two 1930s African American beauty contest winners, Miss Emancipation and her runner-up, who at one time attempted to launch Hollywood film careers. However, when they tried to get movie roles, they were forced to confront the bitter realization that Hollywood had yet to discover them as anything other than Aunt Jemimas. An insensitive film director tells them that, as black actresses, if they want roles in Hollywood, then they better learn to tap dance. In a series of flashbacks, Margaret-Elizabeth, the more flamboyant of Paper Dolls’s two protagonists, drags a reluctant and muted Lizzie through the embarrassing events of

ELAINE JACKSON

297

their unfulfilled lives, insistent on changing the ending. The play’s humor capitalizes on the sibling-like rivalry between the two former ‘‘Negro beauties’’—women who ultimately embrace themselves and each other as who they truly are: strong black women. Just like the protagonist in Jackson’s earlier play, Toe Jam, in Paper Dolls Margaret is acutely aware of herself as an actress and becomes fed up with being forced into socially scripted dramas. She is incensed at a white artist’s negative portrayal of a black woman as an Aunt Jemima, berating her for ‘‘missing the rhythm, vitality, and color intensity of the black model.’’ CRITICAL RECEPTION Derrick C. Lewis observes in his article ‘‘Paper Dolls, Real Women, True Beauty’’ that Paper Dolls is a play that takes a look at black females’ attempts to obtain a ‘‘right look’’ that exposes them to easy exploitation. He says that it takes a bite out of the standard Hollywood assumptions of beauty, one that does not accommodate the natural beauty of the black female. (10). Dana A. Williams says in Contemporary African American Female Playwrights that ‘‘Paper Dolls is a two-act drama that examines the standards of beauty that are set by the American entertainment industry and the negative effects these standards have on black women’’ (59). In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, William Andrews notes that Jackson’s work, whether dealing with endings or beginnings or redefining spaces in between, further opened the stage door for black playwrights and helped set a standard in mainstream theater for richly textured portrayals of black characters and their stories (392). Andrews also emphasizes that Jackson embraced this task because she emerged as a black female playwright in the 1970s, a socially and politically dynamic moment in the nation’s history and a ‘‘renascence’’ decade for African American theater (391). Margaret B. Wilkerson, the editor of 9 Plays by Black Women, finds that ‘‘the destruction of innocence in the world of black girls and women is also a recurring theme in Jackson’s work (348). In her commentary on Jackson’s playwriting and the Black Power Movement, Wilkerson notes that although most of the African American plays of this period tended to dwell upon male identity and social confrontation, Jackson’s Toe Jam became a popular choice at community theaters, colleges, and universities, especially in San Francisco’s Bay Area, where several theaters produced the play in the same season. It was eventually anthologized in King and Milner’s Black Drama Anthology, a seminal collection of works by twenty-two black dramatists (348). Elizabeth Barnsley Brown contends in her dissertation, ‘‘Shackles on a Writer’s Pen,’’ that African American female playwrights like Elaine Jackson are healing the deleterious effects of past constructions of race and gender, manipulating a multiplicity of discourses in order to subvert the dominant ‘‘Master’’ discourse or script. Like Wilkerson, she feels that Jackson’s playwriting emerged as an important and resonant black female voice during the aforementioned black power period. In ‘‘Screening the Camera’s Eye: Black and White Confrontations of Technological Representation,’’ Timothy Murray finds in Jackson’s African American theater a complexity of technological confrontation exacerbated by plays that suggest that the marvelous ‘‘technicolors’’ of American media have yet to escape from their white-against-black fundamentals.

298

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Elaine Jackson Afterbirth (1984), unpublished. Birth Rites (1987), unpublished. Cockfight (1976), unpublished. Paper Dolls (1979). In 9 Plays By Black Women. Ed. Margaret Wilkerson. New York: New American Library, 1986. Toe Jam (1971). In Black Drama Anthology. Ed. Woodie King and Ron Milner. New York: New American Library, 1971.

Studies of Elaine Jackson’s Works Andrews, William, ed. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Brown, Elizabeth Barnsley. ‘‘Shackles on a Writer’s Pen: Dialogism in Plays by Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1996. Janifer, Raymond. ‘‘The Black Nationalistic Aesthetic and the Early Fiction of John Edgar Wideman.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1996. King, Woodie, and Ron Milner, eds. Black Drama Anthology. New York: Penguin Books, 1971. Lewis, Derrick. ‘‘Paper Dolls, Real Women, True Beauty.’’ Michigan Citizen, February 9, 1991, 8. Murray, Timothy. ‘‘Screening the Camera’s Eye: Black and White Confrontations of Technological Representation.’’ Modern Drama 28.1 (1985): 110–24. Partnow, Elaine T. The Female Dramatist: Profiles of Women Playwrights from the Middle Ages to Contemporary Times. New York: Facts on File, 1998. Peterson, Bernard L, ed. Contemporary Black American Playwrights and Their Plays: A Biographical and Dramatic Index. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Wilkerson, Margaret B., ed. 9 Plays by Black Women. New York: New American Library, 1986. Williams, Dana A. Contemporary African American Female Playwrights. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Raymond Janifer

MAE JACKSON (1946– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A prolific fiction writer, poet, playwright, letter writer, grant writer, and activist, Mae Jackson has accomplished much in her sixty years of life. Born on January 3, 1946, near her father’s home in Arkansas, Mae Jackson moved from Arkansas to New Orleans with her mother when she was only nine months old. She lived in the Mardi Gras City for twelve years before moving to Brooklyn, New York, where she continues to reside. Advocating for human rights is what Mae Jackson does. As a teenager, she loved to go through Harlem smoking cigarettes and trying to get into the Apollo Theater. She would walk into the Chock Full of Nuts coffee shop and see Jackie Robinson, while Malcolm X preached outside of Michelle’s Bookstore—a place that Jackson remembers had ‘‘books all about black folks, stacked from the floor to the ceiling.’’ MAJOR WORKS Malcolm X’s family is the subject of Jackson’s 1997 essay, ‘‘The Fire Next Time— Lessons of the Shabazz Tragedy.’’ In the essay, Jackson writes about Malcolm X’s twelve-year-old grandson who sets fire to his grandmother’s apartment. The fire ultimately claims the life of Malcolm’s widow. In exploring the causes of the boy’s actions, Jackson poignantly writes: What can I claim for my generation? We did not have the type of revolution we’d hoped for. We set fire to inner cities, but we didn’t use those fires to purify ourselves. And maybe it’s because we didn’t want to hear Malcolm after all. We didn’t want to take that next step that an oppressed people must take if they are to ever be free. We wanted a little bit of change and were willing to settle for white people liking us enough to stop killing us.

Her 1999 essay, ‘‘Killing of Amadou Dillou—One Mother Hears Another Mother’s Cry of Pain,’’ is about the tragic shooting of Guinea immigrant Amadou Dillou. Dillou was standing unarmed in a New York City doorway when four police officers opened fire on him. They fired forty-one shots, nineteen of which struck Dillou. The policemen mistook Dillou for an armed suspect. After the shooting, many in the African American community stated that it was racially motivated. This ‘‘history of racism’’ is what Jackson writes about in the essay: ‘‘I know the truth. I also know history. But even if I did not know truth or history, common sense tells me what my mother knew—no people are freed by mere words, or desire. They are freed when they ‘recognize the extent of their oppression and organize against it.’’’ Can I Poet with You (1969) is a twenty page book of poetry that includes poems on topics such as African American culture, struggles, concerns and language.

300

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Jackson’s works have not been the subject of criticism, it has been reproduced in several literary journals and books. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Mae Jackson ‘‘Killing of Amadou Dillou—One Mother Hears Another Mother’s Cry of Pain.’’ Pacific News Service, February 17, 1999. http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/5.04/990217-dillou .html. Accessed January 3, 2005. ‘‘The Fire Next Time—Lessons of the Shabazz Tragedy.’’ Pacific News Service, July 11, 1997. http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/3.15/970711-shabazz.html. Can I Poet with You. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1969.

Studies of Mae Jackson’s Work Bell, Roseann, Bettye J. Parker Smith, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979. Foster, F. S. ‘‘Changing Concepts of the Black Woman.’’ Journal of Black Studies 3.4 (1973). Thompson, Julius E. Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960–1995. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999.

Heather Hoffman Jordan

MATTIE JANE JACKSON (1843–?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Mattie Jane Jackson, who deals with her era’s historical literacy, was born in 1843 in St. Charles County, Missouri. Jackson is most well known for her 1866 publication The Story of Mattie J. Jackson; Her Parentage—Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery— Incidents During the War—Her Escape from Slavery. A True Story. Her narrative was written, according to its preface, to ‘‘gain sympathy from the earnest friends of those who have been bound down by a dominant race in circumstances over which they had no control.’’ This is the primary document of Jackson’s life and history, and little is known of her outside the personal narrative.

MAJOR WORK In recounting her life, Jackson lists her ancestors as well as her slave owners, witnessing the conflicting yet inextricable ties that construct her sense of self in history. When Jackson was three years old, her father, a slave and a preacher, was sold away from the family, yet made his escape to a free state before he could be moved. Two years later, and after the death of her oldest daughter, Sarah Anne, Mattie’s mother Ellen Turner and her two remaining children, Mattie Jane and Esther J., attempted an escape themselves. They traveled for two days undetected but were captured when an advertisement describing them reached Illinois just before they did. They were taken to a trader’s yard where they were bought by William Lewis, owner of a tobacco factory outside St. Louis. Jackson writes that four years later her mother married George Brown, a foreman for the Lewis tobacco company, and she had two sons as a result of this union. In an act of resistance to being improperly treated, Brown made his escape to Canada. Soon after he left, Jackson’s youngest half brother ‘‘was taken sick in consequence of being confined in a box [her] mother was obliged to keep him’’ in. The boy never recovered and died at the age of two. Jackson spent most of her young adult years surviving numerous beatings, making several failed escape attempts, and enduring incidents of severe abuse. In 1863, at the age of twenty, she was sold from her family. The conditions of her new residence, with Captain Ehpraim Frisbee, were deplorable. There was never enough heat and the work days were fourteen hours long. After six months and many escape attempts, Jackson finally secured her freedom. Jackson’s sister, Esther J., also referred to in the text as Hester, escaped to the free state but was never heard from again. Jackson’s mother, during her seventh escape attempt, and after forty-three years as a slave, also secured her freedom. After securing their freedom, Ellen Turner married Mr. Adams and Jackson moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts to live with her stepfather George Brown and his wife, Dr. L. S. Thompson, who ghost wrote The Story of Mattie Jane Jackson. In recognition of the

302

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

power that language holds in the construction of an autonomous self, and the ways that literacy negotiates that self to the larger society, Mattie writes, ‘‘Manage your own secrets, and divulge them by the silent language of your own pen.’’ Jackson’s memoir sustains many elements of traditional slave narratives, such as paralleling her geographical path with the chronological events that led to the culmination of her freedom. As well, her narrative style and structure contain a religious foundation that concludes in the final chapter’s exhortation on the importance of utilizing Christianity to triumph over the evils of slavery. Jackson’s narrative not only concerns itself with a personal rendering of the historical travesties of slavery, but also dialogues with the narrative structure, literary style, artistic and political perspectives, and aesthetic engagement of her era’s historical literacy. Jackson seems well aware of the larger discourse into which she is entering, and her voice is a distinct presence in the slave narrative genre. CRITICAL RECEPTION Despite the historical value and literary quality of her work, there is no criticism written about the narrative. A copy of the manuscript is held at the University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the ‘‘Documenting the American South’’ collection. In Jackson’s honor, there is The Mattie Jackson African American Center, which houses special editions and rare books, located in Miles College in Fairfield, Alabama. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Mattie Jane Jackson ‘‘The Story of Mattie Jane Jackson; Her Parentage——Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery— Incidents During the War——Her Escape from Slavery.’’ In Six Women’s Slave Narratives, edited by William Andrews. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Study of Mattie Jane Jackson’s Work Morgan, Tabitha Adams. ‘‘Women’s Urban Identity and Cultural Production: Reading the Texts of Ghetto Regionalism in Lydia Maria Child and Mattie Jane Jackson.’’ Paper given at the Catherine Maria Sedgwick Society Symposium, New York City, 2005. Unpublished paper.

Tabitha Adams Morgan

REBECCA COX JACKSON (1795–1871)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Rebecca Cox Jackson’s public life began when she was 35 years old after a spiritual rebirth led her to become a religious leader. Jackson was born in Horntown, Pennsylvania, just outside of Central Philadelphia, one of four children. Her eventual transformation from seamstress and homemaker to visionary was unanticipated because as she often said she was the only child of her mother that ‘‘had no learning.’’ Her primary responsibility was to take care of her two younger siblings and her elder brother Joseph’s six children. Joseph, a minister and widower, helped Jackson read the Bible and write letters until a thunderstorm in 1830 changed all that. Because Jackson was afraid of storms, she weathered them through prayer. During a pivotal storm, her prayers were answered in the form of three divine gifts: the ability to read, the gift of healing others, and the gift of power—a prophetic ability to control weather and read the intentions of others. She details these miracles in ‘‘Gifts of Power,’’ an autobiography that was not widely published until over a century later. As she honed these gifts, she began to reconcile her Bible-based African Methodist Episcopal upbringing with a more female-centered and abstinence-based theology that compelled her to eventually leave her husband and become an itinerant preacher. When she encountered a small religious fellowship of Shakers called the Little Band in 1836, Jackson believed she had found a faith she could practice and preach, even as some Methodist preachers and other detractors tried to thwart her efforts. Despite the fact that Jackson was not officially affiliated with the Shakers or any other institution until late in her life, she eventually became Mother Rebecca Jackson. With her devout companion Rebecca Perot, she founded the Philadelphia Out-Family, a branch of black Shakers that outlived her by forty years. She died from a stroke in 1871. MAJOR WORKS Jackson’s journals are preserved in her autobiography, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. The book chronicles her extraordinary experiences as an unconventional woman of God in antebellum America. Through her journal writings, Jackson demonstrates how she relied solely on her independence and faith despite isolation, sickness and uncertainty. Gifts of Power serves as a testament to the power of one woman’s faith and vision. Despite its strength, Gifts of Power is sometimes tedious and hard to follow. The writings are not in chronological order, which makes it difficult to distinguish Jackson’s visions from her real world experiences. Furthermore, for all of her description of her dreams and travels, there is not much discussion of her estranged husband Samuel, or much description of those closest to her, including Rebecca Perot.

304

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Only a few critical analyses have been written about Jackson, as she is not widely known. In Joanne Braxton’s view, her obscurity may have been related to the tension between Jackson’s inner voice and the voices of those around her who might have been educated in the African Methodist tradition and could not envision a space for a woman who relied solely on the voice of God in contrast to the voices of external spiritual advisors. Braxton explains that Jackson’s reliance on her visionary experiences and dreams are not supposed to be analyzed by today’s standards or by psychological inquiry, but should be viewed as one black woman’s need to steadfastly pursue her visions. She also notes that testimonies like those of Jackson and other early nineteenth-century black women memoirists set the stage for the better known works of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Rebecca Cox Jackson Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. Ed. Jean McMahon Humez. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981.

Studies of Rebecca Cox Jackson’s Work Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within A Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Williams, Richard E. Called and Chosen: The Story of Mother Rebecca Jackson and the Philadelphia Shakers. Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. and The American Theological Library Association, 1981.

Joshunda Sanders

HARRIET ANN JACOBS (1813–1897)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Harriet Jacobs was born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, to Elijah Jacobs and his wife Delilah, both of whom were slaves. Despite her parents’ slave status, she spent her first six years as a free child in her family home. Upon her mother’s death, she learned of her slave status and was delivered over to Margaret Horniblow, a mistress who treated her kindly and taught her to read and write. Although it was hoped that Horniblow would eventually free Harriet, she bequeathed the slave to her niece Mary Matilda, the threeyear-old daughter of Dr. James and Mary Norcom. After Horniblow’s death in 1825, Jacobs moved to the Norcom household. After she reached adolescence, Jacobs became the subject of Dr. Norcom’s predatory, sexual advances. In an attempt to take control of her life, Jacobs began a relationship with Samuel Sawyer, another powerful white man in the community. Sawyer, an attorney who would later become a U.S. Congressman, fathered the slave’s two children. Jacobs hoped her relationship with Sawyer and the resulting pregnancies would provoke Norcom to sell her. The outraged doctor, however, refused to relinquish control, even after his jealous wife removed Jacobs from their home. Norcom’s persecution of Jacobs continued despite the separation. When she refused to move to a house that he built for her, Norcom sent Jacobs off to work on his family plantation in Auburn. On the plantation, Jacobs finally resolved to escape. Learning her children were to be brought to Auburn to be ‘‘broken in,’’ Jacobs decided to flee north, hoping that the children’s father would purchase and liberate them. Things did not work out entirely as planned. Sawyer bought his children but broke his promise to free them. And while Jacobs successfully escaped from the Norcoms in 1835, she would not arrive in the free north for more than half a decade. Finding it difficult to safely escape her hometown or to sever family ties, Jacobs hid for almost seven years in a tiny crawlspace over the house where her grandmother and children lived. Here, she suffered from sensory deprivation and muscular atrophy; she also felt acute distress from being unable to act as a mother to her children. In 1837, Sawyer removed Jacobs’s daughter, Louisa, from the home, bringing the girl to Washington, D.C., to live with him. To Jacobs’s horror, Sawyer eventually sent their daughter into service to a cousin in Brooklyn. In 1842, an opportunity for escape arrived, and Jacobs fled north. She soon located her daughter in Brooklyn and arranged for her son, Joseph, to be sent to her brother in Boston. Jacobs could not, however, establish a family home, having neither the legal power to remove Louisa from service nor the financial resources to care for her children. To support herself, Jacobs worked in the New York home of magazine editor Nathaniel Parker Willis, caring for the children from his first and second marriages. Until his death, Norcom continued to pursue Jacobs, making several unsuccessful trips north to recapture her. In 1852, Norcom’s daughter, Mary Matilda Messmore, arrived in New York with her husband to reclaim Jacobs. Nathaniel Willis’s second wife, Cornelia, came to the aid of her valued employee, paying the Messmores 150 dollars to free Jacobs. While

306

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

she was relieved, Jacobs bitterly resented that payment was necessary to obtain her legal freedom. In between employment at the Willis home, Jacobs worked with her activist brother, managing an abolitionist reading room in Rochester, New York. Here, she became acquainted with Amy Post, who encouraged her to write her life story. Although anxious to help the abolitionist cause, Jacobs was reluctant to publish the details of her sexual history, and it would be many years before she began the project. In 1853, Jacobs sought to collaborate with Harriet Beecher Stowe to produce a dictated slave narrative, but negotiations ended bitterly. Resolving to tell her own story, Jacobs spent five years writing her memoir by night, while caring for the Willis family by day. Getting the story to print proved difficult for the escaped slave. Jacobs could not find a publisher until Lydia Maria Child agreed to edit the work and write an introduction for the text. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself came to print in America in 1861, and was republished in England the following year. Jacobs lived a long and productive life after the publication of Incidents. During the Civil War, she worked in Washington D.C., and Virginia, collecting and distributing clothing and medical supplies for the ‘‘contrabands’’—southern black refugees who sought aid across Union lines. She later established a free school for the contrabands. During Reconstruction, she continued her relief efforts for southern blacks, working primarily in Georgia. Suffering from declining health and financial circumstances in her final years, Jacobs struggled to support herself by running boarding houses. On March 7, 1897, Harriet Jacobs died in Washington, D.C. MAJOR WORK Harriet Jacobs’s single text, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is an autobiographical work in the tradition of the American slave narrative. Using the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs details her life from early childhood through her escape north and her attainment of legal freedom. Incidents separates itself thematically from male-authored slave texts by focusing on the distinctive concerns of the female slave. Articulating the unique suffering of slave women, Jacobs writes, ‘‘Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings and mortifications peculiarly there [sic] own’’ (77). Throughout the text, Jacobs focuses specifically on the sexual exploitation of the female slave and explores the emotional complexity of slave motherhood. Like other slave narratives, Jacobs’s text is underwritten by the testimony of prominent white citizens. In the introduction and appendix of Incidents, Lydia Maria Child and Amy Post attest to the narrative’s accuracy and vouch for the author’s character. Despite these testimonials, Jacobs takes ownership of her narrative in the preface to the work, underscoring that ‘‘the narrative is no fiction’’ and articulating her own womencentered abolitionist mission: ‘‘I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women in the South, still in bondage . . .’’ (1). Although Incidents has been widely studied as a female slave narrative, one of the most critically interesting aspects of the work is its complex amalgamation of literary genres. In addition to its use of the slave narrative, Jacobs’s text deploys conventions of autobiography, sentimental and domestic fiction, the seduction novel, and abolitionist literature.

HARRIET ANN JACOBS

307

Critics have also noted that Jacobs speaks in multiple, often contradictory, voices throughout Incidents and that the text is riddled with elisions and contradictions. This is nowhere more evident than in Jacobs’s treatment of her sexual history with Samuel Sawyer. On the one hand, Jacobs repents for her sexual impropriety, begging the audience’s ‘‘pity’’ and ‘‘pardon,’’ for the affair (55). On the other hand, she exonerates herself of any sexual indiscretions and boldly instructs her white audience that ‘‘the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standards as others’’ (56). Similarly, Jacobs’s narration both valorizes and critiques the idealized domestic and maternal values of the era. While Jacobs depicts herself as a heroic slave mother in Incidents, she ultimately flees without her children, refusing to let her captors use her maternal affections to ‘‘fetter’’ her ‘‘to the spot’’ (93). The text’s multiple voices and inconsistencies reflect not only the author’s complex subjectivity but also reveal Jacobs’s conflicted relationship with her culture’s ideals of maternity, domesticity, and sexual behavior for women. CRITICAL RECEPTION For much of the twentieth century, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was ignored by historians and literary critics alike because it was suspected to be a work of sentimental fiction, one most likely created by its named editor, Lydia Maria Child. In the 1980s, however, Jean Fagan Yellin authenticated Jacobs as the author of Incidents, established the limited nature of Child’s editorial work, and documented the historical veracity of the memoir. After Yellin’s publication of a new edition of Incidents in 1987, the work has garnered much critical attention and has become a staple of nineteenth-century American literary studies. In the wake of Yellin’s scholarship, critical studies have been preoccupied with the literary innovations that flow from Jacobs’s unique position as a nineteenth-century female slave and author. Specifically, critics are interested in Jacobs’s adoption and adaptation of various literary genres. Mary Helen Washington, Joanne Braxton, and Frances Foster, for example, analyze Incidents as a slave narrative, documenting how Jacobs’s text breaks the conventions of similar, male-authored works such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Such scholarship has led to a reevaluation of the distinctly gendered definitions of the genre that had formerly been used. Jacobs’s deployment of sentimental strategies to appeal to her white, northern audience has also been widely studied. Many critics have noted that Jacobs does not simply adopt the conventions of the sentimental novel. Hazel Carby, for example, argues that Jacobs’s narrative actually critiques the cultural ideals of womanhood upon which much nineteenth-century sentimental fiction is based. Others such as Elizabeth C. Becker, Caroline Levander, and Krista Walter explore how Jacobs specifically challenges the domestic ideology of sentimental novels. Incidents has been studied in relation to other popular genres as well. Beth McClay Doriani and Johnnie M. Stover analyze Jacobs’s work in relation to conventions of autobiography. Franny Nudelman documents how Incidents relies on the form and formulas of abolitionist literature. Finally, Jennifer Rae Greeson explores Jacobs’s work in relation to the conventions of urban gothic fiction. In 2004, Jean Fagan Yellin published a new biography, Harriet Jacobs: A Life. The study, which gives new insight into Jacobs’s relationships with Norcom and Sawyer and details her work during the Civil War and Reconstruction, will likely reenergize scholarship surrounding Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

308

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Harriet Ann Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself. 1861. Reprint, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Studies of Harriet Jacobs’s Work Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African-American Women 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. ‘‘My Statue, Myself: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.’’ In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Garfield, Deborah M., and Rafia Zafar, eds. Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Greeson, Jennifer Rae. ‘‘The ‘Mysteries and Miseries’ of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.’’ American Literature 73.2 (2001): 277–309. Levander, Caroline. ‘‘‘Following the Conditions of the Mother’: Subversions of Domesticity in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.’’ In Southern Mothers, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff, 28–38. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Nudelman, Franny. ‘‘Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.’’ ELH 59 (1992): 939–64. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Stover, Johnnie M. ‘‘Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography as Social Discourse: The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs.’’ College English 66.2 (2003): 133–54. Walter, Krista. ‘‘Surviving the Garret: Harriet Jacobs and the Critique of Sentiment.’’ ATQ 8.3 (1994): 189–210. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987. Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.

Mary McCartin Wearn

AMELIA E. JOHNSON (1858–1922)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Novelist, short-fiction writer, poet, and editor Amelia Etta Hall Johnson was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1858. After her education in Montreal schools, Johnson moved to Boston in 1874. There she met and married Rev. Harvey Johnson, the author, activist, and famed minister of the Union Baptist Church. They had three children, a daughter and two sons. Johnson died in the spring of 1922. MAJOR WORKS Writing under the name of ‘‘Mrs. A. E. Johnson,’’ Johnson is best known for her contributions to children’s literature. In fact, Johnson began her literary career regularly contributing poems and short stories for children in National Baptist, American Baptist, and Sower and Reaper magazines, among other periodicals. In 1887 she founded an eight-page monthly magazine, especially for African American females, titled Joy, while her Ivy, published in 1888, instructed youth about African American history. Her regular contributions to the Baltimore Sower and Reaper, called ‘‘Children’s Corner,’’ is yet another instance of Johnson’s sustained interest in children’s literature. In the early stages of her career, Johnson envisioned novels as a means to morally equip and uplift the American and African American community. Johnson published three novels in her lifetime. They include Clarence and Corinne, or God’s Way (1890), The Hazeley Family (1894), and Martina Meriden, or What Is My Motive? (1901). Clarence and Corinne is a poignant depiction of the agonies and humiliations suffered by Corinne and Clarence after their mother’s death and their father’s abandonment. Though the novel begins on a pessimistic note, it ends with Clarence and Corinne grown and happily married to two childhood friends. With the publication of this book by the American Baptist Publication Society of Philadelphia, white-administered and one of the largest publishing houses of the time, Johnson became the first African American Sunday school fiction writer. And, more significantly, this novel is the second published African American novel. In The Hazeley Family, Johnson through Flora Hazeley, the protagonist, emphasizes, as M. Giulia Fabi observes, ‘‘the Christian value and social usefulness of women’s ‘home-work.’’’ While Martina Meriden, or What Is my Motive is an expansion of her previous themes with a stress on the need for the Christian outlook on life, both novels collectively exemplify Sunday school literature, which R. Frank Taylor in his 1888 essay ‘‘Sunday School Literature’’ defines as ‘‘good, wholesome food for thought’’ and an alternative to ‘‘cheap, trashy reading matter.’’ Johnson’s novels foreground the virtues of Christian ways of life, divulge underlying tension between the domestic sphere and Christian orthodoxy, and further portray the issues of African American women. Unlike her contemporaries, Johnson never overtly

310

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

discusses racial issues, though she always focuses on social problems such as alcoholism and urban poverty. To these ends, Johnson deploys racially neutral characters and thus maintains a healthy indifference to the racial literature. CRITICAL RECEPTION Though Johnson was a prominent writer of the late nineteenth century, there is a dearth of critical materials on her works. In a recent attempt to reclaim and record the nineteenth-century African American literary voices, the highly important Schomburg Library, in collaboration with Oxford University Press under the general editorship of Henry Louis Gates Jr., revived Clarence and Corinne and The Hazeley Family. In her introduction to Clarence and Corinne, published in this series, Hortense J. Spillers contends that as a ‘‘didactic narrative of the family,’’ Clarence and Corinne reflects the social reform ideology of the late-nineteenth-century women’s movement. Barbara Christian’s introduction to The Hazeley Family is also a scholarly attempt to recover and preserve Johnson’s writings for posterity. Christian discusses the nonracial characters, domestic idealism, and the feminist themes of the novel. Claudia Tate’s provocative Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century, through contextualizing Johnson’s works, examines the relations between political desire and domestic ideology in postReconstruction novels. In short, gaining recognition for her literary strategies and thematic concerns Johnson’s works offer fascinating insights into the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American and African American society and therefore deserve special attention. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Amelia E. Johnson Clarence and Corinne, or God’s Way. 1890. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. The Hazeley Family. 1894. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Martina Meriden, or What Is My Motive? Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1901.

Studies of Amelia E. Johnson’s Works Christian, Barbara. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Hazeley Family by Amelia E. Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Fabi, M. Giulia. ‘‘Johnson, Amelia E.’’ In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 401. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ———. ‘‘Taming the Amazon? The Price of Survival in Turn-of-the-Century African American Women’s Fiction.’’ In The Insular Dream: Obsession and Resistance, edited by Kristiaan Versluys, 228–41. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995. Pegues A. W. Our Baptist Ministers and Schools. Springfield, MA: Wiley, 1892. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Spillers, Hortense J. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Clarence and Corinne, or God’s Way by Amelia E. Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

AMELIA E. JOHNSON

311

———. ‘‘Moving on Down the Line.’’ American Quarterly 40.1 (1988): 84. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Sathyaraj Venkatesan

GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON (1877–1966)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet Georgia Blanche Camp was born on September 10, 1877, in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of Laura (Douglas) and George Camp, both of mixed racial heritages. When she was a young child, her parents separated, and Johnson lived with her mother, attending public schools in Atlanta and finishing Atlanta University’s Normal School in 1893. She then served as a teacher in Marietta, Georgia, until 1902 when she left to attend the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Returning to Atlanta in 1903, she worked briefly as an assistant principal, before resigning to marry Henry Lincoln Johnson, a prominent Atlanta attorney, in September 1903. Although her relationship with her mother had often been difficult, when she married, Johnson chose to use her mother’s surname, Douglas, as her middle name. Two sons, Henry Lincoln, Jr. (ca. 1906–1990) and Peter Douglas (1907–1957), were born to the Johnsons before 1910, when the family relocated to Washington, D.C. There Henry Lincoln, Sr., established a law firm and in 1912 was appointed Recorder of Deeds by President Taft. With this appointment, the Johnsons’s place in Washington’s elite African American society was established. In spite of her husband’s conviction that ‘‘a woman should take care of her home and her children and be content with that,’’ Johnson was an extremely prolific writer who published two volumes of poetry, both dedicated to her husband, in spite of his criticism of her efforts: The Heart of a Woman (1918) and Bronze (1922). In addition, around 1920, Johnson began holding informal gatherings of writers in her home. Her ‘‘Saturday Nighters Club’’ meetings, held regularly until the 1930s, became an important venue for prominent writers to discuss literature and share their work. Her salon participants represented both the younger and older generations of writers, including Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer as well as William Stanley Braithwaite, W.E.B. DuBois, Jessie Fauset, and Alice Nelson-Dunbar. After Henry Lincoln, Sr.’s death in 1925, Johnson sought employment, mostly in government service, to support herself and finance her sons’ education: Henry Jr., to Bowdoin College and Howard University Law School and Peter to Dartmouth College and Howard University Medical School. In spite of the demands of working, Johnson continued to write, enjoying the greater freedom widowhood afforded her. In 1926, her one-act play, Blue Blood, won honorable mention in the Opportunity drama contest. The next year, her play, Plumes, won the first prize in the same competition. That moment represented a high point in Johnson’s career. Unable to find a publisher for her third volume of poetry, An Autumn Love Cycle, Johnson published it at her own expense in 1928 (as she had the previous two volumes). The Stock Market Crash and Great Depression further limited Johnson’s access to publishing opportunities. In 1935 the Federal Theater Project (FTP) gave Johnson a venue to submit plays of social protest. From 1935 to 1939, Johnson submitted at least five plays to the FTP, none of which were produced. Two of the plays, Frederick Douglass and William and Ellen

GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON

313

Craft, were historical sketches depicting slaves seeking freedom. Three others focused on the issue of lynching: Blue-Eyed Black Boy, Safe, and A Sunday Morning in the South. Johnson submitted at least two other plays to the NAACP in support of their effort to pass legislation banning lynching. These were also rejected but demonstrate a very important concern in Johnson’s writings. In 1941, Johnson joined a group of black writers called the Writers’ Club of Washington, D.C., and attended meetings regularly until the group disbanded in 1960. According to Writers’ Club records, Johnson continued to publish poems and short stories in a variety of journals and literary magazines, as well as columns for Negro newspapers. Much of her writings, published under pseudonyms in publications that no longer exist, may forever be lost. Scholar Claudia Tate explains, ‘‘This practice was symptomatic of her intense anxiety of authorship, for she was fully convinced . . . that her readers would be more likely to treat her work seriously if she disassociated her black and female self from them’’ (xxxiii). Her last major work, Share My World, a volume of poetry self-published in 1962, included numerous poems written for and shared with friends. Although Johnson never secured funding for her writing, she continued to write, catalogue her work, and seek literary fellowships well into the 1960s. Using her writing to ‘‘sustain her subjectivity and optimistic outlook,’’ Johnson persisted in her efforts even without publishing success (Tate xxxiv). So essential to her was her identity as a writer that, on her deathbed, her friend May Miller soothed her by repeatedly calling her ‘‘Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson.’’ MAJOR WORKS Georgia Douglas Johnson’s varied writings focus primarily on intensely female issues of the heart, African American motherhood, sexual and racial violence, and the experience of mixed-race people. Known primarily for writing traditional poetry of the genteel school, Johnson was regarded as a minor poet of the New Negro era, who was consistently overshadowed by the ‘‘masculine literature of the ‘New Negro’’’ (Redding, quoted in Fletcher 153). The reception to her earlier work reflects the ‘‘unresolved duality of women of color [who] were expected to identify themselves as either black or female, but never both, [and who sought] an audience in a society that respected neither’’ (Moses 203). Her first volume of poetry, The Heart of a Woman, described by William Stanley Braithwaite as ‘‘intensely female . . . which means more than anything else . . . deeply human,’’ focused primarily on the emotions of women. Written from a race-neutral perspective, Heart has been dismissed as sentimental and genteel and criticized for its lack of concern with racial uplift. Claudia Tate argues, however, that Johnson’s style ‘‘was part of her strategy of ‘compensatory conservatism,’ which veiled her criticism of racial and gender oppressions behind the demeanor of ‘the lady poet’’’ (xviii). Although unexplored until recently, even early critics like Braithwaite noted a world of ‘‘mystery and passion . . . or romantic visions and practical ambitions’’ just beneath the surface in Heart (quoted in Hull 157). In Johnson’s era, however, exploring the full implication of such passion would have suggested licentiousness unacceptable in a lady poet. In a 1941 letter to Arna Bontemps, Johnson reflects, ‘‘My first book . . . was not at all race conscious. Then someone said she has no feeling for her race. So I wrote Bronze.

314

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

It is entirely race conscious.’’ While Heart focuses on the heart of the universal woman, Bronze reflects ‘‘the heart of a colored woman aware of her social problems’’ and demonstrates the influence Johnson’s New Negro salon members had on her writing (Fletcher 156). In Bronze, Johnson considers pressing race issues including violence, the experience of mixed race people, and migration north. Of particular interest in Bronze is the ‘‘Motherhood’’ section, which considers the special concerns of African American mothers, specifically ‘‘the ambivalence of black women . . . bringing children into a society that despised them even before they were born’’ (Moses 204). Issues facing African American mothers predominate Johnson’s first two plays as well. Blue Blood depicts two mothers who, just before the marriage of their son and daughter, discover that both children have been fathered by the same white man. Although this knowledge is uncovered as each mother boasts of her child’s superiority to the other because of his or her blue (really white) blood, the play quickly becomes a commentary on the foolishness of African Americans fixating on skin color, which only reflects their own ‘‘violation and powerlessness,’’ and on the state of African American women who are victimized sexually but forced to keep silent in order to protect their husbands and sons from being killed trying to protect their honor (Brown-Guillory 13). In Plumes, Johnson’s most celebrated play, an African American mother with a gravely ill daughter is faced with the choice of spending her last dollar to pay a doctor to perform a surgery that may not cure the daughter or reserving the money to pay for an elaborate funeral (complete with plumed horses) that would demonstrate her love for her child. Here the expression of an African American mother’s love is reduced to dollars and cents. Some critics have suggested that the mother allowing her daughter to die without the surgery demonstrates her choosing death rather than allowing her child to suffer in a racist society. Claudia Tate argues, however, that the play ‘‘represents the inevitability of death and Johnson’s steadfast conviction that only love can preserve human dignity. Thus the mother’s final display of love for her daughter is more important than trying to postpone the certainty of death’’ (lx). Johnson continued to explore motherhood, violence, and miscegenation in her lynching plays. Blue-Eyed Black Boy, for example, depicts a young African American man about to be lynched for innocently brushing against a white woman. The man is saved from death when his mother sends a message and a small ring to the governor advising him that ‘‘they goin’ to lynch her son born 21 years ago.’’ The governor, remembering his liaison with the mother, sends the militia to save his unrecognized son. Safe depicts a mother so traumatized by the lynching of a young African American man on the day she delivers ‘‘a fine boy’’ that she decides to smother her baby to keep him ‘‘safe—safe from the lynchers.’’ Both plays were submitted to the Federal Theater Project and rejected, the first called an ‘‘incomplete drama’’ and the second ‘‘an utter exaggeration [based on] an absurdity—that they lynch Negro boys ‘Down South’ for defending themselves’’ (quoted in Fletcher 160, 161). Interestingly, the two lynching plays Johnson submitted to the NAACP in support of their antilynching legislation, And Yet They Paused and A Bill to Be Passed, were returned to her because they ‘‘all ended in defeat and gave one the feeling that the situation was hopeless’’ (White, quoted in Stephens 519). These plays, discovered in NAACP papers by Judith Stephens in 1999, have begun a new discussion of Johnson’s dramatic works and her significant contributions to this ‘‘uniquely American dramatic genre’’ (519).

GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON

315

CRITICAL RECEPTION Although one of the most anthologized women poets of the New Negro era, Georgia Douglas Johnson was criticized in her time for being insufficiently concerned with race and was labeled a minor figure when the New Negro era was retheorized by African American scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. Overshadowed then by young writers whose black nationalist stance made them more easily reclaimed during the 1960s and 1970s, Johnson has until recently been consigned to the ‘‘old negro’’ generation that preceded the new (Tate xxi, xxii). In more recent years, however, Johnson has herself been recovered and recognized as ‘‘one of the first black feminist poets and the most prolific black women playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance’’ (Brown-Guillory 12). Her work formed a bridge between the genteel age and the age of the New Negro, presented the emotions and experience of women as valid subjects of literary creation, and depicted dramatically how the evils of American society disempowered, victimized, and paralyzed black women in their roles as mothers and lovers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Georgia Douglas Johnson An Autumn Love Cycle. Introduction by Alain Locke. New York: Vinal, 1928. Blue Blood. In The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. Ed. Judith L. Stephens. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Blue-Eyed Black Boy. In Wines in the Wilderness, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. New York: Praeger, 1990. Bronze: A Book of Verse. Introduction by W.E.B. DuBois. Boston: Brimmer, 1922. Frederick Douglass. In The Plays of Georgia Douglass Johnson: From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. Ed. Judith L. Stephens. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems. Introduction by William Stanley Braithwaite. Boston: Cornhill, 1918. Plumes. In Plays of Negro Life: A Sourcebook of Native America Drama. Ed. Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory. New York: Harper, 1927. Safe. In Wines in the Wilderness, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. New York: Praeger, 1990. The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson. Introduction by Claudia Tate. New York: Hall, 1997. Share My World: A Book of Poems. Washington, DC: Author, 1962. A Sunday Morning in the South. In Black Theatre, USA: Plays by African Americans: The Recent Period, 1935–Today. Ed. Ted Shine and James V. Hatch. New York: The Free Press, 1974. William and Ellen Craft. In The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. Ed. Judith L. Stephens. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Studies of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Works Bower, Martha Gilman. ‘‘Color Struck’’ under the Gaze: Ethnicity and the Pathology of Being in the Plays of Johnson, Hurston, Childress, Hansbury, and Kennedy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. ‘‘Wines in the Wilderness’’: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990.

316

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Fletcher, Winona. ‘‘From Genteel Poet to Revolutionary Playwright: Georgia Douglas Johnson.’’ Theatre Annual 30 (1985): 41–64. ———. ‘‘Georgia Douglas Johnson.’’ In Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. Dictionary of Literary Biography 51, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious Davis, 153–64. Detroit: Gale, 1987. Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Moses, Lorraine Alena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, eds. ‘‘Georgia Douglas (Camp) Johnson.’’ In Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, 201–8. Boston: Hall, 1990. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. Boston: Hall, 1988. Stephens, Judith. ‘‘‘And Yet They Paused’ and ‘A Bill to be Passed’: Newly Recovered Lynching Dramas by Georgia Douglas Johnson.’’ African American Review 33.3 (Fall 1999): 519–22. Tate, Claudia. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson, edited by Henry Louis Gates. New York: Hall, 1997. Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Maria J. Rice

HELEN JOHNSON (1906–1995)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Helen (Helene) Johnson’s career as a poet was brief but sparkling. She moved to Harlem during the late 1920s and befriended some of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance such as Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman. She published only thirty-four poems in nine years, but some of her poems are among the best known of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in 1906 in Boston, Johnson was raised in a woman-dominated household that her daughter would later refer to as a ‘‘family collective,’’ which also included eight aunts and two cousins. Despite financial restrictions, the family always provided the cousins with the best educational and cultural opportunities available. Johnson attended Boston University and joined a local literary club. In 1925, she began publishing her work and entering it in contests such as the Opportunity competition. She won honorable mention in poetry in 1926, and she and her cousin Dorothy West traveled to New York to participate in the awards dinner. In 1927, the cousins moved to Manhattan and took classes at Columbia University, but Johnson’s real education came in her exposure to the vibrant cultural life of Harlem. Johnson and West were well liked because of their youth and unaffected innocence. Zora Neale Hurston often subcontracted work to them and let them stay in her apartment while she was traveling. Johnson worked on both the new magazines Fire! and Harlem, both which lasted only one issue. In 1933, Johnson married and dropped out of the literary world. Although she did occasionally contribute to Opportunity, Saturday Evening Quill, and Challenge, she did not otherwise publish her work after 1935. Her daughter was born in 1940, and Johnson devoted herself to raising her child. According to her daughter, she wrote creatively every single day of her life, and, thanks to a new collection of her work, scholars now may read some of her unpublished poems, many of which she wrote while retired and living in Greenwich Village in New York City, where she died in 1995. MAJOR WORKS Johnson’s career peaked during the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic movement that celebrated African American life and culture. The primary themes of Harlem Renaissance art were racial pride, primitivism, social protest against racism, optimism about the future, influence of jazz and blues, and disillusionment with urban experience. Johnson’s poems typify many of these themes, and she is best known for her poems celebrating racial pride. Her most famous poems, ‘‘Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,’’ ‘‘Bottled,’’ and ‘‘Poem’’ each center on a single African American man portrayed as a figure of magnificence, beauty, and admiration. These poems also demonstrate Johnson’s

318

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

ability to move comfortably between traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet, and informal poetic diction. ‘‘Sonnet’’ uses a traditional poetic form to convey Johnson’s feelings toward her unconventional subject, feelings of admiration, awe, and attraction. On the other hand, ‘‘Poem’’ is a free-verse poem, and the colloquial diction and playful tone effectively suggest the speaker’s affection for the subject of the poem. ‘‘Bottled’’ was Johnson’s most high-profile poem, appearing in Vanity Fair in May 1927. As in ‘‘Sonnet’’ and ‘‘Poem,’’ the speaker is observing a male figure, a street performer, comparing the street performer to a bottle of sand from the Sahara. Neither is in its natural environment, and, as a result, each has become an object of curiosity whose beauty cannot be fully appreciated. The colloquial speech patterns of the speaker capture her evolving feelings while watching the performance, from amazement to pride to awareness. This poem focuses on Johnson’s belief that concepts of beauty and value are not intrinsic but socially constructed and context dependent. Johnson’s early poems, which earned her attention from critics such as James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost, relied on natural imagery, which, later in her poetic career, took on more sexual overtones. Her first published poem, ‘‘Trees at Night,’’ is typical of poems in this style, and the references to ‘‘ink,’’ ‘‘stenciled,’’ and ‘‘printed’’ suggest the ways that nature is God’s work of art; in the same way the poem is the creation of the poet. A poem Frost admired, ‘‘The Road,’’ won an Opportunity award (honorable mention) and is a straightforward comparison of the black race to a road, its ‘‘trodden beauty’’ similar to African Americans’ ‘‘trodden pride.’’ ‘‘Summer Matures’’ and ‘‘What Do I Care for Morning?’’ on the other hand, use natural imagery to evoke more sexual connotations. ‘‘Summer Matures,’’ with its allusions to love poet Sappho, describes a ‘‘swooning night’’ of sensual possibility. ‘‘What Do I Care for Morning?’’ also refers to night as a time of sexual possibility, ‘‘yielding and tender,’’ in opposition to the cool, clear light of morning. One prevailing theme in Harlem Renaissance writing involved the perceived conflict between the primitivistic passion of African Americans and the spiritually deadening effects of contemporary Christianity. Johnson addressed this theme as well. ‘‘Regalia’’ portrays a working-class man whose colorful lodge uniform temporarily confers upon him a social status and an inner joy and pride that his position as janitor does not. Unfortunately, his minister criticizes his pleasure in his ‘‘regalia’’ as ‘‘vanity.’’ When the minister dies, the man puts on his regalia only to have the minister’s words come back to haunt him, taking away his pleasure in the uniform. Similarly, ‘‘Magula’’ (Mitchell notes that this is Johnson’s original spelling, and subsequent reprintings of the poem have misspelled the title) describes a young woman being tempted by a ‘‘man with a white collar,’’ whose creeds ‘‘will not let you dance.’’ The poem is an exhortation to the reader to appreciate the value of Magula’s world, ‘‘a pulsing riotous gasp of color,’’ and resist any attempts to repress that sensuality. Johnson’s later poems reflect more socially conscious themes. ‘‘Rootbound,’’ an unpublished poem collected and published for the first time after Johnson’s death, is about a man who is tired of the restrictions of America, so he plans his escape to another country. At the last moment, he reconsiders his choice, affirming his commitment to the America his ancestors lived in and fought for. These later poems share with the earlier poems a validation on the inner worth and dignity of all people, African American and white, rich and poor, young and old. Johnson’s most delightful unpublished poem reflects giddily on an older woman’s crush on a young man. The poem effectively uses rhyme to establish the speaker’s excitement, attraction, and tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation of

HELEN JOHNSON

319

herself for her futile, unrequited feelings. Comparing this poem to those she wrote fifty years earlier reveals that the unreserved pleasure and playfulness of Helen Johnson’s poetry remained unchanged throughout her writing career. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Helen Johnson’s work won Opportunity awards in poetry four times, and several of her poems were included in such well-respected anthologies as Carolling Dusk, edited by Countee Cullen, and The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, it has not received much critical attention. In The Book of American Negro Poetry, James Weldon Johnson writes that Johnson ‘‘possesses true lyric talent. . . . She has taken the very qualities and circumstances that have long called for apology or defense and extolled them in an unaffected manner.’’ Johnson’s work is anthologized in few of the major collections of black poetry, though Blyden Jackson and Louis Rubin (Black Poetry in America) and Eugene Redmond (Drumvoices) call attention to her talent. Even with the renewal of interest in African American women writers in the 1980s and 1990s, few scholars showed interest in Johnson’s work, one notable exception being Verner D. Mitchell, whose 2000 collection This Waiting for Love compiles all Johnson’s poetry, published and unpublished, as well as additional biographical information, letters, and photographs to provide the most complete picture yet of Johnson’s life and work. Critics such as Nina Miller, who has written on modernist women’s poetry, are rediscovering Johnson’s unconventional poems and situating them in their context in the Harlem Renaissance. Miller goes a step further to position Johnson’s poems as examples of an avant-garde feminine aesthetic that asserted the prominence of female subjectivity in the male-dominated movement. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Helen Johnson ‘‘Bottled.’’ Vanity Fair (May 1927). ‘‘Fiat Lux.’’ Messenger ( July 1926). ‘‘Fulfillment.’’ Opportunity ( June 1926). ‘‘Futility.’’ Opportunity (August 1926). ‘‘Goin’ North,’’ ‘‘Rootbound,’’ ‘‘Foraging,’’ ‘‘He’s about 22. I’m 63,’’ ‘‘A Moment of Dignity,’’ ‘‘Time after Time,’’ ‘‘War,’’ ‘‘War——Part II,’’ ‘‘The Street to the Establishment,’’ ‘‘For Jason,’’ ‘‘A Boy Like Me,’’ ‘‘The Whimsy of It All,’’ and ‘‘The Quest.’’ In This Waiting for Love, edited by Verner D. Mitchell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. ‘‘I Am Not the Proud,’’ ‘‘Invocation,’’ ‘‘Regalia,’’ ‘‘Remember Not,’’ ‘‘Rustic Fantasy,’’ ‘‘Why Do They Prate?’’ and ‘‘Worship.’’ Saturday Evening Quill (April 1929). ‘‘Let Me Sing My Song.’’ Challenge (May 1935). ‘‘The Little Love.’’ Messenger ( July 1926). ‘‘Love in Midsummer.’’ Messenger (October 1926). ‘‘Magula.’’ Palms (October 1926). ‘‘Metamorphism.’’ Opportunity (March 1926). ‘‘A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America’’ and ‘‘Cui Bono?’’ Harlem (November 1928). ‘‘Monotone.’’ Opportunity (September 1932). ‘‘Mother.’’ Opportunity (September 1926).

320

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

‘‘My Race.’’ Opportunity ( July 1925). ‘‘Night.’’ Opportunity ( January 1926). ‘‘Plea of a Plebian.’’ Opportunity (May 1934). ‘‘Poem,’’ ‘‘What Do I Care for Morning?’’ and ‘‘Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem.’’ Carolling Dusk (1927). ‘‘The Road.’’ In The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1927. ‘‘Sonnet [Be Not Averse to Beauty].’’ Opportunity (December 1931). ‘‘Sonnet [Wisdom May Caution].’’ Opportunity (March 1932). ‘‘A Southern Road.’’ Fire!! (November 1926). ‘‘Summer Matures.’’ Opportunity ( July 1927). ‘‘Trees at Night.’’ Opportunity (May 1925). ‘‘Vers de Societe.’’ Opportunity ( July 1930). ‘‘Widow with a Moral Obligation.’’ Challenge (March 1934).

Studies of Helen Johnson’s Works Bryan, T. J. ‘‘Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance.’’ In Gender, Culture and the Arts, edited by Ronald Dotterer and Susan Bowers. Selinsgrive, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1993. Ferguson, SallyAnn H. ‘‘Dorothy West and Helene Johnson in Infants of the Spring.’’ Langston Hughes Review 2.2 (1983): 22–24. Griffin, Barbara L. J. ‘‘Helene Johnson (1906–1995).’’ In African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 290–96. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Honey, Maureen, ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Maureen Honey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Miller, Nina. Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mitchell, Verner D., ed. This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Patterson, Raymond. ‘‘Helene Johnson.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 51, edited by Thadious Davis and Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale, 1987.

Wendy Wagner

GAYL JONES (1949–)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Gayl Jones, a writer of drama novels and essays, was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on November 23, 1949, to Franklin and Lucille Jones, the former a cook and the latter a housewife and aspiring writer. She attended Connecticut College, receiving a B.A. in English in 1971. Jones then enrolled at Brown University, where she earned an M.A. (1973) and a D.A. (1975) in creative writing. Upon graduation from Brown, Jones accepted a full-time tenure-track position at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She taught there from 1975 until 1983, having achieved tenure. Jones met and married Robert Higgins, who adopted her surname, while teaching at Michigan. In 1983, she resigned from her professorship at Michigan. From 1983 to 1998, turmoil and tragedy characterized Jones’s life. After her resignation from Michigan, Jones and Higgins ( Jones) left the United States and lived in Europe, mainly France, until their return in 1988 to care for her mother in Kentucky, who was ill with cancer and subsequently died in 1997. In 1998, an intermittent conflict between Higgins and local authorities, over alleged racial injustices related to the hospital care of Jones’s mother, escalated into a violent confrontation between the Joneses and law enforcement. The confrontation culminated in Higgins’s suicide and Jones’s hospitalization for psychiatric examination. Jones’s whereabouts are unknown currently; it is assumed that she continues to reside in Kentucky. MAJOR WORKS Jones writes, in the essay titled ‘‘About My Work,’’ that she is ‘‘interested in the psychology of characters—and the way(s) in which they order their stories—their myths, dreams, nightmares, secret worlds, ambiguities, contradictions, ambivalences, memories, imaginations, their ‘puzzles’’’ (233). Indeed, her early work proffers both stark and brutal accounts of African American women whose psyches, lives, and choices reflect and contradict the desolation of accumulated sexual and racial exploitation and physical abuse. Reflecting her interest in the African presence in the Americas, Jones often, directly and indirectly, reveals the legacy of institutional slavery and other forms of subjugation on the relationships of the people of the African diaspora. Her work is concerned with the harsh realities of African American life, especially for women, revealing the excoriated terrain of intimate relationships. Nevertheless, the female protagonists of her novels are not paralyzed victims of a system that renders them doubly oppressed because of their gender and race. Rather, Jones’s novels ‘‘dismantl[e] the social structures and discourses that necessitate the positioning of the black female subject’’ (Robinson 135). The protagonists of her novels have been denied access to a fixed ‘‘identity,’’ a position that they might occupy safely and unproblematically, because of the legacy of slavery and systematic violence and

322

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

oppression. Subsequently, these women speak and act against the discourses that marginalize them by utilizing the marginal spaces of psychosexual violence and oppression to forge an identity that is neither self (a representation of the oppressor), nor other (a naturalized composite of the oppressed). Jones’s heroines exist outside the normative categories of self and other—both as tragic and redemptive figures—they refuse, often to their own psychic and physical detriment, to embrace the hegemonic and homogeneous representations of themselves by which the dominant society attempts to circumscribe them. Corregidora, Jones’s first novel, rendered dually by first-person narration and internal dialogue, considers the psychosexual effects of slavery and physical and sexual abuse on the life and relationships of a contemporary black woman. Ursa Corregidora is a descendent of Corregidora, ‘‘the Portuguese slave breeder and whore monger,’’ who fathered both her grandmother and mother (9). She sings the blues in a Kentucky nightclub, where she attracts the unsolicited attention of men. Ursa is married to Mutt, a man driven to violence as a result of his jealousy over the attention she garners at the nightclub. In a jealous rage, Mutt throws Ursa down a set of stairs; consequently, Ursa has a hysterectomy. This is significant not only as a sign of the ravages of physical abuse in a sexual relationship, but also because of the dictate Ursa received from her mother and grandmother to ‘‘make generations’’ in order to expurgate the terrible wound inflicted upon their family by institutionalized rape. After leaving the hospital, Ursa separates from Mutt. She then begins to date and eventually marry Tadpole McCormick, the owner of the nightclub where she sings. Ursa divorces Mutt and then marries Tadpole. This relationship, too, is consigned to failure because of Tadpole’s infidelity. Eva’s Man, Jones’s second novel, retains her concern for the psychosexual effects of brutality. Eva Medina Canada is the emotionally desolate protagonist of this novel. She has been incarcerated for the murder and mutilation of a male acquaintance. While in prison, Eva recounts her personal history, which is replete with episodes that chronicle the exploitative world that has shaped her psychologically. She reveals childhood sexual violations, early consciousness of her mother’s adultery and promiscuity, confrontations with the whores of the slums in which she matured to adulthood, and her eventual and hesitant emulation of the sexual profligacy she witnessed as a young girl. In this fragmented narrative, Eva neither provides a tangible motive for the crime of which she has been accused, nor does she express remorse or a desire for rehabilitation. She has become the depravity that has surrounded and was perpetrated against her by those close to her in proximity and relation. Yet, the first-person narrative humanizes Eva; simultaneously, she becomes more than and exists outside of her crime. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, Jones’s collection of critical essays, is a ‘‘transhistorical, transcultural critical survey of literature,’’ which seeks to delineate ‘‘the movement from the restrictive forms . . . to the liberation of voice and freer personalities in more intricate texts’’ in African American literature (Bell 248). The text contains fifteen chapters, which examine the works of authors from Langston Hughes to Toni Morrison. The Healing, Jones’s first post-European novel, focuses on Harlan Jane Eagleton, a traveling faith healer and wife of an anthropologist, among other vocations. Jones’s novel is a meditation on contemporary African American culture and life using the vernacular voice of its narrator, Harlan. In the novel, Harlan transgresses and comments on the hierarchical relationship between black vernacular speech and literary language, and non-English languages and American English dialect.

GAYL JONES

323

Mosquito, Jones’s most recent novel, ‘‘offers a metadiscourse on stereotyping, where racial cliche´s are rehearsed, repeated, and ridiculed without apology.’’ The novel ‘‘challenges the traditional hierarchical assumptions’’ of ‘‘narration by reimagining the spatial and temporal dimensions of the novel’’ (Bramen 127, 129). Mosquito, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, acquired her name from a childhood allergic reaction to an insect bite. She discovers Maria Barriga, a Mexican, hiding in the back of her truck. Mosquito transports Maria to safety by taking her to the local leader of the Sanctuary Movement, Father Ray, with whom she has an affair. Unexpectedly, Mosquito is swept into the movement, which is referred to as the New Underground Railroad. The events of the aforementioned ‘‘plot’’ operate in tandem with image-laden passages of Mosquito’s thoughts and experiences, which include her friendship with Delgadina, a Chicana intellectual bartender, and letters from Monkey Bread, an acquaintance from Kentucky, who is the personal assistant to a movie star. CRITICAL RECEPTION In spite of the defiant female characters at the center of her works, cultural and feminist critics, until recently, have tended to avoid Jones’s work because of the complicated and unflattering portrayal of women, in general, and African American women, in particular. Indeed, in the New York Times Book Review, June Jordan notes, regarding Eva’s Man, that ‘‘[t]here is the very real upsetting accomplishment of Gayl Jones in this, her second novel: sinister misinformation about women—about women, in general, about black women, in particular.’’ Furthermore, Jordan describes Eva’s Man as ‘‘the blues that lost control. This is the rhythmic lamentation of one woman, Eva Medina, who is nobody I have ever known.’’ Nonetheless, in spite of this reception, Jones’s work has been celebrated by literary luminaries such as James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, John Updike, and Toni Morrison. Indeed, Updike comments about Corregidora, that ‘‘[o]ur retrospective impression of [the novel] is of a big territory—the Afro-American psyche—rather thinly and stabbingly populated by ideas, personae, hints. Yet that such a small book could seem so big speaks well for the generous spirit of the author, unpolemical where there has been much polemic, exploratory where rhetoric and outrage tend to block the path.’’ Commenting on Jones’s rigorous refusal to make moral or political judgments of her characters, Keith Byerman asserts that ‘‘[t]he authority of [Jones’s] depiction of the world is enhanced by [her] refusal to intrude upon or judge her narrators. She remains outside of the story, leaving the reader with none of the usual markers of a narrator’s reliability.’’ Regarding Jones’s later works, critical reception has been mixed. Often it is limited, disrupted, and distorted by excessive attention to the tragic circumstances that characterized her life in the years from 1983 to 1998. Jones’s collection of critical essays, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, has been lauded for its reaffirmation of the proposition that ‘‘the foundation of every literary tradition is oral, whether it is visible or invisible in the text’’ (2). However, Bernard W. Bell writes that in spite of the profundity of this proposition and of the pioneering nature of Jones’s work, as the ‘‘first critical survey by a contemporary black woman writer that attempts an extended comparison of the oral foundation of African American literature with those of non-African American literatur[e],’’ the text ‘‘provides a provocative and important yet inadequate, misleading map of the oral or vernacular tradition in African American literature.’’

324

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Concerning the novel The Healing, Marcie Hershman writes that while Jones’s early work was ‘‘bull’s eye directed and tersely expressed, [her late work] now comes across as expansively detailed and moving in circles away from its subject.’’ Valerie Sayers comments that ‘‘[i]n loosening the tight control she exercised over her earlier fiction,’’ sometimes Jones leaps the chasm and sometimes she takes a nose dive, but on the whole the dares are worth her trouble and ours.’’ In general, critics have been bewildered and, at times, unkind in their responses to Jones’s most recent novel, Mosquito. Eleanor J. Bader describes the tome as both ‘‘exhausting and exhilarating.’’ James A. Miller cautions that, for select readers, ‘‘this work, like a mosquito, will buzz along—nagging, irritating, provoking, exasperating,’’ because it is ‘‘long-winded, disassociative, plotless, cutesy, full of hairsplitting deconstructive debates.’’ Henry Louis Gates describes the novel as a ‘‘late-night riff by the Signifying Monkey, drunk with words and out of control, regurgitating half-digested ideas taken from USA Today, digressing on every possible subject.’’ Disagreeing with most critics, Greg Tate writes that ‘‘[w]hen white boys write books as cunning and convoluted as this one we call them postmodern, experimental, exemplars of the literature of exhaustion.’’ Carrie Tirado Bramen agrees with Tate, writing that ‘‘[t]his same seriousness should also be applied to this ‘maddening tale,’ which encourages the reader to rethink the conventions of racial representation by radically challenging the conventions of narration’’ (129). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Gayl Jones Chile Woman. New York: Shubert Foundation, 1974. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon, 1975. Eva’s Man. Boston: Beacon, 1976. The Healing. Boston: Beacon, 1998. The Hermit-Woman. Detroit: Lotus, 1983. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Mosquito. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Song of Anninho. Boston: Beacon, 1981. The White Rat. New York: Random House, 1977. Xargque and Other Poems. Detroit: Lotus, 1985.

Studies of Gayl Jones’s Works Allen, Donia Elizabeth. ‘‘The Role of the Blues in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.’’ Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 257–73. Bell, Bernard. ‘‘The Liberating Literacy and African American Vernacular Voices of Gayl Jones.’’ Comparative Literature Studies 36.3 (1999): 247–58. Bramen, Carrie Tirado. ‘‘Speaking in Typeface: Characterizing Stereotypes in Gayl Jones’s Mosquito.’’ Modern Fiction Studies 49.1 (2003): 124–54. Clabough, Casey. ‘‘Afrocentric Recolonizations: Gayl Jones’s 1990s Fiction.’’ Contemporary Literature 46.2 (2005): 243–73. Coser, Stelamaris. The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

GAYL JONES

325

Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews. London: Pluto, 1983. Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. ‘‘Living the Legacy: Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora.’’ Callaloo 26.2 (2003): 446–72. Horvitz, Deborah. ‘‘‘Sadism Demands a Story’: Oedipus, Feminism, and Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.’’ Contemporary Literature 39.2 (1998): 238–61. Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. ‘‘‘Relate Sexual to Historical’: Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.’’ African American Review 34.2 (2000): 273–97. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1984. Willingham, Kathy G. ‘‘Corregidora: Retelling (Her)Story.’’ Style 35.2 (2001): 308–20.

Helen Doss

JUNE JORDAN (1936–2002)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE June Jordan was a poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, and committed activist. One of the fiercest and most compassionate voices of the twentieth century, as well as one of its most prolific writers, Jordan published over twenty-eight books of poetry, children’s stories, and collections of political essays and lectures. A prominent artist and organizer since the 1960s, Jordan played a significant role in the development of African American artistic, social, and political movements, advocating in particular for the rights of women and urban youth. Jordan was born in Harlem, New York, on July 9, 1936, and lived most of her childhood in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. She was the only child of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maud (Fisher) Jordan, who came separately to the United States from Jamaica. Her father—an often violent man who projected his ambitions onto his daughter—compelled her at an early age to read broadly and memorize passages from classical texts. This had an edifying impact on Jordan’s intellect, and she began writing her own poetry by the time she was seven years old. She describes the complex trials of her early life in her short memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2000), which she dedicated to her father. After a year at Brooklyn’s Midwood High School, where she recalls being the only black student, Jordan’s father transferred her to the Northfield School for Girls in Gill, Massachusetts, where she was again immersed in an all-white environment but in the context of which she was able to construct her consciousness as an African American and a writer. In 1953 she graduated high school and entered Barnard College in New York City, where she met Michael Meyer, a white Columbia University student, whom she married in 1955. Subsequently, she left New York to accompany Meyer to the University of Chicago, where he would pursue graduate study in anthropology. She also enrolled at Chicago but within a year returned to Barnard where she stayed until 1957. In 1958 Jordan gave birth to a son, Christopher David Meyer, for whom she assumed full responsibility, working as a freelance writer, urban planner, and production assistant. The couple finally divorced in 1965. Jordan’s poetry and essays entered the public eye in the 1960s through publication in a number of periodicals, including Esquire, the Nation, Partisan Review, Essence, the Village Voice, and the New York Times, among others. Her novel, His Own Where (1971), was a National Book Award finalist. She also received a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1969, a Yaddo fellowship in 1979, the National Association of Black Journalists Award in 1984, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998, Jordan received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Black Writers’ Conference. By the year 2000, Jordan was still publishing frequently, editing collections of poetry and regularly contributing sharp political essays to the Progressive magazine.

JUNE JORDAN

327

Jordan maintained a long and distinguished career as a college professor, beginning in 1966 as an instructor of English at the City University of New York, then at Connecticut College and Sarah Lawrence College. From 1974 to 1975 she was a visiting professor of English and Afro-American studies at Yale. She earned tenure at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982, and finally became professor of AfroAmerican studies and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989. There she established the ongoing Poetry for the People program through which college students learn to teach creative writing as a form of self-expression and empowerment. June Jordan died of breast cancer on June 14, 2002, in Berkeley, California. MAJOR WORKS Jordan’s poetry reveals her early engagement, as part of her father’s fierce discipline, with the works of Shakespeare and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and also suggests stylistic impulses reminiscent of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden, whom she studied. These influences are present in Jordan’s work, but hers is a unique voice that consistently and artfully weaves her personal experiences as a political activist, educator, and a bisexual African American woman with love, fury, confession, and commentary. Her artistic range encompasses the intimate, the local, and the transnational—from love poems and poems about sexual freedom such as those found in Haruko/Love Poetry (1993), an arc that charts a poet’s cross-cultural relationship in the style of Browning and Neruda, to pieces such as ‘‘Poem about My Rights’’ (Passion 1980), which rages at the injustices of rape, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, linking personal experiences to global issues within the sphere of one poem and one poet’s consciousness. Jordan’s published body of prose—which includes children’s books, letters, essays, and a novella—is likewise intersectional in its substance and themes. His Own Where (1971), a short novel for adolescents, was awarded the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design for its innovative translation of architecture and urban planning into fiction. The novella looks at the problem of African American identity and public space and envisions practical, community-centered methods of environmental planning, and also illustrates Jordan’s attuned adaptation of African American speech in her writing. The inclusion of ‘‘Letter to Michael’’ in Civil Wars (1981), Jordan’s first collection of essays, allows the author to use a private genre to deploy a public appeal. Describing the 1964 Harlem Riots to her estranged ex-husband in an ostensibly private prose style, the letter challenges public perception of the ordeal by divulging a witness’s account of the violence perpetrated by public officials against African Americans, testifying, most importantly, to the resolve and resilience of the Harlem community. In the communities where she worked Jordan was both citizen and witness, but it was through her role as an intellectual that she conveyed her visions for new strategies in civil rights work that are inclusive and nurturing, governments that are effective and democratic, and a society that derides ignorance so that it can thrive in its understanding of difference and potential for equality. In her oft-quoted essay from Technical Difficulties (1992), ‘‘A New Politics of Difference,’’ Jordan confronts the complex imbrications of race, class, sexuality, and family, and contests the ‘‘exploitation of the human domain of sexuality for power.’’ By rhetorically providing links among forms of oppression based on sexuality, race, and gender, she cultivates a context for struggle

328

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

marked by its global complexity and potential for coalition: ‘‘Freedom is indivisible,’’ she writes, ‘‘or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for the few.’’ Selections of Jordan’s latest essays and lectures open the latest collection, Some of Us Did Not Die, in which the multiplicity of her social and intellectual commitments become her trademark. These essays take on the form of short, topical, occasional discussions dealing with everything from ancient poetic forms (‘‘A Far Stretch Well Worth the Effort’’), controversies surrounding the 2000 U.S. presidential election (‘‘The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage’’), her views on Palestine over a number of decades, and commemoration of important civil rights events and news items of social weight. In ‘‘Update on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Best of My Heart,’’ the question of universal equality as articulated by the late civil rights leader is Jordan’s central concern as she describes the imaginative magnitude of a democracy built on a basis of common self-interest as opposed to ‘‘American delusions illusions of autonomy, American delusions of individuality’’ (Some of Us Did Not Die 112)—a national paradox she presents in her 1986 lecture, ‘‘Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dream.’’ Jordan’s body of work is characterized by its contribution to multiple genres and its socially informed style of literary expression—significant practices in contemporary African American intellectual work that are also exemplified by writers like Paule Marshall and Alice Walker. Jordan’s rendering of spoken African American English in both her poetry and prose illustrates her participation in an oral literary tradition also practiced by Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka. The breadth of Jordan’s subject matter, particularly in her poetry, is akin to the work of Rita Dove and Gwendolyn Brooks, insofar as a theme can be built on both domestic and international causes, both intimate and public concerns. Although Jordan’s eloquent and accessible style is often motivated by sincere anger, her ultimate message is invariably infused with optimism and an indefatigable devotion to justice. CRITICAL RECEPTION In her long career as primarily a poet and a journalist, Jordan never concentrated her talent into a singular literary tour de force of the sort that define many foremost African American writers. Instead, Jordan’s work has appeared over a span of decades, often quite pointedly coinciding with major events in U.S. culture. In an essay published in a 1999 issue of the African American Review, Scott MacPhail gives an account of June Jordan’s ambivalent, often misunderstood, role among black intellectuals since the 1960s, particularly as portrayed by the mainstream press. Jordan has often been sidelined, he argues, precisely because she challenges both African American and women’s movements to extend the boundaries of identity politics, or abandon such a project altogether in favor of a new politics of race, gender, sexuality, and transnational action. Included in MacPhail’s genealogy of ‘‘new black intellectuals’’ are Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, both of whom have publicly lauded Jordan’s canon of work, the latter praising Jordan as ‘‘our premier black woman essayist’’ (‘‘After Identity,’’ Erickson 132). Jordan’s work, like the author herself, resists easy classification. Her aesthetic practices, the subjects of her essays, and her interdisciplinary approach to intellectual production all consistently exhibit, as Peter Erickson writes, an ‘‘absolute refusal to be confined by fixed categories of identity.’’ Jordan’s essays exhibit a ‘‘rigorous scrutiny of

JUNE JORDAN

329

democracy’’ that is fueled by her ‘‘transcendent human vision of political coalitions formed across racial lines’’ (‘‘After Identity,’’ 132). Indeed in literary studies Jordan’s work is often examined as a coalitional site and considered in relation to poets such as Adrienne Rich, Ntozake Shange, and Elizabeth Bishop. Her contribution to African American culture in particular, however, is crucial to many critics. In her 1981 review of Civil Wars, Toni Cade Bambara likened Jordan’s body of work to an achievement comparable to W.E.B. DuBois’s Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, published in 1940. The wide range of Jordan’s ideological pursuits illustrate the central ethics of selfdetermination that are not at odds with her belief in the establishment of justice through communal action and coalitional politics. Jordan’s artistic and social vision is comprehensive, engendered by her concurrent participation in antiracist and antihomophobic social movements, and evidenced by her refusal to be confined by identity politics. Having surfaced as a political commentator, activist, and a working artist at a time when liberation movements were often divided from within by conflicting aims, Jordan’s work implements a mode of intersectional human rights discourse that has been influential to the African American movement and U.S. feminism and has become a standard for independent, democratic thought in the twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by June Jordan Affirmative Acts: Political Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. All These Blessings. Play complete in 1988, unpublished. Bang Bang Uber Alles. Produced in Atlanta, GA, 1986, unpublished. Bobo Goetz a Gun. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1985. The Break. Produced in New York, 1984, unpublished. Campaigns: Selected Poems. London: Virago Press, 1989. Civil Wars. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981. Dry Victories. New York: Holt, 1972. Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: Crowell, 1972. For the Arrow That Flies by Day. Produced at the Shakespeare Festival, New York, April 1981, unpublished. Freedom Now Suite. Produced in New York, 1984, unpublished. Haruko/Love Poetry: New and Selected Love Poems. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993. High Tide—Marea Alta. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1987. His Own Where. New York: Crowell, 1971. I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky. Produced at Lincoln Center, New York, 1985, unpublished. In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth. Produced at Public Theater, New York, May 1979, unpublished. Kissing God Goodbye: New Poems. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Living Room: New Poems. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985. Moving towards Home: Political Essays. London: Virago Press, 1989. The Music of Poetry and the Poetry of Music. Produced in New York and Washington, DC, 1984, unpublished. Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989. New Days: Poems of Exile and Return. New York: Emerson Hall, 1973. New Life: New Room. New York: Crowell, 1975.

330

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Okay Now. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977. On Call: Political Essays, 1981–1985. Boston: South End Press, 1985. Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980. Boston: Beacon Press. 1980. Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Some Changes. New York: Dutton, 1971. Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan. New York: Basic/Civitas Books, 2002. Soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry. 1970. Reprint, New York: Harlem Moon, 2004. Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry. New York: Random House, 1977. The Voice of the Children. Editor. New York: Holt, 1970. Who Look at Me. New York: Crowell, 1969.

Studies of June Jordan’s Works Bambara, Toni Cade. ‘‘Chosen Weapons.’’ Ms. (April 1981): 40–42. Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. ‘‘From Warrior to Womanist: The Development of June Jordan’s Poetry.’’ In Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, 198–209. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. ———. ‘‘Planets on the Table: From Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop to Adrienne Rich and June Jordan.’’ Wallace Stevens Journal 19.2 (Fall 1995): 255–78. DeVeaux, Alexis. ‘‘A Conversation with June Jordan.’’ Essence (September 2000): 102. Erickson, Peter. ‘‘After Identity: A Conversation with June Jordan.’’ Transition: An International Review 63 (1993): 132–49. ———. ‘‘Putting Her Life on the Line—The Poetry of June Jordan.’’ Hurricane Alice: A Feminist Quarterly 7.1 (Winter–Spring 1990): 4–5. Freccero, Carla. ‘‘June Jordan.’’ In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith, 443–60. New York: Scribner’s, 1991. Harjo, Joy. ‘‘An Interview with June Jordan.’’ High Plains Literary Review 3.2 (Fall 1988): 60–76. Heflin, Kyla. ‘‘June Jordan.’’ In Contemporary American Ethnic Poets, edited by Linda Collum, 151–54. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Johnson, Ronna C. ‘‘June Jordan.’’ In The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Joyce, Joyce Ann. ‘‘June Jordan.’’ In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed., edited by Paul Lauter et al., 2632–39. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. MacPhail, Scott. ‘‘June Jordan and the New Black Intellectuals.’’ African American Review 33.1 (Spring 1999): 57–71. Nelson, Jill. ‘‘A Conversation with June Jordan.’’ Quarterly Black Review of Books 1 (May 1994): 50–53.

Roy Pe´rez

ELIZABETH HOBBS KECKLEY (1818–1907)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born in 1818 to Agnes Burwell Hobbs, a slave, and Armistead Burwell, her slave owner, in Dinwiddie Court-House, in Virginia. Although the married Armistead Burwell fathered Elizabeth, the enslaved Agnes was the wife of another slave, George Pleasant Hobbs, who loved and accepted Elizabeth. Both Agnes and George were literate (Fleischner 29). Keckley fondly remembered George Pleasant Hobbs as a loving father forced to live and labor on another farm, who referred to her as ‘‘Little Lizzie,’’ wanted her educated, and visited on holidays, until he was sold away from the neighborhood. He tried to maintain his familial connection with letters to Agnes. His communication stopped in 1839.

MAJOR WORK Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley’s only work is Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868). In this work she recounts her experiences as a slave. Among young Keckley’s first official duties as a slave, of four years old, is to care for her master’s infant daughter. She is to rock the cradle, keep flies off, and prevent the baby from crying. Keckley’s enthusiasm for rocking the cradle causes the infant to be tossed to the floor and leads to her first violent punishment. Keckley writes that it was the severity of her lashing that caused her to remember the brutality of the event. Sadly, she writes, ‘‘This was the first time I was punished in this cruel way, but not the last’’ (Keckley 21). Ten years later, at about the age of fourteen, Keckley is sent to live with her master’s eldest son, a Presbyterian minister—Robert Burwell—and his young cruel wife—Anna. Keckley finds that she is to do the work of three servants and is underappreciated by the mistress. Anna, after several years sensing what she characterizes as ‘‘stubborn pride’’ in Keckley, asks the overseer Bingham to gain control over Keckley. Bingham requests that she join him in the study. Once inside the study, Bingham demands that Keckley remove her dress to accept a flogging. The fully developed, eighteen-year-old Keckley responds, ‘‘No, Mr. Bingham, I shall not take down my dress before you. Moreover, you shall not whip me unless you prove the stronger. Nobody has a right to whip me but my own master, and nobody shall do so if I can prevent it’’’ (Keckley 33). Although she loses the fight and is savagely beaten, she demands to know why, maintains her defiance of wrongs against her, and preserves her pride and rebellious spirit. Though she is subjected to more beatings, eventually, Bingham decides it is a sin to beat her further and asks Keckley’s forgiveness, and according to her ‘‘was never known to strike one of his servants from that day forward’’ (37). Keckley reveals that as a result of being raped for four years by an unnamed white man, she gives birth (1842) to her only child, whom she names after her lost father, George. She leaves North Carolina and returns to Virginia as a slave for one of her

332

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

master’s daughters (Ann Burwell Garland) and her husband. It is during this time that she hones her abilities as a seamstress and dressmaker. It is in Virginia that Elizabeth meets her husband James Keckley. Initially she declines his marriage proposal because she refuses to give birth to another child who will suffer the violent and senseless existence of American slavery. However, when Keckley believes he can secure freedom for both her and her son, George, she consents to wed James, who claims to be a free man. After their marriage, in 1852, she discovers that James is a slave who battles other difficulties, and their marriage is brief. When the master’s family talks of letting aged Agnes go, Keckley appeals to Mr. Garland to allow her to earn money to support her mother’s upkeep. Consequently, she gains a reputation as a fine seamstress and dressmaker to affluent women in St. Louis. Keckley states, ‘‘With my needle I kept bread in the mouths of seventeen persons for two years and five months’’ (45). As a result of Keckely’s work, Agnes remains with her enslavers until her death in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1857. On August 10, 1855, 1,200 dollars is paid to secure the freedom of both Elizabeth and her sixteen-year-old son, George. Elizabeth later repays her slave ransom to her patron. By the spring of 1860, James Keckley is dead and Elizabeth forms a school in Baltimore, Maryland, to teach young colored women her system of sewing. After six weeks she becomes disappointed and moves on to Washington. Once in Washington, Keckley begins to develop an impressive cliental of influential women eager to have her sew their dresses and this enhances her entrepreneurial endeavors. Keckley lets it be known that she wants to secure a sewing position in the White House. Among others, she becomes modiste to Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, and also privy to Davis’s political meetings and the upcoming strategies of the Civil War. Although Mrs. Davis wants Keckley to come south with her family, she is determined to ‘‘work for the ladies of the White House’’ (Keckley 76). Keckley’s insight, resolve, ability, and reputation as a dress designer gain her introduction to Mrs. Lincoln and entrance into the White House. The friendship between Keckley and Mary Lincoln extend beyond the White House years. Keckley becomes acquainted with many prominent individuals and her concern for the advancement of African Americans leads her to use these connections to their benefit. For example, she is instrumental in introducing Sojourner Truth to President Lincoln. Notably, she serves as an activist concerned with the freedom of colored people and their acclamation to living free lives. In 1862, she starts and leads the First Black Contraband Relief Organization. At Wilberforce University, in Xenia, Ohio, she heads the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts in 1892. In 1907, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley died in her sleep at the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children, a Washington institution she helped create earlier. CRITICAL RECEPTION At the time of its publication, much controversy surrounded Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years A Slave, and Four Years in the White House. Before its publication, her publisher (Carleton and Company) offered favorable advanced reviews of her narrative. However, its publication caused a rift in Keckley’s relationship with Mary Lincoln and caused Lincoln’s son Robert to campaign to have the narrative withdrawn from publication.

ELIZABETH HOBBS KECKLEY

333

After its publication, many individuals were outraged that a colored woman, former slave, and former dressmaker of the Lincolns, would dare to reveal details of her life, the lives of the Lincoln family, and suggest that she was a friend and confidante to Mrs. Lincoln. As a result, Behind the Scenes and Keckley were mocked and renounced by the press. Most cruelly, Keckley was insulted and ridiculed with a parody titled Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman who took work in from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis, and the author was designated with an ‘‘X’’ for ‘‘Betsey Kickley (nigger)’’ (The National News Co., New York, 1868—Fleischner 317). Despite the aforementioned criticism, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley and her nineteenthcentury narrative, Behind the Scenes, occupy a necessary and critical place in United States presidential history, African American women’s history, and African American literature. For example, James Olney characterizes Behind the Scenes as a memoir more than a slave narrative or autobiography because Keckley’s focus goes beyond personal details to ‘‘external events and figures who occupy some important place in the affairs of the world’’ (xxxiii). Although Behind the Scenes includes outside events, one certainly gets a sense of the concerned and kind woman warrior known as Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. 1868. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Studies of Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley’s Work Fleischner, Jennifer. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship between a First Lady and a Former Slave. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. Foster, Frances Smith. ‘‘Romance and Scandal in a Postbellum Slave Narrative: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes.’’ In Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892, 117–30. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Olney, James. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, xxvii–xxxvi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Regina V. Jones

ADRIENNE KENNEDY (1931– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Adrienne Kennedy, playwright and educator, was born Adrienne Lita Hawkins on September 13, 1931, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Etta Haugabook Hawkins, was a schoolteacher and her father, Cornell Wallace Hawkins, was a social worker and the executive secretary of the YMCA. When Kennedy was four years old, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she remained until she married Joseph C. Kennedy in 1953. Her parents were among the prominent African American citizens of Cleveland, and Kennedy was very interested in their lives and the community around them. She was particularly fascinated by her mother, a beautiful woman, about whom Kennedy says, ‘‘She told me stories about her life in Georgia, which would one day sound remarkably like the monologues spoken by the characters in my plays’’ (People 12). Kennedy’s maternal grandfather was a wealthy white peach grower, and this fact may also have influenced the course of her writing, making her interested in exploring the psyche of the mulatto characters that inhabit her dramatic world. During her childhood, she made frequent visits with her parents and her younger brother to Montezuma, Georgia, where most of her relatives, African Americans and whites lived. Images of Montezuma from her childhood memories persist in her work, and she recalls these in People: ‘‘Montezuma, Georgia looked to me like the drawings we were given in Sunday school of Jerusalem, the golden and red and white colors of the landscape, the processions of people walking on the road coming from the fields, walking to church’’ (85). Her mixed ancestry also inculcated in her a lifelong fascination with England. Again in People, she says, ‘‘My mother often said that most of the white people of Montezuma’s families came from England. . . . I became very interested in ‘England’’’ (22). After her marriage, Kennedy moved to New York with her husband and joined a creative writing course at Columbia University (1954–1956). She had started writing plays and fiction, and her early work, such as ‘‘Pale Blue Flowers’’ (unpublished), was influenced by, and was indeed, as she later said, imitative of, the plays of Tennessee Williams. Other important influences on her were the plays of Chekhov and Lorca. She traveled to Europe and East Africa with her husband and this experience changed the direction of her work. Although she had grown up with significant exposure to African American literature and culture through her parents, her travels to Africa opened new perspectives to her and she says, ‘‘Not until I bought a great African mask from a vendor on the streets of Accra, of a woman with a bird flying through her forehead, did I totally break from realistic-looking characters’’ (People 121). Her first story, ‘‘Because of the King of France,’’ was published in Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and AfroAmerican Literature (1963), a West African journal in which Soyinka and Achebe were also being published in the 1960s. She read many African writers and identified with them: ‘‘Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Eufua Sutherland, Lawrence Durrell. . . . Now that I was going to be published in Black Orpheus, I was joined to these writers and I wanted to read their work’’ (People 121). Kennedy wrote Funnyhouse of a

ADRIENNE KENNEDY

335

Negro and The Owl Answers during her stay in Accra and Rome. When she came back to New York in 1962, she had two children, Joseph and Adam, and two completed plays in her suitcase. Funnyhouse was a powerful introduction of Adrienne Kennedy to the New York Off-Broadway theater world. Since then, she has written some fifteen one-act plays, a highly acclaimed autobiographical work, People Who Led to My Plays, a novella, and various semiautobiographical prose pieces. Besides winning the Obie Award thrice, she has also received the American Book Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Pierre LeComte duNouy Foundation Award, and has also earned several grants and fellowships including the Guggenheim and the Rockefeller. She has taught drama and playwriting at various universities including New York University, Yale University, University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard University. In 1992, the Great Lakes Theatre Company organized a month-long celebration of her work. In 1995–1996, Signature Theatre Company selected her as their playwright of the fall season and produced seven of her plays. She is one of the only five African American playwrights to be included in The Norton Anthology of American Literature (third edition). She has been commissioned to write plays for, among others, the Public Theater, Jerome Robbins, Mark Taper Forum, Juilliard, Lincoln Center, and the Royal Court in England. MAJOR WORKS Kennedy’s powerful antirealistic and nonlinear one-act plays employ surrealistic and often nightmarish imagery, fragmented characters, and a nearly ritualistic repetition of dialogue. She had tried to work with simultaneous use of different settings and perspectives in her short stories earlier, but in her plays, she broke free from the conventions of naturalistic and realistic drama and experimented radically with form and character delineation. It was a radical breakthrough for her when her characters began to have other personas. The use of masks and personas made it possible for her to use historical people as extensions of the main character, thus bringing apparently unconnected but deeply formative areas of experience across the boundaries of race, gender, and culture within the space of individual experience. Although Kennedy has claimed that her work is primarily autobiographical, dealing with inner, psychological confusions stemming from childhood, these personal questions in her plays widen out in space and time to carry the weight of historical and cultural issues concerning women and people of color. Funnyhouse of a Negro is an intense and deeply moving play about the life of Negro Sarah, who longs to become a ‘‘more pallid Negro than I am now,’’ and whose ‘‘only defect is that I have a head of frizzy hair’’ (The Adrienne Kennedy Reader 14). Queen Victoria, Duchess of Hapsburg, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba are each ‘‘One of Herselves.’’ The other characters in the play are The Mother, Landlady who is ‘‘Funnylady,’’ and Raymond, who is ‘‘Funnyman.’’ In terms of chronological sequence, the play seems to begin just a little before the end when Sarah hangs herself. In her first appearance, we see her already with a hangman’s rope about her neck, and at the end we see her hanging figure on the stage. In between, we catch disjointed but highly suggestive glimpses of Sarah’s life and her multiple selves. The incidents repeatedly recalled in the play revolve around Sarah’s African American father and mulatto mother. In Africa, he starts to drink and one night ‘‘rapes’’ his wife. The child of this rape is Sarah, who has yellow skin and no glaring negroid features. After Sarah’s birth her mother suffers a breakdown and has to be sent to an asylum. There are various versions of the father’s fate after his

336

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

return: Sarah confesses that she bludgeoned him to death, Landlady says that he hanged himself in a Harlem hotel, and Raymond claims that the man is alive and that he is a doctor, married to a white woman. Since all the events are reported by the characters and do not take place on the stage, they have no verifiable, objective reality. Kennedy’s plays problematize the idea of a consistent and structured ‘‘reality’’ by playing with continually transforming personas and shifting perspectives. In The Owl Answers, Kennedy continues her experiments with fragmented identities and gives multiple personas to nearly all the characters in the play. The protagonist, Clara, a mulatto and a bastard, is confounded by the cultural, racial, and religious contradictions of her existence and turns into an owl at the end. Two short plays, A Rat’s Mass and A Lesson in Dead Language, express an obsessive fear of heterosexuality, rape, and guilt caused by menstruation. A Lesson in Dead Language conflates the menstrual flow of blood with revenge for the mythical and historical acts of the killing of Jesus and Caesar. Big, red stains of blood on the back of the characters’ white dresses are the sign of guilt and punishment seen in female terms. In Rat’s Mass, the characters appear as rats: Brother Rat with a rat’s head and a human body, and Sister Rat with a rat’s belly and a human head. Their repetitive comments gradually conjure up the image of a traumatic experience that both are trying to overcome— that of the rape of Sister Rat by Brother Rat, because of which Sister Rat has a mental breakdown and has to be taken to the mental asylum. This act was supposedly instigated by Rosemary, the girl with worms in her hair, who looms menacingly over the experiences of Brother and Sister Rat. Having exploited Brother Rat’s love for her to force him into incest and the consequent guilt and horror, she suggests that he put a bullet to his head. The play employs Christian images to suggest a fall into the state of sin and also refers to the coming of Nazis. In both these plays, interestingly, the threatening figures are those of women, the White Dog in A Lesson and Rosemary in A Rat’s Mass. Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder and an Evening with Dead Essex testify to Kennedy’s involvement with the issues of race relations and the larger political questions in the 1960s. Commissioned and produced by the Royal Court Theatre, Sun is a short expressionistic work that combines visual imagery, poetry, body movement, sound, lighting, and screen projections to create choreographed dramatic poetry that speaks in a highly symbolic language. An Evening with Dead Essex is much more explicit and direct in its political commentary. The play is based on the magazine reports and stories about the gunning down of Mark Essex by the police in New Orleans on the roof of a motel with more than a hundred bullets in his body. Kennedy uses the Vietnam War news headlines, statements about President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and references to American soldiers stationed in Europe to underscore her comments on the meaning of Essex’s actions and his death. In an interview with Paul Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, Kennedy remarked that she saw him as a ‘‘victim and a hero,’’saying that ‘‘I feel tremendous rage against American society. I feel like Mark Essex’’ (Bryant-Jackson and Overbeck 8). A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White is a brilliant interweaving of cultural history, autobiographical narrative, and an implied ideological commentary on the Western constructions of race and gender. Hollywood films and stars are appropriated by Kennedy to play roles evocative of their roles in the films and also to become mouthpieces narrating the lives of the African American characters in the play. Marlon Brando, Paul Henry, Montgomery Clift, Jean Peters, Bette Davis, Shirley Winters, and Columbia Pictures Lady recreate visual images from their films Now Voyager, Viva Zapata!, and

ADRIENNE KENNEDY

337

A Place in the Sun, while the narrative revolves around the lives of Clara, The Mother, The Father, and The Husband. Kennedy reverses the phenomenal power of popular icons to be the focus of everyone’s desire and instead makes the movie stars compulsively live out the details of her protagonist’s life. In a further twist that is common in Kennedy’s work, the details of Clara’s life often echo the details of Kennedy’s life, always mapping life on to art, blurring the divide between the two. In A Movie Star, for instance, Clara/ Jean Peters is a writer of a play called A Lesson in Dead Language, and a play ‘‘about a girl who turns into an owl (The Owl Answers). Not only do Kennedy’s characters repeat each others’ lines within a given play, but there is also repetition across plays, such as Jean Peters repeating Clara Passmore’s lines from The Owl Answers. Such intertextuality creates connections of mood and images, suggesting a continuity of concerns across plays, building a unique body of work in which parts flow into one another and characters evoke and resonate not only with each other but also with the autobiographical details of the playwright’s life. The plays published as The Alexander Plays in 1992 include She Talks to Beethoven, The Ohio State Murders, and The Film Club. Kennedy began her literary career in the 1960s when black nationalism was at its peak, but she consistently kept herself out of any kind of political activism. Nevertheless, Kennedy was deeply affected by the contemporary political, social, and cultural upheavals in America and Africa, and her literary and dramatic aesthetics were formed by the dissonance caused by these events. Instead of writing militant, didactic plays, in her early work she sought to grapple with her inner, psychological confusion and conflicts. However, in She Talks to Beethoven, Kennedy goes back to the 1960s and locates her play in the midst of a nationalist movement and shows the artists and the artistic process embroiled in social and political turmoil. She Talks is an intricately woven piece in which a number of contexts are embedded one within the other, contexts that are widely removed chronologically but have innumerable strands connecting them. It brings into conjunction a mythic time in which the story of Beethoven’s opera ‘‘Fidelio’’ is set, Beethoven’s Vienna of the 1820s with the Napoleonic war in the background, the newly liberated but politically troubled Ghana of 1961, and the contemporary African American world in which Kennedy is writing. Each of these contexts reverberates on the other, commenting, enlarging, and enriching the central concern of the play, which is the relationships between the aesthetic, the social, and the political. In The Ohio State Murders, Suzanne Alexander in the present is a ‘‘well-known black writer’’ visiting Ohio State University to give a talk on ‘‘the violent imagery’’ in her work. The younger Suzanne, whose story forms the body of the play, is the ‘‘young writer as a student attending Ohio State’’ (Alexander 26). The narrative is constructed by the alternating voices of Suzanne in the present and as a student in 1949–1950. The dates are relevant because when Suzanne attended the Ohio State University, the 1955 Supreme Court ruling declaring discrimination in education as unconstitutional was still to come. Hence, as a student, Suzanne encounters racial discrimination in various forms. Suzanne, the writer, traces the tragic events in her life at the campus in response to the invitation by the ‘‘Chairman’’: ‘‘we do want to hear about your brief years here at Ohio State but we also want you to talk about violent imagery in your stories and plays’’ (27). The play appears highly self-reflexive as the protagonist, Suzanne Alexander, responds to a question that may well be asked about Adrienne Kennedy’s plays, the source of the violent imagery in her work. Kennedy’s memoir, People Who Led to My Plays, written in a highly original form of short entries, brings together innumerable small and big influences, people, and events

338

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

that shaped her life and writings. June and Jean in Concert is a theater piece with music, in which she reworks material from People into a dramatic form. Deadly Triplets combines a mystery in novella form and journal writing based on Kennedy’s experiences in London from 1966 to 1969. The prose pieces A Letter to Flowers and Sister Etta and Ella again creatively use material from Kennedy’s own life. Sleep Deprivation Chamber, coauthored with her son Adam, records her quest for justice following the beating of Adam by racist police officers. In Motherhood 2000, Kennedy again wrestles with her anger at the unjust beating of her son in the form of a miracle play and ends with an apocalyptic scene in which the character called Mother/Writer strikes the policeman in the head with a hammer. CRITICAL RECEPTION Werner Sollors, the editor of The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, succinctly evaluates the scope and the depth of Kennedy’s works thus: Adrienne Kennedy’s work . . . has affinities to the work of Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Wole Soyinka. Simultaneously, it echoes the entire dramatic tradition, from Greek tragedy to theatre of the absurd, from Euripides to Shakespeare, and from Chekhov to Tennessee Williams. Inspired by the themes of Hollywood movies and by cinematic techniques, Kennedy’s highly acclaimed and frequently staged works have been praised as surrealistic dream plays, hauntingly fragmentary and nonlinear lyrical dramas, high points in the development of the American one-act play, and dramatic harbingers of feminist themes in contemporary Black women’s writing. (The Adrienne Kennedy Reader vii)

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the brilliance and the raw intensity of Kennedy’s work were recognized and her plays were produced by Off-Broadway theaters. Edward Albee, Michael Kahn, Joseph Chaikin, Joseph Papp, Robbie McCauley, Gerald Freedman, and Ellen Stewart are some of the theater people who have produced and directed her work. Her work was also embraced by the European Avant-garde and was performed in London and Paris. The international academic community responded to her writings and she began to be read and taught in countries as far apart as India, Nigeria, and Norway. The complexity of Kennedy’s work was evident from the beginning. The multiplicity of contexts to which her work belongs is evident in Intersecting Boundaries, which contains essays that evoke divergent theatrical, dramatic, and literary contexts: the European Avant-garde movements such as Symbolism, German Expressionism, and the Absurd; West African ritual; African American women’s writing; the transcendentalism of Whitman and Emerson, and so on. In her early plays, one of the most problematic areas of experience for the characters as well as for the reader/audience is the status of ‘‘reality.’’ Even in terms of psychological realism, the plays do not have a stable text or subtext. Her protagonists are invaded by ideas, images, and stimuli with no boundaries to help them distinguish the self from the outer world. The multicultural and multiracial characters and themes of her work were not fully amenable to the black nationalist focus, and her relationship with the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s was a little problematic. Her plays, nonetheless, remain extremely powerful dramatizations of contemporary social and political issues including race relations and its psychological consequences for the people of color. She has brought a new intensity and power to the one-act form, and her influence has been acknowledged by younger playwrights such as Ntozake Shange and

ADRIENNE KENNEDY

339

Suzan-Lori Parks. Today, Kennedy is recognized as a major American playwright who broke free from the dominant conventions of realism and naturalism and gave a new dimension to American and African American drama. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Adrienne Kennedy Adrienne Kennedy in One Act. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. Introduction by Werner Sollors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. The Alexander Plays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Cities in Bezique: Two One-Act Plays. New York: Samuel French, 1969. Deadly Triplets: A Theatre Mystery and Journal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. The Lennon Play: In His Own Write. London: Cape, 1968. People Who Led to My Plays. New York: Knopf, 1986. Sleep Deprivation Chamber: A Theatre Piece. With Adam P. Kennedy. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996.

Studies of Adrienne Kennedy’s Works Barnett, Claudia. ‘‘‘This Fundamental Challenge to Identity’: Reproduction and Representation in the Drama of Adrienne Kennedy.’’ Theatre Journal 48.2 (1996): 141–55. Benston, Kimberly W. ‘‘‘Cities in Bezique’: Adrienne Kennedy’s Expressionistic Vision.’’ CLA Journal 20 (1976): 235–44. Bryant-Jackson, Paul K., and Lois More Overbeck, eds. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Carbone, Melissa. ‘‘The Concomitant Forces of Placement: Re-Placing the African-American Woman in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and Ohio State Murders.’’ Text & Presentation: the Journal of the Comparative Drama Conference 14 (1993): 5–9. Curb, Rosemary K. ‘‘Fragmented Selves in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and The Owl Answers.’’ Theatre Journal 32 (1980): 180–95. Diamond, Elin. ‘‘Rethinking Identification: Kennedy, Freud, Brecht.’’ Kenyon Review 15.2 (1993): 86–99. Kintz, Linda. ‘‘The Sanitized Spectacle: What’s Birth Got to Do with It? Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White.’’ Theatre Journal 44.1 (1992): 67–86. ———. The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Kolin, Philip C. ‘‘Orpheus Ascending: Music, Race, and Gender in Adrienne Kennedy’s She Talks to Beethoven.’’ African American Review 28.2 (1994): 293–312. McDonough, Carla J. ‘‘God and the Owls: The Sacred and the Profane in Adrienne Kennedy’s The Owl Answers.’’ Modern Drama 40.3 (1997): 385–402. Oha, Obododimma. ‘‘Her Dissonant Selves: The Semiotics of Plurality and Bisexuality in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro.’’ American Drama 6.2 (1997): 67–80. Shafee, Syed Ali. ‘‘Probing the African-American Psyche: A Study of the Protagonists of Funnyhouse of a Negro and Les Blancs.’’ Indian Journal of American Studies 24.2 (1994): 83–88. Shinn, Thelma J. ‘‘Living the Answer: The Emergence of African American Feminist Drama.’’ Studies in the Humanities 17.2 (1990): 149–59. Sollors, Werner. ‘‘Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse: Adrienne Kennedy’s Drama.’’ American Literature 63.3 (1991): 507–32.

340

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Tener, Robert L. ‘‘Adrienne Kennedy’s Portrait of the Black Woman.’’ Studies in Black Literature 6.2 (1975): 1–5. Zinman, Toby Silverman. ‘‘‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’: Adrienne Kennedy’s An Evening with Dead Essex.’’ Studies in American Drama 6.1 (1991): 3–13.

Nita N. Kumar

JAMAICA KINCAID (1949– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Jamaica Kincaid, a successful novelist, was born as Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson in St. John’s, the capital of the Caribbean island of Antigua, on May 25, 1949. While Kincaid lived in Antigua, the island was still a British colony, and this firsthand experience of colonialism left a deep trace in her future writing. Kincaid’s family was an ordinary one with her stepfather, a carpenter, earning decent money when there was work, and her mother taking care of the house; Kincaid’s biological father was never a part of her life. Until the age of nine, Kincaid felt happy and loved as an only child, but when her mother gave birth to her three brothers in rapid succession, her world changed. Kincaid felt that her mother’s love shifted to her younger brothers and she deeply resented both the loss of her mother’s affection and her new obligations in helping her mother take care of the babies. Kincaid’s adolescent years were traumatic not only because of the paradise lost at home, but also because of her growing resentment toward the colonial system and the attempts both at home and at school to turn her into a proper middle-class Afro-Saxon girl. While people around her easily accepted themselves as Britons, Kincaid thought they were slaves. Her rebellion took the form of withdrawal into literature, and Kincaid read obsessively, mostly nineteenth-century British literature. At school, she was one of the brightest pupils in class, disliked and bullied by her classmates. At the age of thirteen, when Kincaid was preparing for exams that would open the way to higher education, her parents removed her from school. Her stepfather had been sick and Kincaid was expected to help her mother at home with taking care of her three little brothers. For Kincaid that meant foregoing the dreams of a university education, and she started resenting both her mother and her brothers for taking away the only thing she enjoyed doing—reading. In 1965 Kincaid’s family heard of an opportunity for Kincaid to go to New York and work for a family with kids as an au pair. Since her father was still sick and the family was in financial trouble, they expected Kincaid to support them until things became better. Kincaid left Antigua at the age of seventeen; the next time she saw her hometown was in 1986, twenty years later. Upon her arrival in New York, Kincaid eventually began an au pair job, for New Yorker writer Michael Arlen, his wife, and their four kids. She stayed with them for three years and later described her experiences in her novel Lucy. While working for the Arlens, Kincaid obtained a high school equivalency diploma and took courses in photography, but her attempt to obtain a college diploma was unsuccessful despite the full scholarship she received. Having tried several low-paying jobs, Kincaid started to write as a freelancer, and in the early seventies made herself a reputation with the ‘‘When I Was Seventeen’’ series produced for Ingenue magazine. Around this time she adopted the pseudonym Jamaica Kincaid, which reflects her Caribbean origins.

342

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

In 1974 her first short story appeared in the New Yorker, where she also worked as a staff writer till 1995. Writing for the New Yorker was good schooling for Kincaid professionally; her success as a magazine writer inspired her to try her hand at fiction. Kincaid’s first collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, was published in 1983 and included stories earlier published in the New Yorker. In 1985 she published her first novel, Annie John, written while Kincaid was pregnant with her first child from a marriage to composer Allen Shawn, son of New Yorker editor-in-chief William Shawn. The same year the family moved to Vermont, where Kincaid’s husband was offered a teaching position at Bennington College. In 1986 Kincaid returned to Antigua for the first time in twenty years. She was disappointed with the changes that had taken place since the country obtained independence, as she saw no sign of political or economical improvement. The second blow she received in her home country was her unsuccessful attempt at reconciliation with her mother. Kincaid described her visit in A Small Place (1988). In 1990 Kincaid published her second novel, Lucy, considered by many a sequel to Annie John. About the same time, after her mother’s visit to Vermont, Kincaid had a nervous breakdown and sought help in psychotherapy. She did not publish for three years until 1993, when her third novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, started appearing in installments in the New Yorker. The full text of the novel was published in 1996. Shortly after its publication, Kincaid left the New Yorker, following a conflict with the editor Tina Brown. In 1997 Kincaid published another autobiographical narrative, My Brother, based on the story of her brother’s death due to AIDS. Although Kincaid lost connection with her family during the years she lived in the United States, she helped him during his illness because both homosexuality and AIDS bore a stigma in Antigua. Living in Vermont, Kincaid became a passionate gardener and made gardening her way of life. She channeled her new knowledge and experience into writing and produced a series of articles, the first of which were published in New Yorker before she left it. In 2001 these articles appeared as a book under the title My Garden. Since 1994 Kincaid has been teaching literature and creative writing in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is recognized as a modern classic, with her work widely anthologized and included in course curriculums on literature and writing all over the country. With numerous articles about her work and two books of biography, Kincaid holds a prominent place in American literature of today. MAJOR WORKS Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River, is a compilation of short stories previously published in magazines, in particular the New Yorker, and one new story. In these stories Kincaid attempts to recreate the atmosphere and the mood of her Caribbean childhood using a vague, experimental style and mixing dream and reality in a plotlacking narrative. The first story of the collection, ‘‘Girl,’’ is perhaps the most known one. Written as a mother’s set of instructions to her teenage daughter, only twice interrupted by the girl’s own voice, the story not only creates two vivid characters, but also presents a critique of the mother’s attempt to mold her daughter into an exemplary Saxon middle-class young lady, suppressing and corrupting the daughter’s personality. This

JAMAICA KINCAID

343

one-page story clearly outlines the themes that Kincaid pursues in her subsequent writing: oppression and domination within one’s family, a complex love-hate motherdaughter relationship, and political and cultural power struggles of the colonized against their colonizers. Even Kincaid’s most recent pieces on gardening reflect her favorite domination theme: transplanting the plants from their native soil to the foreign lands serves as a mechanism of suppression and conquest. Kincaid’s first novel, Annie John (1985), consists of eight chapters that were initially published as stories in the New Yorker. Although their themes are reminiscent of At the Bottom of the River, the language is more accessible and the ideas are less puzzling to the general reader, which explains the novel’s immediate success. The story is clearly autobiographical, written in the genre of Bildungsroman that typically traces the spiritual, moral, psychological, or social development and growth of the main character from childhood to maturity. Since the eight chapters of the novel were initially published as self-contained stories, the novel lacks a tight plot. The unifying element of the novel is the protagonist’s voice and powerful presence through which the events are filtered. With the chapters arranged chronologically, from the time Annie is a young girl of ten till the time she leaves Antigua at the age of seventeen, the novel covers seven years. Annie’s story narrates her expulsion from paradise: her early closeness to her mother and mutual adoration gives way to hatred and lack of understanding as the girl approaches adolescence. Annie rejects her mother’s British middle-class values, conventionality, and acceptance of the colonial hierarchy. Through her resistance to her mother’s domination, Annie tries to create her own character and individuality. Her bitterness sometimes seems exaggerated, but it is the only way Annie can sever connections with the system that enslaves her. At the end of the novel Annie leaves for England, not because she is eager to see new places, but because putting distance between herself and her mother, between herself and Antigua, is the only way for her to preserve her newly found identity and escape enslavement for life. Significantly, in the parting scene, when Annie’s mother embraces her, Annie feels that she is suffocating. A Small Place (1988), Kincaid’s nonfiction book, thematically connects to Annie John through addressing the issues of colonialism in her native Antigua. However, while the general tone of Annie John is one of sadness with its insights mediated through the eyes of a teenager, A Small Place strikes by its grown-up relentlessness and uncompromising severity in judging the Antiguan government for the mismanagement of the island as well as industrialized countries for their now covert exploitation of the Antiguan people. The generic tourist, whom Kincaid addresses directly in the first section of the book, is guilty of perpetuating poverty and racism in Antigua. The second part of the book takes the reader back to the times when Antigua was under the British rule, subject to racism and exploitation. Returning to present-day Antigua in the third part, Kincaid invites the reader to face the most important issue of whether the changes brought about after the country gained independence made it into a better place. Kincaid’s answer is an emphatic ‘‘no.’’ A Small Place is a book filled with anger and indignation, calling for the American and British audience to recognize the harm they bring to her country and for the Antiguans to resist corruption and imperialist exploitation. Kincaid’s next novel, Lucy, published in 1990, picks up the story where it was dropped in Annie John, except that the protagonist’s name is now Lucy and she arrives in the United States and not England to work as a nanny for a well-to-do American family. Lucy has the same publication history as Annie John, first appearing as five independent

344

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

stories in the New Yorker, but it shows more tightness and coherence in its plot and works better as a continuous narrative. It is Kincaid’s first novel set outside of Antigua, in New York, and it covers a year of the protagonist’s life. Confronted with a foreign culture and overwhelmed by the lights of a big city, Lucy, a young Caribbean girl, attempts to preserve her identity against her mother’s still powerful influence from Antigua and her employer’s well-meaning but destructive efforts to mold her into something she is not. The friendliness of the American people Lucy meets is corrupting and her main quest is to resist Mariah, her employer, in the same fashion that she resisted her own mother. At the end of the novel, Lucy leaves her surrogate mother Mariah and finds solace and satisfaction in her newly acquired ability to be her own mistress, to be by herself, in her own apartment, content with her solitude. In Lucy, the familiar themes of domination, hierarchy, and power struggles between the oppressor and the oppressed are enriched by the profound discoveries of interconnectedness of race, class, and gender. For several years after the publication of Lucy, Kincaid was working on her next novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, published in 1996. The novel became Kincaid’s most controversial writing, depicting a character who many readers find unsympathetic and difficult or even disturbing. Kincaid bases Xuela, the protagonist, on her mother and attempts to explore what her mother’s life would have been if she had not left Dominica for Antigua and had not had children. The Autobiography narrates the story of the motherless and childless Xuela from birth till her old age, raising the familiar issues of mother-daughter relationship, oppression within the family and, parallel to it, under the colonial rule, self-destructiveness and a search for identity. Kincaid’s second book of nonfiction, My Brother (1997), presents an autobiographical account of Kincaid’s relationship with her brother Devon Drew. While her other books were also based on autobiographical material, they were nevertheless fictionalized; My Brother, on the other hand, is written as an actual account of her brother’s struggle in a society where being homosexual is a stigma and where contracting AIDS means an ignoble and fast death. Thematically, the book is linked to Kincaid’s other writing in raising the issues of oppression and dominance, injustice and exploitation, corruption and hypocrisy. Similar to The Autobiography of My Mother, Mr. Potter (2002) is a fictional memoir, this time of Kincaid’s biological father, Roderick Potter. Told by his illegitimate daughter, Elaine Cynthia Potter, that is, Jamaica Kincaid herself, the novel, as all Kincaid’s writings, is as much about her father as about herself and her attempt to come to terms with her family and her past. Kincaid’s rage against her father is open and uncompromising, reminiscent of Kincaid’s real and fictionalized love-hate relationship with her mother in her other novels. My Garden, Kincaid’s book compiled of her essays on gardening, is a logical continuation of her previous work. In this book Kincaid attempts to weave her gardening experience in her Vermont home into the complex fabric of philosophical and psychological issues. Comparing gardening in Antigua and Vermont allows Kincaid to address the familiar issues of colonialism and forced transplanting of cultures, the scourge of colonial domination, and the resistance to it. Looking through the lens of gardening, and grounding her work in the long-standing tradition of English and American gardenwriting, Kincaid explores her favorite themes of motherhood, home, power, and possession. In a similar vein, Kincaid’s highly introspective book, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, published in 2005, an account of her travel, uses the search

JAMAICA KINCAID

345

for rare plants as a starting ground for the author’s meditations on life, people, and nature. CRITICAL RECEPTION Kincaid’s reception in the United States was immediate and enthusiastic. Her successful career as a novelist was prepared by her long-time collaboration with the New Yorker, where she originally published most of her writings. Starting with her first book, At the Bottom of the River, critics hailed her as one of the most promising and important writers of the 1980s. Though some critiqued the novel for its vagueness and inaccessibility to a general reader, it won public acclaim and received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Kincaid’s second novel, Annie John, became a literary sensation, ending among the three finalists for the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. A Small Place, on the other hand, received a mixed response. Robert Gottlieb, the editor of New Yorker, considered it too critical and refused to publish it. Neither was the book well received in Antigua, from where Kincaid was unofficially banned for years for her open critique of the Antiguan government. Lucy, Kincaid’s next novel, received a favorable reception and was highly praised for its masterful constructing of a girl’s complex identity; however, Kincaid’s colleagues accused her of what they saw as exposing the life of her former employer, Michael Arlen and his wife, as their marriage broke up. The Autobiography of My Mother solidified Kincaid’s position as a writer. It was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and received the Cleveland Foundation’s Anisfield-Wolf Award as well as the Boston Book Review’s Fisk Fiction Award. Kincaid’s books on gardening, while praised by some critics for their lyrical dreaming-meditative style, are at the same time criticized for the author’s self-indulgence and self-absorption as she burdens the narrative with tedious accounts of various nurseries and their services and reproduces lists of catalogued plants. All Kincaid’s work is openly autobiographical, as commented on by critics and acknowledged by the author herself: ‘‘I’ve never really written about anyone except myself and my mother. . . . I’m just one of those pathetic people for whom writing is therapy’’ (Listfield 82). Through creating and recreating her story, Kincaid produced a body of literature that placed her among the most important and provocative American writers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Jamaica Kincaid Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. New York: National Geographic, 2005. Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985. At the Bottom of the River. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. Mr. Potter. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. My Brother. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. My Garden. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.

346

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Studies of Jamaica Kincaid’s Works Bouson, Brooks. Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. New York: State University of New York Press, 2005. Covi, Giovanna. ‘‘Jamaica Kincaid and the Resistance to Canons.’’ In Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carol Boyce Davis and Elaine Savory Fido, 345– 54. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. Donnell, Alison. ‘‘Dreaming of Daffodils: Cultural Resistance in the Narratives of Theory.’’ Kunapipi 14.2 (1995): 45–52. Ferguson, Moira. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Listfield, Emily. ‘‘Straight from the Heart.’’ Harper’s Bazaar (October 1990): 82. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Simmons, Diane Ellis. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne, 1994. ———. ‘‘The Rhythm of Reality in the Work of Jamaica Kincaid.’’ World Literature Today 68.3 (1994): 466–72.

Maria Mikolchak

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS Volume 2 Edited by Yolanda Williams Page

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of African American women writers / edited by Yolanda Williams Page. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-33429-3 (set : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-313-34123-0 (vol 1 : alk. paper)— ISBN 0-313-34124-9 (vol 2 : alk. paper) 1. American literature—African American authors— Encyclopedias. 2. American literature—Women authors—Encyclopedias. 3. American literature—20th century—Encyclopedias. 4. African American women authors—Biography— Encyclopedias. 5. African American women—Encyclopedias. I. Page, Yolanda Williams. PS153.N5E49 2007 810.9'896073—dc22 2006031193 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright # 2007 by Yolanda Williams Page All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006031193 ISBN-10: 0-313-33429-3 (set) ISBN-13: 978-0-313-33429-0 0-313-34123-0 (vol. 1) 978-0-313-34123-6 0-313-34124-9 (vol. 2) 978-0-313-34124-3 First published in 2007 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9

8 7 6 5 4

3 2 1

To my two favorite beaus, David and William

CONTENTS

Preface

xiii

List of Authors by Genre

xv

Chronological List of Authors

xix

Volume 1 Elizabeth Laura Adams (1909–1982) Hermine Pinson Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert (1853–1889) Iva Balic

1

7

Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen (?–?) Elizabeth Marsden

9

Mignon Holland Anderson (1945– ) Teresa Clark Caruso

11

Maya Angelou (1928– ) Joi Carr

13

Tina McElroy Ansa (1949– ) Tarshia L. Stanley

19

Doris Jean Austin (1949–1994) Imani Lillie B. Fryar

23

Nikki Baker (1962– ) Kimberly Downing Braddock

Joanne Braxton (1950– ) Tanya N. Clark

46

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) Bridget Harris Tsemo

49

Linda Beatrice Brown (1939– ) Teresa Clark Caruso

56

Annie Louise Burton (1858–1910) Gabriel A. Briggs

59

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1869–1944) Susan M. Stone 61 Octavia Butler (1947–2006) Keren Omry

64

Jeannette Franklin Caines (1938–2004) Eric Sterling

71

Bebe Moore Campbell (1950– ) Tenille Brown

74

Barbara Chase-Riboud (1939– ) Ginette Curry

76

Alice Childress (1916–1994) Carol Bunch Davis

79

26

Barbara T. Christian (1943–2000) Sharon L. Barnes

85

Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) Rochelle Spencer

28

Pearl T. Cleage (1948– ) Adrienne Cassel

88

Gwendolyn Bennett (1902–1981) Sue E. Barker

35

Michelle Cliff (1946– ) Lopamudra Basu

92

Marita Bonner (1898–1971) Sophie Blanch

39

Lucille Clifton (1936– ) Patricia Kennedy Bostian

94

Candy Dawson Boyd (1946– ) Bennie P. Robinson

43

Wanda Coleman (1946– ) Terri Jackson Wallace

101

viii

CONTENTS

Eugenia W. Collier (1928– ) T. Jasmine Dawson Kathleen Conwell Collins (1942–1988) Chandra Tyler Mountain

103

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) Denisa E. Chatman-Riley

174

106

Grace Edwards-Yearwood (1934?– ) Jasmin J. Vann

180

Zilpha Elaw (1790?–1846?) Nancy Kang

182

Mari Evans (1923– ) Jessica Allen

186

Sarah Webster Fabio (1928–1979) Richard A. Iadonisi

191

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) Joy R. Myree-Mainor

193

Carolyn Ferrell (1962– ) Alex Feerst

200

Julia Fields (1938– ) Jacqueline Imani Bryant

202

Julia A. J. Foote (1823–1900) Ann Beebe

204

Patrice Gaines (1949– ) Amanda J. Davis

207

Patricia Joann Gibson (1951– ) Sarah Estes Graham

209

Anna Julia Hayward Cooper (1858–1964) Gloria A. Shearin

112

J. California Cooper (?– ) Adrienne Carthon

116

Jayne Cortez (1936– ) Ruth Blando´n

121

Margaret Esse Danner (1910–1984) Claire Taft

127

Edwidge Danticat (1969– ) Jana Evans Braziel

132

Doris Davenport (1949– ) Denise R. Shaw

141

Angela Y. Davis (1944– ) Deirdre Osborne

145

Lucy Delaney (1830–1890) Dave Yost

149

Toi(Nette) Marie Derricotte (1941– ) Karen S. Sloan

151

Mercedes Gilbert (1889–1952) Marlo David Azikwe

211

Alexis De Veaux (1948– ) Bennie P. Robinson

155

Nikki Giovanni (1943– ) Jane M. Barstow

213

Marita Golden (1950– ) DaMaris Hill

218

Jewelle Gomez (1948– ) Josie A. Brown-Rose

223

Eloise Greenfield (1929– ) Elissa Gershowitz

227

Angelina Weld Grimke´ (1880–1958) Gloria A. Shearin

229

Rosa Guy (1925– ) Julie Ellam

235

Edwina Streeter Dixon (1907–2002) Kevin L. Cole and Katherine Madison Rita Dove (1952– ) Laura Madeline Wiseman Kate Drumgoold (1858?–1898) Karen S. Sloan Shirley Graham DuBois (1896–1977) Rebecca Walsh

161 163

169

171

CONTENTS

Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1946– ) Lynnell Thomas

237

ix

Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871) Joshunda Sanders

303

Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley (1867–1922) Lisa Pertillar Brevard

241

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813–1897) Mary McCartin Wearn

305

Virginia Hamilton (1936–2002) Myisha Priest

244

Amelia E. Johnson (1858–1922) Sathyaraj Venkatesan

309

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) Kelly O. Secovnie

251

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877–1966) Maria J. Rice

312

Helen Johnson (1906–1995) Wendy Wagner

317

Joyce Hansen (1942– ) Dorsia Smith

259

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) Valerie Palmer-Mehta

261

Gayl Jones (1949– ) Helen Doss

321

Juanita Harrison (1887–19??) Sarah Boslaugh

264

June Jordan (1936–2002) Roy Pe´rez

326

Safiya Henderson-Holmes (1950–2001) Shamika Ann Mitchell

266

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818–1907) Regina V. Jones

331

Carolivia Herron (1947– ) Rachelle D. Washington

268

Adrienne Kennedy (1931– ) Nita N.Kumar

334

Jamaica Kincaid (1949– ) Maria Mikolchak

341

Frenchy Jolene Hodges (1940– ) Katarzyna Iwona Jakubiak bell hooks (1952– ) Peggy J. Huey Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) (1859–1930) Jeehyun Lim

271 Volume 2 273

278

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) Warren J. Carson

283

Angela Jackson (1951– ) Judy Massey Dozier

292

Elaine Jackson (1943– ) Raymond Janifer

296

Mae Jackson (1946– ) Heather Hoffman Jordan

299

Mattie Jane Jackson (1843–?) Tabitha Adams Morgan

301

Pinkie Gordon Lane (1923– ) Julia Marek Ponce

347

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) Frank A. Salamone

350

Kristin Hunter Lattany (1931– ) David M. Jones

355

Andrea Lee (1953– ) Barbara Boswell

360

Helene Elaine Lee (1959– ) Lena Marie Ampadu

364

Jarena Lee (1783–?) Christopher J. Anderson

366

Audre Geraldine Lorde (1934–1992) Heejung Cha

369

x

CONTENTS

Naomi Long Madgett (1923– ) Shayla Hawkins

378

Pauli Murray (1910–1985) Christina G. Bucher

441

Paule Marshall (1929– ) Kalenda C. Eaton

382

Gloria Naylor (1950– ) Pratibha Kelapure

444

Sharon Bell Mathis (1937– ) Loretta G. Woodard

388

Barbara Neely (1941– ) A. Mary Murphy

449

Diane Oliver (1943–1966) Joseph A. Alvarez

451

Brenda Marie Osbey (1957– ) Trimiko C. Melancon

453

Pat Parker (1944–1989) Linda Garber

457

Suzan-Lori Parks (1964– ) Marla Dean

459

Ann Petry (1908–1997) Yolanda Williams Page

465

Ann Plato (1820?–1860) Tinola N. Mayfield

468

Connie Porter (1959– ) Tamra E. DiBenedetto

470

Victoria Earle Matthews (1861–1898) Heidi Stauffer

391

Colleen J. McElroy (1935– ) Roxane Gay

393

Patricia McKissack (1944– ) Rebecca Feind

397

Terry McMillan (1951– ) Yolanda Williams Page

399

Louise Meriwether (1923– ) Bridgitte Arnold

402

May Miller (1899–1995) Miranda A. Green-Barteet

406

Arthenia J. Bates Millican (1920– ) Rebecca Feind

411

Eliza Potter (1820–?) Karen C. Summers

472

Mary Monroe (1949– ) Freda Fuller Coursey

413

Mary Prince (1788–?) Babacar M’Baye

474

Anne Moody (1940– ) Meta Michond Cooper

416

Nancy Prince (1799–?) Dave Yost

477

Opal J. Moore (1953– ) Kellie D. Weiss

420

Aishah Rahman (1939– ) Joan McCarty

480

Toni Morrison (1931– ) Deborah M. Wolf

423

Alice Randall (1959– ) Louis M. Palmer, III

483

Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1849–1916) Megan K. Ahern

486

Gertrude Bustill Mossell (1855–1948) Amanda Wray

434

Harryette Mullen (1953– ) Ordner W. Taylor, III

436

Jewell Parker Rhodes (?– ) Tatia Jacobson Jordan

488

Beatrice Murphy (1908–1992) Judy L. Isaksen

439

Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1943– ) Adenike Marie Davidson

493

CONTENTS

xi

Mona Lisa Saloy (1950– ) Delicia Dena Daniels

495

Joyce Carol Thomas (1938– ) Elizabeth Malia

556

Sonia Sanchez (1934– ) Ben Fisler

497

Era Bell Thompson (1905–1986) Kevin L. Cole

561

Dori Sanders (1934– ) Chandra Wells

503

Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1870–?) Gerri Reaves

563

Ruth D. Todd (1878?–?) Amy L. Blair

567

Mary Elizabeth Vroman (1925–1967) Jean Forst

569

Gloria Wade-Gayles (1938– ) Cameron Christine Clark

572

Alice Walker (1944– ) Su-lin Yu

578

Margaret Walker (1915–1998) Aimable Twagilimana

589

Mildred Pitts Walter (1922– ) Gerardo Del Guercio

595

Marilyn Nelson Waniek (1946– ) Jacob Nelson Wilkenfeld

598

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) Joy. M. Leighton

601

Dorothy West (1907–1988) Pearlie Mae Peters

606

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) Pratibha Kelapure

610

Mary Seacole (1805–1881) Nanette Morton

508

Fatima Shaik (1952– ) Sharon T. Silverman

511

Ntozake Shange (1948– ) Cammie M. Sublette

514

Ann Allen Shockley (1927– ) Adriane Bezusko Amanda Berry Smith (1837–1915) Mary G. De Jong Anna Deavere Smith (1950– ) Yolanda Williams Page Ellease Southerland (1943– ) Kate Falvey Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) Rhondda Robinson Thomas Barbara Summers (1944– ) Firouzeh Dianat Ellen Tarry (1906– ) Kevin Hogg

522

527 529 532 536 540 542

Claudia Tate (1946–2002) Angela Shaw-Thornburg

544

Paulette Childress White (1948– ) Jessica Margaret Brophy

614

Mildred D. Taylor (1943– ) Shawntaye M. Scott

547

Brenda Wilkinson (1946– ) Tamara Zaneta Hollins

616

Susie King Taylor (1848–1912) Laura Gimeno Pahissa

550

Lisa Teasley (1962– ) Jeremy Griggs

Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944) Ted Morrissey

620

552

Lucy Terry (1730–1812) Debbie Clare Olson

554

Sherley Anne Williams (1944–1999) Gretchen Michlitsch

624

xii

CONTENTS

Harriet E. Wilson (1828?–1863?) Katie Rose Guest

629

Appendix: List of Awards and Authors

641

Bibliography of Works

647

Sarah Elizabeth Wright (1928–?) Althea Rhodes

633

Index

653

Shay Youngblood (1959– ) Samira C. Franklin

636

About the Editor and the Contributors

665

PREFACE

Since its inception, the African American literary tradition has been very vital to African American culture. Historically not only has the literature provided insight into various aspects of the African American experience, but it has also served as a source of activism. For example, during the colonial period it was used to prove that blacks, like writers of nonAfrican descent, could successfully produce a variety of belletristic and practical genres of writing; thus giving lie to the justification for the enslavement of black people. Later, during the reconstruction era the literature was used to emphasize African Americans’ similarities to other educated Americans and to protest their exclusion from the American mainstream. Today, it continues to serve as a political and social conduit, the majority of it being used to promote ideas, philosophies and causes, while the rest is simply written with the purpose to entertain or as a platform for the author to express himself. Although the preponderance of African American literature that exists is written by African American males, African American women writers have also produced an impressive body of the literature. In fact, the tradition began with a black woman, Lucy Terry whose ballad poem ‘‘Bars Fight’’ was recited for a century before it was published in 1855. Although some works by African American women were published near or at the turn of the twentieth century, when they enjoyed modest popularity, the vast majority of it was published during the Harlem Renaissance and in the years after the 1970s, as women writers, in general, gained increased access to the marketplace. The Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers provides a comprehensive reference to literature by African American women. One hundred sixty-eight writers are included in this sourcebook. While this work is by no means exhaustive, it does provide coverage of many African American women writers. Many of them are established and canonized, others are emerging, while some are obscure, forgotten writers that this author seeks to bring to the critical attention of contemporary students and scholars. This work is an extensive study of the well-known, not so known and unknown African American women writers from 1746 to present; it provides a thorough examination of their lives, major works and the critical reception of that work. While this sourcebook’s focus is writers of African American descent, Caribbean authors such as Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaica Kincaid have been included because they are closely identified with the African American literary tradition; the themes of their writing resonate aspects of African American life and experience. In addition, their inclusion iterates that the experience of the African Diaspora is not exclusive. The Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers is not the first work of its kind, but it fills an important information gap in that it is genre inclusive. That is, the entries include women who write in a variety of belletristic forms: autobiography, drama, essay, fiction and poetry. Also included are cultural/literary theorists and children/young adult writers.

xiv

PREFACE

The Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers has been written so that the user will find it helpful no matter his stage of research. Advanced high school students, undergraduates and users of community college and public libraries will all find the information accessible. The book includes an alphabetical list of authors as well as a chronological list of authors, a list of authors by genre, and a list of authors and awards. Too, graduate students and seasoned scholars in the initial stage of research will find this text useful, for each entry includes primary and secondary sources. Entries are written in chapter format and consist of five parts: (1) heading-which includes the writer’s name, year of birth and year of death (if applicable); (2) biographical narrative-which consists of a concise writer biographical profile; (3) majors works-which consists of a discussion of the writer’s works. Motifs and themes are also highlighted; (4) critical reception-which consists of critical response to the author’s work; and (5) bibliography which-consists of a list of the author’s work and a list of studies of the author’s work. Entries vary in length from 750 words to 5000 words. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many to whom I am indebted for the completion of this book. I thank George Butler at Greenwood Press for considering this a worthy project. Thanks to my Dillard University family for providing me a research award that allowed me to complete the preliminary work on this project. Thanks also to my undergraduate assistant, LaChandra Pye, for helping with the administrative aspects of this project. I especially express gratitude to the contributors of this book. Without you this project would not have come to fruition. Lastly, I thank my friends and family, especially my mother and my sister, for their words of encouragement and support.

LIST OF AUTHORS BY GENRE

Autobiography Maya Angelou Annie Louise Burton Lucille Clifton Angela Y. Davis Lucy Delaney Kate Drumgoold Zilpha Elaw Julia A. J. Foote Juanita Harrison bell hooks Mattie Jane Jackson Rebecca Cox Jackson Harriet Jacobs Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley Adrienne Kennedy Jarena Lee Audre Geraldine Lorde Anne Moody Pauli Murray Eliza Potter Mary Seacole Notzake Shange Amanda Berry Smith Susie King Taylor Era Bell Thompson Biography Elizabeth Laura Adams Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert Anna Julia Hayward Cooper Shirley Graham DuBois Pauli Murray Ann Plato Henrietta Cordelia Ray Children’s Literature Candy Boyd (Marguerite Dawson) Gwendolyn Brooks Jeannette Franklin Caines Lucille Clifton Alexis DeVeaux

Eloise Greenfield Virginia Hamilton Carolivia Herron bell hooks Amelia E. Johnson Sharon Bell Mathis Patricia McKissack Louise Meriwether Opal J. Moore Connie Porter Fatima Shaik Ellen Tarry Mildred D. Taylor Mildred Pitts Walter Brenda Wilkinson Criticism Joanne Braxton Barbara T. Christian Sarah Webster Fabio Beverly Guy-Sheftall bell hooks Toni Morrison Claudia Tate Gloria Wade-Gayles Drama Maya Angelou Marita Bonner Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Alice Childress Pearl T. Cleage Kathleen Conwell Collins J. California Cooper Alexis DeVeaux Rita Dove Shirley Graham DuBois Mari Evans Julia Fields Patricia Joann Gibson Mercedes Gilbert Angelina Weld Grimke´

xvi

LIST OF AUTHORS BY GENRE

Rosa Guy Lorraine Hansberry Zora Neale Hurston Angela Jackson Elaine Jackson Mae Jackson Gayl Jones June Jordan Adrienne Kennedy May Miller Suzan-Lori Parks Aishah Rahman Sonia Sanchez Ntozake Shange Anna Deavere Smith Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Shay Youngblood

Opal J. Moore Gertrude Bustill Mossell Gloria Naylor Ann Petry Ann Plato Ann Allen Shockley Ellease Southerland Maria W. Stewart Lisa Teasley Era Bell Thompson Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Alice Walker Margaret Walker Ida B. Wells-Barnett Fannie Barrier Williams

Essay Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Tina McElroy Ansa Doris Jean Austin Toni Cade Bambara Marita Bonner Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Octavia Butler Barbara Chase-Riboud Alice Childress Barbara T. Christian Pearl T. Cleage Eugenia W. Collier Anna Julia Hayward Cooper Edwidge Danticat Angela Y. Davis Rita Dove Mari Evans Nikki Giovanni Jewelle Gomez Angelina Weld Grimke´ Virginia Hamilton Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) Gayl Jones June Jordan Jamaica Kincaid Audre Geraldine Lorde Paule Marshall Louise Meriwether

Memoir Toi(nette) Marie Derricotte bell hooks Dori Sanders Era Bell Thompson

Etiquette Book Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley

Mystery Barbara Neely Novel Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen Tina McElroy Ansa Doris Jean Austin Nikki Baker Toni Cade Bambara Candy Dawson Boyd Gwendolyn Brooks Linda Beatrice Brown Bebe Moore Campbell Barbara Chase-Riboud Alice Childress Pearl T. Cleage Michelle Cliff Kathleen Conwell Collins J. California Cooper Edwidge Danticat Rita Dove Grace Edwards-Yearwood Jessie Redmon Fauset Patrice Gaines Marita Golden

LIST OF AUTHORS BY GENRE

Jewelle Gomez Joyce Hansen Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) Zora Neale Hurston Angela Jackson Amelia E. Johnson Gayl Jones June Jordan Jamaica Kincaid Pinkie Gordon Lane Nella Larsen Kristin Hunter Lattany Andrea Lee Helen Elaine Lee Paule Marshall Terry McMillan Louise Meriwether Mary Monroe Toni Morrison Gloria Naylor Suzan-Lori Parks Ann Petry Connie Porter Alice Randall Jewell Parker Rhodes Dori Sanders Fatima Shaik Ann Allen Shockley Ellease Southerland Barbara Summers Lisa Teasley Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Mary Elizabeth Vroman Alice Walker Margaret Walker Dorothy West Sherley Anne Williams Harriet E. Wilson Sarah Elizabeth Wright Shay Youngblood Novella Ruth D. Todd Poetry Maya Angelou Gwendolyn Bennett Joanne Braxton

xvii

Gwendolyn Brooks Linda Beatrice Brown Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Barbara Chase-Riboud Pearl T. Cleage Michelle Cliff Lucille Clifton Wanda Coleman Eugenia W. Collier Jayne Cortez Margaret Esse Danner Doris Davenport Toi(nette) Marie Derricotte Alexis DeVeaux Rita Dove Alice Dunbar-Nelson Mari Evans Sara Webster Fabio Julia Fields Patrice Gaines Mercedes Gilbert Nikki Giovanni Marita Golden Jewelle Gomez Rosa Guy Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Frenchy Jolene Hodges Safiya Henderson-Holmes bell hooks Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) Angela Jackson Mae Jackson Amelia E. Johnson Georgia Douglas Johnson Helen(e) Johnson Gayl Jones June Jordan Audre Geraldine Lorde Naomi Long Madgett May Miller Arthenia J. Bates Millican Opal J. Moore Gertrude Bustill Mossell Harryette Mullen Beatrice Murphy Pauli Murray Brenda Marie Osbey Pat Parker

xviii

LIST OF AUTHORS BY GENRE

Ann Petry Ann Plato Henrietta Cordelia Ray Carolyn Marie Rodgers Mona Lisa Saloy Sonia Sanchez Ntozake Shange Ellease Southerland Lucy Terry Joyce Carol Thomas Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Gloria Wade-Gayles Alice Walker Margaret Walker Marilyn Nelson Waniek Phillis Wheatley Sherley Anne Williams Sarah Elizabeth Wright Science Fiction Octavia Butler Short Fiction Mignon Holland Anderson Tina McElroy Ansa Toni Cade Bambara Gwendolyn Bennett Marita Bonner Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Octavia Butler Michelle Cliff Wanda Coleman Eugenia W. Collier Kathleen Conwell Collins J. California Cooper Edwidge Danticat Edwina Streeter Dixon Rita Dove Alice Dunbar-Nelson Mari Evans Carolyn Ferrell Julia Fields Jewelle Gomez Angelina Weld Grimke´ Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Carolivia Herron Frenchy Jolene Hodges Zora Neale Hurston Amelia E. Johnson

Adrienne Kennedy Jamaica Kincaid Nella Larsen Kristin Hunter Lattany Andrea Lee Paule Marshall Victoria Earle Matthews Colleen J. McElroy Patricia McKissack Louise Meriwether Arthenia J. Bates Millican Mary Monroe Opal J. Moore Toni Morrison Barbara Neely Diane Oliver Ann Petry Carolyn Rodgers Ann Allen Shockley Ellease Southerland Barbara Summers Lisa Teasley Ruth D. Todd Mary Elizabeth Vroman Dorothy West Paulette Childress White Shay Youngblood Slave Narrative Harriet Ann Jacobs Lucy Delaney Mattie Jane Jackson Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley Mary Prince Travel Literature Juanita Harrison Andrea Lee Colleen McElroy Nancy Prince Mary Seacole Young Adult Literature Rosa Guy Joyce Hansen Sharon Bell Mathis Joyce Carol Thomas Mildred Pitts Walter Brenda Wilkinson

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AUTHORS

The dates to the right of the author’s name indicate the date of the author’s initial publication. Lucy Terry (1746) Phillis Wheatley (1767) Mary Prince (1831) Maria W. Stewart (1831) Jarena Lee (1836) Zilpha Elaw (1840) Ann Plato (1841) Nancy Prince (1850) Rebecca Cox Jackson (1857) Mary Seacole (1857) Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1859) Eliza Potter (1859) Harriet E. Wilson (1859) Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861) Mattie Jane Jackson (1866) Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1868) Julia A. J. Foote (1879) Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen (1885) Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert (1890) Amelia E. Johnson (1890) Lucy Delaney (1891) Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1892) Anna Julia Hayward Cooper (1892) Victoria Earle Matthews (1893) Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1893) Amanda Berry Smith (1893) Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1893) Gertrude Bustill Mossell (1894) Kate Drumgoold (1898) Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1899) Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1899) Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Sara A. Allen) (1900) Angelina Weld Grimke´ (1900) Susie King Taylor (1902) Ruth D. Todd (1902) Fannie Barrier Williams (1902)

Annie Louise Burton (1909) Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley (1916) Georgia Douglas Johnson (1918) May Miller (1920) Gwendolyn Bennett (1923) Jessie Redmon Fauset (1924) Helen(e) Johnson (1926) Dorothy West (1926) Marita Bonner (1927) Nella Larsen (1928) Mercedes Gilbert (1931) Shirley Graham DuBois (1932) Zora Neale Hurston (1934) Juanita Harrison (1937) Ann Petry (1939) Ellen Tarry (1940) Elizabeth Laura Adams (1941) Naomi Long Madgett (1941) Margaret Walker (1942) Gwendolyn Brooks (1945) Beatrice Murphy (1945) Alice Childress (1949) Rosa Guy (1954) Sara Elizabeth Wright (1955) J. California Cooper (1956) Pauli Murray (1956) Lorraine Hansberry (1958) Paule Marshall (1959) Margaret Esse Danner (1962) Julia Fields (1962) Adrienne Kennedy (1963) Pat Parker (1963) Mary Elizabeth Vroman (1963) Kristin Hunter Lattany (1964) Ellease Southerland (1964) Diane Oliver (1965) Louise Meriwether (1967)

xx

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AUTHORS

Alice Walker (1967) Mari Evans (1968) Sarah Webster Fabio (1968) Audre Geraldine Lorde (1968) Anne Moody (1968) Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1968) Lucille Clifton (1969) Jayne Cortez (1969) Mae Jackson (1969) June Jordan (1969) Sharon Bell Mathis (1969) Arthenia J. Bates Millican (1969) Sonia Sanchez (1969) Mildred Pitts Walter (1969) Maya Angelou (1970) Nikki Giovanni (1970) Toni Morrison (1970) Ann Allen Shockley (1970) Pearl T. Cleage (1971) Angela Y. Davis (1971) Patricia Joann Gibson (1971) Frenchy Jolene Hodges (1971) Elaine Jackson (1971) Toni Cade Bambara (1972) Eugenia W. Collier (1972) Pinkie Gordon Lane (1972) Aishah Rahman (1972) Paulette Childress White (1972) Sherley Anne Williams (1972) Jeannette Franklin Caines (1973) Alexis De Veaux (1973) Virginia Hamilton (1973) Mildred D. Taylor (1973) Joyce Carol Thomas (1973) Angela Jackson (1974) Barbara Chase-Riboud (1974) Ntozake Shange (1974) Gayl Jones (1975) Brenda Wilkinson (1975) Mignon Holland Anderson (1976) Octavia Butler (1976) Joanne Braxton (1977) Wanda Coleman (1977) Edwina Streeter Dixon (1977) Toi(nette) Marie Derricotte (1978) Eloise Greenfield (1978) Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1979)

Gloria Wade-Gayles (1979) Barbara T. Christian (1980) Michelle Cliff (1980) Kathleen Conwell Collins (1980) Doris Davenport (1980) Rita Dove (1980) Jewelle Gomez (1980) Joyce Hansen (1980) Marilyn Nelson Waniek (1980) bell hooks (1981) Andrea Lee (1981) Harryette Mullen (1981) Barbara Neely (1981) Gloria Naylor (1982) Marita Golden (1983) Jamaica Kincaid (1983) Brenda Marie Osbey (1983) Claudia Tate (1983) Linda Beatrice Brown (1984) Colleen J. McElroy (1984) Mary Monroe (1985) Bebe Moore Campbell (1986) Doris Jean Austin (1987) Candy Dawson Boyd (1987) Terry McMillan (1987) Fatima Shaik Grace Edwards-Yearwood (1988) Patricia McKissack (1988) Tina McElroy Ansa (1989) Opal J. Moore (1989) Suzan-Lori Parks (1989) Barbara Summers (1989) Shay Youngblood (1989) Safiya Henderson-Holmes (1990) Mona Lisa Saloy (1990) Dori Sanders (1990) Nikki Baker (1991) Carolivia Herron (1991) Connie Porter (1991) Anna Deavere Smith (1992) Jewell Parker Rhodes (1993) Edwidge Danticat (1994) Carolyn Ferrell (1994) Patrice Gaines (1994) Helen Elaine Lee (1994) Lisa Teasley (1997) Alice Randall (2001)

PINKIE GORDON LANE (1923– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Pinkie Gordon Lane, the first African American poet laureate of Louisiana, was born Pinkie Rose Gordon in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 13, 1923, to William and Inez Gordon. Both her parents died before she reached the age of twenty-five, and she was forced to sell the family house in order to enroll in college. In 1945, she entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, on a four-year academic scholarship. In 1948, while attending Spelman College, she married Ulysses Simpson Lane. She graduated magna cum laude in 1949, with a bachelor’s degree in English and art. She taught English in the public schools of Florida and Georgia for six years; then she and her husband moved back to Atlanta in 1955. In 1956, Lane graduated from Atlanta University with a master’s degree in English, and she moved with her husband to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she still resides. She began teaching at Leland College in Baker, Louisiana, in 1957. In 1959, she became an instructor of English at Southern University in Baton Rouge, where she later became a full professor, and then director of the English department. Gordon Edward Lane, her only child, was born in 1963. Her husband died seven years later, in 1970. While working as an instructor at Southern University in 1960, a colleague gave Lane a copy of A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks. This was the first time Lane had read a book of poems by an African American woman author, and Lane began writing poems herself. She had previously written works of fiction, mainly short stories. Her first poem was published in Phylon in 1961. She published a number of other poems in journals and magazines, including the Journal of Black Poetry, Pembroke Magazine, Southern Review, and Callaloo. Her first book of poems, Wind Thoughts, was published in 1972. Since that time she has published four other volumes of poetry: The Mystic Female (1978), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1979; I Never Scream: New and Selected Poems (1985); Girl at the Window (1991); and Elegy for Etheridge (2000). Lane became the first African American woman to receive a doctoral degree from Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, when she graduated in 1967. She became the first African American poet laureate of Louisiana in 1989, a position which she held until 1992. She has received numerous awards throughout her career, including the National Award for Achievement in Poetry from the College Language Association in 1988 and the Image Award from the NAACP in 1990, and she was inducted into the Louisiana Black History Hall of Fame in 1991. MAJOR WORKS Even though Lane began writing poetry in the 1960s, her work is in many ways different from other writers of the Black Arts Movement. When she first began writing in 1961, Lane used both the Italian and Elizabethan sonnet forms as models for her poetry.

348

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Later she began to experiment with other forms, and eventually shifted to writing free verse. Her first volume of poems, Wind Thoughts, contains examples of each of these forms. Perhaps the most striking poems of this volume are the ‘‘Poems to My Father,’’ which have also been reprinted in a number of Lane’s later books. Throughout her work it is clear that Lane’s father had a profound influence on her life. In ‘‘Poems to My Father’’ Lane deals with the pain caused by her father’s drunkenness and neglect, but at the same time she expresses her love for him. Her poetry describes the inward wrestlings of her mind and soul with such themes as love, suffering, and death. While Lane deals with these themes from a very personal point of view, they also have broader significance. In The Mystic Female, Lane’s second volume of poetry, she focuses on the everyday experiences of life, but often through a mystical or even metaphysical lens. She often uses her poetry as a means of reaction to situations that are taking place in the world around her. The poem ‘‘Sexual Privacy of Women on Welfare’’ reacts to the questions on a welfare application, poignantly revealing the pain and loneliness which many women on welfare face. The imagery in this volume is often very vivid. Having minored in art at Spelman College, Lane learned how to use her poems to ‘‘paint’’ a detailed picture of the people, and especially the places, in her poems. In the Baton Rouge poems, Lane describes the town of Baton Rouge as it grows and expands into a large city. Many of Lane’s poems describe scenes in nature, and her poems engage the senses as they describe the sights, smells, and sounds of the Louisiana landscape. Lane’s poems are divided into three sections in I Never Scream—‘‘Metaphors,’’ ‘‘People,’’ and ‘‘Love.’’ Lane was greatly influenced by Anne Sexton’s use of metaphor, and this is reflected in the poems in the first section. The second section is written for or about significant people in Lane’s life. In ‘‘Four Poems for Gordon,’’ Lane describes her experiences as a mother, and the struggle she faces as her son grows older. Like the many other elegies and eulogies in Lane’s work, the poem ‘‘Dying’’ was written for Lane’s late husband, and deals with the desire for life amidst the crushing reality of death. A number of poems in this volume and her later volumes are dedicated to other authors such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Etheridge Knight. The final section of this book deals with issues of love, particularly the madness and pain—as well as the hope and ecstasy—that it brings. Girl at the Window and Elegy for Etheridge, Lane’s most recent works, pick up many of the same themes from her previous volumes. A central focus of all of Lane’s poetry is her subjective experience of everyday life. Many of her poems are autobiographical in nature, and concern Lane’s experiences as a teacher, writer, and editor. In ‘‘While Working towards the Ph.D. Degree,’’ Lane recounts the difficulties of trying to balance a career and a family. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Lane’s work has not generated the same amount of criticism as other contemporary poets, her poems have elicited a number of different critical responses. One area that many critics have noted is Lane’s concern with place, culture, and family. The distance between Lane’s childhood home of Philadelphia and her current home in Louisiana is of particular interest because they are ‘‘points metaphors of mental occurences [sic] within the poet/speaker’’ (‘‘Evocations,’’ Bryan 57). These descriptions of place, culture, and family have been examined primarily for their significance to Louisiana

PINKIE GORDON LANE

349

literature, mainly as a record of Southern place. However, critics have also discussed how her depictions provide an important history of African American life and experience. Along with depictions of place, critics have noted a number of other significant aspects in Lane’s work. Some critics have responded to the lyric quality of Lane’s language, and the vivid images in her poems. Other critics have mentioned Lane’s use of emotion and mysticism, particularly in The Mystic Female. Furthermore, her poems are sometimes called ‘‘quiet poems,’’ taken from her poem by the same name, because they deal with broad issues in a personal, ‘‘quiet’’ way. There is much work left to be done in the study of Lane’s poetry. It would be interesting to explore Lane’s work from a feminist perspective. Also, the process of intertextuality in the poems has not been explored fully. These and other future analyses of the poems could prove profitable in helping the reader better understand and appreciate Lane’s work. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Pinkie Gordon Lane Elegy for Etheridge. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Girl at the Window. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. I Never Scream: New and Selected Poems. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1985. The Mystic Female. Fort Smith, AR: South & West, 1978. Wind Thoughts. Fort Smith, AR: South & West, 1972.

Studies of Pinkie Gordon Lane’s Works Bryan, Violet Harrington. ‘‘Evocations of Place and Culture in the Works of Four Contemporary Black Louisiana Writers: Brenda Osbey, Sybil Kein, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Pinkie Gordon Lane.’’ Louisiana Literature 4.2 (1987): 49–60. ———. ‘‘Interview with Pinkie Gordon Lane.’’ Xavier Review 17.2 (1997): 16–24. Cockram, Pati. ‘‘Graceful, Musical Language: The Island Itself by Roger Fanning and Girl at the Window by Pinkie Gordon Lane.’’ American Book Review 15.1 (1993): 30. Craig, Marilyn B. ‘‘Pinkie Gordon Lane.’’ In Afro-American Poets Since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris-Lopez and Thadious M. Davis, 212–16. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 41. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1985. Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry, Black Speech, and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973. Moore, Lenard D. ‘‘Review: Witnesses: African American Poetry of History, Family, and Place.’’ African American Review 28.2 (1994): 311–15. Newman, Dorothy. ‘‘Review: Lane’s Mystic Female.’’ Callaloo (1979): 153–55. Roland, Lillian D. ‘‘Review.’’ Black American Literature Forum 20.3 (1986): 294–98.

Julia Marek Ponce

NELLA LARSEN (1891–1964)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Nella Larsen, a folklorist, novelist and short fiction writer, was born in 1891 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Peter Walker, was a West Indian. Her mother, Mary Hanson, was Danish. Her parents may or may not have separated after her birth. Her mother may or may not have married a white man named Peter Larsen. Because Nella Larsen was secretive about her family history, it is difficult to know the truth. There are those who say that Walker and Larsen were the same man. Larsen, according to the stories, was Walker passing as white to get a job on the Chicago railroad. Nella Larsen, thus, may have learned early the basic lesson of her classic novels. Larsen spent her childhood in Chicago. While there, she went to public schools. In 1907 she went to Fisk University’s Normal School, staying until 1910. This experience served to separate her from her family of birth through bringing her closer to Afrcian American culture and away from her parents’ rejection. Her parents sent her to Fisk in an effort to further hide her. Larsen had found herself excluded time after time from the family. For example, Larsen’s mother failed to report her to census takers. After finishing Fisk on her own without her parents’ help, she then attended the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, from 1910 to 1912, demonstrating her pull toward her bicultural culture. Upon returning to the United States in 1912, she successfully embarked upon a three-year nursing program. Between 1912 and 1915, she studied nursing in New York. When she graduated, she went to the south to work at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There she became the head nurse at John Andrew Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training School. Larsen, however, was never comfortable in the south although she was most comfortable in African American settings. Therefore, she left Alabama and returned to a nursing position in New York. There she met and married Elmer Imes in 1919. Larson’s marriage to the physicist made social prominence easily available. This prominence enabled her to meet people who were significant in the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, she began working in the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library while she attended Columbia University, majoring in library science. At this time she began to publish her writings, starting with two articles for children. These were articles describing Danish games, which Larsen published in the children’s magazine Brownies’ Book. Larsen wrote a few pieces of fiction under the pen name Allen Semi (Semi is a reversal of Imes). She published two captivating novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and three fine short stories, ‘‘Freedom’’ (1926), ‘‘The Wrong Man’’ (1926), and ‘‘Sanctuary’’ (1930). In 1930, Larsen won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first African American woman to receive it. A reader of Forum magazine accused Larsen of plagiarizing her short story ‘‘Sanctuary’’ from Sheila Kaye-Smith’s ‘‘Mrs. Adis.’’ Even though Larsen proved that

NELLA LARSEN

351

she had written her story prior to Kaye-Smith’s work, she felt rejected—a constant theme in her life to that point. Coupled with her marital problems, this charge helped end her writing career. The trauma of an ugly divorce in 1933 interrupted her career forever. Her mother-inlaw, a light-skinned woman, foreshadowed the breakup through her antipathy toward Larsen. Her husband’s affair, significantly, was with Ethel Gilbert, a white staffer at Fisk University, where he taught. The popular press blamed Larsen’s writing career for the breakup, claiming that her preoccupation with success had prevented her from living up to her marital responsibilities. Supposedly, Larsen attempted suicide in her despair. Whether she did or not, Larsen stopped writing, moved to the Lower East Side, and cut herself off from former contacts. Unfortunately, she never published another novel again. Instead of leading to further triumphs, the Guggenheim marked the end of her public career. She retreated to private life and worked as a nurse in New York until she died in 1964. Larsen was found dead in her apartment. MAJOR WORKS Nella Larsen was a woman ahead of her time. Her writings express her desire to identify with both her ‘‘racial’’ backgrounds and heritages. Additionally, she was aware of what today is called the woman’s issue as well as of social class. Freedom, for her, was indeed indivisible. She brought this passion for justice to her all-too-few fictional writings, demonstrating, as Barbara Smith notes, ‘‘that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers’’ (170). This works in Larsen’s fiction toward a fuller picture of identity, its establishment, maintenance, and meaning. Larsen’s work probes the way in which people’s identity can be lost behind labels, or in the jargon ‘‘signifiers.’’ There is a danger of people being lost behind these labels and being confused with them. The person is lost behind that which signifies her or him. Thus, the idea of ‘‘passing,’’ for example, is one that should not exist. It is in itself demeaning. It is the result of setting one ‘‘racial’’ identity above another, forcing people to deny their full heritage. Larsen interestingly enough uses the term ‘‘passing’’ in a double meaning of both ‘‘passing’’ as white, crossing the color line, and of dying, passing to another world. In both cases, essential identity is submerged; one, by social exigencies, the other, through natural ones. Irene Westover Redfield and Clare Kendry Bellew, the major protagonists of Passing, have to deal with the label ‘‘nigger,’’ which threatens to swallow up their identity and submerge them so that they ‘‘pass’’ from sight. The label, in sum, hides or obliterates the identity. Both Clare and Irene seek recognition and both ‘‘pass’’ to attain it. White racism overdetermines their efforts to achieve recognition. Clare passes by crossing the color barriers and ‘‘passing’’ as white. Irene, however, passes through assimilating and embracing white values, including those concerning feminine beauty. Irene is a member of the black bourgeoisie. Clare, however, comes from an impoverished background. Her father was an alcoholic janitor. Moving in with her white great-aunts does not make matters better for these two women. Larsen further plays on the dark-white theme through having Clare (her name means ‘‘light’’) renamed ‘‘Nig,’’ short for the despised word ‘‘nigger,’’ by her husband. Her

352

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

husband is ignorant of Clare’s background and those of her friends, who also disguise their African American heritage. Thus he is free to proclaim his racism openly, claiming that Clare is getting darker daily and soon will be a ‘‘nigger.’’ He continues his speech stating what he means by that term and makes clear his hatred for African Americans, inadvertently denying his wife’s true identity and individual humanity. Larsen neatly displays the imbalance not only in black-white relationships but also in male-female ones. Irene who seeks to maintain her African American identity while assimilating white bourgeois values is in danger of accepting the white ‘‘truth’’ of African American inferiority. Not only is she in danger of losing her identity, but she is also cooperating through her silence in the furtherance of her own oppression. Irene finds the situation intolerable but is helpless to change it. The dilemma it sets up in her mind leads to her increasing mental deterioration and descent into mental illness. She has no control of the situation. The issue of power is central to Larsen’s fiction. The ability of people to humiliate others through casual words is part of that power. Clare is thrown into deep despair when her husband Bellew greets her with a casual ‘‘Hello, Nig.’’ Irene herself, however, applies racist terms unthinkingly to less advantaged and darker-skinned African Americans, showing her assimilation of racist values. She dehumanizes others through her use of language, losing the individual behind the symbol. She terms other African Americans who are somehow beneath her as ‘‘nigger,’’ ‘‘Nig,’’ ‘‘boy,’’ and so on. She uses the term ‘‘creature’’ as an unreflective derogatory term. Certainly, this internalization of white ‘‘values’’ and their projection on others is a classic example of seeking to separate oneself from a ‘‘spoiled’’ category, a kind of Freudian process in which we ‘‘pass’’ on the blame of our stigma to others. Irene’s major fault is beyond her control. White society ‘‘labels’’ her black. In spite of what she does personally, she will be blamed for the reputed deficiencies of African Americans. To defend herself, she projects her fears onto others and ‘‘blames’’ less-fortunate victims for the situation. Larsen poignantly depicts this situation early in the novel. After Irene faints on the street, a cab driver who takes Irene for white brings her to an exclusive hotel, the Drayton. While there Irene worries that she may be found out as not white and expelled, reminding her of past humiliations. The segregation she faces is as oppressive as the August sun that caused her to faint. Larsen states that Irene became aware of a woman staring at her. At once she feels that she has been found out. Her first thought is that she will be humiliated again. In Passing, Larsen constructs a self-aware novel of passing, one that realizes it is part of a genre that stretches back through black and white literature and would go forward into the future. It includes such writers as Eugene Chesnutt, Fannie Hurst, Mark Twain, and others. Larsen repeats the theme of racial pride but with a deep strain of inevitable tragedy. Those who pass in her novel do not find peace or happiness in doing so, whether that passing is physical or psychological. Although Larsen follows the general model of the passing genre of fiction, she adds a major new element. Thus, Larsen’s novel has the following generic characteristics: (1) a chiaroscuro style, (2) a theme of racial justice, (3) a return home, (4) secrecy and exposure, and (5) the heroine’s death. However, Larsen’s contribution and genius is in putting in a concern over the language and message of the tale. Quicksand, the first of her two novels, depicts a different aspect of loss of identity. It, too, draws on autobiographical details, detailing the quest for racial and sexual identity

NELLA LARSEN

353

as part of the construction of an overall identity. Helga Crane, the main character, finds herself trapped in the restrictions and necessities of motherhood. Moreover, Helga is illegitimate and has a white and an African American parent. There is no place for her in post–Civil War American society. Larsen adds to the problem of sex, race, women’s place in society, and the issue of social class. The final paragraph of the book brings many of Larsen’s themes together, especially sex, race, and class: It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and cities, about clothes and books, about the sweet mingled smell of Houbigant and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophisticated tuneless music. It was so hard to think out a feasible way of retrieving all these agreeable, desired things. Just then. Later. When she got up. By and by. She must rest. Get strong. Sleep. Then, afterward, she could work out some arrangement. So she dozed and dreamed in snatches of sleeping and waking, letting time run on. Away. AND HARDLY had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child.

Larsen recounts the psychological world of a middle-class black woman. She avoids a materialistic economic explanation for Helga’s problems. Helga is not simply a symbol of a racist victim. She is a well-rounded individual who has some responsibility for her problems. She is a seductress. She is aggressive in pursuing her own goals. The novel is not simply one of victimization and oppression. These certainly are elements of the story, of Helga’s reality. However, Larsen universalizes Helga’s plight through her careful creation of an individual who is deeper than stereotypes can make her. These aspects of Helga’s personality, her seductiveness and aggressiveness, implicate her in her own fate and place this masterpiece in the realm of tragedy and not melodrama. CRITICAL RECEPTION Nella Larsen is considered one of the more sophisticated authors of the Harlem Renaissance. Her novels Quicksand and Passing have become part of the literary canon in many universities. There have been numerous discussions of her novels and to a lesser extent short stories over the years. As the feminist movement and sensibility emerged, the depth of Larsen’s perception as well as her influence became better appreciated. Even in her lifetime, however, Larsen earned great praise. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship, earned critical praise, and was influential in the Harlem Renaissance movement. Larsen’s Quicksand received better reviews than Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. Larsen also won a Harmon Award in 1928. Unfortunately, Nella Larsen’s treatment of sexuality was rejected at the time by not only white editors but also the NAACP and black women social leaders. These black leaders felt that her openness jeopardized the cause of racial advance and played to stereotypes concerning black sexual license. Larsen’s last three novels were never published. The publisher’s readers found merit in Mirage. However, Larsen chose not to rewrite them and never published another thing. So far no manuscripts of these works have come to light so that modern readers may judge for themselves. More recent commentators have noted how far in advance her combination of gender, class, and race actually was. She advocated an understanding of the intertwining

354

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

of these issues and an understanding of the importance of the individual. Her work was subtle and sophisticated. Her characters were well-rounded, in-depth individuals, not representatives of personal stands. Neither were they stereotypes. Their complexities gave them humanity. Larsen’s oeuvre was small, but it was significant and influential. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Nella Larsen The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand and the Short Stories, edited by Marita Golden. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. ‘‘Freedom’’ (1926). In The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passsing, Quicksand and the Stories. Ed. Charles Larson. New York: Anchor, 2001. Passing. New York: Penguin Classics, 1929. Quicksand and Passing (reprint). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. ‘‘Sanctuary’’ (1930). In The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passsing, Quicksand and the Stories. Ed. Charles Larson. New York: Anchor, 2001. ‘‘The Wrong Man’’ (1926). In The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passsing, Quicksand and the Stories. Ed. Charles Larson. New York: Anchor, 2001.

Studies of Nella Larsen’s Works Bennett, Juda. The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Larson, Charles. An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen. New York: Anchor, 1992. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Mille, Erica M., and Erick Miller. The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nella Larsen. New York: Garland, 1999. Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Other Works Smith, Barbara. Toward a Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Out and Out Books, 1981.

Frank A. Salamone

KRISTIN HUNTER LATTANY (1931– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Kristin Hunter Lattany, a distinctive voice in American literature, was born on September 12, 1931, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents, George and Mabel Eggleston, were professionally employed at a time when legal discrimination was common in the United States. Despite these challenges, both parents managed dual careers, George as a school principal and army colonel, and Mary as a pharmacist and schoolteacher. The influences of Lattany’s family and hometown are evident in her fiction, particularly in her depiction of educated African American characters and her use of the regions around Philadelphia and western New Jersey as settings. Lattany began her writing career as a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier at age fourteen. A few years later, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a degree in education. She married Joseph Hunter in 1952 and worked as an elementary schoolteacher and an advertising writer. In the early 1960s, Lattany gained a foothold in the academic and literary worlds that she would sustain for four decades. She earned a research assistantship at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961, where she would later serve for twenty-three years as an English professor. Her early work was published under the name Kristin Hunter, including her first novel, God Bless the Child. Two more published novels would follow before the end of the 1960s. She married John Lattany in 1968, and completed eleven full-length works of adult and adolescent fiction by 2003. MAJOR WORKS In her career as a novelist, Kristin Hunter Lattany has developed a distinctive voice in late twentieth and early twenty-first century American literature. Her work is topical, addressing political and cultural issues that have arisen in the United States since the civil rights movement, especially inequalities and miscommunication in American race relations. Through effective characterization, Lattany explores the promising and problematic traits characters inherit from family, contradiction and compromise in work life, and the ways that communities form among small circles of people for personal growth or political activism. Stylistically, Lattany’s use of realism makes her work accessible to diverse audiences—academic, popular, adolescent, and adult. Lattany’s first novel, God Bless the Child (1964), was a critical and popular success. The novel provides a hard look at issues in the inner cities of the 1960s, including a lack of jobs and adequate housing, family instability, and ethnic tensions between white business owners and African American employees and customers. The novel’s mood is shaped by the specter of ‘‘The Man,’’ a symbolic representation of a white power structure that benefited from rackets such as the heroin trade and ‘‘the numbers.’’ The institutional power of ‘‘the man’’ is projected in the novel by powerful underlings such as

356

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Benny, an Italian-American restaurant owner who exerts direct control over numbers runners, pimps, and other crime figures. The protagonist of God Bless the Child is Rosie Fleming, a young African American woman whose efforts to become wealthy at any cost lead to unforeseen consequences. In her formative years, Rosie witnesses contrasting strategies for survival among the most important women in her life, her mother and her grandmother. Her mother, Queenie, earns enough in her work as a hairdresser to keep the rent paid on a roach-infested apartment and to insure the family’s basic survival, but she also gives away money to a womanizing boyfriend and is an alcoholic. Ironically, Queenie’s boyfriend is known to Rosie at first as ‘‘Uncle Roscoe,’’ though there are no illusions that he or previous boyfriends were ever Rosie’s real uncle. The second powerful parental figure in the novel is Rosie’s grandmother, Lourinda Baxter Huggs. Lourinda works for years in a white family household. She is convinced that her employers embody the strength of character and good taste that would make appropriate models for African Americans to follow. Readers, however, are invited to consider the futility of pursuing an image of success based strictly on material possessions and requiring the repudiation of one’s familiar notions of home. Two years later Lattany published her second novel, The Landlord. In this novel a young Jewish man of inherited means, Elgar Enders, purchases an inner city apartment building but is unable initially to collect rent from his tenants. Later, he moves into one of the apartments and becomes friendly, even intimate, with some of the tenants, with comic results. Audience response to the novel was positive and sustained enough to support production of a film version in 1970 starring Pearl Bailey, Beau Bridges, and Lee Grant. The novel illustrates Lattany’s ability to write sympathetically about characters of various ethnicities. Lattany’s third novel of the 1960s, The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou (1968), was the first of several texts she wrote for adolescent readers in the vein of other socially conscious young adult fiction such as Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Numbers Runner (1970), Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love (1972), and Alice Childress’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973). The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou depicts the adolescence of Louretta Hawkins, who is living in the inner city with a large, multigenerational, single-parent family. The story revolves around Louretta, her family, and several young men from her neighborhood who are disillusioned by the atmosphere of violence and economic stagnation in the inner city. However, prospects change for everyone when Louretta convinces her ambitious brother William to rent an abandoned church. The space allows her brother to pursue his dream of a printing business, while the teenagers gain a place to rehearse their singing with hopes of a music career. The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou seems to embody the author’s disillusionment and optimism about the role of identity movements in improving the lives of African Americans, a topic she returns to repeatedly in her later work. In an interview published in Black Women Writers at Work (1983), Lattany states that ‘‘as Americans, we believe that all problems can be solved, that all questions have answers’’ (Tate 84), and these assumptions are implicit in social movements based on race and gender identity. Lattany then weighs the gains and losses of the civil rights and feminist movements. She suggests that ‘‘the women’s movement has eclipsed many black concerns and diluted black gains’’ (Tate 80), and does not identify strongly with an African American female standpoint as a particular way of writing. Instead, she marvels at ‘‘the enormous and varied adaptations of black people to the distorting, terrifying restrictions of society’’ (84).

KRISTIN HUNTER LATTANY

357

After the 1960s, Lattany continued to publish adult fiction and adolescent literature. Two collections of adolescent short fiction appeared in the early 1970s, Boss Cat (1971) and Guest in the Promised Land (1973), followed by The Survivors (1975), a novel with an adult-child friendship plot that may also appeal to young readers. Her next major work was The Lakestown Rebellion (1978), a treatment of African American community life and collective action to save an all–African American town from a misdirected urban renewal project. Related themes were raised earlier in The Landlord, but Lattany gives these themes a more earnest treatment in this novel, with Lakestown modeled after the real-life town of Lawnside, New Jersey. The reputation of the novel was strong enough that it was republished in 2003 by Coffee House Press, in a limited reissue series of key texts from the Black Arts Movement. Since the 1970s, Lattany has published four novels, Lou in the Limelight (1981), a sequel to The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou, Kinfolks (1996), Do Unto Others (2000), and Breaking Away (2003). Among these, Lou in the Limelight responded to popular demand for a continuation of the story of Louretta and her compatriots. Lattany returns to adult themes in her last three texts with reflective views of the social changes that were set in motion during her early adulthood. Kinfolks tells the story of Patrice Barber and Cherry Hopkins, both parents and close friends who must come to terms with their histories of growing up in the 1960s in order to advise their children on their emerging sexualities and other matters of identity and behavior. Do Unto Others raises the subject of African American relationships with Africa, in terms of both ancestry and the present. The protagonist, Zena Lawson, becomes the latest in a list of memorable African American female characters in Lattany’s fiction, and the novel takes a critical look at the Afrocentricity movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Breaking Away, Lattany’s most recent novel, blends the methods of realism and historical fiction to examine cultural debates in higher education. The protagonist is Bethesda Barnes, an African American professor in an English department at a New Jersey university. She is an untenured professor who does not participate actively in department politics, but she is confident in her teaching skills. The novel’s primary conflict surrounds Dr. Barnes’s response when several black female students report to her that they have been verbally harassed by a group of white students. The harassment occurred around midnight, when the students were practicing for a step show. Dr. Barnes puts aside her own skepticism about African American sororities and the artistic legitimacy of step shows in order to support and advise the students. However, internal conflicts prove difficult to resolve, especially her personal struggles after the death of her father, instability in her romantic life, and her department’s opposition to her support for the students. Once again, the novel suggests that the mass activism of the 1960s did not resolve the dilemmas that most African Americans face in everyday life, even if they are privileged enough to attend or even teach at an elite university. CRITICAL RECEPTION Only a small number of critical studies of Lattany’s fiction have been published to date. The dearth of criticism may be attributable to Lattany’s realist aesthetics. While Lattany has been effective as a satirist, she does not engage in formal experiments as have Ishmael Reed or Percival Everett, and her historical writing bears little resemblance stylistically to the celebrated recent authors of that genre—Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Sherley Anne Williams, for instance. Thus, while African American realist writers of

358

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

significant force and power remain a part of the literary landscape (Terry McMillan and Bebe Moore Campbell are examples), Lattany’s recent texts have not benefited from widespread national review or careful critical analysis by established scholars. Of the published commentary that is currently available, Gerald Early’s ‘‘Working Girl Blues: Mothers, Daughters, and the Image of Billy Holiday in Kristin Hunter’s God Bless the Child’’ is most effective at placing Hunter’s work within a larger context of African American aesthetics, although the article examines only Lattany’s first novel. In his analysis, Early argues that the thematic content of Billie Holiday’s song provides a better starting point for understanding Lattany’s text than do the naturalist novels of the early twentieth century by Theodore Drieser, an author who is often mentioned as a source point for Lattany’s early work. Early compares the characterization of Rosie Fleming in the text to the tragic life of Billie Holiday, whose rise from poverty to wealth and celebrity also provided no escape from oppression. In Early’s words, Rosie ‘‘can only be driven mad by the horror of it all, much as Billie Holiday was driven to drugs, to drink, and finally to inertia as she became overwhelmed by the horror of American culture’s utopian vision of bourgeois success’’ (438). Reviews from her first decade of writing also help to explain Lattany’s unique vision and qualities and may also help explain why critics have been slow to take up her work. From that period, noted editor Abraham Chapman provides perhaps the most balanced and thoughtful assessment of her work. In his review of The Landlord, Chapman criticizes the ‘‘artistic and structural flaws’’ of the novel, especially Elgar’s psychologist Borden, whose conversations with Elgar are a too-convenient device for character development, and Chapman also finds elements of the novel’s resolution unrealistic. However, Chapman recognizes Lattany’s skill in moving away from ideological dogma while effectively using a familiar set of realist tools: chronological time, sympathetic characters, and clear displays of causes and effects within the plot. As a capstone assessment, Chapman writes that ‘‘Kristin Hunter, whose first novel was God Bless the Child, here negates any idea that all American Negro writing is didactic and dead earnest and bitter and full of the mystique of race; she explodes the stereotype of the so-called ‘Negro Novel’’’ (45). Reviewing The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou, Zena Sutherland writes in memorable terms that might apply to the fiction of Lattany’s later years as well. Sutherland complements the novel’s depiction of ‘‘the maturing of a young girl who learns to appreciate her racial heritage during those difficult years when self-acceptance and self-identity are problems for all adolescents. This is indeed a book for our times’’ (37). In her larger body of fiction, Lattany implies that the process of maturing and appreciating one’s racial heritage extends into middle age, and is not confined to the struggles faced by Louretta Hawkins, Rosie Fleming, or the young people of the inner city. Instead, Lattany suggests imaginative ways that Americans of all races might examine their relationships to the legacy of racial division that continues into the twenty-first century, even if solutions to these dilemmas remain elusive. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Kristin Hunter Lattany Boss Cat. New York: Avon Books, 1971. Breaking Away. New York: Ballantine/One World, 2003. Do Unto Others. New York: One World/Ballantine, 2000.

KRISTIN HUNTER LATTANY

359

God Bless the Child. New York: Bantam, 1964. Guest in the Promised Land. New York: Scribner, 1973. Kinfolks. New York: Ballantine, 1996. The Lakestown Rebellion. New York: Scribner, 1978. Reprint, Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2003. The Landlord. New York: Scribner, 1966. Lou in the Limelight. New York: Scribner, 1981. The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou. New York: Scribner, 1968. The Survivors. New York: Scribner, 1975.

Studies of Kristin Hunter Lattany’s Works Ballantine Reader’s Circle and Random House, Inc. Kinfolks. Reading Group Guide and Interview with Kristin Lattany. http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/kinfolks-author.asp (accessed May 1, 2005). Bogart, Gary. ‘‘Kristin Hunter Lattany.’’ Wilson Library Bulletin 50.2 (October 1975): 115ff. Brooks, Gwendolyn. ‘‘Tenant Problem: A Review of The Landlord by Kristin Hunter Lattany.’’ Washington Post, May 8, 1966, 14. Buckmaster, Henrietta. Rev. of God Bless the Child. Christian Science Monitor, September 10, 1964, 7. Chapman, Abraham. ‘‘White Invisible Man.’’ Rev. of The Landlord. Saturday Review 49.20 (May 14, 1966): 45. Davis, Thadious, and Trudier Harris. Dictionary of Literary Biography (African-American Fiction Writers after 1945), vol. 33. Detroit: Gale Research Group, 1984. Early, Gerald. ‘‘Working Girl Blues: Mothers, Daughters and the Image of Billie Holiday in Kristin Hunter’sGodBlesstheChild.’’BlackAmericanLiteratureForum20.4(Winter1986):423–42. Heins, Paul. Horn Book Magazine 49 (August 1973): 386. Johnson, Becky. Voices of Youth Advocates 4.6 (February 1982): 33. Kaye, Marilyn. New York Times Book Review, February 21, 1982, 35. Kirkus Review 46.6 (March 15, 1987): 325. Nelson, Emmanual, ed. Contemporary African-American Novelists: A Bio-Biographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Saal, Rollen. ‘‘What Made Rosie Run?’’ Rev. of God Bless the Child by Kristin Hunter Lattany. New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1964, 36. Schraufnagel, Noel. ‘‘Kristin Hunter.’’ Salem Press. MagillOnLiterature Plus. Ebscohost Research Databases/Academic Search Elite (accessed April 18, 2005). Stanton, Junious. ‘‘Saving a Black Haven.’’ Rev. of Lakestown Rebellion, reprint edition. Black Issues Book Review 5.4 ( July/August 2003): 50–51. Sutherland, Zena. Saturday Review 51 (October 19, 1968): 37. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Zaleski, Jeff. ‘‘Breaking Away’’ (review). Publishers Weekly 250.9 (March 3, 2003): 51.

David M. Jones

ANDREA LEE (1953– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born in Philadelphia in 1953, fiction and travel writer, Andrea Lee spent most of her childhood in a middle-class suburb of the city. Reflecting on her childhood, Lee has written that she was part of ‘‘an affluent, extremely bookish, extremely middle-class Afro-American family, in which the adults, at least, would have been horrified to hear themselves called Afro-Americans’’ (‘‘Double Lives’’ 60). Though her parents were actively involved in the civil rights movement, Lee describes them as consummate outsiders, who felt apart ‘‘from the poorer, blacker masses with whom they were declaring solidarity’’ (60–61) while distrusting white, mainstream America. Consequently, Lee and her two brothers ‘‘grew adept at assimilation without absorption, at double lives . . . we went everywhere and belonged nowhere’’ (61). Lee obtained a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English from Harvard University. While pursuing her master’s degree, she accompanied her husband, a doctoral student in Russian history, to the Soviet Union in 1978. Russian Journal, published in 1981, was the result of Lee’s ten-month Russian sojourn. It was nominated for the American Book Award for General Nonfiction in 1981, and garnered the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1984. Lee published the bildungsroman Sarah Phillips in 1984, followed by a short-story anthology, Interesting Women, in 2002. Throughout her writing career Lee has worked as a staff writer for the New Yorker, later becoming an occasional contributor. Lee now lives in Turin, Italy, with her Italian spouse and son.

MAJOR WORKS Lee published Russian Journal in 1981, after living in Russia for ten months. Predating the glasnost and perestroika era, Russian Journal provides an intriguing glimpse into the mechanisms of Soviet Russia. The work comprises a series of vignettes centered around a cast of exotic young students and artists the author encounters or befriends. This collection succeeds in capturing a particular moment in USSR history when, underneath the surface of seeming compliance with an authoritarian regime, the society’s foundations are crumbling. With rich description, Lee evokes a sense of place—be it in her descriptions of a Leningrad sunset or the Moscow metro, ‘‘heavy with the odors of sharp tobacco, sausage, and perspiring human flesh’’ (Russian Journal 7), or the ancient babushki sweeping streets in their black dresses and shawls. Through her writing, the imagined Russia of her childhood—that ‘‘mysterious counterweight to the known world of America’’ (Russian Journal 4)—takes on a new and animated form as Lee discovers some of what lies beneath the surface of ‘‘official’’ metanarratives of Russian life.

ANDREA LEE

361

In 1984 Lee published Sarah Phillips, a collection of interlinked short stories that charts an African American girl’s coming-of-age between 1963 and 1974. Though initially written separately, the stories form a seamless narrative arch, which excavates the intersections of race, gender, and class in the United States and Paris, France. Through Sarah Phillip’s first-person narrative, Lee sketches a complex picture of African American racial identity, as it is mediated by class, gender, and location. Firmly ensconced in a middle-class milieu, which includes private boarding schools and summer vacations in Europe, Sarah emerges from adolescence ‘‘tall and lanky and light-skinned, quite pretty in a nervous sort of way; . . . with an unfocused snobbery, vague literary aspirations, and a lively appetite for white boys’’ (Sarah Phillips 4). Lee explores the tensions generated when this young, African American female subject enters the ostensibly racially integrated world that her parents’ generation had fought for during the civil rights movement; and the alienation Sarah feels from members of her own race. Sarah Phillips’s class privilege initially buffers her against racism in the United States; yet this protection leaves her vulnerable when she encounters racism and sexism as a young adult. When her French lover taunts her for being the product of the rape of an Irishwoman by ‘‘a jazz musician as big and black as King Kong, with sexual equipment to match’’ (Sarah Phillips 11), Sarah does not know how to respond, and misreads his comment as ‘‘part of our special brand of humor’’ (Sarah Phillips 12). Sarah’s ambivalence toward racism and sexism, and her lack of awareness of her own subjugation as an African American woman becomes a motif throughout the novel. In Interesting Women (2002), Lee continues the theme of exploring African American female subjectivity, this time using a wide array of characters and international settings for her short stories. If Lee has any agenda beyond the aesthetic, it is disrupting stereotypical notions of what it means to be black, American, and a woman. In Interesting Women the protagonists’ racial identities are not always made explicit. Those who are African American exist in such diverse contexts and locations that there is very little—except perhaps their upper-middle-class position—that marks them as coming from the same community. As in Sarah Phillips, most of Lee’s African American protagonists seemingly fail to recognize or interrogate their privilege within a world of white domination. Often, these women exist in troubled relation to indigenous African American women in the locales they visit as holidaymakers. Lee shows how the privileged African American woman’s identity is shored up through her othering of non-U.S., working-class black women living in places like Madagascar and the Honduras. Ultimately, Lee’s project is one of deconstructing the idea of a unitary, African American female subject, and, by extension, the idea that an African American woman writer’s primary literary preoccupation should be issues of race. CRITICAL RECEPTION Most criticism of Lee’s work centers around Sarah Phillips. Valerie Smith and Donald Gibson note that the text often produces discomfiture in their students. Smith cites Lee’s transgression of the conventional bounds of what is considered ‘‘black women’s writing’’ as one source of this discomfit. Mary Helen Washington’s 1985 review of Sarah Phillips positions the novel within a tradition of African American novelists such as Nella Larsen and James Weldon Johnson, who created privileged black narrators struggling with identity while moving between white and African American worlds. However, Sarah differs from these authors’

362

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

protagonists in that she fails to become the ‘‘perceptive narrator’’ who understands the tensions generated between these two worlds, and who interrogates the ways in which her social status mitigates the impact of racism. Sarah Phillips, argues Washington, initially grapples with issues of racial identity and privilege, but by the middle of the novel her voice shifts from a ‘‘privileged kid’’ to that of ‘‘the privileged narrator, no longer willing to struggle over issues of race and class, unable to bear the ‘alarming knowledge’ that these issues must reveal’’ (Washington 3). Other critics have praised Sarah Phillips for illuminating the complexity and multiplicity of African American identity and experience. Gibson argues that there is a need to engage with this text ‘‘because of what it reveals about the intersection of class values with those of color and race’’ (Gibson 164). Smith concurs, asserting that Sarah’s silence in the face of racism, and her seeming complicity with those who taunt her, signifies Lee’s problematizing of what it means to be a resisting, African American subject in postintegration America. Since racism has shifted to manifest itself more subtly after the civil rights movement, argues Smith, the nature of resistance has changed too, so that black subjects have a wider range of responses from which to choose. Sometimes, responses to racism can include not responding at all. Don Enomoto describes Sarah Phillips as a text that defies theoretical classification, thus inhabiting the liminal space between theory and tradition. For Enomoto, Lee’s transgressive and boundary-crossing writing ‘‘delineates the limitations of modernism, postmodernism, and traditional black criticism, and suggests that our hope lies in the ability to combine the best aspect of each perspective’’ (Enomoto 215). However, as Adrienne McCormick points out, Enomoto’s position does not allow for Lee’s work to be situated as postmodernism within an African American literary tradition (emphasis hers). Locating Lee’s work at this intersection may be the closest we can come to situating an oeuvre that has thus far defied all literary categorization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Andrea Lee ‘‘Double Lives.’’ In They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing, edited by William Zinsser, 57–74. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991. Interesting Women: Stories. New York: Random House, 2002. Russian Journal. New York: Random House, 1981. Sarah Phillips (reprint). Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.

Studies of Andrea Lee’s Works Enomoto, Don. ‘‘Irreconcilable Differences: ‘Creative Destruction’ and the Fashioning of a Self in Sarah Phillips.’’ MELUS 24.1 (Spring 1999): 209–34. Gibson, Donald B. ‘‘Review: Andrea Lee. Sarah Phillips.’’ African American Review 29.1 (1995): 164–66. Hogue, W. Lawrence. ‘‘The Limits of Modernity: Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips.’’ MELUS 19.4 (Winter 1994): 75–90. King, Nicole. ‘‘‘You Think Like You White’: Questioning Race and Racial Community through the Lens of Middle-Class Desire(s).’’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35.2/3 (Spring/Summer 2002): 211–31.

ANDREA LEE

363

McCormick, Adrienne. ‘‘Is This Resistance? African-American Postmodernism in Sarah Phillips.’’ Callaloo 27.3 (2004): 808–28. Smith, Valerie. ‘‘Foreword.’’ In Sarah Phillips, edited by Andrea Lee, ix–xxi. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993. Washington, Mary Helen. ‘‘Young, Gifted and Black.’’ Women’s Review of Books II.6 (March 1985): 3–4.

Barbara Boswell

HELEN ELAINE LEE (1959– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born in Detroit, Michigan, novelist Helen Elaine Lee was reared by a mother who was a college professor of comparative literature, Dorothy Lee, and an attorney, George Lee. Their presence instilled in her a love of, respect for, and fascination with, books and a facility with language. Thus, her becoming a writer seemed a natural outgrowth of the values passed to her during her early years. Following in the footsteps of her father, she became a Harvard-trained lawyer, and earned the J.D. degree in 1985. She supported herself through practicing law full time in Washington, D.C., until she could sustain herself financially as a writer. Her first book, The Serpent’s Gift, was warmly received by her audience. After her success as a writer, Lee secured a professorship in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MAJOR WORKS Lee’s first successful novel, The Serpent’s Gift (1994), is set in a small Midwestern town, Black Oak, in 1910. Inspired by her own close-knit family, it explores love and the survival techniques that African American families used to keep families intact during significant historical eras, including the Depression, the Great Migration, Jim Crow, World War II, and the civil rights movement. Early in the story, Eula Smalls, a victim of domestic violence, finds refuge in the home of the Staples family. She moves in with her children, LaRue and Vesta, after her husband dies accidentally. Lee deftly captures the African American folk and storytelling tradition through make-believe characters that LaRue invents to escape the pain of his family’s past. Confronted with color prejudice and haunted by the stigma of her father’s death, Vesta finds comfort in the sisterly relationship with Ouida Staples and later in rearing the child left behind by Ruby Staples’s premature death. After a brief failed marriage and several love affairs, Ouida finds true love with a woman, reflecting Lee’s own lesbianism. The book attunes the reader to the possibility of humanity’s advancing to new beginnings linked to the symbolism of the snake’s rebirth. Lee’s second novel, Water Marked (1999), continues the emphasis on family history. The story focuses on estranged sisters, Sunday and Delta Owens, who try to reconcile their past and gain a better understanding of themselves by becoming better acquainted with their father, Mercury, whom they believed was deceased. For most of their lives, the sisters were raised by their mother and grandmother. Although the two matrons were good providers, they failed to give the sisters a sense of their family’s heritage. It is through Mercury, who had faked his own suicide and disappeared when their mother was pregnant with Sunday, that they are able to acquire knowledge of their familial legacy. As a writer, Lee has Sunday and Delta reconstruct their past through swapping stories, remembering childhood incidents, and collecting oral histories from community members.

HELEN ELAINE LEE

365

CRITICAL RECEPTION Though Lee has been recognized as a talented writer, her works have not amassed volumes of critical studies. As a testament to her literary skill, her first novel won a Black Caucus of the American Library Association First Novel Award (1995). The criticism, mostly editorial reviews, published on The Serpent’s Gift is largely favorable. No fulllength books or lengthy critical treatises exist. One reviewer regards her strength as being lyrical and richly textured and comments that her hurried pace in telling the story shortchanges plot and character along the way (Kirkus Reviews, 166). Other critics agree that the character LaRue’s storytelling emerges as a vibrant facet of the story, fashioned after the African and African American oral traditions of Anansi the spider and Br’er Rabbit. Others, however, think his stories become less charming as they progress. One admiring critic praises her ability to seduce her readers with her use of the color blue and to weave together family stories with exquisite lyricism (Davis). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Helen Elaine Lee The Serpent’s Gift. New York: Scribner, 1994. Water Marked. New York: Scribner, 1999.

Studies of Helen Elaine Lee’s Works Davis, Sandra D. ‘‘The Storyteller’s Gift.’’ Detroit Free Press (1994): E1, E3. Review of Serpent’s Gift. Kirkus Reviews. February 15, 1994: 166. Rowell, Charles. ‘‘An Interview with Helen Elaine Lee.’’ Callaloo 23.1 (2000): 139–50. Woods, Paula L. ‘‘Tell Your Friends.’’ Los Angeles Times Book Review (1994): 3, 13.

Lena Marie Ampadu

JARENA LEE (1783—?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Jarena Lee, itinerant minister and author, was born in 1783 to a free African American family at Cape May, New Jersey. In 1804, at age twenty-one, Lee attended a religious meeting of an itinerant Presbyterian missionary whose sermon, Lee claimed, challenged her to change from her sinful ways and seek a relationship with God. Shortly after her conversion to Christianity, Lee began attending the religious services of a Methodist Episcopal church in Philadelphia. In her quest to be used by God, Lee sought to attain sanctification, which she believed would help her end a lifelong struggle with selfish ambitions and set her apart as a Christian worker. Shortly thereafter, following an intense session in prayer, Lee recorded, ‘‘That very instant, as if lightning had darted through me, I sprang to my feet, and cried, ‘The Lord has sanctified my soul!’’’ (Religious Experience, 13). In 1809, Lee heard a divine voice telling her to ‘‘Go preach the Gospel,’’ which confirmed her ‘‘call’’ to ministry. Lee met with Richard Allen, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, to discuss her desire to preach and serve as a licensed minister. Allen’s response was less than enthusiastic declaring the Church Discipline ‘‘knew nothing at all about it—that it did not call for women preachers.’’ Lee would not let the response of Bishop Allen deter her future work. In 1811, Lee married the minister of a small AME Church outside Philadelphia. Six years later, Lee returned to Philadelphia following the deaths of her husband and four of her six children. In 1818 or 1819, while in the presence of Bishop Allen at an AME service, Lee rose to her feet to offer an exhortation on the sermon. Upon hearing her words, Allen rescinded his earlier concerns, giving Lee permission to hold meetings in her home, to comment on public sermons, and to travel as an itinerant speaker. Lee traveled thousands of miles throughout the United States and spoke in venues from Upstate New York to Maryland to Ohio. Lee’s itinerancy took her into the camp meetings, homes, and churches of Quaker, Presbyterian, and Baptist adherents. During her preaching tours Lee spoke at a number of multiracial church gatherings, including religious meetings in Maryland with slaveholders in attendance. In 1836 Lee published her spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee. In 1849, Lee edited and published a second version of her autobiography, Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, which included comments on the social and religious concerns of her day. No official documentation exists indicating the year or location of her death. MAJOR WORKS Jarena Lee sold copies of both versions of her spiritual autobiography at camp meetings, churches, and revivals. For Lee, the publications provided literary evidence of

JARENA LEE

367

her ‘‘calling’’ by God and documented her religious experiences including her conversion to Christianity and subsequent spiritual empowerment through sanctification. An example of her work reveals a sense of relief following her conversion to Christianity: ‘‘Great was the ecstacy [sic] of my mind, for I felt that not only the sin of malice was pardoned, but all other sins were swept away together. That day was the first when my heart had believed, and my tongue had made confession unto salvation’’ (Religious Experience, 4). Lee’s text provides a spiritual narrative of the life and journey of an African American woman in antebellum America. Lee’s work shows how racism and sexism pervaded American religious culture as she dealt with inequity not only as an African American but also as a woman who desired authorization to speak for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Lee worked on the periphery of an American environment that discriminated her not only because she was an African American in a slaveholding country but also because she was a woman in a male-dominated ecclesiastical system. Lee’s autobiography suggests the itinerant did not allow these conditions to keep her out of the public sphere of influence. Lee believed God gave her authority to speak, to leave her children in the hands of others during her travels, and to write about her life and freedom found as a Christian African American woman. These indications of divine guidance provoked her to travel thousands of miles throughout the United States and to write her experiences in autobiographical form for the benefit of future generations. CRITICAL RECEPTION Scholars of Jarena Lee note that her writings constitute early examples of African American spiritual autobiography. The narrative style of Lee emphasizes religious themes of Christian conversion, sanctification, and the self-described journeys of a black itinerant exhorter. In her autobiography, Lee intended to evoke a response from readers that would ‘‘change the hearts of the men and women’’ toward an ‘‘escape from sinfulness’’ resulting in ‘‘the achievement of salvation’’ (McKay 140–41). The works of Jarena Lee convey concern and victory over sexism and racism in antebellum America. Scholars note the difficulties experienced by Lee as a woman who desired permission to speak publicly within her own African Methodist Episcopal Church. Discriminated against because of her gender, Lee found solace that God, and not the all-male leadership of the AME Church, chose to exhort her to write her own story. Lee cherished the African American community within the AME tradition yet branched out and held revivals for gatherings of men and women, both black and white. Her willingness to travel into Maryland, a slave state, demonstrated her social and religious convictions to preach to slave owners even at the possible expense of her own personal safety. Through her writings Jarena Lee established her identity as a confident African American woman and informed readers of her personal feelings of accomplishment and self-respect. In her autobiography Lee expressed notions of liberty and Christian freedom that, for today’s reader, as Frances Smith Foster suggests, ‘‘can enrich our concepts of history and literature and thus of our notions of selfhood’’ (Niether Auction Block Nor Pedestal, 129).

368

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Jarena Lee The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. Philadelphia: Printed and Published for the Author, 1836. Reprint, Nashville: African Methodist Episcopal Church Sunday School Union/Legacy Publishing, 1991. Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, Revised and Corrected from the Original Manuscript Written by Herself. Philadelphia: Published for the Author, 1849.

Studies of Jarena Lee’s Works Andrews, William, ed. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Dodson, Jualynne. ‘‘Nineteenth-Century A.M.E. Preaching Women.’’ In Women in New Worlds, edited by Hilah F. Thomas and Rosemary Skinner Keller, 276–89. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981. Foster, Frances Smith. ‘‘Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.’’ In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 25–38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. ———. ‘‘Neither Auction Block Nor Pedestal: ‘The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady.’’’ In The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Domna C. Stanton, 126–30. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Spiritual Narratives. With an introduction by Sue E. Houchins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. McKay, Nellie Y. ‘‘Nineteenth-Century Black Women’s Spiritual Autobiographies: Religious Faith and Self-Empowerment.’’ In Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, edited by The Personal Narratives Group, 139–54. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Peterson, Carla L. ‘‘Doers of the Word’’: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Christopher J. Anderson

AUDRE GERALDINE LORDE (1934–1992)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Audre Geraldine Lorde, a prolific writer, poet, teacher, and activist, was born on February 18, 1934, in New York City as the youngest daughter of Frederic Byron and Linda Belmar Lorde, who immigrated from Grenade in the West Indies and settled in Harlem during the Depression. In her autobiographical work Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Lorde reveals her precocious awareness of self-renaming at the age of four: ‘‘I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey . . . I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE . . .’’ (24). Later on, she took the African name Gambda Adisa, meaning ‘‘warrior: she who makes her meaning clear,’’ and also used the pseudonym Rey Domini. In 1990, Lorde self-assuredly stated that ‘‘I am a Black lesbian feminist warrior poet mother and I am still making trouble.’’ With a powerful, angry voice, she critically redefined and embraced human differences as sources of power (Sister Outsider 115). Indeed, her work and life expands, deepens, and enriches our understanding of relationships between self and others in terms of racial, gender, sexual, class, and cultural differences. Lorde was tongue-tied and nearsighted to the degree that doctors declared her legally blind. At the age of four, her mother, Linda, taught her to talk, read, and write. In Zami, Lorde recounts that as a little girl she was often spat upon on the street, and her mother, whom she remembered as a very powerful woman, remained silent about such humiliation and racial hatred. She went to Catholic grammar schools such as St. Mark’s School where she faced a patronizing racism and St. Catherine’s School where, as the first black student, she experienced hostile racist treatments. In addition, while her mother was light enough to pass for white, Lorde was darker skinned than her sisters, Phyllis and Helen. Lorde painfully sensed her light-skinned mother’s internalized racism toward the darker skinned. At the age of twelve or thirteen, she began to write poems to express her feelings: ‘‘I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information’’ (Sister Outsider 82). She attended Hunt High School, where she befriended others who were outcast poets called ‘‘the sisterhood of rebels.’’ When she was fifteen, her first poem appeared in Seventeen magazine. The teenaged Lorde came to rebel at her strict parents. Two weeks after graduating from high school, she moved out of her parents’ home. In order to support herself, she worked at various jobs, including a nurses’ aide, medical clerk, factory worker, and social worker, and went through painful experiences of abortion, loneliness, isolation, and hunger. Lorde attended Hunter College in New York from 1951 to 1959 and obtained a bachelor’s degree. In 1954 she studied at the National University of Mexico for one year, where she confirmed her identity as a lesbian and a poet. Upon her return to New York, she became actively engaged in the predominantly white gay culture in Greenwich Village and went to pursue her master’s degree in library science at Columbia University. On graduation in 1961, Lorde worked as librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library until 1963. On March 31, 1962, she married white attorney Edwin Ashley

370

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Rollins and gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, and a son, Jonathan. Her interracial marriage was little known and ended in divorce in 1970. During the 1960s, Lorde was actively engaged in political movements such as the civil rights movement, antiwar movement, and feminist movement. From 1966 to 1968, Lorde worked as head librarian at Town School Library in New York City. In 1968, her first collection of poetry, The First Cities, was released, and she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. In the same year, she accepted a teaching position and became the poet in residence at Tougaloo College, a small black college in Jackson, Mississippi, where racial violence, even after the civil rights movement (1955–1965), seriously remained. This teaching experience greatly affected her social and political consciousness as an artist and activist in a racist, capitalist, patriarchal, and homophobic society. Lorde since held various academic positions including lecturerships in creative writing at City College and in the Education Department at Herbert H. Lehman College, and an associate professor in English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College. In 1978, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer, resulting in a mastectomy but she became more focused on writing and social activism. In 1979, she was a featured speaker at the first national march for lesbian and gay liberation in Washington, D.C. In the early 1980s, furthermore, closely working with women of color in other countries, Lorde actively helped to found groundbreaking female organizations such as Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and the Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa. As a poet, teacher, and activist, Lorde raised an awareness of interlocking oppression in terms of power relations and taught the powerless to break silence and express their feelings for freedom from all oppression. At the forefront of the feminist movement, she emphasized difference as a creative force, not as a fearful element, to transform unnecessary divisions among women suffering in various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression. Lorde became a powerful voice for people of color, women, and the lesbian and gay community. From 1968 to 1993, Lorde published about a dozen collections of poetry and six books of prose and gave numerous lectures throughout the United States and Europe. Her best-known prose works are The Cancer Journals (1980), which narrates her survival and struggle with her own fear and despair as well as cancer, and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), which innovatively describes the process of her becoming a poet. Her collections of essays and speeches, Sister Outsider and A Burst of Light, were released in 1984 and 1988 respectively. Her poetry publications include Coal (1976), The Black Unicorn (1978), and Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (1993), and more. Moreover, in recognition of her art and activism, Lorde received numerous awards and honorary doctorates. In 1972, Lorde was given a Creative Artists Public Service grant. In 1974, her third poetry volume, From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award. And The Cancer Journals won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book for the Year Award in 1981. Lorde also received the American Book Award for her prose collection, A Burst of Light. In 1991, she became the recipient of the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit and was named the poet laureate of New York from 1991 to 1993. Two weeks before her fiftieth birthday in 1984, Lorde was diagnosed with liver cancer. Struggling with cancer, she continued with a scheduled teaching trip to Europe. Lorde died on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. However, her courageous spirit, outspoken voice, and rich literary legacy are much alive to give hope and strength

AUDRE GERALDINE LORDE

371

in surviving to the next generation. As her work continuously touches and amplifies our lives with creativity and vitality, Lorde has been and will be remembered as a talented poet, inspirational teacher, passionate mother, strong-willed woman, and energetic fighter for civil justice and racial/sexual equality. MAJOR WORKS Lorde is a prolific writer. Thematically, throughout various genres including poetry, fictionalized autobiography, political essays, and personal journals, Lorde emphasizes the need of a speaking voice for women. Keenly aware of the oppression she faced as a black lesbian, she openly expresses her struggle and anger. With force and clarity, she opposes racial injustice, gender inequality, sexual oppression, urban blight, and global exploitation through her writing and speech. Lorde refuses to be defined in the discourses of race prejudice, gender bias, and sexual oppression and continuously reclaims self-representation as a black lesbian working-class woman and mother of two interracial children. Furthermore, in order to create female solidarity and to realize equality among women, Lorde challenges dominant movements in feminism exclusively mobilized in the interests of relatively privileged women, that is, white, Eurocentric, bourgeois, and educated women. In much of her work, with an eloquent and powerful voice, she redefines difference on multiple fronts of the feminist movement, deals with the politics of location and identity, and envisions useful strengths and hope for positive change and spiritual renewal. During the 1960s, when the Black Arts Movement was radically initiated, Lorde’s poems regularly appeared in several anthologies and literary magazines. In 1968, her first collection of poems, The First Cities, was released by the Poets Press. Critics reviewed it as an innovative, refreshing, and introspective book. Focusing on feelings and relationships, Lorde describes the self-celebration of being a black woman: ‘‘I am black because I come from the earth’s inside’’ (Coal). In addition, she expresses her personal suffering. For instance, in ‘‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost,’’ Lorde grieves over her father’s death and infidelity in a straightforward manner: ‘‘I have not ever seen my father’s grave/ . . . / Each week/ A different woman has my mother’s face.’’ It was followed by Cables to Rage, which was published in London in 1970. While teaching poetry at Tougaloo College, Lorde wrote most of the poems contained in this volume, which deal with themes such as human love, betrayal, hunger, and child bearing/rearing/ and nurturing. And, for the first time, she overtly expresses her lesbianism: ‘‘No Martha I do not know if we shall ever/ sleep in each other’s arms again’’ (‘‘Martha’’). Later on, the poems in these two books reappeared in her fifth volume of poetry, titled Coal. It was released by a major publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, in 1976. In Coal, Lorde describes unfair and brutal treatments of women in social, political, and cultural contexts. She was acclaimed for her poetic language and creative metaphor and began to receive public attention and wider readership. Lorde’s third volume of poetry, From a Land Where Other People Live, was nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry in 1973. This book reflects her personal experiences as a woman, mother, daughter, lover, and teacher in complex contexts of racial oppression, social injustice, and gender struggle. She further develops her angry voice with a focus on a mother-daughter relationship: ‘‘I learned from you/ to define myself/ through your denials’’ (‘‘Black Mother Woman’’) and a maternal concern for children: ‘‘My children have gone to the wood/ . . . / Let their journey be free from

372

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

ghosts’’ (‘‘Signs’’). In the following collection of poems, New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), which is dedicated to ‘‘The Chocolate People of America,’’ Lorde continues to express her radical socialist politics and calls for immediate actions for change: ‘‘I am/ are you/ Ready’’ (‘‘Now’’). She goes on to narrate harshness in life as a black woman and a mother of black children with decaying images of New York City: ‘‘Past questioning the necessities of blood/ or why it must be mine or my children’s time’’ (‘‘New York City 1970’’). In 1978, Lorde’s seventh collection of sixty-seven poems, The Black Unicorn, was released, and it was well received as her most successful and rich volume. By exploring African matriarchal myths, which are reflected in poems such as ‘‘From the House of Yemanja,’’ ‘‘Coniagui Women,’’ ‘‘Dahomey,’’ and ‘‘12th Street and Abomey,’’ Lorde cultivates her poetic vision of a black transatlantic culture and tradition. In the opening poem, ‘‘The Black Unicorn,’’ she critically and metaphorically points out the misrepresentations of Africa and its people: ‘‘The black unicorn was mistaken/ for a shadow/ or symbol /. . . / the black unicorn is not free.’’ Furthermore, in adamantly questing for freedom, Lorde defines not only her womanhood and blackness, ‘‘I am woman and not white’’ (‘‘A Woman Speaks’’), but also evinces her lesbianism: ‘‘I dream of a place between your breasts/ to build my house like a haven’’ (‘‘Woman’’). In many of her poems, Lorde characteristically expresses a deep maternal love for children. The poem ‘‘Power’’demonstrates that Lorde is greatly enraged by a real-life incident where a white policeman killed a ten-year-old black boy but was acquitted: ‘‘A dead child dragging his shattered black/ face off the edge of my sleep.’’ This volume of poetry monumentally reconfirms her ability and creativity as a poet. Lorde’s final collection of thirty-nine poems, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems 1987–1992, was published in August 1993. Facing her own mortality in the advanced stage of cancer, she reflects on her past in terms of Caribbean heritage, family, and parenting in poems including ‘‘Legacy-Hers,’’ ‘‘Inheritance-His,’’ ‘‘Prism,’’ ‘‘For Craig,’’ and more. As always, Lorde shows her anger toward social and political injustice as well as racial and sexual oppression in a global context in poems such as ‘‘Peace on Earth: Christmas, 1989,’’ ‘‘East Berlin,’’ ‘‘jessehelms,’’ and others. One of the most remarkable poems in this commanding and poignant volume is ‘‘Today Is Not the Day,’’ in which Lorde relentlessly claims her ownership over her art and her life: ‘‘I am dying/ but I do not want to do it/ looking the other way.’’ Indeed, she insightfully looks at life even in front of death. In her numerous essays and speeches arising from her radical social and political consciousness, Lorde emphasizes the significance of writing, language, and voice to women, and the roles of women writers and artists in a male-dominated society where women’s voices are intentionally silenced, and their feelings are distorted. In one of her best-known essays, ‘‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury,’’ Lorde redefines the meaning of poetry as ‘‘a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play’’ (37). This essay first appeared in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture in 1977. Lorde argues that for women, writing poetry is a necessity of existence, not a luxury: ‘‘The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free’’ (38). She compares the process of writing poetry with a process of creating a new life embedded in possibilities and strengths. Therefore, poetry becomes the revolutionary foundation for not only women’s freedom and empowerment but also their survival and change. Indeed, through her poems, which

AUDRE GERALDINE LORDE

373

illuminate her fears, pain, love, and concerns, Lorde names her dreams to be realized and encourages women to see, feel, speak, and dare for their dreams, hopes, and survival. In another well-known essay, titled ‘‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,’’ delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College (1978), Lorde further analyzes women’s feelings in terms of power. She critically points out that just as blackness is considered inferior, the erotic is contemptibly seen as a sign of female inferiority: ‘‘We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society’’ (53). Instead, by distinguishing eroticism from pornography, which results in the abuse of feeling, she vigorously speaks in defense of the erotic as an enlightening force within women’s lives: ‘‘The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling’’ (53). In doing so, Lorde challenges an exclusively European-American male tradition producing, and produced by, a patriarchal antierotic society. What is more, Lorde vigorously criticizes homogenous generalization and representation in academic feminist discourse based on an umbrella usage of the term ‘‘woman,’’ which became a shield for one woman’s privileges linked to another woman’s exploitation. In essays such as ‘‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining difference,’’ she indicates institutionalized rejection of difference and emphasizes the creative function of difference and interdependency among women. As her famous dictum ‘‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’’ implies, Lorde argues that ‘‘survival is not an academic skill,’’ and without a proper understanding of difference— race, sexuality, class, and age—within the lives of women, women hardly attain a full freedom that ‘‘allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative’’ (‘‘The Master’s Tools,’’ 111–12). While criticizing the misnaming of human differences, Lorde goes on to assert that black sexism perpetuates white racist patriarchal social order. Thus, difference should be recognized as a crucial strength and force for change and true liberation, not as a cause for separation and suspicion. At the crossroads of her existence, Lorde fought cancer and won. The Cancer Journals, a chronicle of her experiences of painful struggles with breast cancer and mastectomy, was published in 1980. This book raises public awareness of women’s health issues and contributes to the redefinition of a stereotyped feminine beauty. It won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book for the Year Award in 1981. As in other essays, Lorde begins the book with the self-definition: ‘‘I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and used’’ (9). In spite of her confrontation with mortality, Lorde refused to be silenced by her pain and fear about cancer and further keenly realized the function of cancer in a profit economy. Alice Walker states that The Cancer Journals ‘‘has taken away some of my fear of cancer, my fear of incompleteness, my fear of difference. This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me.’’ To be sure, by making visible her fears, Lorde was empowered to survive: ‘‘I was fighting the devil of despair within myself for my own soul’’ (77). In addition, while recovering from a radical mastectomy, she learned to love and embrace a new difference in her body. By documenting her experience with cancer and pain and affirming her survival, Lorde distinctively conveys that speaking, not silence, underlines the possibilities of self-healing and the richness of self-conscious living. It cannot be denied that her painful experience and strength serve as encouragement for other women to speak and act out of their experiences with threats of death.

374

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

In 1982, Lorde’s autobiographical Zami: A New Spelling of My Name was released. Lorde calls it ‘‘a biomythography’’ mingling of Caribbean and African cultural heritages with everyday life in New York. Indeed, by blending various genres, including autobiography, fiction, history, and mythology, Zami reflects her life from her childhood in Harlem to her midtwenties in New York City in chronological order. Lorde is acclaimed for her rich craft of vivid description and charming characterization with poetic language and erotic images. In Zami, as a necessary part of the (re)constructing process of the multiple selves, Lorde narrates her Caribbean-American experience, lesbianism, and anger at racism and heterosexism. In other words, Zami describes her quest for identity as a black girl, black woman, and black lesbian, during conflicting periods from the poverty ridden 1930s, to the war-devastated 1940s, and to the anticommunist hysteria inflicted 1950s: ‘‘To the journeywoman pieces of myself. Becoming. Afrekete’’ (5). In fact, as the title implies, Zami shows Lorde’s transformation from the passive be to the active being; it is a fictionalized record of how she became a poet. In the first part of Zami, Lorde vividly depicts her childhood episodes scarred by cruelties of racism and poverty. The young Lorde was insatiably curious and fascinated by her discovery of a visual world with language. Growing up, Lorde was greatly influenced and angered by her mother who dreamed of returning home to Grenville, Grenada, and told stories about the West Indies. By narrating her difficult relationship with her mother, Lorde came to realize that her mother’s strength and courage enriched her inner development of voice as a poet: ‘‘I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as her hidden anger’’ (32). In the epilogue, Lorde explains that Zami is ‘‘[a] Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers’’ (255). To realize the integration of her life, her being, and her creative work, Lorde explores physical and psychological experiences with other women, including Gennie, Ginger, Muriel, and Afrekete, and social rejection. Indeed, Lorde’s relationships with other women as well as her mother are central in Zami. And these relationships, in terms of sexual intimacy and emotional interdependence, expose her vulnerability and sensibility as a young black woman battling racism and heterosexism. For instance, at Hunt High School in New York, Lorde befriended a girl named Gennie, who became the first true friend that she was ever conscious of loving, but their relationship ended with Gennie’s suicide. Nevertheless, Gennie left her significant print upon Lorde’s life. Much later on, through the memories of Gennie, Lorde came to realize the importance of her voice: ‘‘I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty’’ (251). Ultimately, Zami carries not only Lorde’s reflections on her struggle to rename and embrace her myriad selves mingled with words of young, girl, black, lesbian, woman, and poet, but it also celebrates women’s power and ancestral black mothers. Lorde’s last collection of essays, A Burst of Light, was published in 1988. It won the American Book Award for 1989. It includes an interview with Susan Leigh Star, in which Lorde discusses sadomasochism as ‘‘an institutionalized celebration of dominate/ subordinate relationships’’ in the lesbian-feminist community (14). Also, her selected daily journals from January 1984 to August 1987, titled ‘‘A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer,’’ narrates her continuous battles with liver cancer spread from the breast cancer she had six years before. Like Zami, which is poetically presented, these essays have the poetic quality combined with her great sensibility and powerful insight to living with cancer and its meanings. Lorde courageously takes the struggle with cancer as ‘‘another face of that continuing battle for self-determination and survival that Black women fight

AUDRE GERALDINE LORDE

375

daily, often in triumph’’ (49); in a way, it is ‘‘an act of political warfare’’ (131). Also, she states that it would be certainly worth telling of her personal struggle if one black woman gains hope and strength from her story. In turn, the journals illustrate her strongly determined will, despite a reality of cancer, to live fully, love deeply, write passionately, resist fiercely, and speak out vigorously: ‘‘I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report’’ (134). CRITICAL RECEPTION Audre Lorde is one of the most influential activists and respected writers in the feminist movement from the midtwentieth century to today. Lorde’s work has been reviewed in many national publications and is internationally recognized. Also, her writing is widely taught in women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, American cultural studies, and literature courses and translated into several languages. There are numerous critical articles and books about her life, philosophy, social and political activism, and writing. Adrienne Rich calls Lorde ‘‘the Amazon warrior’’ and states that her work offers women a new and deeply feminist challenge. By inscribing her own experiences as a black lesbian, Lorde strengthened the connection between women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights movements. In essence, dealing with internalized racism, sexism, and homophobia in women’s lives in terms of power and knowledge, Lorde’s work draws special attention to the dynamics of solidity among women across differences of ethnicity, sexuality, culture, age, class, and others. Barbara Christian, in ‘‘The Dynamics of Difference: Book Review of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider,’’ acclaims Lorde’s powerful, eloquent voice as a black, lesbian, feminist, poet, and mother, which stresses the importance of the concept of difference in selfformation and in relation to others and demonstrates the connections between sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, classism, and between people as well. She defines Lorde’s collection of essays as ‘‘another indication of the depth of analysis that black women writers are contributing to feminist thought’’ (210). In Women Reading Women Writing, AnnaLouise Keating analyses Lorde’s dynamic formation of gendered and ethnic identities in terms of an ongoing process of ‘‘interactional self-naming,’’ in Lorde’s semiautobiographical fiction, poetry, and prose. She points out that ‘‘silence—the absence of language and the refusal to name—plays a significant role in Lorde’s interactional self-naming’’ (147). Keating goes on to argue that Lorde reinvents her own gender/ethnic identity and her readers’ as well through formative, disruptive, and transformational language. In ‘‘Audre Lorde’s Life Writing: The Politics of Location,’’ Lori L. Walk discusses that with the concept of positionality constantly reproduced by and within the social matrix, Lorde’s life-writing brings the often tangible theories into realizable political action, self-determination, and means of survival and uses the erotic, the lyrical, and the mythological to build home for her myriad selves. In the article, by comparing Lorde’s concept of positionality with those of postmodern theorists such as Merleau-Ponty, Butler, Bakhtin, and others, Walk explores Lorde’s poetic language, the symbol of the mother, the erotic desire, the black woman’s body, as well as her life-struggle inscribed in her work. Walk concludes that ‘‘[a]ll writing is life-writing for Audre Lorde,’’ whose language is ‘‘action, and with it she makes her power a permanent location for all fluid identities to use as refuse, a home-place’’ (833).

376

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

In Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, by capturing Lorde’s charismatic and complex personality, biographer Alexis De Veaux mentions that ‘‘the three themes of escape, freedom, and self-actualization were crucial determinants’’ of Lorde’s life from a difficult childhood to a celebrated literary career (xi). Also, while tracing her public and private life, she describes that Lorde’s erotic lesbianism and Caribbean cultural heritage are central to her development of the multiple selves and searching for a home. Ultimately, the narrative of Lorde’s life deepens our understanding of and appreciation for her literary legacy. Having worked for eight years in collaboration with Lorde to make a film titled A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, Ada Gay Griffith comments that ‘‘Audre Lorde has been a pioneer in making available her voice as a teacher, a survivor, an activist, and a crusader against bigotry.’’ The documentary film profiles this fascinating woman’s extraordinary life through a series of interviews with her family, lovers, colleague poets and activists, who acknowledge Lorde’s political and artistic accomplishments and pay tributes to her wisdom, strength, endurance, and inspirational force. Many critics and readers appreciate that Lorde articulates her critical ideas on race, sexuality, gender, and human difference in groundbreaking ways. Through her work and life, Lorde relentlessly attempts to transform a society marked by injustice and inequality and make women’s voices heard. As many critical articles demonstrate, by cultivating the concept of the interconnectedness among women across difference, Lorde painstakingly argues that while women’s silence, even if strategic silence, serves as denial of societal oppressions, women’s speaking makes their fears and pains visible, and in doing so realizes their survival and freedom. In addition, critics indicate that in various forms and manners, love and anger almost always underlie her writing and activism to make a better world. As in the last poem of her ninth volume, Our Dead Behind Us (1986), Lorde firmly states that ‘‘I believe in the holy ghost mother’’ whose name has been lost in time; likewise, her readers will genuinely remember her as ‘‘Mother loosen my [their] tongue and adorn me [them] with a lighter burden’’ (‘‘Call’’).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Audre Geraldine Lorde Between Our Selves. Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon, 1976. The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978. A Burst of Light. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988. Cables to Rage. London: Breman, 1970. The Cancer Journals. Argyle, NY: Spinsters Ink, 1980. Chosen Poems Old and New. New York: Norton, 1982. Coal. New York: Norton, 1976. The First Cities. New York: Poets, 1968. From a Land Where Other People Live. Detroit: Broadside, 1973. I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities. New York: Women of Color, 1985. The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems 1987–1992. New York: Norton, 1993. Need: A Chorale for Black Women Voices. New York: Women of Color, 1990. New York Head Shop and Museum. Detroit: Broadside, 1974. Our Dead Behind Us. New York: Norton, 1986.

AUDRE GERALDINE LORDE

377

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. New York: Out & Out, 1978. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1982.

Studies of Audre Geraldine Lorde’s Works Abod, Jennifer. The Edge of Each Other’s Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde. Long Beach, CA: Profile Productions, 1990. ‘‘Audre Lorde: A Special Section.’’ Callaloo 14.1 (1991): 39–95. Brooks, Jerome. ‘‘In the Name of the Father: The Poetry of Audre Lorde.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 269–76. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. Christian, Barbara. ‘‘The Dynamics of Difference: Book Review of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider.’’ Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamaon, 1985. De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York: Norton, 2004. Griffith, Ada Gay, and Michelle Parkerson. A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde. New York: Third World Newsreel, 1994. Hall, Joan Wylie. Conversations with Audre Lorde. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Heacock, Maureen C. ‘‘The ‘Sharpened Edge’ of Audre Lorde: Visions and Re-visions of Community, Power, and Language.’’ In Sharpened Edge: Women of Color, Resistance, and Writing, edited by Stephanie Athey, 165–85. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Kader, Cheryl. ‘‘‘The Very House of Difference’: Zami, Audre Lorde’s Lesbian-Centered Text.’’ In Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 181–94. New York: Haworth, 1993. Keating, AnnaLouise. Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua and Audre Lorde. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Major, William. ‘‘Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals: Autopathography as Resistance.’’ Mosaic 35.2 (2002): 39–56. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1984. Walk, Lori L. ‘‘Audre Lorde’s Life Writing: The Politics of Location.’’ Women’s Studies 32.7 (2003): 815–34. Wood, Deborah. ‘‘Interview with Audre Lorde.’’ In The Memory and Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women and Writing, ed. Juliette Bowles, 11–22. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1979.

Heejung Cha

NAOMI LONG MADGETT (1923– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Though she would earn lasting acclaim as a poet and publisher in Detroit, Michigan, Naomi Long Madgett’s life and literary journey began in the southern United States. Born Naomi Cornelia Long in Norfolk, Virginia, on July 5, 1923, Madgett was the youngest of three children and the only daughter of the Rev. Clarence Marcellus Long and Maude Selena Long (ne´e Hilton), a homemaker and former teacher. Before Madgett’s second birthday, she and her family moved to East Orange, New Jersey, after her father was appointed pastor of Calvary Baptist Church. It was in New Jersey that Madgett, who was quiet and introverted, first encountered poetry. Reverend Long encouraged his daughter to read, and in his personal library Madgett read mythological stories, fables, and poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Alfred Tennyson. Reverend Long also aided his daughter’s future writing and publishing career by providing her with books that showcased the talents of African American poets. Two such volumes were the Robert Kerlin anthology Negro Poets and Their Poems and an adult education textbook titled An Anthology of Negro Poetry. In them Madgett discovered poems by notable African American poets including Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Anne Spencer. Madgett’s exposure to African American verse filled the educational void left by her school curriculum (which did not recognize or permit discussion of African American achievements) and also inspired Madgett to write her own poetry. Many of Madgett’s childhood poems were published in her grammar school newspaper, and by the time she was twelve, Madgett had written over 100 poems. One of them, ‘‘My Choice,’’ was published on the youth page of the Orange Daily Courier (Madgett’s hometown newspaper) in 1935. In 1937, after Reverend Long received a pastoral appointment to another church, Madgett and her family moved to St. Louis, Missouri. At that time, schools in Missouri were racially segregated. So Madgett entered the all–African American Charles Sumner High School in January 1938. But the school held high standards for its students, and Madgett’s academic studies and creativity flourished. As a teenager, Madgett met Langston Hughes for the first time, who encouraged her writing and, later, upon their second meeting, interrupted his own poetry presentation to read some of Madgett’s poems. In 1939, Madgett’s father secured a contract with a small New York press to publish a book of his daughter’s poetry. In 1941, when Madgett was seventeen, her first book, Songs to a Phantom Nightingale, was released a few days after her high school graduation. And, about one year before his death, Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen invited Madgett to his home, read some of her poetry, and praised her efforts. In 1945, Madgett received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Virginia State University in Petersburg. Soon after, she married Julian Fields Witherspoon. In April 1946, the couple moved to Detroit, where Witherspoon lived before enlisting in the armed services. For several months, Madgett worked part time as a copyreader and

NAOMI LONG MADGETT

379

writer at the Michigan Chronicle. But she left that job before giving birth to her only child, Jill Witherspoon Boyer, in April 1947. Madgett’s marriage soon dissolved. Subsequently, she worked as a service representative at the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. Madgett continued writing poetry, however, and within three years, some of her work appeared in two important anthologies: The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949, edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and American Literature by Negro Authors (1950), edited by Herman Dreer. In 1954, Madgett returned to college and earned a master’s degree from Wayne State University. The following September, she started a twelve-year career as a high school teacher in the Detroit public schools. In 1968, Madgett became a professor of English at Eastern Michigan University and taught there until her retirement in 1984. MAJOR WORKS Madgett’s second poetry collection, One and the Many, was published in 1956 followed by her third book, Star by Star, in 1965. But it was not until the 1970s, after Madgett tried and failed to find a publisher for her fourth poetry manuscript, that she would establish one of the most acclaimed and enduring publishing companies in the history of African American literature. Madgett’s nine poetry collections are lyrical distillations of her quietness, her respect for humanity, and her pride in the perseverance, ingenuity, and accomplishments of African Americans. Critics characterize Madgett’s poems as elegant, introspective analyses of universal emotions and life experiences. Madgett’s contemplative verse was a stark contrast to the inflamed and confrontational political poetry of the Black Arts Movement. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the American publishing industry was flooded with poems by African American authors that glamorized crime, broken families, ghetto life, and were openly hostile and racist toward white people. Such poems came to define the Black Arts Movement and were, ironically, lucrative for white publishing companies. Madgett’s poetry, however, tended to explore and transcend race rather than exploit it, and was rejected by white and African American editors. In 1972, with the help of three friends and her third husband, Leonard Patton Andrews, Madgett established Lotus Press to publish Pink Ladies in the Afternoon, her fourth book. In 1974, Madgett and her husband gained sole ownership of Lotus Press. For years afterward, Madgett, with the rare help of an intern or volunteer, executed every publishing duty of Lotus Press, from typing and layout to bookkeeping and promotion, entirely by herself. Madgett’s unfailing commitment to poetry and Lotus Press has paid off. In its more than thirty years of existence, the press has helped establish or promote the careers of prominent African American authors such as Gayl Jones, Toi Derricotte, E. Ethelbert Miller, Haki Madhubuti, Claude Wilkinson, and Dudley Randall. The annual Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, established in 1993, grants the winning poet 500 dollars and publication of his or her manuscript, and is one of the most revered prizes in African American poetry. Also in 1993, Madgett (in what would end up in a short-lived arrangement) turned distribution of Lotus Press books over to Michigan State University, which established the Lotus Press Series and named Madgett its senior editor. Lotus Press now handles its own distribution. In the past twenty years, Madgett has been able to devote more time to her own writing projects. In 1988, Third World Press published Madgett’s book Octavia and

380

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Other Poems, her most challenging and personal favorite of all her poetry collections. The book is a tribute to Octavia Long, Madgett’s paternal aunt who died of tuberculosis before Madgett was born, and to whom Madgett bore a striking resemblance. Madgett has also completed a memoir titled Pilgrim Journey, and in 2004, Lotus Press released Connected Islands: New and Selected Poems, Madgett’s ninth and most recent poetry collection. CRITICAL RECEPTION In April 2001, Madgett was appointed Poet Laureate of Detroit, and a bronze bust of Madgett sculpted by Artis Lane was unveiled in the summer of 2005 at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Most of the information regarding Madgett’s work appears in reference works such as Black Women In America and Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, among others. Most of these works describe Madgett’s poetry as personal, dealing with themes such as faith, integrity and sense of responsibility (Wedge 469). Madgett’s unpublished poetry and other documents related to her writing and Lotus Press are archived in the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Naomi Long Madgett Adam of Ife´: Black Women in Praise of Black Men. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1992. Connected Islands: New and Selected Poems. Detroit: Lotus Press, 2005. Deep Rivers, A Portfolio: Twenty Contemporary Black American Poets. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1978. Exits and Entrances. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1978. Hymns Are My Prayers. (Poster-poems.) Detroit: Lotus Press, 1994. A Milestone Sampler: 15th Anniversary Anthology. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1988. Octavia and Other Poems. Chicago: Third World Press, 1988. Octavia: Guthrie and Beyond. Detroit: Lotus Press, 2002. One and the Many. Exposition, 1956. Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1981. Pink Ladies in the Afternoon. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1972. Reprint, 1990. Remembrances of Spring: Collected Early Poems. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993. Songs to a Phantom Nightingale. New York: Fortuny’s, 1941. Star by Star. Detroit: Harlo, 1965. Reprint, Detroit: Evenhill, 1970.

Studies of Naomi Long Madgett’s Work Deck, Alice A. ‘‘Madgett, Naomi Long.’’ In Black Women in America, Volume 2, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, 741–43. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Madgett, Naomi Long. ‘‘Naomi Long Madgett.’’ In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, edited by Shelly Andrews, 193–213. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. Sedlack, Robert P. ‘‘Madgett, Naomi Long.’’ In The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin, 535–36. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995.

NAOMI LONG MADGETT

381

———. ‘‘Naomi Long Madgett.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 76: Afro-American Writers, edited by Trudier Harris, 104–12. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Warren, Nagueyalti. ‘‘Naomi Long Madgett.’’ In Notable Black American Women, Book I, edited by Jessie Carney Smith, 716–19. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Wedge, George F. ‘‘Madgett, Naomi Long.’’ In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 468–69. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Shayla Hawkins

PAULE MARSHALL (1929– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Paule Marshall is a novelist, short-fiction writer, essayist, and educator. She was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, to parents who immigrated to America from the Caribbean island of Barbados. Marshall’s childhood experiences of growing up in an immigrant West Indian community inform her writing style and thematic approach. Marshall often attributes her cultural knowledge and passion for narratives to the ritualistic storytelling and diverse conversations she witnessed in her mother’s kitchen, a place where her mother and other female members of the community would gather to discuss culture, and national and international politics. Marshall began her writing career at a young age, first trying poetry, but quickly realizing that ‘‘poetry was not for (her).’’ Upon graduating from high school, she attended Brooklyn College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in English literature (1953). After graduating from college, Marshall pursued a master’s degree at Hunter College, before deciding to become a librarian. After leaving her work at the library, Marshall became the ‘‘only woman on staff ’’ at Our World, a 1950s-era African American magazine (quoted in Voices from the Gaps). During this time in her life, she married (1950), had a child (1959), and finished her first novel, titled Browngirl, Brownstones (1959). The novel tells the story of Selina Boyce, a young girl growing up in a Barbadian community located in Brooklyn, New York. Marshall followed the success of Browngirl, Brownstones with a collection of four novellas, titled Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). In this work, Marshall delves deeper into the intricacies of the Pan-African experience by exploring four different locales (Brazil, Barbados, Brooklyn, and British Guyana) that speak to a shared African heritage. Her seminal novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), which retraces themes of place, Afro-Caribbean identity, home, and responsibility, placed Marshall at the forefront of African American literature and secured her place within the literary canon. Marshall followed The Chosen Place with Praisesong for the Widow (1983), a novel that charts the protagonist’s (Avey Johnson) path to healing and self-discovery. Also published in 1983 was a collection of short stories titled Reena, and Other Stories (1983). Included is the essay ‘‘From the Poets in the Kitchen,’’ which highlights the creative power of her mother and other women in the community in which she was reared. By the end of the twentieth century, Marshall produced two more novels, Daughters (1991) and The Fisher King (2000). These further explore female responsibility and the contentious relationships between African American and Caribbean families, respectively. Throughout her career, Paule Marshall’s writing and creativity have received high acclaim, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1960), a National Institute of Arts Award (for Soul Clap Hands and Sing), the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, the Columbus Foundation American Book Award (for Praisesong for the Widow), and a MacArthur ‘‘Genius’’ Award (1992). She has also received the PEN/Faulkner Award for her excellence in the field of literature. In addition, Marshall’s works have been included

PAULE MARSHALL

383

in countless anthologies of African American and American literature, and are widely taught in universities. Paule Marshall currently holds the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture in the Creative Writing Department at New York University. MAJOR WORKS In her novels, Paule Marshall places family, community, identity, class, gender, and nationality at the forefront. When writing women’s experiences, she masters the ability to ‘‘use words as a weapon’’ through her rich portrayals of African American and Caribbean American life cultural experience including the inevitable connections between the two diverse worlds. Browngirl, Brownstones is a coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of a close-knit Caribbean community in Brooklyn, New York. The protagonist, Selina Boyce, is the daughter of Barbadian immigrant parents who must face the challenges of residing in a foreign land. The story follows Selina’s attempt to understand her life, family community, and the larger world as a young woman caught between West Indian culture and the myth of the ‘‘American Dream.’’ The novel moves within the Caribbean American experience from the inside out, making it possible to see the members of the community through Selina’s eyes. Selina’s parents are integral to her growth as both represent different views of the immigrant Caribbean community in New York, post–World War II. Her father, Deighton, is a mild-mannered, dreamy, and passionate man who remains optimistic in his constant quest for purpose. Selina’s mother, Silla, on the other hand, is presented as stern and rough, a woman who believes that hard work and ambition are the ultimate keys to success in America. She often berates Deighton for being irresponsible with money. In reference to his actions, she remarks, ‘‘But what kind of man he is, nuh? Here every Bajan is saving if it’s only a dollar a week and buying house and he wun save a penny. He ain got nothing and ain looking to get nothing’’ (24). As the novel progresses, Selina makes mature choices and many mistakes. Marshall allows the character to build and grow as a young woman who is not yet ‘‘grown’’ but definitely growing. In addition, Selina is forced to make choices between her loyalty to a mythic Caribbean homeland that she envisions through her father’s stories and dreams and accepting her reality as an American. Ultimately, Selina chooses to forge her own identity as a Caribbean American woman. Marshall’s next major work, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People provides an examination of life on fictional Bourne Island, where African-descended islanders separate themselves according to color, caste, and British education. Those who live in ‘‘Bournehills,’’ the underdeveloped portion of the island, retain a rich cultural heritage that their middle and upper class black counterparts cannot understand. The novel opens with white American representatives of CASR (Center for Applied Social Research) converging on the island in an attempt to help the poor of Bournehills progress socially and economically. Saul Amron, a Jewish sociologist who is conflicted within, leads the crew. He desires to be more than a cultural outsider, but wrestles with his responsibility to the ‘‘folk’’ and to his conservative white spouse. The lives and stories of the island’s inhabitants are told through Merle Kinbona, a woman who, despite being deemed the ‘‘perfect cultural broker,’’ is the voice of the people. As her surname suggests, she represents the ‘‘family goods’’ (kin means ‘‘family,’’

384

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

bon means ‘‘good’’) of a community that is unable and often unwilling to speak for themselves. Through her attempts at self-forgiveness for past wrongs and a desire to remake herself whole, Merle becomes a savior for those who remain grounded in a glorious history of black resistance and strength. Several motifs and themes exist in the novel, including the debilitating yoke of slavery and colonization, the postcolonial subject, place consciousness, the African diaspora, the ocean as burial ground, creolization, class, social progress, and revolution. In another of Marshall’s major works, Praisesong for the Widow, Avatara ‘‘Avey’’ Johnson embarks on a cultural quest of epic proportions. When the novel opens, Avey, a middle-aged successful African American woman, is indifferent and emotionally detached from the rest of the world. Her hardworking husband is deceased and her relationship with her daughter is waning. In addition, class and upward mobility have made it possible for Avey to disregard her cultural memories and exist as a member of an amnesiac African American middle class. When Avey is snatched from her destructive reality on an annual cruise and forced to recall the early years of struggle with her husband, she realizes that she does not know the person she has become. On the same cruise, Avey encounters the spirit of another reminder, her Great Aunt Cuney, a woman who introduced a much younger Avey to the power of storytelling and African heritage. Through dreams and nightmares, Avey is made to revisit her early life in New York as a young wife and mother, as well as the summers she spent in the lowlands of South Carolina with her aunt. Remembering these experiences prepares Avey for a series of events that take her to the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, a place where she learns to love herself, forgive past wrongs, and rediscover her cultural ‘‘roots.’’ In several of Marshall’s major works, the protagonist embarks on a reverse Middle Passage in order to fully heal and accept his or her self. Praisesong for the Widow is another example of this quest. Through various methods, the novel takes Avey physically and psychically from New York to South Carolina, to Grenada, and then Carriacou. As she moves further south, she encounters ‘‘Africanisms’’ in the form of Creole language, dance, music, tradition, food, and community. Avey unwittingly travels back through the African slave route, and this becomes the only way that she can become liberated from the strictures of her present life. Her ‘‘praisesong’’ draws her into a place where she can fully understand the true meaning of her name (Avatara) as it relates to mental and physical survival in the New World. Women’s lives are central to Paule Marshall’s examination of African American and Caribbean American experiences. She continues the pattern of the female protagonist in her next novel, Daughters (1991). Daughters invokes a young woman, Ursa Mackenzie, who matures through an increasing responsibility to those around her. Like Browngirl, Brownstones, Ursa’s parents inform her decisions, and their influence adjusts the way she understands the world. Set in New York and the fictional island of Triunion, the novel explores the choices one must make between motherhood and abortion, and the importance of legacies. Ursa is caught between her role as a researcher and her role as the daughter of a prominent Triunion official (the PM) and an American mother, Estelle. As in other works by Marshall, Ursa’s travels are integral to her character. She is born in Triunion, and lives in New York, a place she calls home. In the novel, Ursa’s mother beckons her ‘‘home’’ because she feels that Ursa is the only one who can prevent the PM from making a grand political mistake. The movement to and from the Caribbean and the United States mirrors Ursa’s own internal angst. Like other Marshall heroines,

PAULE MARSHALL

385

she is born into two worlds, both competing for her loyalty while Ursa is forced to decide which experience is greater, if any. Proving the power of her craft and the universality of her writing, Marshall ushered in the new century with her latest novel, The Fisher King (2000). While the themes in this work are similar to Marshall’s other writings, there exists a further level of complexity regarding place, acculturation, family, and flight. The novel tells the story of a deceased expatriate jazz musician Sonny-Rett Payne and his family’s inability to love unconditionally, across cultural lines. Similar to other novels with musical themes, The Fisher King embodies the jazz essence and moves in cadenced tempos. As a slight departure from the female protagonist present in her previous works, Marshall introduces the characters through Sonny Carmichael Payne’s eyes. Throughout the novel, Sonny (Sonny-Rett’s Parisian-born grandson) exists as a foreign-born child attempting to understand his distant and troubled American and West Indian family members in the United States. Viewing the actions through his eyes permits a multilayered representation of cultural conflict, interpreted from the outside. While it appears that Marshall has departed from the female-centered novel, by making the principal character a young boy, Sonny’s experience in Brooklyn is informed by the women who power the novel and the family. Hattie, another primary character, serves as young Sonny’s nurturer and protector in France and in the United States. Their relationship at home and abroad is maintained by the connection to Sonny-Rhett’s legacy. Therefore, Marshall positions both characters, young and old, ‘‘American’’ and French, as the physical embodiments of the expatriate identity. Young Sonny’s greatgrandmothers represent two opposite worlds, one a West Indian immigrant, and the other a middle-class African American. Their separation is further depicted by each living on the opposite side, of the street from the other. The women desire young Sonny and ‘‘hold on for [him]’’ because he is the evidence of their love—the grandchild of their children who fled to France escaping America’s racial history and their families’ bitter divide. In The Fisher King, Marshall is able to explore the consequences of separation and insularity throughout generations. Marshall is unapologetically invested in creating works that address the specific experiences of the Afro-Caribbean subject. Her own experiences inform her writing and add depth to the larger meaning. Simultaneously, Marshall’s novels place West Indian immigrant experience in contrast with African American experience in order to show the commonalities between the two cultures. The stories she tells require that the reader complicate his or her own notions of identity, location, class, gender, language, and kinship, and attempt to deconstruct how social and cultural divisions affect the progress of the global black community. CRITICAL RECEPTION Paule Marshall has indelibly forged a place within the history and tradition of African American literature. Her vivid descriptions of the immigrant experience serve as the foundation for much of the writings by contemporary Afro-Caribbean and African American writers. Her first novel, Browngirl, Brownstones, has been frequently read and analyzed for more than forty-five years after its first publication. Likewise, any anthology of African American literature would be incomplete without either one of her short stories or an excerpt from one of her full-length novels. Her work remains a favorite

386

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

among scholars because of the groundbreaking discussions of hybridity and dualconsciousness within the black experience, the general thematic consistency, and craft of storytelling evident in each of Marshall’s works. There is little doubt that Paule Marshall has become a legend within the literary canon. Since Marshall’s work has been widely received for a number of years, there has been much critical response to it. For example, Martin Japtok is compelled by the recreation of the natural Caribbean setting in Marshall’s works, specifically ‘‘To Da-Duh, in Memoriam.’’ In discussing her short story, he connects the Caribbean ‘‘flora and fauna’’ to the colonial history of the West Indies. He states, ‘‘Paule Marshall shows the inescapability of this history by inscribing it into the very landscape’’ (476). Carole Boyce Davies has referenced Paule Marshall’s works in several of her writings, noting the ‘‘heritage/ancestry relationship.’’ She further observes, ‘‘There is a definite Pan-Africanist focus in the relationship to heritage in Praisesong [for the Widow] and in several other Marshall works’’ (61). Davies also states that Avey (Praisesong for the Widow) must undergo a maturation process in order to return to the United States—an important statement given the fact that Avey is ‘‘middle-aged’’ when she embarks on her journey toward identity transformation. Lori Leibovich, in the New York Times review of The Fisher King, is disappointed by the novel’s ‘‘abrupt ending,’’ but writes, ‘‘Marshall’s prose is full of expert dialogue, mellifluous rhythms and sharply drawn portraits of Sonny-Rett’s loved ones.’’ In addition to scholarly essays and reviews, there have been several full-length critical studies of Paule Marshall’s work, including but not limited to Eugenia Delamotte’s Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall (1998), Dorothy Denniston’s The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender (1995), and Joyce Owen Pettis’s Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction (1995).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Paule Marshall Browngirl, Brownstones (reprint). New York: Feminist Press at CUNY. The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. New York: Vintage, 1969. Daughters. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991. The Fisher King. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Penguin, 1983. Reena, and Other Stories. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1983. Soul Clap Hands and Sing. New York, Atheneum, (1961).

Studies of Paule Marshall’s Works Alexander, Simone James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Brownley, Martine Watson. Deferrals of Domain: Contemporary Women Novelists and the State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

PAULE MARSHALL

387

Davies, Carole Boyce, and Elaine Savory Fido. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, 2nd ed. Trenton: African World Press, 1994. Delamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Japtok, Martin. ‘‘Sugarcane as History in Paule Marshall’s ‘To Da-Duh, in Memoriam.’’’ African American Review 34 (2000): 475–82. Leibovich, Lori. ‘‘Sounds Good, Feels Bad.’’ New York Times (November 26, 2000). Liddell, Janice Lee. ‘‘Voyages beyond Lust and Location: The Climacteric as Seen in Novels by Sylvia Winter Beryl Gilroy, and Paule Marshall.’’ In Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature, edited by Janice Lee Liddell and Yakini B. Kemp. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Pettis, Joyce Owen. Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

Kalenda C. Eaton

SHARON BELL MATHIS (1937– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Sharon Bell Mathis, a columnist, librarian, interviewer, and educator, emerged in the 1970s as one of the most gifted, prolific writers of literature for children and young adults. Although Mathis had published most of her award-winning works by the mid1970s, she has devoted much of her life to writing for and about black children. Mathis states, ‘‘I write to salute the strength in Black children and to say to them, ‘Stay strong, stay Black and stay alive’’’ (Commire 162). In 1984, Mathis received the Wallace Johnson Memorial Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Literary Arts, and the Arts and Letters Award from the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington. Two years later, she was honored with the Outstanding Writer Award from the Writing-to-Read Program, D.C. Public Schools. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to John Willie and Alice Mary (Frazier) Bell, Mathis was raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she attended parochial schools. Exposed early to a wide range of literary works, various theatrical productions, and to her mother’s extensive collection of books, Mathis was encouraged by her parents and her high school teachers to write short fiction and poetry. After graduating from Morgan State College (now Morgan State University) with a B.A. in sociology and after beginning her lifelong professional career as a teacher, Mathis became a writer. In 1969, Mathis launched her literary career with her first story for children, ‘‘The Fire Escape,’’ which appeared in News Explorer. While teaching junior high school, she published her first book, Brooklyn Story (1970), as part of the Challenger Book series, and her two poems, ‘‘Ladies Magazine’’ and ‘‘R.S.V.P.,’’ were included in Nikki Giovanni’s anthology, Night Comes Softly: An Anthology of Black Female Voices. Mathis’s second book, Sidewalk Story (1971), received an award from the Council on Interracial Books for Children in 1970. Her third book, Teacup Full of Roses (1972), won the Child Study Association of America’s Children’s Books of the Year Award, the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, and was a runner-up for the Coretta Scott King Award. In 1973, she published her juvenile biography, Ray Charles, winner of the Coretta Scott King Award in 1974. Listen for the Fig Tree (1973) was followed by The Hundred Penny Box (1975), a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book, and Cartwheels (1977). After a long hiatus, Mathis published her two volumes of poetry, Red Dog, Blue Fly: Football Poems (1991) and Running Girl: The Diary of Ebonee Rose (1997). In 1995, Mathis retired from the school system. Currently, she is working on the young adult novels Sammy’s Baby and Carrotsticks and Marshmallows. MAJOR WORKS In Mathis’s most popular award-winning novel, Teacup Full of Roses, she focuses on a family torn apart by one son’s drug addiction and on another son’s unsuccessful attempt to keep the family together. Set in the ghetto of Washington, D.C., within

SHARON BELL MATHIS

389

a one-week span, the book is filled with suspense and tension as Mathis introduces and develops her main characters through their actions. The protagonist is Joe Brooks, a seventeen-year-old storyteller, who uses the title phrase to describe a kind of utopia ‘‘where trouble never comes.’’ As Joe takes on the role of ‘‘savior’’ throughout the novel, he learns, despite his love for his family and his girlfriend, Ellie, that he can save only himself in a world where his own dream is threatened by the realities of ghetto life. He loses his brother Paul, an artistic twenty-four-year-old heroin addict, to drugs. He loses Davey, his idealistic fifteen-year-old younger brother, who is an athlete and honor student, to street violence. Mattie Brooks, the uptight, hardworking mother, is completely consumed by Paul’s drug problem. Isaac Brooks, the sick and unemployed father, tries to please his wife Mattie, but reads the newspaper and watches television to escape her constant nagging. The last of the family members, Joe’s Aunt Lou, and Isaac’s oldest sister, is an eccentric, elderly woman lost in a world of spirits. Not surprisingly, it is the aunt who warns Joe of trouble and encourages him to be strong. By the end of the novel, the focal point is indeed survival, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. In Mathis’s heartbreaking, fast-paced narrative, her sensitivity and clever use of foreshadowing, poetic language, dialogue, strong black images, and a loving tone add tremendous depth to the realistic portrayal of her characters’ lives. Moreover, her genuine perception of the human condition allows readers to discover that her characters are caring, everyday people who, even with their weaknesses and limitations, have ‘‘pride in appearances, faith in education, hard work and the hope for a better life through sacrifice’’ (Harris 8). CRITICAL RECEPTION All of Mathis’s critics agree that she writes honestly and respectfully about black people and their relationships with families, neighbors, and friends, and their coming to terms with themselves and with those whom they love. Writing for Black World, Eloise Greenfield agrees that Mathis writes of ‘‘real people’’ and identifies her talent as being rooted in ‘‘a profound knowledge of people and an infinite love and respect for Black children’’ (86). Janet Harris observes that Mathis ‘‘weaves her plots with sure authority and creates her characters with economy and veracity’’ (8). Judy Richardson states that the book has ‘‘. . . an ending which is realistically hopeful, giving the young reader a sense of his [or her] own inner strength’’ (381). Karen Hanley also praises the book and concludes that what makes it memorable is its ‘‘[p]owerfully motivated characters, skillful foreshadowing, and taut storyline’’ (647). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Sharon Bell Mathis Brooklyn Story. New York: Hill & Wang, 1970. Cartwheels. New York: Scholastic, 1977. The Hundred Penny Box. New York: Viking, 1975. Listen for the Fig Tree. New York: Viking, 1973. Ray Charles. New York: Crowell, 1973. Red Dog, Blue Fly: Football Poems. New York: Viking, 1991. Running Girl: The Diary of Ebonee Rose. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997.

390

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Sidewalk Story. New York: Viking, 1971. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986. Teacup Full of Roses. New York: Viking, 1972. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1987.

Studies of Sharon Bell Mathis’s Works Commire, Anne, ed. ‘‘Mathis, Sharon Bell.’’ In Something about the Author, vol. 7, p. 162. Detroit: Gale, 1975. Foster, Frances Smith. ‘‘Sharon Bell Mathis.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, vol. 33, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 170–73. Detroit: Gale, 1984. Gottlieb, Annie. Rev. of The Hundred Penny Box by Sharon Bell Mathis. New York Times, May 4, 1975, 20. Greenfield, Eloise. Rev. of Teacup Full of Roses by Sharon Bell Mathis. Black World (August 1973): 86–87. Hanley, Karen Stang. ‘‘Mathis, Sharon Bell.’’ Twentieth Century Children’s Writers. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978. Harris, Janet. Rev. of Teacup Full of Roses by Sharon Bell Mathis. New York Times, September 10, 1972, 8. Kutenplon, Deborah, and Ellen Olmstead, eds. ‘‘Mathis, Sharon Bell.’’ In Young Adult Fiction by African American Writers. 1968–1994: A Critical and Annotated Guide. New York: Garland, 1996. Liggins, Saundra. ‘‘Mathis, Sharon Bell.’’ In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Francis Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 483–84. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Metzger, Linda, ed. ‘‘Mathis, Sharon Bell.’’ In Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale, 1989. Richardson, Judy. ‘‘Black Children’s Books: An Overview.’’ Journal of Negro Education (Summer 1974): 380–400.

Loretta G. Woodard

VICTORIA EARLE MATTHEWS (1861–1898)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Victoria Earle Matthews was born into slavery in Fort Valley, Georgia, where she remained for eight years until her mother returned to claim her around 1869. She published three short stories: ‘‘Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life’’ (1889), ‘‘Eugenia’s Mistake: A Story’’ (1892), and ‘‘Zelika: A Story’’ (1892). Matthews was also known for her philanthropy, journalistic efforts, and speeches meant to improve the plight of African American woman. She hailed racial uplift and Christian values, which were apparent in her efforts to investigate the problems that southern African American women were facing in areas of unfair employment. She rallied support through her speeches and short stories, became president of the Woman’s Loyal Union, and was later named chairman of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, which she helped establish. MAJOR WORKS The major themes in Matthews’s literature relate to racial uplift, Christian values, and African American womanhood. These are apparent in one of Matthews’s most wellknown stories, ‘‘Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life,’’ and speak toward Matthews’s dedication to the improvement of conditions for African Americans during the Reconstruction era. ‘‘Aunt Lindy’’ depicts a small town’s struggle to fight and recover from a devastating fire. Many perish in the flames of this disaster, and Aunt Lindy is asked to care for one dying man, who she later discovers is her former slave master. In the end, it even seems as if Aunt Lindy’s benevolence toward her cruel master is divinely rewarded. Matthews uses the short story to perpetuate a new ideology of forgiveness and Christian ethics, despite the suffering endured by the former slave. One of the messages inherent in the story is the reconstruction of the traditional African American female role through Aunt Lindy. Lindy defies the typically submissive traits usually attributed to older African American characters and embraces intelligence and fortitude instead. Whether this is a result of the fact that Matthews is a former slave herself, or an effort to reconfigure the preconceived notion of the mentality of the slave, her intentions to improve the image of the African American women are apparent. CRITICAL RECEPTION Shirley Wilson Logan describes how Matthews, ‘‘at turn of the nineteenth century, serv[ed] as a prototype of the emerging black woman public intellectual’’ (‘‘To Embalm Her Memory,’’ 127). Indeed, Matthews asserts what Bill Mullen calls a ‘‘recurring theme in African American literature: slavery’s traumatic effects on the family,’’ as well as a ‘‘suggest[ion] [of] forgiveness as antidote to racism’’ (13). She explores the role of the

392

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

African woman and the significance that religion and spirituality hold for former female slaves who seem to ‘‘forgive’’ the slave master, and it is the recreation of the ‘‘True Woman,’’ which reveals her attempts to convince her fellow African female peers to ‘‘abandon the self-effacing restrictions associated with middle-class respectability and the cult of true womanhood that prevented them from defending their own name’’ (‘‘TO Embalm Her Memory,’’ Logan 128). Elizabeth Ammons suggests that oftentimes these typically romantic writers were instead ‘‘engaged in focused, mainstream public action to achieve sexual—and even more pressing for women of color, racial—equality . . .’’ (6). In other words, Matthews’s motive was to alter the place that African American women held within society, because for Matthews and Aunt Lindy, the demands of true womanhood could never be fulfilled. She attempts to create an image of a strong woman, one which holds admirable qualities similar, yet different, from those subscribed to through the ‘‘Cult of True Womanhood.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Victoria Earle Matthews ‘‘Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life.’’ In Revolutionary Tales: African American Women’s Short Stories, From the First Story to the Present, edited and introduced by Bill Mullen, 13– 19. New York: Dell, 1995.

Studies of Victoria Earle Matthews’s Work Ammons, Elizabeth, ed. ‘‘The Limits of Freedom: The Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Kate Chopin, and Pauline Hopkins.’’ In Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, 7–8, 59–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Logan, Shirley Wilson, ed. ‘‘‘To Embalm Her Memory in Song and Story’: Victoria Earle Matthews and Situated Sisterhood.’’ In ‘‘We Are Coming’’: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, 127–51. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. ———, ed. ‘‘Victoria Earle Matthews (1861–1907).’’ In With Pen and Voice a Critical Anthology of Nineteenth Century African-American Women, 120–25. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. McCaskill, Barbara. ‘‘‘To Labor . . . and Fight on the Side of God’: Spirit, Class, and NineteenthCentury African American Women’s Literature.’’ In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, edited by Karen L. Kilcup, 164–83. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Mullen, Bill, et al. Left of the Color Line. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Robinson, Fred Miller. ‘‘Victoria Earle Matthews: The Value of Race Literature (1895).’’ Massachusetts Review 27.2 (1986): 169–91.

Heidi Stauffer

COLLEEN J. MCELROY (1935– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Colleen J. McElroy is a prolific poet and writer whose words bridge distances and create a unique sense of place. She was born in 1935 in St. Louis, Missouri, to Ruth Celeste and Purcia Purcell Rawls. Her parents divorced in 1938, and she and her mother moved in with her grandmother, where her love of language began. McElroy’s mother married an army sergeant named Jesse Dalton Johnson in 1943. It was then that McElroy began the life of a nomad living everywhere from Wyoming to Germany. She earned an associate’s degree at Harris-Stowe Teachers College in 1956 and went on to receive her bachelor’s degree from Kansas State University in 1958, where she also received her master’s degree in 1963. For the next several years, McElroy worked a range of unique jobs from speech clinician to television talk show moderator before taking a position as the director of Speech and Hearing Services at Western Washington University. After receiving her doctoral degree in ethnolinguistic patterns of dialect differences and oral traditions from the University of Washington in 1973, she joined the faculty and went on to become that university’s first black female full professor. McElroy came to writing seriously in her thirties. In 1972, she published a textbook on speech and language development in preschool aged children. She published her first book of poetry in 1973, The Mules Done Long Since Gone and followed that with another collection, Winters Without Snow, in 1980. During the past thirty years, she has published hundreds of poems, prose, and scholarly work in some of the most prestigious literary journals, such as Callaloo, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, the African American Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Manhattan Review and the Seattle Review. In 1975, she received a Pushcart Prize for her poetry. In 2001, her poem ‘‘Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith,’’ which originally appeared in the Crab Orchard Review, was anthologized in the annual Best American Poetry series. In 1978, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for her poetry, and in 1991 she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for her fiction. She has also received both a Rockefeller Fellowship and a Dupont Visiting Scholar Fellowship. Her poetry collection Queen of the Ebony Isles received the Before Columbus Association’s American Book Award in 1985. In 1987, McElroy traveled as a Fulbright Scholar to Yugoslavia and also won a Washington State Governor’s Award for her second book, Bone Flames. In 1993, McElroy journeyed to Madagascar on a second Fulbright Fellowship, an experience that led to her collection of translations and travel memoirs, Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar. McElroy’s poetry collection Travelling Music was a Bronze finalist in poetry for ForeWord magazine’s 1998 Book of the Year Awards. Over the years, McElroy’s books have been translated into Russian, Italian, German, Malay, and Serbo-Croatian. In addition to teaching and sharing her writing throughout

394

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

the Pacific Northwest, McElroy serves as the editor-in-chief of the Seattle Review, which has published writers such as Sharon Olds, Diane Wakoski, Al Young, Carolyn Kizer, Marilyn Hacker, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Grace Paley. Never one to forego the pleasures of travel, McElroy visited Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2005, to commemorate their African American History month. Today, she is highly sought after as a speaker, teacher, and writer. She has traveled throughout the world, from Europe to South America, and Asia to Africa, bridging culture and distance with her words, creating unique literary places that resonate in the human imagination.

MAJOR WORKS McElroy has widely published across a range of genres, from poetry to fiction to scholarly work to drama. Jesus and Fat Tuesday and Other Stories (1987) is a collection of McElroy’s fiction— fourteen short stories that cover environments from rural America to the inner cities, over the span of nearly 100 years. The stories make the ordinary extraordinary and detail the lives of everyday people with lyrical language and hope. In McElroy’s memoir, A Long Way from St. Louie (1997), a collection of essays and poems, she shares her love of movement and travel. This is a book about the world as a place to explore and inhabit, sharing stories of traveling on the famed Route 66, studying in Germany after World War II, adventuring in Fiji, getting to know the country of Malaysia, climbing Machu Picchu, and traveling across Australia on a motorcycle at the age of fifty-eight. In her own words, McElroy describes this book as ‘‘impressions of journeys, memories held in fragments like footprints on a sandy beach . . . or the special spice in a dish prepared by a favorite cook.’’ In addition to travel narratives, she also shares stories of her childhood in St. Louis and words of appreciation about role models including Josephine Baker and Ethel Waters. The poetry collection Travelling Music (1998) continues to catalogue McElroy’s world travels in the free-verse style she is known for, this time taking readers to the Balkans, Japan, Paris, and throughout the United States. The poems also recall current events, in poems such as ‘‘The Verdict: Los Angeles 1992,’’ which speaks to the acquittal of four white police offers who were charged with beating Rodney King. Several of the poems pay homage to prominent African American figures such as Dorothy Dandrige, Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, and Bill Robinson. McElroy continued to write about her travel abroad in Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (1999), based on her experiences traveling to Madagascar as a Fulbright researcher, where she undertook an ethnographic study of the Malagasy oral traditions and myths. The book opens with an explanation of how McElroy’s project in Madagascar began and the oral traditions on which she focused her research. The introduction is followed by an overview of the linguistics of the island, and the ensuing nine chapters deal with the various regions of Madagascar. The narrative includes twenty-eight native folktales and examples of Malagasy poetry interspersed with McElroy’s impressions of Madagascar and her adventures interacting with the Malagasy people and immersing herself in the culture.

COLLEEN J. MCELROY

395

CRITICAL RECEPTION McElroy’s work has always been well received by audiences and critics alike. She has won numerous awards and grants for her writing, including two prestigious National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. With reference to an early collection of poetry, What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968–1988, the San Francisco Review of Books wrote, ‘‘McElroy is the master of long, finely-crafted poems, each with a particular melodic intensity and tone.’’ Kirkus Reviews referred to her memoir, A Long Way from St. Louie, as a ‘‘lovely, lyrical memoir of an African American woman’s travels through life,’’ and ‘‘a stunning piece of writing, and a fitting summary of a life led to the fullest.’’ Publishers Weekly wrote that the book was a ‘‘high-spirited, fresh and beautifully written memoir.’’ Kirkus Reviews was equally enamored with Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar, which they described as ‘‘[a] piquant glimpse into Malagasy storytelling, set to advantage by the kind of poised writing that makes one slow down, read carefully, savor.’’ Over the Lip of the World was also well reviewed in Seattle’s independent weekly newspaper, the Stranger. Kent Miller writes, ‘‘Whether chatting with renowned poets or sweating out encounters with hissing cockroaches, McElroy is a most amiable companion. Linguists will find much fascinating material in her introductory chapter on the island’s 18 dialects, but the rest of us will be impatient to climb aboard an overcrowded jitney, bound for yet another balladeer softly murmuring of ancient doings.’’ In a review of Travelling Music, Publishers Weekly writes, ‘‘The pleasure in accompanying McElroy on her excursions and jazz age reconstructions, such as the impressive ‘A Charleston for Florence Mills,’ allows us to overlook some of the more overstated lines, and find how ‘each landscape has its own remark for our lives.’’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Colleen J. McElroy Bone Flames. Middletown: CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Driving under the Cardboard Pines. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company, 1989. Jesus and Fat Tuesday and Other Stories. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company, 1987. Lie and Say You Love Me. Tacoma, WA: Circinatum Press, 1981. A Long Way from St. Louie. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997. Looking for a Country under Its Original Name. Yakima, WA: Blue Begonia Press, 1984. The Mules Done Long Since Gone. Seattle: Harrison-Madrona Press, 1973. Music from Home. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976. Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Queen of the Ebony Isles. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. Travelling Music: Poems. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1998. What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968–1988. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1991. Winters Without Snow. San Francisco: Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, 1980.

396

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Studies of Colleen J. McElroy’s Works Koolish, Linda. African American Writers: Portraits and Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Strickland, Daryl. ‘‘Seattle’s Black Voices—For Authors of Color, the Local Literary Scene is Filled with Promise.’’ Seattle Times, February 16, 1997, M1. Watson Sherman, Charlotte. ‘‘Walking across the Floor: A Conversation with Colleen J. McElroy—Black Writer and Teacher.’’ American Visions (April–May 1995).

Roxane Gay

PATRICIA MCKISSACK (1944– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Patricia L’Ann Carwell McKissack, a writer of children’s fiction, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on August 9, 1944. She and her husband, Fredrick L. McKissack, are both graduates of Tennessee State University. Married since 1964, their writing careers are deeply entwined. The McKissacks are the co-owners of All-Writing Services. Patricia McKissack also holds a master’s degree from Webster University and taught English for several years at the junior high and college level. Long-time residents of St. Louis, they have retired to Chesterfield, Missouri. MAJOR WORKS Patricia McKissack has written and published several books by herself, but has also had great success in collaborating with illustrators such as Jerry Pinkney and Rachel Isadore. Her husband Fredrick McKissack is her most frequent and closest writing collaborator. Together, the two have published dozens of titles for children in the areas of African American biography and history. The McKissacks’s books have won several notable awards, including the prestigious Coretta Scott King award in 1995 for Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters and again for Black Hands, White Sails. Patricia McKissack’s breakout book for children was Flossie and the Fox, published in 1986. Her personable note to her readers introduces the story as part of an oral tradition. The character of Flossie is a satisfying counterpoint to the Eurocentric Red Riding Hood archetype of a young girl journeying in the forest. When Flossie encounters danger in the form of a talking fox, she defeats the trickster at his own game. When Mr. Fox informs her he is a fox, she tells him, ‘‘I just purely don’t believe it,’’ and through the book continues to verbally vex him through denial until she safely arrives at her destination. Goin’ Someplace Special also features a strong young African American character. Unlike Flossie, who has just one villain to deny, Tricia Ann must run a gauntlet of dangers to reach her Someplace Special, the Public Library. In an interview with Heather Vogel Frederick, McKissack explains how the events in story were prompted by personal experience. Besides illuminating a particular time in history, she wrote the story to convey an encouraging message, ‘‘I wanted it to be a book of personal triumph, so that a young person reading it would not just see me as a black child in the South dealing with segregation, but as any child dealing with a challenge—a learning disability or physical challenge or anything that sets them apart’’ (90). Narrating African American history is a goal that Patricia and Fred McKissack have achieved through historical fiction and biographies of major figures. Biographies they have created for the ‘‘Great African Americans Series’’ published by Enslow include

398

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

books on Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Louis Armstrong, Marian Anderson, and Jesse Owens. CRITICAL RECEPTION McKissack’s individual and collaborative works have been favorably reviewed by major publications like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and the Horn Book. Sharon McElmeel cites McKissack’s work as being ‘‘noted for candor and thoroughness’’ (36). Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman? (Scholastic 1994), cowritten with Fredrick, won the 1993 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for children’s literature in the nonfiction category. Besides being critically acclaimed as a children’s author, articles in scholarly journals like African American Review and Language Arts provide substantial literary analysis of McKissack’s writings. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Patricia McKissack Black Hands, White Sails: The Story of African-American Whalers. With Fredrick L. McKissack. New York: Scholastic, 1999. Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters. With Fredrick L. McKissack. New York: Scholastic, 1994. Flossie and the Fox. New York: Dial, 1986. Goin’ Someplace Special. New York: Atheneum, 2001. Mirandy and Brother Wind. New York: Knopf, 1988. Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman? New York: Scholastic, 1994.

Studies of Patricia McKissack’s Works Brodie, Carolyn S. ‘‘Patricia and Fredrick McKissack: Changing Lives.’’ School Library Media Activities Monthly 17.5 (2001): 45–48. Davis, Olga Idriss. ‘‘The Rhetoric of Quilts: Creating Identity in African-American Children’s Literature.’’ African American Review 32 (1998): 67–76. Frederick, Heather Vogel. ‘‘PW Talks with Patricia McKissack.’’ Publishers Weekly (August 6, 2001): 90. McElmeel, Sharon. ‘‘Patricia McKissack: Wordsmith and Avid Reader.’’ Book Report 18.3 (1999): 36–37. Yenika-Agbaw, Vivian. ‘‘Taking Children’s Literature Seriously: Reading for Pleasure and Social Change.’’ Language Arts 74 (1997): 446–53.

Rebecca Feind

TERRY MCMILLAN (1951– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Popular novelist Terry McMillan was born on October 18, 1951 in Port Huron, MI. Her parents, Madeline Washington Tilman and Edward McMillan, divorced when she was thirteen years old, and her father died three years later. McMillan became interested in literature as a teenager when she worked in the local library. McMillan received a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986 and a master of fine arts degree in film from Columbia University. McMillan has an adult son, Solomon. She currently resides in California. MAJOR WORKS To date, McMillan has written six novels. The first of those novels, Mama (1987) was self-published. Mama is the story of Mildred Peacock, a hardworking mother of five children. A single mother by choice-she throws her drunken husband out of the house after a fight—Mildred daily struggles to take care of her children. Initially finding solace in liquor and cigarettes, she eventually finds solace in the bond she develops with her eldest daughter, Freda. McMillan’s second novel, Disappearing Acts (1989), is the urban love story of Franklin Swift and Zora Banks. Franklin is a construction worker and Zora is a teacher and aspiring singer and songwriter. The novel follows the ups and downs of their relationship as they learn that sometimes socio-economic differences trump mutual attraction. Waiting to Exhale (1992) is McMillan’s third novel. Four friends—Robin Stokes, Bernadine Harris, Gloria Matthews, and Savannah Jackson—are at the center of this novel. An examination of the bond of friendship among women, the novel follows the four Phoenix friends who support each other through trials such as depression and divorce. McMillan published her fourth novel in 1996. How Stella Got Her Groove Back is semiautobiographical. It is loosely based on McMillan’s own experience. In the novel Stella Payne, a 42-year-old investment analyst meets and falls in love with a Jamaican half her age. A Day Late and a Dollar Short (2001) followed How Stella got Her Groove Back. It is similar to Mama in that it has a matriarch, Viola Price, at its center. The novel focuses on the Price family’s struggles with themselves and one another. The Interruption of Everything (2005) is McMillan’s most recent work. Marilyn Grimes, a middle aged wife and mother, is the novel’s heroine. The novel follows Marilyn through her mid-life crisis. In addition to the six novels, McMillan also edited Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction (1990), a collection of fiction by African American writers.

400

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION McMillan’s work has been positively received by both the popular and critical communities. Waiting to Exhale was a New York Times bestseller. Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back were both developed into movies which grossed millions of dollars. Disappearing Acts was produced into a direct to cable film, and McMillan received a National Book Award for Mama. Critics praise McMillan’s ability to depict the African American female experience. For example, Tina M. Harris and Patricia S. Hill argue that the screen version of Waiting to Exhale was so wildly popular because of its ability to address the tension between African American women’s personal and professional lives (9). Similarly, Janet Mason Ellerby argues that McMillan has found success because she ‘‘resists following the script written by main stream American discourse that imposes the cultural ideals of white patriarchal domesticity . . .’’ (106). Like her predecessors Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, McMillan has been criticized for her negative depiction of African American men ( Jackson 20); however, her work promises to continue to have ‘‘sister’’ popularity. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Terry McMillan Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction. New York: Penguin Group, 1990. A Day Late and a Dollar Short. New York: Penguin Group, 2001. Disappearing Acts. New York: Penguin Group, 1989. How Stella Got Her Groove Back. New York: Penguin Group, 1996. The Interruption of Everything. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Mama. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Waiting to Exhale. New York: Penguin Group, 1992.

Studies of Terry McMillan’s Works Champion, Laurie. ‘‘Terry McMillan.’’ In Twenty-First Century American Novelists. Ed Lisa Abney and Suzanne Disheroon-Green, Suzanne. Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale, 2004. 245–51. Dandridge, Rita B. ‘‘Debunking the Beauty Myth in Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale.’’ In Language, Rhythm, and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. 121–33. ———. ‘‘Debunking the Motherhood Myth in Terry McMillan’s Mama.’’ CLA Journal 41.4 ( June 1998): 405–16. ———.‘‘Terry McMillan.’’ Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. 319–326. Ellerby, Janet Mason. ‘‘Deposing the Man of the House: Terry McMillan Rewrites the Family.’’ MELUS 22.2 (Summer 1997): 105–17. Harris, Tina M. ‘Waiting to Exhale’ or ‘Breath(ing) Again’: A Search for Identity, Empowerment, and Love in the 1990’s. Women and Language 21.2 (Fall 1998): 9–20. Jackson, Edward M. ‘‘Images of Black Males in Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale.’’ MAWA Review 8.1 ( June 1993): 20–26. Vo¨lz, Sabrina. ‘‘Teaching Terry McMillan’s Short Fiction.’’ ELT Journal 55.2 (Apr 2001): 164–71.

TERRY MCMILLAN

401

Waltonen, Karma. ‘‘Terry McMillan 1951’’ In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement XIII: Edward Abbey to William Jay Smith. Ed Jay Parini. New York, NY: Scribner, 2003. 179–211.

Yolanda Williams Page

LOUISE MERIWETHER (1923– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Most known, perhaps, for her juvenile biographies of notable African Americans and her novel Daddy Was a Number Runner, Louise Meriwether has been and continues to be an advocate for African Americans and women. Her candid writing style and activist voice has impacted American social thinking. She was born the third of five children and the only daughter to Marion Lloyd Jenkins and Julia Jenkins in Haverstraw, New York. Her father, a bricklayer, moved the family to Brooklyn, where he became a numbers runner during the Great Depression, and, from there, the family moved to Harlem, where Meriwether spent her adolescent years. After high school, Meriwether earned a B.A. in English from New York University, and soon after married a Columbia University graduate student, Angelo Meriwether. She taught in the Midwest before moving with her husband to Los Angeles, where her marriage ended, as did a second marriage to Earl Howe. She earned her master’s degree in journalism from the University of California at Los Angeles and published numerous articles and reviews in the 1960s in periodicals such as the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Sentinel, and the Antioch Review, catching the eye of Prentice-Hall with her short story ‘‘A Happening in Barbados,’’ published in the spring 1968 issue of the Antioch Review. After the publication of Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), Meriwether returned to New York to write three children’s biographies of notable African American men and women over the next three years. She did so to remedy what she perceived as a void of influential African American figures in American history education. The biographies— The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls; The Heart Man: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams; and Don’t Ride the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Parks Story—were meant to right that wrong. Most recently, Meriwether has published the adult novels Fragments of the Ark (1994) and Shadow Dancing (2000). MAJOR WORKS Louise Meriwether’s first and best-known novel is Daddy Was a Number Runner. Inspired by her own adolescence in Harlem, this novel is representative of Depressionera Harlem and the lack of opportunity and hope found in desolate conditions, though not the autobiography it is sometimes alleged to be. The despair of Harlem is portrayed through the eyes of the adolescent protagonist Francie Coffin and focuses on the struggle of young women who are sexually victimized so much that sexuality becomes a commodity traded on a daily basis. The first response is to cover one’s eyes, but her scenes assault so quickly and are written so soberly that the reader has no time to look away. Forgoing the rhetoric of what it means to grow up as a young girl in Harlem, Meriwether involves and invades the reader, who wants the best for Francie, but is left in the end feeling that the patterns of Harlem life are all but unalterable and inescapable.

LOUISE MERIWETHER

403

Meriwether followed the success of Daddy Was a Number Runner with the children’s biographies The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls, The Heart Man: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, and Don’t Ride the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Parks Story, publishing one a year from 1971 to 1973. Each of these tells the life stories of influential African Americans often left unsung by American education. Although Meriwether simplifies the stories for an audience of children, the poignancy remains. The books leave readers with a sense of the hope inherent in the fortitude of the individuals to whom she gives voice. In the midst of the publication of these children’s biographies, Meriwether also published the short story ‘‘That Girl from Creektown’’ in 1972’s Black Review No. 2, a collection of works by African American authors edited by Mel Watkins. This short work showcases the best of Meriwether’s talents. In this ambiguous story of Lonnie Lyttle, a young southern African American woman, seemingly ensnared by her poverty, race, and gender, Meriwether again paints with candor the friction of desire and circumstance. Lonnie’s pride and hunger for success keep her from accepting a menial job that her mother and her poverty push her toward. It is the same pride that strengthens her to reject the advances of Daniel, a past lover now married to another woman. And it is the same hunger that fuels her eventual acquiescence to the affair with Daniel. Meriwether writes about this desire and pain of the characters masterfully: ‘‘Hope fluttered in Lonnie’s breast. She waited for him to say he was through with Viola, was moving out of her father’s house, but he only looked at Lonnie in silent anguish. For a moment his need for her lay naked between them. Lonnie felt a vague alarm, sensing a hurting in him somewhere where she had presumed only strength’’ (86). The reader, though, is uncertain to what Lonnie has finally succumbed—to Daniel, to her own passion, to selling her body? The duplicitous ending leaves the reader questioning whether Lonnie has been empowered or entrapped by her affair with Daniel. In 1994, Meriwether published Fragments of the Ark, an adult historical fiction and extension of one of her earlier children’s biographies. This novel narrates the life of Robert Smalls, who saves other slaves from a crumbling south, helps northern forces, and becomes a Union naval officer. Perspicuously representative of slave life during and after the Civil War, in this novel, Meriwether does not romanticize the effects of emancipation, but instead offers a realistic look at the degree to which African American lives are changed and unchanged by the Civil War. In Meriwether’s Shadow Dancing, a modern embodiment of her theme of African American female struggle and identity, protagonist Glenda Jackson navigates career, motherhood, friendship, pain, and love. Meriwether’s thumbprint is certainly on this novel, and although her other novels can be arguably categorized as young adult fiction, the themes of this work clearly designate it to an adult audience. While this novel details a woman who is perhaps Meriwether’s most successful female character, the novel itself carries less impact than her previous works. Her candor seems subdued here. That telltale candor and the incredible fortitude of the African American spirit in the face of Sisyphean circumstances is what creates a thread of continuity throughout Meriwether’s diverse works. Whether writing for children, for adolescents, or for adults, Louise Meriwether writes about real and fictional heroes who face unfathomable odds. Some succeed; others face more indistinct futures. Perhaps that ambiguity, too, is what sets Meriwether’s writing apart.

404

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Given the diversity and amount of Meriwether’s writing, surprisingly little critical work focuses on her. Almost all that is published on Meriwether praises her believable characters for their simultaneous innocence and intuitive intelligence and praises her representation of the economic, social, and relational reality of African American lives in whatever historical period she writes. Indicative of the kind of critical reception common to Meriwether, Janelle Collins writes the following in ‘‘‘Poor and Black and Apt to Stay That Way’: Gambling on a Sure Thing in Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner’’: ‘‘Meriwether’s novel powerfully reminds us of the human tragedy behind the statistics and stereotypes of the black underclass. It is for this reason that the importance of Daddy Was a Number Runner extends far beyond both its literary and historical value’’ (58). This applause for Meriwether’s first novel echoes throughout critical reviews of her adult works, which are repeatedly admired for their poignancy. Perhaps in the best praise possible for any author’s writing, James Baldwin expresses in the foreword to Daddy Was a Number Runner that the novel is an object he can point to proudly when people ask him why he writes. He continues, ‘‘This book should be sent to the White House . . . and to everyone in this country to read’’ (6–7). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Louise Meriwether Daddy Was a Number Runner. New York: The Feminist Press, 1970. Don’t Ride the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Parks Story. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Fragments of the Ark. New York: Pocket Books, 1994. ‘‘James Baldwin: The Fiery Voice of the Negro Revolt.’’ Negro Digest (August 1963): 3–7. ‘‘The Negro: Half a Man in a White World.’’ Negro Digest (October 1965): 4–13. ‘‘The New Face of Negro History.’’ Frontier (October 1965): 5–7. ‘‘No Race Pride.’’ Bronze America ( June 1964): 6–9. Shadow Dancing. New York: One World, 2000. ‘‘That Girl from Creektown.’’ In Black Review No. 2, edited by Mel Watkins, 79–92. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1972. ‘‘The Thick End Is for Whipping.’’ Negro Digest (November 1968): 55–62.

Studies of Louise Meriwether’s Works Baldwin, James. ‘‘Foreword.’’ In Daddy Was a Number Runner, edited by Louise Meriwether, 5–7. New York: The Feminist Press, 1970. Collins, Janelle. ‘‘‘Poor and Black and Apt to Stay That Way’: Gambling on a Sure Thing in Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner.’’ Midwest Quarterly 45.1 (2003): 49–58. Dandridge, Rita B. ‘‘From Economic Insecurity to Disintegration: A Study of Character in Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner.’’ Negro American Literature Forum 9 (1975): 82–85. ———. ‘‘Louise Meriwether.’’ Literature Resource Center. The Gale Group, 2003. University of Texas at Arlington Library. http://www.galegroup.com (accessed January 6, 2005). Davis, Thadious M., and Trudier Harris, eds. ‘‘Louise Meriwether.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, 182–86. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984.

LOUISE MERIWETHER

405

Keymer, David. Rev. of Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether. Library Journal ( January 1, 1994): 163. McKay, Nellie. ‘‘Afterword.’’ In Daddy Was a Number Runner, edited by Louise Meriwether, 209–34. New York: The Feminist Press, 1970. Naylor, Gloria. ‘‘Finding Our Voice.’’ Essence (May 1995): 193–98. Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, FL: Everett/ Edwards, Inc., 1973, 134–35.

Bridgitte Arnold

MAY MILLER (1899–1995)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet and dramatist May Miller was born on January 26, 1899, in Washington, D.C., to Kelly and Annie May Miller. Along with her four siblings, she grew up on the campus of Howard University, where her father worked as a professor and dean. During his last year at Howard, Kelly Miller founded Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, a nationally recognized repository for the documentation of people of African descent. His position at Howard introduced the family to many respected scholars, writers, and activists, including W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Carter G. Woodson. In addition to being a nationally known educator and sociologist, Miller’s father was also a respected orator and published poet. His love for literature inspired Miller at a young age as he encouraged her to read and write. As a child, Miller was drawn to literature. She read Poe and Whitman, who were among her father’s favorites. She attended the well-known M Street School, which was later renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. Her teachers included playwright Mary P. Burrill and poet Angelina Grimke´. Burrill encouraged Miller to write, and at fourteen, Miller had her first poem, ‘‘Venus,’’ published in the School Progress magazine. A year later, School Progress also published Miller’s first play, Pandora’s Box. In 1916, at sixteen, Miller enrolled at Howard University. She joined the Howard University Dramatic Club, which was organized to train students in theater arts. As a member of Howard’s theater community, Miller was active in the movement to develop and perform plays written by African American writers at a time when the only plays being staged about African Americans were written by white playwrights. During her four year tenure at Howard, Miller performed in several plays, including Clyde Fitch’s The Truth. Miller graduated at the top of her class in 1920, and in that same year she received a playwright’s award for her one-act play, Within the Shadows. After graduation, Miller moved to Baltimore, where she taught drama, dance, and speech at Frederick Douglass High School. Miller also joined Georgia Douglas Johnson’s ‘‘S Street Salon.’’ Johnson’s Washington, D.C., home became a gathering place for writers to meet and share their works. Miller traveled to S Street on the weekends. There she developed friendships with Langston Hughes, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Carter G. Woodson, among others. In the summer, Miller studied playwriting at Columbia University under Frederick Koch, a prominent theater scholar of the period. In 1925, Opportunity magazine awarded the third prize to Miller’s one-act play The Bog Guide. While teaching and living in Baltimore, Miller wrote her most well-known plays, including the 1926 Cuss’d Thing, to which Opportunity gave an honorable mention. In 1929, the University of North Carolina’s Carolina magazine published Miller’s play Scratches. During the summer of 1927, Miller was invited to join the Krigwa Players, which W.E.B. DuBois founded in 1923. Miller performed in the Krigwa Players’ production of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Blue Blood with Frank Horne. In 1930, Willis Richardson compiled Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, an

MAY MILLER

407

anthology frequently used in schools. Richardson required that none of the contributing playwrights employ dialect, which was used in most African American plays of the period. He included two of Miller’s plays, Graven Images and Ridin’ the Goat. Upon the collection’s publication, Richardson cited Miller as among the most promising Negro playwrights. Throughout the 1930s, Miller continued to write plays, focusing on history plays for her students at Douglass High School. In 1935, Miller collaborated with Richardson on Negro History in Thirteen Plays, an anthology of plays that dramatized the lives of African American men and women. Miller contributed four of her own plays: Harriet Tubman, Samory, Christophe’s Daughters, and Sojourner Truth. Both Miller and Richardson received national recognition for the anthology. Miller wrote two plays that remain unpublished. Stragglers in the Dust was completed in 1930, and Nails and Thorns won the third prize in Southern University’s 1933 writing contest. While continuing her work in drama, Miller began writing short stories and poetry. In May 1930, her short story ‘‘Doorstops’’ was published by Carolina magazine. She published a second story, ‘‘Bidin’ Place,’’ in Dillard University’s April 1937 edition of Arts Quarterly. Like her plays, Miller’s short stories are largely concerned with political and social issues and their impact upon African American families. The year 1943 was a pivotal one for Miller. She wrote her last play, Freedom’s Children on the March, which was presented at Douglass High School’s June commencement exercises. At the encouragement of her husband, John Lewis Sullivan, whom she married in 1940, Miller retired from teaching at the end of that school year to devote herself to writing poetry full time. Embarking upon her career as a poet with the same determination that she exhibited as a playwright, Miller attended numerous writing workshops in Washington, D.C., to improve her writing, including one headed by Inez Boulton. A devotee of the Imagist School, Boulton drew many budding poets to her workshops, among them Owen Dodson and Paul Lawson, who later published two of Miller’s poetry collections. Between 1945 and 1955, several of Miller’s poems appeared in the literary magazines Antioch Review and Poetry. Miller’s first major collection of poems, Into the Clearing, was printed in 1959 by Lawson’s Charioteer Press. Poems, her second collection, appeared in 1962. Miller published three books of poetry in the 1970s: Not That Far was issued in 1973 and was greatly influenced by her travels in Europe; The Clearing and Beyond was printed in 1974; and 1975 saw the publication of Dust of Uncertain Journey. In addition to writing and publishing, Miller continued to teach, serving as poet-inresidence at Monmouth College, West Virginia State College, Exeter Academy, the Bluefield Arts Commission, and the Southern University Poetry Festival. Throughout the 1970s, Miller began reading her poetry at national celebrations, including the Washington, D.C., bicentennials of 1973 and 1974 as well as the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter in 1977. During the 1960s and 1970s, Miller became increasingly active in Washington, D.C.’s community arts programs, serving as the coordinator for performing poets in 1964 and 1965. From 1970 to 1978, Miller served on the District of Columbia Commission of the Arts, chairing the literature panel. In 1979, Miller was elected to the Folger Library’s Poetry Advisory Committee. Miller continued to write and publish throughout the 1980s. Her last collection, Collected Poems, was printed in 1989. Miller’s works, both poetic and dramatic, have been published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. May Miller died on February 8, 1995, in Washington, D.C.

408

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

MAJOR WORKS Like most African American women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Miller wrote plays that were primarily concerned with political and social issues, especially those that affected African American women and their families. Miller’s work differs from many of her contemporaries, however, because she ventured beyond the domestic sphere, representing life beyond the confines of the home. Miller was also daring in her decision to feature white characters in major roles, something most of her colleagues avoided. Miller seemed to believe that bringing African American and white characters together on stage was an effective means of presenting racial issues and combating racial stereotypes. Most of Miller’s early plays center on issues of racism and class. Written in 1926, Scratches highlights class differences and stereotypes between mulattos and darker-skinned African Americans. Set in an urban pool hall, the play tells the story of Dan, a poor young man torn between Abbie, a light-skinned mulatto, and Meldora, who is darker. Meldora is cast as ‘‘a cheap imitation, whereas one indefinable feels that Abbie, in spite of dissipation, is to the manner born.’’ Dan ultimately chooses Abbie, whom he believes to be the epitome of class and beauty, and Meldora receives little consideration in the play’s conclusion. With Scratches, Miller examines the prejudices that exist within the African American community, suggesting that African Americans often accept the same stereotypes about themselves that whites perpetuate. Miller’s Graven Images and Ridin’ the Goat, both published in Willis Richardson’s Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, focus on an individual’s relationship with the community. Graven Images, which was inspired by an Old Testament verse, presents an African American hero in a biblical story. Moses’s son confronts a hostile environment and triumphs through intelligence rather than force. Several critics have noted that the play could have been read to the children who integrated the public school system in Little Rock, perhaps urging them to rely upon their intellect rather than responding to violence in kind. Like Graven Images, Ridin’ the Goat draws on themes of the individual at odds with the community. With comical and occasionally satirical look at life in an African American community, the play follows a young doctor through his journey to be accepted into a Baltimore community and to gain the trust of his uneducated clients. In this work, Miller emphasizes the importance of education, casting it as the hope of all African Americans. In some sense, she repeats DuBois’s call for educated women and men to share their knowledge with others, thus uplifting their community. In the 1930s, Miller began writing plays that dramatize the lives of African American men and women who played a crucial role in history. In both Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Miller seeks to call attention to the forgotten women of African American history. By presenting strong African American women of the past, Miller seemingly urges all African Americans to remember the strength of their foremothers and urges them to draw upon figures like Truth and Tubman for inspiration. After retiring from teaching in 1943, Miller began writing and publishing poetry full time, and she quickly gained national recognition as a poet. As with her plays, Miller’s poetry confronts social and political concerns, posing moral questions that face a society that lacks humanist values. In her first two collections of poetry, Miller explores her growing concern with morality, sacrifice, and knowledge. Poems like ‘‘Green Leaf,’’ ‘‘Trails,’’ and ‘‘Late Conjecture’’ consider man’s relationship to a higher power, an issue in which Miller became increasingly interested. Miller’s poems reveal a simple,

MAY MILLER

409

straightforward style that encourages readers to reflect on their own lives. As critic Claudia Tate notes, Miller’s poetry is contemplative and evocative, placing the reader at the center of each poem. Miller has often been described as a playwright and poet of exceptional vision, incorporating spiritual, social, political, and emotional themes in her works. CRITICAL RECEPTION Miller’s work has largely been well received. She is frequently described as one of the best African American female playwrights of the early twentieth century, and she is noted for her ability to accurately represent African American urban life. She is also lauded by critics for her insistence upon including white characters in her plays, for her honesty in tackling racial issues, and for portraying African American women as threedimensional characters who want lives beyond their homes. Similarly, Miller’s poetry, which is less concerned with politics and more concerned with virtue than her plays, is said to express a humane vision of quiet strength and moral courage. While both her plays and her poems are widely anthologized and Miller is often cited in works on African American writers, Miller’s works have received scant critical attention. Like many African American women who enjoyed successful careers as writers, Miller has been remembered more as a social activist than as a writer who received national recognition at the height of her career. Known as both a member of the Harlem Renaissance and the black Avant-garde movement, Miller is best remembered as an actor, director, collaborator, activist, and artist. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by May Miller ‘‘Bidin’ Place.’’ Arts Quarterly (April 1937). The Bog Guide. 1925. Unpublished. The Clearing and Beyond. Washington, DC: Charioteer Press, 1974. Collected Poems. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1989. ‘‘Doorstops.’’ Carolina Magazine (May 1930). Dust of Uncertain Journey. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1975. Freedom’s Children on the March. 1943. Unpublished. Graven Images. In Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, edited by Willis Richardson. New York: Associated Publishers, 1930. Halfway to the Sun. Washington, DC: Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1981. Into the Clearing. Washington, DC: Charioteer Press, 1959. Lyrics of Three Women. With Katie Lyle and Maude Rubin. Baltimore: Linden Press, 1964. Nails and Thorns. 1933. Unpublished. Negro History in Thirteen Plays. With Willis Richardson. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1935. Not That Far. San Luis Obispo, CA: Solo Press, 1973. Poems. Thetford, VT: Cricket Press, 1962. The Ransomed Wait. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1983. Ridin’ the Goat. In Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, edited by Willis Richardson. New York: Associated Publishers, 1930. Scratches. 1929. Unpublished. Stragglers in the Dust. 1930. Unpublished.

410

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Studies of May Miller’s Works Christian, Samuel. ‘‘Four African-American Female Playwrights, 1910–1950: The Narratives of their Historical, Genteel, and Black Folk Voodoo Plays.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation., City University of New York, 1995. Hatch, James V., and Leo Hamalian, eds. The Roots of African-American Theatre. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Miller, Jeanne Marie A. ‘‘Georgia Douglas Johnson and May Miller: Forgotten Playwrights of the New Negro Renaissance.’’ CLA Journal 33.4 (1990): 349–66. Mutima, Niamani. ‘‘Hatch-Billops Archives: Interviews with Playwrights.’’ Negro American Literature Forum 10.2 (1976): 64–65. Nouryeh, Andrea J. ‘‘Twice Silenced, Twice Oppressed: African American Women Playwrights of the 1930s.’’ New England Theatre Journal 13 (2002): 99–122. Parry, Betty. ‘‘Belles Lettres Interview.’’ Belles Lettres 2.3 (1987): 9. Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1976. Young-Minor, Ethyl A. ‘‘Staging Black Women’s History: May Miller’s Harriet Tubman as Cultural Artifact.’’ CLA Journal 46.1 (2002): 30–47.

Miranda A. Green-Barteet

ARTHENIA J. BATES MILLICAN (1920– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born and raised in Sumter, South Carolina, Arthenia J. Bates Millican has had a long career as a writer and an educator. She received formal education at Lincoln High School and Morris College, but was also inspired by her intellectual father, Calvin Shepard Jackson, who encouraged her to write. After completing her studies at Morris, she began her teaching career. After teaching in different schools from 1941 to 1946, she attended Atlanta University, completing a master’s degree and studying under Langston Hughes. She married Noah Bates in 1950, a union that concluded in divorce in 1956, and later married Wilbert Millican. Her first book, Seeds beneath the Snow, was published in 1969. She completed her dissertation on James Weldon Johnson in 1972 at Louisiana State University. Millican combined her skills as a writer and contributor to African American scholarship with her abilities as a professional educator, attaining the status of full professor at Southern University. Retired from teaching since 1980, she has continued to explore ideas through writing and public speaking. MAJOR WORKS Millican is known as a poet and a prose writer. Her writings examine religious themes, seeking answers and explanations about suffering and tragedy. In her essay ‘‘The Autobiography of an Idea,’’ she describes her father’s influence on her perspective on fate, saying, ‘‘I worshipped at his shrine of ‘tragedy,’ unconsciously bringing a predilection for doom and gloom into my stories and verse’’ (25). Her tendency toward ‘‘doom and gloom’’ was balanced by advice from her mentors, Langston Hughes and Lance Jeffers. The balance for Millican is in the exploration of painful themes and deep questions with a wry humor that makes her an engaging and believable narrator. For example, in the vignette ‘‘Little Jake,’’ she explains the spoiled young man’s lack of ambition with a brief statement on his behavior in high school, ‘‘Truancy interested him during the first year’’ (Seeds 22). In stories like ‘‘Little Jake,’’ Millican combines observation of family dynamics with realistic details that illustrate the lives of her characters. Parent-child relationships are also a major theme of Millican’s writings. She presents several parent-child dyads that hinge on the parent’s willingness to raise a child in a strict environment, examining positive and negative aspects of traditional roles. The stories in Seeds reflect the multifaceted ironies in raising African American children in the segregated South. Millican’s child characters range from the abused Silas, who is faced with the limited definition of manhood that denies emotion, to the fatherless Runetta, the focus of her mother’s great devotion. Besides examining the role of fate through a religious lens, Millican also examines religion in the role of the community, including the division between Christians and black Muslims. As Rita Dandridge explains, ‘‘With good intentions and quiet reserve,

412

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Millican broaches a subject few would dare to approach. In doing so, she challenges social mores, questions guarded beliefs, and exposes insecurities, frustrations, and mistrust’’ (21). CRITICAL RECEPTION Millican received critical attention for Seeds beneath the Snow when first published in 1969 and positive reviews upon its republication in 1975. However, her second and third novels did not receive wide critical response. Millican’s works provide a ripe harvest for scholars interested in deeper understanding of the African American South aesthetic and the literary influences of Jeffers and Hughes on a female writer. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Arthenia J. Bates Millican ‘‘The Autobiography of an Idea.’’ African American Review 27 (1993): 25–28. The Deity Nodded. Detroit: Harlo, 1973. Seeds beneath the Snow. New York: Greenwich, 1969. Such Things from the Valley. Norfolk, VA: Millican, 1977.

Studies of Arthenia J. Bates Millican’s Works Dandridge, Rita. ‘‘The Motherhood Myth: Black Women and Christianity in The Deity Nodded.’’ MELUS 12.3 (1985): 13–22. Gill, Glenda. ‘‘Arthenia Bates Millican.’’ In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Smith, Virginia Whatley. ‘‘Arthenia J. Bates Millican.’’ In Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 38. Detroit: Gale, 1985.

Rebecca Feind

MARY MONROE (1949– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Fiction writer Mary Monroe, her family’s first and only high school graduate (Monroe says she completed ‘‘high school by the skin of [her] teeth’’), was born in Toxey, Alabama, and is a former Choctaw County cotton picker. She is the third child of sharecroppers Otis and Ocie Mae Nicholson, who she refers to as ‘‘Bible-thumping farm workers and domestics.’’ Monroe never attended college or studied writing, but taught herself to write, beginning around age four or five, using her gifts for observation and storytelling. She says, ‘‘‘I was born to write . . .’’ Monroe spent her first six years in Alabama, moved at seven (her father died, and her mother remarried) to Alliance, Ohio, married at seventeen but later divorced, moved with her two daughters to Richmond, California, in 1973, and moved to Oakland in 1984. Monroe is an avid traveler, and loves ‘‘to mingle with other authors.’’ She began sending out her own manuscripts at age twelve, and says, ‘‘Over the years I’ve collected more than two thousand rejection letters.’’ Kensington Books, Monroe’s current publisher, says about Monroe, ‘‘Mary’s . . . childhood . . . [was] one of passion for reading. . . . She overcame a range of adversity—mental, physical, and economic—to achieve her . . . dream of becoming a writer.’’ Her first book was published on February 27, 1985. Monroe currently has an active agreement with Kensington, calling for three Monroe novels and one Monroe novella to be published by 2009. MAJOR WORKS In her teens, to earn spending money, Monroe wrote articles for Reader’s Digest, Bronze Thrills, and for confession magazines, with titles including ‘‘I Married a Hairy Beast,’’ ‘‘I Married My Rapist,’’ ‘‘My Husband and His Mistress Tried to Kill Me with Voodoo,’’ ‘‘They Called Me the Lonely Hearts Swindler,’’ and ‘‘A Homosexual Preacher Stole My Husband.’’ Monroe’s debut novel is The Upper Room (1985). The main character is Ruby Montgomery, an obese woman who steals her best friend’s baby daughter and flees to rural Florida. During the course of the story, Ruby develops an unhealthy dependence on her daughter, Maureen, which estranges them as Maureen becomes older. God Don’t Like Ugly (2000) is the coming-of-age story of Annette Goode. Annette is an overweight compulsive overeater. After her father left her domestic mother for a white woman, she began overeating to deal with her feelings of abandonment. In addition to her feelings of abandonment, Annette is constantly molested by the family’s male boarder, Mr. Boatwright. Her eventual friendship with Rhoda Nelson, daughter of the town undertaker, helps her put a stop to the molestation. God Still Don’t Like Ugly (2003) is the sequel to God Don’t Like Ugly (2000). Several years have past and Annette is a young woman with many secrets. The novel focuses on these secrets and their uncovering, which is triggered by her desire to meet

414

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

her father. When Annette travels to Miami to meet her father, she meets Jerome, a young man who falls in love with her and proposes marriage. It is at their engagement party that her life starts to fall apart, again. In Sheep’s Clothing (2005) introduces a dissatisfied woman from a low-income background, who dreams about her unfulfilled desires and how to satisfy them. She becomes a secretary and later, in an effort to obtain what she considers ‘‘the good life,’’ adopts her supervisor’s identity, only to become the target of a hit man looking for the supervisor. As the story progresses, the woman learns to value what she has. CRITICAL RECEPTION The Upper Room, Monroe’s first novel, came out more than a decade before her best seller God Don’t Like Ugly (one writer says the delay occurred only because Monroe ‘‘could not find a publisher’’). The San Francisco Chronicle describes The Upper Room as ‘‘magnificent . . . and terrifying,’’ and the Chicago Sun-Times calls the book ‘‘visionary,’’ comparing Monroe to William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison. The Wisconsin State Journal calls The Upper Room ‘‘powerful . . . outlandish . . . [and] impressive,’’ and ‘‘the most impressive debut novel . . . since [John Kennedy Toole’s] The Confederacy of Dunces.’’ Widely reviewed throughout the United States and in Great Britain, this Monroe novel is excerpted in Terry McMillan’s anthology Breaking Ice. Though The Upper Room made an obvious impact, it was Monroe’s coming-of-age novel God Don’t Like Ugly, set in 1960s and 1970s Ohio, that made Monroe an Essence magazine bestselling author. God Don’t Like Ugly received the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award for the year’s best fiction, a nomination for Black Writers Alliance’s Golden Pen Award, remained on Essence, Waldenbooks, and Blackboard best seller lists for three months, has more than a quarter million copies in print, and appears, with some other Monroe works, on numerous library-recommended reading lists. Upon receiving her PEN award, Monroe said about publishing in 2001: ‘‘‘It’s a huge market to learn about the black experience. Back in ’85 [when The Upper Room was published] that wasn’t the case.’’ Monroe’s other novels include God Still Don’t Like Ugly, Red Light Wives, Gonna Lay Down My Burdens, and In Sheep’s Clothing. God Still Don’t Like Ugly was an Essence best seller for seven months, and a Black Issues’s best seller for four months. Red Light Wives, a story about the background, lives, and ultimately redeemable value of six prostitutes (the ‘‘wives’’), reached number one on Essence’s best seller list. Monroe did book signings in her home city of Oakland, California, for this book. Gonna Lay Down My Burdens, a 2003 Boston Public Library– recommended fiction book, was a bet.com (an affiliate of Black Entertainment Television) Best Book in 2002. Booklist says Gonna Lay Down My Burdens ‘‘delves both painfully and humorously into the lives of southern African Americans.’’ Publishers Weekly calls this Monroe novel ‘‘a standout,’’ Booklist calls In Sheep’s Clothing a ‘‘pageturner.’’ In Sheep’s Clothing was selected as the sixth annual book-to-be-discussed-aboard-ship (and Monroe was a ‘‘featured guest’’) for an October 2005 ‘‘Afrocentric voyage,’’ a seven-day cruise aboard the ship Carnival’s Pride, departing from Long Beach, California, and visiting three Mexican ports: Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas. (A ‘‘cruise for intellectuals,’’ the African American Book Club Summit at Sea (AABCS) cruise began in 2000 as a book club meeting for African American lovers of books.)

MARY MONROE

415

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Mary Monroe God Don’t Like Ugly. New York: Dafina-Kensington Publishing, 2000. God Still Don’t Like Ugly. New York: Dafina-Kensington Publishing, 2003. Gonna Lay Down My Burdens. New York: Dafina-Kensington Publishing, 2002. In Sheep’s Clothing. New York: Dafina-Kensington Publishing, 2005. Red Light Wives. New York: Dafina-Kensington Publishing, 2004. The Upper Room. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Studies of Mary Monroe’s Works ‘‘Bookshelf—Books by, and Concerning, African Americans: God Don’t Like Ugly.’’ Ebony (February 2001). ‘‘Fiction Round-Up—Review: Reissue of The Upper Room.’’ Black Issues (November–December 2001). McKanic, Arlene, and Kelly Ellis. ‘‘God Don’t Like Ugly. Review—Book Review.’’ Black Issues (November 2000).

Freda Fuller Coursey

ANNE MOODY (1940– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Anne Moody, a Mississippi writer, chronicled her life and events of the civil rights movement in her autobiography and memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). Born and raised in Centreville, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow era, Moody details her resistance of patriarchal control, racism, and injustice along with documenting her involvement with organizations such as the NAACP, SNCC, CORE, and other grassroots organizations. A graduate of Tougaloo College, Moody reflects upon her participation with other Tougaloo students and local leaders to protest against racial injustices. Having met many leaders and witnessed unforgettable events, her narrative includes history that may otherwise have never been documented and told. She lends her voice and story to narrate events such as Medgar Evers’s assassination, Emmett Till’s lynching, as well as rallies and sit-ins of which she fully participated. Upon the publication of Coming of Age in Mississippi, Moody went on to write and publish a collection of short stories titled Mr. Death: Four Stories (1975). Anne Moody has since relinquished her fame and spot in the public eye. She, instead, remains ambiguous about her whereabouts and doings, hoping to fade out of history and memory. Her autobiography will, however, forever remain as one of the most heart-wrenching, truth-telling, unapologetic narratives in southern history. MAJOR WORKS Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi details her life growing up in Mississippi during the civil rights era in which she historicizes her involvement with the civil rights movement through Tougaloo College, the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, and other organizations. She captures her fight against racism for equality, voting rights, civil liberties, and personal freedom. As she tells her unique story, Moody creates and re-creates history—a history of African Americans, a history of women, a history of southerners, a history of Mississippians, a history of a people in their fight for freedom and autonomy. Anne Moody saw race relations at their worst in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. Quickly realizing that she was both African American and female, Moody learned to adapt to various situations that would have been fatal had she not accepted her imposed ‘‘inferior’’ role as an African American woman. Although she somewhat conformed and came to understand her role in society, Moody never quite became accustomed to or satisfied with the mandated subordination due to whites. She, instead, began to challenge white authority, myths, assumptions, and false heirs of superiority. Moody, like Richard Wright in Black Boy, began to question her assumed role and position in opposition with other whites. And similar to Wright, she began to question other African Americans as to why they simply played the role rather than acting or reacting against whites. As Moody continued to mature, she learned of the many lynchings, murders, and threats to African Americans who acted upon the very impudence and rebellion that she longed to demonstrate. While these hate crimes disgusted her, they also prevented her from acting or

ANNE MOODY

417

reacting as she notes, ‘‘Negroes are being killed, beaten up, run out of town by these white folks and everything. But Negroes can’t even talk about it’’ (Coming of Age, 155). Coming of age, Moody constantly learned of the differences between behaviors, expectations, and rules governing African Americans and whites. Because she never accepted and believed in the Jim Crow system supporting people because of race, Moody sought to move. In her first attempt to leave Mississippi, where Jim Crow laws and race relations appeared to be the worst in the country, she traveled to Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, to live with relatives. Expecting to find more freedom and equality, Moody was disappointed because she was again met with a harsh reality of prejudices and racism which she learned was truly embedded all over the deep south. Upon her return to Mississippi during the academic school terms, race relations became worse as the lynchings, murders, and hate crimes increased making it unbearable for anyone to live without fear of his or her life. It was at this point that Moody became fed up with the indifference shown by her family, friends, and community. She could no longer merely be inactive and afraid; she needed to do something to make a difference as she asserts, ‘‘Courage was growing in me too. Little by little it was getting harder and harder for me not to speak out’’ (Coming of Age, 163). Moody attended community college in Natchez and furthered her education at Tougaloo College—the college serving as her introduction to activity with the civil rights movement. Her involvement with other Tougaloo students and professors, city leaders, and activists gave her a sense of self, identity, purpose, and fulfillment for which she had longed and sought. Because of her fulfillment, a great portion of Moody’s narrative details the joys and sorrows she felt as she participated in various riots, marches, rallies, sit-ins, meetings, and other activities to plead and fight for equal rights for all African American citizens. Her inclusion of such events allows her to create and recreate history from an African American woman’s point of view, which is short of phenomenal considering that history was and is a field dominated by white men. Moreover, Moody’s history is powerful not only because she documents ‘‘HERstory’’ but also because she documents a history of and for America, all African American people, and especially southerners. Following in the African American literary tradition, Anne Moody’s sociopolitical narrative fuses multiple themes and discourses to include: naturalism, existentialism, poverty, classism, perseverance, and education. Naturalism—a type of realism that pays close attention to forces beyond the character’s or narrator’s control—is a common trope used in African American literature. Moody tropes upon discourses such as poverty and classism explaining the difficulty of growing up in the south due to forces binding people to extreme states of poverty. She also stresses the inability for white and African American people to unite due to class issues. While Moody captures the affects of such forces as they operate in Naturalism, she emphasizes a form of black Naturalism, stressing that she and others in the south were the objects of various forces simply because they were African American. Another common theme found in Moody’s narrative is existentialism—the notion or belief that one must act in order to establish or distinguish oneself. This existentialistic value is inherent in Moody for she is determined to use her education and will for the betterment of society. Moreover, her every action and word is intrinsic to her search for an identity autonomous from race, sex, class, and imposed values or qualities. Yet another common discourse found in the narrative is the importance of literacy and education. Following in the tradition of slave and liberation narrators, Moody appreci-

418

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

ates the value of education and, thus, explains her challenges as she strives to be a top scholar. She stresses the importance of education by heavily focusing major parts of her narrative upon her school days at Natchez Community College and, later, at Tougaloo College—the ‘‘Mecca’’ of African American higher education in the south. In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody makes use of many strategies of reading and writing common in the African American literary tradition. Strategies include her serving as a griot looking back and recounting stories; her inclusion of childhood memories challenging the reader to place fragmented memories and histories together; her fusion of historical events and personal stories to document the lives and times of a people; her use of spirituals, gospel, and blues to commemorate African American musical contributions; and her focus on the ‘‘dogged strength’’ of which W.E.B. DuBois claims will not let African Americans be torn asunder. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi is phenomenal, it has not received the criticism it deserves. The bulk of the criticism on Moody and her narrative can be found in online summaries and entries in various anthologies and compilations. She has, however, been compared to other ‘‘major’’ autobiographers by key critics in the fields of African American and American literature. In ‘‘The Girls Who Became Women: Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Church Terrell, and Anne Moody,’’ Nellie Y. McKay compares the autobiographers’ ways of reconstructing their childhoods. McKay is specifically interested in tracing three major steps within the narratives: the Innocent or Edenic stage, the Orphan stage, and the Warrior stage. She compares the three autobiographies analyzing whether they conform to the inclusion of these three stages. According to McKay, Moody did not experience an Edenic stage in her developing childhood because, at an early age, she realized the oppression of her family and all African American people in Mississippi. McKay confirms, ‘‘Unlike Jacobs and Terrell, Anne Moody had no consciousness of an Edenic period in her life, only of the physical and psychological fears encumbering her and those around her’’ (117). In ‘‘Coming of Age in the Segregated South: Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Black and White,’’ Lynn Z. Bloom also compares autobiographers’ ways of reconstructing childhoods. Bloom, however, strictly focuses on autobiographies written by African American and white southerners. In addition to tracing the development of childhood, Bloom also traces a sense of family, community, and place within autobiographies. Her reflections on Moody’s narrative echo McKay’s sentiments: ‘‘Moody’s firsthand awareness of the indelible evils of segregation begins at a much earlier age than [other autobiographers]—in the consciousness of early childhood rather than with the dawn of conscience in adolescence. Throughout her growing up the message of segregation is insistent and excoriating’’ (119). In From Girl to Woman: American Women’s Coming-of-Age Narratives, Christy Rishoi examines the autobiographies of a diverse group of women. Rishoi specifically examines Moody’s autobiography for its resistance to the objectification of the African American woman’s body. Rishoi declares, ‘‘In an environment that valued black women primarily as domestic workers and sexual objects, Anne Moody pushed herself to scholastic achievement, economic self-sufficiency, and a sense of self-worth with little support or encouragement’’ (96). She views Moody’s self-characterization as an attempt

ANNE MOODY

419

to set herself apart from other African American women who, like Moody’s mother, accepted their fates as oppressed and inferior beings. Rishoi argues that ‘‘by highlighting her social and cultural alienation, Moody is adapting the grand narrative of the autonomous individual in an attempt to align herself with ‘universal’ American values’’ (98). In his ‘‘In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies,’’ William Andrews compares the autobiographies of William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Willie Morris’s North Toward Home, and Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi. As he performs an intertextual reading of the four autobiographies, Andrews specifically examines the effects of race in relation to the textual differences. Based upon race, he found that Percy and Morris, two white Mississippians, shared similarities that were uncommon to Wright and Moody, two black Mississippians. However, Andrews also notes that aside from race, the four narrators all share commonalities such as experiences, perspectives, memories, and histories. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Anne Moody Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Dial Press, 1968. Mr. Death: Four Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Studies of Anne Moody’s Works Anderson, Jace. ‘‘Re-Writing Race: Subverting Language in Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi and Alice Walker’s Meridian.’’ A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 8.1 (Spring 1993): 33–50. Andrews, William. ‘‘In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies.’’ Southern Review 24 (1988): 47–64. Beavers, Gina. ‘‘Anne Moody.’’ In Black Women in America: a Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hines et al., 809–10. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993. Bloom, Lynn Z. ‘‘Coming of Age in the Segregated South: Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Black and White.’’ In Home Ground: Southern Autobiography, edited by J. Bill Berry, 110–22. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Eckard, Paula Gallant. ‘‘Anne Moody.’’ In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 506–7. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hart, James D. ‘‘Anne Moody.’’ In The Oxford Companion to American Literature, edited by James D. Hart, 441. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. McKay, Nellie Y. ‘‘The Girls Who Became Women: Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Church Terrell, and Anne Moody.’’ In Tradition and the Talents of Women, edited by Florence Howe, 105–24. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Rishoi, Christy. ‘‘Hegemonic Inscription of the Body in Coming of Age in Mississippi.’’ In From Girl to Woman: American Women’s Coming-of-Age Narratives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. White, Elease. ‘‘Effects of Poverty on the Social Maturation of Anne Moody: A Commentary on Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi.’’ Journal of African Children’s and Youth Literature 6 (1994–1995): 43–55.

Meta Michond Cooper

OPAL J. MOORE (1953– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Functioning within both the fields of the creative arts and criticism, the specific focus of Opal Moore’s work has shifted between children’s literature, short stories, and poetry, but her concerns about the black community and women have always remained stable. Growing up in Chicago, Moore began her postsecondary education in her home state at Illinois Wesleyan College, where she received her B.F.A. in 1974. She continued her education at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where she graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, completing an M.A. in drawing and printmaking and earning an MFA in fiction writing in 1982. In 1994 Moore became a Fulbright Lecturer at Johannes Gutenburg-Universita¨t in Mainz, Germany, and in 1995 she was an associate professor of English at Radford University, as well as a Jessie Ball DuPont Visiting Scholar at Hollins College in Virginia. A Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow and a Cave Canem alumna, Moore currently serves as the chair of the English Department at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she has taught African American literature and fiction and poetry writing. MAJOR WORKS Opal Moore’s poetry and prose are interested in the emotional and psychological conditions of black people, especially women. Her criticism begins where this condition often originates—childhood. Moore has published numerous articles addressing children’s literature. In a 1991 interview with Donnarae MacCann and Olga Richard, Moore speaks about a selection of children’s book titles. Moore notes that the problems of colorism, the desire for universality, and the failure to honestly speak about the multicultural experience infuse the structure of many children’s texts that are concerned with the lives of children in the African diaspora. But, Moore also suggests that these children’s texts can demonstrate positive imaginative escapes from racism in their healthy portrayals of child-parent/grandparent relationships. Communication between the generations seems to be the redeeming quality of some of these stories and for some of these characters. These texts are also a place where art and creative writing meet for Moore, who spends a lot of time critiquing the pictures within the books. She argues that artwork should respond to and enlighten the ideas inherent within the works themselves. Moore’s biggest issue in general with the selected children’s picture books is that they erase critical issues, such as those listed above, and value shallow portraits over more substantial renderings of children’s lives. Moore’s short stories, such as ‘‘A Happy Story,’’ also explore the problem of not telling the whole truth in literature. In her attempt to write a ‘‘happy story’’ the protagonist finds that these types of stories tend to erase any sad or troubling parts of the narrative. After much difficulty, the narrator finally concludes that her mother’s story

OPAL J. MOORE

421

was a happy one, not because it would have been considered ‘‘perfect’’ in the traditional sense, but because she ‘‘always spoke of her life without excluding any parts.’’ ‘‘The Fence’’ explores another dominant theme in Moore’s works, women within the patriarchy. ‘‘The Fence’’ opens up the ways that the sexual divide influences women’s lives. The young girl in ‘‘The Fence’’ struggles to keep up with her brother and his friend when they run off to play but finds that girls are not welcome in the male sphere. The text considers how, at the same time the young boys physically separate themselves from the girl, her life is still often prescribed by the men surrounding her. Her life is dictated by her patriarchal father, her sporting activities are governed by the judging force of the boys at school, and her body is controlled by her Uncle who molests her. Moore’s uncollected published poetry, from 1985 to 1999, serves to speak women’s voices into fields where they were not welcome, namely she addresses women’s negotiation of their place within the Christian religion. Moore’s poetry struggles between the redemptive power of Christianity and its historical repression of women’s voices. In ‘‘I Fly Away: John’s Song’’ Moore considers the bodily relief from the oppressions of real life that one can find in gospel songs. The voice of the worldly religious singer, John, becomes a transcendent voice shaking its audience from the bodily shackles of life and raising them to an awareness beyond that of the real, an awareness that is instead of the imagination. Much in the same way Moore argues that children’s imaginings serve as safe spaces for them to escape the oppressions of racism; this poem praises the ability of the religious song to help its audience escape from the difficulties of daily life. But, in poems such as ‘‘The Mother’s Board,’’ Moore uncovers the underbelly of Christianity, and the church becomes a space where the pastor’s honor is established only through the church women’s suppression. This same theme also runs throughout ‘‘A Woman’s Virtue: Sister I Need to Hear You Sing That Song’’ and ‘‘Eulogy for Sister.’’ In Moore’s works, suburbia, church, and sometimes even the home become spaces that are unsafe for a woman’s body and a woman’s emotional well-being, spaces where women are challenged and subdued. Moore’s first published collection of poetry, Lot’s Daughters, contains revisions of many of the earlier poems that she published in Callaloo and African American Review. Therefore, some of those same early themes are transmitted into her new collection, such as the contradictory roles of religion in women’s lives and the power of communication between the generations. But, Moore extends those themes and explores new ones in Lot’s Daughters, themes such as migration, rebirth, agency, and ancestry. Lot’s Daughters is divided into two sections: ‘‘Geometry for Leaving’’ and ‘‘Lot’s Daughters.’’ Moore explains that, while the first section offers portraits of her mother’s and grandmother’s generation, the second section considers contemporary challenges and envisions the current world as ‘‘another Middle Passage.’’ CRITICAL RECEPTION To date, there has been no critical response to Moore’s work.

422

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Opal Moore ‘‘Enter, the Tribe of Woman.’’ Callaloo, Emerging Women Writers: A Special Issue 19.2 (1992): 340–47. ‘‘Eulogy for Sister.’’ Callaloo 19.3 (1996): 622–23. ‘‘The Fence.’’ African American Review 29.1 (1995): 47–54. ‘‘The Fence.’’ In Honey Hush! An Anthology of African American Women’s Humor, edited by Daryl Dance, 227–37. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. ‘‘Freeing Ourselves of History: The Slave Closet.’’ Obsidian II (1988). ‘‘A Happy Story.’’ Callaloo 39 (1989): 274–81. ‘‘I Fly Away: John’s Song.’’ Callaloo 19.3 (1996): 624–27. ‘‘Landscapes: Shakin’.’’ Black American Literature Forum 19.3 (1985): 113. Lot’s Daughters. Chicago: Third World Press, 2004. ‘‘The Mother’s Board.’’ Callaloo 19.1 (1996): 101–6. ‘‘Othello, Othello, Where Art Thou?’’ The Lion and the Unicorn 25.3 (2001): 375–90. ‘‘Picture Books: The Un-Text.’’ In The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism, 2nd ed., edited by Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard, 183–91. Metuchen and London: Scarecrow Press, 1985. ‘‘A Pilgrim Notebook.’’ In Home Places: Stories of the South by Women Writers, edited by Mary Ellis Gibson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. ‘‘A Small Insolence.’’ Callaloo 24 (1985): 304–9. ‘‘A Woman’s Virtue: Sister I Need to Hear You Sing That Song.’’ Callaloo 22.4 (1999): 979–80.

Kellie D. Weiss

TONI MORRISON (1931– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Toni Morrison, primarily a novelist, has also published works in the fields of literary theory, drama, and short fiction. In addition, she has edited numerous collections of essays and fiction works. She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, a working-class Midwestern steel-town which was ‘‘neither plantation nor ghetto.’’ Although Lorain was largely populated by European immigrants, Morrison grew up in a small African American community within the town and was raised with a rich sense of racial and cultural history. Her mother, a singer in her church’s choir, came from a resourceful family that stressed education. Morrison’s father was a dignified man who took pride in his work. As an African American man who left the Jim Crow segregation of Georgia, his race politics were greatly informed by experience; he distrusted ‘‘every word and every gesture from every white man on earth.’’ In childhood, Morrison was a good student who loved to read; favorite authors of her youth included Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, and Austen. Although she sensed a cultural disconnect between European canonical authors and a young African American girl from the Midwest, Morrison responded profoundly to these writers, feeling as though they spoke directly to her out of their own specificity. Morrison received her B.A. in English from Howard University in 1953. After earning her M.A. from Cornell in 1955, she began teaching at Texas Southern University. She returned to Howard as an English instructor two years later and, within a year, married a Jamaican architect named Harold Morrison. While at her alma mater, Morrison met several important African American political and literary figures, including Amiri Baraka, Andrew Young, Stokely Carmichael, and Claude Brown. In 1961, she gave birth to her first child, Harold Ford. Besides teaching and caring for her infant son, Morrison also began to stage her writing, including a short piece about an African American girl who prayed for blue eyes. The year 1964 held dramatic changes for Morrison; pregnant with her second son, Slade Kevin, she divorced her husband and left her job to become an editor for Random House in Syracuse, New York. Her twenty-year-long career at Random House demonstrated her commitment to the production of African American literature; she published work from Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, Gloria Naylor, Leon Forrest, and Andrew Young, among others. A mother of small children and eventually a senior editor, she also resumed teaching in 1971 at SUNY Purchase. She found time to pursue her desire to write during her few peaceful morning hours ‘‘before [her children] said, ‘Mama’ . . . always around five in the morning.’’ Morrison wrote her first four novels while working at Random House: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981). Eventually, she left her position as senior editor to continue to write and teach, lecturing at numerous universities including Yale, Bard, Harvard, Rutgers, Trinity College Cambridge, SUNY Albany, the University of California at Berkeley, and Bowdoin College. She became the Robert F. Goheen Professor in Hu-

424

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

manities at Princeton University in 1989. To date, Morrison has published eight novels, a work of literary theory, a play, and a short story. More recently, she has written children’s literature with her son Slade. Screenplays have been written for Tar Baby and Beloved. Toni Morrison’s literary career is marked by numerous honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. In 1993, she became the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her lyrical and insightful body of work chronicles the intricacies of centuries of the African American experience. MAJOR WORKS The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison’s first novel, begins with a primer that structures the entire narrative. Echoing the conventions of children’s literature, the narrator describes a middle-class family in grammatically simple sentences. The description is repeated without punctuation, and again without spaces. Here, Morrison disrupts the dominant narrative of bourgeois respectability. She strips it of authority by dismantling standard grammatical constructions, finally representing it almost unintelligibly. This becomes a central concern of the text; Morrison reveals the ‘‘American dream’’ to be exclusionary and unrealizable (for the Breedloves), stifling (for Geraldine), perverting (for Soaphead Church), and ultimately grotesque (for Pecola). The story’s opening invites the reader to participate in community gossip. ‘‘Quiet as its kept,’’ the narrator says, ‘‘there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941’’ (Bluest Eye 8). This natural image of rupture is immediately aligned with a social one: we learn Pecola is ‘‘having her father’s baby’’ (8). This part of the text, italicized and written in the past tense, is set off from the rest of the narrative and frames the story. Claudia comments on the story retrospectively, but narrative position becomes complicated as the novel progresses. Claudia’s subjective ‘‘I’’ emerges from an initial ‘‘we’’: the second sentence in the novel begins ‘‘We thought . . .’’ (8). This is the first instance of Morrison’s consistent interest in individual and communal memory. While the central story is Pecola’s tale of abjection, violence, and self-hate, it could not be told without the histories of Pauline and Cholly Breedlove, Geraldine, Soaphead Church, and Frieda and Claudia, who become repositories of the community’s memory. Ultimately, Pecola’s story is at once personal and collective. Her ridicule, rape, and degeneration are entwined with the same social and economic forces that emasculate Cholly, degrade Pauline, repress Geraldine, privilege Maureen Peal, and produce the ‘‘ascetic . . . misanthrope’’ Soaphead Church (165). Thus, everyone is involved; everyone is complicit—including the reader, who the narrator implicates through gossip. While the shifting narrative position assigns guilt, it also complicates the notion of blame. Because we are privy to, for example, Cholly’s story, his act of violence against Pecola is contextualized. We are told of his abandonment by his mother; we witness his humiliation at the hands of white men during his first sexual experience; we see his ‘‘dangerous freedom’’ and his despair at married life. Following his personal history, we are given the only description of the rape of Pecola. Morrison embeds this incident in Cholly’s story, imbues it with Cholly’s subjectivity, encouraging the reader to witness the act as desperate and pathetic rather than merely predatory or lustful. The Bluest Eye is an assault on accepted notions of beauty, ‘‘respectability,’’ race, class, and community. The horrific ‘‘transformation’’ of Pecola (and the ideological roots of desire for ‘‘transformation’’) figures as a sort of inverted fairy tale. The novel

TONI MORRISON

425

becomes, in part, an unrealized coming-of-age story—the image of stunted growth in the marigolds foreshadows this theme. Morrison’s second novel, Sula (1973), explores relationships between women and interrogates the functions of an insular African American community. Critics often read this as a feminist text that subordinates heterosexual romance to emotional intimacy among women. The title character, dangerously indifferent to social constraints and gender expectations, certainly seems to invite this reading. However, Morrison problematizes the absoluteness of Sula’s freedom, in part by shifting narrative focus among a variety of perspectives. The novel begins with a sort of folk history of ‘‘the Bottom,’’ the neighborhood created, we are told, because of an old ‘‘nigger joke.’’ The irony, cruelty, and humor associated with the land come to characterize life in the Bottom as well. Morrison’s consistent interest in the interplay between individual, community, and geography figures prominently in Sula. Also, the construction of paradox here, through narrative and over time, becomes a trope for the entire novel. To a large extent, Sula is a story concerned with deconstructing binaries. It rejects the strict demarcation of male/female by imbuing Sula with traditionally male traits (she is especially reminiscent of Cholly Breedlove). It undermines the notion of ‘‘peace’’ by representing instances of violence, destruction, and trauma during the time between the two world wars. Morrison’s characterization of Nel and Sula also embodies this deconstructive aim. Where Nel lives for her family, community, and church, Sula centers her life on selfdiscovery and the indiscriminate fulfillment of her desires (or curiosities). Where Nel strives to be a positive figure of African American womanhood, Sula is repeatedly aligned with whiteness (for example, when rumors circulate that she has slept with white men, or when she decides to leave her grandmother in a white nursing home). Nel is a ‘‘good woman’’—a wife, a mother, a church member; Sula is perceived as an evil conjure woman. Her birthmark, her mysterious unaffectedness, and instances of violence that come to be associated with her wickedness (Teapot’s fall and Mr. Finley’s death), all contribute to this impression. Yet, Morrison suggests, the evil the community projects onto Sula defines, and makes possible, the existence of good. After Sula’s death, Teapot’s mama resumes beating him, women ‘‘uncoddle their husbands’’; and more generally, ‘‘affection for others [sinks] into flaccid disrepair’’ (Sula 154). The novel asserts the complicity of good and evil and breaks down the notion of a moral absolute. Many scholars note Morrison’s break with female-centered narrative in Song of Solomon (1977). Yet, although she appropriates the traditionally male-quest narrative to structure her third novel, Morrison acknowledges the women who remain behind. When Milkman tells Sweet of his flying African ancestor, she wonders, ‘‘Who’d he leave behind?’’ (Song of Solomon 328). Morrison complicates the romance of the quest by emphasizing the importance of rootedness: being rooted in community, in culture, and in history. Macon Dead attempts, and fails, to isolate himself and his family from the surrounding ‘‘rank-and-file’’ African American folks. Part of Hagar’s tragedy is her unfulfilled need for the guidance of ‘‘a chorus’’ of African American women. Ultimately, even the quest itself loses its emphasis on the heroic individual—Milkman comes to discard his search for fortune; instead, he seeks to discover his past, his ancestors. This theme—the reclamation of self and history—figures in the prominent motif of naming. The African American community assigns names to people (Railroad Tommy, Hospital Tommy, Empire State, Guitar Bains, and Milkman are renamed because of their actions or characteristics) and places (such as Not Doctor Street, No Mercy Hospital, and

426

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Blood Bank). Exercising power over one’s name becomes a symbolic act of defining one’s personal experience. Pilate, by wearing her ominous name on her ear, bravely subverts its power by claiming possession of it. In Morrison’s first novel, the narrator tells us that ‘‘love is never any better than the lover’’ (Bluest Eye 206). She returns to this interest in the destructive possibilities of love in Song of Solomon. Hagar’s unrequited love for Milkman fuels her determination to kill him; Guitar’s love for the African American race becomes murderous through his involvement with the Seven Days. If the Dead family offers an example of the absence of love, we witness a potentially ideal love between Milkman and Sweet. The relationship’s reciprocity, simplicity, and beauty are even evident in the language: ‘‘He made up the bed. She gave him gumbo to eat. He washed the dishes. She washed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He scoured her tub’’ (Song of Solomon 285). As he approaches selfknowledge through a sense of history, Milkman becomes capable of connecting with others. Morrison’s rich sense of literary history is especially evident in Song of Solomon. She draws on the Western odyssey and appropriates biblical names, placing them in a matrix of African and American cultural forms. Her interest in the oral tradition is integral to the text—Milkman’s discovery of his history would be impossible without Pilate’s ‘‘Sugarman’’ blues song, the children’s rhyme of Solomon’s genealogy, and, of course, the Angolan Gullah folktale of the flying African which underpins the narrative. Song of Solomon holds disparate elements in flux; it blends oral with written, Western with African, and ancient with modern, telling a story that is at once particularly African American and inherently universal. Morrison’s fourth novel, Tar Baby (1981), affirms her interest in folklore; the title appropriates a Brer Rabbit tale from the Uncle Remus collection, which itself is rooted in African mythology. Morrison discusses the sacred and binding qualities implicit in the symbolism of tar. Thus the metaphor carries a double meaning: the ‘‘tar baby’’ in the plantation tale is constructed by a white man; the African ‘‘tar lady,’’ in contrast, is the embodiment of history and the facilitator of community. This layered understanding of the symbol informs both who Jadine is and who she is not. Discussions of Tar Baby often focus on its various departures from her previous work. Set on a small fictitious Caribbean island rather than the close-knit rural African American communities of her first three novels, Tar Baby is also her first text to feature central white characters (Valerian and Margaret). Described by Morrison as ‘‘a love story, really,’’ the novel is structured around the relationship between Jadine, a lightskinned African American model aligned with Western culture, and Son, a near-ideal of Afrocentric masculinity. The theme of beauty is taken up in her fourth novel in a significantly distinct way. Where white standards exclude Pecola, repress Nel, and intimidate Hagar, Jadine physically and culturally embodies them. Morrison also presents an alternative to Eurocentric beauty in the dark-skinned ‘‘woman in yellow.’’ As in Sula and Song of Solomon, naming is a central motif of Tar Baby. Rather than asserting agency over the self, however, characters rename one another in acts of dominance, ridicule, and rebellion. Sydney and Ondine Childs refer to the Dominique African Americans as ‘‘swamp women’’ and ‘‘horsemen’’; they also call Gideon, The´re`se, and Alma Este´e ‘‘Yardman’’ and ‘‘The Marys.’’ Gideon and The´re`se call Sydney and Ondine ‘‘Bowtie’’ and ‘‘Machete hair,’’ respectively. Jadine is derided as ‘‘the yalla,’’ ‘‘fat ass,’’ and a white girl. The relatively powerful and powerless both participate in this struggle over definition.

TONI MORRISON

427

As a fictional slave narrative, Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), is also profoundly concerned with definition. A major aim of the neo-slave narrative is the reclamation and revision of history. Thus, though Beloved is structured around instances of storytelling, it is also itself an act of narrated ‘‘rememory.’’ As a result of this parallel relationship between form and content, the structure of the story becomes especially important. Scholars often call attention to Beloved’s nonlinear temporality. Stories, particularly traumatic ones, are fragmented and retold, sometimes from different perspectives. This emphasizes the communal nature of memory in the text. Characters share possession of a collective account of history. Those who are not incorporated into the oral tradition feel alienated. The narrator reveals Denver’s resentment that Sethe and Paul D were ‘‘a twosome, saying ‘Your daddy’ and ‘Sweet Home’ in a way that made it clear that both belonged to them and not to her. That her own father’s absence was not hers’’ (Beloved 13). Shared ownership of memory is the foundation of human connection in the text. Sethe describes her understanding with Paul D: ‘‘the mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well—to tell, to refine, to tell again’’ (99). Yet memory also makes relationships impossible: the force of the past, embodied in Beloved, drives Paul D from 124. Storytelling is a moral act in the novel; the decision to retell (and even remember) one’s past has profound consequences. Madness, also a moral choice for Morrison, becomes the inverse of the decision to remember. Sethe laments her willingness to remember: ‘‘other people went crazy,’’ she says, ‘‘why couldn’t she?’’ (71). Six-O and Halle retreat into madness; even Paul D allows himself to be driven ‘‘crazy so he would not lose his mind’’ (41). Insanity is presented as a sort of escape; it is aligned with maleness as an extreme form of rootless masculinity. Ultimately, it is irresponsible—women are once again left behind to bear the knowledge of cultural history. Beloved, like Song of Solomon, sets the desire for human connection against the weight of the past. Love and history are at once interdependent and antagonistic forces in the text. While Song of Solomon shows the impossibility of love when divorced from the past, Beloved describes the other extreme: destructive mother-love ‘‘too thick’’ with collective traumatic memory. Murderous love also figures prominently in Morrison’s sixth work, Jazz (1992). Incorporating formal and thematic elements of jazz music, the novel tells of Joe Trace’s ultimately fatal love of the shallow eighteen-year-old Dorcas. The text is improvisational, open-ended, and participates in call-and-response techniques. Besides love, Jazz explores pain, loss, and longing. The absent presence is a central motif of both the novel and the musical form. This is embodied first by the narrator—the ‘‘voice’’ without race, gender, or age. The opening paragraph introduces a number of other absent presences: ‘‘the woman’’ (Violet Trace), who is spoken of but is not there, and Dorcas, whose absence is supposed to sustain the presence of Joe’s love. Indeed, the ‘‘presence’’ of Joe’s absent mother in Dorcas sparks his desire for her. The orphans who populate the narrative ( Joe, Violet, Dorcas, Felice, Golden Gray) also evoke this motif: their missing parents essentially become ever-present by defining their orphan status. The novel’s structure emphasizes absences and silences through whitespace between sections, seen by some critics as musical pauses. Jazz is also intertextual; it engages in a sort of call and response with Morrison’s previous work. For example, there are curious similarities between Wild and Beloved: their childish demeanor, language, and their connection with sweet things (Beloved’s

428

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

honey, sugar sandwiches, and cane sticks, Wild’s honeycombs and association with the cane field). This connection is left ambiguous, inserting the reader into the construction of the story. The act of interpretation is also central to both form and content of Morrison’s seventh work, Paradise (1997). Its nonlinear structure and enigmatic opening line (‘‘They shoot the white girl first’’) invite and even insist upon reader participation. The story is also fundamentally concerned with contestation over meaning; the Oven exemplifies this theme. Although most explicit in the struggles over the inscription on the oven’s ‘‘mouth,’’ the mythology of Haven, the Old Fathers, biblical narratives, and the symbolism of the cross all become sites of contested interpretation. (Steward Morgan, expounding on the significance of the cross, notes that ‘‘a cross was no better than the bearer’’ [Paradise 154], recalling the view expressed in The Bluest Eye that ‘‘love is never any better than the lover.’’) The Convent is a continually appropriated and redefined physical space: from a pornographic structure belonging to an embezzler, to a Catholic school for Arapho girls, and finally a refuge for displaced women, the significance of the Convent is fluid—imbued with history and informed by the needs of its inhabitants. History is central to the story of Paradise. The plot is essentially the convergence of distinct pasts: the stories of the Convent’s women (Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, Pallas, and Connie) are juxtaposed against the story of Ruby. It is ultimately the accumulation of history that layers meaning and fuels conflict. In contrast to Beloved, where memory of the past is repressed and denied, Paradise presents an overpresence of the past. The New Fathers attempt to ‘‘repeat exactly’’ the history of Haven (113). The desire for repetition concretizes in the town’s hidden privileging of racial purity (‘‘8-rock blood’’). Through a description of the school’s Christmas play, Morrison portrays attempts at reenactment as potentially corrupt. The story of Nativity is revised to include a pivotal moment in Ruby’s history, the Disallowing. The number of wise men in the Nativity scene is expanded to correlate to the number of Founding Fathers, but this number changes when one family is no longer in the ruling group’s good graces. This instance of problematic revisionist history becomes a figure for the novel’s larger themes: the idealization of the past, the relationship between the human and the sacred, and the interpretation of narrative as a moral act. Love (2003), Morrison’s latest novel, is essentially the story of the women surrounding Bill Cosey, the owner of the Cosey Hotel and Resort. He marries his granddaughter Christine’s eleven-year-old (one-time) friend Heed (short for ‘‘Heed the Night’’). Contemporaneous to the narration of the text, Christine and Heed find themselves sharing the house of the late Cosey. Other women involved include May, Cosey’s daughter-in-law; L, Cosey’s cook and one of the novel’s narrators; and Junior, a displaced sixteen-year-old who applies to work for Heed and is subsequently haunted by Cosey’s ghost. Critics have remarked on the relative underdevelopment of Cosey’s character— this is deliberate. Playing on the presence/absence theme consistent in her work, Cosey is rendered a present absence both through his death and his emotional unavailability. The novel presents a patriarchal economy in which relationships between women are defined by their relationships to men (or in this case, a man). May turns Christine against Heed, and only toward the end of the novel do the characters begin to realize that more cooperative relationships between women would have been better than ‘‘looking for Big Daddy everywhere.’’ The novel continues to explore several of the dominant themes in Morrison’s work, including an interrogation of love, intraracial issues in the African

TONI MORRISON

429

American community, possibilities of relationships between women, sexual violence, the oral tradition, and mythology. The narrative structure of Love is also consistent with Morrison’s craft; she uses temporal shifts and flashbacks and makes use of multiple perspectives. CRITICAL RECEPTION Scholarship on Toni Morrison spans decades and encompasses a wide variety of approaches. In her introduction to Toni Morrison’s Fiction, Jan Furman distinguishes between earlier, more thematically focused criticism and more contemporary scholarship concerned with narrative structure. While periodizing critical reception is certainly useful, this overview is thematically organized instead, emphasizing that feminist, Marxist, and Afrocentric readings of her work are not entirely restricted to the past. For the most part, scholarship on Morrison’s works can be placed into six categories: those that emphasize her African and African American literary heritage, those that consider the importance of the oral tradition, texts that investigate her role in revising history, those that read her novels as feminist texts, works that attempt to locate Morrison in the Western literary tradition, and, finally, works concerned with narrative structure. Scholars interested in Morrison’s place in the African American literary tradition emphasize her use of African American cultural forms. Trudier Harris describes the ‘‘orality’’ so central to Morrison’s fiction as fundamentally African American. Gurleen Grewal reads The Bluest Eye (which makes Pecola’s invisibility conspicuous) as a response to canonical African American male authors who ignore the African American female experience. Lucinda H. MacKethan contextualizes Morrison within an African American literary tradition that uses naming to emphasize selfhood. Also, Sandra Pouchet Paquet connects Their Eyes Were Watching God’s Janie Crawford to Tar Baby’s Jadine Childs to explore the tension between the individual and the community in African American literature. These scholars identify characteristics of Morrison’s work that make it distinctively African American. Comparing her novels to African American musical forms is also a key approach to this perspective. For Barbara Williams Lewis, Jazz the novel is structured by formal elements of jazz music—especially open-endedness and ambiguity. Joyce Wegs’s ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Blues Song’’ takes a similar approach: Song of Solomon is structurally a blues song in that it is the enunciation of a collective experience. It is also thematically a blues song: characters appropriate gender-specific behavior representative of blues narratives—men respond to life’s trials by leaving home, women remain and grieve. Certain critics argue that Morrison’s novels can only be fully understood when contextualized by cultural knowledge and history. Susan Bowers, in ‘‘Beloved and the New Apocalypse,’’ investigates the particularities of the notion of ‘‘apocalypse’’ within an African American context. She explains that while white hopes for humankind lay in the future, African American expectations of glory involve the reclamation of the past. The latter informs Bowers’s reading of Beloved: for her, an apocalyptic battle is waged over ‘‘rememory.’’ Similarly, Gay Wilentz emphasizes black storytelling and writing traditions as central and necessary to any interpretation of Morrison’s works. Wilentz cites characteristics of the oral tradition, the emphasis on reader participation, and ‘‘tribal values’’ (such as community) within Morrison’s novels as examples of her African heritage. Philip Page draws on West African concepts of fluidity to analyze Morrison’s

430

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

novels. The coexistence of past, present, and future, as well as ‘‘life and death, sacred and secular . . . spiritual and material . . . individual . . . and community’’ all connect Morrison’s work to West African culture (Page 11). Morrison’s participation in oral culture is also often linked to African and American cultural forms. Trudier Harris, in Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, argues from the position that folklore is the foundation for African American literature, so that literary themes derive from those of the oral tradition. She challenges the traditional dichotomy between folklore and literature, asserting that, in Morrison’s texts, lore is not merely ‘‘lifted’’ and represented isolated from the literary content of the novel. It is instead integrated and integral to the thematic aims of her works. Harris’s designation of Morrison’s work as ‘‘literary folklore’’ embodies a consistent scholarly concern with her novels: the juxtaposition of the individual literary imagination with a sense of communal history and tradition. Gurleen Grewal’s Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle also touches on this issue in its examination of temporality. Grewal argues that linear time is disrupted because personal experience must continually be contextualized within history. Morrison’s novels, for her, represent the process of shaping narratives from the folk and oral traditions. For example, Grewal reads The Bluest Eye as an inversion of the fairy-tale notion of transformation, a complication of long-standing African American belief in the north as a better place for black people, and a challenge to the myth of upward mobility. Catherine Carr Lee, in ‘‘The South in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Initiation, Healing, and Home,’’ also addresses the ways in which Morrison undermines traditional notions of north and south. Morrison simultaneously represents and revises cultural myths. Scholars note her similar object/agent position to history. Morrison’s novels are historical—they span centuries of African American experience (beginning with Beloved’s references to the Middle Passage)—yet they are also fictional. Gurleen Grewal reads Morrison as postcolonial literature that rewrites dominant historical narratives from a marginalized perspective. She draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature in order to examine Morrison’s treatment of memory; namely, Grewal views her use of memory as an attempt to make sense of individual experience through the lens of a collective consciousness. Ashraf Rushdy is also concerned with memory; he uses Wordsworth’s notion of primal sympathy and Freud’s idea of constructed fantasies to emphasize the centrality of primal scenes to Morrison’s interrogation of (re)memory. J. Brooks Bouson, similarly, draws on shame and trauma theory to analyze Morrison’s treatment of historic racism. While some critics focus on Morrison’s revision of history, others discuss the ways in which her novels deal with existing accounts. In ‘‘Dead Teachers: Rituals of Manhood and Rituals of Reading in Song of Solomon,’’ Linda Krumholtz analyzes Song of Solomon as a narrative of Milkman’s quest for African American history. David Lawrence, in ‘‘Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved,’’ examines how characters deal with knowledge of the past. He argues that acts of remembering and forgetting are both potentially dangerous and enslaving. Ultimately, he concludes, the relationship between control over the body and control over language is central; thus, Sethe and Paul D must struggle with language before reclaiming their lives. A significant body of scholarship on Morrison focuses on her works as feminist texts. Perhaps this category is a misleading distinction, as most critics acknowledge feminist and womanist influences on her novels even when not making them a central focus. For example, Philip Page mentions Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and

TONI MORRISON

431

Luce Irigaray, as well as bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Barbara Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Hazel Carby, and Valerie Smith, among others, in his preface to Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Ed Guerrero examines the patriarchal gaze in Morrison’s first five novels. He explores the ways in which race, class, and gender intersect in her construction of the gaze. Lauren Lepow’s ‘‘Paradise Lost and Found: Dualism and Edenic Myth in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby’’ reads the novel as an attempt to overcome dualistic thinking by establishing a mythology which redefines original sin as a form of innocence: a lack of self-knowledge. Sula is a work particularly emphasized by feminist scholarship. Gurleen Grewal presents Sula as a class history of the African American female experience in America: Eva, Hannah, and Sula Peace are working class; Rochelle, Helene, and Nel Wright are upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek, in ‘‘Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula,’’ remark on the centrality of female experience and perspective, as well as issues of community, friendship, and empathy among women. In contrast, Michael Awkward focuses on what some scholars see as the least feminist of Morrison’s fiction. In ‘‘‘Unruly and Let Loose’: Myth, Ideology, and Gender in Song of Solomon,’’ he departs from most analyses of the novel that emphasize the focus on male consciousness. Instead, he suggests, the novel comments on the marginalization of women within the dominant male narrative. As Morrison’s work becomes increasingly mainstream, many scholars begin to assess her relationship to the American and Western literary traditions. There seem to be three distinct approaches: those who attempt to canonize her within the tradition, those who argue that she participates in the tradition, and those who discuss how she subverts and undermines it. Most notable among the first group is perhaps Harold Bloom, who in The Western Canon includes Morrison’s Song of Solomon for its participation in the quest narrative. David Cowart echoes Bloom’s assessment, claiming that Song of Solomon is ‘‘literature,’’ not ‘‘black literature’’ (Middleton 95). He argues that Morrison is universal and encourages people to read her texts within a ‘‘larger tradition’’ of Western writing. John Duval, in ‘‘Doe Hunting and Masculinity: Song of Solomon and Go Down, Moses,’’ diverges from critics like Bloom who see Faulkner’s work as a ‘‘master-narrative’’ for Morrison. Instead, he emphasizes Morrison’s craft and contribution by suggesting a shift in terminology: she ‘‘engages’’ Faulkner. Philip Page acknowledges the plurality of Morrison’s literary heritage: he locates predecessors for his fusion and fragmentation trope in American culture, deconstruction, and African American culture. Other critics emphasize Morrison as subversive. Valerie Smith, in ‘‘The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,’’ argues that the novel undermines individualistic notions of identity by insisting that a more authentic identity must be essentially communal. Catherine M. Woidat similarly posits Morrison’s work as a challenge to canonical American authors in her article ‘‘Talking Back to Schoolteacher: Morrison’s Confrontation with Hawthorne in Beloved.’’ Gurleen Grewal situates Morrison’s work within the tradition of the bourgeois novel while also undermining it with her emphasis on ‘‘peasant’’ oral culture. The narrative perspective within her work is also subversive in that it is ‘‘on the side of those who are subordinated to bourgeois power’’ (Grewal 4).

432

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Finally, a number of critics have remarked on the structure in Morrison’s fiction. Scholarship often remarks on several characteristics of Morrison’s narrative structure: multiple points of view, conflation of characters, repetition, nonlinear temporality, and ambiguous narration. Philip Page draws on Ralph Ellison’s term—the ‘‘puzzle of the one-and-the-many’’—to characterize Morrison’s work as ‘‘a unified entity [that] simultaneously exists as a complex configuration of its constituent parts’’ (Page 3). He applies this idea to themes in the content of her novels as well as their form—particularly her disruption of temporal linearity. Brian Finney also discusses temporality, emphasizing the large gap between the order in which events occur in Beloved and the order in which they are told. He sees the intermediary, timeless status of Beloved-as-ghost as parallel to the narrative structure, which he describes as nonlinear and disorienting. Katherine J. Mayberry, in ‘‘The Problem of Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,’’ diverges from the idea that narrative structure is the result of Morrison’s participation in African American cultural forms; instead, she resists closure in her fiction to prevent her texts from being subordinated to hegemonic ideology. Mayberry emphasizes Morrison’s agency and craft in constructing her narratives. New and original scholarship on Toni Morrison’s novels continues to be published in major literary journals and volumes of criticism. Her texts offer rich possibilities for critical interpretation of their social and cultural commentary, preservation of history, intertextuality, and intricately crafted aesthetics. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Toni Morrison Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Jazz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Love. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Paradise. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Rac(ing) Justice, (En)gender(ing) Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of a Social Reality. New York: Pantheon, 1992. ‘‘Recitatif.’’ In Confirmation, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka. New York: Morrow, 1983. Song of Solomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Sula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. Tar Baby. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Studies of Toni Morrison’s Works Andrews, William L., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Berkman, Anne Elizabeth. The Quest for Authenticity: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Bjork, Patrick B. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place within the Community. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Bloom, Harold. Toni Morrison. Bloom’s Major Novelist series. Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.

TONI MORRISON

433

———. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt, 1994. Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction. Troy, NY: The Whitson Publishing Company, 1993. Christian, Barbara. ‘‘Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison.’’ Journal of Ethnic Studies 7.4 (1980): 65–78. Conner, Marc C. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. David, Ron. Toni Morrison Explained. New York: Random House, 2000. Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Grewal, Gurleen. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1991. Kolmerton, Carol A., Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg, eds. Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, (1998). Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. McKay, Nellie Y. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. McKay, Nellie Y., and William L. Andrews, eds. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press: 1998. McKay, Nellie Y., and Kathryn Earle, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: The Modern Langauge Association of America, 1997. Middleton, David L., ed. Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. ———, ed. Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Reyes-Connor, Marc Cameron. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Smith, Valerie. New Essays on Song of Solomon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Spillers, Hortense, and Marjorie Pryse, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Sumana, K. The Novels of Toni Morrison: A Study in Race, Gender, and Class. London: Sangam Books, 1998.

Deborah M. Wolf

GERTRUDE BUSTILL MOSSELL (1855–1948)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Gertrude Bustill Mossell was a journalist and published two books in her literary career. She was born on July 3, 1855, into a pioneering, socially active, and politically aware Philadelphia family. Mossell did not disappoint her family’s legacy. She taught school for several years after graduating from Robert Vaux Grammar and published her first text at the age of sixteen when her high school commencement speech ‘‘Influence’’ appeared in the Christian Recorder. As an early feminist, Mossell focused most of her journalistic endeavors on articles concerning women’s rights and responsibilities. She published in a variety of periodicals including the AME Church Review, Philadelphia Echo, Independent Freeman, Our Women and Children, and Woman’s Era. In December 1885 Mossell became the first woman to publish an ongoing column in an African American newspaper. ‘‘The Woman’s Department’’ ran in the New York Freeman, the leading African American newspaper at the time, and was later picked up by Indianapolis World and New York Age. She also worked for three of Philadelphia’s most widely distributed daily periodicals for almost seven years: the Philadelphia Times, Inquirer, and Press. Mossell had two daughters, Mary Campbell and Florence Alma, with her husband Dr. Nathan Frances Mossell. The two worked together in 1895 to establish the Frederick Douglas Memorial Hospital and Training School. Mrs. Mossell, though rarely noted for her assistance, raised over $30,000 for the hospital’s creation, served as president of the Social Service Auxiliary, and spent two years working on the Alumni Magazine. Her most notable civic accomplishment, however, may be her support in organizing the Philadelphia branch of the National Afro-American Council, predecessor to the NAACP, in 1899. She died on January 21, 1948, in Philadelphia. Sadly, her obituary headline did not even mention her name; it read, ‘‘Widow of Dr. Mossell Succumbs at 92 years.’’ MAJOR WORKS While Mossell is most noted for her extraordinary career as a journalist, she published two books during her lifetime. The first, and most widely recognized, is The Work of the Afro-American Woman. Published in 1894, this feminist and political text is a collection of original essays and poems by a diverse group of women including businesswomen, journalists, educators, and missionaries. Mossell focuses on the industrious work and writings of contemporary women while highlighting how the legacy of historical figures like Harriet Tubman and Phillis Wheatley enables the current and future race projects. She praises African American women’s efforts and accomplishments, emphasizing the extraordinary nature of African American women to prevail and pioneer while maintaining dignity and identity. She encourages young women to make responsible choices concerning their future roles as mothers, wives, and professionals, emphasizing one’s need for personal space within the home as a way to retreat and

GERTRUDE BUSTILL MOSSELL

435

rejuvenate her worldly endeavors. Mossell also focuses on African American history as a point of reference for future hope as well as a critical tool for racial pride. She beautifully crafts her text to inspire, instruct, and offer accolade to African American women without openly antagonizing masculine authority or igniting racial conflict. This was a skill Mossell practiced in all her journalistic efforts for which she was handsomely rewarded with a lengthy list of periodical publications. Mossell published her second and last book, Little Dansie’s One Day at Sabbath School, in 1902. It is the story of a little girl who is killed while trying to save her Sunday school teacher from an oncoming train. CRITICAL RECEPTION Mossell published The Work under her husband’s initials, perhaps as a way to highlight her domesticity and mask the progressive nature of the text. Unlike many nineteenth-century race writers, she was able to put into print her ideas regarding race with minimal negative press. Her first book sold 1,000 copies immediately and a second edition was printed in 1908. The New York Independent, Chicago Inter-Ocean, and Springfield Republican all published complimentary reviews. Her work as a journalist was also extremely well received by the public. Like many nineteenth-century African American female writers, Mossell is noticeably absent from contemporary discourse. The few resources in circulation emphasize the irreplaceable and progressive role she played in African American history. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Gertrude Mossell Little Dansie’s One Day at Sabbath School. Philadelphia: Penn Printing and Pub., 1902. The Work of the Afro-American Woman. Philadelphia: G. S. Ferguson, 1894.

Studies of Gertrude Mossell’s Work Pero Gaglo, Dagbovie. ‘‘Black Women Historians from the Late 19th Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement.’’ Journal of African American History 89.3 (2004): 241–62. Price-Groff, Claire. Extraordinary Women Journalists. New York: Children’s Press, 1997. Streitmatter, Rodger. Raising Her Voice: African American Women Journalists Who Changed History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994.

Amanda Wray

HARRYETTE MULLEN (1953– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet Harryette Mullen was born on July 1, 1953, in Florence, Alabama, to James Otis and Avis Ann Mullen. By age four she moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where her life as a writer began. Initially she wrote to entertain family and friends; but before graduating high school, her poetry was published in a local newspaper. Continuing her education and her writing, she attended the University of Texas, Austin, taking an English degree in 1975. Publishing Tree Tall Woman in 1981 as her first professional publication, she later entered graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz, earning her master’s degree in 1987 and doctorate in 1990. Upon graduating in 1990 Mullen took a position as an assistant professor at Cornell University and by 1991 published Trimmings. In 1992 she followed up with the publishing of S*perm**K*T. Focusing more in academia and professional scholarship, Mullen published about one critical article per year until 1995. In that year, two significant events occurred; Mullen published Muse & Drudge and she left Cornel University to join the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) faculty. MAJOR WORKS Mullen’s work, whether classified as a collection of individual prose-poems or a large unit of poetic-prose, is always experimental poetry in one fashion or another. In Tree Tall Woman Mullen seeks to discuss elements of black identity especially as manifested within the context of the Black Arts Movement. She attempted to project a voice telling of the black identity and experience without having that voice scream the identity of the black speaker. To that end Mullen tells Cynthia Hogue in an interview that she created a work that ‘‘is really about relationships among black people.’’ As such it allowed her vicariously to reveal her identity in a way that made race central but not overwhelming. In doing this, she makes a niche in and from which she can work to create an authorial identity. Ten years later when Mullen published the poetic-prose work Trimmings, she again experimented with the language to offer a feminist critique of American society through the thematic use of clothing accessories to discuss the image of women in America. This particular work seems to focus less on issues of race and more on issues relating to women, as does S*perm**K*T the following year in which the shopping list is explored as a vehicle for offering a feminist critique of American society. While these works are marvelously crafted and are at the zenith of innovation, they indirectly seem to alienate Mullen’s minority audience. Responding directly to this, Mullen published Muse & Drudge, a long poetical work discussing the African American woman from the obvious perspective of an African American woman, in 1995. The voice in this work resonates differently than the voice of

HARRYETTE MULLEN

437

the earlier works, and the effort is rewarded through a welcoming reception of a more diverse audience. In 2002 she wrote her most critically praised work, Sleeping with the Dictionary. In this particular work, Mullen provides the perfect combination of linguistic wordplay and appreciable themes. It is not only pleasing to her target audience, but it extends itself beyond that demographic into the mainstream so that aficionados and casual readers alike take notice. Sleeping with the Dictionary is a collection of prose-poems treating a variety of themes. Ironically, the language used to express the themes is as important as the themes themselves. In this work, language not only provides a conduit for discussing a subject but also becomes the subject of the discussion. The work riddled with duplicities, and laced with wordplay and word games subtly becomes about language. Just as Mullen directly treats blackness in Tree Tall Woman without directly discussing it, she illuminates language in Sleeping with the Dictionary without shining a spotlight on it. CRITICAL RECEPTION Mullen’s reception is broad. Deborah Mix notes Aldon Nielsen’s praising Mullen ‘‘as . . . critic and poet [who] has helped . . . to identify and sustain a tradition of African American experimentalism that has been marginalized, if not ignored . . .’’ (Mix 65–66). Mithcum Huehls extols Mullen’s experimentation in Muse and Drudge as intentional Veil shifting within the DuBoisean paradigm of double consciousness (19). Sleeping with the Dictionary was highly praised by many groups simultaneously, winning it a nomination as a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award. Hokes S. Gloever III posits that Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary challenges how language is obtained by ‘‘presenting a wide range of linguistic forces converging in the poems’’ presented while Carol Muske-Dukes says the work ‘‘may be lexicon lust, but it’s no one-night stand.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Harryette Mullen Blues Baby: Early Poems. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Muse & Drudge. Philadelphia: Singing Horse, 1995. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. S*perm**K*T. Philadelphia: Singing Horse, 1992. Tree Tall Woman. Galveston: Energy Earth, 1981. Trimmings. New York: Tender Buttons, 1991.

Studies of Harryette Mullen’s Work Bedient, Calvin. ‘‘Interview with Harryette Mullen.’’ Callaloo 19.3 (Summer 1996): 651–69. Frost, Elisabeth A. ‘‘An Interview with Harryette Mullen.’’ Contemporary Literature 41.1 (Spring 2000): 397–421. ———. ‘‘Signifyin(g) on Stein: The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino.’’ Postmodern Culture 5.3 (May 1995). Glover III, Hoke S. Rev. of Sleeping with the Dictionary. Black Issues Book Review ( July–August 2002): 63.

438

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Hogue, Cynthia. ‘‘Beyond the Frame of Whiteness: Harryette Mullen’s Revisionary Border.’’ In We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, 81–89. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. ———. ‘‘Interview with Harryette Mullen.’’ Postmodern Culture 9.2 ( January 1999). Hoover, Paul. ‘‘Stark Strangled Banjos: Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, Harryette Mullen, and Al Hibbler.’’ Denver Quarterly 36.3–4 (Fall–Winter 2002): 68–82. Huehls, Mitchum. ‘‘Spun Puns (and Anagrams): Exchange Economies, Subjectivity, and History in Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge.’’ Contemporary Literature 44.1 (Spring 2003): 19–46. Mix, Deborah. ‘‘Tender Revisions: Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings and S*PERM**K*T.’’ American Literature 77.1 (March 2005): 65–92. Muske-Duke, Carol. Rev. of Sleeping with the Dictionary. Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 31, 2002, 6. Pinto, Samantha. ‘‘Feminist Subjectivity and the Everyday Blues: The Casual Erotics of Harryette Mullen.’’ In Sound as Sense: Contemporary U. S. Poetry &/in Music, edited by Michael Delville and Christine Pagnoulle, 59–75. Belgium: Peter Lang, 2003. Williams, Emily Allen. ‘‘Harryette Mullen, ‘The Queen of Hip Hyperbole’: An Interview.’’ African American Review 34.4 (Winter 2000): 701–7.

Ordner W. Taylor, III

BEATRICE MURPHY (1908–1992)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Hailing from Monessen, Pennsylvania, Beatrice Murphy as a young child put down roots in Washington, D.C., where she spent the remainder of her prolific life working as an editor, reviewer, columnist, poet, and bibliographer. Clearly a lesser-known voice among African American women writers, Murphy nonetheless garners recognition for giving voice and support to other African American writers, advocating primarily for young, unknown, and struggling poets. Throughout her career, Murphy wrote syndicated book and poetry review columns for the Associated Negro Press that ran in African American newspapers. She founded the Negro Bibliographic and Research Center in Washington, D.C., which published the Bibliographic Survey: The Negro in Print (1965–1972), a periodical of reviews of black fiction and nonfiction that was subscribed to by public, university, and federal libraries. MAJOR WORKS Murphy published three books of original poetry. Love Is a Terrible Thing (1945) explores love from its heights of passion to the valley of despair. The Rocks Cry Out (1969) takes a definitive nonviolent stance in the midst of the civil rights movement. Get with It, Lord (1976) directly calls upon God for strength. Facing impending blindness, Murphy writes of engulfing darkness and contemplates what might happen to the question of race, for she can no longer see visual markers. Murphy’s dedication to young black poets is exemplified in her three edited collections. In Negro Voices (1938) she contends that it is her ‘‘duty’’ to bring undiscovered ‘‘talent to light’’ (5–6). A combination of factors—lack of publication venues, ‘‘callous indifference’’ from white publishers, and feeling disloyal to the black race when publishing with white presses—makes the ‘‘role of the Negro writer a difficult one’’ (6). While still advocating unknown black writers, Ebony Rhythm (1948) attempts to erase matters of race. Murphy states that ‘‘Negro poets write . . . about love, nature and everyday events in the world they live in—which is an American, not a Negro, world’’ (i). She was not ‘‘swayed by sentimental considerations of race’’ (ii) yet at least a third of the poems are indeed black-themed. In stark contrast to her earlier attempt to gloss over race, Today’s Negro Voices (1970) is ‘‘much more race oriented . . . even race saturated.’’ Murphy admits that the sensibilities of black nationalism along with ‘‘determination’’ for change are felt in the ‘‘unadorned hate flowing from their pens’’ (7). Indeed nearly all of the thirty-four poets deal with matters of survival and black pride.

440

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Despite Murphy’s efforts to popularize young black poets, she did not receive the critical recognition that she may have deserved. Keneth Kinnamon’s extensive survey of African American anthologies does give a nod to Murphy’s first two edited collections, but his assessment is less than stunning. In one throwaway comment he finds her ‘‘lack of selectivity’’ unimpressive (469). It is unfortunate that Kinnamon did not give consideration to her final anthology, which is by far the most race based. Nor does he bother to explain her noble mission to assist black writers as they face publication roadblocks, an impressive undertaking for a Negro woman in 1938. Indeed the strongest critical blow was delivered by Nikki Giovanni in her 1969 review of The Rocks Cry Out in which Murphy points an accusatory finger at the ‘‘Negro youth.’’ Entrenched in the Black Pride Movement, Giovanni is saddened at being ‘‘so misunderstood by some of our older generation.’’ She charges Murphy with missing the ‘‘whole point of being Black in the beginning of Blackness’’ (97) and resents the ‘‘despair and helplessness’’ in Murphy’s poetry (98). While the works of Beatrice Murphy did not resonate throughout the larger African American literary realm, her nuanced efforts of giving voice to hundreds of unknown writers will always be a noteworthy part of African American literary history. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Beatrice Murphy Bibliographic Survey: The Negro in Print. Washington, DC: Minority Research Center, 1965– 1972. Ebony Rhythm: An Anthology of Contemporary Negro Verse. New York: Exposition, 1948. Get with It, Lord: Poems New and Selected. Washington, DC: Winebury Press, 1976. Love Is a Terrible Thing. New York: Hobson, 1945. Negro Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Verse. New York: Harrison, 1938. The Rocks Cry Out. Detroit: Broadside, 1969. Today’s Negro Voices: An Anthology by Young Negro Poets. New York: Messner, 1970.

Studies of Beatrice Murphy’s Work Adams, Katherine H. ‘‘Beatrice M. Murphy.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Afro American Writers, 1940—1955, ed. Trudier Harris-Lopez. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 1988. Giovanni, Nikki. Rev. of The Rocks Cry Out by Beatrice M. Murphy and Nancy L. Arnez. Negro Digest (August 1969): 97–98. Kinnamon, Keneth. ‘‘Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994.’’ Callaloo 20.2 (1997): 461–81.

Judy L. Isaksen

PAULI MURRAY (1910–1985)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Pauli Murray, a novelist, poet, and author of law books and autobiographies, was born in Baltimore in 1910 but lived from the age of three until sixteen in Durham, North Carolina, with her maternal grandparents Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald and her aunts Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, who eventually adopted Murray, and Sallie Fitzgerald Small. During her time in North Carolina, Murray developed a strongly ambivalent attitude toward the south, abhorring the Jim Crow laws she was forced to live under. She left Durham in 1926 to attend college in New York City. Murray received her undergraduate degree from Hunter College and later went on to attend law school at Howard University, where she engaged in several nonviolent protests in the 1940s, long before their popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. Murray received graduate degrees in law from UCBerkeley and Yale University; later she would practice law as well as teach at the Ghana School of Law and at Brandeis, where she not only taught law but also was responsible for helping to design their first African American Studies program. Murray was also an ardent advocate for women’s rights, coining the phrase ‘‘Jane Crow’’ to refer to women’s second-class status in the United States and serving as one of the founding members of the National Organization for Women in 1966. In 1973, at the age of sixty-two, Murray entered divinity school and in 1977 became one of the first women, and the first African American woman, ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in the United States. Murray died on July 1, 1985. MAJOR WORKS While Murray is most often recognized as a civil rights’ activist, a teacher, and a priest, writing was the vocation she felt most drawn to. Amidst the many pamphlets, newspaper articles, and two law books Murray wrote, three texts should be of particular interest to the scholar of African American women’s literature: two autobiographical works and one collection of poetry. Proud Shoes (1956) chronicles the story of her maternal grandparents Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald who raised her, the former a free African American man from Chester County, Pennsylvania, who came to North Carolina during Reconstruction as a teacher devoted to educating the newly freed slaves, and the latter the offspring of a slave woman named Harriet and her owner, Sidney Smith, a member of a prominent Orange County family, who raped her repeatedly. Later Sidney’s brother Frank would claim Harriet for himself and produce three more daughters. Mary Ruffin Smith, the Smith brothers’ unmarried sister, raised eyebrows when she took the girls into her household, brought them up much differently than other Smith slaves, including instilling in them a sense of their aristocratic blood, and bequeathing each of them substantial parcels of land upon her death. The book is a milestone, not only for its recounting of the success of an African American family during Reconstruction and the early twentieth century but also for the way it tells the national story of America’s tangled

442

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

race relations and racial identities; it makes a worthy companion to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In 1987, two years after her death, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, her own autobiography she was working on with editors up to the time of her death, was published. The autobiography recounts Murray’s awakening to both racial and gender inequities and eloquently explains how she shaped herself into the civil rights’ activist and feminist she became. Murray also published one volume of poetry, Dark Testament and Other Poems (1970), which has largely been neglected but deserves greater attention. The collection can be characterized as containing a significant number of poems that speak to racial and economic injustices as well as a section of beautiful, striking, and conflicted love poems that are particularly intriguing, especially in light of the struggles Murray underwent in the 1930s and 1940s with her gender identity and sexuality, when most of the love poems were written. Murray found herself emotionally and sexually drawn to women but was unable to accept lesbianism as a respectable identity. Her distress over her attractions to women and her deep belief that she was really biologically a man resulted in several psychiatric hospital stays and finally abdominal surgery to assure her that she did not have ‘‘hidden’’ male sex organs. Following this surgery, Murray seems to have relinquished her struggle over her gender and sexuality and turned her energies toward her work; nonetheless, the love poems are significant for they can be read as helping to establish an African American lesbian tradition in poetry brought to fruition in the work of such writers as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Pat Parker. CRITICAL RECEPTION Murray’s literary texts garnered some critical attention at the times of their publications. Proud Shoes, especially, received glowing reviews from major newspapers, including the New York Times; a reviewer from the New York Herald Tribune deemed Proud Shoes more than ‘‘a family chronicle . . . [it is] a personal memoir, it is history, it is biography, and it is also a story that, at its best, is dramatic enough to satisfy the demands of fiction. It is written in anger, but without hatred; in affection, but without pathos and tears; and in humor that never becomes extravagant’’ (quoted in Song 311). Song in a Weary Throat won the Lillian Smith Award in 1987, was widely and positively reviewed, and was later reprinted by the University of Tennessee Press as Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet. Dark Testament and Other Poems received the least critical attention and, unfortunately, is currently out of print. Lately, Murray has been receiving more scholarly attention. Several dissertations on Murray were completed in the 1990s, and one of those, by Darlene O’Dell has been revised into a book titled Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katherine Dupre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray. Most notably, in 2002, the Journal of Women’s History devoted a section of seven short articles on Murray to encourage, as the editor of the section notes, ‘‘readers to take up the story where we left off, and enter into their own personal journeys of discovery and appreciation of Pauli Murray’s multifaceted life’’ (56). Ware also notes that several of the writers who contributed are at work on longer pieces on Murray, including biographies (54), which indicates that there are even more studies on Murray to come. Christina Bucher’s recent article on Murray’s much-neglected poetry seeks to revive interest in her poems as valuable contributions to the protest tradition of African American poetry.

PAULI MURRAY

443

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Pauli Murray The Constitution and Government of Ghana. With Leslie Maxwell. London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1961. Dark Testament and Other Poems. Norwalk, CT: Silvermine, 1970. Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet. 1987. Reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. Proud Shoes: The Story of An American Family. 1956. Reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. States’ Laws on Race and Color. 1955. Reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

Studies of Pauli Murray’s Works Bucher, Christina G. ‘‘Pauli Murray: A Case for the Poetry.’’ North Carolina Literary Review 13 (2004): 59–73. ‘‘Dialogue: Pauli Murray’s Notable Connections.’’ Introduction by Caroline Ware. Journal of Women’s History 14.2 (2002): 54–86. Drury, Doreen Marie. ‘‘‘Experimentation on the Male Side’: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Pauli Murray’s Quest for Love and Identity, 1910–1960.’’ Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2000. Humez, Jean M. ‘‘Pauli Murray’s Histories of Loyalty and Revolt.’’ Black American Literature Forum 24.2 (1990): 315–35. McKay, Nellie. ‘‘Pauli Murray.’’ In African American Poets Since 1955 DLB 41, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 248–51. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. O’Dell, Darlene. Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph. Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers 1900–1945. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Christina G. Bucher

GLORIA NAYLOR (1950– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Novelist Gloria Naylor was born in 1950 in New York City. Her father was a transit worker; her mother was a telephone operator. Although Naylor grew up in an urban area, she had deep roots in the south since her parents had worked as sharecroppers in Robinsonville, Mississippi. Naylor’s parents emigrated from rural Mississippi to north the year before her birth. She inherited her mother’s love for books, and from a very young age, she was an avid reader. In 1963, her family moved to Queens, where Naylor became aware of racism. Gloria was a shy and introverted child. The love of the written word kept her spirits thriving. She wrote her thoughts in a diary while growing up. Her love of reading and writing grew during her high school years when she was exposed to many classics. Naylor graduated high school in 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated that year, and that event had a great impact on her; as a result, she followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a Jehovah’s Witnesses missionary. For the next seven years, she traveled the country preaching. The Jehovah’s Witnesses role made her come out of her shell and offered her an opportunity for community service and travel. In 1975, Naylor began attending Brooklyn College. From 1975 to 1981, she worked full-time as a switchboard operator, while pursuing writing and her college education. During this time she became familiar with the vast body of African American literature and discovered feminism. She read Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye in 1977. It was the very first book she read that was written by an African American woman author. Reading it gave her an inspiration to tell the stories of the world that she knew. Naylor’s early attempts at writing were immediately successful. One of her first short stories was published in Essence magazine. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Brooklyn College in 1981. That same year she completed her first novel The Women of Brewster Place. She traveled to Spain and Tangiers during that summer. On her return, she began graduate work in Afro-American Studies at Yale University. In 1983, she graduated with a Master of Arts degree. That same year she received the American Book Award for the Best First Novel for The Women of Brewster Place. She served as the writer-in-residence at Cummington Community of the Arts, and as a visiting lecturer at George Washington University. Naylor has continued to receive awards and honors, including fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Guggenheim Foundation. Naylor next published Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1987), Bailey’s Cafe´ (1992), and The Men of Brewster Place (1998). In addition to her novels, Naylor has also written essays and screenplays, as well as the stage adaptation of Bailey’s Cafe´. In 1989, The Women of Brewster Place was made into a television movie starring Oprah Winfrey. Naylor also founded ‘‘One Way Productions,’’ an independent film company.

GLORIA NAYLOR

445

MAJOR WORKS Naylor’s first four novels—The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, Mama Day, and Bailey’s Cafe´—form a quartet, with the themes and characters from one novel appearing in another novel. In an interview with Diane Osen, Naylor said that she did not want to be a one-book wonder, like so many African American writers before her. She planned to write four interwoven novels. She said in the interview: ‘‘. . . I would write these four novels and think of them as a base, and then go on and build a career.’’ Naylor’s first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, is a montage of African American womanhood. It celebrates the complex and diverse lives of African American women. The seven women of the novel manage to survive and support each other in an impoverished and dangerous neighborhood. The novel was critically acclaimed, received several awards, and was made into a television series in 1989. In a March 1989 interview with Ebony magazine, Naylor explains her motivation behind writing The Women of Brewster Place: ‘‘. . . one character couldn’t be the Black woman in America. So I had seven different women, all in different circumstances, encompassing the complexity of our lives, the richness of our diversity, from skin color on down to religious, political, and sexual preference.’’ In the first few pages of the novel, Naylor offers readers a vivid portrait of the women whose lives she is about to explore in the coming chapters. She writes, ‘‘Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it a home. . . . Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story’’ (5). The women of Brewster Place have all had decent upbringings, but, in almost every case, they ended up in Brewster Place as result of just one mistake that they made. In some cases that mistake was of having too much spirit. In the end each one of them rises above that mistake, conquers injustices to become a positive influence in the lives of other residents. Mattie Michael becomes an unwed mother as result of a youthful indiscretion and this marks the beginning of her downward spiral that brings her to Brewster Place. Independence and free spirit were Etta May Johnson’s downfall, because ‘‘. . . Rutheford County wasn’t ready for Etta’s blooming independence.’’ So she leaves, but she soon finds out that ‘‘. . .America wasn’t ready for her yet—not in 1937.’’ Kiswana Browne grows to be an independent woman who quits college to become a community activist. She believes that her place is among her people, fighting for equality and a better community. Her well-to-do parents live on Linden Hills and her brother is a successful lawyer. Kiswana brings the diverse community of Brewster Place together. Lucielia Louise Turner has an unsuccessful and temperamental husband, Eugene, who forces her to have an abortion, and tragically Ciel (Lucielia) loses her only daughter to an illness. Again, it is Mattie who nurses Ciel back to life. Cora Lee, a woman who is emotionally just a child, continues to bear children fathered by a series of useless men, and continues to treat the babies like dolls. She only likes men because they continue to provide her with babies. When Kiswana takes her to see an African American production of Shakespeare in the park, Cora Lee is almost inspired to become active and change her life, and, yet in the end, she accepts the ‘‘. . . the shadow, who has let himself in with his key.’’ Lorraine and Theresa are two lesbian partners who have had to keep moving to find a place that will accept them. Brewster Place is not very accepting of their relationship either. In a stark contrast to the rebirth and hope of the stories of the other ladies, their story ends in death and destruction. Lorraine is gang raped by the

446

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

neighborhood hoodlums and in the aftermath of that event kills Ben, the resident caretaker of Brewster Place. Linden Hills portrays a world of economically successful African Americans and the hidden price of that success. The novel is loosely modeled after Dante’s Inferno. The nine circles of hell from Inferno become the crescents of Linden Hills. Naylor allegorizes Dante’s narrative journey through hell, in a similar journey by Willie and Lester through Linden Hills. In an interview with Angels Carabi, Naylor said she wanted to ‘‘look at what happens to black Americans when they move up in America’s society. They first lose family ties . . . then there are the community ties. You can create a whole different type of community around you—mostly of a mixture of other professional, middle-class people—but you lose the ties with your spiritual or religious valuesb’’ (38). This is exactly what happens to many residents of Linden Hills. Luther Nedeed immigrates to Wayne County from Tupelo, Mississippi. He is sold a useless piece of land by the white landowners of the town. But Luther Nedeed is a resourceful and determined man. He becomes the undertaker for the town, and soon creates a small fortune for himself and his descendents. The five generations of the Nedeed family are the new oppressors of the African American community. In Mama Day Naylor narrates the love story of two people from two different backgrounds. George is an orphan from the urban north and Cocoa is a young woman, coddled by her mother Abigail and her mother’s sister Miranda, known as Mama Day. Cocoa is from the rural south. In order to maintain an independent, black cultural identity, Naylor has created a fictional place called Willow Springs, which is not a part of any state. The only external connection to Willow Springs and the rest of the world is a few weakly built bridges, which are frequently washed out by storms. After their marriage, George and Cocoa spend their vacation in Willow Springs every summer. During one of those vacations, Ruby, a jealous root doctor, poisons Cocoa. Cocoa becomes dangerously ill. George and Cocoa are stranded due to a thunderstorm that washes out the bridge from Willow Springs. George dies in the process of trying to help Cocoa. His death and Mama Day’s healing powers lead to Cocoa’s healing. Bailey’s Cafe´ explores female sexuality and male-female sexual identity. The structure of the novel is similar to the riffing in a blues or jazz song. Each character tells his or her own story which is echoed by another’s story. Most of the storytellers are women who have suffered childhood abuse and are scarred for life as a result of that abuse. Each one ends up at Eve’s Boarding House. Most of the characters of Bailey’s Cafe´ have led isolated lives. Nadine, Bailey’s wife, is a woman of few words; their relationship is missing personal affection. Sadie grew up alone and has lived through a lonely married life. She attempts to earn love by fulfilling everyone’s wishes around her. Eve grew up with a doting grandfather, but as she began to show signs of womanhood, he became distant and as result she became emotionally isolated. Esther’s brothers used Esther as an economic pawn. They sold her to an older man who performed unspeakable sexual acts on her, and kept her isolated in a dark cellar. Mary (Peaches) is beautiful but hates her mirror image because her beauty is her own prison and men want only one thing from her. Jesse Bell turns to heroin and becomes a lesbian when her marriage to the wealthy Sugar Hill King ends in a bitter divorce. The Ethiopian, Miriam, was subjected to genital mutilation and suffers through a virgin pregnancy. ‘‘Miss Maple’’ is the rich, well-educated son of a wealthy Negro family who becomes the transvestite housekeeper for Eve’s Boarding house.

GLORIA NAYLOR

447

In The Men of Brewster Place, Naylor fills in the narrative gaps of The Women of Brewster Place, which was originally told from the women’s perspective. Naylor returns to the same depressing block of city tenement housing. This time she focuses on the African America men of the struggling community. Each chapter of the novel highlights the life of one man. First, there is Ben, the alcoholic superintendent of Brewster Place. He is stuck with the impossible task of fixing and improving the failing architecture of Brewster Place. There is Autistic Jerome, whose mother wants to use his musical talents for financial gains and refuses to provide him with the institutionalized care that he needs. Also, there is Eugene, Ciel’s husband; he is gay, married to Ciel, and a father. In addition there is Basil, Mattie Michael’s son, who longs for children of his own and is trying to raise other’s children. Also, there is Rev. Moreland T. Woods who wants a new church to glorify himself. Then there is Abshu (Clifford Jackson), a playwright and community activist. He hates greedy, politically ambitious minister, C. C. Baker. Additionally, there are the other men who gather at the barbershop to comment on the general state of the world. CRITICAL RECEPTION Critic Henry Louis Gates has noted that Naylor’s first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, boldly returns to and revives ‘‘naturalism as a mode of narration and plot development.’’ Annie Gottlieb of the New York Times writes, ‘‘Miss Naylor bravely risks sentimentality and melodrama to write her compassion and outrage large, and she pulls it off triumphantly.’’ Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris, in The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor, summarize the five categories of scholarly perspectives addressed by Naylor critics. The perspectives are (1) Naylor’s work as a product of an African American writer, (2) as an example of work positing a feminist or women’s studies agenda, (3) as a focus of influence studies or intertextual comparisons, (4) as a study of narrative and/or rhetorical methods, and (5) as an exponent of popular culture. The Women of Brewster Place and Bailey’s Cafe´ fall under the first category. Mama Day and Linden Hills squarely fall under the category of intertextual comparisons, as a study of narrative and/or rhetorical methods. In Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves, Peter Erickson analyzes Naylor’s frequent and systematic invocations of Shakespeare. Erickson points out that The Women of Brewster Place tries to recreate A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Erickson further argues that Mama Day provides critical analysis of George’s attachment to King Lear. He shows how the novel recreates The Tempest. For example, the title character is an African American female magician named Miranda, who is the matriarch of the island of Willow Springs. Missy Dehn Kubitschek, in ‘‘Shakespeare, Morrison, and Gloria Naylor’s ‘Mama Day,’’’ points out that ‘‘[Mama Day] simultaneously appropriates and signifies on earlier texts to create its own idea of order’’ (79). She argues that by using voices from EuroAmerican as well as African American tradition, Naylor strives to create a new social order. Willow Springs is not part of any state, yet it is part of the country, with residents participating in the political process at the national level; thus, giving them freedom from smaller allegiances. Sapphira Wade is of ‘‘pure Africa Stock,’’ thus her identity is not American. Kubitschek further argues that Shakespeare is invoked at many points in the narrative. The names of the central characters—Ophelia and Miranda—are from Hamlet. On his first date with Ophelia, George has to interrupt his reading of King Lear.

448

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Gloria Naylor Bailey’s Cafe´. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1996. Linden Hills. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985. Mama Day. New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 1987. ‘‘The Meaning of a Word.’’ In Language Awareness, edited by Paul Eschholz, 305–7. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. The Men of Brewster Place. New York: Hyperion Books, 1998. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Viking Adult, 1982.

Studies of Gloria Naylor’s Works Carabi, Angels. ‘‘An Interview with Gloria Naylor.’’ Belles Lettres 7 (1992): 36–42. Erickson, Peter. Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Felton, Sharon C., and Michelle C. Loris, eds. The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Fowler, Virginia C. Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Kelley, Margot Anne, ed. Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. ‘‘Toward a New Order: Shakespeare, Morrison, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.’’ MELUS 19.3 (1994): 75–89. Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Gloria Naylor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Wilson, Charles E., Jr. Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Pratibha Kelapure

BARBARA NEELY (1941– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Short fiction writer Barbara Neely was born in 1941 in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three children. She holds a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to her career as a novelist and short-fiction writer, Neely applied her graduate work to a position with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, overseeing development of the state’s first community-based correctional center for women. Her efforts toward social justice are consistently evident in her executive, activist, and literary undertakings. In addition to her work with Pennsylvania Corrections, Neely has served as director of a YWCA branch, executive director of Women for Economic Justice, producer for Africa News, cofounder of Women of Color for Reproductive Freedom, and host of Commonwealth Journal on Boston radio. Her first fiction publication appeared in Essence in 1981, and her short fiction continues to appear regularly in anthologies and magazines. Beginning in 1992, with the multiple-award-winning Blanche on the Lam, she has published four novels in her Blanche White detective series, for which she is best known. Neely’s entertaining murder mysteries take refreshing liberties with generic conventions, not the least of which is Blanche White herself. MAJOR WORKS Building on aspects of the diverse personalities of her grandmothers, both of whom worked as domestics, Neely in her Blanche White detective series presents a protagonist who may cook and clean for other people but is never a servant. Blanche is a full-bodied woman who is full of sass, sexual sauciness, and spiritual awareness of her ancestors, and unmarried and childless by choice. Her resistance for societal norms such as marriage and reproduction reflects Neely’s own. Blanche is unmarried not because she got no offers—she did—but because of her discomfort with the institution. She also planned not to be a mother, but her sister’s death leaves her with a niece and nephew to foster, a situation which puts her in a position to demonstrate a broader notion of social responsibility through the nurture of young people not her own, but of her community. The novels explore outsiderness, most obviously by having a poor African American woman as the central character, but also by including characters such as the developmentally delayed Mumsfield in Blanche on the Lam (1992) and the gay Ray-Ray and lesbian Mick in Blanche Cleans Up (1998). Neely creates opportunities to discuss additional social issues such as teen pregnancy, environmental poisoning, political corruption, and scandal, rape, and racism. Blanche does not function outside of these realities, untouched and detached. Rather, she finds herself guilty of assumptions, and the pregnant teen is her own niece, she lives in a neighborhood where children are sickened by lead paint in housing owned by absentee landlords, and she suffers from rape trauma, which she confronts in Blanche Passes Go. And as a dark-skinned poverty-

450

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

class black woman, she encounters intraracial racism and classism in Blanche among the Talented Tenth when she visits a light-skinned upper-class enclave. CRITICAL RECEPTION Despite the societal issues Neely explores in her fiction, literary critics, for the most part, have overlooked it. One critic who has found merit in Neely’s work is Stephen Soitos who admires Neely’s meditation on ‘‘insidious internal prejudice’’ and applauds her creation of a setting that mirrors the economic and color conflicts in African American society. He points to her incorporation of ‘‘black vernaculars’’ and ‘‘hoodoo awareness’’ (233) as ways in which she adds dimension to the cultural reality in her books, and recognizes the significance of the resilient African American woman in these novels, defining what Neely calls the ‘‘pivotal role that older women play in society’’ (Cary). For Neely, ‘‘the mystery genre [is] perfect to talk about serious subjects’’ (quoted in Collette). But the talk is never prosaic and preachy. Blanche is a very interesting woman, a dynamic and entertaining character who lives in a believable world. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Barbara Neely Blanche among the Talented Tenth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Blanche Cleans Up. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. Blanche on the Lam. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Blanche Passes Go. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000.

Studies of Barbara Neely’s Works Bailey, Frankie Y. ‘‘Blanche on the Lam, or the Invisible Woman Speaks.’’ In Diversity and Detective Fiction, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein, 186–204. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Cary, Alice. ‘‘Grandma Just Liked to Boogie.’’ Boston Globe May 9, 2004, 3rd edition, City Weekly: 1ff. Collette, Ann. ‘‘Damn, She Done It: Barbara Neely’s Fictional Detective Fights More Than Crime.’’ Ms. Magazine, June 2000. Ms. Magazine 2005. http://msmagazine.com/jun2k/ books.html (accessed February 1, 2005). Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Tolson, Nancy D. ‘‘The Butler Didn’t Do It So Now They’re Blaming the Maid: Defining a Black Feminist Trickster through the Novels of Barbara Neely.’’ South Central Review 18.3–4 (Fall– Winter 2001): 72–85. Witt, Doris. ‘‘Detecting Bodies: Barbara Neely’s Domestic Sleuth and the Trope of the (In)visible Woman.’’ In Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African-American Women, edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D., 165–94. Dickerson. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

A. Mary Murphy

DIANE OLIVER (1943–1966)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Diane Oliver’s literary production comprises six short stories. ‘‘Neighbors,’’ her most recognized story, placed third in the 1967 O. Henry Award competition and was later reprinted in several anthologies. She was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on July 28, 1943, to school administrator William Oliver and piano teacher Blanche Rann Oliver. She grew up within the southern African American middle class, attended segregated public schools, and entered the second integrated freshman class at Women’s College (now University of North Carolina at Greensboro). Upon graduation in 1964, she became guest editor of Mademoiselle magazine and studied in Switzerland. She then enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree posthumously, days after she was killed in a motorcycle-automobile crash on May 21, 1966, in Iowa City. MAJOR WORKS Oliver’s first published story, ‘‘Key to the City,’’sketches the character point-of-view identification, which recurs in most of her stories: a relatively young female protagonist, either married with young children or single and the oldest child. ‘‘Key to the City’’ portrays a matriarchal African American family emigrating from the south to join the absent husband in the promised land of Chicago. Upon arrival, they discover that the husband has abandoned his family; the protagonist is so disappointed and bewildered that she tries to reimpose order in her family’s life by sorting out their clothing bundles and ironing their Sunday clothes. Oliver’s second story, ‘‘Health Service,’’ introduces Libby, a young mother whose husband, Hal, works ‘‘upstate,’’ a euphemism for unknown whereabouts. The family reappears in ‘‘Traffic Jam,’’ at the end of which Hal unnerves Libby by returning without notice. ‘‘Neighbors,’’ which takes place in Charlotte, North Carolina, quickly became Oliver’s most acclaimed story, as suggested by Arthur Mizener: ‘‘It is hard to believe this beautifully conceived story was written by a twenty-three-year-old’’ (Handbook 28). Based on a true story of attempted high school integration involving one of Oliver’s teenage female friends, Dorothy Counts, Oliver transforms the story to the elementary school and a boy named Tommy. The hatred from elements of the white community and the fears of Tommy’s family erupt when their house is bombed the night before school is to start, resulting in Tommy’s parents’ decision to end the attempt to integrate Jefferson Davis School. Oliver moved the theme to the college level with ‘‘The Closet on the Top Floor.’’ The protagonist, Winifred, also suffers defeat by withdrawing into her closet and by being withdrawn from the southern women’s college she attempts to integrate. Oliver’s female protagonists must cope with personal problems as well as with the enveloping and often suffocating majority culture. Her last story, ‘‘Mint Juleps Not

452

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Served Here,’’ published posthumously, enacts a reversal of the ‘‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’’ tale with an African American family of three (‘‘bears’’) comfortably isolated in the woods of Forest Preserve. When a golden-haired woman visits, she, like previous visitors, is killed to preserve the Edenic home of the ‘‘three bears.’’ CRITICAL RECEPTION Although only little scholarly work has been published, entries in Cyclopedia of World Authors II (1989) and Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997) attempt to address the significance of Diane Oliver’s work. Arthur Mizener’s instructor’s manual accompanying Modern Short Stories is the longest study of a single work, ‘‘Neighbors.’’ In 1984, the South Carolina Educational Television Network produced a trilogy titled Tales of the Unknown South, which included a version of ‘‘Neighbors.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Diane Oliver ‘‘The Closet on the Top Floor.’’ In Southern Writing in the Sixties, edited by John W. Corrington and Miller Williams, 150–61. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966. ‘‘Health Service.’’ Negro Digest (November 1965): 72–79. ‘‘Key to the City.’’ In Red Clay Reader II, edited by Charlene Whisnant, 17–21. Charlotte, NC: Southern Review, 1965. Reprint, Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African American Short Stories, edited by Clarence Major. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. ‘‘Mint Juleps Not Served Here.’’ Negro Digest (March 1967): 58–66. ‘‘Neighbors.’’ The Sewanee Review 74 (1966): 470–88. Reprints. ‘‘Traffic Jam.’’ Negro Digest ( July 1966): 69–78.

Studies of Diane Oliver’s Works Alvarez, Joseph A. ‘‘Diane Oliver.’’ In Cyclopedia of World Authors II, vol. 3., edited by Frank McGill, 1141–42. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1989. Kratt, Mary N., ed. ‘‘Diane Oliver.’’ In The Imaginative Spirit: Literary Heritage of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, 77. Charlotte, NC: Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, 1988. Llorens, David. ‘‘Remembering a Young Talent.’’ Negro Digest (September 1966): 88–89. Mizener, Arthur. A Handbook of Analyses, Questions, and a Discussion of Technique for Use with Modern Short Stories: The Uses of Imagination. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1979. Smith, Virginia Whatley. ‘‘Oliver, Diane.’’ In Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 551–52. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Joseph A. Alvarez

BRENDA MARIE OSBEY (1957– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Brenda Marie Osbey, poet laureate of Louisiana, was born on December 12, 1957 in New Orleans, which serves as the geographical core of her work—a creative tapestry replete with rich cultural elements of her native place. Inscribed in her poetry and nonfiction are Louisiana Creole and New Orleanian traditions that resonate and capture the essence of this unique dynamic culture. Yet, while Osbey foregrounds New Orleans heritage and customs with a certain particularity, her work and the salient issues she addresses are by no means provincial but, rather, universal and far-reaching. This lends itself to Osbey’s own experiences locally, nationally, and internationally. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Dillard University in New Orleans in 1978; a Master of Art from the University of Kentucky, where she studied with Charles Rowell, in 1986; and attended the Universite´ Paul Vale´ry at Montpe´llie´r, France. In addition to studying in various geographical locales, Osbey has also taught a range of courses—from African American literature to French language—at a number of institutions in New Orleans and elsewhere. At her alma mater Dillard University, for instance, she taught English, French, and African World literatures. She taught African American literature and creative writing at Loyola University, and was a visiting writerin-residence at Tulane University. And, among other appointments, she has also taught African American and Third World literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been a scholar-in-residence at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Likewise, Osbey has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College/ Harvard University. In several respects, then, Osbey’s work is largely experiential: infused with, enriched by, and reflective of not only her firsthand knowledge of Louisiana culture but also her vast experiences residing elsewhere: Kentucky, Virginia, California, Massachusetts, and France, to only name a few. What this has done for Osbey, and her work especially, is enable her to render her artforms—her poetry, characters, and nonfiction—in ways that are adorned with the rich symbolism, language, mythology, and traditions of New Orleans particularly, but along a larger cultural landscape and social backdrop. MAJOR WORKS Brenda Marie Osbey has published four volumes of poetry: Ceremony for Minneconjoux (1983, 1985), In These Houses (1988), Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (1991), and All Saints: New and Selected Poems (1997). Her first collection, a compilation of roughly fourteen poems, foregrounds black women—their voices, remembrances, and roots—in New Orleans, which, rich with its African, French, and Spanish heritage, also functions as a character in the text. With poems ranging thematically

454

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

from love and madness to beauty and murder, Osbey conjures, much like her characters, stories of women—fe´fe´ and bahalia women—who, in their unconventional behavior, exhibit haunting power and, other times, a lack thereof. Stories of Lenazette, for instance, told by her daughter Minneconjoux, contain themes of love and death, while others, such as the one involving Ramona Veagis, deal with madness. Then other poems explore these recurring themes with regards to family: ‘‘Eileen,’’ for instance, features a character that complicates the family ideal by, rather than showing them love and familial devotion, killing her ‘‘people’’ and waiting five days before going public to announce it. Consistent in this collection of poems, then, is women and their experiences, in all their complexity, on the bayous and streets or ‘‘bankettes’’ of Louisiana. In These Houses is, as Osbey asserts, her first ‘‘planned’’ volume: that is, in preparation for the collection, she constructed and compiled timelines, photographs, genealogy charts, and landmark maps, which account for the detail and specificity in which she renders these poems. This collection, as did her first, also centers on women of African descent, exploring their various accounts, particularly with love, death, and insanity. In fact, some of the characters in her first collection become the subjects of the poetry of In These Houses as well. Divided in three sections—‘‘Houses of the Swift Easy Women,’’ ‘‘House of Mercies,’’ and ‘‘House of Bones’’—Osbey places emphasis on women and their relational aspects, both literally and metaphorically, to houses. Women, such as Thelma V. Picou, run naked into the street calling ‘‘freedom’’; and, she threatens to kill her Darling Henry if he is in her house—which she misses rather than her children—when she is released. Ophelia, another unconventional woman, surrounds herself with flowers and beautiful things, reminiscing while in the infirmary about the lovers whom she has had and kept long dead. Other poems evoke blues lyricism, as is the case in ‘‘How I Became the Blues.’’ While a number of these poems generally end with men dead at the hands or conjuration of women, Augustine in ‘‘The House’’ consumes rat poison, killing herself, and epitomizes a tragic blues genre. Osbey takes her work into a different trajectory in her third volume Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman, which is constituted by a single book-length poem. Comprised of twelve chapters and a glossary, it chronicles the experiences of Marie Crying Eagle and her lover Percy, as well as Ms. Regina, a conjurer and former friend of Marie’s deceased mother. Set primarily in Faubourg Marigny, an early suburb or district of New Orleans, this work is infused with spirituality and hoodoo practices, as well as historical links to maroon communities—le ma`ron—to which Marie learns she has familial connections. In her 1998 American Book Award–winning All Saints: New and Selected Poems, comprised of three sections and twenty poems, Osbey continues her exploration of various religious aspects of Louisiana culture. She continues her focus on hoodoo and explores Catholicism, and its deeply rooted practices in Louisiana, which accounts in part for her title, ‘‘All Saints,’’ which alludes to the Feast of All Saints. Osbey evokes Louisiana spiritual folklore and legend in ‘‘Mother Catherine’’ and the Seven Sisters of New Orleans, showing the coexistence and influences of hoodoo and Catholicism, as well as the ways traditional African-based religions impact spiritual practices. Likewise, Osbey pays tribute and homage to legendary musical figures and attributes her book title, as well, to the tendency to ‘‘deify’’ musicians and singers, who become almost god-like—hence her poem ‘‘The Evening News,’’ which she writes to Nina Simone. She also infuses, in some of the poems of this collection, jazz and blues lyricism and celebrates these musical styles and their influences on New Orleans culture. In addition

BRENDA MARIE OSBEY

455

to exploring religiosity and musical forms and figures, Osbey memorializes the dead, who, as in the African tradition, has ‘‘life’’ and a connection to us long beyond the grave; and, in ‘‘Peculiar Fascination with the Dead,’’ she shows the extent to which the dead are honored, celebrated, and ever present. In addition to these published volumes, Osbey has written creative nonfiction on Buddy Bolden, the father of jazz, and rituals, death, music, and jazz funerals of New Orleans. Her work appears in a multiplicity of journals and anthologies including, but not limited to, the following: Callaloo, Essence, Renaissance Noire, Southern Review, Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, The American Voice, The American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, and Creative Nonfiction. CRITICAL RECEPTION Osbey has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work: the Carmargo Foundation Fellowship, Cassis France (2004); the American Book Award (1998); the Louisiana Division of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1994); the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation Maxi-Grant (1993); the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1990); the Associated Writing Program Poetry Award (1984); and the Academy of Poets Loring-Williams Prize (1980), to name a few. While there is a paucity of scholarship on Osbey’s work, some critical attention has been given to her publications in the following: The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris; and Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women by Lynn Keller. In ‘‘Sequences Testifying for ‘Nobodies’: Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah and Brenda Marie Marie Osbey’s Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman—the third chapter of Forms of Expansion—Keller examines both Dove’s and Osbey’s appropriation of the largely Anglo-European epic to present the individual black protagonist’s actions as representative of the group’s experiences with historical and geographical specificity. Similarly, scholar Violet Harrington Bryan explores geography and culture, particularly Osbey’s excavation of New Orleans history and tradition, in ‘‘Evocations of Place and Culture in the Works of Four Contemporary Black Louisiana Writers: Brenda Osbey, Sybil Kein, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Pinkie Gordon Lane.’’ Like Keller, Bryan’s analysis of Osbey is comparative in nature, as well as historical, cultural, and geographical in scope. In his coedited volume The Future of Southern Letters, John Lowe, in ‘‘An Interview with Brenda Marie Osbey,’’ provides an insightful discussion with the author that foregrounds her experiences and illuminates her work. Interviewing Osbey in her New Orleans residence near the French Quarter, Lowe elicits responses that address Osbey’s literary influences; the conditions in which she writes; how and why New Orleans and Louisiana have privileged positions in her work; and various other salient aspects that pertain to Osbey’s life and literature. Osbey continues to publish and discuss New Orleans history and culture, which is particularly pertinent and significant during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Her work, like her long narrative poem, is far-reaching and should not be read solely within an individual local culture, but as representative of, as well as along, a larger social, cultural, and historical continuum.

456

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Brenda Marie Osbey Books All Saints: New and Selected Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Ceremony for Minneconjoux. Lexington: Callaloo Poetry Series, 1983. Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman. Brownsville: Story Line, 1991. In These Houses. Middletown: Wesleyan University, 1988.

Essays ‘‘I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say.’’ Creative Nonfiction 7 (Winter 1996): 33–48. ‘‘I Want to Die in New Orleans.’’ American Voice 38 (Fall 1995): 103–12. ‘‘One More Last Chance: Ritual and the Jazz Funeral’’ Georgia Review 50.1 (Spring 1996): 97–107.

Studies of Brenda Marie Osbey’s Works Bryan, Violet Harrington. ‘‘Evocations of Place and Culture in the Works of Four Contemporary Black Louisiana Writers: Brenda Osbey, Sybil Kein, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Pinkie Gordon Lane.’’ Louisiana Literature Review 4.2 (1987): 49–80. Keller, Lynn. ‘‘Sequences Testifying for ‘Nobodies’: Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah and Brenda Marie Osbey’s Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman.’’ In Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Lowe, John. ‘‘Brenda Marie Osbey.’’ In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 555–56. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Osbey, Brenda Marie. ‘‘An Interview with Brenda Marie Osbey.’’ By John Lowe. In The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe, 93–118. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Trimiko C. Melancon

PAT PARKER (1944–1989)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born to working-class parents in Houston, Texas, poet Pat Parker described herself in her autobiographical poem ‘‘Goat Child’’ as a rebellious tomboy. She declined a college scholarship so she could move to California, where in 1962 she married Ed Bullins, a playwright and Black Panther Party activist. She published her first poem (as P. A. Bullins) in 1963 in Negro Digest. By 1969 she had come out as a lesbian, and she soon became an architect of the lesbian-feminist movement on the west coast. Throughout the 1970s she performed her poetry around the country, often with Judy Grahn, with whom she recorded the album ‘‘Where Would I Be Without You?’’ (1976). Parker died of breast cancer at age forty-five and is survived by her partner and their two daughters. MAJOR WORKS By most accounts, Parker was the first African American woman to publish poetry openly as a lesbian. Her work addresses the intersections among the African American, feminist, gay, and lesbian communities and movements, challenging exclusions and oppression in all of them. ‘‘For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend’’ confronts racism, while ‘‘For the Straight Folks Who Don’t Mind Gays But Wish They Weren’t So BLATANT’’ similarly questions the limits of liberal tolerance. Both ‘‘Brother’’ and ‘‘Womanslaughter’’ address violence against women in the African American community, while ‘‘have you ever tried to hide’’ expresses both the racism in the women’s movement and the tendency of African American women to avoid each other’s gaze in groups of white feminists. ‘‘Where Will You Be?’’ her most frequently anthologized poem, demands that all gays and lesbians come out to fight the homophobia that threatens them. Like her better-known friend Audre Lorde, Parker insisted on bringing all the parts of herself to her various communities, as articulated in her poem ‘‘i have a dream’’; an obvious riff on King’s famous speech, the poem imagines a world in which Parker can safely be a lesbian in many ‘‘liberation fronts.’’ The ‘‘Love Poems’’ section of Movement in Black: The Collected Poetry of Pat Parker, 1961–1978 is similarly political. Parker counts as love poems the expected lyrics (‘‘Let me come to you naked’’), but also poems about homophobia (‘‘My lover is a woman’’) and poems of women’s solidarity (‘‘Gente,’’ ‘‘Womanslaughter’’). Themes of love, oppression, justice, and liberation run throughout her works, from her first chapbook, Child of Myself (1972), to her last collection, Jonestown and Other Madness (1985). Showing her roots in the Black Arts Movement, Parker’s poems are written to be heard. Her signature poem ‘‘Movement in Black’’ was performed in five voices, usually herself and four African American women in her audience. The poem celebrates the achievements of African American women famous and unknown. Rooted in the African

458

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

American oral tradition, Parker uses vernacular language and form rather than what she considered oppressive ‘‘academic’’ diction. CRITICAL RECEPTION Perhaps as a result of her refusal to use academic diction, Parker’s work was largely ignored by critics. Though the Lambda Book Report called Parker one of the ‘‘50 Most Influential People in Gay and Lesbian Literature’’ in the 1980s, most attention came after her death, when tributes were published in feminist and gay publications around the country, as well as in Black Literature Forum. Parker’s poetry was always more favorably reviewed by African American lesbians than by others, to whom it seemed too strident. Reevaluating Parker’s work after her death, Dympna Callaghan read her multiple positioning as a postmodern strategy. Barbara Smith and Pamela Annas both wrote about the importance of naming in Parker’s work; Annas placed her in the company of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Despite the paucity of critical attention, Movement in Black has remained in print on and off since 1978, marking her lasting impact. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Pat Parker Jonestown and Other Madness. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1985. Movement in Black: The Collected Poetry of Pat Parker, 1961–1978. 1978. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1999.

Studies of Pat Parker’s Works Alexander, Ilene. ‘‘Pat Parker.’’ Voices from the Gaps, August 13, 1998, http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ vg/Bios/entries/parker_pat.html (accessed May 30, 2005). Annas, Pamela. ‘‘A Poetry of Survival: Unnaming and Renaming in the Poetry of Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich. Colby Library Quarterly 18.1 (March 1982): 9–25. Callaghan, Dympna. ‘‘Pat Parker: Feminism in Postmodernity.’’ In Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory, edited by Antony Easthope and John O. Thompson, 128–38. New York: Harvester, 1991. Garber, Linda. ‘‘ ‘i have a dream too’: Pat Parker.’’ In Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory, 63–96. New York: Routledge, 2001. Smith, Barbara. ‘‘Naming the Unnameable: The Poetry of Pat Parker.’’ Conditions: Three 1.3 (Spring 1978): 99–103.

Linda Garber

SUZAN-LORI PARKS (1964– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Dramatist, novelist, and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks is one of today’s foremost American theater voices and in 2002 she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, Parks grew up in a military family. Her father was a colonel in the United States Army and her family moved often. Her high school years were spent in Germany where she attended German schools instead of those provided for American military personnel. She began writing short fiction pieces during this period in her second language. Parks attributes this use of a language other than her native tongue as the reason she views language and specifically dialogue as both confrontational and tools of power. She received her bachelor’s degree in English and German in 1985 from Mount Holyoke College and soon began writing for the stage after taking a creative-writing course at the school with James Baldwin. It was Baldwin that proposed she should write for the theater. On hearing the young writer read her work aloud, Baldwin predicted her prominence as a playwright. Parks, by her own admittance, knew little of the theater and found those involved in the field as pretentious and foreign to her. However, within Baldwin’s class she began to see her characters and her stories as created in a dramatic form to be heard. She began to read plays, including those of Ntozake Shange and Adrienne Kennedy, which affected her perception of theatrical structure. She was awakened to the freedom of nontraditional dramatic form and theatrical experiment that would mark her work and also its controversy. Her first play, The Sinner’s Place (1984), received honors at her college, but was refused a production due to its experimental form. She went to London after graduating from Holyoke to study acting and within a year moved to New York City. Her second play, Betting on the Dust Commander (1987) was produced in a New York bar. However, by 1989 she was working for Off-Broadway and won her first Obie Award for the best new play of 1990 for her drama Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. That same year, Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World was completed, and in 1992 her play Devotees in the Garden of Love premiered at the Humana Festival of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. She explored the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in American Play (1994) through a black carnival performer who plays the president in white face for customers who pretend to assassinate him. Perceived as her most Brechtian work, Venus (1996), directed by Richard Foreman, focused upon racism, sexism, and the deconstruction of African American history through the portrayal of Venus Hottentot’s suffering within an early nineteenth-century freak show. The play opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre, then moved to the Public Theatre in New York City and won Parks her second Obie Award for the best OffBroadway play. Her next plays, In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000) explore the Hawthorne novel The Scarlet Letter and implode the meaning of adultery, class systems, poverty, and race within today’s American culture. After opening at Public Theatre, Topdog/Underdog (2001), far more linear than her other work, moved uptown. It had

460

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

been twenty-five years since words written by a black woman had been heard on a Broadway stage. Parks revisited the Abraham Lincoln myth within her Pulitzer Prize– winning play, which reconstructed history through the shadows of the African American journey. Her play, Fucking A, after many revisions, opened at Public Theatre in 2003 to critical acclaim. Although best known for her writings for the stage, Parks wrote her first screenplay in 1996 for Spike Lee’s film Girl 6. She also adapted the novel Gal into a screenplay for Universal and rewrote the screenplay God’s Country for Jodie Foster and Egg Pictures. She authored an original television pilot for Kennedy/Marshall as well as the teleplay for the 2005 film Their Eyes Were Watching God based upon the novel by Zora Neale Hurston and produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. Her most recent screenplay The Great Debaters was cowritten with Robert Eisle, directed by Denzel Washington, and is scheduled for release in 2006–2007. In addition, Parks has written three plays for radio: Locomotive (1991), Third Kingdom (1990), and Pickling (1990). Her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body, published in 2003, takes the narrative form of firstperson monologues, which reveal her stage foundation but also her love of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. A prolific writer, who is always challenging herself and experimenting in new fields, Parks is writing a musical called Hoops for Disney and a new teleplay, adapting Toni Morrison’s Paradise. She has taught playwriting at Yale, lectures at leading universities, and currently is the director of A. S. K. Theatre Projects Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Parks has been the recipient of major grants from the New York Council on the Arts, New York Foundation of the Arts, the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, TCG-Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford, Rockefeller, W. Alton Jones, Lila Wallace and Whiting Foundations. In 2001 she received the MacArthur Foundation Genus Grant and has twice been a National Endowment of the Arts playwriting fellow. In 1989, the New York Times named Suzan-Lori Parks ‘‘The year’s most promising new playwright.’’ She received a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship for playwriting and in 2002 the PEN-Laura Pels Award for excellence in playwriting. Her professionally produced plays are all published either singly or in collections. Two of her collections are The Red Letter Plays and The American Play and Other Works. Parks is also a musician and songwriter. She plays the harmonica, blues guitar, and has studied cello. Her life in music is evident within her plays. After over a decade of residing in Brooklyn, New York, Parks now lives in Venice Beach, California, with her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher. MAJOR WORKS Parks is noted for her in-depth road map preceding many of the texts of her plays. She explains her nontraditional format and its musical sense to her readers often using diagrams and clues to unravel the significance of structure within the play. Using poetic language, nontraditional characters, and extraordinary images, Parks creates a work of dense structure that is often impenetrable for an audience. Her dialogue form is based in a repetition and revision style similar to the 1920 writings of Gertrude Stein. Removing herself from conventional dramatic structure, the playwright uses a jazz aesthetic, which necessitates that repetition always creates revision. Repetition also gives her plays a ritual sense. Her plays choreograph sound and silence creating a drama of language with few stage directions allowing the character and the word to be the primary source of theatricality.

SUZAN-LORI PARKS

461

Parks combines, what many African American playwrights have focused upon, the double consciousness of the black American, W.E.B. DuBois’s sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, with a unique form of ritualistic absurdism. Parks, unlike other African American contemporary writers, dramatizes the process of the self as an object produced by others, but also as an object looking in on itself. She creates a dual reality for her characters who are both subject and object. For example, in The American Play (1994), a reflection of the black identity, American history, and theatre, her focus is upon history, but not a history about race but more about historiography. Similar to Brecht, her concern is not our emotional identification with the character, but with a conscious awakening that there are larger societal dynamics operating and acting upon the masses. Parks’s theater is very different from that of her predecessors. In her own words she describes her play Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom as ‘‘African-American history in the shadow of the photographic image.’’ The play is completely nonnaturalistic and each of its four parts is centered on theatrical metaphors. It possesses the aura of an African American and feminist protest drama, but is delivered through a fusion of Beckett, Ionesco, Fornes, and early Shepard. The program described the play as ‘‘an ensemble of actors move through four allegorical phases of African American history.’’ Her work fascinates theoretical scholars who have claimed that in many ways her plays are more experimental than Adrienne Kennedy’s, Robbie McCauley’s, or even Anna Deavere Smith’s. Parks further explains that a play for her is always ‘‘a blueprint of an event; a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature.’’ She enacts the process of remembering within her plays, but it is not the traditional history that she recalls, but that which has been forgotten or silenced. Parks feels that the theater ‘‘is the perfect place to make history, that is, because so much of African American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out.’’ Time is irrelevant upon her stage. The dead and the living simultaneously inhabit the same light. Progress and time are not linear in her dramas, often different eras and localities are play simultaneously, as she illuminates a world where the now is always haunted by the whisperings of a dead past. Parks begins her histories with what she calls a fabricated absence. As she explains, ‘‘It’s the story that you’re told that goes, once upon a time you weren’t here. You weren’t here and you didn’t do shit. And it’s that, that’s fabricated absence.’’ She simply fills in this hole with a created history for the African American, a history of what might have been, the imaginings of a people long absent, but always standing in the middle of the event. Within The Death Of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990) Parks combines DuBois’s thesis (the sense of self and of race as seen through history) with a Locke form (something similar to ritualistic absurdism). The play is set in a theme park called the Great Hole of History, which reflects the black population in America. It is a history that is in reality an absence, because the national mythology or history has been created by whites. The play retains an African American content and theme within an absurdist structure and a ritualistic pattern of performance. The simplistic plot introduces Gamble, a thirty-eight-year-old forerunner of the civil rights movement who during the progress of the play is captured, enslaved, shipped, bred, raped, auctioned, and lynched by Europeans. The playwright replaces realism with absurdism. She uses an authentic African American nineteenth-century rural dialect and names her characters after stereotypical food: Black Man with Watermelon (Gamble) and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick (Gamble’s wife). The theme of the play is that Europeans stole not only Africa’s people, wealth, and minds, but also its history.

462

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

The use of an African American theme is not what sets Parks apart from other contemporary playwrights, but her structure and treatment of her themes. She divides the play into seven sections, beginning with the overture and followed by six panels. These divisions, though, do not follow in a cause-and-effect linear form but are episodes. The overture introduces the characters, plot, and subplots while the remainder of the play is divided into three duets and three chorus segments. Parks uses the duets for her dramatic power, which is personalized through the main sporadic plot line and then explodes the history by the object describing and experiencing its own death through a description of contemporary capital punishment. The chorus segments are rituals composed of repetitious sounds, puns, silences, and visions. Gone are the victims of the DuBois era. Parks portrays characters who are recreating a history, who observe that they are history and rejoice in their story and voice. In her essay ‘‘Elements of Style,’’ Parks description of her characters states ‘‘they are not characters. To call them so could be an injustice. Instead, she says they are figures, figments, ghosts, roles, lovers maybe, speakers, maybe, shadows, slips, players maybe, maybe someone else’s pulse. For Parks, form is not a passive thing anymore than language but is a physical and powerful means to communicate message and image. Topdog/Underdog (2001) winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama is the story of two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, named so by their father as a joke. Lincoln and Booth’s parents abandoned them when they were teenagers, and they live together in Booth’s apartment. Lincoln, the older of the two brothers, has a job impersonating Abraham Lincoln at the local arcade. Daily he works as the target for one of the shooting games. Booth, on the other hand, is a petty thief who yearns to master the con game Three-Card Monte. Booth remembers the success Lincoln had at the game before he gave it up for a more ‘‘respectable’’ job. The play’s conflict is Booth’s attempt to convince Lincoln to give up his arcade job and return to the hustle. Fucking A, produced in 2003, is stylistically different from her 1999 In the Blood. The ‘‘A’’ on this Hester’s breast does not identify her as an adulterer, but as an abortionist. Both plays center around an abused woman, but Parks’s later play has no historical grounding. It is a parable about revenge composed in an epic, Brechtian style interrupted by dark songs sung by its characters. The playwright creates a world in which good boys are turned into monsters by oppression, and sexuality or fertility must be spoken of through a coded language, which is translated to the audience through over-stage screens. Parks depicts a world of invisible and dangerous power where imprisonment is arbitrary and engulfed with sadistic violence. She places her characters in an environment that breeds its own destruction and depicts her drama through an episodic and ritualistic structure. They are self-aware and simultaneously see themselves through the eyes of the other as they experience themselves as the other. Within this mythic fable, escape is impossible and returns the audience to the ancient tragedies of the Greeks, where bloodletting continues and endless repetition allows us to see a society turning in on itself and eating its own tail. The ghosts of the past haunt the play. Unlike the Hester of In the Blood, who admits her own fault and is created and destroyed by her society, this Hester in Fucking A is also created and destroyed by her world, but she pulls it down with her. Repetition does necessitate change as Parks once again evokes awareness through structure and ritual for her audience to view itself as butcher, hunter, and victim. In an essay titled ‘‘Possession,’’ the playwright states that her task is ‘‘to locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.’’

SUZAN-LORI PARKS

463

CRITICAL RECEPTION Parks has been acclaimed and ridiculed by her critics. Working in a style poetic, postmodern, and her own, her plays have been described by theater historians as discontinuous postmodern ruminations of the black experience in American society (Brockett 572) or as ‘‘the most sophisticated plays in contemporary American theatre’’ (Hay 133). One critic, Abiola Sinclaire wrote of her second Obie-winning play, Venus (1996), ‘‘Venus is not absurdist, it’s insulting and absurd.’’ Many theater producers are uncomfortable because of her racial themes and advant-garde experimental structure that they assume will make their white audiences uncomfortable. A 1993 symposium on her work was abandoned by Theatre magazine because not enough African American critics were willing to participate, citing their objections to her politics. She herself admits that her plays are not for an audience that wants something simple. Her plays deal with the controversial issues of race and sexism and as Erika Munk states, ‘‘lends itself to connections and expansions, as images and wordplay flow along, inviting little riffs of interpretation’’ (Barnett 1443). In 1988, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom opened in a tiny theater in downtown Brooklyn. Usually missed by critics and audiences alike, the play immediately received a buzz as something completely new and visionary. Yale University’s Theatre magazine stated the play contained ‘‘startling stage imagery and a lyrical sense of wordplay that has been scarce in American playwriting for ages . . .’’ (Barnett 1442). A little over ten years later, a New York Times critic reviewed her play In The Blood at Public Theatre and stated, ‘‘You will leave In the Blood feeling pity and terror. And because it is a work of art, you will leave thrilled, even comforted by its mastery’’ (Barnett 1472). Her Pulitzer Prize play, Topdog/Underdog, after opening in New York at Papp’s Public Theatre fulfilled Baldwin’s prophecy for Suzan-Lori Parks as she became one of the preeminent dramatic voices in American theater. August Wilson wrote that she was an original whose fierce intelligence and fearless approach to the craft subverts theatrical convention. Fucking A also received praise from her critics. Many stated that it was her best work and darkest to date, and, yet, controversy and critical conflict continue to surround all of her work. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Suzan-Lori Parks The American Play (1994). In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Betting on the Dust Commander (1987). In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990). In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992). In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Fucking A (2000). In Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001. Getting Mother’s Body: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2003. Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989). In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995.

464

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

In the Blood (1999). In Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001. Pickling (1990). In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Topdog/Underdog (2001). New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002. Venus (1996). New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997.

Studies of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Works Bean, Annemarie, ed. A Sourcebook of African-American Performance. London: Routledge, 1999. Brockett, Oscar G., ed. Plays for the Theatre: A Drama Anthology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1988. Drukman, Steven. ‘‘Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-A-Diddly-Dit-Dit.’’ In Redirections: A Theoretical Practical Guide, edited by Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody, 352–65. London: Routledge, 2002. Elam, Harry J., Jr., and Robert Alexander, eds. The Fire This Time, African American Plays for the 21st Century. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 2004. Elam, Harry J., Jr., and David Krassner, eds. African American Performance and Theatre History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hay, Samuel A. African American Theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ryan, Laura T. ‘‘Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks.’’ Post Standard, December 8, 2005, 82. Savran, David. The Playwright’s Voice. New York: Theatre Communication Group, Inc., 1999. Wainscott, Ronald, and Kathy Fletcher, eds. Plays on Stage. Boston: Pearson, 2006. Wilmer, S. E. ‘‘Restaging the Nation: The Work of Suzan Lori-Parks.’’ Modern Drama 43.3 (Fall 2000), 442–52.

Marla Dean

ANN PETRY (1908–1997)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Novelist and short story writer Ann Petry was born to Peter Clark Lane, Jr. and Bertha Lane on October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Petry was educated in Old Saybrook public schools and earned a PhG degree from the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy in 1931. Upon graduation, she worked in family-owned drugstores until 1938. Petry married George Petry in 1938, and they moved to Harlem soon after their marriage. Upon her move to Harlem, Petry began her writing career. She worked for several journalistic agencies including the Amsterdam News and the People’s Voice. In 1939 her first short story was published. ‘‘Marie of the Cabin Club’’ was published in the Baltimore Afro-American under the pseudonym Arnold Petri. That story was followed by ‘‘On the Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon’’ (1943), ‘‘Olaf and His Girl Friend,’’ (1945) and ‘‘Like a Winding Sheet’’ (1945); all of which were published in the Crisis magazine. Although ‘‘Like a Winding Sheet is the more anthologized of the three stories, it was ‘‘On the Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon’’ which brought Petry’s writing talent to a major publisher’s attention. A Houghton Mifflin editor advised her to apply for the company’s literary fellowship after reading the short story. She did and won the fellowship in 1945. Her submission was the first three chapters of The Street. Houghton Mifflin published the novel in its entirety in 1946. The Street was followed by two more novels, Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1953). In addition, Petry has published four children’s books, The Drugstore Cat (1949), Harriet Tubman: Conductor of the Underground Railroad (1955), Tituba of Salem Village (1964), and Legends of the Saints (1970); two essays, ‘‘Harlem’’ (1949) and ‘‘The Novel as Social Criticism’’ (1950); a collection of short stories, Miss Muriel and Other Short Stories (1971) and five poems. Petry and her husband returned to Old Saybrook in 1947, where she resided until her death in 1997. Their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1949. MAJOR WORKS The Street is Petry’s most well-known work. Set in the 1940s, it is the story of Lutie Johnson, a well-meaning woman who seeks a better life for herself and her son, Bub. Lutie believes the best place for this is New York City. She leaves her job and husband behind in Old Saybrook and moves into a three room apartment in Harlem. Despite their less than suitable living conditions, Lutie continues to believe that she can have a good life in Harlem. Like Benjamin Franklin whose story serves as her inspiration, Lutie believes that as long as she works hard, she will be successful. She fails to realize, however, that she is a single mother who lives in a society that is socially and economically oppressive to African Americans. A chain of events, however, cause Lutie’s ideal life to spiral out of control: the tenement superintendent attempts to rape her, her

466

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

son is arrested, and she kills the local bandleader. Realizing that she will never achieve her goal, she leaves New York and her son. Petry’s remaining two novels examine social issues. Country Place examines class and gender as it is observed and experienced by a white World War II veteran in smalltown New England. Race is the focus of The Narrows; an interracial love affair between a black man and a white woman provide the novel’s plot. Petry’s most popular short stories are ‘‘Like a Winding Sheet’’ and ‘‘Miss Muriel.’’ ‘‘Like a Winding Sheet’’ is the story of an African American male, Johnson, who succumbs to the racial and societal pressures he experiences daily. Johnson’s life has become a meaningless routine over which he has no control. He describes it as ‘‘get up, go to work and come home.’’ Finally, fed up with his situation, he violently lashes out at his wife. The story ends with him repeatedly punching her. Better described as a novella, ‘‘Miss Muriel’’ is told by a 12-year-old narrator, who observes her family and community’s reactions to the courting of her aunt Sophronia by three distinct male suitors: an older white gentleman, a working-class blues musician, and a fellow with effeminate mannerisms. During the course of the story, the narrator learns and reveals much about prejudices based on race, gender, sexual preference, and age. CRITICAL RECEPTION Petry’s work has been well received. In 1946 ‘‘Like a Winding Sheet’’ was included in Martha Fuller’s The Best American Short Stories. Fuller also dedicated the collection to Petry. The Street is the first novel by an African American to sell more than a million copies. Her work, especially The Street, has been described as naturalistic. Petry’s writing style is often compared to naturalist writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. For example, in her essay ‘‘This Strange Communion: Surveillance and Spectatorship in Ann Petry’s The Street,’’ Heather Hicks articulates that Wright and Ellison’s work can be used to illuminate central concerns in The Street, that of the dynamics of spectatorship and surveillance. Petry’s work has also been hailed by the feminist pact. The Street, Country Place and The Narrows are described as feminist texts. In ‘‘Women in the Novels of Ann Petry,’’ Thelma Shinn claims that in both The Narrows and The Street Petry creates women who might be characterized as feminist. Petry’s work continues to be the subject of criticism. Most recently, William Scott argues that ‘‘The Street should be read as a story not just about one woman’s subjugation and degradation by forces beyond her control but as a story about acts of material resistance as well as the various forms that this resistance may take in an apparently hopeless and predetermined environment’’ (93). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Ann Petry Country Place. Madison, NJ: Chatham Bookseller, 1971. The Drugstore Cat. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad. New York: Collins, 1996. Legends of the Saints. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1970. Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Boston: Mariner Books, 1999. The Narrows. Boston: Mariner Books, 1999.

ANN PETRY

467

The Street. Boston: Mariner Books, 1998. Tituba of Salem Village. New York: Harper Trophy, 1991.

Studies of Ann Petry’s Work Barrett, Lindon. ‘‘Further Figures of Violence: The Street in the U.S. Landscape.’’ Blackness and Value: Seeing Double, 94–128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bernard, Emily. ‘‘Raceless Writing and Difference: Ann Petry’s Country Place and the AfricanAmerican Literary Canon.’’ Studies in American Fiction 33.1 (Spring 2005): 87–117. Drake, Kimberly. ‘‘Women on the Go: Blues, Conjure and Other Alternatives to Domesticity in Ann Petry’s The Street and The Narrows. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 54.1 (Spring 1998): 65–90. Gross, Theodore L. ‘‘An Petry: The Novelist as social Critic.’’ Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945, 41–53. Edited by. A. Robert Lee. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980. Henderson, Carol E. ‘‘The Walking Wounded: Rethinking Black Women’s Identity in Ann Petry’s The Street.’’ MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 46.4 (Winter 2000): 849–67. Hicks, Heather. ‘‘This Strange Communion: Surveillance and Spectatorship in Ann Petry’s The Street.’’ African American Review 37.1 (2003): 21–37. Holladay, Hilary. Ann Petry. New York: Twayne, 1996. Lucy, Robin. ‘‘Fables of the Reconstruction: Black Women on the Domestic Front in Ann Petry’s World War II Fiction.’’ CLA Journal 49.1 (Sept 2005): 1–27. McBride, Kecia Driver. ‘‘Fear, Consumption and Desire: Naturalism and Ann Petry’s The Street.’’ Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism, 304–22. Edited by Mary E. Papke. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. McKay, Nellie Y. ‘‘Ann Petry’s The Street and The Narrows: A Study of the Influence of class, race and Gender on Afro-American Women’s Lives.’’ Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s, 127–140. Edited by Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Hornung-Fischer. New York: Berg, 1990. Pryse, Marjorie. ‘‘Pattern Against the Sky: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry’s The Street.’’ Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition, 116–31. Edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Scott, William. ‘‘Material Resistance and the Agency of the Body in Ann Petry’s The Street.’’ American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 78.1 (Mar 2006): 89–116. Washington, Gladys. ‘‘A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry’s Short Fiction.’’ CLA Journal 30 (Sept 1986): 14–29.

Yolanda Williams Page

ANN PLATO (1820?–1860)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE There are few known details about the life of nineteenth-century poet Ann Plato. It is known that Ann Plato was a free African American who lived in Hartford, Connecticut. Ann Plato was also an essayist and schoolteacher who described herself as a pious woman of modest worth. It is also known that Plato was a member of the Talcott Street Congregational Church. Ann Plato held education in high regard and stated that ‘‘a good education is that which prepares us for our future sphere of action’’ (Essays). Plato taught in the Elm Street School, a school designed by the A.M.E. Zion Church in Hartford, Connecticut. The school, housed in the basement area of the church, allowed African American children the possibility of going to school without harassment from white schoolmates. The church also served as a gathering spot for a vibrant African American writing community in Hartford, Connecticut. Currently, Trinity College offers an Ann Plato Fellowship for underrepresented students working on a dissertation. There are no records of Plato’s life after 1845. MAJOR WORK Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Poetry is Plato’s only known publication. The book contains sixteen short essays, four biographical sketches, and twenty poems. Plato’s writing is conceptualized as taking on a motif of romantic escapism. The genre of romantic escapism is especially known for its emphasis on the idea of natural religion—for presenting writings that offer nature as a way of exploring notions of subjectivity via an extended metaphor. Plato’s biographical sketches, for example, focus on the piety of four women (Louisa Sebury, Julia Ann Pell, Eliza Loomis Sherman, and Elizabeth Low) who resided in Hartford and died at an early age. These women, according to Plato, were pious because they all died in the bosom of the Christian faith. The notion of natural religion is further conceptualized in a section of the text titled Lessons from Nature. In this section, Plato states, ‘‘I confessed that I knew naught of knowledge, save that which I learned of the violets that grew, and the lily which appears from the vale, and the vines which clime my father’s bowers. I was ashamed, and felt that I had need to be taught of nature; and I yet wished to turn from the wild scenery around, and look into the moral and intellectual views of mankind’’ (Essays). Other concepts explored in this text include: benevolence, obedience, the death of the Christian, and reflections of life upon death.

ANN PLATO

469

CRITICAL RECEPTION Since there is little information regarding Ann Plato’s life and writing, there is a lack of critical response to her work. Nonetheless, Ann Plato is an important figure in literature, not only because Essays was the first book of essays published by a female writer and the second book published by an African American woman writer, but also because she represents a nineteenth-century female print culture ‘‘that gave primacy to everyday life and human connection, building networks of community—centered on women and children’’ (Gray, xxxii). Rev. James Pennington, in his preface for the text, states: ‘‘[M]y authoress has a taste for poetry. And this is much to the advantage of any one who makes an effort in this difficult part of literature. The opinion has too far prevailed, that the talent for poetry is exclusively the legacy of nature. . . . My authoress has followed the example of Phillis Wheatly, and of Terence, and Capitain, and Francis Williams, her compatriots’’ (quoted in Plato, Essays). Ann Plato is also important to the history of women’s rhetoric. Plato’s work is thought to ‘‘attest to the gulf between rhetoric and reality . . . revealing the limitations of the cultural and social role of rhetorical pedagogy in its failure to address the issue of race (Xavier, 438). BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Ann Plato Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Poetry. N.p.: Hartford, 1841. (Reprint). Essays. Intro Kenny J. Williams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Studies of Ann Plato’s Work Bogin, Ruth, and Bert James Loewenberg. Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Brown, Hallie Q. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Clay, Katherine. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Woman, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Gray, Janet, ed. She Wields a Pen: American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Mossell, N. F. The Work of the Afro-American Woman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Williams, Kenny J. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Poetry. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Xavier, Silvia. ‘‘Engaging George Campbell’s Sympathy in the Rhetoric of Charlotte Forten and Ann Plato, African-American Women of the Antebellum North.’’ Rhetoric Review 24.4 (2005): 438–56.

Tinola N. Mayfield

CONNIE PORTER (1959– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Connie (Rose) Porter was born in New York City and raised in Lackawanna, New York. The eighth of nine children, Porter grew up in a housing project and attended public schools, both of which influence the settings and characterizations of her creative work. Porter earned her undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Albany in 1981 and holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Louisiana State University. She has taught English and creative writing at Milton Academy and Emerson College in Massachusetts and at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. MAJOR WORKS Porter’s debut novel, All-Bright Court (1991), received the New York Times Notable Book award and was selected by the American Library Association as one of the Best Books of 1991. Following the tradition of the African American migration narrative, AllBright Court tells the story of Samuel and Mary Kate Taylor who, in 1959, migrate from the segregated south to the industrial north in search of economic opportunity and social equality. Samuel Taylor secures a job in a steel mill and the Taylors settle in All-Bright Court, a housing project in Lackawanna, New York, where they start a family and develop a strong sense of community with their neighbors. Faced with a variety of hardships, from the faltering steel mills and poor working conditions to social unrest and rioting, Samuel Taylor finds that the mythic dream of economic freedom and social equality ‘‘up north’’ is fragile and often elusive. Conscientiously avoiding sentimentality, Porter portrays both the decay of All-Bright Court and the crumbling dreams of its residents. New York Times reviewer Michiko Katutani praises Porter for ‘‘showing the reader the harsh reality of her characters’ daily lives.’’ Porter is perhaps best known for her series of books for children about the character Addy in the Pleasant Company’s ‘‘American Girls’’ historical series. The series features Addy, a young slave girl who escapes to freedom with her mother during the Civil War. The Addy series has sold more than 3 million copies and was voted Best Children’s Series of 1993 in the annual Publishers Weekly Cuffie Awards. In 1998, Porter returned her attention to the young-adult/adult audience with her novel Imani All Mine. The novel chronicles the tragedies and triumphs of 15-year-old Tasha, a rape victim and single mother of daughter Imani. Vividly told from Tasha’s perspective in a nonlinear fashion and written in dialect, the novel depicts Buffalo’s inner-city violence, frustration, and poverty in what New York Times book reviewer Andrea Higby calls a ‘‘story of great promise shining through monstrous obstacles.’’ Booklist praises Imani All Mine as a ‘‘sad though ultimately hopeful novel, compelling from its very first page.’’

CONNIE PORTER

471

CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Porter has received numerous awards for her creative work, was named a fellow at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and was a regional winner in Granta’s Best Young American Novelist competition, her work has received no critical attention. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Connie Porter Addy Learns a Lesson: A School Story. Illustrated by Melodye Rosales. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 1993. Addy Saves the Day: A Summer Story. Illustrated by Bradford Brown. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 1994. Addy Studies Freedom. Illustrated by Dahl Taylor. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 2002. Addy’s Little Brother. Illustrated by Gabriela Dellosso and Dahl Taylor. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 2000. Addy’s Story Collection. Illustrated by Dahl Taylor, Middleton: Pleasant Company, 2001. Addy’s Surprise: A Christmas Story. Illustrated by Melodye Rosales. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 1993. Addy’s Wedding Quilt. Illustrated by Dahl Taylor. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 2001. All-Bright Court. Boston: Houghton, 1991. Changes for Addy: A Winter Story. Illustrated by Bradford Brown. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 1994. Happy Birthday, Addy!: A Springtime Story. Illustrated by Bradford Brown. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 1993. High Hopes for Addy. Illustrated by John Thompson and Dahl Taylor. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 1999. Imani All Mine. Boston: Houghton, 1998. Meet Addy: An American Girl. Illustrated by Melodye Rosales. Middleton: Pleasant Company, 1993.

Studies of Connie Porter’s Work Anderson, Karen. Rev. of Imani All Mine. Library Journal, February 1, 1999, 122. Biography of Connie Porter. Literature Resource Center site. Thompson Gale, 2002. http:// infotrac.galegroup.com/ (accessed March 4, 2005). Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 70. Detroit: Gale, 1992, 96–101. Kakutani, Michiko. Rev. of All-Bright Court. New York Times, September 10, 1991, C14. Pearl, Nancy. Rev. of All-Bright Court. Library Journal, November 1, 2000, 168. Rev. of Addy Learns a Lesson. Publishers Weekly ( July 5, 1993): 73. Rev. of Imani All Mine, Booklist, April 1, 2000, 1449. Rev. of Imani All Mine. New York Times Book Review, June 18, 2000, 28. Rev. of Imani All Mine. Publishers Weekly (November 23, 1998): 58.

Tamra E. DiBenedetto

ELIZA POTTER (1820–?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Autobiographer Eliza Johnson Potter was born in Cincinnati in 1820. She was raised in New York, but little else is known of her childhood. While in Buffalo, New York, she married and she and her husband moved to Pennsylvania where her two children were born. This pattern of constant movement continued through Potter’s adult life. She traveled to Canada before settling for a time in Cincinnati. A freewoman, Potter was arrested and imprisoned for helping a runaway slave find his way to Canada. After three months she was acquitted as a result of her impassioned speech to the court denying any wrongdoing in ‘‘rescuing the soul of an oppressed fellow-being’’ (Potter 19). Upon her release from prison she found work as a maid and governess and traveled with her employers around Europe. As her employers were ‘‘in high position, and possessed much public influence’’ (Potter 20), she was exposed to high society, once even witnessing the baptism of the Prince of Wales. While in Paris she learned the art of hairdressing, a skill that she used to support herself upon her return to the United States. Although she continued to indulge her ‘‘vagabond disposition’’ by moving from New Orleans to Saratoga to other fashionable resort cities, where her services as a society hairdresser were in high demand, she eventually settled in Cincinnati for at least six years, from 1856 to 1861 (Graber 215). It was during this time that Potter, after years of observing the habits and lifestyles of the wealthy, wrote her book. It caused a great deal of excitement when it was published because most of the people about whom she wrote were recognizable to the members of the society set, despite an attempt at hiding their identities. MAJOR WORK The significance of the year of publication of A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life cannot be overstated. In 1859 the United States was struggling toward Civil War, divided over the slavery issue. Given this context, it is unusual to read a story written by a free, educated African American woman. She was able to decide her own fate rather than follow the usual path of women in those days. Few people, male or female, African American or white, were able to travel as they wished, but Potter did so by supporting herself. Her book is more a critique of white society rather than of the slavery issue. In fact, at times she seems to use her voice to uphold the ‘‘unchanging and steadfast hierarchy among [white] classes’’ (Huot 354), preserving rather than questioning the idea of white superiority. Because of the intimate nature of the relationship between hairdresser and client, Mrs. Potter garnered a wealth of gossipy information about the people in high society, to whom she catered exclusively; it is this that forms the basis of her book. Nevertheless, the fact that she was able to publish her autobiography at all is remarkable. Because of her status as free, and because she does not allow herself to be fettered long by marriage and motherhood, she is able to decide for herself how to use

ELIZA POTTER

473

her voice. She does not fill the traditional role of an African American woman suffering under the oppressions of society. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life caused a stir when it was first published because of its expose´ of white society, it is not generally well known. Despite her avowal that she detested slavery, Potter accords relatively little attention to this matter that was convulsing the United States, and for this her work has been criticized. Despite the book’s lack of political influence, Sue Graber points out that it does shed light upon the context of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and for Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which incorporates the true story of Cincinnati resident Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who murdered her daughter rather than allow her to go back into slavery. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Eliza Potter A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Studies of Eliza Potter’s Work Graber, Susan. ‘‘A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life by Mrs. Eliza Potter: Cincinnati Society in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.’’ Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 25.3 (1967): 215–24. Harlow, Alvin Fay. The Serene Cincinnatians. New York: Dutton, 1950. Huot, Nikolas. ‘‘Eliza C. Potter.’’ In African American Authors, 1745–1945: Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000.

Karen C. Summers

MARY PRINCE (1788–?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Mary Prince was born into slavery in 1788 at Brackish Pond, in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda, which was then a British colony. She grew up in the households of white slave owners such as the Darrels, the Williams, and the Prudens (Ferguson 49). Later, she was sold to Captain and Mrs. I——, at Spanish Point, and then to Mr. D——, in Turks Island. In 1810, she returned to Bermuda and lived there for eight years before she was sold to Mr. and Mrs. John Wood in Antigua where she met and married Daniel James, who was a free black carpenter and cooper. In 1827, she accompanied her owners to England and established connections with the Anti-Slavery Society in Aldermanbury in November 1828. Later, Prince refused to return to Antigua with her owners and was backed by abolitionist lawyer Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. Shortly before her death, she told her story of the brutality and humanity of slavery in Bermuda, Turks Island, Antigua, and England to Susanna Strickland, a guest of the Pringles. In 1831, her story was published in England as a tract for the Anti-Slavery Society, and Mr. Pringle served as her editor and publisher (Paquet 28–29). Moira Ferguson describes Prince as ‘‘The first black British woman to ‘walk away’ from slavery and claim her freedom’’ and hails her narrative as ‘‘the first known recorded autobiography by a freed West Indian slave’’ (48). MAJOR WORK Prince’s narrative, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831), denounces the exploitation, oppression, exile, deprivations, anxieties, and legal barriers against people of African descent in the diaspora. The story participates in the Pan-Africanist intellectual tradition of early black intellectuals by finding within racist contexts the legal, professional, and spiritual support that could help improve the conditions of enslaved Africans. Though it is a personal account, the narrative was relevant to the lives of millions of people of African descent of the diaspora who were direct victims of slavery, racial prejudice, classism, and sexism. Using the power of eyewitness and first-person’s account, Prince describes the painful conditions in which the enslaved Africans in Bermuda and Antigua labored, revealing the immorality and brutality of slavery in the West Indies. In order to protect herself from the violence of her owners, Prince devises tactics of resistance that draw on the strength of her black community in Antigua and Bermuda. Her first strategy is to build a family based on bloodline, gender identity, and racial solidarity. Her bloodline community is recreated when she seeks refuge from her mother after she is beaten by Mr. I——. The narrator tells us that when Prince was chased by her drunken master Captain Mr. I——, her mother hid her in a hole and brought her food at night certainly because of filial bonds but also because Prince was a young black woman whose life was in danger. Like her mother, Prince’s father comes to her rescue.

MARY PRINCE

475

The latter uses a pacifist strategy consisting of an appeal to the conscience of the slave owner. He says: ‘‘Sir, I am sorry that my child should be forced to run away from her owner; but the treatment she has received is enough to break her heart. The sight of the wounds has nearly broke mine’’ (197). This anecdote reflects Prince’s ability to reconstruct her black family that slavery fragmented. Having being separated from her mother, two sisters and two brothers, Prince recreates her lost community on principles based on racial solidarity and gender unity. Her reconnection with her parents is a search for kinship that resonates the primordial importance that slaves in Antiguan society placed on family and community. In his report on the West Indies, Bryan Edwards confides that the African slaves shared a special spirit of solidarity and affection with each other, especially with people from the same countries as theirs (64–76). Through their bonding to protect their daughter from Mr. I——’s tyranny, Prince ’s parents exhibit this African search for unity. CRITICAL RECEPTION In their interpretation of Prince’s narrative, many literary critics have represented the story as an individual’s struggle against slavery and sexism only, overlooking the importance of African survivals and consciousness in the book. In The Maroon Narrative: Caribbean Literature in English Across Boundaries, Ethnicities, and Centuries (2002), Cynthia James writes: ‘‘Although she is of African descent, she [Prince] knows neither Africa nor African parentage, and can cite no African comparisons, traditions, and customs. In her case, the famous freedom narrative opening, ‘I was born,’ records a Caribbean parentage that opens its eyes on slavery as practice and tradition’’ (44). Later, James contends: ‘‘In addition to being cut off at root from her African legacy, Mary Prince knows the dislocated, loveless, and unstable existence of being moved from island to island’’ (45). James’s thesis rejoins that of the Anti-African supporters who claimed that slavery and contact with Europeans were the only forces that shaped the traditions of the West Indian blacks. This Eurocentric perspective minimizes the complex ways in which African cultures survived in the Caribbean in ways that can be analyzed only through reinterpretation of Caribbean cultures themselves. Kamau Brathwaite states that ‘‘much of what we have come to accept as ‘literature’ is work which ignores, or is ignorant of, its African connection and aesthetic.’’ (204). Brathwaite’s rationale suggests the necessity for reinterpreting West Indian literature through new eyes. From this perspective, Prince’s narrative becomes a work in which the author’s individual achievements and resistance are connected with her search for an African Caribbean community that spiritually and ideologically influences her actions. To reflect the multiple sides of Prince’s identity, Sandra Pouchet Paquet argues in ‘‘The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince’’ (1992) that Prince’s struggle in a brutal world must be understood as ‘‘an individual and collective state of mind. It is an ideology of survival and resistance. It is the well of being. It engenders a new literary tradition rooted in the values of a transplanted and transformed African community in the Caribbean’’ (142). While it is transformed to face new situations, the reinvented African community is not devoid of agency and hope because its resistance against oppression is inspired by ageold wisdom preserved in African and Caribbean folktales. This wisdom is apparent in the language, worldview, and search for community that Prince exhibits in her fight against racism in Bermuda, Antigua, and England.

476

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Mary Prince The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831). In The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 183–242. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1987.

Studies of Mary Prince’s Work Berrian, Brenda F. ‘‘Claiming Identity: Caribbean Women Writers in English.’’ Journal of Black Studies 25.2 (December 1994): 200–216. Brathwaite, Kamau. Roots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Edwards, Bryan. ‘‘The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies.’’ In After Africa: Extracts from British Travel Accounts and Journals of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries Concerning the Slaves, Their Manners, and Customs in the British West Indies, edited by Roger D. Abrahams and John F. Szwed, 64–76. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Ferguson, Moira, ed. Nine Black Women: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Writers from the United States, Canada, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. James, Cynthia. The Maroon Narrative: Caribbean Literature in English across Boundaries, Ethnicities, and Centuries. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 28–29. ———. ‘‘The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince.’’ African American Review 26.2 (Spring 1992): 131–46. Woodward, Helena. African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Race and Reason. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Babacar M’Baye

NANCY PRINCE (1799–?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Little is known about the life of Nancy Prince aside from the record of her Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written by Herself (1850). What is known is Prince was born on September 15, 1799, in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Though Prince was born free, her paternal grandparents were brought from Africa as slaves, and Prince identified strongly with their experiences. Prince’s paternal grandfather, Tobias Worton, was also kidnapped from Africa as a slave, though later freed for his role in the Battle of Bunker Hill; her Native American paternal grandmother was also enslaved and later freed. Three months after Prince’s birth, her father, Thomas Gardner, died at sea. Prince’s mother then married Money Vose, a former slave from Africa who had escaped from his slave ship as it docked in America. Vose made his living as a sailor for twelve years but died when impressed into service by a British privateer. Prince’s mother was again a widow, now with eight children to feed. Though Vose was never kind to Prince or her older sister Silvia, his death marked a new era of deprivation for the family. Prince went into service to support her siblings, but soon overworked herself into illness. In 1816, Silvia entered a brothel; Prince and a cane-wielding friend traveled to Boston and removed her by force. In 1819, Prince was baptized by Rev. Thomas Paul, giving her a new religious consciousness that would shape the rest of her life. Increasingly frustrated with caring for her siblings and her mother’s ‘‘spells of insanity,’’ Prince resolved to leave the country, marrying Nero Prince, a much older African American sailor journeying to serve as a guard in the court of the Russian Czar. Prince arrived in St. Petersburg in 1824 where she worked with a missionary society to sell Bibles and aided in the creation of an orphanage. She traveled the area around the city, learning several languages and observing local customs, and witnessed the disastrous flood of 1824 and the 1825 Decembrist Revolt. In 1833, Prince left Russia to return to America, ostensibly on the recommendation of her doctor but possibly as a result of increased government repression. Her husband, who remained at the court, died shortly following her departure. Prince speaks little of the next six years of her life, but there appears to have been a period of personal confusion and financial deprivation. She attempted to found an orphanage in Boston in 1839, but the project failed within three months. Feeling alienated from the American abolition movement due to a lack of roles for women, Prince set sail for Jamaica in 1840, eager to serve as a missionary and teacher to the island’s many newly freed Afro-Jamaican citizens. In this stage of her travels, she encountered many obstacles, including pirates, civil disturbances, greedy locals, and even attempts to sell her into slavery. However, Prince saw these problems not as the fault of the Afro-Jamaican people she lived among, but of the corrupt system of slavery that raised them. Prince returned penniless to New York in 1842 and worked as a seamstress,

478

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

saving to go into business. In 1848 and 1849 she suffered serious health problems, leading her to write her 1850 Life and Travels in hopes of supporting herself. Prince attended the Fifth National Women’s Rights Convention in Philadelphia in 1854, and published a third edition of Life and Travels in 1856. No record exists of her life beyond this point, including of when or how she died. MAJOR WORK Prince published her The West Indies: Being a Description of the Islands, Progress of Christianity, Education, and Liberty among the Colored Population Generally while still working in Jamaica in 1841. Targeted to a New England audience, the sixteen-page tract describes the geography, fauna, and political history of the islands. Prince pays particular attention to criticizing imperialism in the West Indies and the institution of slavery, comparing it to England’s unjust treatment of the Irish. However, Prince is primarily remembered for her 1850 Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written by Herself. Half travelogue, half spiritual autobiography, Life and Travels is one of the few autobiographical accounts of a free African American woman in the pre-war north. In her brief preface, Prince notes that she writes not from ‘‘a vain desire to appear before the public,’’ but in an attempt to ease her poverty. Following the lead of Jarena Lee, Prince published her work at her own expense, becoming one of the first African American self-published authors. The book sold successfully enough to go through three editions in her lifetime (1850, 1853, and 1856). Prince opens the book with an evocation of her ancestors, including a dramatic recounting of stepfather Money Vose’s escape from a slave ship. Following Vose’s death, Prince describes her family’s destitution and her own efforts to care for her siblings, and later her mother as well. When Prince finally makes up her mind to leave the ‘‘anxiety and toil’’ of the United States behind, she marries Mr. Prince and departs for Russia. Prince gives surprisingly little detail about her husband or her life with him, omitting even his first name, his age, his history, and the year and cause of his death. Instead, the Russian portion of her narrative focuses on two key events, the terrible St. Petersburg flood of 1824 and the 1825 Decembrist Revolution. In the first, Prince tells of her own dangerous experiences with the flooding and later with a sinkhole, and her efforts to aid survivors. In the second, though Prince implies that she witnessed some of the fighting personally, her narrative takes a broader view of the event, summarizing the action across the city and placing it in a historical context. She also describes Russian holidays and burial rituals with an objectivity rarely found in the travelogues of her day. The second half of the text deals with Prince’s experiences in Jamaica, especially her frustrations in her missionary work. Though she unblinkingly details the moral ‘‘corruption’’ of the Afro-Jamaicans that she meets, Prince observes repeatedly that she feels this corruption to be a result of the slave system, rather than inherent to the race. Prince also includes the text of her 1841 pamphlet on the West Indies, adding a subsection on miscegenation, mulattoes, and the Maroon people. On Prince’s return voyage to America, the captain attempts to trick her ashore in both Florida and Texas in order to sell her into slavery, but fails due to Prince’s vigilance. The narrative closes with the suggestion that ‘‘the world’s pilgrimage’’ is the last of Prince’s many voyages, and a reaffirmation of the trust in God that has guided her actions throughout her life.

NANCY PRINCE

479

CRITICAL RECEPTION Long a neglected text, Life and Travels received little critical attention until the mid1980s. Recent critics have focused on the ways in which Prince’s status as a free African American woman shaped her narrative, particularly in her relationship to America as a homeland. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s model of the ‘‘black diaspora,’’ Sandra Gunning analyzes Prince’s role as ‘‘the quintessential black diaspora subject,’’ closely tied to an African genealogy and dissatisfied with her American identity. In discussing how Prince subverts the conventions of travelogue and spiritual autobiography, Cheryl Fish similarly attributes this subversion to Prince’s outsider status. Given Prince’s reticence to discuss her personal life, several critics have expressed interest in what she chose to leave out of her text. Ronald Walters examines how Prince evades discussion of racial pride, her marriage, and her childlessness, while Gunning and Darcy Zabel both speculate as to how the prolonged silences in the narrative may reflect abolitionist schisms that Prince could not openly discuss. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Nancy Prince A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written by Herself. Boston: Author, 1850. The West Indies: Being a Description of the Islands, Progress of Christianity, Education, and Liberty among the Colored Population Generally. Boston: Dow & Jackson, 1841.

Studies of Nancy Prince’s Works Fish, Cheryl. ‘‘Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the Antebellum Americas.’’ Women’s Studies 26 (1997): 475–95. Foster, Frances Smith. ‘‘Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.’’ In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Gunning, Sandra. ‘‘Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home, and Diasporic (Mis)Indentification.’’ American Quarterly 53.1 (2001): 32–69. Peterson, Carla L. ‘‘Doers of the Word’’: African-American Women Speakers & Writers in the North (1830–1880). New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers 1746–1933. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Walters, Ronald G. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In A Black Woman’s Odyssey through Russia and Jamaica: the Narrative of Nancy Prince. New York: M. Weiner, 1989. Zabel, Darcy A. ‘‘Prince, Nancy.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Women Prose Writers 1820–1870, vol. 239, edited by Amy E. Hudock et al. Detroit: Gale, 2001.

Dave Yost

AISHAH RAHMAN (1939– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Dramatist Aishah Rahman was born Virginia Hughes, but changed her name after a religious conversion to Islam. Rahman was raised in Harlem and became a foster child in her early youth. Her coming-of-age experiences and cultural influences during this time became the subject of her 2001 book, Chewed Water. Educated at Howard University, she graduated in 1968 with a degree in Political Science, but began writing as a child. This love for writing eventually led her to Goddard College where she received her M.A. in Playwriting and Dramatic Writing in 1970. Always interested in nurturing new dramatic voices, Rahman has worked at New Federal Theater as the Director of Playwriting. She is the founder/editor of NuMuse, a journal of new dramatic writings and essays published by Brown University where she has been a professor since 1992. Rahman has also taught at Nassau Community College and Amherst College, and has been a guest artist at several other colleges and universities. Her plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of the Arts, the Chelsea Theater in Brooklyn, Crossroads Theatre in New Jersey, the New York Shakespeare Festival, and several other regional theaters and colleges and universities. Her play Transcendental Blues was nominated for an AUDELCO Award. In 1988 she received the Doris Abramson playwriting Award for The Mojo and the Sayso. She also received a Rockefeller Fellowship in American Playwriting award and a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1988. MAJOR WORKS A prolific writer, Rahman is author of several plays and is widely anthologized and produced. In Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land while a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage, Rahman explores the dilemma faced by young teens who find themselves pregnant, unmarried, and living together in a home for unwed mothers. The young women must decide whether or not to give up their babies, whether to accept the hard realities of being a black woman, or to dream of being rescued and redeemed by illusive boyfriends. The Mojo and the Sayso, first produced by Crossroads Theatre and directed by George Ferencz, addresses the killing of a child and the response of the family and authorities. If Only We Knew is a one act that mirrors the Amadou Diallo killing by the New York police department. Chewed Water is a book that is autobiographical in nature and chronicles her life as a foster child and her life growing up in Harlem. It is a tale of abuse and triumph. Plays by Aishah Rahman is an anthology that features Only in America, The Mojo and the Sayso, and Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land while a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage. Other plays include The Lady and the Tramp and The Tale of Madame Zora. Many of her plays incorporate the use of music; rather than simply a background device, the music in her plays often echoes the rhythms of her character’s speech. Music

AISHAH RAHMAN

481

is central to the advancement of the story line, and becomes a metaphor for the struggle in which the characters are engaged. In the anthology, Moon Marked & Touched by Sun, Rahman states, ‘‘The jazz aesthetic in drama expresses multiple ideas and experiences through language, visual art and spirituality simultaneously.’’ CRITICAL RECEPTION Although critical commentary of Rahman’s work is sparse, what has been written about it is generally positive. About Chewed Water Azande Mangeango writes, ‘‘The vivid characterization of Harlem and the epic confrontations between foster mother and foster child give this memoir its drive and power. Whenever Harlem is foregrounded, Chewed Water explodes into magic. In large part, Harlem is the sweetener in this bittersweet tale. . . . In rich, lyrical language written in the cadence of jazz and blues, the pervasive music of her Harlem Childhood, this uniquely written memoir assumes its own shape. It is a mixed media event, narrative, dramatic and cinematic. . . . Aishah Rahman has written a masterful memoir that fills a void of women’s voices in the literature of mid-twentieth century Harlem.’’ According to Margaret Wilkerson, Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land while a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage is an underground classic. It ‘‘reaches beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teen-age mothers. . . .’’ Joyce Meier writes in her critical essay, ‘‘The effect of all these voices is of an antiphonal interplay . . . that has its roots on jazz and in the call-and-response form of traditional African and antebellum music. . . . Rahman’s five pregnant women (and their nurse) serve as a chorus, a response to the periodical ‘call’ of Parker’s impassioned musical and vocal solos which are interspersed throughout the play.’’ Sydne Mahone critiques the importance of The Mojo and the Sayso, by stating ‘‘Aishah Rahman uses the domestic drama as a launching pad for a highly imaginative flight into new dimensions of style. Her self-defined jazz aesthetic creates a dynamic of several genres including allegory, farce satire and myth, all of which culminate in this reinvention of the miracle play.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Aishah Rahman Chewed Water, a memoir. New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2001. Plays by Aishah Rahman. New York: Broadway Press, 1997. Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land while a Bird Cries in a Gilded Cage. New York: Drama Jazz House, 1984.

Studies of Aishah Rahman’s Works ‘‘Aishah Rahman,’’ Women of Color, Women of Words. www.scils.rutgers.edu (accessed June 30, 2006). Mahone, Sydne, ed. Moon Marked & Touched by Sun. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994.

482

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Mangeango, Azande. ‘‘Broken Ancestry: A Review of Chewed Water.’’ Black Renaissance/ Renaissance Noire (2002). http://www.highbeam.com (accessed September 2005). Maynard, Suzanne. ‘‘Aishah Rahman. Interview.’’ www.brown.edu. Meier, Joyce. ‘‘The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women’s Theater.’’ MELUS 25.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2000): 117–39. Wilkerson, Margaret, ed. Nine Plays by Black Women. New York: Signet Mentor Press, 1986.

Joan McCarty

ALICE RANDALL (1959– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Presently the only African American woman ever to write a number-one country song, Alice Randall is also a novelist and screenwriter. She was born in Detroit, Michigan, grew up in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Harvard in 1981. Following an emerging trend for children and grandchildren of the Great Migration, she moved to the south, to Nashville, Tennessee, to become a country songwriter. The more than twenty songs she has had recorded include a song about lynching (‘‘The Ballad of Sally Anne’’) and a song about honoring both the Confederate dead and the slave dead (‘‘I’ll Cry for Yours, Will You Cry for Mine?’’). As a screenwriter she has worked on adaptations of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Parting the Waters, and Brer Rabbit. Randall has published two novels, The Wind Done Gone (2001) and Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (2004). For The Wind Done Gone, she was awarded the Free Spirit Award in 2001 and the Literature Award of Excellence by the Memphis Black Writers Conference in 2002, and she was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in 2002. MAJOR WORKS The Wind Done Gone (2001) was the subject of a failed lawsuit by Margaret Mitchell’s estate to prevent publication based on its references to Mitchell’s 1939 novel Gone With the Wind. After an injunction followed by an appeal with an impressive show of support from most of the leading figures in Southern Letters, The Wind Done Gone was released to fairly positive reviews. Whether regarded as a parody of Gone With the Wind or as something more, The Wind Done Gone includes renamed versions of characters and settings from Mitchell’s book. It is presented in the form of a diary written by Cynara, Rhett Butler’s (‘‘RB’s’’) mistress and eventual wife, who is the daughter of a long-term liaison between Gerald O’Hara (‘‘Planter’’) and Mammy, and as such is Scarlett O’Hara’s (‘‘Other’s’’) half-sister. Rejected by her mother and sold in her early teens, Cynara still sees the plantation (‘‘Tata’’) as home. As she becomes increasingly literate, self-aware, and self-assertive, Cynara leaves RB, whom she renames ‘‘Debt Chauffeur,’’ to associate with the emerging African American political structure in Washington, where she provides a surrogate child for a congressman and his wife. In an interview, Randall says that she and members of her immediate family circle, who have connections to both the African American elite and to white southern blue blood families, refer to themselves as ‘‘not-so-tragic mulattos,’’ and she acknowledges that they are interested in exploring new roles, relationships, and histories in the context of a south that is not divided along racial lines.

484

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Bettye Williams analyzes the novel as a parody of Gone With the Wind, ‘‘a revisionist version of American history which inverts and subverts traditional assumptions about issues of African American maleness and womanhood’’ (323), and points out that Cynara’s assertive self possession allows her to avoid censure, recrimination, and punishment, either for her own interracial dalliances or for her mulatto status. In this way, she avoids the ‘‘tragic mulatto’’ stereotype that has haunted American depictions of biracial characters. Nicole Argall’s reading of The Wind Done Gone as the product of an ‘‘Africana womanist’’ perspective is somewhat more problematic, first because she wants to present Cyana as an ‘‘antihero,’’ and second because she applies only four of the eighteen defining qualities of this perspective, acknowledging that the others do not fit as well. That being said, Argall does provide some interesting insights into the novel, especially in the way that she reads Cynara’s self-fashioning through writing in the context of an emerging understanding of the tripartite (raced, classed, gendered) structure of the oppression of African American women in American society. Randall’s second novel is Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (2004). It concerns a culture conflict between narrator/protagonist Windsor Armstrong, a professor of Russian literature, and her son Pushkin X, a professional football player who is planning to marry a white Russian stripper. A discursive, rambling novel addressed in part to Pushkin and in part to a larger audience, it allows Armstrong to examine her past (Motown to Harvard) and influences, both literary and family, in order to come to terms with her son’s choices. Most reviews have been mixed, pointing to the novel’s diffuse structure and the difficulty of liking the abrasive, snotty central character’s voice. A rap version of a Pushkin story offered by Armstrong to her son as a peace offering also takes some hits from the reviewers. In her New York Times review, Julie Salamon praises Randall’s publicity people for bringing the author out to selected book groups rather than relying on reviewers. Like The Wind Done Gone but without its controversial court case, the hope is that this book will find its own audience in the public. This makes sense, because this is a novel where postmodern plotting and abundant literary references combine with family melodrama and Randall’s sure eye for racial and social contradictions, so that it finds its location somewhere between Windsor Armstrong’s world of high culture and Pushkin X’s world of popular entertainment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Alice Randall Pushkin and the Queen of Spades. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. The Wind Done Gone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Studies of Alice Randall’s Works Argall, Nicole. ‘‘A Rib from My Chest: Cynara’s Journey as an Africana Womanist.’’ CLA Journal 47.2 (December 2003): 231–43.

ALICE RANDALL

485

Salamon, Julie. ‘‘Provocatuer Returns with a New Firebomb.’’ New York Times, March 17, 2004, 9. Williams, Bettye. ‘‘Glimpsing Parody, Language and Post-Reconstruction Themes in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. CLA Journal 47.3 (March 2004): 310–25.

Louis H. Palmer, III

HENRIETTA CORDELIA RAY (1849–1916)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet H. Cordelia Ray was born in 1849 to a prominent and progressive New York City family. Like her four older siblings, she graduated from college, and, like her beloved sister Florence, became a teacher, eventually earning an M.A. in pedagogy from the University of the City of New York (now known as New York University). She was proficient in French, German, Latin, and Greek, and after three decades of teaching in the New York City public school system, Cordelia moved out to Woodside, Long Island, with Florence, where she taught foreign languages as well as English literature, mathematics, and music in their home. She was very close to her sister, living with her until Florence died, and she generally led a quiet and rather private life. MAJOR WORKS H. Cordelia Ray was first publicly recognized for her poem ‘‘Lincoln,’’ commissioned for the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, D.C., in 1876. The poem, however, did not reach press until 1893, the same year that her Sonnets came out. Meanwhile, Cordelia and Florence collaborated on a short biographical work of their father, Sketch of the Life of the Reverend Charles B. Ray, published in 1887. Cordelia contributed poems to periodicals, such as the AME Church Review, throughout her career. Finally, she published her larger collection, titled Poems, in 1910. The themes of her poetry range from morally austere yet optimistic meditations on duty and the human condition, to tributes to specific abolitionists, to passionate treatments of romantic love. CRITICAL RECEPTION In her day, Ray was generally praised for her refined, erudite style and diverse subject range. She has since, however, been faulted for this by critics who think that it signals too close an identification with white literary traditions, or that her focus might have been too much on form and not enough on creative expression. Nonetheless, Ray has received increasing positive attention from critics and anthologists in recent years, and thus more acceptance and celebration within the literary community. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Henrietta Cordelia Ray ‘‘Charles Lamb.’’ AME Review 8 (1891): 1–9. Lincoln. Written for the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, April 14, 1876. New York: J. J. Little, 1893. Poems. New York: Grafton Press, 1910.

HENRIETTA CORDELIA RAY

487

Sketch of the Life of the Reverend Charles B. Ray. With Florence T. Ray. New York: J. J. Little, 1887. Sonnets. New York: J. J. Little, 1893.

Studies of Henrietta Cordelia Ray’s Works Banks, Marva Osborne. ‘‘Henrietta Cordelia Ray.’’ In African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 366–70. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Blount, Marcellus. ‘‘Caged Birds: Race and Gender in the Sonnet.’’ In Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, edited by Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden, 225– 38. New York: Routledge, 1990. Fauset, Jessie Redmon. ‘‘What to Read.’’ Rev. of Poems, by Henrietta Cordelia Ray. Crisis 3–4 (1912): 183. Flint, Allen. ‘‘Black Response to Colonel Shaw.’’ Phylon 45.3 (1984): 210–19. Frazier, S. Elizabeth. ‘‘Some Afro-American Women of Mark.’’ A.M.E. Church Review 8 (1892): 373–86. Jackson, Blyden. A History of Afro-American Literature, vol. 1. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Kapai, Leela. ‘‘Henrietta Cordelia Ray.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 50, edited by Trudier Harris, 233–37. New York: The Gale Group, 1986. Kerlin, Robert T. Negro Poets and Their Poems. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1947. Lyons, Maritcha R. ‘‘Henrietta Cordelia Ray.’’ In Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, edited by Hallie Quinn Brown. Xenia, Ohio: Aldine, 1926. Moorehead, Elizabeth A. ‘‘Henrietta Cordelia Ray.’’ In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Denise D. Knight and Emmanuel S. Nelson, 343–46. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. ‘‘Ray, H(enrietta) Cordelia.’’ In Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors, edited by Linda Metzger et al. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1989. Robinson, William Henry, Jr. Early Black American Poets. Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown, 1969, 138–44. Sampson, Henry T. Blacks in Black and White. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977. Sanders, Kimberly Wallace. ‘‘Henrietta Cordelia Ray.’’ In Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews et al., 261–62. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Sherman, Joan R., ed. African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992, 265–81. ———, ed. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Collected Black Women’s Poetry, vol. 3. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, xxix–xxxiv. ———. Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, 129–35. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers (1746–1933). Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Smith, Jessie Carney, ed. Notable Black Women. New York: Gale Research Group, 1992. Walker, Cheryl, ed. American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992, 352–63. Walters, Tracey Lorraine. ‘‘Reclaiming the Classics: The Emancipatory Strategy of Selected African American Women Poets: Phillis Wheatley, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and Gwendolyn Brooks.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, Howard University, 1999. Ward, Jerry W., Jr., ed. ‘‘Henrietta Cordelia Ray.’’ In Trouble the Water: 250 Years of AfricanAmerican Poetry. New York: Penguin, 1997, 55.

Megan K. Ahern

JEWELL PARKER RHODES (?– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A writer with both a critical eye and a creative talent, Rhodes’s publishing career encompasses several genres, including creative writing, literary criticism, and pedagogical work. As a child, she was an avid reader and writer of stories, yet received little encouragement to develop her artistic talent. Her parents’divorce and her subsequent move to live with her grandmother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, later impacted the substance of her writing as themes of family legacy, rejection, and racial relationships, as well as male and female relationships, often surface in her novels. In college, Rhodes’s interest in literature began to blossom. She attended Carnegie-Mellon and received a B.A. in Drama Criticism, an M.A. in English, and a Doctor of Arts in English for Creative Writing. Rhodes explains that her writing, and particularly her first novel, became the passage for helping her discover the meaning of being African American, female, and particularly, a mother. She worked on her first manuscript, Voodoo Dreams, initially titled Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen for years, finally finishing in 1983. No publisher showed interest in printing a book about an African American woman, claiming the story was not universal enough, a situation that led to Rhodes being overlooked for tenure in her university teaching position and her subsequent dismissal. During this time, she also survived a number of other personal challenges, including divorce, remarriage, and her grandmother’s death, events that played prominently into her search for self and her subsequent motivation to succeed as an African American female author. Dealing with pain and discouragement, Rhodes ceased writing for a period of over four years. For another three years, after finding the inner strength to return to her writing, she patiently continued to work on her manuscript and to search for a publisher. Rhodes relates this time in her life to the pain her protagonists often must endure in order to self-actualize. Voodoo Dreams was finally published in 1993 by St. Martin’s Press, and has been followed by six other books, including one soon to be released, Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery. A prolific author, Rhodes writes short fictions as well as novels, and these stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. The Institute for the Study of the Arts at Arizona State University also staged a reading of Voodoo Dreams as a play in 2001. Additionally, her scholarly and nonfiction articles appear in various academic journals and in many composition texts. She was selected as the Creative Writing Delegate for the Modern Language Association and has served as a professor and the former Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Arizona State University, where she has won numerous teaching awards. She devotes herself to working with her students, assisting them creatively and professionally, presently serving as the Artistic Director at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Frequently traveling to speak at literary events and to read on book tours, Rhodes spends her downtime in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband Brad and her two children.

JEWELL PARKER RHODES

489

MAJOR WORKS In Voodoo Dreams, Rhodes pens the tale of Marie Laveau, a voodooienne of French, Indian, and African ancestry in New Orleans. Reminiscent of Gayl Jones for its attention to family legacy and Toni Cade Bambara’s circuitous narrative style, Rhodes details Marie’s motherless childhood as she lives with her grandmother, a former voodoo queen herself. In the bayou country of Louisiana, as Marie matures, she begins to receive visions of the past and her mother, as well as visions of the future, seeing her own daughter through her voodoo heritage. Moving to a village in which free African Americans reside outside New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, Marie yearns to experience city life for herself. She struggles with her Christian grandmother’s plans for her to marry at sixteen, and laments the power men like Jacques and John, her mother’s former lover, hold over her life. Jacques saves her from a white slave owner’s son, and then demands that she love him in return. Her grandmother’s complicity in this plot hurts Marie, but she aims to prevent Marie from her own mother’s mistakes with John, an abusive voodoo businessman who tricks people with his fake version of voodoo in order to make money. In her quest to discover not only her mother but love and acceptance as well, Marie discovers that her mother has died, and that she never loved her—only her grandmother’s love kept her alive. Yet, by subscribing to the power of voodoo and aligning herself with John, Marie chooses a life that limits her future choices. She abandons her marriage to Jacques, her grandmother, and her Christian religion in order to become a voodoo queen. She kills a man attempting to rape her because of her skin color, and ends up in prison, an act that starts a race riot in the city between the Christians and the voodoo practitioners. Marie is freed because she is feared. Pregnant and in an abusive relationship with John, Marie thrives on the power that her popularity gives her. Strangers worship Marie for her powers, cutting her garments for a blessing; yet, she is powerless in her personal life, controlled by John. Through Marie’s tragic relationships with those around her, and the strength she discovers when she has her own child, the fourth Marie, she grows into a strong woman, strong enough to break the legacy of abuse that haunts her. To leave John and to survive, she must murder him, tricking him into holding a snake during one of her conjuring sessions as voodooeinne. Years later, Marie’s tale ends on her deathbed as her faithful friend Louis pens her story into his diary. With New Orleans as a slave city, the horrors of slavery are detailed in this novel as new slaves are unloaded, caged, whipped, and beaten, and free African Americans mistreated. The racial differences in the city figure prominently in the novel, as people are tiered according to the mixture of white and African in their blood, where a drop of African blood denigrates whites, African Americans and mulattos to a lower social status. This novel painfully explores the legacy of slavery, the intricacies of voodoo, mother and daughter relationships, and the delicate interconnectivity between Christianity and voodoo, while detailing Marie’s own search for self, a quest she finally achieves. Magic City is based on historical events in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. Parker Rhodes fictionalizes the story of several days in the life of Joe Samuels and Mary Keane, two people whose lives intersect in downtown Tulsa. Joe, from Deep Greenwood, known as the ‘‘Black Wall Street,’’ is a banker’s son and a shoe shiner in downtown Tulsa who practices magic religiously, performing escapist routines after his idol, Houdini. With his older brother Henry dead from the war, Joe feels destined for more in life, yet faces his parents’ shame and scorn at his lack of career motivation.

490

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

The novel then switches narrative to Mary’s story, where white, poor, and motherless, raised by an abusive father and a racist brother left handicapped by the war, she already dreams of escaping her fate. When her father promises her hand in marriage to Dell, the farmhand, and he subsequently rapes her, Mary’s world begins to shatter. Working as an elevator woman in the same skyscraper as Joe, their worlds collide when Joe mistakenly takes the elevator intended for whites only. Mary’s distress at her earlier rape causes her to scream at the sight of Joe’s handcuffs that he regularly uses for his escapist routines, and she faints. Joe, immediately scared and worried about his own family problems, runs back to Deep Greenwood. Mary’s hysteria and her bruises and other markings from her earlier rape lead the whites in the downtown tower to assume that she was assaulted by Joe, a presumption that sparks a mob in Tulsa, a hot bed for racial hostilities and a city with a large Klan population. Racial tensions figure prominently at a time when all African Americans are presumed guilty and lynched immediately with no defense. Joe’s subsequent arrests, beatings, and escapes eventually lead him back to Deep Greenwood, bent on fighting the mob that he knows will come. Mary’s attempts at clearing Joe of the charges fail miserably in light of the Klan’s power to murder before Joe’s innocence can be proven. Through the help of her new friend Allen, Mary heads to Deep Greenwood, befriending Joe’s sister, Hildy, in her attempt to clear Joe’s name. Subsequent inflammatory and false newspaper reports, historically documented, as well as the hatred of those involved in the case, flare up racial tensions to the point that national guardsmen drop dynamite on Deep Greenwood, incinerating the entire area and many inhabitants. The novel explores at length Joe’s relationship with his father, Douglass, a founding member of Deep Greenwood and one of its prominent citizens. He dies trying to protect his vault at the bank, claiming that white men only respect money and property. Joe and Mary must both decide after everything that has happened whether to leave Tulsa or stay and face the damage from the spark of racial hatred that flared into a fire beyond their control. Rhodes explores family ties, the southern history of racism, abuse, and the power of friendship in this attempt to see beyond the headlines of the newspapers and into the lives of real people. In Douglass’ Women, Rhodes writes an historical fictional novel about abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the women who love him—both a wife and a mistress. The novel begins in early nineteenth-century Maryland, with the tale of Anna Murray Douglass, and her recounting of the first time she met Douglass, then a slave. An uneducated southern woman making a living through domestic service, Anna is portrayed, nevertheless, as an extremely sensitive and caring individual who bore Douglass’s children while enduring a less than fulfilling relationship with him for many years. The novel details their courtship and marriage as Anna recalls the memories as an old woman on her deathbed. Her voice, filled with hope and often regret for the changes in their relationship over the years, recounts Douglass’s journey to freedom. Anna herself gives Douglass the money to escape, and assists him as he creates a new life in New York, transforming into the renowned speaker and abolitionist. The novel continues with Ottilie Assing’s diary, a German woman who immigrates to America and meets Douglass through her involvement in the Anti-Slavery society. An artist and writer, Ottilie served as Douglass’s mistress for over twenty years. The reader sees Anna, abandoned by Douglass, alone birthing and raising her children while he travels, speaking out against slavery. In addition, the complications in their relationship because of Anna’s uneducated background, and her ignorance at understanding the role

JEWELL PARKER RHODES

491

Douglass plays in the abolitionist movement are examined. Anna’s strength in raising her children and performing domestic service to keep food on the table speaks to her portrayal as a woman with a larger purpose in life. It is Anna who encourages Douglass to write his story down, the story that will cement his position in the abolitionist movement and in history. Douglass disappears sometimes for as long as three years at a time, leaving Anna and his children to fend for themselves until his freedom is bought. The intricacies of Douglass’s humanity are shown through his relationship with both women. Ottilie, his mistress, depends on Douglass for happiness, whereas Anna is portrayed as strong and independent. Both women confront each other at times, knowing the relationships that exist between them and ‘‘Freddy,’’ as Anna calls him. For example, Rhodes fictionalizes the moment when Anna discovers their relationship, pregnant with Douglass’s third child, and how Ottilie stakes her claim to their oldest child, Rosetta, as she resembles her father in mind and spirit. With no children of her own, Ottilie leads a lonely life, and Anna remains busy with her family of five. The novel continues to track the emotional aspect of their relationships with each other and Douglass’s family life in a compelling and fascinating look into the love triangle, up until Anna’s death and Ottilie’s suicide at learning of Douglass’s remarriage eighteen months later.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Widely published, Rhodes regularly receives kudos from critics who describe her work as ‘‘betwitching,’’ with a ‘‘deft narrative style.’’ Houston A. Baker, Jr., says that Rhodes writes with a flair for drama. Her most recent novel, Douglass’ Women, described as ‘‘passionate’’ and ‘‘captivating,’’ has achieved greatest acclaim by winning the 2003 American Book Award, the 2003 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award for Literary Excellence, the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and by being recognized as a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award in Fiction and for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. She has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Rhodes has also been the recipient of the Yaddo Creative Writing Fellowship and the National Endowment of the Arts Award in Fiction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Jewell Parker Rhodes The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Non-Fiction. New York: Broadway, 2001. Douglass’ Women. New York: Atria, 2002. ‘‘Enough Rides.’’ Callaloo 14.1 (1991): 12–19. ‘‘Enough Rides.’’ In Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, edited by Charles Rowell and John Edgar Wideman. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. ‘‘Evan.’’ In Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Writing about Their Sons, edited by Patricia Stevens. New York: Touchstone, 1999. ‘‘Foreword.’’ In Proverbs for the People, edited by Tracy Price-Thompson and TaRessa Stovall, ix. New York: Kensington, 2003. Free within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors. New York: Main Street, 1999. ‘‘The Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny and the Feminist Utopia.’’ In Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, edited by Marleen Barr and Nicholas D. Smith, 108–20. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983.

492

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

‘‘Long Distances.’’ In Children of the Night: Best Short Stories by Black Writers, edited by Gloria Naylor, 172–79. Canada: Little Brown, 1995. Magic City. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. ‘‘Meeting Frederick.’’ In Gumbo: An Anthology of African American Writing, edited by Marita Golden and E. Lynn Harris, 458–63. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. ‘‘Mixed Blood Stew.’’ Creative Nonfiction 19 (2002). www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/ back.htm (accessed September 2006). Voodoo Dreams: A Novel of Marie Laveau. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993.

Studies of Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Works Baker, Houston A., Jr. Rev. of Voodoo Dreams: A Novel of Marie Laveau, by Jewell Parker Rhodes. African American Review 29 (1995): 157–60. Quashie, Kevin E. ‘‘Interview. Mining Magic, Mining Dreams: A Conversation with Jewell Parker Rhodes.’’ Callaloo 20.2 (1997): 431–40. Rhodes, Barbara C., and Allen Ramsay. ‘‘An Interview with Jewell Parker Rhodes.’’ African American Review 29 (1995): 593–603.

Tatia Jacobson Jordan

CAROLYN MARIE RODGERS (1943– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Carolyn Marie Rodgers is best known as one of the female poets of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), but her work far surpasses that era despite being neglected and overlooked. Born on December 14, 1943, she began writing poetry in her freshman year at University of Illinois as a means of coping with isolation. The next year she transferred to Roosevelt University. Eventually, she received her B.A. in 1981 and M.A. in English in 1984 from the University of Chicago. She has won the Conrad Kent Rivers Award for writing in 1968, an NEA grant in 1969, was named poet laureate of the Society of Midland Authors in 1970, and won the Pen Award in 1987. In addition to her poetry, Rodgers published several short stories; these focus on what may be called ordinary and overlooked people and often show their struggles and spirit of survival. MAJOR WORKS As a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), Rodgers was mentored by Hoyt Fuller and Gwendolyn Brooks, along with other major writers of BAM, and she developed a militant voice and form. Her first three volumes of poetry were published by Third World Press: Paper Soul (1968), 2 Love Raps (1969), and Songs of a Black Bird (1969). Broadside Press published her four subsequent volumes: Now Ain’t That Love (1970), For H. W. Fuller (1970), For Flip Wilson (1971), and Long Rap/ Commonly Known as a Poetic Essay (1971). The poems in these volumes explore her battle with the militancy of the time and the traditional life in which she was reared. Her use of obscenities and other common language, as well as her nonstandard and inconsistent structure, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation drew much criticism even as her talents were praised. In struggling with issues of womanhood, battling with racial oppression, and attempting to authentically express the life, pains, and joys of regular people, she examines her own inner conflicts on all these issues as well. Rodgers broke with OBAC, and the black-owned independent presses, sometime in the mid-1970s. Her next two volumes—how i got ovah (1975) and The Heart as Ever Green (1978), both published by Anchor/Doubleday—explore identity issues, a desire for creative and personal freedom, and also question the revolution out of which she emerged. Her more recent volumes appear from her own Eden Press: Translation: Poems (1980), Eden and Other Poems (1983), A Little Lower Than Angels (1984), Finite Forms: Poems (1985), Echoes, from a Circle Called Earth (1988), and Morning Glory (1989). Her body of work shows her process from a militant to a religious loyalist. Yet in 1984, after writing for over twenty years, she still saw herself as ‘‘. . . becoming. I am a has-been, would perhaps, going to be. Underneath, I’m a dot. With no i’s’’ (Evans 374).

494

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Rodgers is, unfortunately, much neglected in current criticism regarding African American poets and especially African American female poets. In analyzing her work, one easily finds much autobiography. Parker-Smith suggests there are three major dilemmas running throughout her texts: ‘‘the fear of assimilating the value system of her mother, which interferes with claiming an independent life-style of her own; the attempt to define her ‘self ’ by the standards of the social system responsible for creating her own and her mother’s condition; and the search for love (a man) that will simultaneously electrify and save her’’ (395). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Carolyn Marie Rodgers ‘‘Blackbird in a Cage.’’ Negro Digest 16 (August 1967): 66–71. ‘‘Black Poetry—Where It’s At.’’ Negro Digest 18.1 (September 1969): 7–16. Echoes, from a Circle Called Earth. Chicago: Eden Press, 1988. Eden and Other Poems. Chicago: Eden Press, 1983. Finite Forms: Poems. Chicago: Eden Press, 1985. For Flip Wilson. Chicago: Broadside Press, 1971. For H. W. Fuller. Chicago: Broadside Press, 1970. The Heart as Ever Green. Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978. how i got ovah: New and Selected Poems. Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975. A Little Lower Than Angels. Chicago: Eden Press, 1984. Long Rap/Commonly Known as a Poetic Essay. Chicago: Broadside Press, 1971. Morning Glory. Chicago: Eden Press, 1989. Now Ain’t That Love. Chicago: Broadside Press, 1970. Paper Soul. Chicago: Third World Press, 1968. Songs of a Black Bird. Chicago: Third World Press, 1969. ‘‘A Statistic, Trying to Make It Home.’’ Negro Digest 18 ( June 1969): 68–71. Translation: Poems. Chicago: Eden Press, 1980. 2 Love Raps. Chicago: Third World Press, 1969.

Studies of Carolyn Marie Rodgers’s Works Davis, Jean. ‘‘Carolyn M. Rodgers.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Poets Since 1955, vol. 41, edited by Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale, 1985, 287–95. Evans, Mari. ‘‘An Amen Arena.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 373–76. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. Jamison, Angeline. ‘‘Imagery in the Women Poems: The Art of Carolyn Rodgers.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 377–92. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. Parker-Smith, Bettye J. ‘‘Running Wild in Her Soul: The Poetry of Carolyn Rodgers.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 393–410. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984.

Adenike Marie Davidson

MONA LISA SALOY (1950– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Poet Mona Lisa Saloy was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1950. Named by her father after Nat King Cole’s popular song ‘‘Mona Lisa,’’ his symbolic Creole potency beside her mother’s rhythmic black beauty bared the beginning of a powerful poet, folklorist, and writer. Having received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, Saloy went on to pursue a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing and English at San Francisco State University. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University. After relocating to New Orleans, Saloy began teaching at Dillard University as an associate professor of English, where she also developed a successful Creative Writing program. Saloy continued her educational pursuits at Louisiana State University where she earned the Doctor of Philosophy degree in English and Anthropology. Her research and dissertation focused on Black Beat Poet, Bob Kaufman, who served as an essential link to the Black Arts Movement. This research was funded by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the United Negro College Fund/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Saloy currently holds her position at Dillard University, however, having been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, she is a visiting associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Washington. MAJOR WORKS Several of Saloy’s writings perceptively construct Louisiana, allowing readers to engage themselves. Her overall themes employ empathy and evolution for women, African American culture and communities, family (extended family), and notable writers— particularly those often overlooked. Red Beans and Ricely Yours, Saloy’s prize-winning compilation of verse for which she won the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize, chronicles five sectors of personal geography that prepare, kiss, and coax the human spirit. ‘‘Still Laughing to Keep from Crying: Black Humor,’’ an ethnographic article by Saloy, distinctively displays her talent as a true guru of folklore. She provides in-depth testimony of historic and contemporary black comedians, categorizing the delicate traditions from which they result, featuring their racial anecdotes of laughing to keep from crying. Perhaps one of Saloy’s most prominent works is ‘‘Word Works,’’ a brilliant poem that emphasizes the beauty of southern culture, recently made into a film by Betsy Weiss.

496

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Absolute acclaim is a must for Saloy’s exceptional verse. She captures the essence of well-rounded literature. In ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic AfricanAmerican Themes, literary critic Rudolph Lewis’s review of Saloy’s Red Beans and Ricely Yours enhances these findings: ‘‘Mona Lisa’s poems are concrete. They are filled with objects (cats, mosquito hawks, word sounds, music and musicians, oaks and mums, colors, houses (shotgun), yards, etc.) and actions (talk, dance, more talk, touching, eating, bereft of abstractions) like good modern poems ought to be’’ (3). Fiction novelist Ishmael Reed states: ‘‘Mona Lisa Saloy captures the street idioms and culture of New Orleans that challenge tourist misconceptions about that fabulous city. She also succeeds where many performance poets fail. These poems are music to the ear as well as on the page’’ (Back cover of Red Beans and Ricely Yours, 4). Well-renowned poet Lorenzo Thomas credits Saloy as a voice of creative inspiration for literary critic Fahamisha Patricia Brown’s Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture: ‘‘By to choosing to explore poetry—beginning with Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson and covering contemporaries as recent as Mona Lisa Saloy and Saul Williams—Brown attempts to demonstrate that our poetic vernacular ‘is not merely colloquial, slang, or vulgar’’’ (174).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Mona Lisa Saloy ‘‘African American Oral Traditions in Louisiana.’’ In Louisiana Folklife Festival Guide. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Division of Folklife, 1990. www.louisianafolklore.org/LT/Articles_Essays/ creole_art_african_am_oral.html (accessed September 2006). ‘‘Black Beats and Black Issues.’’ In Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965, edited by Lisa Phillips, 153–65. New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995. ‘‘New Orleans Lagniappe: Terms of Our Endearment.’’ In Ties That Bind: Making Family New Orleans Style, 53–59. New Orleans: Ashe Cultural Center and Ebon Images, 2001. Red Beans and Ricely Yours. Kirsksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2005. ‘‘Still Laughing to Keep from Crying: Black Humor.’’ In Louisiana Folklife Festival Guide, 14–15. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Division of Folklife, 2001. ‘‘Word Works.’’ In Poets in the Dream State: An Anthology of Louisiana Writers. NOVAC, 2001.

Studies of Mona Lisa Saloy’s Works Lewis, Rudolph. ‘‘A Life Won with Blood & Tears.’’ ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes (2005): 1–7. www.nathanielturner.com/redbeansandricely yours.htm (accessed September 2006). Thomas, Lorenzo. Rev. of Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture, by Fahamisha Patricia Brown. African American Review, 35.3 (Autumn 2001): 174–76.

Delicia Dena Daniels

SONIA SANCHEZ (1934– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A combination of artistic engagements and race/gender oppression characterizes the early life of poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez. She was born Wilsonia Sanchez, reportedly because her father, Wilson L., wanted a male child (Melhem, Heroism 133). Wilson, a musician by trade, introduced her to such jazz greats as Billie Holiday. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in 1955, and later did postgraduate study in poetry, at New York University. Her work with Louise Bogan, the late author of The Sleeping Fury (1937), led her to establish a writer’s workshop with Don L. Lee, the African American activist and author of Don’t Cry, Scream (1969). This was her first milestone in a lifetime of contributions to the literary field. She joined the ranks of the Black Arts Movement, published early poems in a variety of African American circulars, and enlisted in the Nation of Islam all in four-year period (1972–1975). Though she disagreed with the antifemale undertones of the Nation’s philosophy, her poetry participates in the assertion of black pride through masculinity, which is a characteristic of the sociocultural efforts of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Her first anthology of poetry was Home Coming (1969), which featured an introduction by her confederate, Don Lee. Between 1968 and 1974, Sanchez experimented with a variety of literary forms. She produced four plays, The Bronx Is Next (1968), Sister Son/ji (1969), Dirty Hearts (1973), and Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us? (1974), at such stagehouses as Theatre Black and the New York Public. She also composed her first five collections of poetry: Home Coming (1969), We a BaddDDD People (1970), It’s a New Day (1971), A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974), and Love Poems (1973). In the same period, she served as editor for a collection of student poems, a product of her own writer’s workshop at the Countee Cullen Library titled Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin’ at You (1971), and published her first children’s stories, The Adventures of Fathead, Smallhead, and Squarehead (1973). She has continued to operate in these diverse segments of the literary arts throughout the last three decades. Fourteen years passed between Home Coming and Sanchez’s first formal recognitions from the literary field. She received an American Book Award for Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984) and, four years later, was presented the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities (1988). That same year, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom recognized her with its highest commendation. In 1989, she received the Paul Robeson Social Justice Award. Academic foundations seem to have been quicker to acknowledge Sanchez as a figure in American literature. The National Endowment for the Arts presented her with a fellowship in 1978, and Trinity College awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1988. By this year, San Francisco State College, the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University, Manhattan Community College, City College of CUNY, Amherst College, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Haverford College, and the University of

498

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Delaware had employed her in a number of educational positions. Temple University selected her for special recognitions, electing her to Laura H. Carnell Professor of English in 1979 (making her the first African American to hold a chair at Temple University), and a Provost Office faculty fellowship in 1986. At the University of Delaware, she was named Distinguished Minority Faculty Fellow (1987). At Spelman College, in Atlanta, Georgia, she was Distinguished Poet-in-Residence (1989). Her academic efforts culminated in a Roots Award from the PAN-African Studies Community Education Program (1993) and a PEN fellowship in the Arts (1993). She has continued to serve the academy in a variety of roles, while maintaining her professorship at Temple, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing. Sonia Sanchez enjoys an international reputation as poet, having given readings in Asia, Australia, Canada, Central America, and Europe. She traveled on fully funded cultural tours to Bermuda, Guyana, and Jamaica (1972), to China (1973), and Cuba (1979). The latter was sponsored by the Venceremos Brigade, a youth organization dedicated to supporting the revolutionary government and resisting American trade/ travel policies directed at Cuba. She published her memories of the pilgrimage to Nicaragua as a semi-poetic essay, ‘‘Bullet Holes of Resistance’’ (1994). MAJOR WORKS Though she is generally recognized as a poet first and a playwright second, the spirit of theater pervades her work. Seven of her plays have enjoyed professional production, most recently Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings at the Freedom Theatre in Philadelphia (1995). And yet, performance is central to her literary endeavors as well. Sanchez has adopted the intense vocal variations of sub-Saharan African speech and music, embedding her remarkable record of national and international readings with a broader sense of the African American spoken tradition. In her publications, she has regularly notated the verbal organization of the text, including a wide variety of accents and slashes. She is adamant that such choices are integral to the poetic themes, having taught her students that ‘‘free verse . . . is not free,’’ rather that there are specific reasons for the seemingly random choices in experimental poems (Melhem, Heroism 169). In effect, Sanchez provides stage directions for the theatrical annunciation of poetry. This theatricalization of the written word provides the scope for her to examine a variety of topics, including: sexuality, masculinity, feminism, social/political revolution, and spirituality. In The Bronx Is Next, her first drama, she answers Ed Bullins’s call for street theater with a story of militant, organized African American resistance. A mere five pages of text enact a mime-show of reversal. A character known only as White Cop chastises African Americans for not ‘‘putting forth a little more effort’’ (49) and for rioting in the streets. Three African American residents of Harlem (Roland, Charles, and Jimmy) offer him a chance to understand their perspectives, by switching roles with him. They become the police; White Cop plays the African American man. They abuse him, accusing him of trying to flee arrest when he does not move, and finally drag him from the stage. As they pull him to his apparent doom, his assailants ignore his protests that he has never hurt nor killed an African American, even if other police he has known have. The building where the play is staged begins to burn, as the last character on the stage predicts, ‘‘the Bronx is next’’ (54). The implicit purpose of such a play, an interest in

SONIA SANCHEZ

499

making performance a factor in community action, may explain her early tendency to stage poetry readings in bars and other community locales. Many of her poems adopt dramatic techniques. In Home Coming, she uses lowercase lettering to undermine the power of cultural monoliths. She lowercases American and that most troublesome of racist signifiers, Nigger, reducing the impact of words that might otherwise be emphasized in oral presentation. In Homegirls & Handgrenades, she introduces the reader to a variety of characters, from a child called ‘‘Militancy’’ to a friend called Martin (in a letter written to Dr. Martin Luther King). One of her newest published poems ‘‘For Sweet Honey in the Rock,’’ collected in Shake Loose My Skin (1999), uses her familiar pattern of repetition to evoke the theatricality of African American cultural performance, colloquially referred to as ‘‘running it down’’ (Baker 332). It is not unreasonable to claim that Sanchez has followed the career path of a poet, but done so with the soul of a dramatist. On the surface, much of her work has a thematic character that connects her to other feminist poets of the Black Arts Movement. Like Ntozake Shange and others, Sanchez engages African American masculinity and African American spiritual traditions, and challenges the history and heritage of oppression in a divided America. She grieves over the violence she returns to, in the African American communities of Home Coming. She celebrates ancestral figures and tribal medicine in Generations (1969). She romanticizes feminine healing powers in Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1999). Certainly, her poetry claims a partnership with other poets, in its ‘‘revolutionary didacticism meant to inspire mass audiences,’’ and in her ‘‘genius for the vernacular’’ (Baker 332). However, Sanchez also demonstrates a desire to reconcile with the literary monolith of masculinity, a desire that produces a thematic voice unique to her. The most elaborate examples of this stretch toward empathy with the African American male subject are Blues Book and a selection of haikus in I’ve Been a Woman (1978). In these poems, the African American male body becomes a vessel for the same romantic ego displacement that men have traditionally made of the female subject. Man embodies home, history, and the Earth itself, in a series of poems with such hyperbolic connections as seeing Africa in the eyes of a father. Also, she is not afraid to turn an angry eye at other women. In ‘‘to all sisters,’’ collected in Home Coming, she sends a venomous diatribe at white women who try to seduce African American men. Unlike Shange, whose literary project assaults the perceived sexism in much of the history of African American empowerment, Sanchez works with and through masculinity to achieve mutual goals of self-realization for herself and her African American brothers. CRITICAL RECEPTION Many critical responses see a kinship between Sanchez and Malcolm X. For Houston A. Baker, she borrows many of her dramatic techniques from the activist, despite originally seeing him as a dangerous racist (328). For D. H. Melhem, Sanchez’s elegy to the fallen leader is both an evocation of his undying anger and a spiritual bonding driven by deep sorrow (Heroism 137). Yet, for Melhem, she is no more a student of Malcolm X than she is of any other African American leader or poet. Though she shares the artistic experimentalism and moral asceticism of Lee, for example, she does not reflect his homophobia or segregationism (135–36). Explaining what he sees as her strongest collection of poetry, Homegirls & Handgrenades, he celebrates its ‘‘influx of

500

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

African and Latino influences . . . blues mode, love poems . . . haiku . . . [and] significant development that is the abundance of poetic stories and prose poems that create their own fluid forms’’ (142). Lee, himself, in his introduction to Home Coming, calls her ‘‘dangerous,’’ praising her ability ‘‘to do damage to the nigger’s control center. His mind’’ (7). Mimicking the dialect representations in Sanchez and others, he attests that her poetry ‘‘helps u face yr/ self. Then, actually u will be able to move thru/out the world and face otherpeople as a true blackperson’’ (7). More than twenty years later, Kamili Anderson, in a review of Under a Soprano Sky (1987), asserts that Sanchez was perhaps ‘‘the most undeservedly underspoken of contemporary women poets in America’’ (‘‘Sonia Sanchez’’ 1669). Anderson argues that ‘‘Sanchez has a penchant for enlisting words to imagery. She can mesmerize with scenarios that require readers to transfuse all of their senses. . . . Few poets write with more succinctness and intensity’’ (1669). As Sanchez has continued to produce new work into her seventies, she has been, though perhaps underrepresented, consistently celebrated by those who have taken notice. If Sanchez’s poetry has not earned the critical attention it has deserved, virtually no attention has been paid to her dramas. Mike Sell appears to be the only scholar to have given them serious consideration, devoting a portion of his essay in African American Performance and Theatre History (2001) to her first three plays. For Sell, Sanchez’s drama ‘‘demonstrate[s] the power available to a ‘whirlwind commonwealth’’’ (71). Considering mainly Sister Son/ji and Malcolm/Man Don’t Live Here No More, Sell concludes that Sanchez’s plays ‘‘utilize monologue and movement to highlight personality without celebrating individuality . . . they are . . . among the most acutely selfcritical, resolutely revolutionary plays of the Black Arts era’’ (71–72). It appears that Sanchez has created a poetry that is enriched by the strategies of performance, and a drama that is enriched by the strategies of narrative poetry. Perhaps Baker best summarizes the theatrical dynamism of Sonia Sanchez’s contribution to literature: ‘‘There may well be more celebrated Afro-American writers, but Sonia Sanchez helps bring an enduring spirit of black renaissancism to contemporary effectiveness. . . . Nobody performs like Sonia Sanchez; nobody brings quintessential black cultural rituals to the high note she achieves’’ (345).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Sonia Sanchez The Adventures of Fathead, Smallhead, and Squarehead. With Taiwo DuVall. New York: The Third Press, 1973. Black and in Brooklyn: Creators and Creations. With Linda Cousins. Brooklyn: Universal Black Writer Press, 1983. A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974. The Bronx Is Next. In A Sourcebook of African American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, edited by Annemarie Bean. New York: Routlege, 1999. ‘‘Bullet Holes of Resistance.’’ In Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women, edited by Particia Bell-Scott. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Crises in Culture-Two Speeches by Sonia Sanchez. New York: Black Liberation Press, 1983. Dirty Hearts. In Break Out! In Search of New Theatrical Environments. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1973.

SONIA SANCHEZ

501

Does Your House Have Lions? Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Generations: Poetry 1969–1985. London: Karnak House, 1969. Home Coming: Poems by Sonia Sanchez. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969. Homegirls & Handgrenades. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1984. It’s a New Day; Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems. Sausalito, CA: The Black Scholar Press, 1978. Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Love Poems. New York: Third Press, 1973. Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Sister Son/ji. In New Plays from the Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins. New York: Bantam Books, 1969. A Sound Investment and Other Stories. Chicago: Third World Press, 1979. Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin’ at You. New York: FX Publishing, 1971. Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us? In The New Lafayette Theatre Presents: Plays with Aesthetic Comments by Six Black Poets, edited by Ed Bullins. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press, 1974. Under a Soprano Sky. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1987. We a BaddDDD People. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970. We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans. New York: Bantam Books, 1974. Wounded in the House of a Friend. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Studies of Sonia Sanchez’s Works Anderson, Kamili. ‘‘Giving Our Souls Ears.’’ Belle’s Letters 4.2 (Winter 1989): 14. Asim, Jabari. ‘‘A Revival with Sonia Sanchez.’’ American Visions 13 (1998): 27–28. Baker, Houston A. ‘‘Our Lady: Sonia Sanchez and the Writing of a Black Renaissance.’’ In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Bell, Bernard W. The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974. Cornwell, Anita. ‘‘Attuned to the Energy: Sonia Sanchez.’’ Essence 10.3 (1979): 10. Decker, Jeffrey Louis. The Black Aesthetic Movement. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Dudley, Randall. Broadside Memories: Poets I Have Known. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975. Gabbin, Joanne Veal. ‘‘The Southern Imagination of Sonia Sanchez.’’ In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1990. Joyce, Joyce Ann. ‘‘The Development of Sonia Sanchez: A Continuing Journey.’’ Indian Journal of American Studies 13.2 (1983): 37–71. ———. Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic Tradition. Chicago: Third World Press, 1996. Kalasky, Dale, ed. Poetry Criticism, Volume 9: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of the Most Significant and Widely Studied Poets of World Literature. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Leibowitz, Herbert. ‘‘Exploding Myths: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez.’’ Parnassus 12–13 (1985): 357–68. Melhem, D. H. Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions & Interviews. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. ———. ‘‘Sonia Sanchez: Will and Spirit.’’ Melus 12.3 (1985): 73–98. Roderick, Palmer R. ‘‘The Poetry of Three Revolutionists: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni.’’ CLA Journal XV (1971): 25–36. ‘‘Sanchez, Sonia.’’ Contemporary Authors 74 (1999): 364–68. Saunders, James Robert. ‘‘Sonia Sanchez’s Homegirls and Handgrenades: Recalling Toomer’s Cane.’’ Melus 15 (1988): 73–82. Sell, Mike. ‘‘The Black Arts Movement: Performance, Neo-Orality, and the Destruction of the ‘White Thing.’’’ In African American Performance and Theatre History: A Critical Reader, edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr., and David Krasner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

502

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

‘‘Sonia Sanchez.’’ In Black Literature Criticism: Excerpts from the Criticism of the Most Significant Works of Black Authors over the Past 200 Years, edited by James P. Draper, Jeffrey W. Hunter, and Jerry Moore. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Walker, Barbara. ‘‘Sonia Sanchez Creates Poetry for the Stage.’’ Black Creation 5 (1973): 12–14.

Ben Fisler

DORI SANDERS (1934– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Novelist Dori Sanders was born on her family’s peach farm in Filbert, South Carolina, where she continues to live and work today. This farm, one of the oldest African American owned farms in the state, has played a central role in her writing. She draws on her knowledge of agricultural practices, family history, and life in rural African American communities to create the convincing settings and characters of her fiction. Of the relationship of her experiences to her literary efforts, Sanders has said, ‘‘What I’m writing about is so much of what I am really about. I grew up in a place and a time, and I’ll never be able to get myself out of where I am. I’ll never write about anything else. I shouldn’t’’ (Fein C14). Although she never deliberately set out to become a writer, preferring farming as her first vocation, Sanders nonetheless began honing her craft at an early age. As a child, she discovered her creativity at the ‘‘storytelling rock,’’ where she and her nine siblings would gather to entertain themselves by swapping tales they made up. She began writing while working as a hotel banquet manager during the farm’s off-season, jotting stories on discarded menus in her spare moments. After receiving encouragement from Algonquin editor Louis Rubin, who told her to ‘‘write what you actually know,’’ Sanders focused her efforts on the manuscript that would become her first novel Clover (1990). Clover, eventually translated into five languages, became an international best seller. In 1992, Sanders won the Lillian Smith Award, which honors authors whose work advocates social justice. Sanders’s second novel, Her Own Place, followed in 1993. In the wake of the media attention that her writing attracted to her peach farm, Sanders authored Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking: Recipes and Stories from the Family Farm Stand (1995), a cookbook that blends an homage to traditional southern cooking with family anecdotes. Recently, Sanders has moved beyond fiction in Promise Land: A Farmer Remembers, a memoir adapted from an address she delivered at the Southern Foodways Alliance Annual Symposium in 2004. In this slim volume, she relates more stories drawn from Sanders family lore and her own youth, describing the efforts of African Americans to live with dignity and grace despite the oppressions of the Jim Crow South. MAJOR WORKS In Clover, Sanders traces the developing relationship between the novel’s narrator, a ten-year-old African American girl named Clover Hill, and her white stepmother Sara Kate. Clover finds herself forced to live alone with Sara Kate when her father, Gaten, is killed in a car accident shortly after his marriage. Over the objections of Clover’s extended family, Sara Kate decides to honor Gaten’s dying wish that she be the one to raise Clover. Clover is naturally resistant to this prospect; she sees Sara Kate as a ‘‘total stranger’’ and notes that ‘‘anybody who knows the story about Cinderella should know

504

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

that nobody in the world would want a stepmother unless they were all the way crazy’’ (34). Moreover, Sara Kate’s whiteness makes her seem alien. Clover’s preoccupation with her new guardian’s race is expressed through images of graphic contrast; at her father’s funeral, she remarks that ‘‘Sara Kate is wedged between me and Uncle Jim Ed, squeezed in between us on the crowded bench like vanilla cream between dark chocolate cookies’’ (22). Sanders also presents Clover’s sense of racial difference in terms of the unfamiliar cultural preferences that puzzle the young girl. Clover is especially unimpressed by Sara Kate’s bland way of preparing food ‘‘cooked flat out in water, not a speck of grease’’ (71). Her ambivalence is reinforced by the members of her family, especially her aunt Everleen, who does not hide her antagonism toward the woman whom she perceives as an intruder. Everleen misreads Sara Kate’s behavior, ascribing any action she disapproves of to Sara Kate’s race; for instance, she tells Clover that Sara Kate did not cry at Gaten’s funeral because ‘‘white folks don’t cry and carry on like we do when somebody dies. They don’t love as hard as we do’’ (67). Yet by living with Sara Kate, sharing the intimacy of domestic routines and gradually getting to know her, Clover begins to see through this screen of racial stereotypes and appreciate Sara Kate’s sincerity. Sanders’s simple plot documents the small moments that lead her characters to a better understanding of one another and the expressions of love and concern that enable them to build a mother-daughter bond. However, as she grows to care for Sara Kate, Clover finds herself feeling conflicted by her loyalty to Everleen. The tensions between Everleen and Sara Kate come to a head in an explosive argument over Clover’s well-being, leading the women to realize that they have a shared interest in helping the grieving girl to heal. The novel’s conflict is resolved in a final crisis that requires Sara Kate to prove herself, earning the respect of both the Hill family and the townspeople of Clover’s rural African American community, Round Hill. Sanders was inspired to write Clover after watching two different funeral processions drive past her peach stand: one comprised of poorer African American mourners in battered cars and the other comprised of wealthy whites in much more expensive vehicles. She has said that observing the equally intense sadness of passengers in both groups ‘‘made me think of the things people have in common’’ (Fein C14). This desire to explore the common humanity of her diverse characters informs Sanders’s fiction. Through humor and compassion, Sara Kate and Clover transcend their differences to forge an interracial friendship, one that eventually grows to encompass others in Clover’s family and community. Sanders suggests that such personal relationships can be a wellspring for a broader social process of reconciliation, offering a hopeful vision of interracial tolerance in the post–civil rights south. In her second and most recently published novel, Her Own Place, Sanders follows her African American protagonist Mae Lee Barnes throughout her life, spanning more than fifty years. The episodic plot of Her Own Place is less focused than that of Clover, but most of the novel concerns Mae Lee’s struggles to raise a family and establish a profitable farm, all on her own. Her story begins in the present time, as the elderly Mae Lee moves from her rural farm to a modern suburban home. The novel then shifts to a flashback as she travels back in memory to her youth, recollecting her experiences as a naı¨ve war bride, and the plot moves forward from the year 1941. While her husband Jeff Barnes is away fighting World War II, Mae Lee manages to save enough money from her work at a munitions plant to buy farmland to surprise her husband. However, Mae Lee’s high expectations are dashed when Barnes returns from the war; he refuses to live the

DORI SANDERS

505

traditional farming life his wife desires and abandons her to raise their five children alone. Despite the obstacles she faces over the years, Mae Lee succeeds at both farming and childrearing through hard work, faith, and the help of friends and family. Sanders depicts Mae Lee as a nurturing matriarch, cultivating both her land and her young according to the rhythms of nature. As her son and daughters grow into independent adults, Mae Lee feels uncertain about what comes next: ‘‘Her children, who had grown up surrounding her like plants in a carefully tended perennial garden, had removed themselves and left visible the now uneven edges of her life’’ (3). She adapts to this new phase of her life by finding another outlet for her nurturing talents when she volunteers in a hospital. In Mae Lee, Sanders creates a touching, authentic portrait of an older woman trying to build a meaningful life for herself after her work of raising children is done. Yet despite her many accomplishments, Mae Lee struggles against the loneliness produced by her husband’s departure. Her yearning for romance is finally realized at an advanced age, when she takes in a boarder named Fletcher Owens. By the novel’s end, Mae Lee envisions a blossoming future with her new lover, described in Sanders’s characteristic agricultural imagery. Negotiating a respect for tradition with the necessity of change is one of the central themes of Her Own Place. Mae Lee is shaped by the values and circumstances of her past, and her old-fashioned ways lead to generational conflict; she cannot bring herself to approve of her grandson’s pierced ear or her daughters’ directness in dealing with their husbands. Yet Mae Lee has the self-awareness to realize that she must learn to embrace the present despite realities she occasionally finds frightening. Her Own Place continues to explore themes presented in Clover, affirming the importance of racial tolerance and the sustaining intimacy to be found in female friendship. Although Her Own Place has significant weaknesses (there is not enough conflict to drive the plot and Sanders is unable to create for Mae Lee the same kind of strong, appealing narrative voice that she gives Clover), it is a pleasurable read for its humor, quirky characters, and generous warmth of tone. CRITICAL RECEPTION Sanders’s literary debut generated a warm critical response. Most of the reviews of Clover were positive; critics commend Sanders for her simple, yet engaging, narrative style, the warmth and humor of her tone, and the authenticity of the voice she gives to her wryly observant young narrator. Remarking on the author’s artistry, one reviewer wrote: ‘‘Sanders sews these family scenes together like a fine quilt maker, delicately fashioning scenes that include distant relatives and old friends with all their peculiarities and local customs’’ (Camp C1). Critics also note her southern settings, praising her ability to convey a strong sense of place through rich, evocative detail. According to one reviewer, ‘‘As a specimen of the new realism in regional fiction, Clover is very much the genuine item’’ (Sullivan 30). Critics’ responses to Her Own Place are more muted. Many reviewers appreciate the warmth and optimism of Sanders’s style. Mae Lee’s characterization also garner praise, especially the traits of strength and endurance that are her defining features; for instance, Monique Guillory admires the fact that Mae Lee ‘‘breaks new ground for a woman of her generation’’ while also maintaining the conventional roles of wife, mother, and daughter

506

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

(E9). However, the problems of the novel’s plot do not escape comment; as Patricia Smith succinctly puts it, Mae Lee ‘‘seems on the verge of everything. Southern-bred racism, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, all make cameo appearances, then disappear’’ (48). Clover has received some attention from scholars, who tend to situate their readings of Sanders in the broader contexts of African American literature, southern literature, and feminist critique. Linda Tate observes that Clover is ‘‘innovative’’ in that it reverses a dominant trope in southern fiction dealing with race by presenting a white character who must enter the domain of African American characters and try to win their acceptance. She contends that ‘‘Ultimately, Sanders’s vision of black-white relationships in the South may be more optimistic as well as more radical: it posits a deep, significant, ongoing bond between black and white communities in the South and articulates a new vision of integrated southern community’’ (61). Suzanne Jones also notes Sanders’s centering of an African American perspective: ‘‘Sanders is primarily concerned with blacks’ assumptions about whites, and she uses her novel to show that some black assumptions about white people are based on preconceived and unsubstantiated beliefs’’ (63). Critics also note Sanders’s tendency to present racial differences as a matter of contrasting cultural tastes rather than innate differences. Lara Putnam focuses on the role that food plays in Clover to signify both personal and racial differences, suggesting that ‘‘Sara Kate, Everleen, and Clover use food to express, explore, and occasionally cross the seemingly impermeable demarcation line that exists between blacks and whites’’ (63). Taking a different tack, Laura Zaidman reads Clover as an example of young adult literature, noting that although the book was marketed to adults, school-age readers appreciate its ‘‘realism, humor, and honesty’’ and respond to the narrator’s struggle to grow up, a process reflected by Sanders’s pastoral imagery of farm life. Zaidman notes that the novel’s ‘‘metaphor of growth ties all the literary elements into an aesthetic whole.’’ Finally, Nicholyn Hutchinson’s reference article is noteworthy for its cogent analysis of Her Own Place, one of the few treatments of Sanders’s second novel. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Dori Sanders Clover. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1990. Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking: Recipes and Stories from the Family Farm Stand. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1995. Her Own Place. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1993. Promise Land: A Farmer Remembers. Charlotte, NC: Novello Festival Press, 2004.

Studies of Dori Sanders’s Works Camp, Margaret. Rev. of Clover. Washington Post, April 5, 1990, C1. Fein, Esther B. ‘‘Becoming a Writer, Remaining a Farmer.’’ New York Times, May 3, 1993, C11ff. Guillory, Monique. ‘‘Places in the Heart.’’ New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 27, 1993, E9. Hutchinson, Nicholyn. ‘‘Dori Sanders.’’ In Contemporary African American Novelists: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 407–10. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

DORI SANDERS

507

Jones, Suzanne. Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since the Sixties. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Putnam, Lara. ‘‘ ‘This Chicken Is Some Kind of Good’: The Power of Food in Dori Sanders’s Clover.’’ Xavier Review 17.2 (1997): 63–76. Smith, Patricia. ‘‘Her Own Place Feels Good, Goes Nowhere.’’ Boston Globe, May 28, 1993, 48. Sullivan, Jack. Rev. of Clover. New York Times, May 20, 1990, 30. Tate, Linda. A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Zaidman, Laura M. ‘‘A Sense of Place in Dori Sanders’ Clover.’’ ALAN 22.3 (1995), http:// scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejurnals/ALAN/spring95/Zaidman.html (accessed March 12, 2005).

Chandra Wells

MARY SEACOLE (1805–1881)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Mary Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1805 to a Scottish army officer and a free black ‘‘doctoress’’ and boardinghouse keeper. Although she spent her early years with an unnamed ‘‘patroness’’ who might had educated her, Seacole’s early memories of bandaging dolls and assisting her mother with convalescent military officers and their wives are evidence that she was drawn to her mother’s profession at an early age. Seacole also displayed a marked turn for business: after her first visit to England, she made a second trip there to sell preserves. She also made small but successful import/export ventures in Haiti and Cuba. She became a widow shortly after she married the ailing Edwin Seacole in 1836. Although she had inherited her mother’s boardinghouse, Seacole left Jamaica for New Grenada (now Panama) in 1851 to help her brother run a small store/hotel, which he had established to serve travelers on their way to the gold fields of California. Seacole later set up her own establishment. When a cholera epidemic struck, she nursed its victims, performed a postmortem, and tested the efficacy of various remedies. Wearied by her efforts and the ingrained prejudice of American travelers, Seacole returned to Jamaica only to be confronted by a yellow fever epidemic. At the request of British army authorities, she provided nursing services at Up Park. In 1854, when Seacole heard about the wretched conditions that wounded British soldiers faced in the Crimea, she resolved to offer her services there. Although she possessed letters of introduction and significantly more nursing experience than Florence Nightingale, she was not allowed to join the latter in the field. Undaunted, Seacole financed her own journey and, with Mr. Day, her husband’s relative, established a combination store, restaurant, and nursing station near the front line. Drawing on her experience in Panama, the popular ‘‘Mother Seacole’’ treated cholera, dysentery, knife and bullet wounds, and other diseases while selling champagne and other delicacies to officers. In spite of the business’ initial success, pilfering, disregarded IOUs, and the sudden end of the Crimean War forced Day and Seacole to declare bankruptcy upon returning to England in 1856. A subsequent benefit concert failed to provide Seacole with an income. In need of funds, she published Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands in 1857. A later subscription fund, established by Lord Rokeby and other influential patrons, allowed her to live comfortably in London until her death in 1881. MAJOR WORK Because she wrote few letters, and did not keep a journal, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Seacole’s only work, is the primary source of information about her. In it, she strategically depicts herself as a British subject who has done her

MARY SEACOLE

509

civic duty, crediting her ‘‘Scotch blood’’ for her energy and decisiveness and occasionally displaying the xenophobia characteristic of her British audience. At the same time, Seacole uses her declared Britishness to castigate the racial prejudice of Americans she encounters in Panama. She resists patronizing attitudes and praises the abilities of black Panamanian officials. Even as she depicts herself as a respectable Briton, Seacole firmly and proudly steps over gender boundaries. Although Victorian convention prevents respectable women from traveling alone, Seacole does so, making her own business decisions alone and without apology. Similarly, Seacole makes no apologies for trespassing into the masculine domain of medicine. Championing the heroism of British soldiers, she also unabashedly and humorously declares ‘‘the unselfishness of [her] motives’’ and her ‘‘struggles to become a Crimean heroine!’’ (Seacole 76–79). CRITICAL RECEPTION Critical approaches to Seacole’s narrative focus on the complexities surrounding her identity as a black colonial subject. Writing that many Caribbean authors exhibit ‘‘a negotiation of intercultural identities,’’ Paul Baggett notes that Seacole allies herself with the colonial power, ‘‘even demonstrating an enthusiastic loyalty toward England and its imperialist enterprises’’ (45). Sandra Paquet agrees, criticizing the way Seacole occasionally minimizes her Jamaican origins. At the same time, however, the text is also slyly subversive: Evelyn Hawthorne argues that Seacole’s declaration of her ‘‘good Scotch blood’’ and her confusing use of the word ‘‘creole’’—usually applied to European settlers—allow Seacole to declare her value in the face of a racist discourse which would label her illegitimate and sexually immodest. Seacole also ‘‘counters prevailing views of black dependency’’ by emphasizing her own decisiveness (320). Bernard McKenna notes that while Seacole stereotypes Amerindians and dark-skinned blacks in order to project these stereotypes outside of herself—thus ‘‘implicitly casting herself as the insider’’—contradictions appear in the narrative, as she represents Central American blacks as equal to the English. He suggests that Seacole uses stereotypes to pacify her audience before presenting the notion that ‘‘blacks do not always conform to stereotype, [and] . . . have an existence beyond conventional representation’’ (227). Still, in Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives, Cheryl Fish writes that Mary Seacole, as ‘‘Mother Seacole,’’ was treated as a mammy figure; ‘‘most illustrations of Seacole play up her flamboyant dresses and hat . . . and minimize the threat of her politics of trespass and medical intervention’’ (80). Both Cheryl Fish and Lorraine Mercer compare Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands to nineteenth-century travel narratives. Mercer writes that, unlike other female travel writers of the era, Seacole was not a privileged white woman traveling to the fringes of the empire. Seacole traveled from margin to center and her narrative ‘‘shores up her claim to ladylike behavior while at the same time it illustrates how she transcends the values and abilities of the prescribed feminine behaviors and achieves near epic hero status’’ (5). Cheryl Fish writes that Seacole ‘‘adapts for her travelogue a female version of the picaro’’: unlike the slave narrators that were her contemporaries, she ‘‘shifts the emphasis [of her narrative] from bodily constraint to the realm of adventure’’ (Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives 71).

510

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Mary Seacole Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. 1857. Shomburg Library of NineteenthCentury Black Women Writers Series, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Studies of Mary Seacole’s Work Alexander, Ziggi, and Audrey Dwejee, eds. ‘‘Editor’s Introduction.’’ In Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. 1857, 1–45. Bristol: Falling Wall, 1984. Andrews, William L. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. 1857. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers Series, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Baggett, Paul. ‘‘Caught between Homes: Mary Seacole and the Question of Cultural Identity.’’ MaCome`re: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 3 (2000): 45–56. Cooper, Helen M. ‘‘England: The Imagined Community of Aurora Leigh and Mrs. Seacole.’’ Studies in Browning and His Circle (1993): 123–31. Fish, Cheryl J. Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004, 65–95. ———. ‘‘Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the Antebellum Americas.’’ Women’s Studies 262 (1997): 475–95. Hawthorne, Evelyn J. ‘‘Self-Writing, Literary Traditions and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole.’’ Biography 23.2 (Spring 2000): 309–31. Judd, Catherine. Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998, 101–21. McKenna, Bernard. ‘‘ ‘Fancies of Exclusive Possession’: Validation and Dissociation in Mary Seacole’s England and the Caribbean.’’ Philological Quarterly 76.2 (Spring 1997): 219–32. Mercer, Lorraine. ‘‘Shall Make No Excuse: The Narrative Odyssey of Mary Seacole.’’ Journal of Narrative Theory 35.1 (Winter 2005): 1–24. Moakler, Laura L. ‘‘Mary Seacole.’’ In African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 371–74. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. ‘‘The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.’’ African American Review 26.4 (Winter 1992): 651–63. Parry, Mel Melanie, ed. ‘‘Mary Seacole.’’ In Larousse Dictionary of Women, 590. New York: Larousse, 1996. Rappaport, Helen. ‘‘The Invitation That Never Came: Mary Seacole After the Crimea.’’ History Today 55 (February 2005): 9–15. Robinson, Amy. ‘‘Authority and Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.’’ Feminist Studies 20.3 (Fall 1994): 537–57. Robinson, Jane. Mary Seacole: The Most Famous Black Woman of the Victorian Age. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2004. Salih, Sara. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. 1857, edited by Sara Salih, l–lii. New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 2005. Simpson, LaJuan. ‘‘Architecting Humanity through Autobiography: Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.’’ Revista/Review Interamericana 31 (Winter 2001): 1–4. Woodward, Loretta G. ‘‘Mary Seacole.’’ In African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 328–32. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Nanette Morton

FATIMA SHAIK (1952– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Adult children fiction writer Fatima Shaik was born on October 24, 1952, in New Orleans, Louisiana, daughter of Mohamed and Lily Shaik. She attended Xavier University– New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1970 to 1972 and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from Boston University in 1974. Shaik continued her education, and in 1978, received a master’s degree from New York University in New York. Shaik worked as a summer intern reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1973 and 1975, and the Miami News, Miami, Florida, in 1974. Also, in 1974 she worked for Gulf South Publishing as assistant editor of the Newsleader. From 1976 until 1988 she attained various editorial positions during her employment with McGraw-Hill in New York City. From 1976 to 1981, she held the position of assistant editor in the World News Division, foreign digests editor in 1981– 1986, and copy editor in Standard and Poor’s Division in 1987–1988. In 1990–1991 at Southern University in New Orleans, Shaik held assistant professor/instructor position in print journalism. Shaik currently is a lecturer and gives readings from her works. She is on the English Department faculty of Saint Peter’s College in New Jersey where she is the Director of the Communication/Mass Media Program and a member of the Board of Director-Writers Room. Her freelance writing has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Working Woman, Black Enterprise, and Essence. Shaik has received several honors and awards: a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1981), a grant from the Kittredge Fund (1997), ‘‘Pick of the Lists’’ citation, and from the American Booksellers Association for the children’s novel Melitte. Shaik is married to painter James Little and is the mother of two children, Celeste and Sophia. She resides both in New York City and New Orleans, Louisiana.

MAJOR WORKS Shaik has authored four books including three for children: Melitte, On Mardi Gras Day, and The Jazz of Our Street, and one adult collection of fiction, The Mayor of New Orleans: Just Talking Jazz. The most acclaimed of her children’s books is Melitte. Written in first-person narrative for ages ten to fourteen or grades four to eight, Melitte is set in the late eighteenth century in Louisiana and is Shaik’s first novel. ‘‘Melitte didn’t even know she was a slave. She just assumed that all children were treated like this. When her owner married a cruel woman who seemed to enjoy taunting Melitte, things got worse. Melitte even had thoughts of poisoning Madame just to be rid of her. But then the baby was born. The most precious little girl that anyone ever saw. Madame didn’t want to care for her so she gave Melitte the responsibility. As baby Marie grew, the two girls became fast friends. To allow Marie to have a Christian education, both Marie and Melitte were allowed to visit a nearby plantation to attend worship. This is where Melitte learned that there were other brown skinned

512

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

folks. And they were slaves. She never realizes she was a slave. Now she is determined to leave the family and become a free woman. Can a 13 year old girl ever hope to be free?’’ (Shaik, Melitte)

One review of On Mardi Gras Day states, ‘‘In this disjointed picture book, two young narrators describe their activities on New Orleans’ ‘day of street parties’, a time when Mardis Gras Indians don feathers, beads, and gemstones to dance through neighborhoods. Unless readers are already familiar with Mardi Gras, they will be at sea here’’ (Publishers Weekly, February 8, 1999) Booklist describes The Jazz of Our Street, ‘‘like Medearis and Ransome’s Rum-a-Tum-Tum (1997), this is a celebration of the marching bands of New Orleans. Poetic words and stunning, light-filled watercolors express the rhythm and feeling of individual people who play in the band and of those who listen hard and dance and follow the musicians as they wind through the streets of the Treme neighborhood’’ (May 1, 1998). The Black Collegian reviews The Mayor of New Orleans: Just Talking Jazz ‘‘a collection of three beautifully written heart-warming stories set in and around New Orleans. Each of the stories gives the readers a glimpse and feel of New Orleans as seen through the eyes of the characters in the book who are all Black but whose backgrounds differ’’ (March–April 1988). In each of Ms. Shaik’s works she shares and exposes the reader to the culture of New Orleans. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although critical analysis of Shaik’s works is scant, there have been numerous reviews of Melitte. The reviews have ranged from comments such as: ‘‘Shaik points out the dehumanizing effect of slavery on the slaveholder as well as on the enslaved as readers watch Melitte’s owner (who in actuality is her father) become increasingly callous toward the girl, stealing the money she earned to purchase her freedom’’ (School Library Journal, 138) to ‘‘Melitte’s intelligence allows her to question the institution of slavery, and her capacity to love eventually helps her to escape. The incidents described are not monumental historical events, but rather a relentless documentary of day-to-day cruelty ultimately—and triumphantly—transformed into a struggle for survival’’ (Horn Book Magazine, 685). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Fatima Shaik The Jazz of Our Street. Illustrated by E. B. Lewis. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1998. The Mayor of New Orleans: Just Talking Jazz. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1987. Melitte. Illustrated by Bill Dodge. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1997. On Mardi Gras Day. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1999.

Studies of Fatima Shaik’s Works Rev. of The Jazz of Our Street. Booklist 94.17 (May 1, 1998): 1523. Rev. of The Jazz of Our Street. Publisher’s Weekly 245.20 (May 18, 1998): 78. Rev. of The Jazz of Our Street. Horn Book Magazine 73.6 (November-December 1997): 685.

FATIMA SHAIK

513

Rev. of The Mayor of New Orleans: Just Talking Jazz. Publisher’s Weekly 232.18 (October 30, 1987): 52. Rev. of The Mayor of New Orleans: Just Talking Jazz. Booklist 84 (December 15, 1987): 676. Rev. of The Mayor of New Orleans: Just Talking Jazz. Black Collegian 18.4 (March-April 1988): 150. Rev. of Melitte. Booklist 98.12 (February 15, 2002): 1028. Rev. of Melitte. School Library Journal 43.10 (October 1997): 138. Rev. of Melitte. Booklist 94.4 (October 15, 1997): 398. Rev. of Melitte. Publisher’s Weekly 244.44 (October 27, 1997): 76. Rev. of Melitte. Horn Book Magazine 73.6 (November-December 1997): 685. Rev. of On Mardi Gras Day. Publisher’s Weekly 246.6 (February 8, 1999): 214. Rev. of On Mardi Gras Day. Booklist 95.13 (March 1, 1999): 1223. Rev. of On Mardi Gras Day. School Library Journal 45.4 (April, 1999): 109.

Sharon T. Silverman

NTOZAKE SHANGE (1948– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE The various elements of autobiographer, poet, and fiction writer Shange’s biography have not been collected into a full-length work, but much information can be gleaned in fragments from various interviews and from the splashes of autobiography found in Shange’s texts. Born in 1948 in Trenton, New Jersey, Paulette Williams moved with her family to St. Louis, met many famous musicians, black activists, and athletes, and attempted suicide four times before changing her name to Ntozake Shange, a Zulu name meaning ‘‘she who comes with her own things’’ and ‘‘who walks like a lion’’ (Lester, Ntozake Shange, 10). As the child of two working professionals—a doctor and a psychiatric social worker—Shange never suffered financial deprivations. However, Shange’s childhood was not without strife. Perhaps the most traumatic element of her childhood was her forced participation in the St. Louis school integrations, a topic that surfaces in several of her works, most prominently in Betsey Brown. Married and then quickly divorced, Shange’s early adulthood was marred by loss, depression, and alienation. Once she found her artistic voice, though, Shange began channeling her pain as well as her optimism for the future into her many female heroines who took the stage, initially, and later championed her novels. Shange holds a B.A. in American Studies from Barnard College and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Southern California. She has taught in a variety of disciplines—from the humanities to women’s studies—at the University of Houston, the University of Florida (Gainesville), Yale, Douglass, Howard, NYU, the City College of New York, Brown, and Sonoma State. MAJOR WORKS Only one of a few works authored by an African American woman to be staged on Broadway, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1974) is Shange’s most influential work. Because of its fusion of dance, poetry, drama, and music, the work’s classification is complex, though the preferred term ‘‘choreopoem’’ was first provided by Shange herself. In the work, seven women explore their lives through extended poetic monologues and dance, and each woman represents one of the colors of the rainbow or the color brown. The implication, given the second half of the choreopoem’s title and the strong bonds expressed between women throughout the piece, is that women’s primary sources of strength and unity lie in other women. This is not to suggest that the poem is always about all women; for women of color are the focus of the poem, as the title suggests. Although Shange’s vision may resonate with women of all colors, especially when dealing with topics such as abortion and date rape, the unique oppression experienced by minority women is highlighted in poems such as Sechita’s story of sexual exploitation or the Lady in Orange’s struggle to transcend stereotypes of black women.

NTOZAKE SHANGE

515

One of the most remarkable facets of for colored girls has been its fluidity, its organic ability to change and grow as it transitioned from its original status as a collection of a few poems, to a collection of a few poems set to dance by Shange and Paula Moss, to a collection of poems set to dance and accompanied by the music of a horn trio and reggae blues band, to a full-scale Broadway production. Although its current productions are fairly standardized, in the early days, Shange and Moss would rearrange the poems selected for performance, varying the choreopoem as they saw fit. Shange writes of the genesis of for colored girls, ‘‘In the summer of 1974 I had begun a series of seven poems, modeled on Judy Grahn’s The Common Woman, which were to explore the realities of seven different kinds of women’’ (‘‘A History’’ xii). This early influence of Grahn’s work is suggestive, for the women in both works are ‘‘common’’ (although certainly not dull) and united in their common or average lives, their lived lives. Shange’s unnamed women experience beatings and other tragedies such as the deaths of children, as well as triumphs of first loves and the sisterhood of other black women in what may initially appear as unrelated snapshots of black womanhood. Shange’s poem-as-photo technique is also reminiscent of Grahn’s work, and both poets make their snapshots combine into—as Michael Davidson notes is the case of Grahn’s The Common Woman—the photo album. Shange has also stated her fondness for Grahn’s attempt to ‘‘murder . . . the King’s English’’ (Lester, ‘‘At the Heart,’’ 726). For her part, Shange commits linguistic regicide by violating the rules of capitalization, spelling, and punctuation, and she also peppers her English with both African American Vernacular English and Spanish. Finally, like Grahn, Shange infuses her work’s pathos with occasional militant calls to action. Like for colored girls, A Daughter’s Geography (1983) blends genres, though not all of the poems in the text are performance pieces. Also like for colored girls, a number of the poems indict men’s abuse of women. For example, in the poems appearing under the heading ‘‘Some Men,’’ Shange explores men’s exploitation and abuse of women in the forms of rape, sodomy, pornography, stalking, and verbal criticisms. Though the poems uniformly criticize men, they do not criticize all men, just ‘‘some men.’’ They are the worst of the worst, the men who belittle women in order to feel big, who rape, mutilate, and silence the women they encounter. But these are not all men, and not even all of the men in the text are abusive. Perhaps the biggest contrast to ‘‘Some Men,’’ as Neal A. Lester notes, is that of Greens, the masculine hero in ‘‘From Okra to Greens / A Different Kinda Love Story’’ (‘‘Shange’s Men’’ 325). Greens and Okra (the feminine hero) are both depicted, in the opening poem, as ‘‘crooked,’’ which Lester interprets as beaten, mistreated, and abused (325). Though both are undervalued in their mutual society, in each other they find their own worth and means of expressing themselves. Basking in the influence of Greens, Okra begins to relish her black heritage and shun the white faces, voices, and even scents emerging from her television set (59). Though the relationship has its turmoil—one poem is titled ‘‘Revelations (The Night Greens Went Off with That Hussy, Rutabaga)’’—Okra and Greens work through their disputes and betrayals, and the final poem in the collection celebrates their marriage and incredibly romantic honeymoon. Innovative in its blending of genres and polyphonic perspectivism, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) is Shange’s most successful novel to date. The style can be initially daunting for the reader unfamiliar with Shange’s work, but as the multiple voices come together via poems, journal entries, letters, traditional narrative fragments, incantations, and recipes, the novel pulls the reader into a culturally rich black female history.

516

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo—siblings and title characters—each come of age and come into their own black aesthetic as the novel progresses. Indigo, the character most closely aligned with the black south and gifted with a natural musical brilliance, expresses herself through her fiddle. Although her gift is supernatural and ultimately becomes a healing art, Indigo still retains poetic reign over her musicality, refusing to take lessons, as her mother repeatedly requests. Even after she has practiced enough to master the fiddle, Indigo still finds her music stunted whenever she tries to imitate the songs of others. Cypress finds her self-expression in dance, though the particulars of her dance aesthetic shift drastically once she encounters African dance and puts classical ballet mostly aside. Sassafrass and the matriarch of the novel, Hilda Effania, both find their artistic voices in the weaving of cloth, though Sassafrass later supplements her early artistry with poetry. Though in the novel the main characters are women and perspectives provided are theirs, the novel is sprinkled with male characters, many of whom are artists as well. Mitch, Sassafrass’s temperamental lover, and Leroy, Cypress’s down-to-earth lover, are both professional musicians. In fact, much of the seduction in the novel occurs through music or dance rather than words or traditional gestures of courtship. The other significant male characters are Hilda’s deceased husband, whom she romanticizes although her daughters remember a darker side to their father, and Uncle John, an elderly junk man revered by all area hoodlums, young and old. Both Leroy and Uncle John play significant roles in helping two of the female characters find their voices—Leroy provides Cypress with unconditional love and financial backing and Uncle John introduces Indigo to the gift of musical expression—and therefore illustrate that while Sassafrass may be first and foremost a novel about female expression, it also pays homage to black men’s roles in paving the way for women’s voices. Reminiscent of Mark Twain’s masterpiece for reasons beyond its setting on the Mississippi River, Shange’s second novel, Betsey Brown (1985) is a Bildungsroman that features the title character’s attempts to reconcile white hostility or indifference to blacks with her own family’s contradictory impulses to uplift the black race and simultaneously avoid interacting with poor blacks. The daughter of a doctor and a social worker, just as Shange herself was, Betsey Brown finds that her parents have different philosophies about their children’s destinies. Dr. Greer Brown is a race man, a man who awakens his children with conga drums each morning, insists that his children be among the first to integrate white schools in St. Louis, introduces his children to Ike and Tina Turner, and risks his marriage in order to take his children to a protest demonstration aimed at defeating hotel segregation. Jane Brown, though not born into great wealth, clings to her middle-class existence and fifteen-room home with passionate determination. She and her mother, Vida, both have a touch of southern gentility in their light-skinned and delicate compositions. Although both women prove themselves loving at various points in the novel, neither is able to see how her own elitism (and colorism, in the case of Vida) robs the family of much happiness. Perhaps the most egregious error made by Jane Brown occurs at the end of the novel as she dismisses Carrie, the black female servant and nanny to the children. Carrie first appears after she rescues the family from grief and chaos in the wake of Jane Brown’s temporary desertion. Giving the children confidence, genuine attention, and abundant domestic chores, Carrie nurtures the Browns into a version of themselves they have never known—their best, most cooperative, most loving selves. Throughout Jane’s absence, Carrie helps the children cherish their memories and love for their mother,

NTOZAKE SHANGE

517

constantly reassuring them that she will soon return. When she does return, however, Carrie’s days are numbered. At the first sign of trouble, Jane asks Carrie to remove her things from their home and be on her way. This signals the end of childhood for Betsey, the eldest daughter and now surrogate mother to her siblings. Still an adolescent herself, Betsey, like Huck Finn in Twain’s celebrated novel, must make the adult decisions that reflect a better morality than her social environment has provided. She will love and nurture where her mother was unable or unwilling, and, having loved Carrie, she will judge those around her on more than the color of their skin or their dialect or income. Despite the interesting plot and historical insights provided by the novel, it fails to achieve the literary quality of Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. Limited by a traditional narrative structure and nearly dialect-free vocabulary, the novel is incredibly bland when compared to the magic of Sassafrass. Though Betsey is a thoroughly lovable little girl, her voice remains largely submerged by the voices of her oppressors, and even the influence of Carrie, a rural black Arkansan who wears double-layered housecoats cinched with a rope belt and drinks homemade blackberry wine, will not save Betsey from her mother’s black middle-class respectability. Then, too, where so much of the richness of Sassafrass comes from the artistry of black women as they weave, write, cook, play music, and conjure, Betsey and her sisters, mother, and grandmother barely scratch the surface of any of these arts, though there is mention of Jane Brown’s love of literature and Betsey’s mastery of the clarinet. Never, though, do we actually encounter the women in the process of creating, excepting the moments when the children improvise rhymes as they march off to the white schools or perform their chores under Carrie’s direction. Gone are the extended descriptions of meal preparation and wool dying; instead, we merely get the chaotic tangle of children’s nervous voices as they rush off to slay the racist dragons of ignorance. A compilation of essays, See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays & Accounts, 1976–1983 (1984) collectively represents Shange’s artistic philosophies told in the highly poetic voice akin to those found in for colored girls. The first essay provides fascinating historical commentary on for colored girls, ending with a statement on Shange’s long wait for recognition and need to move on to other projects: ‘‘i am on the other side of the rainbow / picking up the pieces of days spent waitin for the poem to be heard / while you listen / I have other work to do/’’ (17). Shange’s second essay is a polemic against imitative drama, urging black playwrights to take chances and tap into their rich cultural history. Sounding much like Langston Hughes in his ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,’’ Shange writes, ‘‘we are selling ourselves & our legacy quite cheaply / since we are trying to make our primary statements with somebody else’s life / and somebody else’s idea of what theater is’’ (19). Further, Shange argues that black playwrights are spilling far too much ink on the lives of black musicians and other famous entertainers, presumably because they offer the audience interesting stories of achievement. Instead, says Shange, playwrights need to focus more on the common black men and women who help to shape the black aesthetic through lived experience (18–19). The third essay, or, ‘‘Program Note,’’ introduces Shange’s use of Franz Fanon’s ‘‘combat breath.’’ The intense exercise of will required to live in an occupied or colonized area, Fanon asserted, made breathing itself an expression of combat. So, too, does Shange feel the oppression of living as a black woman in a society privileging whiteness and maleness. Shange suggests that those who criticize her on the grounds that she is ‘‘too self-conscious of being a writer’’ and doing great harm to the English language

518

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

have missed the point of her struggle: writing, especially in the oppressor’s language, is suffocating. Therefore, Shange writes, ‘‘i cant count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n main the language that i was taught to hate myself in’’ (21). In her most famous essay, ‘‘takin a solo / a poetic possibility / a poetic imperative,’’ Shange argues that black writers need to better distinguish themselves from others and readers need to become more discerning interpreters of poetic self-expression. She lightly chides, ‘‘you never doubt bessie smith’s voice. i cd not say to you / that’s chaka khan singin ‘empty bed blues’’’ (26). Although the essay begins by criticizing those authors who are content with imitation, the essay quickly progresses into a keen critique of the audience’s poor ear for poetry. There is clearly a difference between the poets you fail to recognize, writes Shange, ‘‘a difference / in syntax, imagery & rhythm & theme’’ (27). CRITICAL RECEPTION Shange may well be the least studied most important African American author alive. Though the early success of for colored girls earned her a solid reputation, many of her works remain unexplored in the academic presses, with only one full-length study of her works published to date. This, despite two Obies, a two-year run on Broadway, multiple Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, Grammy, Tony, and Emmy nominations, and an Outer Circle Critics Award. While Shange’s work has not received enough attention, much of the attention received has been related to the single topic of negative masculine representations in her works. What began as a controversy started with Curtis E. Rogers’s comment on her ‘‘‘unrelenting stereotyping of Black men’’’ (quoted in Watson 381) became a full-blown battle when Robert Staples attacked Shange and Michele Wallace in ‘‘The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists.’’ Seventeen authors involved in the controversy were asked to respond to the debate in a 1979 issue of the Black Scholar (Hernton 141). Ntozake Shange was represented in the two-part series on black sexism, as were Audre Lorde, Robert Staples, and Alvin Poussaint (141). Although the women were diplomatic though insistent that they had a right to express both their feminist and black loyalties, as Calvin Hernton notes, ‘‘the men claimed that the women had fallen prey to white feminist propaganda’’ (141). The controversy reached epic proportions when Alice Walker and The Color Purple were pulled into the fray, and several of the parties involved were called together in a watered-down ‘‘discussion’’ promising to stir the pot even further—a debate hosted by Phil Donahue. The superstar panelists appearing on this historic episode of Phil Donahue were Ntozake Shange, Maya Angelou, Michele Wallace, Angela Davis, and Alice Walker. The audience was composed mostly of black men, many of whom seemed fairly sympathetic with what the black women panelists were trying to accomplish, and many of whom echoed the sentiments of Alice Walker that the media had overstated the disagreement between black men and women writers and intellectuals. Whether the media is to be blamed or not, much of the academic criticism of Shange’s work continues to focus on the issue of male bashing. In addition to Hernton’s overview of the black sexism debate published in 1984 and Neal A. Lester’s refutation of the charge respecting Shange, ‘‘Shange’s Men: For Colored Girls Revisited, and Movement Beyond,’’ Ann duCille, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Mary Helen Washington have all written on various aspects of black feminism in Shange’s works. Each of these works is crucial to understanding Shange, but Shange’s works are much more

NTOZAKE SHANGE

519

comprehensive and complicated than these studies suggest. A few notable additions to the critical study of Shange are Maria V. Johnson and Arlene Elder’s studies of blues music in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, P. Jane Splawn’s study of black folklore in Shange’s drama, and Karen Cronacher and Sandra L. Richards’s studies of minstrelsy in Shange’s spell #7. The one full-length study of Shange’s dramatic works, Lester’s Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays provides numerous insights and careful research of unpublished as well as published texts, but Lester’s work is by no means exhaustive, particularly since Shange continues to write. Then, too, Lester’s focus is mostly on Shange’s plays. As a novelist, poet, and critic, Shange remains largely unexplored. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Ntozake Shange Drama Daddy Says. In New Plays for the Black Theatre, edited by Woodie King, Jr. Chicago: Third World, 1989. For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. 1974. Reprint, New York: Scribner, 1997. ‘‘A History.’’ Forward for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. New York: Scribner, 1997: ix–xvi. A Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion. New York: French, 1981. See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, and Accounts, 1976–1983. San Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1984. Spell #7. London: Methuen, 1985. Three Pieces: Spell #7, A Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion, Boogie Woogie Landscapes. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.

Poetry Black & White Two-Dimensional Planes. Callaloo 5 (1979): 56–62. A Daughter’s Geography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Nappy Edges. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions. San Francisco: Heirs, 1977. Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Novellas Melissa & Smith: A Story. St. Paul: Bookslinger, 1976. Sassafrass. Santa Cruz: Shameless Hussy Press, 1976.

Novels Betsey Brown. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. New York: Picador, 1982.

Studies of Ntozake Shange’s Works Anderlini, Serena W. ‘‘Drama or Performance Art? An Interview with Ntozake Shange.’’ Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6 (1991): 85–97.

520

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachael Koenig, eds. ‘‘Ntozake Shange.’’ In Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, 365–78. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. Blackford, Holly. ‘‘The Spirit of a People: The Politicization of Spirituality in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies, Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God.’’ In Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality, edited by Kristina K. Groover, 224–55. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Blackwell, Henry. ‘‘An Interview with Ntozake Shange.’’ Black American Literature Forum 13.4 (1979): 134–38. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. ‘‘Black Women Playwrights: Exorcising Myths.’’ Phylon 48.3 (1987): 229–39. Cronacher, Karen. ‘‘Unmasking the Mistrel Mask’s Black Magic in Ntozake Shange’s ‘spell #7.’’’ Theatre Journal 44.2 (1992): 177–93. Damon, Maria. ‘‘Kozmic Reappraisals: Revising California Insularity.’’ In Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, 254–71. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Dong, Stella. ‘‘Ntozake Shange.’’ Publishers Weekly (May 5, 1985): 74–75. duCille, Ann. ‘‘Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical ‘I.’’’ Callaloo 16.3 (1993): 559–73. Early, James. ‘‘Interview with Ntozake Shange.’’ In In Memory and Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women and Writing, edited by Juliette Bowles, 23– 26. Washington: Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, Howard University, 1979. Ecker, Gisela. ‘‘Eating Identities—From Migration to Lifestyle: Mary Antin, Ntozake Shange, Ruth Ozekl[i].’’ In Wandering Selves: Essays on Migration and Multiculturalism, edited by Michael Porsche and Christian Berkemeier, 171–83. Essen, Germany: Blaue Eule, 2000. Effiong, Philip U. ‘‘The Subliminal to the Real: Musical Regeneration in Ntozake Shange’s Boogie Woogie Landscapes.’’ Theatre Studies 39 (1994): 33–43. Elder, Arlene. ‘‘Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: Ntozake Shange’s Neo-Slave/Blues Narrative.’’ African American Review 26.1 (1992): 99–107. El-Shayal, Dalia. ‘‘Nonverbal Theatrical Elements in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls . . . and Intissar Abdel-Fatah’s Makhadet El-Kohl (The Kohl Pillow).’’ Comparative Drama 37.3–4 (2003–2004): 361–78. Erickson, John. ‘‘The Face and the Possibility of Performance.’’ Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13.2 (1999): 5–21. Flowers, Sandra Hollin. ‘‘Colored Girls: Textbook for the Eighties.’’ Black American Literature Forum 15.2 (1981): 51–54. Hayes, Ned Dykstra. ‘‘Whole ‘Altarity’: Toward a Feminist A/Theology.’’ In Divine Aporia: Postmodern Conversations about the Other, edited by John C. Hawley, 172–89. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000. Hernton, Calvin. ‘‘The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers.’’ Black American Literature Forum 18.4 (Winter 1984): 139–45. Holloway, Karla F. C. ‘‘Revision and (Re)membrance: A Theory of Literary Structures in Literature by African-American Women Writers.’’ Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (1990): 617–31. Hubert, Susan J. ‘‘Singing a Black Girl’s Song in a Strange Land: for colored girls and the Perils of Canonicity.’’ Literary Griot 14.1–2 (2002): 92–102. Huse, Nancy. ‘‘Because the Rainbow Is Not Enuf.’’ Paradoxa 2 (1996): 490–93. Johnson, Maria V. ‘‘Shange and Her Three Sisters ‘Sing a Liberation Song.’’’ In Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison, edited by Saadi A. Simawe, 181–203. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Kent, Assunta. ‘‘The Rich Multiplicity of Betsey Brown.’’ Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7.1 (1992): 151–61. Kim, Jeongho. ‘‘Aesthetic of Liberation and Subversion: Discursive Strategy in Shange’s Choreopoem.’’ Journal of English Language and Literature 50.2 (2004): 543–62.

NTOZAKE SHANGE

521

Lester, Neal A. ‘‘At the Heart of Shange’s Feminism: An Interview.’’ Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (1990): 717–30. ———. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. New York: Garland, 1995. ———. ‘‘Shange’s Men: For Colored Girls Revisited, and Movement Beyond.’’ African American Review 26.2 (1992): 319–28. McDowell, Deborah E. ‘‘ ‘The Changing Same’: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists.’’ New Literary History 18.2 (1987): 281–302. Mullen, Harryette. ‘‘ ‘Artistic Expression Was Flowing Everywhere’: Alison Mills and Ntozake Shange, Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s.’’ Meridians 4.2 (2004): 205–35. Murray, Timothy. ‘‘Facing the Camera’s Eye: Black and White Terrain in Women’s Drama.’’ In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 155–75. New York: Meridian, 1990. ‘‘Ntozake Shange.’’ New Yorker (August 2, 1976): 17–19. Richards, Sandra L. ‘‘Conflicting Impulses in the Plays of Ntozake Shange.’’ Black American Literature Forum 17.2 (1983): 73–78. Rushing, Andrea Benton. ‘‘For Colored Girls: Suicide or Struggle.’’ Massachusetts Review 22.3 (1981): 539–50. Splawn, P. Jane. ‘‘ ‘Change the Joke(r) and Slip the Yoke’: Boal’s ‘Joker’ System in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls and Spell #7.’’ Modern Drama 41.3 (1998): 386–98. Tate, Claudia, ed. ‘‘N.S.’’ In Black Women Writers at Work, 149–74. New York: Continuum, 1983. Taylor-Thompson, Betty. ‘‘Female Support and Bonding in for colored girls . . .’’ Griot 12.1 (1993): 46–51. ———. ‘‘Ntozake Shange.’’ In The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 363–65. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Washington, Mary Helen. ‘‘New Lives and New Letters: Black Women Writers at the End of the Seventies.’’ College English 43.1 (1981): 1–11. Watson, Kenneth. ‘‘Ntozake Shange.’’ In American Playwrights since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, and Performance, edited by Philip C. Kolin, 379–81. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Waxman, Barbara Frey. ‘‘Dancing out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange, and Walker.’’ MELUS 19.3 (1994): 91–106. Whitney, Elizabeth. ‘‘When White Girls Act Black: Reconsidering Performances of Otherness.’’ In Casting and Gender: Women in Intercultural Contexts, edited by Laura Lengel and John T. Warren, 109–28. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. ‘‘Women and the Creative Process: A Discussion (with Susan Griffin, Norma Leistiko, Ntozake Shange, and Miriam Schapiro).’’ Mosaic 8 (1974–1975): 91–117. Young, Jean. ‘‘Ritual Poetics and Rites of Passage in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.’’ In Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker III, and Gus Edwards, 296–310. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Young-Minor, Ethel. ‘‘Performance Pedagogies for African American Lit: Teaching Shange at Ole Miss.’’ Radical Teacher 65 (2003–2004): 27–32.

Cammie M. Sublette

ANN ALLEN SHOCKLEY (1927– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Ann Allen Shockley has written reference books, nonfiction and fiction for newspapers and journals, as well as book reviews, essays, novels, and a collection of short stories. She was born on June 21, 1927, in Louisville, Kentucky. She began publishing short stories in the Louisville Defender at age eighteen. After receiving a B.A. at Fisk University, Shockley went on to pursue an M.A. in Library Science at Case Western Reserve University. She has worked at Delaware State College, University of Maryland (Eastern Shore Branch), and at Fisk University where she still works as the curator for African American collections. Although a majority of Shockley’s fictional characters are lesbian, she identifies as a feminist with lesbian sympathies. MAJOR WORKS Loving Her, Shockley’s first published novel, is a lesbian romance. Terry, a wealthy white writer, and Renay, a lounge pianist and mother, fall in love. Renay’s relationship with Terry saves Renay from her abusive husband, Jerome, who raped her and impregnated her—forcing their marriage. Terry replaces everything that Renay has lost or never had during her heterosexual marriage to Jerome. Terry buys Renay another piano, encourages her musically, gives her plenty of money to buy groceries, and loves her and her daughter Denise. Terry is also the first sexual relationship Renay chooses. During the course of the text Renay and Terry’s relationship investigates racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism. Terry and Renay’s love for one another is not fully understood—even in the lesbian community. Terry’s former lover Jean is overtly racist. Jean calls Renay a ‘‘nigger bitch’’ (56) and refuses to drink with her because she is African American. Other lesbian characters such as Lorraine and Vance fail to understand Renay and Terry as an interracial lesbian couple. Although the other white lesbian characters make attempts to understand Renay, she remains a manifestation of African American stereotypes. Renay is also oppressed by patriarchal society. She remains passive in her relations with Jerome and also, to a lesser degree, with Terry. Renay allows Jerome to sell the most important thing to her—the piano. Jerome does not work, drinks too much, kills Denise, and rapes and beats Renay. Renay allows her will to be thwarted by her husband in many ways until she meets Terry. However, Renay is still in a subservient position with Terry. Renay is younger and depends on Terry for money, education, and support. Terry is also the sexual aggressor with only one exception. But even when Renay is the aggressor she is still subservient because she is ‘‘trying to please her lover’’ (48). Renay cannot escape the dichotomy of aggressive and subservient—nor can Terry. Terry, although she gives Renay a satisfying relationship both mentally and physically, uses language that is dominating. Terry speaks of Renay as an object to be owned. Instead of Renay belonging with, she ‘‘belongs to’’ Terry (88). Terry also drinks in

ANN ALLEN SHOCKLEY

523

almost every scene throughout the novel—paralleling her to Jerome. However loving and supportive their relationship, it is flawed as a result of sexist indoctrination. At the close of the novel, after Denise’s death resulting from Jerome’s drunk driving, Terry and Renay’s relationship has grown. Both women reunite after a short absence while Renay grieves Denise and waits ‘‘for the morning, which promised to be even better than the night’’ (187). Although Terry and Renay have grown in their relationship the society does not mirror the girl’s progress. As a lesbian Renay encounters homophobia from the African American community and remains closeted. Renay’s best friend Fran takes care of Denise while Renay works and helps her cope while she is married to Jerome. However, when Renay meets and falls in love with Terry, Fran is both jealous of their relationship and angry that Renay is friends with a white woman. Renay wants to tell her best friend that Terry is not simply a friend but rather a lover. But Renay knows that Fran will not accept this relationship due to her sexual fixation on men. Fran’s homophobia is exposed when she yells out at a nightclub ‘‘Fag!’’ and Renay begins to pass as a straight—becoming a ‘‘stranger among her own’’ (153). Sadly, Fran and Renay’s mother are both astounded that Renay can live with a white woman and Renay knows that they will not accept their relationship as interracial lesbian lovers. Renay faces homophobia from the African American community while Terry and Renay receive acceptance from their much older white neighbor. Terry gives Mrs. Stilling a copy of a book that she has written about her relationship with Renay. Mrs. Stilling likes Terry’s book and asks Terry whether she has considered their relationship racially. Terry says that she does not think about it. Mrs. Stilling replies knowingly and acceptingly. Although, the novel does not equate oppression of African Americans and homosexuals, there is however a paradox exposed: white lesbians accept African Americans because lesbians experience discrimination while African American heterosexuals blame Lesbianism ‘‘on white women’’ (31). Renay is poor, female, African American, and lesbian. Terry can understand her position only partially because she is not African American or poor. However, their love is more powerful than the problems each face in society. Shockley exposes the paradox between lesbians accepting African Americans while African Americans blame white women for lesbianism. In doing so, the text illustrates that the only space Renay can be both African American and lesbian is in the white lesbian community—but Renay still yearns for an African American lesbian community. The Black and White of It is the first published short story collection containing African American lesbian experience. However, there are only ten stories in the collection and three do not refer to racial identity directly. Probably the most successful of the essays is ‘‘The Meeting of the Sapphic Daughters.’’ This story is similar to Shockely’s longer fiction in that it exposes the ostracization of African American lesbians by white lesbians. In this collection there are relationships unlike in Loving Her and Say Jesus and Come to Me because not all the relationships end happily. There is also a divergence in the collection as a whole regarding its relative lack of focus on politics and sex. Overall the collection illustrates a greater thematic range of Shockley’s writing. Say Jesus and Come to Me is Shockley’s second novel and is much more complex and less trite than Loving Her. Myrtle Black, the female protagonist, is an evangelical lesbian minister. Myrtle is an extremely flawed character—she preaches for money, uses the media to gain attention for her church, and has sex with her congregation members.

524

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

However, for all of Myrtle’s negative traits she also strives, however selfishly, for political change. Myrtle’s focus, therefore, is both selfish and altruistic. When Myrtle arrives in Nashville she reads about two prostitutes who have been shot and are in the hospital. Happily, Myrtle realizes that Nashville is in need of God and proceeds to make plans to use the situation to her advantage. While at the Reverend Cross’s house, the minister of New Hope Unity Church, Myrtle makes connections with George Clemons—a journalist. Myrtle convinces Clemons to run a story about her visiting the prostitutes to advertise her sermons. Although Myrtle is using the prostitutes to greedily fill her church pews, she tries her best to get the prostitutes, Earthly Treasures and Heavenly Delight, to change their ways. Ultimately she is successful with only Heavenly Delight. Myrtle’s plan of action to fill her pews sets off a chain of profound consequences. First a blues singer Travis Lee, who Myrtle is already fascinated with, is born again when she hears Myrtle on the radio. Travis Lee’s popularity also brings in people to the church. Myrtle is then able to disseminate her beliefs about the Bible, God, and social injustice more effectively. She is also making a large sum of money from the large numbers in attendance. However Cross knew that ‘‘there wasn’t a man in the church, including himself, who hadn’t paid for [sex] one time or another’’ (79). Consequently Myrtle is asked to leave the church even though her sermons have been successful. Directly after Myrtle’s dismissal from Cross’s church, Myrtle sets out to have a Women’s March. The march allows Myrtle to stay in Nashville and make real change for herself and the community. During this time Myrtle is given a place to stay and preach from a wealthy white landowner—Wilma Freelander. During this time Myrtle has the freedom to preach what she likes, but also has to compromise with the women’s march. The freedom within the church allows Myrtle to court Travis Lee and consummate a loving relationship. The work of the women’s march pulls Myrtle and Travis apart. There are opposing views between men and women, African Americans and whites, and lesbians and heterosexuals for the march. Ultimately the committee decides that the march will be for issues affecting straight women of any color. During the march Travis is symbolically ran over by a car. Myrtle decides that it is time to come out as a lesbian to her church. Previously Myrtle felt that the church was not ready, but believes that she must now give the most important sermon of her life. Her sermon is titled ‘‘Freedom and Acceptance’’ (279) and calls for the church to change its teachings on homosexuality. She announces to her congregation that she is a lesbian and asks anyone who is uncomfortable to leave. No one does. At the opening of the novel Myrtle is concerned with money, clothes, and finding women but she progresses to find loving relationships through political and social change. The novel calls for intersections of sexual and spiritual, gay and straight, African American and white in order to find love and acceptance. The progress of the novel is a process of social change. Indeed, when no one in Myrtle’s congregation leaves as a result of her homosexuality—this is a radically different society compared to the one that forces Myrtle to leave due to her teachings on prostitution. In making Myrtle flawed, the text suggests that political and social change can be accomplished by those who are less than perfect.

ANN ALLEN SHOCKLEY

525

CRITICAL RECEPTION Loving Her reached the Christopher Street bestseller list when it was first published in 1974 (Dandridge 26). However, critics had varying views—some extremely harsh. Frank Phillips in Black World writes ‘‘this bullshit should not be encouraged’’ (90) while Karla Jay in WIN suggests that Loving Her commits ‘‘all the deadly sins lesbians preach against’’ (20). Others, however, note that Loving Her is the first to address race issues in lesbian relationships and therefore give Shockley credit for her attempts to represent what has never been done before and sympathy for her failures in character development and realism. Reception of The Black and White of It was also mixed. Alexis De Veaux reviewed the work in 13th Moon and believes that the characters throughout the collection lack depth. De Veaux goes on to mention that in the short story ‘‘A Birthday Remembered,’’ the girls are simply ‘‘victims of their sexuality’’ (144). While in Motherroot Journal, Gayle White gives the collection of short stories praise despite their predictability. Because The Black and White of It is the first collection of short stories about African American lesbian experience, most reviewers tend to suggest that the visibility of African lesbian experience outweigh the lack of aesthetic and character development. When Say Jesus and Come to Me was published in 1982, it received more positive reviews than Loving Her and The Black and White of It. However, John Tremaine calls Shockley’s work ‘‘pathetic’’ and the male characters ‘‘fools or morons’’ (66). The other reviews of the novel were mostly if not entirely positive. Helen Eisenbach in the New York Native reviews the novel, calling it ‘‘peculiar, dreadfully written, yet somehow fascinating[ly] trashy . . . vaguely evil lesbian’’ novel (39). However, Eisenbach mistakes central characters’ racial identities. Two different reviewers state that the novel would make an excellent movie. Shockley’s fiction often received poor reviews. Responding to this, Karla Jay suggests that Shockley’s negative reception is a function of male criticism. Even the essay that Jay wrote on Loving Her in WIN the editors cut ‘‘the positive comments and left the bad ones’’ (17). Jay considers The Black and White of It to be a better work of fiction and is grateful that Shockley continues writing in the face of criticism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Ann Allen Shockley The Black and White of It. Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1980. Reprint, 1987. ‘‘The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview.’’ In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983. Living Black American Authors: A Bibliographical Directly. Edited with Sue P. Chandler. New York: Bowker, 1973. Loving Her. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974. Reprints, New York: Avon, 1978; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997. Say Jesus and Come to Me. New York: Avon, 1982.

Studies of Ann Allen Shockley’s Works Dandridge, Rita B. Ann Allen Shockley: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Eisenbach, Helen. New York Native 2 (November 22–December 5, 1982): 39.

526

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Jay, Karla. ‘‘Deny, Deny, Deny.’’ New Women’s Times Feminist Review 15 (April–May 1981): 17–18. ———. WIN 12 (December 1974): 20. Josey, E. J., and Ann Allen Shockely, comps. and eds. Handbook of Black Librarianship. Littleton: Libraries Unlimited, 1977. Phillips, Frank Lamont. Black World 24 (September 1975): 89–90. Smith, Barbara. ‘‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.’’ Conditions: Two 1 (October 1977): 25–44. Tremaine, John S. West Coast Review of Books 8 (September–October 1982): 66. White, Gayle. Motherroot Journal 2 (Summer 1980): 4.

Adriane Bezusko

AMANDA BERRY SMITH (1837–1915)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Amanda Berry Smith was born on January 23, 1837, in Long Green, Maryland, to Samuel Berry and Miriam Matthews, slaves on neighboring farms. By 1840 Samuel had earned enough money to purchase his own freedom and that of Miriam and their children. The Berrys then moved to York County, Pennsylvania, a station on the Underground Railroad. As a result of her family’s free status, Amanda received minimal formal education at a school for white children, and her parents helped her learn to read. In 1854 she married Calvin M. Devine and moved to Columbia, Pennsylvania. She found Devine ‘‘profane and unreasonable’’ when he indulged in alcohol (Autobiography 42). She underwent conversion in 1856. Devine enlisted in the Union Army and never returned from the Civil War. Moving to Philadelphia, she joined the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and married James H. Smith. The couple relocated to New York City. Because James was not a steady provider, Amanda worked as a servant and took in laundry. In 1868 she experienced sanctification, the ‘‘second blessing’’ that, according to Wesleyan tradition, purifies converts from intentional sin. She began testifying at AME churches and became prominent in Holiness: a predominantly white interdenominational movement that promoted the controversial doctrine of immediate sanctification by faith and encouraged all believers to testify publicly about their spiritual lives. After James died in 1869, she devoted herself to full-time evangelism, but because the AME Church refused to ordain women, she depended on donations from well-wishers. An enthusiastic speaker with a beautiful singing voice, Smith received many invitations to preach, though some AME pastors adamantly opposed women preachers. She also campaigned for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In 1878 her tour of England on behalf of temperance and Holiness led to an invitation to serve as a missionary in India. In 1882 she proceeded to Africa, again with ‘‘no official backing or financial support’’ (Israel 74). Like many westerners, Smith considered Africans deeply ignorant and superstitious. Still, she maintained that blacks given equal opportunities could equal whites, and she spoke out against the whites’ alcohol trade in Africa. A celebrity upon returning to the United States in 1890, Smith spoke widely even while working on her autobiography. In 1893 she settled in Harvey, Illinois, determined to found a home and school for black orphans. After years of national fund-raising tours, she opened her orphanage in Harvey in 1899. Not tax supported, the institution was insolvent by the time Smith retired to Sebring, Florida, in 1912 to a home provided by an admirer. She died in Sebring on February 25, 1915. The school closed after a fire in 1918. MAJOR WORK Smith’s An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith the Colored Evangelist incorporates elements of the spiritual autobiography, travel

528

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

narrative, and slave narrative. The author focuses on her spiritual experiences and evangelistic and reformist activities. She omits certain personal details—saying little, for example, about her siblings and bypasses exciting incidents such as her flight to Philadelphia as the Confederate Army marched toward central Pennsylvania in 1863. Unlike evangelist-autobiographers Jarena Lee and Julia Foote, she does not argue for the ordination of women, declaring instead that God validates her. The Autobiography as a whole affirms the universal need for, and accessibility of, sanctification; it presents the love of God along with ‘‘common sense’’ (41) as remedies for social problems. Prominent themes include the need for self-control and courage; joy in enthusiastic worship; the evils of alcohol and tobacco; the importance of education; and racism and sexism in India, Africa, and the United States. Smith’s prose, though sometimes weighted down with details, is clear and graced with touches of humor. Dialogues with God and with Satan vividly capture her sense of the drama of the devout life. A master of the memorable anecdote, Smith conveys the difficulties of being marginalized—as a woman, an African American, a preacher, an advocate of Holiness, and a person whose determination to get along with others leads some of her own people to criticize her as a ‘‘white folks’ nigger’’ (232, 453). A selective account of the life of an individual for whom faith and racial identity were vital issues, the Autobiography provides insights into styles of religious expression, reforms grounded in the African American and evangelical communities, and race and gender relations on four continents. CRITICAL RECEPTION Praised and promoted by friends and offered for sale by Smith herself, the Autobiography sold well enough to help support her orphans’ home. An abridged version appeared in 1977, and the entire work was reprinted several times during the twentieth century. Long a popular author, Smith has recently been examined in scholarly books by historians and literary critics, including Betty Collier-Thomas, Richard J. DouglassChin, and Susie C. Stanley. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Amanda Berry Smith An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith the Colored Evangelist. Chicago: Meyer & Brother, 1893.

Studies of Amanda Berry Smith’s Work Dodson, Jualynne E. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Smith, Autobiography, xxvii–xlii. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Israel, Adrienne M. Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1998.

Mary G. De Jong

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH (1950– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Anna Deavere Smith was born on September 18, 1950 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Anna, was an elementary school teacher and her father, Deavere, was a coffee merchant. Smith grew up the eldest of her parents’ five children. Although she was an extremely shy child, Smith was able to develop a circle of friends because of her talent for mimicry. Smith studied acting at Beaver College in Pennsylvania. She earned the B.A. in 1971 and the MFA in 1977 from San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. Upon her relocation to New York from San Francisco, Smith became very active on the stage; she appeared in several off-Broadway productions. Those parts served as precursors to small and big screen acting roles. Smith has appeared in the soap opera All My Children; the television dramas Presidio Med and The West Wing; and the films The American President, Dave, The Human Stain and Philadelphia. In addition to her acting and screen credits, Smith has also taught at Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, University of Southern California and Yale. She is currently a tenured professor at New York University. MAJOR WORKS Over the course of her career, Smith has developed a oeuvre of documentary shows she refers to as On the Road: A Search for American Character. On the Road includes Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1993), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994) and House Arrest: A Search for American Character in and Around the White House (2003). The shows are Smith’s attempt to explore national identity and American character. They have been described as combining the journalistic technique of interviewing with the art of interpretation. For each theatrical show, Smith interviews hundreds of people and interprets their words through her performance. For Fires in the Mirror Smith interviewed more than 600 people. The show presents the viewpoints of those people affected by the 1991 Crown Heights riots. First performed at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York, Fires in the Mirror examines the motivations behind the rioting. Not only does Smith reveal the mitigating circumstances that led to the riots—a young African American child is killed when a Jewish driver runs a red light; in retaliation a group of black men kill a Jewish student—but she delves into the problem that underlies the people’s actions, the years of racial tension between the two groups. The play’s dialogue contains the voices of the Jewish and African American communities as they provide their account of the situation and problem. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is an examination of the rioting that erupted in Los Angeles after white police officers were acquitted of beating African American motorist Rodney King. Smith interviewed 175 people for the play and assumes the voice of 26 of

530

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

them, including Reginald Denny, the driver who was pulled from his truck and beaten by African American males after the verdict was read; former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates; and a pregnant young woman who was shot in the cross fire. In House Arrest Smith explores American national identity as it has been embodied by the American presidency. The play is a result of interviews with over 400 people from all walks of life. The play opened at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage; unlike its predecessors, Smith did not play all the roles in House Arrest. It had a cast of actors. Smith’s other works include Piano (1989), a dramatic depiction of gender and racial tension in an affluent Cuban household prior to the Spanish-American War; Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics (2001), which documents the creative process behind House Arrest; and Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts—For Actors, Performers, Writers and Artists of Every Kind (2006), a practical manual for aspiring artists.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Smith has received many accolades for her work. She was named the Ford Foundation’s first artist in residence. In 1996 she received a MacArthur Genius Award. She has won many major awards including two Obie Awards and two Drama Desk Awards. Fires in the Mirror received a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1992. Critics praise Smith’s work and performances. In the introduction to ‘‘The Circle of Confusion: A Conversation with Anna Deavere Smith’’ Barbara Lewis refers to Smith’s work ‘‘as having something [to say] about race and urban America in the ’90s that’s real and riveting’’ (54). Elizabeth Brown-Guillory describes Twilight as a ‘‘razor-sharp play script . . . a major contribution to American theater.’’ (373). In ‘‘Teaching the Politics of Identity in a Post-Identity Age: Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight’’ Sandra Kumamoto Stanley concludes that Smith succeeds in breaking the barrier to ‘‘blackness and whiteness by exposing and questioning the apparatus of representation that governs both groups.’’ (202). Finally, Debby Thompson in ‘‘Is Race a Trope?:’’ Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity’’ argues that Smith performance style is worthy of emulation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Anna Deavere Smith Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities. New York: Anchor, 1993. House Arrest and Piano: Two Plays. New York: Anchor, 2004. Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind. New York: Anchor, 2006. Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics. New York: Random House, 2001. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Anchor, 1994.

Studies of Anna Deavere Smith’s Work Blanchard, Bob. ‘‘‘Twilight: Los Angeles 1992’.’’ The Progressive 57.12 (1993): 35(2). Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. ‘‘‘Twilight: Los Angeles 1992’.’’ African American Review 31 (1997): 372–373.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

531

Brustein, Robert. ‘‘‘Twilight: Los Angeles 1992’.’’ The New Republic 210.18 (May 1994): 29(2). Connor, Kimberly Rae. ‘‘Negotiating the Differences: Anna Deavere Smith.’’ Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition, 194–238. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Fitzgerald, Sharon. ‘‘Anna of a Thousand Faces.’’ American Visions 9.5 (Oct–Nov 1994): 14(5). Lahr, John. ‘‘Under the Skin.’’ New Yorker ( June 28, 1993): 90–93. Leonard, John. ‘‘Humane Voices: Anna Deavere Smith’s Astonishing Gift for Mimicry is Enhanced by Her Openhearted Ability to Listen to People.’’ New York Metro: Best of the Year 2001. http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/tv/reviews/4617/. Lewis, Barbara. ‘‘The Circle of Confusion: A Conversation with Anna Deavere Smith.’’ Kenyon Review 15.4 (1993): 54–64. Lloyd, Carol. ‘‘Voice of America: Anna Deavere Smith.’’ Salon Brilliant Careers Series No. 5. 1998. http://www.salon.com/bc/1998/12/cov_08bc.html. Martin, Carol. ‘‘Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You.’’ Drama Review 37.4 (1993): 45–62. Marvel, Mark. ‘‘Ms. Smith Goes to Washington.’’ Interview 26.9 (September 1996): 46(2). Mermelstein, David. ‘‘Legit Reviews: ‘House Arrest: An Introgression’.’’ Variety 374.10 (April 1999): 57–58. O’Quinn, Jim. ‘‘Getting Closer to America.’’ American Theatre 13.8 (October 1996): 18(3). Reinelt, Janelle. ‘‘Performing Race: Anna Deaver Smith’s ‘Fires in the Mirror’.’’ Modern Drama 39.4 (1996): 609–617. Schechner, Richard. ‘‘Anna Deavere Smith: Acting As Incorporation.’’ TDR: The Drama Review 37.4 (1993): 63–64. Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. ‘‘Teaching the Politics of Identity in a Post-Identity Age: Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight.’’ MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States, 30.2 (Summer 2005): 191–208. Stayton, Richard. ‘‘A Fire in a Crowded Theatre: Anna Deavere Smith Relives the Los Angeles Riots.’’ American Theatre 10.7–8 ( July–August 1993): 20(7). Thompson, Debby. ‘Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity.’’ African American Review 37.1 (Spring 2003): 127–38.

Yolanda Williams Page

ELLEASE SOUTHERLAND (1943– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Ellease Southerland (now known as Ebele Oseye or Ellease Ebele Oseye) is the third of fifteen children, the eldest daughter of Ellease Dozier and Monroe Penrose Southerland. Though she is sometimes associated with the southerness of her mother’s North Carolina girlhood, which she recreated in her lyrically resonant, critically appreciated 1979 novel, Let the Lion Eat Straw, she was born in Brooklyn June 18, 1943, and raised in Queens, New York, where she still makes her home. She visited the south for the first time as a young woman, though she is southern enough through collective family memory to have been included in Alex Harris’s 1987 anthology of snapshots and stories, A World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood, alongside such southern mainstays as Barry Hannah and Bobbie Ann Mason. Monroe Southerland insisted that his children work to become both physically and mentally fit. Regular exercise and organized sports were routine. To this day, Southerland is deeply concerned with the integration of physical and mental health and is an advocate of sound nutrition and exercise. Reading was encouraged. At ten, after hearing an elegiac poem written by her uncle, Southerland began writing her own poetry. With characteristic enthusiasm and purposeful determination, she organized ongoing poetry days at her father’s church, edited her elementary school newspaper, and went on to serve as an editor of both her high school and college magazines. Southerland completed her B.A. in 1965 and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1974. Her deep interest in African history and culture is reflected in her scholarly study of Zora Neale Hurston’s use of folklore; her travels to Ghana, Egypt, and Nigeria; her conference papers delivered yearly at the Africa Conference convened at the University of Texas at Austin; her membership in the Association of Nigerian Authors; and her appointment as professor of Creative Writing and the Literature of African Peoples at Pace University in New York. She has taught at Pace since 1975. She has also taught in the Columbia University Community Educational Exchange Program and at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. In 1989, she was made a Fellow of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She has been traveling to Nigeria since the early 1970s and has for years supported Nigerian literacy projects through philanthropic contributions of books. A life-long resident of Queens, Southerland received a Citation of Honor for Literary Achievement from Borough President Claire Schulman in 1990. Southerland’s abiding belief in the interconnectedness of mind and body, the individual and the cosmic, the physical and the spiritual manifests itself in her serious study of Egyptology and astronomy. In 1996, according to Diane McKinney-Whetstone (181), Southerland changed her name to Ebele (Igbo for ‘‘mercy’’) Oseye (a Beninese name for ‘‘the happy one’’—though some sources list the origin of the name as Nigerian or Egyptian).

ELLEASE SOUTHERLAND

533

MAJOR WORKS Let the Lion Eat Straw (1979) is the lovingly told story of Abeba Williams Lavoisier Torch’s curtailed, constricted but ultimately expansive life. Forty years is compressed into less than 200 pages, yet the unfolding of this intergenerational tale never seems hurried. The relative brevity of the work underscores the twin themes of evanescence and renewal. At the same time, Southerland takes the full measure of these brief, complicated, workaday lives and offers them with knowing reverence, dignifying the individual dramas while evoking the aching vitality of our collective lot. The intermingled histories of the gifted, life-affirming Abeba and her stern, bitter mother, Angela, are presented with unsentimental spareness. Southerland’s prose, at once concretely descriptive and eerily fragmented, both earthbound and dreamily imagistic, is closely akin to poetry. She counts Yeats and Gwendolyn Brooks (as well as Amiri Baraka and Hurston) as early influences, and Yeats’s symbol-laden, myth-infused work helped spark her own cross-cultural mythological explorations. The almost mythological significance of ordinary lives seen in their historical fullness and interconnected, familial dimensionality is emphasized in Lion through the telling amplitude of biblical symbols as well as through undisguised biographical references. The title comes from Isaiah 11: 6–7, the evocative passage prophesying harmony and deliverance from threat: ‘‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb . . . and a little child shall lead them.’’ The suffering of children is a key theme in Southerland’s book. Abeba is torn away from her nurturing guardian; her beloved and protective stepfather dies; and she is repeatedly raped by an uncle. Yet her life force is, almost miraculously, undiminished. Her grievous losses are offset by a startling fecundity. Her musical gift is transmuted into finely tuned mothering. Her brilliance is transferred to her children and community. Because Abeba is the fictional incarnation of Ellease Dozier Southerland, she becomes a kind of sacred space, embodying the fierce delicacy of a remarkable life as well as symbolizing hope and creative fire. Abeba is contrasted with her mother, Angela, who is unable to transcend the harshness of her life and is unable to find, as did her daughter, lasting love or a lasting peace. Southerland’s novella White Shadows won the 1964 John Golden Award for Fiction. Her poetry appeared in such publications as Black World, Poet Lore, and Presence Africaine. ‘‘Beck-Junior and the Good Shepherd’’—a Torch family story that heralded the 1979 achievement of Let the Lion Eat Straw—was published in the Massachusetts Review in 1974. In 1972, her poem ‘‘Warlock’’ won Black World’s Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award and the poetry collection The Magic Sun Spins came out in 1975. Let the Lion Eat Straw was named a Book of the Month Club alternate selection and a ‘‘Best Book for Young Adults’’ by the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association. In 1987 it was included in the Black Heritage Series by the New York Public Libraries. Later work includes A Feast of Fools (1998), which continues the saga of the Torch family into the next generation. Southerland’s own press, Eneke Publications, brought out her travel memoir, This Year in Nigeria (2001), and the first of a projected series of books on writing and communication, Opening Line: The Creative Writer: From Blank Page to Finished Story (2000). She is currently at work on a third novel, a second collection of poetry, and a book on communication techniques developed through her many years of teaching.

534

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Let the Lion Eat Straw was immediately lauded as a debut novel of rare worth and delicacy. Critics noted its potent lyricism, stylistic grace, and affecting narrative. Writing in the Library Journal, Janet Boyarin Blundell sums up the work’s impact: ‘‘It’s hard to convey the special beauty of this accomplished first novel; Southerland, with her sparse prose and sharp imagery, has captured the essence of one black woman’s life’’ (850). New York Times critic Mel Watkins considered the prototypical significance of this ‘‘one life’’ as Abeba confronts the ‘‘formidable barriers’’ of the urban north and, like innumerable numbers of southern blacks ‘‘in search of a better life in the north,’’ is ‘‘forced to transfer [her] hopes to [her] children’’ (BR 2). John Leonard, also writing in the New York Times, testifies to the novel’s scope and poignancy: ‘‘In these few pages, an entire history of desire and talent and frustration and triumph—from boiled peanuts to Nebuchadnezzar—is whittled to an arrow in the heart’’ (C21). Los Angeles Times reviewer, Anne Wittels, noted the haunting effect of the ‘‘condensed, distilled . . . style.’’ The story, she writes, has ‘‘the effect . . . of a play seen through Venetian blinds. It is all there. We can see it, really, quite clearly. And yet half is not there; half is hidden by thin shadows; half is between the lines’’ (N4). Washington Post critic Jabari Asim describes Southerland’s style as ‘‘urban minimalism’’ and likens her ‘‘sparse, evocative phrasing’’ to the poetry of June Jordan and Audre Lorde (T15). Despite nearly rhapsodic critical accolades, Let the Lion Eat Straw went quietly out of print. Reissued by Amistad in a fittingly ‘‘commemorative’’ 25th anniversary edition, the work is once again being affirmed as, in the words of Jabari Asim, ‘‘a bittersweet gem of a novel.’’ Asim speculates that though the work belongs in the same company as its contemporaries, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), it may have been eclipsed by the critical and popular reception of these now-classics. Hailed as a classic itself, Let the Lion Eat Straw is finding new life and inspiring a new generation of readers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Ellease Southerland ‘‘Beck-Junior and the Good Shepherd.’’ Massachusetts Review 15 (Autumn 1974): 719–32. ‘‘A Feast of Fools.’’ In Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction, edited by Terry McMillan. New York: Penguin, 1990. A Feast of Fools. New York: Africana Legacy Press, 1998. ‘‘I Got a Horn, You Got a Horn.’’ In A World Unsuspected, edited by Alex Harris. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. ‘‘The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.’’ In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly GuySheftall, 172–83. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979. Let the Lion Eat Straw. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979. Let the Lion Eat Straw. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Reissued by Harper/Collins (Amistad), 2004. The Magic Sun Spins. London: Paul Bremen, 1975. Opening Line: The Creative Writer: From Blank Page to Finished Story. New York: Eneke Publications, 2000.

ELLEASE SOUTHERLAND

535

‘‘Seventeen Days in Nigeria.’’ Black World 21 ( January 1972): 29–41. This Year in Nigeria: A Memoir. New York: Eneke Publications, 2001.

Studies of Ellease Southerland’s Works Asim, Jabari. Rev. of Let the Lion Eat Straw. Washington Post, July 20, 2005, T15. Blundell, Janet Boyarin. Rev. of Let the Lion Eat Straw. Library Journal 104.7 (April 1, 1979): 850. Brookhart, Mary Hughes. ‘‘Ellease Southerland.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, v 33: AfroAmerican Fiction Writers After 1955, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 239–44. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research, 1984. Leonard, John. ‘‘Homage Is Paid.’’ New York Times, May 10, 1979, C21. McKinney-Whetstone, Diane. ‘‘First Person Singular.’’ Essence 36 (May 2005): 181. Swan, Annalyn. ‘‘Love Story.’’ Time 113.25 ( June 18, 1979): 85–86. Towers, Robert. ‘‘In the Trap.’’ New York Review of Books 26.15 (October 11, 1979): 43–44. Trescott, Jacqueline. ‘‘Let the Lion Eat Straw. Let the Author Win Glory.’’ Washington Post August 6, 1979, B1, B11. Watkins, Mel. ‘‘One Woman Surviving.’’ New York Times Book Review June 3, 1979, BR4, 2. Wittels, Anne. ‘‘Abeba’s Journey into Maturity.’’ Los Angeles Times July 15, 1979, N4.

Kate Falvey

MARIA W. STEWART (1803–1879)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Essay writer Maria W. Stewart was born Maria Miller to free parents in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1803. When she was five years old, her parents died, and she was ‘‘bound out’’ as a servant for a clergyman’s household for the next ten years. She subsequently worked as a domestic servant while educating herself by attending Sabbath School classes and studying the Bible. In the 1820s, she moved to Boston. There she met James W. Stewart, a veteran of the War of 1812 and successful shipping agent who outfitted whaling and fishing vessels, whom she married on August 10, 1826, and settled into the activist-minded free African American community. After only three years of marriage, Maria Stewart’s husband became ill and died, plunging her into grief and destitution. James Stewart had amply provided for his wife in his will, but his white business associates defrauded her of her inheritance. Maria Stewart’s sorrow deepened when her close friend David Walker, author of the radical Appeal, died in 1830, and then Thomas Paul, founder of the First African Baptist Church that she attended and the minister who officiated at her wedding, died in 1831. The young widow sought solace in Christianity and experienced religious conversion. She believed God called her to address the spiritual and political issues facing the African American community. In 1832, Stewart became the first American woman to deliver a speech to a ‘‘promiscuous’’ audience composed of African American and white males and females. During her three-year public career, she published a political pamphlet, spiritual meditations, and antislavery writings, and she delivered four lectures. William Lloyd Garrison advertised and published her work in the Liberator, a weekly abolitionist newspaper. In 1833 Maria Stewart ended her controversial public-speaking career and began moving south in search of a place where she could continue her community activism and support herself. She first settled in New York and worked in the abolitionist movement and women’s literary societies and began a teaching career. In 1835, she published a collection of meditations and lectures she had presented in Boston. Stewart moved on to Baltimore and continued teaching before relocating to Washington, D.C., in 1861 where she founded a school before accepting a position as the Matron of the Freedmen’s Hospital. Near the end of her life, Stewart petitioned the U.S. government and received a pension as a veteran’s widow. She secured her legacy by investing the money in a new edition of her work. Stewart died in December 1879. MAJOR WORKS Stewart’s writings and speeches reflect her belief that God called her to embark on a public career to rouse African Americans to fight for freedom and equality. She revealed the spiritual nature of her calling in her Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall (1832): ‘‘Methinks I heard a spiritual interrogation—‘Who shall go forward, and take off the

MARIA W. STEWART

537

reproach that is cast upon the people of color? Shall it be a woman? And my heart made this reply—‘If it is thy will, be it even so, Lord Jesus!’’’ Stewart realized the danger she faced by stepping into the public arena but expressed a willingness to die for God’s cause and her people. She relied on the Bible as the chief source for her work. Her speeches and essays also reflected David Walker’s revolutionary ideas regarding racial uplift and her knowledge of history and current events. In her work, Stewart focused her attention on the free African American community, whom she considered only slightly better off than slaves did because they refused to challenge restrictions on their liberty. She expressed concern for African Americans’ temporal affairs and eternal salvation and urged them to develop their talents and intellect, live moral lives, and devote themselves to racial activism. Stewart challenged her audience to emulate the valor of the pilgrims and American revolutionaries in demanding freedom, and advised them to establish institutions such as grocery stores and churches to support their community. She was particularly concerned with the plight of African American women whom she encouraged to be virtuous mothers and use their influence in the home to affect change in their communities. Stewart directed most of her ire at African American men, however, whom she chided for not fulfilling their role as community leaders. Stewart also included admonitions to white members of her audience. She scolded white women for failing to acknowledge their privileged position and ignoring the needs of African American children. Stewart demanded white Americans’ support for African American freedom as they had backed other nations, such as Poland, in their fight for liberty. She particularly decried colonization. In An Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall, Stewart declared, ‘‘They would drive us to a strange land. But before I go, the bayonet shall pierce me through.’’ Stewart reminded white Americans that African blood had enriched America’s soil and warned them that God would repay them for wrongs done to African Americans. CRITICAL RECEPTION Scholars have described Stewart in a variety of ways, including abolitionist, evangelist, feminist, journalist, and prophet, and have examined her writings through African and Western literary traditions. In Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, Marilyn Richardson characterizes Stewart’s work as ‘‘political thought,’’ situates her as a feminist, and examines how abolitionist rhetoric, the Black Jeremiad, and call-and-response cadence inform her work. In Written by Herself, Frances Smith Foster analyzes how Stewart helped to create a literary tradition for African American women and ‘‘wrote herself into history’’ by giving speeches and publishing her writings that advocated militant Christianity as the means by which African Americans could transform their lives during a time when women were unwelcome in the public sphere. Carla Peterson builds on Foster and Richardson’s work in Doers of the Word by describing Stewart’s writings and speeches as ‘‘political sermonizing,’’ and arguing that her Meditations reflect the inner struggles that led her to engage in social activism, while her other work exemplifies the depth of her commitment to racial uplift. Some scholars focus on Stewart’s role in her community. In her entry on Stewart published in Women Public Speakers in the United States, Laura R. Sells posits Stewart as a forerunner for key abolitionists and activists and examines the rhetorical strategies

538

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Stewart used to surmount the challenge the African American female faced in being a ‘‘true woman’’ in nineteenth-century America. In Raising Her Voice, Roger Streiltmatter portrays Stewart as the first African American female journalist and critiques her writings and speeches published in the Liberator as journalistic efforts to bring about racial reform from within the African American community. In ‘‘The Productions of Maria W. Stewart: Rebellious Domesticity and Black Women’s Liberation,’’ Opal Moore examines the contradictions in Stewart’s work as she created a new voice for African American women who sought to redefine their role in their families, community, and country. Other scholars focus on Stewart’s rhetorical strategies. In Traces of a Stream, Jacqueline Jones Royster analyzes how Stewart creates an ethos within her essays to justify her entry into the public sphere and provide the authority she needed to encourage her audience to participate in racial uplift. In We Are Coming, Shirley Logan employs classifications from The New Rhetoric to examine how Stewart created communion with her audience by highlighting their African heritage and the liberation it offered through biblical references to Ethiopia stretching forth her hand unto God.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Maria W. Stewart ‘‘Lecture Delivered at The Franklin Hall.’’ In Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, edited by Marilyn Richardson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. Washington, DC: n.p., 1879. Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart Presented to the First Africa Baptist Church & Society, of the City of Boston. Boston: Friends of Freedom and Virtue, 1835.

Studies of Maria W. Stewart’s Works Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomingdale: Indiana University Press, 1993. Logan, Shirley Wilson, ed. ‘‘African Origins/American Appropriations: Maria Stewart and ‘Ethiopia Rising.’’’ In We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women, 23–43. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Moody, Jocelyn. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Moore, Opal. ‘‘The Productions of Maria W. Stewart: Rebellious Domesticity and Black Women’s Liberation.’’ In Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture, edited by Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischman, 441–65. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Peterson, Carla L. Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830–1880. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Richardson, Marilyn, ed. Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Royster, Jacqueline. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Rycenga, Jennifer. ‘‘Maria Stewart, Black Abolitionist, and the Idea of Freedom.’’ In Frontline Feminisms: Women, War and Resistance, edited by Marguerite R. Waller and Jennifer Rycenga. New York: Garland, 2000.

MARIA W. STEWART

539

Sells, Laura R. ‘‘Maria W. Miller Stewart (1803–1879), first African-American woman to lecture in public.’’ In Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925, A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, 339–48. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Streitmatter, Roger. Raising Her Voice: African-American Women Journalists Who Changed History. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994.

Rhondda Robinson Thomas

BARBARA SUMMERS (1944– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Barbara Summers has written and edited a number of books, including I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America. She was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in French literature. Summers completed doctoral degree in French at Yale, and spent time studying at the Sorbonne in France. Summers has taught French, English, and journalism and currently teaches English Composition at a CUNY institution. She lives in New York City and is at work on a novel about the Harlem Renaissance. MAJOR WORKS I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America is a pictorial of African American women who in Summers’s opinion have been instrumental in shaping America. In this book Summers captures the life of seventy-five magnificent women through their heart and mind outside of race, gender, age, and class. Nouvelle Soul is a collection of twenty-four short stories, which introduced Barbara Summers as a new literary voice. The book represents diverse men and women confronted with every day life. Different in subject and style from typical stories, the stories in Nouvelle Soul provide new perspectives on scenes people often overlook. In one of the stories ‘‘Me and Superman,’’ the writer obliges the reader to ponder a homeless street person that he would otherwise prefer not to see. The Price You Pay has been labeled both a mystery and love story. It explores the mixed blessings bestowed on women who live off their looks and dreams. Through a pleasant trip Summers identify the richness of African American life and culture. Black and Beautiful: How Women of Color Changed the Fashion Industry is a collection of 250 photos that Summers acquired while interviewing her modeling friends. The book emphasizes more than sixty years of the African American fashion model’s conquest and struggles. Black and Beautiful depicts and celebrates the beauty of the African American woman who has been historically viewed as unattractive. This book tries to eliminate the blinders to correct our cultural vision, and unfold the definition of the beauty. Open the Unusual Door, Summers’s most recent book, includes sixteen autobiographical essays from a diverse group of African Americans. These stories are examples of challenges and choices of what happened to these people and what they did to make things happen. The anthology teaches us how to recognize the right door, open it, and walk through it. Skin Deep: Inside the World of Black Fashion Models is a book of more than 250 pictures about the history of black models in America and abroad for the past fifty years. Summers, a Ford model for seventeen years, spent a decade interviewing models on three continents to record their experiences.

BARBARA SUMMERS

541

CRITICAL RECEPTION Reception of Summers’s work is generally favorable. In a Los Angeles Times article, Lynell George writes that Summers has provided a record—oral remembrances, antique advertisements, fantasy high-fashion spreads, working girl composite shots—that stitches together the flourish and fanfare with the contortions and compromise that black women endured to fit ideals of imagination—without losing their sense of self (back cover). Likewise, in a review of Nouvelle Soul that appeared in Publishers Weekly, the author wrote, ‘‘the author of the story collection Nouvelle Soul makes her novelistic debut with a glitzy tale of racism and intrigue in the world of modeling. Summers a former Ford model, writes with firsthand knowledge about the dilemmas faced by women of color in this line of work; glimpses of their rarefied world distinguish this otherwise unexciting example of glamour fiction from the pack of Danielle Steel wannabes’’ (408). Finally about I Dream a World, Yvonne Easton writes, ‘‘I Dream a World established a cultural meeting point of racial and sexual polarities in America and it created a new page in America history books where succeeding generations can write their names. If that’s not changing America, I don’t know what it is’’ (17). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Barbara Summers Black and Beautiful: How Women of Color Changed the Fashion Industry. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989. Nouvelle Soul: Short Stories. New York: Amistad Press, 1992. Open the Unusual Door. Boston: Graphia, 2005. The Price You Pay: A Novel. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Skin Deep: Inside the World of Black Fashion Models. New York: Amistad Press, 1998.

Studies of Barbara Summers’s Works Easton, Yvonne. Intro. I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, edited by Barbara Summers. New York: Stewart, Tabor & Chang, 1999. 17. George, Lynell. Back Cover. Black and Beautiful: How Women of Color Changed the Fashion Industry. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Rev. of Nouvelle Soul. Publishers Weekly 241.3 ( January 17, 1994): 408.

Firouzeh Dianat

ELLEN TARRY (1906– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Writer of children literature, Ellen Tarry has also written biographies of many African Americans. Born to mulatto parents, she was set apart from other African American children by her light skin, reddish-blonde hair, and blue eyes. Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, she attended public school before leaving for a Catholic school in Virginia. She later studied at Alabama State College, Bank Street College, and Fordham University School of Communications. In Virginia, she converted to Catholicism against the wishes of her father and spoke out against problems and policies that she felt prevented other African Americans from embracing the Catholic Church. For several years, Tarry was a journalist and contributor to Commonweal and Catholic World magazines where she wrote about these issues in such articles as ‘‘Native Daughter’’ and ‘‘Why Is Not the Negro Catholic?’’ Tarry was a cofounder of Friendship House in New York, an interracial Christian center, and a director of the Chicago branch. She served in many organizations dedicated to social justice as well as fighting poverty, racism, and Communism, including several positions with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Tarry is best known for her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance along with James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and others. With this group, she worked to bring about reform through her writing. Tarry’s stories advocate social change through compassion and understanding between races. MAJOR WORKS Tarry taught elementary school and realized that there were no books that gave children a realistic view of city life, which inspired her to create stories of her own. Her first book, Janie Belle, presents the story of an abandoned child and her adoption by a white nurse. It was a significant breakthrough in African American children’s stories, depicting a positive relationship between different races. Hezekiah Horton and The Runaway Elephant both feature an African American boy growing up in an urban setting in sharp contrast to the stereotypical southern countryside. Although Hezekiah’s relationship with Mr. Ed in Hezekiah Horton can be seen as subservient and undesirable, it is important to remember that the friendship would have been shocking to some readers at the time. My Dog Rinty, written with Marie Hall Els, tells the story of an African American boy who loses his dog and finds it with the help of kind white strangers. The photographs in this book are also noteworthy, as they provide a realistic view of a Harlem neighborhood. Tarry also wrote biographies of several African Americans whose stories had been largely neglected, including her friend James Weldon Johnson.

ELLEN TARRY

543

CRITICAL RECEPTION Unfortunately, very little has been written on Tarry’s life and works. She is often cited as a member of the Harlem Renaissance and as a pioneer in African American children’s writing. However, her portrayal of African Americans in a positive and active role was groundbreaking for its time. She constantly stresses that it is possible to overcome poverty and racial prejudice. Her stories focus on people from her own life, helping her achieve a sense of realism that had been lacking in many other writers. Although children’s literature met with some resistance in the Harlem Renaissance, Tarry felt it was important to teach children about life outside their hometowns. As Tarry claims in an interview with Katharine Capshaw Smith, she can think of no better way to be remembered as a writer than ‘‘as a person who tried to depict life as she saw it’’ (Smith 283). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Ellen Tarry Hezekiah Horton. New York: Viking Press, 1942. Janie Belle. New York: Garden City, 1940. Katharine Drexel: Friend of the Neglected. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1958. (Reprinted after Drexel’s canonization as St. Katharine Drexel: Friend of the Oppressed. Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2000.) Martin De Porres Saint of the New World. Fairfield, CA: Vision, 1963. My Dog Rinty. New York: Viking Press, 1946. The Other Toussaint: A Modern Biography of Pierre Toussaint, a Post-Revolutionary Black. Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981. The Runaway Elephant. New York: Viking Press, 1950. The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman. Detroit: McKay, 1955. Young Jim: The Early Years of James Weldon Johnson. New York: Dodd, 1967.

Studies of Ellen Tarry’s Works Scally, Sr. Mary Anthony. Negro Catholic Writers, 1900–1943: A Bio-Bibliography. Sr. Mary Anthony Scally. Detroit: Walter Romig, 1945. Smith, Jessie Carney, ed. Notable Black American Women. Detroit: Gale, 1992. Smith, Katharine Capshaw. ‘‘From Bank Street to Harlem: A Conversation with Ellen Tarry.’’ The Lion and the Unicorn 23.2 (April 1999): 271–85. Sternsher, Bernard, and Judith Sealander. Women of Valor: The Struggle Against the Great Depression as Told in Their Own Life Stories. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1990.

Kevin Hogg

CLAUDIA TATE (1946–2002)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Claudia Tate, literary critic, was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on December 14, 1946. Tate’s parents, Harold Tate and Mary Austin Tate, were college-educated professionals who were able to provide a comfortable, middle-class upbringing for their daughter. The material success of the Tates, their emphasis on the importance of education, and their close connections to both the south and north offered Claudia Tate a perspective on African American identity and culture that diverged sharply from the common perception that African American identity is defined solely by racial oppression and economic deprivation. After graduating from Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School with honors, Tate enrolled in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor program in English and American Literature. She received her B.A. in 1968 and continued her studies in English at Harvard University, where she encountered Cheryl Wall, Arnold Rampersad, and Nellie McKay, scholars who, along with Tate, later helped establish African American literature as a modern field of literary study. Tate was awarded her Ph.D. in 1977. She taught at Howard University (1977–1989), George Washington University (1989–1996), and Princeton University (1997–2002). Tate died of small cell lung cancer July 29, 2002. MAJOR WORKS Tate’s major books, Black Women Writers at Work (1983), Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (1992), and Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998), were groundbreaking explorations of previously ignored issues and approaches to reading African American literature. Black Women Writers at Work is a collection of fourteen interviews of then-established and -emerging African American women writers. Tate, according to the introduction to the volume, envisioned her work as an exploration of the impact of African American women’s dual status as racial minority and women in a male-dominated society on their literature. Tate also describes her interviews as: carefully controlled dialogue fashioned to engage the writer in an analytical discussion of her work with regard to theme and technique, as well as the intellectual and social climates from which the work arose. Each writer presents an understanding of her own sensibility, and explains aspects of her craft that are rendered in particular rhetorical, dramatic, and lyrical details. As a result, the interviews provide firsthand accounts for appreciating a specific body of literature and the creative process in general. (xviii–xix)

Tate’s interviews emphasize the craft of these women’s texts, a point that needed to be made given the tendency of literary critics—when they read African American literature as a part of the American canon—to focus on the sociological and historical

CLAUDIA TATE

545

aspects, to the exclusion of literary aspects, in works by African American women. Tate’s discussion of the characteristics of writing by African American women, based on her reading and the interviews included in the volume, help to outline the connections between the works of women. The articulation of those connections was an important step in the establishment of African American women’s writing as a sub-field. Her discussion of the characteristics of ‘‘the black heroine,’’ the central figures in the works of the interviewees, anticipates her work in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire. Black Women Writers was well received by critics. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire offers an examination of African American women’s post-Reconstruction domestic novels, a genre that was often ignored or dismissed because of its focus on heroines intent on marriage, the acceptance of a femininity rooted in Victorian ideals, and the achievement of middle-class economic status. Tate’s methodology in her study of these novels involves close reading and careful contextualization of the works through a discussion of the historical period and the expectations of the contemporaneous audience for the works. Tate’s overarching argument is that critics’dismissal of these novels from the African American canon is a result of a failure to appreciate the importance of these works in consolidating African American citizenship and participation in public life. For the audiences reading these works, the lives of these African American heroines—adventures, followed by marriage, an idealized family life, and economic success—offer a vision of an affirmative African American culture in a time when the promise of Reconstruction was rapidly receding. More contemporary critics read these texts out of the African American literary canon because they fail to adhere to a model of African American literature that emphasize the impact of racial oppression and discrimination on African American families and communities, and that offered overt social protest within the novel. Ignoring this significant body of work suppressed the contribution of African American women writers and the diversity of perspectives encompassed by African American literature. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998) is another study motivated by Tate’s desire to broaden the canon of African American literature. As with Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, Tate uses psychoanalysis to examine texts that have been neglected because of their authors’ refusal of the ‘‘racial protocol’’ of overt social protest against racial oppression in the lives of African Americans. Instead, the authors of these novels focus on the issue of personal desire or longing by using white protagonists or by de-emphasizing the issue of racial oppression in the lives of African Americans protagonists. While some critics took Tate to task for applying psychoanalysis to African American literature, Tate’s ability to bring a fresh (and rigorous) perspective to these works was praised by many. CRITICAL RECEPTION Black Women Writers at Work was lauded as a collection of rich primary texts. In her review of Tate’s life and works, critic Nell Irwin Painter argues that the text ‘‘set a new standard for the interview as a genre and mapped new directions for critical and theoretical discourse on African American women writers.’’ Domestic Allegories of Political Desire was well received by critics, with some reservations expressed by those critics. Tate’s work emphasizes the need to pay attention to the original contexts in which these texts were written and received. By bringing these texts to the attention of contemporary readers of African American literature, Tate helped to expose the impact that

546

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

preconceptions about what African American literature is ‘‘supposed to do’’—register protest—had on the critical reception of texts. Criticism of the work focus on whether or not some of the texts analyzed by Tate (Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee, for example) receive less critical attention because of the poor quality of the texts, as opposed to the ideological biases of the critics. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels (and in other works) helps to legitimize the use of psychoanalytical criticism in African American literature. Many critics laud Tate’s work as a pioneering first step in such readings, even as they acknowledge that her eclectic approach to psychoanalysis (Tate uses several schools of psychoanalysis in her readings, including work based on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan) at times generated readings that would have functioned well enough or better without the application of psychoanalytic theory. Tate was a prolific writer whose rigorous theoretical work and innovative approaches to African American literature earned her the respect of her peers. Her involvement with African American literature as an editor of scholarly editions, a reviewer of works within the field of African American literature, and as a writer of her own scholarly texts helped to change the shape of African American literary studies. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Claudia Tate Black Women Writers at Work (edited by Tate). New York: Continuum, 1983. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ‘‘The Occult of True Black Womanhood.’’ With Ann duCille. In American Literary Studies: A Methodical Reader, edited by Michael A. Elliot and Claudia Stokes. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ‘‘Reshuffling the Deck; Or, (Re)Reading Race and Gender in Black Women’s Writing.’’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 7.1 (1988): 119–23. The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson. New York: G. K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall, 1997. The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Studies of Claudia Tate’s Works Carby, Hazel. ‘‘African American Intellectuals Symposium: Claudia Tate.’’ Journal of African American History 88.1 (2003): 78–81. ‘‘Claudia Tate: In Memoriam.’’ African American Review 36.4 (2002): 705. Ervin, Hazel Arnett. ‘‘In Memoriam-Claudia Tate (December 14, 1946–July 29, 2002).’’ CLA Journal 46.2 (2002): 270–73. Hoeveler, Diane Long. Rev. of Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, by Tate. African American Review 33.4 (1999): 691. Jones, Clara B., and Matthew V. Johnson. Rev. of Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, by Tate. The Western Journal of Black Studies 22.3 (1998): 205. Painter, Nell Irvin. ‘‘Introduction: Claudia Tate and the Protocols of Black Literature and Scholarship.’’ Journal of African American History 88.1 (2003): 60–65.

Angela Shaw-Thornburg

MILDRED D. TAYLOR (1943– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Mildred Taylor, juvenile writer, was born September 13, 1943, in Jackson, Mississippi, to Wilbert Lee and Deletha Marie (Davis) Taylor. At three months old, her family moved to Toledo, Ohio, because her father refused to raise Taylor and her sister Wilma in the racist, segregated south. Despite moving north, the family never forgot their southern roots and frequently vacationed in the south, returning to visit family members. As an adolescent Taylor loved reading, and read books from home and the library. She dreamed of writing novels with African American main characters, portraying the culture accurately. Taylor decided to become a writer around the age of nine or ten (Crowe 17). She was exposed to the art of storytelling during her childhood and adolescence. On her trips down south, she was mesmerized by all the adventurous stories she heard her family tell. After finishing high school, she attended the University of Toledo majoring in education. In 1965, after graduating with a baccalaureate degree, she served in the Peace Corps. Taylor spent two years in Ethiopia, from 1965 to 1967, teaching English and history to Ethiopian students. When she returned to the United States, she moved to Boulder, Colorado, and enrolled in the journalism graduate program at the University of Colorado. She redefined their Black Studies Program and developed a study skills and tutorial program for the Bachelor of Science curriculum. After receiving her master’s degree in journalism, she moved to Los Angeles and became a proofreader and editor for a tax firm. In the back of her mind was the desire to write and, during her spare time, she wrote down familial stories. The stories she remembered hearing down south transpired into the Logan sagas. MAJOR WORKS Taylor’s first published book stemmed from an old manuscript. She heard about a contest sponsored by the Council of Interracial Books for Children. She had entered the manuscript in contests but each time it was rejected. Eight months after entering the contest, she received confirmation that she won the contest in the African American category. That manuscript is Taylor’s first novella, Song of the Trees (1975). It debuted the Logan family: Stacey, Christopher-John, Little Man, Cassie, Mama, Big Ma, Papa, and Uncle Hammer. Taylor’s story depicts an actual incident and is narrated through the voice of eight-year-old Cassie Logan. There are three generations of Logans living on land Grandpa Logan bought in 1887. David Logan leaves for Louisiana to take a job laying railroad track. Meanwhile, a white man threatens to cut down all the trees on their land. David returns to confront the white man before the trees are cut. Taylor’s second book Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) is set in Great Faith, Mississippi, in 1933. It earned the prestigious Newbery medal in 1977 and continues the saga of the Logan family. Now considered a classic in children’s books, Taylor wrote her author’s note as a tribute to the familial influence in her writing. She credits her father for

548

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

instilling strong moral values and a sense of self-respect and dignity despite living in a racist society. The book chronicles the Logan family’s life and shows how they cope with racial discrimination everyday. Cassie must wait for help until the white customers are served in Mr. Barnett’s store; the Logan children are splashed with mud by a school bus transporting white children to school. Mama defies the school administration by discussing slavery in a history lesson, therefore, losing her job. A childhood friend of Cassie and her brothers, T. J. Avery, is involved in a robbery of a store owned by Mr. Barnett. T. J. is then accused of murder after T. J.’s accomplices, the Simms brothers, who are white, murder Mr. Barnett. Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981) continues the story of the Logans. It won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1982 and was nominated for the American Book Award. It begins with T. J. Avery’s trial, which results in an all-white jury convicting him. Other incidents include a sixty-five-year-old African American woman being denied the right to vote, local white boys harassing a biracial girl, and Cassie’s brother, Stacey, almost dying because of his boss. The next book, The Friendship, written in 1987, also won a Coretta Scott King Award and a 1988 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. It is a short novel, in which Cassie and her siblings witness the murder of a family friend, Mr. Tom Bee. Taylor’s other books include The Gold Cadillac (1987), a story set in the 1950s about an African American family’s car trip down south in an expensive car. Jeremy Simms, the Logan children’s white friend, narrates Mississippi Bridge (1990). It tells the story of a bridge collapsing because of an overcrowded bus. The Road to Memphis (1990) deals with Moe, a friend of the Logan children, who beats up three white boys and faces a lynching because of it. The Well (1995) features a young David Logan, Cassie’s father, who narrates the story. It is set in the early 1900s during a sweltering summer, when most of the wells have dried. The Logans share their well water with neighbors. Jealousy fueled by the Simms family results in the poisoning of Logan’s well. The Land (2001) is the first book in the Logan family saga. Two themes evident in Taylor’s work are family unity and land ownership. Coming from a strong familial background spanning several generations, she infuses a theme of family into her stories. As a child, she always felt African Americans were misrepresented and incorrectly portrayed in history books. ‘‘I envisioned presenting an aspect of American history which during my own childhood was not presented in the history books. I envisioned presenting a family united in love and self-respect, and parents, strong and sensitive, attempting to guide their children successfully without harming their spirits, through the hazardous maze of living in a discriminatory society.’’ (Acceptance Speech)

CRITICAL RECEPTION Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is praised for its honesty in portraying racial discrimination. Mildred Taylor pioneered children’s literature at a time when few children’s books about African Americans existed. She is considered a pioneer in writing books depicting African Americans realistically and truthfully. Dianne Johnson from World Literature Today says, ‘‘. . . Mildred Taylor’s writing is timeless; in a most profound way, it is bound neither to date nor place because she writes not only about American civil rights but about human rights and the human spirit’’ (4). Taylor has, however, received criticism from some parents regarding her use of the ‘‘n’’ word. Some people feel children should not be introduced to the harsh side of

MILDRED D. TAYLOR

549

American history. Sometimes, schools have responded to the backlash. Roll of Thunder in schools has been a constant censored book throughout the country. ‘‘ . . . I understand not wanting a child to hear painful words. . . . I do not understand trying to prevent a child from learning about history that is a part of America . . . ’’ (Scales). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Mildred D. Taylor The Friendship. Illustrated by Max Ginsburg. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1987. The Gold Cadillac. Illustrated by Michael Hays. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1987. The Land. New York: Phyllis Fogelman Books/Penguin Putnam, 2001. Let the Circle Be Unbroken. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1981. Mississippi Bridge. Illustrated by Max Ginsburg. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1990. ‘‘My Life as a Writer.’’ World Literature Today, 78.2 (May–August 2004). The Road to Memphis. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1990. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1976. Song of the Trees. Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1975. The Well: David’s Story. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1995.

Studies of Mildred D. Taylor’s Works Bader, Barbara. ‘‘How the Little House Gave Ground: The Beginnings of Multiculturism in a New Black Children’s Literature.’’ Horn Book Magazine (November/December 2002): 657–74. Bontempo, B., and R. Jerome. ‘‘Exploring Diversity in Adolescent Literature.’’ Workshop Presentation, National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, Baltimore, Maryland. November 19, 1989. Crowe, Chris. Presenting Mildred D. Taylor, edited by Patricia J. Campbell. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. Hayn, Judith, and Deborah Sherril. ‘‘Female Protagonists in Multicultural Young Adult Literature: Sources & Strategies.’’ ALAN Review 24.1 (1996): 43–46. Huber, Angela. ‘‘Beyond the Image: Adolescent Girls Reading and Social Reality.’’ NWSA Journal 12.1 (Spring 2000): 84–99. Johnson, Dianne. ‘‘A Tribute to Mildred D. Taylor.’’ World Literature Today 78.2 (May–August 2004): 4. Mikkelsen, Nina. ‘‘Insiders, Outsiders, and the Question of Authenticity: Who Shall Write for African-American Children?’’ African American Review 32.1 (Spring 1998): 33–49. Rochel, Hazel. ‘‘The Booklist Interview: Mildred Taylor.’’ Booklist 98.2 (September 15, 2001): 221. Scales, Pat. ‘‘Profile: Mildred D. Taylor: Keeper of Stories.’’ Language Arts, Urbana 80.3 ( Jan 2003): 240–45. Schafer, Elizabeth. ‘‘I’m Gonna Glory in Learnin’: Academic Aspirations of African American Characters in Children’s Literature.’’ African American Review 32.1, Children’s and YoungAdult Literature Issue (Spring 1998): 57–66. Simon, Daniel. ‘‘Introducing the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature.’’ World Literature Today 78.2 (May–August 2004): 5–7. Smith, Karen Patricia,ed. ‘‘African-American Voices in Young Adult Literature.’’ Tradition, Transition and Transformation (1994).

Shawntaye M. Scott

SUSIE KING TAYLOR (1848–1912)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Laundress, nurse, teacher, and autobiographer, Susie King Taylor was born Susie Baker in 1848 on a slave plantation in Georgia. She was sent to live with her grandmother in Savannah, where she learned to read and write clandestinely: ‘‘We went every day about nine o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them.’’ After the announcement that all slaves in the vicinity of Fort Pulaski would be free, Taylor and her family went to Saint Simons Island to obtain their liberty. Teenage Susie found herself living with and working for the 33rd United States Colored Troop commanded by Colonel T. Higginson. While she remained with the troop, Taylor worked as a laundress, healed the injured, and taught reading and writing to soldiers. She witnessed some crucial events of the American Civil War and eventually married a black soldier, Edward King. After the war, Taylor continued to be engaged with education and opened several schools (including a public institution for black children and a night one for adults). When her last school closed in 1868, Taylor started working in domestic service. In 1879 she remarried. Her second husband was Russell L. Taylor. Susie King Taylor continued to be extremely engaged in both social and political causes (‘‘my interest in the boys in blue had not abated’’) and in 1886 she helped organize the Corps 67, Women’s Relief Corps, where she collaborated as guard, secretary, treasurer, and president. She was encouraged to write her autobiography which she published in 1902 under the title: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, Late 1st South Carolina Volunteers: A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs. She died in 1912. MAJOR WORKS Susie King Taylor only published one book in which she told her experiences in the American Civil War. Although the autobiography Reminiscences starts by giving a brief account of her past as a slave and also deals with her life after the Civil War, the main theme of the book is her experience with the 33rd Colored Troops. Told in a very direct and objective style, Taylor wants to emphasize the deep commitment and bravery of African Americans in the Civil War as opposed to the postwar lack of involvement of the American nation toward blacks. The book is filled with her anecdotes and experiences in camp, although the most powerful and outspoken chapter is number XIII where she overtly deals with racial problems in the United States: ‘‘I wonder if our white fellow men realize the true sense or meaning of brotherhood? . . . when I read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, was the war in vain?’’ The tone used by Taylor throughout Reminiscences is a combination between patriotism and disillusionment at the treatment of African Americans before and after the Civil War.

SUSIE KING TAYLOR

551

CRITICAL RECEPTION Susie King Taylor’s work has not been widely reviewed, so she still remains a pretty much-unknown autobiographer. The scholars who have studied her work agree that her Reminiscences is an exceptional book that describes the Civil War from an unusual perspective. As W. L. Rose states it: ‘‘there is nothing vaguely resembling Susie King Taylor’s small volume of random recollections in the entire literature of the Civil War’’ (7). In J. Stover’s ‘‘African-American ‘Mother Tongue’ Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Postbellum Black Women’s Autobiography: Elizabeth Keckley and Susie King Taylor’’ (2003), Taylor and Elizabeth Keckley are analyzed as examples of postbellum narrators who sought new ways of expressing the African American reality after the Emancipation. Taylor’s style is described in the article as ‘‘documentary’’ (120), ‘‘clever,’’ and ‘‘creative’’ (123). Joanne Braxton’s chapter ‘‘Fugitive Slaves and Sanctified Ladies: Narratives of Power and Vision’’ (1989) focuses on several African American women who wrote their autobiographies and who offered other textual possibilities besides the widely known slave narrative. Taylor is praised here for her concern with ‘‘the bond between freedom and literacy’’ (44) and for the ‘‘nurturing and self-sacrificing qualities of the heroine’’she portrays in her book. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Susie King Taylor Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, Late 1st South Carolina Volunteers: A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs. Princeton and New York: Markus Wiener Publishing, Inc., 1988. Reprint, 1992.

Studies of Susie King Taylor’s Work Baum, Rosalie Murphy. ‘‘Susie King Taylor.’’ In African American Women—A Biographical Dictionary, edited by D.C. Salem. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. Braxton, Joanne. ‘‘Fugitive Slaves and Sanctified Ladies: Narratives of Power and Vision.’’ In Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Moody, J. K. ‘‘Twice Other, Once Shy: Nineteenth-Century Black Women Autobiographers and the American Literary Tradition of Self-Effacement.’’ A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 7.1 (Spring 1992): 46–61. Nulton, K. ‘‘The War of Susie King Taylor.’’ In Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930, edited by Monika M. Elbert. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. Ostrom, Hans, and J. David Macey, eds. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Rose, W.L.. ‘‘Introduction.’’ A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs, edited by Patricia W. Romero. New York: Markus Wiener Publishing, 1988. Stover, Johnnie. ‘‘African-American ‘Mother Tongue’ Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Postbellum Black Women’s Autobiography: Elizabeth Keckley and Susie King Taylor.’’ A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 18.1 (2003) 115–144.

Laura Gimeno Pahissa

LISA TEASLEY (1962– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Fiction writer Lisa Teasley was born the oldest of three daughters to Larkin and Violet Teasley in Los Angeles. She recalls a very sheltered childhood, but one filled with encouragement of her artistic endeavors at a very early age. Her mother taught her to draw, and around the age of five or six, Teasley began to write and illustrate her own stories, sure even at that young age that she would one day be a writer. Teasley stayed close to home during her college years, earning a bachelor’s in English with an emphasis in creative writing from UCLA. While at UCLA, Teasley nurtured the seeds of short stories that would later mature into Glow in the Dark, her debut work. She published an essay in a 1997 anthology, An Ear to the Ground: Presenting Writers from 2 Coasts, and has to date released two works—a collection of short stories, Glow in the Dark (2002), and a novel, Dive (2004). MAJOR WORKS While Teasley may describe her life as rather ordinary, the lives of her characters are extraordinary in a way only an imaginative girl from a sheltered upbringing might envision. The characters of both Glow in the Dark and Dive abound with folks who would be, for the most part, out of sorts with Teasley’s parents and friends in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles. From a forlorn ten-year-old to a drug-addicted female surfer, the characters all reflect Teasley’s purpose as a fiction writer: to transport her readers into the thick of her characters’ psyches at that moment just before ‘‘breakdown or breakthrough.’’ Teasley told the Los Angeles Times, ‘‘I just happen to be attracted to those kind of situations, just in wondering what is the human spirit in those kind of dire circumstance[s], or just at the point of epiphany.’’ Thus, in Dive, Teasley presents Ruby, an indifferent spirit who spins out of control after a murder occurs outside her Laurel Canyon guest home, and Ray, a construction worker whose past includes three ex-wives and someone else’s blood on his hands. Love, or the possibility of it, seems to be the impetus moving these characters from the brink of breakdown to the brink of a breakthrough. CRITICAL RECEPTION Readers and critics have been most impressed with Teasley’s characterizations, particularly her willingness as an African American woman to write in voices clearly alien to her own. Ray, in Dive, is a white Floridian construction worker, for example, far divorced from Teasley’s own experience as a black Los Angelino artist, but as Los Angeles Times writer Reed Johnson notes, her prose is so ‘‘blunt and elliptical’’ that readers never get a chance to question the authenticity of her characters. Some critics have taken

LISA TEASLEY

553

exception to the violence that her characters perpetrate or suffer through, calling the situations ‘‘over the top,’’ yet the same critics applaud the unflinching eroticism in Teasley’s works, particularly Dive. Miriam Wolf ’s review of Dive indicates that ‘‘Teasley seems to be at her best when she’s illuminating the interplay between a man and a woman. Her writing is ribald and romantic at the same time.’’ The critical praise has resulted in several awards for her work, most recently the 2002 Gold Pen Award for Best Short Story Collection and the 2002 Pacificus Literary Foundation Best Short Story Writer award for fiction, both for Glow in the Dark. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Lisa Teasley Dive. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Glow in the Dark. Seattle: Cune Press, 2002.

Studies of Lisa Teasley’s Works Galipeaux, Jeff. Rev. of Glow in the Dark, by Lisa Teasley. San Francisco Chronicle on the Web, April 28, 2002, http://www.sfgate.com (accessed April 22, 2005). Johnson, Reed. ‘‘Words from a Street-Smart Tale Teller.’’ Los Angeles Times on the Web, February 24, 2002, http://www.lisateasley.com/latimes.html (accessed April 22, 2005). Nicholson, Joy. ‘‘Chewing Tobacco and Big Feet.’’ LA Weekly on the Web, May 28–June 3, 2004, http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/27/wls-nicholson.php (accessed April 22, 2005). Palmer, Nichole. Rev. of Glow in the Dark, by Lisa Teasley. Black Issues Book Review (May/June 2002): 44. Rev. of Dive, by Lisa Teasley. Kirkus Reviews 72.1 (2004): 15. Rev. of Dive, by Lisa Teasley. Publishers Weekly 251.6 (2004): 55. Tate, Greg. ‘‘Adventures in the Skin Trade.’’ Village Voice on the Web, March 27–April 2, 2002, http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0213,tate,33310,10.html (accessed April 22, 2005). Turrentine, Jeff. Rev. of Dive, by Lisa Teasley. New York Times Book Review, March 21, 2004, 16. Wolf, Miriam. Rev. of Dive, by Lisa Teasley. San Francisco Chronicle on the Web, March 28, 2004, http://www.sfgate.com (accessed April 22, 2005).

Jeremy Griggs

LUCY TERRY (1730–1821)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE The first African American writer, Lucy Terry was born in Africa where she was kidnapped and sold into slavery as an infant. At the age of five, Terry was purchased by Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts, where she lived until 1756 when she married a wealthy free landowner, Abijah Prince. Terry converted to Christianity as a child during the Great Awakening, and at the age of fourteen was admitted into the ‘‘fellowship’’ of the local church, an unusual occurrence for an African American during slavery. When she was twenty-five, the Prince family moved to Guildford, Vermont, where Terry spent the remainder of her life. Terry and her husband had six children and their home was a central gathering place in the community where Terry read her poems and told stories about Africa. Terry was very much a skilled orator, an abolitionist, and worked to promote and defend African American civil rights. When Williams College denied her son entry based on his race, Terry gave a compelling, though futile, threehour address to the Board of Trustees in his defense. Lucy Terry was the first African American to present, and win, an argument in front of the Supreme Court in a land ownership dispute. Lucy Terry died at the age of ninety-one. MAJOR WORKS Lucy Terry is the author of the first known literary work by an African American. Terry wrote the poem ‘‘Bars Fight’’ when she was sixteen years old and though she was known to have written many more, it is Terry’s only surviving work. The poem recounts the Indian ambush of two white families in the Bars, a common colonial term for meadow, on August 25, 1746, near Deerfield, Massachusetts. Though ‘‘Bars Fight’’ is not of significant literary style, the poem consists of simple rhymed couplets, that the poem exists at all challenges commonly held beliefs about African Americans in colonial America and particularly African American women. The colonial age was not conducive to poetic creativity and most colonials did not read or write; very few were inclined to write poetry. Terry’s authorship demonstrates the extent to which African Americans rejected the repressive atmosphere of slavery and, instead, empowered themselves through language. Though the poem itself is simple in structure, its characterizations are richly textured for the time and demonstrate a social awareness that belies standard beliefs about African American exclusion from social discourse. Terry gives the most attention in her poem to Eunice Allen, devoting six lines to Allen’s desire to ‘‘save herself by running.’’ But Allen was tripped up by her petticoats and suffered a ‘‘tommy hawk’’ on her head and left to die. Terry’s focus on Eunice Allen’s fate may be read as a criticism of the restrictive vestments woman of all races were required to wear in colonial America. Though African American and white women lived vastly different lives in terms of social standing and acceptance, Terry’s focus on the petticoats as the cause of Allen’s fate elicits a particular acknowledgement of the universality of women’s

LUCY TERRY

555

oppression by men. Though some of the known facts of the ambush differ slightly from the information in Terry’s poem, those disparities merely signal an independent minded poet who valued and demonstrated creative license, despite social attitudes about African American women. CRITICAL RECEPTION Critical reception of ‘‘Bars Fight’’ has been mixed. Some critics lament the poem’s lack of social commentary about the state of African American slaves at the time. Other scholars read the lack of social commentary as an attempt by Terry to be accepted by her community, a position that assumes Terry’s objective is motivated by social concerns. Other scholars read the poem’s subject as Terry’s recalcitrance against the belief that African Americans cannot command or understand white language, a reading more closely aligned with what is known about Terry’s authoritative involvement in community affairs. That a close textual reading of this poem unfortunately reveals nothing of the author or her life is a common critique of ‘‘Bars Fight.’’ Indeed, some scholars have questioned the authorship of the poem, a criticism which assumes a uniform’’ type’’ or ‘‘style’’ for any early African American literary work to be considered authentic. The very fact that the authorship of ‘‘Bars Fight’’ is questioned presumes a skepticism of authorship rooted in the pervasive history of American racism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Lucy Terry ‘‘The Bars Fight,’’ 1746. Springfield, MA: Samuel Bowles and Company, 1855.

Studies of Lucy Terry’s Work Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Harris, Sharon M. Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005.

Debbie Clare Olson

JOYCE CAROL THOMAS (1938– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Joyce Carol Thomas has contributed to the literary field through poetry, plays, and novels. She was born in a poor, rural family in Oklahoma that supplemented their livelihood by picking cotton during the Great Depression. She was fortunate to be surrounded by a long oral-storytelling tradition in the African American subculture, as well as a very strong influence from her church and close-knit family. Thomas feels she was compelled to write by this background and her very close relationships and church ties. She focuses upon family and values, recasting the tales she has heard within her family and community, and shows how people are all interconnected, interdependent, and important parts of a whole. Notably, Thomas does not focus on racial issues or take political stands in her writing. Ponca City, Oklahoma, was Thomas’s first home, and she was born to Floyd David and Leona Thompson Haynes in 1938. The fifth of nine children and the first of two girls, Thomas was surrounded by family. She still maintains a strong personal and literary connection with her hometown and state, using them frequently as the settings for her novels, stories, and poems. Thomas’s father worked as a barber. Thomas and her eight siblings augmented the family income by picking cotton in the summers with their parents. The family existed within a large and protected African American community. This community was homogenous unto itself, so Thomas experienced little of the turbulence of racial discrimination. A very strong grounding in a fundamentalist Christian faith was part of the overall community structure and contributed to Thomas’s love of words, music, stories, and rhythm. Her focus on patterns of speech and words derives from this. The Haynes family moved to Tracy, California, when Thomas was ten. There, as in Oklahoma, the family picked seasonal fruits to supplement their living. In California, many of the people Thomas worked alongside were hardworking Mexican Americans, and she formed strong attachments to their culture, as well as became fluent in Spanish. Thomas put herself through college at night while working full time as a phone operator. Thomas has four children from two marriages. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from San Jose State College, Thomas began teaching, and eventually earned a master’s degree in education from Stanford in 1967. Her interest in Spanish is directly tied to her days as a fruit and vegetable picker. Thomas taught at various schools for over twenty-five years as she raised her own family. Eventually, she began a shift into academia and creative-writing instruction in colleges. Assignments at California State University, Purdue, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, among others, fostered her writing career. She began publishing in the early 1970s, with several small volumes of poetry and four plays to her credit. Her first novel, Marked by Fire, was published in 1982, to great acclaim. Several of her novels and poetry anthologies would later be adapted for the stage. Thomas retired from teaching to pursue her writing career full time in 1995.

JOYCE CAROL THOMAS

557

Joyce Carol Thomas now lives in Berkeley, California, close to her family, and friends. She spends much of her time writing. She also enjoys making school visits. Over the years she has participated in many national and international conferences and festivals. She loves to see the light of comprehension and a love of language in students’ eyes. She also remains dedicated to sharing the experience of community and the strength of family and faith. For Thomas, life is not idyllic, but it is roughly balanced between good and evil. MAJOR WORKS Thomas writes for all ages, but has been most recognized for her work for children and young adults. She has consciously chosen to write for these age groups because she feels they are more open to the beauty of the world and the wonder of human life. Her choice of audience, however, does not limit her grasp of characterization and community, of beauty and personal strength. And while her works are often lyrical and idealistic, they are not without recognition of evil and terrible incidents. Thomas’s point is to show that life is both good and bad and that people need to support each other and approach life in a positive manner. The most important work by Joyce Carol Thomas is her first novel, Marked by Fire. This is the story of a young African American girl born in the cotton fields of Ponca City, Oklahoma. Abyssinia Jackson, as she is named, is born into a homogenous community of African American rural agricultural workers who work side by side, worship together, and have a very strong bond. Love, family, wonder, music, faith, and magic surround Abby. Nonetheless, she is raped in her early teens, and becomes mute. The annual floods cause great hardship, and her father abandons the family. Through it all Abby takes in the music of language, the magic of healing, and the discovery of her own value. She overcomes her reaction to the assault, learns about herbs and plants for healing, and brings her family back together within the safety of the community and love. Written in a particularly lyrical manner, Marked by Fire (1982) was awarded the National Book Award in 1983. The Coretta Scott King Foundation and the American Library Association also recognized it for its complex yet accessible layers of story and character. Thomas has been recognized as being a master of beautiful prose, intuitive characterizations, and a very positive influence upon readers without resorting to sentimentality or stereotype. This novel spawned three sequels, a play, and then a musical. Bright Shadow is the story of Abby’s first love, more hardship through murder, and her own maturity into a real doctor against very large odds. Water Girl is about Abby’s granddaughter, and The Golden Pasture is about the childhood of her future husband, Carl Lee Jefferson. The central theme of all of these novels is that although tragedy and evil do exist and can be terribly painful or even crippling, people have untapped strength within themselves and as a community that can carry them through hard times. Adversity can be overcome through grit, honesty, faith, an appreciation of beauty, and a belief in dreams. Threaded throughout these novels in service to this theme are the motifs of family love, music as a strengthening and fulfilling entity, wonderful food, and the importance of hope. I Have Heard of a Land is a poem that celebrates and illustrates the history of African Americans in the development of the frontier. Oklahoma encouraged settlers in the late nineteenth century by staging land rushes, or free land given to those who would stake a claim and work it. These poems tell the story of a young African American

558

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

woman and her family as they pursued the dream of owning their own land and building a community against great difficulties and all expectations. This book also won the Coretta Scott King award and tells a little-known story of African American history. Joyce Carol Thomas is not limited to one format of writing, let alone one audience. She has written many poetry works addressed to young children, the most important of which are Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea, and its companion piece, Gingerbread Days. Broomwheat tea is an herbal concoction that Thomas herself grew up on in Oklahoma. It is used for healing, for comfort, and for all manner of ills. A very inadequate comparison would be to compare this to current comfort foods such as meatloaf or macaroni and cheese. Thomas celebrates its simplicity and profundity as a healing nostrum, as well as its value as a community tie and wonderful memory of a rural childhood. Other poetry books address the beauty of one’s first born infant, You Are My Perfect Baby, and the bond between a mother and a daughter, A Mother’s Heart, a Daughter’s Love and Cherish Me. It is very obvious from interviews with the author and from the poetry itself that Thomas intends for many of her poems to be read aloud to small children. They are characterized by a verbal rhythm and Thomas’s usual themes of family and goodness. Many picture books for early readers have been produced by Thomas in collaboration with a wide variety of illustrators. The most important of these is The Gospel Cinderella. There is no handsome prince looking for a bride here, but a young orphan girl taken in to be a servant to an evil woman and her two terrible daughters. Cinderella knows that there must be something more in life for her and someone to love her, but she is unable to seek it out directly. Her one solace is singing in church. Queen Mother Rhythm, the lead singer of the gospel choir, is looking for a prote´ge´ to take over the choir as she retires. She accidentally hears Cinderella singing in the woods. It develops that Queen Mother Rhythm lost a young girl child and has been mourning her loss for many years, just as Cinderella has hoped for a real family. Lo and behold, they realize that they are mother and daughter. A beautiful and meaningful new life built around gospel music is before them. This story is all about rhythm and melody. Thomas’s point is that life has a rhythm, and if you let it, it has a melody, as well. You just have to learn how to sing, metaphorically. Her use of words and rhythm to create a melody is inspired, and well served by the vibrantly brilliant illustrations by David Diaz. Family again is celebrated, as well as the strength of an individual and her dreams. Zora Neale Hurston has been an icon of Joyce Carol Thomas’s since she discovered the stories from the south that Hurston collected and published. When Thomas was in graduate school, she found an old, rather neglected copy of one of Hurston’s ‘‘pourquoi’’ books and wondered why she had never heard of this author. At the time, Hurston’s works were virtually out of print. Recently, Thomas has taken some of these stories of poor, rural, African American life in the south in the early part of the twentieth century and adapted them for a children’s audience, along with copious illustrations. What’s the Hurry, Fox? and The Skull Talks Back contain nearly twenty-five of Hurston’s stories. Thomas chose to adapt them in order to give children better access to their own oral heritage, and to ensure that the stories and the voices in them are well preserved for a long time. They have been received very well. Thomas has also compiled and edited two collections of stories from other authors. The first, A Gathering of Flowers, features stories and poetry from several authors to illustrate and promote multiracial and ethnic diversity. Linda Brown, You Are Not Alone

JOYCE CAROL THOMAS

559

(2003) gives the reader memories and anecdotes concerning the Brown v. Board of Education supreme court decision that brought an end to legal discrimination and segregation in the United States. Certain of the authors write about their own experiences at the time, while others detail instances of discrimination. This book was published on the eve fiftieth anniversary of this controversial and far-reaching court decision. Joyce’s success and hard work has garnered many awards, such as the Coretta Scott King award from the American Library Association for Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea. Her first novel won the 1983 National Book Award, the 1982 Best Book for Young Adults from the American Library Association, and was named the 1983 ‘‘Outstanding Book of the Year’’ by the New York Times. Further recognition has come from the state of Oklahoma, where she served as poet laureate from 1996 to 2000. All in all, Thomas has achieved a great deal, continues to toil in the literary vineyard, and has brought joy and entertainment to many people.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Joyce Carol Thomas has written for so many age groups and in so many formats that the critical reception of her work is somewhat diffused. Repeatedly, however, the words ‘‘lyrical,’’ ‘‘joyous,’’ ‘‘celebration,’’ and ‘‘uplifting’’ are used to describe her writing. Musical terms are frequently applied as well, and this is how Thomas intended her material to be received by readers. Her children’s materials tend to be reviewed by the library review journals and children’s magazines and Web sites, rather than more traditional, literary sources. Even her first novel, Marked by Fire, which won major awards, did so in the children’s categories. Finally, however, this novel and its sequels have given Thomas international recognition. Thomas has also written plays whose reviews were sometimes rather negative. Her novels have generally fared better, although at least once her writing style was referred to as saccharine and self-consciously moralizing. Younger reviewers have occasionally taken Thomas to task for not writing more about the evils of racism and segregation, but her subtle style is designed to show that all people are alike and to explore the character of people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Joyce Carol Thomas Ambrosia. Produced in San Francisco at Little Fox Theatre, 1978. Angel’s Lullaby. Illustrated by Pamela Johnson. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Bittersweet. San Jose: Firesign, 1973. Black Child. Illustrated by Tom Feelings. New York: Zamani Productions, 1981. The Blacker the Berry: Poems. Illustrated by Brenda Joysmith. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Blessing. Berkeley: Jocato, 1975. The Bowlegged Rooster and Other Tales That Signify. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Bright Shadow. New York: Avon, 1983. Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Cherish Me. Illustrated by Nneka Bennett. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Crowning Glory: Poems. Illustrated by Brenda Joysmith. New York: HarperCollins 2002. Crystal Breezes. San Jose: Firesign, 1974. Gingerbread Days. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

560

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

The Golden Pasture. New York: Scholastic, 1986. The Gospel Cinderella. Illustrated by David Diaz. Hew York: HarperCollins, 2004. Gospel Roads. Produced in Carson, CA, at California State University, 1981.Unpublished. House of Light. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Hush Songs: African American Lullabies. Illustrated by Brenda Joysmith. New York: Hyperion, 2001. I Have Heard of a Land. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Inside the Rainbow. Palo Alto: Zikawana Press, 1982. Journey. New York: Scholastic, 1988. Joy! Illustrated by Pamela Johnson. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Linda Brown, You Are Not Alone: The Brown v. Board of Education Decision: a Collection, edited by Joyce Carol Thomas. Illustrated by Curtis James. New York: Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children, 2003. Look! What a Wonder! Produced in Berkeley at Berkeley Community Theatre, 1976. Unpublished. Magnolia. Produced in San Francisco at Old San Francisco Opera House, 1977. Unpublished. Marked by Fire. New York: Avon, 1982. A Mother’s Heart, a Daughter’s Love. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. A Song in the Sky. Produced in San Francisco at Montgomery Theatre, 1976. Unpublished. Water Girl. New York: Avon, 1986. When the Nightingale Sings. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. You Are My Perfect Baby. Illustrated by Nneka Bennett. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

Studies of Joyce Carol Thomas’s Works Bader, Philip. African-American Writers: A to Z of African Americans. New York: Facts On File, 2004. Cart, Michael. Linda Brown, You Are Not Alone, A Study Guide. New York: Hyperion, 2003. Henderson, Darwin L., and Anthony J. Manna. ‘‘Evoking the ‘Holy and the Horrible’: Conversations with Joyce Carol Thomas.’’ African American Review 32.1 (Spring 1998): 139–46. Hudson, Theodore R. ‘‘Affirming Rainbows and Flames: A Conversation with Joyce Carol Thomas.’’ SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 5.1 (Summer 1988): 68–70. Kovacs, Deborah. Meet the Authors: 25 Writers of Upper Elementary and Middle School Books Talk about Their Work. New York: Scholastic, 1995. Marowski, Daniel G., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 35. Detroit: Gale, 1985, 405–7. Nakamura, Joyce, ed. Something about the Author: Autobiography Series, vol. 7. Detroit: Thomas Gale, 1993, 299–312. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Rockman, Connie C., ed. Eighth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators. New York: Wilson, 2000, 518–21. Senick, Gerard, ed. Children’s Literature Review, vol. 19. Detroit: Gale, 1990, 219–23. Scot Peacock, ed. Something about the Author, vol. 137. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2003, 194–207. Toombs, Charles P., ed. ‘‘Joyce Carol Thomas.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro American Writers after 1955, vol. 33. Detroit: Gale, 1984, 245–51. Yalom, Marilyn, ed. Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983.

Elizabeth Malia

ERA BELL THOMPSON (1905–1986)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Era Bell Thompson is a significant but overlooked figure in twentieth-century American letters. Originally from Virginia, Thompson’s family migrated west: first to Des Moines, Iowa, then to a homestead in North Dakota. Thompson was born in Des Moines in 1905 where, according to her autobiography American Daughter, she experienced a short but idyllic childhood. In Des Moines, her father, Tony, who worked as a waiter, and her mother, Mary, were able to provide their family (two sons and a daughter) a middle-class existence. But in 1914, Tony followed his half brother to North Dakota, settling the family on a homestead near Mandan. As seen in American Daughter, this experience— growing up African American on the Northern Plains in the early twentieth century— speaks in large part to Thompson’s unique American experience. (The 1920 census indicates that of the 646,872 citizens of the state only 467 were African American.) Thompson’s mother died in 1918. By 1920 her father had moved the family to Bismarck, where Thompson attended high school and excelled in athletics and wrote articles for and published poetry in the school newspaper. Thompson eventually saved enough money to attend the University of North Dakota, where, among other things, she ran track (she broke five UND records) and wrote for the Dakotah Daily Student. Persistent financial and health problems prevented her from graduating, however. Thompson moved to Chicago in 1928 and found a position as a writer with a small black magazine. But shortly thereafter she returned to North Dakota to care for her dying father. Through the generosity of a Methodist minister for whom she had begun to work, Thompson was able to graduate in 1933 from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. After graduation, she immediately returned to Chicago where she spent the rest of her life as a writer. MAJOR WORKS American Daughter (1946) is Thompson’s most important work. First, it is unique, one of only a handful of autobiographies and memoirs by African Americans—such as Oscar Micheaux—who grew up or spent time in the Northern Plains. Second, it is unique in terms of its tone. Unlike other autobiographies by African Americans of the same period, Thompson’s tone is not one of protest, rage, bitterness, or disappointment. Instead, Thompson portrays herself as an idealist and optimist, whether she is writing about race or about overcoming personal travail and tragedy. Third, in style and content, American Daughter is ambitious in scope. Thompson writes poetically of the geography and ethos of the Great Plains; she writes poignantly of the various types of tragedy and hardships her family encounters; she writes lovingly and admiringly of her parents; and she writes optimistically about the future. Moreover, she seamlessly integrates self-deprecating

562

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

humor. For these reasons and others, American Daughter remains a noteworthy literary and historical document. Thompson published two more books. Africa: Land of My Fathers (1954), a memoir of her travels there, written in her signature style. And in 1963 she and Herbert Nipson, another editor at Ebony, edited and published a collection of essays: White on Black: The Views of Twenty-Two White Americans on the Negro. This collection features figures ranging from William Faulkner to Jack Dempsey. CRITICAL RECEPTION American Daughter was well received when University of Chicago Press published it in 1946. Ralph Ellison wrote a complimentary review of it. In Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition, critic Joanne Braxton examines Thompson’s use of tone and espouses that unlike many similar texts of the time Thompson’s tone is quite optimistic. Perhaps the major indication of her critical reception is the state of North Dakota recognition of Thompson’s life and work in two significant ways: it awarded her the Roughrider Award—the state’s highest honor—and in 1979 the University of North Dakota renamed its Black Cultural Center the Era Bell Thompson Cultural Center in her honor. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Era Bell Thompson Africa: Land of My Fathers. Garden City: Doubleday, 1954. American Daughter. 1946. Reprint, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 1986. White on Black: The Views of Twenty-Two White Americans on the Negro, edited by Era Bell Thompson and Herbert Nipson Thompson. Chicago: Johnson Publishers, 1963.

Studies of Era Bell Thompson’s Works Anderson, Kathie R. ‘‘Era Bell Thompson: A North Dakota Daughter.’’ In The Centennial Anthology of North Dakota History: Journal of the Northern Plains, edited by Janet Daley Lysengen and Ann M. Rathke, 307–19. Bismarck: State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1996. Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989, 144–80. Cole, Kevin L., and Leah Weins. ‘‘Religion, Idealism, and African American Autobiography in the Northern Plains: Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter.’’ Great Plains Quarterly 23.4 (Fall 2003): 219–29. Johnson, Michael K. ‘‘ ‘This Strange White World’: Race and Place in Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter.’’ Great Plains Quarterly 20.2 (Spring 2000): 101–11. Long, Judith. Rev. of American Daughter, by Era Bell Thompson. Nation 244.25 (1987): 899–900.

Kevin L. Cole

KATHERINE DAVIS CHAPMAN TILLMAN (1870–?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Katherine Tillman, essayist, poet, dramatist, and fiction-writer of the post-Reconstruction era, was born in Mound City, Illinois, February 19, 1870. Although Tillman’s work focuses primarily on the standard themes of the nineteenth-century sentimental narrative, it emphasizes that black women can fight racism in their roles as wives and mothers. As Claudia Tate has expressed, Tillman, along with other contemporary black women writers, transformed this genre into ‘‘liberational discourses’’ (‘‘Allegories’’ 126). Katherine Tillman began to write in childhood. The short stories she published as a high school student in Yanktown, South Dakota, in Our Women and Children are among works that are no longer extant. She published her first poem, ‘‘Memory,’’ in the Christian Recorder, an A.M.E. publication, at the age of eighteen, and occasional articles and poems appeared in the Indianapolis Freeman. She attended the State University of Louisville in Kentucky and Wilberforce University in Ohio. After her marriage to the Rev. George M. Tillman, minister of Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, she proceeded to publish widely in A.M.E. Church publications, most notably the A.M.E. Church Review. That review serialized her novellas, Beryl Weston’s Ambition: The Story of an African American Girl’s Life and Clancy Street, and published a short play, Heirs of Slavery: A Little Drama of To-day. In 1902, the A.M.E. Book Concern published Tillman’s volume of poetry, Recitations, and later several plays as well. All of Katherine Tillman’s available texts have been published in one volume, The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, edited and introduced by Claudia Tate. MAJOR WORKS Tillman’s works argue for education, uplift of the race, social reform, hard work, and ambition tempered by Christian piety and womanly purity. The protagonist of the novella Beryl Weston’s Ambition successfully combines domesticity, intellectual achievement, and social responsibility through hard work, devotion to family, and Christian faith. The heavy family responsibilities Beryl inherits when her mother dies forces her to leave college; however, domesticity and marriage do not defeat Beryl, but provide the context in which she can realize her goals. She marries happily and becomes a college teacher. The novella also introduces the subjects of expatriation and repatriation at a time when many African Americans were torn between leaving the United States as missionaries or seekers of a less racist society and committing to the fight for racial equality in this country. Clancy Street is set in the gritty urban realism of an interracial and multiethnic poor neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky. More caustic in tone than the first novella, it

564

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

fiercely critiques a racist society that has abandoned the poor of all races. The text also admonishes the recently emancipated race that ‘‘too often acted like so many children in the face of the grave responsibilities that confronted them’’ (251). Through the characters of Caroline and Hettie, Tillman lays out the harsh choices and fates available to sexually vulnerable poor ‘‘colored girls.’’ Obedient Caroline heeds her mother’s advice to ‘‘stay in her place and keep white men folks in theirs’’ (273). Her dedication to Christ and devotion to education contrast with Hettie’s fall into a ‘‘disgrace . . . worse than death’’ (271). This work confronts, as well, the gruesome social problems of alcoholism, domestic abuse, ‘‘the habit of wastefulness’’ (252), prostitution, and anti-Christian ‘‘cunjerin’, fixin’, trickin’, poisonin’, and hoodooin’’’ (261) that plague the Clancy Street neighborhood. Tillman’s two short stories feature idealized African American male characters, both of whom embody commitment to education, Christian values, and social change. In ‘‘Miles the Conquerer,’’ Miles Brown’s ‘‘Christ-like patience’’ (248) over six years enables him to ‘‘conquer’’ the racism at college and eventually become the president of an Afro-American college. In ‘‘The Preacher at Hill Station,’’ Elder Clark uses his authority to reform and empower the community, fight for a library and an extended school term, and heroically confront a crowd of violent whites who deny blacks access to the polls. The subject matter of Tillman’s essays ranges from practical advice to literary criticism. ‘‘Some Girls That I Know,’’ ‘‘Afro-American Women and Their Work,’’ and ‘‘Paying Professions for Colored Girls’’ instruct and inspire women to cultivate selfreliance and economic independence. Her essays on Afro-American poets reaffirm their contributions to the literary tradition. Essays on Alexander Dumas Pe`re and Alexander Pushkin incorporate into the American literary tradition great writers with Negro blood, who, had they lived in the United States, would be classified as African American. In Tillman’s single volume of poetry, Recitations, the themes of racial affirmation and uplift dominate; however, as Tate points out, Tillman’s poetry also challenges her own and her readers’ intraracial prejudices primarily through nonconfrontational methods—methods that ‘‘may have been a most potent subversion of racist allegations’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ 21). Some of the most memorable are the persona poems that are written in dialect and address specific racist issues. The speaker in the heart-rending ‘‘She Who Never Had a Chance’’ is a victim of family violence, poverty, ignorance, and early death, despite her sincere desire for love, home, and respectability. The poem clearly condemns not ‘‘She’’ the sinner but the societal indifference and hypocrisy that predestine many girls to utter misery. Also a searing indictment of racism is the poem ‘‘Bashy,’’ which pointedly mentions the intraracial hatred practiced by Negroes who ‘‘hate a black face’’ and ‘‘prize’’ the white. ‘‘A Southern Incident’’ invites today’s readers to draw a startling contrast between the kindness of the ‘‘rale’’ southern lady who offers her seat to an elderly ‘‘old colored woman’’ on a bus or streetcar, and the racism that confronted Rosa Parks on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. ‘‘Sen’ Me Back to De Souf ’’ explores the paradoxical nostalgia for the south experienced by blacks who have moved to the north. Given African American women writers’ lack of access to the professional theater, it is doubtful that Tillman’s dramatic works were ever formally produced. The themes of both Aunt Betsy’s Thanksgiving and Thirty Years are the reuniting of the family and the economic prosperity brought by hard work. Fifty Years of Freedom, or From Cabin to Congress chronicles orphan Benjamin Banneker Houston’s determined struggle for an education that eventually takes him to Congress. The emotional center of the drama,

KATHERINE DAVIS CHAPMAN TILLMAN

565

however, is Aunt Rhoda, who personifies the older generation’s ambivalence about emancipation, complicated by old loyalties and memories. Tillman’s last drama, The Spirit of Allen: A Pageant of African Methodism, is a tribute to the AME Church, and is assumed to have been self-published. CRITICAL RECEPTION Claudia Tate is the only critic to have published extensively on Tillman. She places Tillman’s work in the context of nineteenth-century black writers, who ‘‘inscribe racial oppression and black people’s desire to participate in . . . an emergent bourgeoiscapitalistic society.’’ Significantly, Tate differentiates between the ‘‘racial protestation in male texts’’ and the ‘‘ideal familial formation’’ of female texts, including Tillman’s (‘‘Allegories’’ 104). Tate argues that fiction by Tillman and other postbellum African American women writers has been misread—mostly in opposition to both the Victorian ideals sanctioned in white women’s fiction and the African American male heroic standards in the more prominent narratives of writers such as Frederick Douglass. Quite simply, reading these nineteenth-century romance and marriage narratives with twentieth-century eyes has blinded critics to the black female authority inscribed in the texts. In fact, the narratives do not portray marriage as ‘‘a negation of personal autonomy’’ (‘‘Allegories’’ 101), but as a liberating base from which to challenge racism and promote social progress. Tate argues masterfully that Tillman and other writers such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Amelia E. Johnson, and Emma Dunham Kelley critiqued and revised the concepts of race, class, and gender. She corrects the dismissive assumption that Tillman’s work merely conforms to narrow sentimental-narrative conventions. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Published in The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman ‘‘Afro-American Poets and Their Verse’’ (1898). ‘‘Afro-American Women and Their Work’’ (1895). ‘‘Alexander Dumas, Pe`re’’ (1907). ‘‘Alexander Sergeivich Pushkin’’ (1909). Aunt Betsy’s Thanksgiving (n.d.). Beryl Weston’s Ambition: The Story of an African American Girl’s Life (1893). Clancy Street (1898–1899). Fifty Years of Freedom, or From Cabin to Congress: A Drama in Five Acts (1910). Heirs of Slavery: A Little Drama of To-day (1901). How To Live Well on a Small Salary (lost; mentioned in the Christian Recorder, 1895). ‘‘Miles the Conqueror’’ (1894). ‘‘The Negro among Anglo-Saxon Poets’’ (1898). ‘‘Paying Professions for Colored Girls’’ (1907). ‘‘The Preacher at Hill Station’’ (1903). Quotations from Negro Authors (anthology) (1921). Recitations (1902). ‘‘Some Girls That I Know’’ (1893).

566

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

The Spirit of Allen: A Pageant of African Methodism (1922). Thirty Years of Freedom: A Drama in Four Acts (1902).

Studies of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman’s Works Tate, Claudia. ‘‘Allegories of Black Female Desire; or Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority.’’ In Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989. ———. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, edited by Claudia Tate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Gerri Reaves

RUTH D. TODD (1878?–?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Between March 1902 and March 1904, Ruth D. Todd contributed three short stories and one serial novella to the Colored American Magazine. Then she disappeared. Since her biographical information was never featured in the magazine, what is known of Todd’s life must be pieced together from federal census records, operating under the assumption that she was publishing under her own name. The 1900 census lists Ruth D. Todd, an African American woman, living and working as a servant in the Philadelphia home of a physician named George M. Cooper. This census record also indicates that Todd was born in September 1878 in Virginia. Following this lead backward to the 1880 census, there is a one-year-old Ruth A. Todd living in Fairfield, Virginia with her mother, Mattie Todd, and her father, Edward P. Todd. Despite the different middle initials, the coincidences of birth date and geography suggest that the Ruth D. Todd of 1900 and the Ruth A. Todd of 1880 are the same person. By 1910, the thirty-one-year-old Todd was a self-employed seamstress, living as a boarder in a more modest section of Philadelphia with a fellow native Virginian, twentyseven-year-old Alice Byers, a chambermaid. After this date, Todd vanishes from the census rolls. Work to uncover more information about her life is ongoing. MAJOR WORKS Ruth Todd’s stories were never featured in the Colored American Magazine’s previews for upcoming issues, and they were consistently overshadowed by fiction from the magazine’s most eminent contributor, Pauline Hopkins. And yet, her abbreviated oeuvre offers an interesting counterpoint to what Claudia Tate has termed the ‘‘domestic fictions’’ written by her more well-known contemporaries. Todd is the author of four known works, all of which appeared in the Colored American Magazine, and all of which fly in the face of stock ‘‘tragic mulatta’’storylines. ‘‘The Octoroon’s Revenge’’ tells the story of a southern belle who falls in love with, and finally elopes with, her father’s African American coachman; at the end, the reader discovers that her octoroon nurse was her birth mother, who switched her own daughter with the master’s legitimate baby girl after the latter’s death in infancy. On learning of her heritage, the belle embraces the nurse as her ‘‘poor abused mother,’’ and the happy threesome move to France to live openly as a mixed-race family. The eponymous heroine of ‘‘Florence Grey: A Three-Part Story’’ is a belle of African American society of Washington, D.C., who is pursued and finally abducted by an obsessed wealthy white man. Florence refuses to give in to her would-be seducer, and is finally saved by Susie Hill, a schoolteacher-in-training and temporary servant in the white man’s household who recognizes Florence from the society pages and alerts her family. ‘‘The Folly of Mildred: A Race Story with a Moral’’ indicts its snobbish title character for discriminating against darker-skinned African Americans; she marries a light-skinned man with loose morals, shunning her darker-skinned mother

568

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

and friends, and ends up a ‘‘veritable slave’’ working to support her infant and her profligate husband. ‘‘The Taming of a Modern Shrew’’ is a comedic piece that mocks flirtation and, ultimately, the romantic frivolity of many male writers; its lightness, Elizabeth Ammons argues, constitutes a ‘‘political act’’ in itself. CRITICAL RECEPTION Todd’s work is just beginning to receive critical attention. In her introduction to Short Fiction by Black Women, 1900–1920, Elizabeth Ammons makes important initial forays into Todd’s biography and briefly discusses the political chutzpah of the deceptively lighthearted ‘‘The Taming of a Modern Shrew.’’ Amy Blair’s ‘‘Rewriting Heroines: Ruth Todd’s ‘Florence Grey,’ Society Pages, and the Rhetorics of Success’’ reads ‘‘Florence Grey’’ in the context of contemporaneous African American society pages, and, seeing the novella as a direct response to Pauline Hopkins’s serial novel Hagar’s Daughter, argues that Susie Hill is to be seen as the true heroine of the piece. Carrie Tirado Bramen reads ‘‘The Octoroon’s Revenge’’ alongside Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy as a text exemplifying what she calls the ‘‘Mendelist allegory’’ of race, in which a biracial subject’s blackness triumphs over her whiteness, thereby ‘‘unsettl[ing] dominant assumptions about the desirability of whiteness.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Ruth D. Todd ‘‘Florence Grey: A Three-Part Story.’’ Colored American Magazine 5.1 (August 1902): 307–13; 5.2 (September 1902): 391–97; 5.3 (October 1902): 469–77. ‘‘The Folly of Mildred: A Race Story with a Moral.’’ Colored American Magazine 6 (March 1903): 364–70. ‘‘The Octoroon’s Revenge.’’ Colored American Magazine 4 (March 1902): 291–95. ‘‘The Taming of a Modern Shrew.’’ Colored American Magazine 7 (March 1904): 191–95.

Studies of Ruth D. Todd’s Works Ammons, Elizabeth, ed. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Short Fiction by Black Women, 1900–1920, 3–20. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Blair, Amy L. ‘‘Rewriting Heroines: Ruth Todd’s ‘Florence Grey,’ Society Pages, and the Rhetorics of Success.’’ Studies in American Fiction 30 (Spring 2002): 103–28. Bramen, Carrie Tirado. The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, 201–49.

Amy L. Blair

MARY ELIZABETH VROMAN (1925–1967)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Mary Elizabeth Vroman was a short story writer, novelist, and screen writer. Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1925 and reared in the West Indies, she earned her B.A. at Alabama State University, and went on to teach in the public schools of Alabama, Chicago, and New York. A member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority—founded on January 13, 1913, by twenty-two students at Howard University—Vroman later published Shaped to Its Purpose: Delta Sigma Theta, the First Fifty Years in 1961, providing a history of the sorority which highlighted among other things, the Delta Founders’ participation in the Women’s Suffrage march in Washington, D.C., in March 1913. She died in 1967. MAJOR WORKS Vroman is best known for ‘‘See How They Run,’’ her short story about a rural teacher in the south reaching out to a troubled child, which ran in the June 1951 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, and subsequently won that year’s Christopher Award. It was made into the 1953 film Bright Road; a major studio production with an almost all-black cast, the film deviated markedly from the glamorous MGM productions during that time. Starring newcomers Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, the film impressed Dandridge in that according to her it ‘‘showed that beneath any color skin, people are simply people’’ With her writing credit on the film, Vroman became the first black woman of the Screenwriter’s Guild. Vroman also wrote two compelling novels—Esther, published in 1963, and Harlem Summer, published in 1967—notable for their frank exploration of controversial racial issues. Esther focuses on the protagonist Esther Kennedy’s maturity, developing its plot initially around young Esther’s formative relationship with her grandmother, Grandear, and her older sister Lucy. As a young girl, Esther takes a job as a domestic for a wealthy white family to earn money for nursing school, a move that results in the life-altering event of Esther giving birth to a daughter, Hope, as a result of her rape by the family’s decadent eldest son. While the novel relates the shame heaped upon Esther, it more emphatically highlights Esther’s subsequent achievement as a supervisor of nurses. Still, rather than suggesting her heroism, the novel routinely connects Esther to her community: When she visits Hope’s father Paul to parlay his guilt over raping her into building a decent wing for black people at the hospital that employs her, Paul remarks that he finds her ‘‘extraordinary,’’ a characterization Esther rejects. The novel further engages issues of class distinctions within African American communities by suggesting the backlash heaped upon the man Esther dated as a young woman, Joe, when, as a doctor, he shuns the poor man who raised him, and by illustrating the tensions between Esther and her sister when Esther marries Joe while Lucy remains married to a carpenter. Finally, in its depiction of Esther as a professional success and as a wife and mother

570

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

frustrated by staying home to take care of her second child, the novel also explores tensions between traditional and modern roles for women. Written for a young adult audience, Harlem Summer engages frankly with how race informs issues such as bullying, being away from home, and young love. At times educational in a literal sense, the novel reproduces conversations that detail moments in African American history such as Marcus Garvey’s ideas about addressing racial inequities, and Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. Yet the novel also offers a compelling storyline as it traces the friendship between the southern John and the northern Mark, and carves out an important female role in Mark’s girlfriend Deena, who helps John navigate his new surroundings. When John bewilderingly looks around as crowds gather in front of speakers in Harlem, Deena explains that these discussions help diffuse potential violence between blacks and whites. The novel portrays both young men positively and as having a lot in common, positioning the honest and considerate Mark as an obvious friend for the equally likeable John, as they explore their common love of reading and share the impact on their young lives of losing their fathers at an early age. John’s bringing to justice, at the novel’s end, the men who bullied Mark when Mark was younger solidifies the male friendship that focuses the novel. CRITICAL RECEPTION ‘‘See How They Run’’ has been included in the recently published short story anthologies, Modern Fiction about School Teaching: An Anthology, edited by Jay S. Blanchard and Ursula Casanova; Edith Bliksilver’s Ethnic American Woman, Problems, Protests, Lifestyle; and John Henrik Clarke’s American Negro Short Stories, a reprint of the original published in 1966. These reprintings highlight the story’s merit, and can help revive critical interest in Vroman’s other work as well. Vroman’s work is also included in The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1899–1967 by Langston Hughes, an anthology which reproduces more canonical African American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison as well. Much remains to be written about Vroman. Bright Road, the film adaptation of ‘‘See How They Run,’’ has received some critical attention. Writing for Turner Classic Movies, Frank Miller writes that the film, an anomaly in a period when Hollywood was producing glamorous musicals, had a ‘‘quiet daring [that] has earned it a faithful fan following, particularly in light of the starring performances of Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte before they became major stars.’’ Miller relates that ‘‘[t]hough the studio only gave [the film] a 19-day shooting schedule, they still put a good deal of talent behind the cameras, with Alfred Gilks, a recent Oscar-winner for An American in Paris (1951), shooting the film and composer David Rose, currently scoring a major hit as oncamera musical director for television’s The Red Skelton Show, composing the score.’’ Both Dandridge and Belafonte successfully downplayed their sexuality to evoke the dignity of Vroman’s characters: a hardworking, caring low-income schoolteacher and the principal who falls in love with her. As Miller writes, ‘‘[a] year later, the two would team in the much more torrid Carmen Jones, which made Dandridge the first AfricanAmerican performer nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Belafonte’s career would take off in 1957 when he recorded ‘Day O’ and created the ’50s rage for calypso music.’’

MARY ELIZABETH VROMAN

571

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Mary Elizabeth Vroman Esther. New York: Bantam, 1963. Harlem Summer. New York: Putnam, 1967. Shaped to Its Purpose: Delta Sigma Theta, the First Fifty Years. New York: Random, 1961.

Studies of Mary Elizabeth Vroman’s Works Conrad, Earl. Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Traagedy. New Yorkk: Harper Collins, 2000. Miller, Frank. ‘‘Bright Road.’’ http://tcmdb.com/title/title.jsp?stid¼639&atid¼5350&category ¼Articles&titleName¼Bright%20Road&menuName¼MAIN (accessed June 10, 2006).

Jean Forst

GLORIA WADE-GAYLES (1938– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Gloria Jean Wade was born in Memphis, Tennessee, during a period when racial segregation was still prevalent and enforceable by Jim Crow laws. She was raised by her mother, Bertha, and grandmother, Nola Ginger Reese. She grew up in a low-income housing project along with her sister, Faye, her aunt Mae and three uncles. Although her father lived in Chicago, Wade-Gayles was still close to him, taking annual visits, writing letters, and speaking to him on the phone. As she writes in her memoir, Pushed Back to Strength, her childhood, while tinged with the harsh realities of racism, was not without the love and care of an entire black community. Wade-Gayles attended LeMoyne College in 1955. At the time LeMoyne was the only college in the area that would admit African American students. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English in 1959, and moved north to pursue her master’s degree in American literature at Boston University as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Boston held none of the warmth and kind sentiments of the south. She realized her time there would be short. During her studies, Wade-Gayles became more aware of civil inequalities and became heavily involved in the civil rights struggle. She was an active member of the Boston Committee on Racial Equality (CORE), as she reports, ‘‘In 1959 Boston was a venomously racist city.’’ After obtaining her graduate degree she moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and taught at the all-female, historically black college, Spelman College. Still committed to the fight for equal rights, she was dismissed from the school because of her activism. She left Atlanta and obtained a teaching position at another historically black college, Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1967 she married Joseph Nathan Gayles and had her first child a year later. Within six months of the birth she was pregnant again, and she and Joseph decided they would leave San Jose, California, and raise their family in the south. Returning to Atlanta, she entered the doctoral program at Emory University and received her degree in American Studies in 1981. Two years later Wade-Gayles returned to Spelman College, where she is currently a tenured faculty member. While many African American professors have left historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to teach at historically white universities for monetary gain, career progression, and scholarly validation, Wade-Gayles has remained faithful to teaching within the Atlanta University Center (AUC) for a number of reasons. She writes in Rooted Against the Wind, ‘‘Everything at Spelman, as at other historically black colleges, speaks to students. The buildings say, ‘Enter. We have a seat for you in the classroom, a carrel for you in the library, a terminal for you in the computer center, and a station for you in the science lab.’ The trees say, ‘You have deep roots here, You will grow tall and sturdy. No winds will attempt to uproot you.’ Faculty, staff and administrators say, ‘You have talent and genius and that means you have an obligation to our people to develop both. You must soar.’ And the sky promises never to fall.’’ Wade-Gayles holds the Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair at Spelman and is the mother of two, Jonathan and Monica.

GLORIA WADE-GAYLES

573

MAJOR WORKS She gained popularity in the early 1980s along with other writers who strove to increase the criticism of black female literature, which was largely nonexistent. WadeGayles has received acclaim as editor of several collections devoted to testimony as a means of remembering and honoring the personal history of those writers who contribute to her anthologies. Her collections focus on a connectedness with family and community, spirituality and strength. Gloria Wade-Gayles’s writing exemplifies a dedication to uncovering truth by highlighting stories of the past. By focusing on memory and rememberings, WadeGayles creates texts that help shape the future of her readers. As Johnetta Cole writes, ‘‘Indeed, she does teach us about the power that is lodged within a caring family; about the enduring strength of black people; about the centrality of education not only for mobility of an individual but also for the progress of a people; and about the complexity of issues like divorce, abortion, and interracial friendships—issues we too often simplify.’’ Centering on the themes of self-reflection, recovery, ancestry, and community, she uncovers a rich tradition of storytelling. She balks a traditional approach to literary studies and criticism by exploring the significance of personal testimonies. In 1984 she published No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women’s Novels, 1946–1976. The text examines selected novels that Wade-Gayles considers ‘‘representative of black women’s reality.’’ In scrutinizing the work of authors such as Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, and Gayl Jones, she received criticism for her larger claims of black womanhood in America, rather than a solid analysis of the effects of racism and sexism on the characters. As with much of the literary criticism of the decade, many theorists assumed a logical connection between the written word and an understanding of the black experience, positing that the literature conveyed an accurate portrait of black life. Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman’s Journey Home (1993) is a testament to her belief in self-reflection and generational continuity. Not necessarily an autobiography, Wade-Gayles prefers to call the work a ‘‘book of rememberings.’’ Throughout the text she remembers the cultural atmosphere living in Memphis during a period of great racial inequality. She remembers going to Main Street, a visible site of racial oppression and violence: ‘‘The law gave one white woman, man, or child in a bus filled with blacks the right, the power, to determine where we sat. Even when we outnumbered them, we obeyed. Because of the law. Because of their faces. They had a way of lynching us with their eyes which said they were capable of lynching us with their hands. Especially on Main Street.’’

She recounts the three years she and her sister worked after school at the Georgia Theatre, her Uncle Prince’s influence on her love of teaching and poetry, and her mother’s determination to see her daughters succeed. In My Soul Is a Witness: African American Women’s Spirituality (1995), WadeGayles edits the anthology of poetry, prayers, essays, and songs. The text aims to celebrate the connectedness of African American women to the power of the Spirit interweaving writings by a host of literary notables such as Rita Dove, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Sonia Sanchez. Spirituality has been the hallmark of black female survival in America. In My Soul Is a Witness, Wade-Gayles celebrates the significance of a religious

574

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

tradition and spirituality on the lives of black women. Wade-Gayles introduces the text writing, ‘‘I must ‘do what the Spirit says do’ and serve as a conduit for the testimonies included herein.’’ The testimonies included are as rich and varied as the contributors. Speaking of the indefinable power of the Spirit, Wade-Gayles contends, ‘‘We cannot hear it, but we hear ourselves speaking and singing and testifying because it moves, inspires, and directs us to do so.’’ She makes two contributions to the diverse anthology in ‘‘The ‘Finny-Finny’ Rain: Three Women’s Spiritual Bonding on Sapelo Island,’’ an essay written with Ellen Finch and the ‘‘Epilogue: Remembering Roseann Pope Bell.’’ In Rooted Against the Wind, Wade-Gayles scribes a collection of personal essays, expressing her responses to provocative issues such as rape, homophobia, interracial relationships, and ageism. Not one to ascribe to the belief that the personal is private, she candidly writes in her introductory address to her readers, ‘‘Perhaps, like me, you have come to accept that we can never dress ourselves in any clothes until/unless we become naked. I did that in this ritual in order to put on the right clothes for these un-right times, knowing, as the drums told me, that right clothes are made only when the past and the present work together with threads of love for the people. In this ritual, I am trying to earn the right to wear those clothes.’’ The first essay, ‘‘Who Says an Older Woman Can’t/Shouldn’t Dance?’’ WadeGayles arms herself against a culture which values being white, male, and young. She writes, ‘‘Becoming older is a gift, not a curse, for it is that season when we have long and passionate conversations with the self we spoke to only briefly in our younger years.’’ While the essay confronts a serious issue facing aging women, Wade-Gayles is not above injecting humor in the piece comparing asking a woman her age to the invasiveness of a gynecological exam. Father Songs: Testimonies by African-American Sons and Daughters is an anthology of stirring accounts of black fatherhood. Again, Wade-Gayles compiles a collection of stories written from the heart. Preferring not to recount sociological studies and statistics, which are rarely without flaw, as with other collections she has edited, Father Songs is about memories. Unapologetically, writers share stories of their relationship with cruel fathers, missing fathers, heroic fathers, and fathers who have passed away. In Praise of Our Teachers: A Multicultural Tribute to Those Who Inspired Us, edited by Wade-Gayles, is an impressive collection of stories about teachers and the art of teaching. The work highlights a moment in the educational foundation of various successful actors, writers, and educators in which a teacher impacted their lives in remarkable ways. From public grade schools to college classrooms, contributors reflect on the methods and varying styles educators implored to transform generations of students. Maya Angelou, James Earl Jones, Angela Davis, and Nikki Giovanni are just a few of the contributors who honor teachers with their personal accounts. Noting, ‘‘Really great teachers have this kind of x-ray vision that allows them to look at a young person and see right into that important intersection of emotion and intellect and see how to harness that.’’ In Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, Wade-Gayles edits the only collection of interviews devoted solely to Brooks (1917–2000). The interviews span three decades in the life of the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Interviews by Haki Madhubuti and Roy Newquist, among others, highlight the humility of one of America’s most beloved poets.

GLORIA WADE-GAYLES

575

Wade-Gayles has contributed poems, chapters in edited collections, and numerous scholarly articles for periodicals such as Callaloo, Black Scholar, Black World, and Atlantic Monthly. An accomplished poet, Wade-Gayles published her own book of poetry in 1991. The poetry in Anointed to Fly touches on the sensations of love and grief, of longing and the pursuit of freedom. She has also received many awards in her professional career including: Boston University Woodrow Wilson Fellow (1962); Merrill Travel Grant, Charles Merrill Foundation (1973); Danforth Fellow (1974); National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (1975); Faculty of the Year Award, Morehouse College (1975); Outstanding Young Woman of America (1975); United Negro College Fund Mellon Research Grant (1987–1988); Rosa Mary Eminent Scholar’s Chair in Humanities/Fine Arts, Dillard University; DuBois Research Fellow, Harvard University (1990); Emory Medal; CASE Professor for Excellence in Teaching for the State of Georgia (1991); Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, MeadvilleLombard Theological School of the University of Chicago; Spelman College President’s Award for Outstanding Scholarship; and Malcolm X Award for Community Service. She is also director of RESONANCE, a choral group at Spelman College, which celebrates the literature and history of African Americans. She has been praised as being a ‘‘master teacher,’’ educating her readers with each new text on the necessity of education, the power of spirituality, and the unwavering strength of black families and black communities. In her 1996 interview with Benilde Little for Essence magazine, Wade-Gayles states, ‘‘We stopped passing on the short stories, and this generation is growing up without them. In those stories were the metaphors, the symbols, the images, the expressions that were passed down. Now our children grow up empty.’’ With her work, Wade-Gayles attempts to fill in those empty spaces using personal testimonies as her medium. She has devoted much of her career to telling the stories that the next generation needs to hear. Wade-Gayles is currently at work on another project researching community as savior in African American fiction. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Gloria Wade-Gayles has been acclaimed as a pioneer in African American feminist scholarship, much of her writing has not received the critical attention it merits. While her texts have been widely reviewed, there has yet to be a comprehensive study done of her works. With the publication of No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women’s Novels, 1946–1976, much of the criticism associated Wade-Gayles with many African American female authors emerging during the 1980s and early 1990s who strove to expand the scholarship of African American women in terms of literary study. While the text established her as an African American feminist scholar, it was not without critique. Frances Smith Foster writes, ‘‘I admire the work that Wade-Gayles has done; however, I have two major concerns, both of which stem from the question of methodology and application’’ (93). Foster questioned the selection of authors WadeGayles had included in the text as ‘‘representative’’ of African American female life. Wade-Gayles went on to distinguish her tone as a writer when she ventured beyond literary criticism and into memoir writing that focused on self-reflection. She received praise for both Pushed Back to Strength and Rooted Against the Wind as Allison O. Adams explains, ‘‘Gloria Wade-Gayles’ scholarly writings reject traditional approaches to literary criticism by presenting a deeply personal perspective’’ (para. 11). The tone of

576

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

the works is both strong and engaging. Sandra Gunning contends, ‘‘It would be unfair to expect all black feminist intellectuals to write with the controversial edge you often find in essays by bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Alice Walker, or Michele Wallace; for me, part of the experience of reading this book [Rooted Against the Wind] was learning to recognize the different tonality of Wade-Gayles’ voice’’ (18). Her writer’s voice struck a cord with African American female scholars on a personal as well as academic level. In many of her essays Wade-Gayles battles the ascribed definitions of what it means to be African American and female in American society. As Trudier Harris contends in the Afterword to Body Politics and the Fictional Double, ‘‘I felt Gloria Wade-Gayles’ frustration and at times her anger at being categorized as a woman whom others judge to be too old to look as good as she does, too old to participate in certain activities, or too old to wear certain clothes or even to say certain things, and I celebrated the ways in which she has resolved those socially imposed issues of growing older’’ (180). In essence, Wade-Gayles’s provocative narratives reaffirm and ultimately redefine African American womanhood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Gloria Wade-Gayles Anointed to Fly. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1991. Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Father Songs: Testimonies by African-American Sons and Daughters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ‘‘Hemorrhaging, and a Call to Arms for the Poor: A Response to the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings.’’ Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 7.2 (1990). In Praise of Our Teachers: A Multicultural Tribute to Those Who Inspired Us. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. My Soul Is a Witness: African American Women’s Spirituality. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women’s Novels, 1946–1976. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1984. Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman’s Journey Home. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. Rooted Against the Wind: Personal Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. ‘‘She Who Is Black and Mother: In Sociology and Fiction, 1940–1970.’’ In The Black Woman, edited by La Frances Rodgers-Rose. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1980. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. With Roseann Bell, Bettye Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Lancaster: Anchor Books, 1979. ‘‘The Truths of Our Mothers’ Lives: Mother Daughter Relationships in Black Women’s Fiction.’’ Sage 1.2 (1984): 8–12.

Studies of Gloria Wade-Gayles’s Works Adams, Allison O. ‘‘Coloring Outside the Circles.’’ Emory Magazine (Spring 1995) http:www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/spring95/Wade-Gayles.html (accessed March 19, 2005). Foster, Frances Smith. Rev. of No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women’s Fiction. Black American Literature Forum. (1985): 93–94. Govan, Sandra Y. ‘‘The Narrow Space, the Dark Enclosure.’’ Callaloo 25 (1985): 661–664.

GLORIA WADE-GAYLES

577

Gunning, Sandra. ‘‘The Roads Not Taken,’’ Women’s Review of Books 14.4 (1997): 18 Harris, Trudier. ‘‘Afterword.’’ In Body Politics and the Fictional Double, by Debra Walker King. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Peterson, Carla L. Rev. of My Soul is a Witness: African-American Women’s Spirituality. African American Review 31.2 (Summer 1997): 355–56.

Cameron Christine Clark

ALICE WALKER (1944– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE A prolific and diverse writer, adept at poetry, novels, short stories, and essays, Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the eighth child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, who were both sharecroppers. From early childhood, she witnessed violent racism, poverty, and the injustice of the sharecropping system. The young Walker was certainly affected by the impact it had on African American families. When she was eight years old, Walker lost the sight of one eye from an accidental gunshot wound. Isolated and partially blinded by such an injury to her eye, she nevertheless read widely. This disfigurement eventually enabled her to develop a writer’s voice, because she withdrew from others and became an acute observer of her surroundings, human relationships, and interactions. In high school, Walker became valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, combined with a ‘‘rehabilitation scholarship,’’ made it possible in 1961 for her to go to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. During her years at Spelman (1961–1963), Walker was drawn into a Civil Rights Movement that contrasted with the college’s conservative mission—to refine students according to traditional standards of southern womanhood. Disappointed at Spelman’s limitations, Walker transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965. While in college, she not only became involved in political activism, but also began to produce her first literary works. The summer before her senior year, she visited Kenya and Uganda on an educational grant. She returned to college pregnant and suicidal. After an arranged abortion, she wrote poems to keep her from despair. Just after graduation, with help from the poet Muriel Rukeyser, then writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence, Walker had her first poetry collection, Once, accepted by the company Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which was to become her longtime publisher. After college, Walker worked for the New York City welfare department for a short time, an experience that formed the basis for certain sections of Meridian and her controversial story about interracial rape, ‘‘Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells.’’ In 1966 she moved to Mississippi to teach and continue her social activism. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, she worked in Mississippi in voter registration and welfare rights. While working there, Walker discovered the writings of the nearly forgotten Zora Neale Hurston, who would have a great influence on her later work. In March 1967, Walker married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish lawyer active in the civil rights movement. At the time, they were the only legally married interracial couple living in Jackson, Mississippi. A year after that, she gave birth to Rebecca. She left Mississippi for good in 1974 to become an editor at Ms. magazine. In 1976, she divorced Leventhal, and in 1978 moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco with Robert Allen, a writer and former member of the board of directors of Black Scholar and since 1984 one of her partners at Wild Trees Press.

ALICE WALKER

579

Since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Walker has been an involved activist. She has spoken for the women’s movement, the antiapartheid movement, for the antinuclear movement, and against female genital mutilation. Amidst her political activism, Walker has taught writing and African American studies at several colleges and universities, including Jackson State (1968–1969), Tougaloo (1970–1971), Wellesley (1972– 1973), Yale (1977–1978), Berkeley, and Brandeis (both 1982). During the last three decades, Walker has been recognized as one of the most prolific, controversial, and respected African American writers. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple. Among her numerous awards and honors are the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Merrill Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman’s Club of New York. She also has received the Townsend Prize and a Lyndhurst Prize. MAJOR WORKS In her works Walker consistently reflects her concern with racial, sexual, and political issues—particularly with the African American women’s struggle for spiritual survival. She has said that her one overriding preoccupation was ‘‘the spiritual survival, the survival whole of my people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women’’ (O’Brien 192). Throughout her work, she records the courage, resourcefulness, and creativity of African American women of various ages, circumstances, and conditions. Indeed, Walker has become a focal spokesperson and symbol for black feminism; however, she describes herself as a ‘‘womanist’’—her term for a black feminist—which she defines in the introduction to her book of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, as one who ‘‘appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility . . . women’s strength’’ and is ‘‘committed to [the] survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.’’ Her work often reflects this stance. Walker’s central characters are almost always African American women, because she admires the struggle of African American women throughout history to maintain an essential spirituality and creativity in their lives, and their achievements serve as an inspiration to others. In addition, she has expressed a special concern about the cruelty and inhumane abuse that African American women have endured. While exposing issues such as domestic violence, child abuse, and women’s sexuality in her works, Walker sees writing as a way to correct wrongs that she observes in the world and has dedicated herself to delineating the unique dual oppression from which African American women suffer: racism and sexism. Her writings portray the struggle of African American people throughout history, and are praised for their insightful and riveting portraits of African American life, in particular the experiences of African American women who have struggled within themselves to discover who they are in a sexist and racist society. Her works often explore the individual identity of the African American woman and how embracing her identity and bonding with other women affects the health of her community at large. Walker is best known for her novels. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), introduces many of the themes that would become prevalent in her works, particularly the domination of powerless women by equally powerless men. It

580

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

displays Walker’s interest in social conditions that affect family relationships, in addition to her recurring theme of the suffering of African American women at the hands of African American men. The novel describes the racism-ravaged life of an impoverished southern African American sharecropping family in which cycles of male violence affect three generations. Grange, the father, cannot withstand racist pressures and sadistically takes out his frustrations on his wife and children. He then abandons his abused wife and young son for a more prosperous life in the north, and returns years later to find his son similarly abusing his own family. Grange tries in vain to keep his son from making the mistakes that he himself has made. Only his granddaughter, Ruth, receives his love, as he tries to make up for past sins. Walker explored similar terrain in her second novel, Meridian (1976), one of the first books based on the lives of women in the civil rights struggle. She recounts the personal evolution of a young African American woman against the backdrop of the politics of the civil rights movement, extending her attacks on racial injustice to castigate the sexism she observed in some African American relationships. Like Walker, Meridian was born in the rural south, and uses education as a means of escape. Pregnant and married to a high school dropout, Meridian struggles with thoughts of suicide or killing her child, but eventually decides to give the child up and attend college. After graduating she enters an organization of African American militants in Mississippi, but realizes that she is not willing to kill for the cause. With this knowledge she resolves to return to rural Mississippi to help its residents struggle against oppression. In The Color Purple (1982), Walker brings together in one book many of the characters and themes of her previous works. She continues to expose the oppression of African American women in sexual as well as political situations. She draws a searing picture of sexual abuse within a context of white racism, depicting the search for selfhood of the central figure, Celie, and her emergence as a strong creative individual through friendship with other women. Walker uses the form of letters in creating a woman-centered focus for her novel. The letters span thirty years in the life of Celie, a poor southern African American woman victimized physically and emotionally by men. First, it is her stepfather, who repeatedly rapes her and then takes her children away from her. Later, she is abused by a husband, an older widower, who sees her more as a beast of burden than as a wife. The letters are written to God and Celie’s sister, Nettie, who has escaped a similar life by becoming a missionary in Africa. Celie eventually overcomes her oppression with the intervention of an unlikely ally, her husband’s mistress, Shug Avery. Shug helps Celie find self-esteem and the courage to leave her marriage. The end of the novel reunites Celie with her children and her sister. The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Walker’s fourth novel, is a complex spiritual novel in which Miss Lissie is presented as an ancient African goddess. As such, she has been incarnated hundreds of times, in periods ranging from a prehistoric world during which humans and animals lived harmoniously within a matriarchal society to the reign of slavery in the United States. She thus represents an African cultural heritage. She befriends Suwelo, a narcissistic university professor whose marriage is threatened by his need to dominate and sexually exploit his wife. Through a series of conversations with Miss Lissie and her friend Hal, Suwelo learns of Miss Lissie’s innumerable lives and experiences and regains his capability to love, nurture, and respect himself and others. Walker’s fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), exposes the horrors of female genital mutilation. Practiced mainly on the continents of Asia and Africa,

ALICE WALKER

581

particularly in the Middle East, genital mutilation is performed to ensure a girl’s virginity or purity before marriage. In this novel, Walker brings back a character, Tashi, who has previously appeared in The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar. After undergoing therapy, the young African woman comes to terms with the genital mutilation she endured while with her tribe in Africa and eventually questions such unchallenged but incredibly harmful traditions. In By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), Walker extends her exploration of female sexuality. The text is a life-affirming, sensuous, and unusually sexually explicit account of an African American family who travel to a remote part of Mexico to study the Mundo people. Their encounter with the Mundo belief system, with its gentleness and spirituality, changes their lives and challenges the sexual hypocrisy of their own culture. By the Light is, in Walker’s own words, ‘‘a celebration of sexuality, its absolute usefulness in the accessing of one’s mature spirituality, and the father’s role in assuring joy or sorrow in this arena for his female children.’’ The main characters are the Robinsons, a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists. Unable to secure funding for research in Mexico in the 1950s, the husband poses as a minister to study the Mundo, a mixed black and Indian tribe. The couple brings along their daughters to this new life in the Sierra Madre. The father reacts violently upon discovering that one of his daughters has become involved with a Mundo boy. The daughter, however, ultimately overcomes the sexual repression forced on her by her anthropologist father. Walker’s next book, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000), employs a narrative strategy different from those in her more conventional novels and stories. In a ‘‘quasi-autobiographical reflection,’’ she tells stories of her own past, including ones about her marriage to Melvyn Leventhal, the birth of her daughter, and her life after her divorce. Looking back at their happy years together in ‘‘the racially volatile and violent Deep South State of Mississippi,’’ she evokes a place and time in which her union with Leventhal was not only unconventional but also illegal. In this collection of stories, Walker reflects on the nature of passion and friendship, pondering the emotional trajectories of lives and loves. Some of the pieces are directly autobiographical. As Walker explains in her preface, ‘‘To My Young Husband’’ is about her marriage as a young woman to a white civil rights lawyer and their difficult but mostly happy decade in Mississippi and Brooklyn. Many years later, Walker wonders how she and her exhusband, once so close, could have become such strangers. Other stories are ‘‘mostly fiction, but with a definite thread of having come out of a singular life.’’ Infusing her intimate tales with grace and humor, Walker probes hidden corners of the human experience, at once questioning and acknowledging sexual, racial, and cultural rifts. Her next work of fiction, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), is clearly a novel, as Walker returns to a more conventional form. It is the story of a successful African American female novelist, Kate Talkingtree. As she is fearful of aging and uncertain about continuing her relationship with her boyfriend, Yolo, Kate decides to set off on a journey of spiritual discovery. After dreaming of a dry river, Kate makes voyages down the Colorado River and later down the Amazon. After the first voyage, an allfemale white-water rafting trip down the Colorado, Kate decides that it is time to give up her sexual life and ‘‘enter another: the life of the virgin.’’ Soon off on another quest, this time into the Amazon rain forest, she hopes to heal herself through trances induced by yage, a South American medicinal herb, also known as Grandmother to the native peoples. Indeed, it turns out that Kate’s Grandmother archetype—representing the Earth, the ancestors, and those violated by patriarchy and racism—has been calling out to her.

582

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Under the influence of yage, Kate is able to keep in touch with the elders and finally unburden her self of her past. Besides the novels, Walker has published collections of short stories and books of poetry. Walker’s short story collections, In Love and Trouble (1974) and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981), expand upon the problems of sexism and racism facing African American women. In Love and Trouble features thirteen African American women protagonists—many of them from the south—who, as Barbara Christian notes, ‘‘against their own conscious wills in the face of pain, abuse, even death, challenge the conventions of sex, race, and age that attempt to restrict them.’’ In Our Mothers’ Gardens, Walker states that she intends to present a variety of women—‘‘mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful, and magnificent’’—as they ‘‘try to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives.’’ Barbara Smith in Ms. praises the collection, stating it ‘‘would be an extraordinary literary work if its only virtue were the fact that the author sets out consciously to explore with honesty the textures and terror of black women’s lives.’’ Smith adds: ‘‘The fact that Walker’s perceptions, style, and artistry are also consistently high makes her work a treasure.’’ While the protagonists of In Love and Trouble wage their struggle in spite of themselves, the heroines of You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down consciously challenge conventions. Published eight years apart, these two collections are rooted in the same perspective yet demonstrate a clear progression of theme. Like her first collection of short stories, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down proves the extent to which African American women are free to pursue their own selfhood in a society permeated by sexism and racism. And though the stories in the book are contemporary in subject matter, they are contextualized in the history of African American women. Moreover, the stories represent an evolution in subject matter, as Walker delves into issues raised by feminists in the 1970s—such as rape, abortion, and pornography. Indeed, in her analyses of these themes, she suggests that intimate relationships are not only personal but also political. Many of the stories in this volume, showing the connection between racist and sexist stereotypes, particularly reveal how sexuality affects the quality of the lives of African American women. Although she is much better known as a prose writer, Walker began her professional career as a poet, and has continued, though less prolifically than early on, to produce volumes of verse that reflect a deep passion for language along with her commitment to activism and social change. Though not widely reviewed, Once, the first collection of poems, marked Walker’s debut as a distinctive and talented writer. Walker wrote many of the poems in the span of a week in the winter of 1965, when she wrestled with suicide after deciding to have an abortion. The poems recount the despair and isolation of her situation, in addition to her experiences in the civil rights movement and of her trip to Africa. In 1973 Walker published her second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems, a National Book Award nominee. The volume contains poems; she writes in the preface, ‘‘about Revolutionaries and Lovers; and about the loss of compassion, trust, and the ability to expand in love that marks the end of hopeful strategy.’’ The title poem of this volume concerns Sammy Lou, a woman who has killed her husband’s white murderer and, on her way to the electric chair, reminds her children to water her petunias. The title of Walker’s third volume of poetry, Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (1979), is her mother’s farewell to her father at his funeral. Among other topics, the poems in the volume deal with love and the history of slavery. These poems are, according to Walker, ‘‘a by-product of the struggle to be,

ALICE WALKER

583

finally, an adult—grown up, responsible in the world—to put large areas of the past to rest.’’ Walker’s fourth volume of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984), is made up of poems written between 1979 and 1984. The subjects of the poems range from the very personal (her daughter’s return, daily exercise) to the political (the assassination of Martin Luther King’s mother, Golda Meir’s trip to Africa). The political content of these poems reflects Walker’s continuing concern with the preservation of people, animals, indeed, of the whole planet. Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965–1990 Complete (1991) collects all the poems from Walker’s four previous volumes, adding a new introduction to each, along with a section of sixteen previously uncollected works. In Sent by the Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit after the Bombing of the Trade Center and Pentagon (2001), Walker uses a combination of political commentary and poetry to draw attention to the detrimental environmental effects of war. The 2003 collection Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth explores a range of topics including further reflections on post–September 11 discrimination and long-term spiritual and ecological interests. Walker declares most of her political concerns and social consciousness in her influential essay collections. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) celebrates African women who kept the spark of creativity alive in spite of the racism and sexism that often denied them the means of expressing their art. Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–87 (1988) records her journey out of isolation in search of the planet she had known and loved as a child. Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (the script for a documentary film directed by Pratibha Parmar, 1993) is a nonfiction account of this ceremony still practiced throughout the world. Walker has also drawn scholarly attention to other important African American women writers. She was mainly responsible for the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston, for example, and edited the collection I Love Myself when I’m Laughing . . . and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader for the Feminist Press in 1979. She also edited The Audre Lorde Compendium (1996). Whether rescuing from oblivion the writing and reputation of other women writers who are frequently devalued or producing her own portraits of black women whose rich and complex lives have been little known, Walker continues to be a central figure in reshaping and expanding the canon of African American literature. CRITICAL RECEPTION Within the last two decades, Walker has emerged, both nationally and internationally, as one of the most versatile and controversial woman writers of African American literature. While Walker achieved early recognition as a poet, it is through her novels that she has found her larger audience and has more fully established the subject matter and premises of her work. Her fictional works have elicited praise for their authentic treatment of women and portrayal of the vital struggle of ordinary people to preserve their humanity. Many critics have commented on Walker’s apparently natural authority as a writer, and her assurance with words. Those qualities have made her, according to Renee Tawa in the Los Angeles Times, ‘‘one of the country’s bestselling writers of literary fiction. . . . More than ten million copies of her books are in print.’’

584

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Walker’s first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, has received little critical attention. When first published it was reviewed sparsely but called a powerful, compassionate view of African American family life. Her second novel Meridian has received more widespread attention than Walker’s first novel. Critics such as Marge Piercy and Margo Jefferson have praised the work for its ambitious and sharp exploration of the civil rights movement. Some have remarked Walker’s gift for storytelling and her talent in creating subtle, yet compelling, characters. Feminist critics have commented on Walker’s strong portrait of an emergent woman. Indeed, on the basis of this novel, they began to regard Walker as a mature and important writer. Walker’s literary reputation was secured with her Pulitzer Prize–winning third novel, The Color Purple. Adapted for a popular film by Steven Spielberg in 1985, The Color Purple won the high praise of reviewers and the hearts of millions of readers, especially for her accurate rendering of African American folk idioms and her characterization of Celie. Peter S. Prescott echoed the opinion of most reviewers when he called Walker’s work ‘‘an American novel of permanent importance.’’ Although the novel won public and critical acclaim, the book seemed heretical to some African American male critics who resented its depiction of African American men in the novel and in the Steven Spielberg film made from it. As a result, The Color Purple subjected her to extensive, heated criticism in the 1980s. Many reviewers condemn her portrayals of African American men as unnecessarily negative. They disagree with her so much that they accuse her of having ‘‘a feminist agenda at the expense of black men’’ (Winchell 132). Walker’s response to these and other attacks upon her work is contained in The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996), a volume that gathers a number of her own essays, her original screen treatment of the novel (which is not the version that was ultimately filmed), reprints of several articles by others about The Color Purple, and a selection of letters sent to her by readers. Addressing detractors who fault her ‘‘unabashedly feminist viewpoint,’’ Walker explained that she simply strives to create a meaningful story that allows for all of her characters to ‘‘come to recognize and acknowledge the divine both within themselves and in everything in the universe.’’ Of her next novel, The Temple of My Familiar, critical opinions are mixed. The novel was criticized upon its publication for its lack of plot and its ‘‘new age’’spirituality, but academic critics have seen it as an important statement of an affirmative African American feminism. Luci Tapahonso noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that the novel focuses on familiar Walker themes, such as ‘‘compassion for the oppressed, the grief of the oppressors, acceptance of the unchangeable and hope for everyone and every thing.’’ Although The Temple of My Familiar has proved too much a novel of ideas for many readers, it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for more than four months. Walker’s next novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), is seen by many critics as more controlled and artistically satisfying than its predecessor. In commenting on Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alyson R. Buckman states that Walker’s ‘‘text acts as a revolutionary manifesto for dismantling systems of domination,’’ echoing the sentiments of many reviewers. By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998) has drawn praise from many for its innovative narrative technique but critics have also complained that the novel is too didactic. The novels following fared better. Linda Barrett Osborne, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Way Forward a ‘‘touching and provocative collection.’’ And Booklist’s Vanessa Bush praised Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart as a ‘‘dreamlike novel [that] incorporates the political and spiritual consciousness and emotional style for which [Walker] is known and appreciated.’’

ALICE WALKER

585

Walker has also become a central figure in the academic study of African American literature and culture; her work is much acknowledged in gender studies and African American literature. Books on her works include Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), Critical Essays on Alice Walker (1999), and Maria Lauret’s Alice Walker (2000). Most critical assessments of Walker’s novels address her presentation of black women. Barbara Christian sees Walker working through themes of contrariness and waywardness in such characters generally and artist characters in particular. Bettye J. Parker-Smith observes a transformation of African American women from victims to heroines in The Color Purple. Karen C. Gaston argues that in ‘‘Grange Copeland,’’ female characters serve as the moral centers of the work, even though the males are the central characters. Mary Helen Washington describes Walker’s ambition to be an ‘‘apologist and chronicler’’ of African American women’s lives. Her works reveal the complexity of moral decision making and the tattered fabric of life in the daily existence of African American women. Elliot Butler-Evans examines the gendered production of history in the first two novels. He describes a dual process, in which a generalized narrative of racial history is doubled (and displaced) by a feminine counternarrative, a historical struggle that mirrors the personal struggles of the protagonists. The passage from The Third Life of Grange Copeland to Meridian is shown to consist in the eruption of this second, female narrative or historical voice. Scholars also note ‘‘Womanism’’ as an ideological stance and as the basis for Walker’s works. W. Lawrence Hogue read The Third Life of Grange Copeland as an example of feminist discourse arguing that the social order dehumanizes African American men who then abuse their families. Chikwenge Okonjo Ogunyemi defines womanism as the focus on women’s issues in the context of African American culture. While he considers several writers, he presents Walker as one who is optimistic on such issues, especially in The Color Purple. Barbara Smith shows how the emphasis on women enables Walker to see through the myths surrounding the lives of African American women and to reveal the problems of their married life. There is also unanimous consent that Walker is a writer of great gifts and important themes. Wendy Wall examines the relationship between writing and the body in The Color Purple. In her interpretation, the violence Celie initially sustains is transformed into a textual inscription in her letters to God; writing serves as a strategy for psychic survival by creating a second body, unmarred by physical force. Wall further elaborates on the consequences of the epistolary structure of much of the novel. Linda Abbandonato, in a provocative reading of The Color Purple, maintains that its form (Hurstonean vernacular) and its content (black lesbian triumph) undermine white patriarchal political and linguistic structures. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Charlotte Pierce-Baker situate Walker’s writing in the context of quilt making in Afro-America. Both represent, they argue, a specifically female craft that confronts chaos and orders it through the skillful arrangement of patches, recreating the literary art of bricolage. In Mae G. Henderson’s perspective, The Color Purple strongly ‘‘subverts the traditional Eurocentric male code which dominates the literary conventions of the epistolary novel.’’ Deorah E. McDowell credits Walker with having helped to create a purely female aesthetic and even an African American female aesthetic. Covering a broad spectrum of emotions, Walker’s poems have long been her warmest, least artful utterances, invoking the solidarity and the compassion she invites her readers to feel. Walker’s poetry has always been admired for its ostensible simplicity of statement and construction and its easy accessibility. Although she often addresses the

586

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

reader directly, speaking eloquently of the most intense sorts of pain and struggle, there is nothing rhetorical or artificial in her work. In an affirmative essay, Hanna Nowak recounts the engaging simplicity of Walker’s poetry, noting themes of love, death, and tradition. Thadious Davis reads Walker’s poetry in the context of her other fiction and nonfiction work. Davis detects the resonance of her poetic concerns in all of Walker’s artistic works. Both Gail Gilliland and Sonia Gernes express the view that the best poems are those based on personal experience. As a major voice for contemporary African American women, Walker has helped to expand contemporary understanding of African American women and promote an African American women’s literary tradition. Walker is dedicated to the continuation and preservation of African American cultural traditions. Her works can be read as an ongoing narrative of an African American woman’s emergence from the voiceless obscurity of poverty and racial and sexual victimization. And she has articulated a black feminist criticism that has had a major impact on the increase in critical writings by African American women scholars. As she continues to write from her unique intellectual and spiritual perspective, her contribution to literature and social change is expected to grow ever more solid and abiding. Undoubtedly, Walker’s versatility as a writer along with her role as public intellectual has enabled her to occupy an extraordinary position in contemporary American letters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Alice Walker Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems. New York: Random House, 2003. Alice Walker Banned. With Introduction by Patricia Holt. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1996. Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism. New York: Random House, 1997. By the Light of My Father’s Smile: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1998. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Dreads: Sacred Rites of the Natural Hair Revolution. With Francesco Mastalia and Alfonse Pagano. New York: Artisan, 1999. Finding the Green Stone. Illustrations by Catherine Deeter. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems. New York: Dial, 1979. Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965–1990 Complete. San Diego: Harcourt, 1991. Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. I Love Myself when I’m Laughing . . . and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Introduction by Mary Helen Washington. New York: Feminist Press, 1979. In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Langston Hughes: American Poet. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973–87. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Meridian. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2004. Once: Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968.

ALICE WALKER

587

A Poem Traveled down My Arm: Poem and Drawings. New York: Random House, 2002. Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult; A Meditation of Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film ‘‘The Color Purple,’’ Ten Years Later. New York: Scribners, 1996. Sent by the Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit after the Bombing of the Trade Center and Pentagon. New York: Open Media, 2001. The Temple of My Familiar. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. The Third Life of Grange Copeland. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. To Hell with Dying. Illustrations by Catherine Deeter. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. With Pratibha Parmar. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. New York: Random House, 2000. You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

Studies of Alice Walker’s Works Abbandonato, Linda. ‘‘Rewriting the Heroine’s Story in The Color Purple.’’ In Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, 296–308. New York: Amistad, 1993. Baker, Houston A., Jr., and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. ‘‘Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use.’’’ Southern Review 21 (1985): 706–20. Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989. Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Christian, Barbara, ed. ‘‘Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–80): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 457–77. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. ———. ‘‘The Contrary Women of Alice Walker: A Study of Female Protagonists in In Love and Trouble.’’ In Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, 31–46. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985. Davis, Thadious. ‘‘Poetry as Preface to Fiction: Alice Walker’s Recurrent Apprenticeship.’’ Mississippi Quarterly 44.2 (1991): 133–42. Dieke, Ikenna, ed. Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Gaston, Karen C. ‘‘Women in the Lives of Grange Copeland.’’ CLA Journal 24 (1981): 276–86. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Henderson, Mae G. ‘‘The Color Purple: Revisions and Redefinitions.’’ Sage 2 (1985): 14–18. Hogue, W. Lawrence. ‘‘History, the Feminist Discourse, and Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland.’’ MELUS 12 (1985): 45–62. Lauret, Maria. Alice Walker. New York: Pallgrave Macmillan, 2000. McDowell, Deborah E. ‘‘‘The Changing Same’: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists.’’ New Literary History 18 (1987): 281–302. Nowak, Hanna. ‘‘Poetry Celebrating Life.’’ In Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, 179–92. New York: Amistad, 1993. O’Brien, John, ed. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. Parker-Smith, Bettye J. ‘‘Alice Walker’s Women: In Search of Some Peace of Mind.’’ In Black Women Writers (1950–80): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 478–93. New York: Pergamon, 1985.

588

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Piercy, Marge. ‘‘Rev. of Meridian.’’ In Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives: Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, 9–11. New York: Amistad, 1993. Prescott, Peter S. ‘‘A Long Road to Liberation.’’ Newsweek ( June 21, 1982): 67–68. Smith, Barbara. ‘‘The Souls of Black Women.’’ Ms. (February 1974): 42–43. Wall, Wendy. ‘‘Lettered Bodies and Corporeal Tests in The Color Purple.’’ Studies in American Fiction 16 (1988): 83–97. Washington, Mary Helen. ‘‘An Essay on Alice Walker.’’ In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, edited by Roseann P. Bell, 133–49. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979. White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Su-lin Yu

MARGARET WALKER (1915–1998)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Prolific poet and fiction writer, Margaret Abigail Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 1915, to Methodist Minister Sigismund Walker and music teacher Marion Dozier Walker. Her middle-class environment exposed her to Christian values, music, and books and to the importance of education. This family standing, however, could not shield her from the cruel realities of southern racism. She later conveyed her awareness of race matters in her first collection of poetry, For My People (1942). In 1925 the Walkers moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where the young Margaret Walker attended Gilbert Academy and graduated at the age of fourteen. She then spent two years at New Orleans University (now Dillard University). In her teenage years she met famed literary figures such as James Weldon Johnson, Roland Hayes, W.E.B. DuBois, and Langston Hughes. Encouraged by the latter, she left the south to seek education in the north. In 1932, she enrolled at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1935. In 1934 she had her first poems published in Crisis (edited by W.E.B DuBois) and began working on Jubilee. Walker worked for the Works Project Administration (WPA) as a social worker and for the Federal Writers’ Project as a writer assigned to the Illinois Guidebook. These two experiences helped sharpen her craftsmanship and her appreciation of urban life. Living in Chicago in the 1930s made her aware of the realities of the Great Depression and put her in contact with other writers in the city such as Richard Wright. She admired Wright’s writing and shared his view of literature as an instrument for political change. It is in this context that she drafted Goose Island, a novel that has remained unpublished. In 1939, the year Walker and Wright’s friendship and her work with the Federal Writers’ Project ended, she enrolled at the University of Iowa for a master’s in creative writing. Her first major publication, For My People (1942), was developed as her M.A. thesis. The following year she married Firnist James Alexander. For the next few years she held teaching positions at Livingston College in North Carolina and West Virginia State College. In 1949, her husband, three children (she later had a fourth), and herself moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where she started a new teaching job at Jackson State University; she stayed there until her retirement in 1979. In 1962 she returned to the University of Iowa for a Ph.D. in English, which she received in 1965 after presenting her dissertation, a novel titled Jubilee, published the following year by Houghton Mifflin. Between 1966 and her death in 1998 Walker wrote several other books. During her tenure at Jackson State University she established the Institute for the Study of the History, Life and Culture of Black People (1968), later renamed the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center to honor her. It focuses on the preservation of, and research on, black experience in America. Walker’s achievements are reflected in the many recognitions she received, including six honorary degrees, the Yale Series for Young Poets Award for For My People (1942), a Rosenwald Fellowship (1944), a Ford Fellowship (1953), the Houghton Mifflin Literary

590

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Award (1968) for her novel Jubilee, a Fulbright Fellowship to Norway (1971), a senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1972), the College Language Association Lifetime Achievement Award (1992), the State of Mississippi Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts (1992), the White House Award for Distinguished Senior Citizen given by President Jimmy Carter, and induction into the African American Literary Hall of Fame on October 17, 1998. MAJOR WORKS Margaret Walker’s work can be read as the fulfillment of her wish to write ‘‘songs for my people,’’ as she sings in the poem ‘‘I want to write.’’ Indeed, in her poetry and fiction, she has written and recorded the history, culture, fear, and hope of her people. Taken together, her work is an assembly of forms such as the blues, spirituals, jazz, tales, songs, animal tales, sermons, prayers, and the black vernacular serving as oral depositories of African American life. At the same time she also constructs myths for the future, imagining a prophetic and humanistic vision in spite of the difficulties of the moment. The main setting of her opus is the south, with its historical burden of moral decay, shame, and marginality, resulting from the practices of slavery and a long history of racism. Margaret Walker conceives a cave myth of her own, offering the south possibilities of redemption and regeneration from the darkness and wilderness of oppression to the brilliant dawn and light that come from forgiveness, reconciliation, belief, and hope, ideas embodied in poems such as ‘‘For My People,’’ ‘‘We Have Been Believers,’’ and ‘‘I Want to Write’’ and in Jubilee. Margaret Walker’s poetry pays tribute to the resilience of African Americans throughout their historical experience in America, celebrating the joys of simple things in life and vividly chronicling the anguish and pleasures of a people often disheartened by hardships. Walker counters this bleak background with her belief in the power of humanism as a creative force that transforms despair into hope. Using the south as the locale of many of her poems, in the manner of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘‘I Have a Dream,’’ Walker projects a ‘‘new earth’’ and a new ‘‘race of men’’ characterized by peace, courage, and freedom. Walker’s poetry articulates black historical consciousness through the blending of African American oral traditions, biblical typology (the appropriation of the holy history of salvation or Heilsgeschichte), free verse, conventional poetic forms, and multiple literary traditions—a palimpsest that helps to create what Maryemma Graham calls ‘‘acts of cultural recovery’’ in the process of ‘‘reconstructing [Walker’s] own family as a communal history of African Americans’’ (Fields Watered with Blood 14–15). In this respect, Margaret Walker paves the way for, and participates in, the work of memory with other contemporary African American writers, such as Alice Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. As she later disclosed in How I Wrote Jubilee (1972), Margaret Walker wrote Jubilee as a fulfillment of a promise she had made to her maternal grandmother to write down the story of her maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown— Vyry in the novel—who lived in the south before, during, and after the Civil War. After hearing harrowing stories about slavery from her grandmother, Walker promised her that ‘‘when I grew up I would write her mother’s story’’ (How I Wrote Jubilee 12). Jubilee extensively depicts the life of a female slave and the folk tradition that African American women have preserved through time to sustain their survival within the trying institution of slavery. The folk tradition fosters a strong sense of community, nurturing, and

MARGARET WALKER

591

sisterhood among slave women. Deprived of her mother, who is a victim of intensive childbearing resulting from repeated rape by her master, Vyry leads a life of tremendous suffering at the hands of her father’s wife. Instead of bitterness, she returns love, forgiveness, and caring for others regardless of race. At a time of racial tension during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Margaret Walker promotes the power of humanism in the face of intolerance. Vyry has been said to bring sanity to the chaos of slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, but the novel’s publication in the 1960s brings the same sanity to one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the United States. Margaret Walker dedicates her novel to her family and to the memory of her grandmothers: her ‘‘maternal great-grand mother, Margaret Duggans War Brown, whose story this is, my maternal grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier, who told me this story; and my paternal grandmother, Margaret Walker’’ (v). Margaret Walker’s namesake, Alice Walker, cogently asserts in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens that ‘‘so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories’’ (232). Margaret Walker’s and other African American women’s writings are acts of recording their (grand)mothers’ stories. In the novel, young Vyry is told stories and hears songs, and later on she tells stories and sings for her own children. In her book, Alice Walker also portrays mothers and grandmothers as ‘‘artists’’ and ‘‘Creators . . . so rich in spirituality’’(233). In this tradition even the domestic activities African American women perform in Jubilee convey the creativity that they use to convey humanism and participate in the spiritual rebirth of the south. Against the horrors of slavery and racism, Vyry opposes the resilience of the African American woman, love for others, forgiveness, and reconciliation as well as the expression of a rich cultural life evolving around a community of African American women. From this perspective, the novel links the African American woman’s history and culture to Vyry, to her family’s own history and to future generations of women. This is seen notably in the use of oral traditions, folk medicine, feminine art, the art of cooking and food preparation, and the sustaining power of sisterhood and motherhood. Vyry learns about the use of herbs and roots in African American folk medicine and later gathers them by herself. Vyry’s knowledge about herbs and roots, taught to her by a community of women, contributes to the recording of the folk tradition that could otherwise be lost. The same community of African American women teaches Vyry about the herbs and roots used for medicinal purposes but also for cooking. Jubilee also describes the transmission of the art of cooking, passed from generation to generation within the slave family. Since her biological mother dies when she is still an infant, Vyry learns the different aspects of the folk tradition from Aunt Sally and other slave women. Aunt Sally, the chief cook at the Big House, becomes a surrogate mother to her. She initiates Vyry to the art of cooking and taking care of the kitchen (35). Later on, Vyry herself teaches the same cooking skills to her daughter Minna (342). With the skills slave women learn, they feed both their masters’ families and their own families. The visible presence of the culinary art is metonymic of the nurturing and caring aspect of the African American woman in Jubilee and in African American literature in general, even though it is sometimes corrupted by slavery. Feminine art (sewing and quilt making) plays a special role in the novel. The art of sewing is also passed from mother to daughter: as she learned from her ‘‘mothers,’’ Vyry also teaches her daughter Minna. In a remarkable display of humanism, quilt making

592

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

becomes an occasion for racial harmony in chapter 54. As men are helping to build a new house for Innis Brown and Vyry for her to stay in the community as a midwife, Vyry is working with her white female neighbors on a piece of quilt. This activity creates, around a female activity, a new community that respects difference, as each housewife uses her own design pattern, but it also invokes the possibility of racial forgiveness and reconciliation generated by shared interest. This proposition may sound too idealistic for the Reconstruction south, but it potently conveys Margaret Walker’s humanistic vision. The novel turns the south, the place of the cruel and inhumane regime of slavery, into a location of humane possibilities through the character of Vyry. When she has all the reasons to be bitter after surviving white cruelty and oppression, she chooses love and forgiveness. Vyry’s continuous availability to help white women in the face of war and poverty is a redemptive moral choice that is conveyed through motherhood, an idea that frames the novel. At the beginning, Sis Hetta dies of intensive childbearing. At the end, Vyry is expecting her fourth child and is a midwife. This is particularly significant, given the fact that she does not really know her mother. She also loses her surrogate mothers, Mammy Suckey and Aunt Sally. Mammy Suckey’s death early in the novel leaves Vyry devastated. She shakes ‘‘like a leaf in a whirlwind’’ when Aunt Sally is sold. As Vyry wants to go with Aunt Sally, Big Missy slaps her ‘‘so hard she saw stars and when she saw straight again Aunt Sally was gone’’ (71), a scene that vividly portrays the terror of southern slavery. In spite of this ordeal, Vyry stays the course of love and compassion. The Civil War section shows Vyry taking care of white women after their world of power and privilege has been shattered by war. Amid the physical and psychological ravages of the war, Vyry does not abandon her half sister Lillian and her children. She diligently takes care of them. As the old south disintegrates, the African American female’s redemptive will is affirmed in Vyry’s humanism. Even when she marries Inns Brown, she does not leave Lillian until another relative of Lillian’s, Lucy Porter, arrives to take care of her. Years later, Vyry goes back to visit the debilitated Lillian; she has forgiven Lillian’s thoughtlessness. Even after the Ku Klux Klan burns Vyry’s and Innis Brown’s house and despite the generalized bias against African Americans, she keeps her humanistic sense of duty to fellow human beings intact, guided by the principle that ‘‘I feels like it’s my duty to help anybody I can wheresomever I can’’ (360). In spite of the persistence of the codes and practices of slavery after the Civil War, they do not deter Vyry from seeking friendship with white women. When Vyry improvises as a granny to Betty-Alice Fletcher and takes care of both mother and child, it also becomes an occasion to dispel racist myths, leading Henry Fletcher, his wife Betty-Alice and her parents to acknowledge her humanity. This episode projects Walker’s vision of the transformative possibilities of love and compassion, values that bring the human race together. In a moment of epiphany, Vyry chastises Randall Ware, who views the relationship between whites and African Americans as one between exploiters and exploited. Vyry insists that African Americans and whites need each other. She revisits her childhood and the abuse she received from Big Missy. Taking her clothes off, she exposes the scars that resulted from a severe whipping after her failed attempt to meet and flee with Randall Ware. In spite of this indelible mark of her suffering, unlike Ware, she does not hold any grudge, but instead she reaffirms the force that has always defined and sustained her life: humanism.

MARGARET WALKER

593

CRITICAL RECEPTION Margaret Walker is most known for her poetry collection For My People (1942) and her novel Jubilee (1966), both of which received literary prizes, respectively the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. In spite of these immediate accolades and the popular reception of her work, Margaret Walker did not attract the same kind of critical attention that greeted such writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. In fact, Nikki Giovanni has dubbed her ‘‘the most famous person nobody knows,’’ an assessment echoed by Maryemma Graham and Deborah Whaley (Fields Watered with Blood 1). Of all Walker scholars, Maryemma Graham is probably the most devoted student, having edited two of her works—How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990) and On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932–1992 (1997)—and two critical volumes—Conversations with Margaret Walker (2002) and Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2001), undoubtedly the best critical book yet on Walker’s oeuvre. In the words of the editor, this volume contains ‘‘the best essays’’ (Field Watered with Blood, xiii) written between 1977 and 1999 and conveys an ‘‘increasingly diverse, intergenerational, intercultural, and international’’ scholarly interest in the work of Margaret Walker (Field Watered with Blood, xv). The different contributions capture the power of Walker’s humanistic vision, informed by her family history; the south as setting; African American folklore, language, and culture; an African American woman’s perspective; and multiple literary traditions. Discussing Walker’s themes in Jubilee, Graham argues that they ‘‘are moral ones: love conquers violence and hatred; suffering makes us strong; the search for home and community prevails over all else’’ (Graham, Conversations, ix). This humanistic vision proves particularly salutary against racism, against the violence and anger of the tumultuous 1960s, and against the easy drift to racial intolerance at times of tension. Walker counters this wilderness with poems and stories that offer a non-self-destructive way of dealing with the past, forges a common past with its hardships and joys, and expresses the necessity to record history and to remember and redeem African American heritage without succumbing to the detrimental forces of the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Margaret Walker The Ballad of the Free. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1966. For Farish Street Green. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1986. For My People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942. How I Wrote Jubilee. Chicago: Third World Press, 1972. How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, edited by Maryemma Graham. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1990. Jubilee. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. October Journey. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973. On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932–1992, edited by Maryemma Graham. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974.

594

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Prophets for a New Day. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work. New York: Warner Books, 1988. This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Studies of Margaret Walker’s Works Carmichael, Jacqueline M. Trumpeting a Fiery Sound: History and Folklore in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Goodman, Charlotte. Tradition and the Talents of Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Graham, Maryemma, ed. Conversations with Margaret Walker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. ———, ed. Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Gwin, Minrose. Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

Aimable Twagilimana

MILDRED PITTS WALTER (1922– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE African American children’s writer Mildred Pitts Walter was born on September 8, 1922, in DeRidder, Louisiana. Walter received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Southern University, and later earned a master’s degree in Education from Antioch (Colorado). Earl Lloyd Walter, the late husband of Mildred Pitts Walter, was a social worker and civil rights activist. Together they raised two sons, Earl Lloyd, Jr., and Craig Allen Walter. Throughout her adult life, Walter has occupied various roles including kindergarten teacher, consultant at the Western Interstate Commission of Higher Education in Boulder, Colorado, and lecturer at Metro State College. Since 1969, Mildred Pitts Walter has devoted her time exclusively to authoring books intended for children and young adults. MAJOR WORKS Mildred Pitts Walter’s thirty-six-year career has produced over twenty-five published texts. A major theme of Walter’s fiction is that African Americans who achieve high academic standing are typically excluded from their community. Emma Walsh, the main character of Because We Are (1983), has ambitions to study medicine, and is a perfect 4.0 student, but she fears that her strive toward perfection will ultimately lead her to lose the companionship of her friends. The anxiety Emma feels is based on a guilt that is normally associated with African American pedagogical success that inherently places those students who cannot reach the same level of accomplishment on the lower end of the educational hierarchy. Academically inclined pupils usually receive rewards and are praised for overcoming the oppression of being African American in a white-dominated school system. Perhaps Walter’s most widely read book is My Mama Needs Me (1984). Walter’s protagonist, Jason, learns the responsibilities of domestic life when his mother brings home a newborn baby. The introduction of a younger sibling into Jason’s home life instructs him that he must now sacrifice his personal desires to satisfy the needs of a newborn infant. Jason continually reminds his friends and neighbors that he is now obliged to divide his time between his personal and home life by repeating the phrase, ‘‘I can’t. I’ve got to go. My Mama needs me’’ (11). The most prevalent motif that Walter incorporates into her work is that parental figures always attempt to include every member of their family in domestic responsibilities. CRITICAL RECEPTION Walter has enjoyed great critical acclaim for her fiction. Mississippi Challenge won the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award in 1993, as did Trouble’s Child in 1986.

596

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Literary critics and educationalists have defined Walter’s writing as a positive, realistic portrait of Afro-American family life that studies African American history and culture. Parents have praised Walter for producing work that gives an interpretation of the African American experience with a comprehension that race implies more than simply skin color. Walter’s books have been taught during Black History Month across the United States. Although few scholarly studies deal exclusively with Walter, many critics use her writings as a reflection of the concerns surrounding the intellectual ambitions and family scenarios of African American adolescents. These concerns and scenarios are then juxtaposed to the public constraints under which African Americans are forced to live. Walter has collaborated with illustrators Carole Byard, Pat Cummings, and Leo Dillion to provide pictorial depictions of her written texts. She was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Mildred Pitts Walter Alec’s Primer. Vermont: Vermont Folklife Center, 2004. Because We Are. New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Books, 1983. Brother to the Wind. New York: HarperCollins, 1985. Darkness. New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1995. The Girl on the Outside. New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Books, 1982. Have a Happy Birthday. New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Books, 1989. Justin and the Best Biscuits in the World. Caledonia, MN: Turtleback Books, 1986. Kwanzaa: A Family Affair. New York: Avon Books, 1996. Lillie of the Watts Takes a Giant Step. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971. Mariah Keeps Cool. New York: Bradbury Press, 1990. Mariah Loves Rock. New York: Bradbury Press, 1988. Mississippi Challenge. New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 1996. My Mama Needs Me. New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Books, 1984. Ray and the Best Family Reunion Ever. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. The Second Daughter: The Story of a Slave Girl. New York: Scholastic, 1996. Suitcase. New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Books, 1999. Tiger Ride. New York: Scholastic, 1995. Trouble’s Child. New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Books, 1985. Two Much and Too Much. New York: Bradbury Press, 1990. Ty’s One-Band. New York: Scholastic, 1984.

Studies of Mildred Pitts Walter’s Works Englebaugh, Debi. Integrating Art and Language Arts through Children’s Literature. Westport, CT: Teacher Ideas Press, 2003. Kutenplon, Deborah, and Ellen Olmstead. Young Adult Fiction by African American Writers, 1968–1993: A Critical and Annotated Guide. New York: Garland, 1996. Murphy, Barbara Trash, ed. ‘‘Mildred Pitts Walter.’’ In Black Authors and Illustrators for Books for Children and Young Adults: A Biographical Dictionary, 3rd ed., 386–87. New York: Garland, 1999. Rudman, Marsha Kabakow, ed. Children’s Literature: Resource for the Classroom. Norwood: Christopher-Gordon Publishers, 1989.

MILDRED PITTS WALTER

597

Schafer, Elizabeth. ‘‘I’m Gonna Glory in Learnin’: Academic Aspirations of African American Characters in Children’s Literature.’’ African American Review 32.1 (1998): 57–66. Smith, Katherine Capshaw. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Gerardo Del Guercio

MARILYN NELSON WANIEK (1946– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 26, 1946, poet Marilyn Nelson grew up on military bases around the United States where her father Melvin, a Tuskegee Airman, was stationed. Her mother, Johnnie, was a teacher. The family eventually settled in Sacramento, California, where the poet attended high school. She was educated at the University of California at Davis (B.A., 1968), the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1970), and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1978). In 1970, Nelson married a German scholar; they divorced in 1978, but until 1997 she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She has taught at colleges and universities around the United States and in Europe, most of her career at the University of Connecticut. Nelson was named Poet Laureate of Connecticut in 2001. Nelson has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation. Nelson has two children, Jacob and Dora, from her second marriage, to English professor Roger Wilkenfeld. In 2004, she founded Soul Mountain Retreat, a poets’ colony in East Haddam, Connecticut. MAJOR WORKS Nelson’s first book, For the Body, was published in 1978 and her second, Mama’s Promises, in 1985. With the publication of her third book, The Homeplace, in 1990, Nelson began to be recognized as a major poetic voice. That book, and later, The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997) and Carver: A Life in Poems (2001) were finalists for the National Book Award. Her other volumes are Magnificat (1994), Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem (2004), A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), and The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems (2005). Nelson has also published verse for children, translations, and essays. As the title The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems suggests, Nelson celebrates the self ’s relation to a contradictory, hostile, but ultimately compassionate universe. Nelson’s first book foregrounds the major themes of her later work: the interplay between history and identity, and the earthly wisdom borne of spiritual love. In her second book, Mama’s Promises, celebratory images of an African American mother figured as ‘‘the feminine face of God’’ are balanced with the quotidian tensions of a modern professional, wife, and mother. The theme of family is amplified and nuanced in Nelson’s third book, The Homeplace, a watershed publication in her career. In this book narrative elements come to the fore, as the poet tells stories of both her maternal ancestors and of the Tuskegee Airmen her father knew as a U.S. Air Force officer. A new, more formal prosody complements the innovative structure. The poet weaves a rich vernacular seamlessly into traditional verse forms, while continuing to use freer verse as well. The Homeplace was followed by Magnificat, which similarly combines formal and free verse in a narrative of desire and spiritual growth inspired by Nelson’s friendship

MARILYN NELSON WANIEK

599

with a Benedictine monk. The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems received critical acclaim, as did her next book, Carver: A Life in Poems, a lavishly illustrated poetic biography of George Washington Carver. The year 2005 saw the publication of three books written entirely in received forms: Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem commemorates the life of an eighteenth-century Connecticut slave; A Wreath for Emmett Till (an heroic crown of Petrarchan sonnets) tries to find healing in the wake of the infamous 1955 lynching; The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems includes a rollicking Chaucerian narrative which chronicles a trip to Brazil. CRITICAL RECEPTION Response to Nelson’s work has been for the most part restricted to reviews and reference-book articles. Major critical work remains to be done. Judging by the poet’s growing recognition, such attention is imminent. Paul A. Griffith notes how Nelson’s ‘‘dual awareness of African and American ancestry—impacts her search for poetic forms’’ (Griffith 234). In an as yet unpublished conference paper, David Anderson, writing of the poet’s use of allusion in The Homeplace, writes that ‘‘Nelson’s conception of tradition remains open, rather than dictatorial or restrictive. By writing in a multitude of forms, and referring to several vernacular and literary traditions, the poet acknowledges and celebrates her connections to a complex cultural past’’ (Anderson 1). Like Ralph Ellison, Nelson has upheld African American writers’ prerogative to utilize both the prevailing canon and the rich African American literary and oral traditions. One point of interest concerns Nelson’s decision to publish for the young adult audience three books dealing with African American historical figures—Carver: A Life in Poems, Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem, and A Wreath for Emmett Till. These three volumes are in no sense ‘‘children’s’’ poems. Betty Adcock comments about Carver: ‘‘Though clearly written for an adult audience . . . this book was marketed for young readers’’ (658). One result of the young adult designation has been beautifully illustrated books of a kind rare in the world of poetry publication. The reviews that the poet has garnered for these books have been overwhelmingly laudatory. It remains to be seen what the status of these books will be in Nelson’s oeuvre. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Marilyn Nelson Waniek The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Carver: A Life in Poems. Asheville, NC: Front Street, 2001. The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. For the Body, as Marilyn Nelson Waniek. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem. Asheville, NC: Front Street, 2004. The Homeplace, as Waniek. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Magnificat, as Waniek. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Mama’s Promises, as Waniek. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. ‘‘Marilyn Nelson’’ (autobiographical essay). In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 23, edited by Shelly Andrews, 247–67. Detroit: Gale Group, 1996. ‘‘Owning the Masters.’’ Gettysburg Review 8.2 (Spring 1995): 201–9. A Wreath for Emmett Till. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

600

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Studies of Marilyn Nelson Waniek’s Works Adcock, Betty. Rev. of Carver: A Life in Poems. Southern Review 39.3 (Summer 2003): 650–70. Anderson, David. ‘‘Building the Homeplace: Rewriting Family and Cultural History in Marilyn Nelson’s The Homeplace.’’ Unpublished paper. English Department, University of Louisville. Boelcskevy, Mary Anne Stewart. ‘‘Waniek, Marilyn Nelson.’’ In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 756. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Dick, Rodney Franklin. ‘‘Creative and Constructive Tensions: A Discussion of the Poetry of Marilyn Nelson (Waniek).’’ M.A. thesis, University of Louisville, 2000. Gardiner, Susan. ‘‘Bootleg, Jackleg Medicine: Curing as Only Generations Can.’’ Rev. of The Homeplace. Parnassus 17.1 (1992): 65–78. Griffith, Paul A. ‘‘Marilyn Nelson.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 282, edited by Jonathan N. Barron and Bruce Meyer, 233–40. Detroit: Gale Group, 2003. Hacker, Marilyn. ‘‘Double Vision.’’ Rev. of The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems. Women’s Review of Books 15.8 (May 1998): 17–18. Kitchen, Judith. ‘‘I Gotta Use Words.’’ Rev. of The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems. Georgia Review 51.4 (Winter 1997): 756–76. Pettis, Joyce. ‘‘Marilyn Nelson.’’ In African American Poets: Lives, Works, and Sources, 262–69. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Rosengarten, Theodore. ‘‘America in Black and White.’’ Rev. of A Wreath for Emmett Till. New York Times Book Review, November 11, 2004, 43. Williams, Miller. Rev. of The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems. African American Review 33.1 (Spring 1999): 179–81.

Jacob Nelson Wilkenfeld

IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT (1862–1931)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Journalist and activist, Ida Bell Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the Civil War. She was the oldest of eight children. Her father, James Wells, the son of a white slave owner, was a carpenter, and her mother, Elizabeth Warrenton, was a cook. After the war, Wells’s parents were highly regarded in Holly Springs for their character and principles; these characteristics they also instilled in their children while also emphasizing the importance of education and religion. Wells-Barnett and her siblings attended Rust University, a school established for former slaves by the Freedmen’s Bureau. She left Rust, however, after her parents died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 to take care of her five younger siblings. She eventually became a school teacher. In 1880, Wells-Barnett moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to live with her aunt and two of her sisters. In Memphis she continued to teach and began writing a weekly column, ‘‘Iola’’ (her pen name) for the Living Way, an African American Christian weekly paper. She also became the editor of the Evening Star. In 1884, Wells-Barnett was involved in a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad Company. While traveling from Memphis, the conductor told Wells that she could not sit in the ladies’ car; when she refused to move to the smoking car, she was forcibly removed by three men. Although Wells-Barnett won the lawsuit, the Tennessee State Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s ruling in 1887. Wells wrote about the incident and lawsuit in the Living Way. In 1889, Wells-Barnett became the co-owner of the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper with Rev. Taylor Nightingale and J. L. Fleming. In 1891, because of an editorial that criticized the Memphis Board of Education and the poor and unequal condition of schools for African Americans, Wells failed to gain reelection as a teacher. At this point she began traveling throughout the south obtaining subscriptions for the Free Speech, trying to make a living from the paper; she was quite successful and wrote in her autobiography, ‘‘I had found my vocation’’ (39). The year 1892 marked a turning point in Wells-Barnett’s life. Already an outspoken journalist with a sharp mind and pen, Wells learned that three of her friends had been lynched. To this point Wells-Barnett had not questioned the culture of lynching. The American public, including Frederick Douglass, accepted the white mobs’ argument that those lynched were guilty of raping white women. However, Wells knew that this was not the case with her friends, so she began to investigate incidents of lynching, which eventually lead to the publication of three pamphlets over the next eight years: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). On May 21, several months after the lynching of her friends, Wells published her own editorial of the incident in the Free Speech, questioning the reasons for the lynching and accusing those who committed the act of lying. When

602

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

her editorial was published she was in Philadelphia on business. In response to her editorial, Wells’s newspaper office was burned and her life was threatened if she returned to Tennessee. She remained in exile from the south for thirty years. Wells-Barnett became a reporter for the New York Age, signing her columns ‘‘Exiled,’’ and began her campaign against lynching as a public speaker. In 1893 and 1894, Wells made a strategic move by taking the national issue abroad. She traveled to England, Scotland, and Wales, gaining support for her antilynching campaign among antilynching groups in England. When questioned as to why white northerners and/or Christian groups were not supporting her cause, she replied that they sometimes condone the lynchings either through their silence, or like Frances Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and famous in the United States and England, desire the support of southerners and, therefore, publicly condone such behavior. Her reports of her speaking tour are printed in the Chicago Inter Ocean. Between trips to England, Wells produced, with Frederick Douglass, Ferdinand L. Barnett, and I. Garland Penn, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Her contribution to the pamphlet, chapter 4, ‘‘Lynch Law,’’ details the numerous lynchings of African Americans. In 1895, WellsBarnett married Ferdinand Barnett, an attorney in Chicago. Together they had four children: Charles Aked, Herman Kohlsaat, Ida B. Wells, Jr., and Alfreda M. During this time, Wells-Barnett began to devote more of her time to her family. She concentrated much of her political activism to the local politics of Chicago and even ran for state senator of Illinois in 1930 as an Independent. Wells-Barnett founded the Negro Fellowship League in 1910 and was a founding member of the NAACP in 1909. Wells died on March 25, 1931. MAJOR WORKS Wells-Barnett is most remembered for her antilynching campaign. In Southern Horrors, Wells-Barnett’s first pamphlet, she makes several devastating claims about the racial and sexual politics of America in the post-Reconstruction era. In the decades following the end of Reconstruction, lynching became a means of white supremacist control over the African American population, not only in the south but throughout the United States. Historically, lynching was justified on the grounds that African American men were raping white women (‘‘violating their purity’’) and that white southern men were defending the honor of their women. In Southern Horrors, Wells makes several arguments to prove that this cannot be true for all the victims of lynching: 1. Why were white women in danger at that time, if they were not in danger before or during the Civil War, when many plantations and homes were left with only the slaves to protect the master’s family while the master was away? 2. Why were white northern Christian women not in danger during Reconstruction, when they came to the south to help establish schools for blacks? 3. The victims of lynchings were not only black men but also black women and children. How can they be guilty of rape? Those who advocated lynching made several arguments, which Wells also challenges:

IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT

603

1. Lynch Law was supposedly used by communities beyond the reach of the law and civilization; yet, Wells’s points out that many lynchings took place in civilized areas with laws, and, therefore, there is no need for mob violence. 2. Rape was not the only reason being used to lynch people. In A Red Record, which provides extensive background of the circumstances leading up to many reported lynchings as well as the graphic details of the murder, Wells-Barnett reveals that some African Americans were lynched for ‘‘stealing hogs,’’ ‘‘because they were saucy,’’ and even for ‘‘no offense’’ at all (Royster 106–7). 3. The crimes of African people were, in reality, often achievements, such as the financial success of the People’s Grocery Store. 4. There were white women who had consensual relationships with African American men. Moreover, white women sometimes seduced African American men and lied about their attraction for them since this attraction was not socially acceptable. Wells-Barnett also points out that with regard to the lynchers’ claims of African American men raping white women, the reverse is true: white men were and had been guilty of raping African American women since slavery. Mulattos were the evidence of this common occurrence. In general, Wells-Barnett insists that lynching is a form of control and terrorism to limit African Americans economically, politically, and socially. Wells-Barnett ends Southern Horrors by urging the African American community to take action in three ways: (1) boycott white-owned businesses; (2) emigrate; and (3) use the press to disseminate the truth and expose the lies. She even advocated protecting oneself with a ‘‘Winchester,’’ if need be. In all three of her pamphlets, Wells-Barnett closely examines the incidents reported in white-owned newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune and the Cleveland Gazette, to question the supposed crime and to challenge unsubstantiated beliefs surrounding the culture of lynching. Also included are sketches and detailed facts surrounding the deaths of the victims. For instance, in Mob Rule in New Orleans, she inserts a table listing the number of lynchings of African Americans for each year from 1882 to 1899. Wells-Barnett also wrote three diaries and an autobiography in addition to several other pamphlets and countless articles. Wells-Barnett began writing her autobiography in 1928 but was unable to finish it before she died; its voice is that of a mature woman reflecting back on her life and includes many interesting stories of the inner politics of her world. Her diaries, however, are different in tone from her autobiography. In her diary entries during her twenties, the voice is that of an anxious young woman working hard to support herself and help her siblings, find a male companion whom she can respect and who is her intellectual equal, and develop a writing career. CRITICAL RECEPTION Many critics consider Wells-Barnett an early civil rights activist. In recent decades, the issue of lynching has been brought to the public’s attention through the recovery of forgotten Americans, such as Wells-Barnett, who made important contributions to U.S. political history but who have not been given adequate attention or credit. Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Southern Horrors and Other Writings reproduces WellsBarnett’s three antilynching pamphlets in a small textbook format. Her introduction is helpful in contextualizing the historical period and Wells-Barnett’s political work.

604

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Trudier Harris’s compilation of Wells-Barnett’s works includes The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition in addition to her three antilynching pamphlets. Alfreda M. Duster, Wells-Barnett’s youngest child, is the editor of Wells-Barnett’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice. Linda McMurry’s To Keep the Waters Troubled is a biography of Wells-Barnett. Patricia Schechter’s informative Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform focuses less on her biography and more on her social activism and the political climate of the period. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells reproduces Wells’s diaries written at different periods in her life: her midtwenties as a teacher and journalist, at age thirty-one when she is traveling abroad, and at age sixty-eight. Almost every entry is preceded with a paragraph contextualizing Wells-Barnett’s situation and the numerous people about whom Wells-Barnett wrote in her entries. This text also includes a few of the articles Wells-Barnett wrote for the Living Way, the New York Freeman, and the Fisk Herald. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works By Ida B. Wells-Barnett ‘‘Afro-Americans and Africa.’’ AME Church Review ( July 1892): 40–44. The Arkansas Race Riot. Chicago: Author, 1920. ‘‘Booker T. Washington and His Critics.’’ World Today 6 (1904): 518–21. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. ‘‘Functions of Leadership.’’ In The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, edited by Miriam DeCostaWillis, 178–79. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. ‘‘How Enfranchisement Stops Lynching.’’ Original Rights Magazine ( June 1910): 42–53. ‘‘Iola on Discrimination.’’ The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, 186–87. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. ‘‘Liverpool Slave Traditions and Present Practices.’’ Independent 46 (May 19, 1894): 617. ‘‘Lynching and the Excuse for It.’’ Independent 53 (May 1901): 1133–36. ‘‘Lynching: Our National Crime.’’ In National Negro Conference: Proceedings, 174–79. New York: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1909. ‘‘Lynch Law in America.’’ Arena 24 ( January 1900): 16–24. Lynch Law in Georgia. Chicago: Author, 1899. Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death. In Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, compiled by Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ‘‘The Model Woman: A Pen Picture of the Typical Southern Girl.’’ In The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, 187–89. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. ‘‘The National Afro-American Council.’’ Howard’s American Magazine 6.10 (1901): 413–16. ‘‘The Negro’s Case in Equity.’’ In Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, edited by Mildred I. Thompson, 245–46. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990. ‘‘The Northern Negro Woman’s Social and Moral Condition.’’ Original Rights Magazine (April 1910): 33–37. ‘‘Our Country’s Lynching Record.’’ Survey, February 1, 1913, 573–74. ‘‘Our Women.’’ 1887. In The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, 184–86. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. In Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, compiled by Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT

605

A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892– 1893–1894. In Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, compiled by Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ‘‘The Requirements of Southern Journalism.’’ AME Zion Church Quarterly (April 1892): 189–96. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, compiled by Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ‘‘A Story of 1900.’’ In The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, 182– 84. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. ‘‘Two Christmas Days. A Holiday Story.’’ AME Zion Church Quarterly 4 ( January 1894): 129–40. United States Atrocities: Lynch Law. London: Lux Press, 1894. ‘‘Woman’s Mission.’’ In The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, 179–82. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Studies of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Works Adams, Samuel L. ‘‘Ida B. Wells: A Founder Who Knew Her Place.’’ Crisis 101 ( January 1994): 43–44. Aptheker, Bettina. ‘‘The Suppression of the Free Speech: Ida B. Wells and the Memphis Lynching, 1892.’’ San Jose Studies 3 (1977): 34–40. Davis, Simone W. ‘‘The ‘Weak Race’ and the Winchester: Political Voices in the Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.’’ Legacy 12 (1995): 77–89. DeCosta-Willis, Miriam, ed. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Humrich, Shauna L. ‘‘Ida B. Wells-Barnett: The Making of a Public Reputation.’’ Purview Southeast (1989): 1–20. Logan, Shirley W. ‘‘Rhetorical Strategies in Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.’’ Sage 8 (Summer 1991): 3–9. McMurry, Linda O. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ochiai, Akiko. ‘‘Ida B. Wells and Her Crusade for Justice: An African American Woman’s Testimonial Autobiography.’’ Soundings 75 (Summer/Fall 1992): 365–82. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, ed. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. Schechter, Patricia A. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Thompson, Mildred I. Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893–1930. Brooklyn: Carson Publishing, 1990. Tucker, David M. ‘‘Miss Ida B. Wells and Memphis Lynching.’’ Phylon 32 (Summer 1971): 112–22.

Joy M. Leighton

DOROTHY WEST (1907–1988)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Dorothy West was a literary and journalistic maverick who wore many artistic hats in her illustrious ninety-one years of life that began with her birth to Isaac Christopher and Rachel Pease Benson West on June 2, 1907, in Boston, Massachusetts, and ended with her death on August 16, 1998, in Boston. West’s literary career lasted sixty years and, as a result, she may be described in a number of ways: short story writer, novelist, actress, welfare investigator researcher and writer (for the New York branch of the WPA Federal Writers’ Project), editor of two short-lived black literary magazines of the 1930s and post–Harlem Renaissance years (Challenge and New Challenge), and cashier. Langston Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance notables referred to Dorothy West as ‘‘the Kid’’ because of her youthful age of seventeen when she (and first cousin, Helene Johnson) first arrived in Harlem and brushed competitive, literary shoulders with the older, more mature members of the Harlem Literati. In the 1990s, when she experienced a second and prolific literary awakening—when she was well into her eighties—with the publication of two books, The Wedding (1995) and The Richer, the Poorer (1995), in editorial collaboration with Jackie Kennedy Onassius and Henry Louis Gates, Dorothy West earned the distinction of being called, as Sally Ferguson describes her, ‘‘a national gift, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance,’’ and as other critics envisioned her as being ‘‘the last leaf on the artistic tree of the Harlem Renaissance Literary Movement.’’ Dorothy West’s upbringing in Boston, at 478 Brooklin Avenue in an economically prosperous and socially affluent black middle-class family, nurtured and influenced her literary path as writer and journalist. Only child of Rachel and Isaac West, who was known as the Black Banana King of Boston, West was encouraged to excel in all areas of her Victorian-styled, Bostonian existence where identities and distinctions of race, class, and gender were heavily ingrained in her young psyche. The ideals of education, class, social manners, racial pride, family love, loyalty, and solidarity were often stressed to West by her fair-skinned mother, Rachel, and by other members of West’s large, extended family of aunts and cousins. The family’s Boston and Martha’s Vineyard homes further illuminated upper-middle-class values and traditions in the precocious West. By contrast to her mother and other female members of the family, Mr. West, an ex-slave from Virginia, emphasized to West the value of self-help, self-employment, thrift, and the entrepreneurial opportunities available with sacrifice and hard work. An imaginative child, who was fascinated by the family stories she heard told in their home, West set her fancy on storytelling rather than on a serious engagement with business and the great prospects of money-making ventures Mr. West described to her each evening upon his return from the fruit store he owned and operated in the Boston market. Mr. West’s business philosophy and habits would later impact economic and class themes in West’s fictional writings, but not in her real, everyday life or in her eventual career. Her mother’s influence in shaping West’s individualism and in dominating her own three sisters

DOROTHY WEST

607

and other members of the extended family would have a supreme impact on her freedom to be individual with an unrestrained artistic and social vision. West often interjected her own imaginative, hyperbolic ideas and fancied stories in the adult conversation that the women elders of the home engaged. On one occasion, West’s creative outpouring of stories became so profound and mature in nature that one of her aunts, according to Sally Ferguson, remarked, ‘‘That’s no child. That’s a little sawed-off woman.’’ MAJOR WORKS West’s intellectual brilliance and breath for dynamic storytelling were realized and she exerted it at will so much so that she began actually writing stories at age seven and formally publishing them at fourteen, beginning with her first story, ‘‘Promise and Fulfillment,’’ which was published in the Boston Post as the best story of the week. West continued on the short story writing path with the publication of ‘‘The Typewriter’’ (1926) in Opportunity magazine. For this story she earned a second prize award. To West’s credit, the story would later be published in Edward J. O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories of 1926. Later, in the 1940s when she became a contributing writer to the New York Daily News, her most anthologized story, ‘‘Jack in the Pot,’’ which she termed her manifesto on poverty, would receive the Blue Fiction Prize Award from the New York Daily News. As West’s writing career flourished, she published a prolific assortment of stories in literary venues such as Opportunity, Messenger, the Saturday Evening Quill, the New York Daily News, and the Vineyard Gazette. Although her stories focus on middle-class American dream themes, many are not stories about the black race; they are simply people-oriented stories about life, racism, classism, and sexism. According to Sally Ferguson and Margaret Perry, Dorothy’s stories are characteristically influenced by her preoccupation with the Russian writer, Dostoyevski and her ‘‘tendency to emphasize moral, psychological, and social confinement,’’ to focus on childhood and innocence and to show the irony of black urban existence and the superficiality and contradictions of urban middle-class life. To promote writing excellence in writers displaced by the poverty of the Depression, West edited two short-lived literary journals with her own finances she earned from theatrical work in Russia: Challenge (1934) and New Challenge (1937) which she coedited with Richard Wright and Marion Minus. West stressed high quality work over the representation in the journals of poorly written essays propagandizing political ideologies under the Communism umbrella. She introduced writings by Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright—most notably his essay, ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing.’’ She also wrote stories in disguised names. To West’s dismay, both Challenge and New Challenge folded because of hard, financial times. With the demise of New Challenge, West began writing a novel while contributing over thirty short stories from 1940 to 1960 to the New York Daily News. She would later write columns about life in Oak Bluffs for the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette until she was infirmed by illness in 1998. West also expanded her short story themes in two novels. The Living Is Easy (1948) is an autobiographical novel based on the character of her mother, Rachel, as represented in the aggressive and manipulative Cleo Judson who dominates her husband, Bart, a successful businessman whom she calls ‘‘Mr. Nigger.’’ The novel reached brief critical

608

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

acclaim, even though it did not sell as well as expected, especially when Ladies’ Home Journal, yielding to southern prejudice, decided not to serialize in its monthly journal a novel about a powerful black woman protagonist. Feminist Press reissued the novel in 1982 when renewed critical interest in West escalated. Some forty years later, on the persuasion of Doubleday editor and Martha’s Vineyard neighbor, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, West published her second much-anticipated novel, The Wedding. Set during the weeks prior to the wedding of a white jazz musician and a black, upper-class woman, The Wedding examines intraracial class and color prejudice among Martha’s Vineyard residents. It received rave critical reviews and Oprah Winfrey produced a two-part television miniseries of the novel several months before West’s death in July 1988. CRITICAL RECEPTION Prior to Margaret Perry’s critical study of a few of West’s selected short stories in the book, Silence to the Drums: A Survey of the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (1976), West’s works received limited critical assessment. However, in the 1990s with the publication of The Wedding (1995) and The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences (1995), a slight surge in critiques of West’s works emerged. Critics have been enthusiastically receptive to West, beginning in 1998 with Pearlie Peters’s critical study, ‘‘The Resurgence of Dorothy West as Short Story Writer,’’ which assesses West’s career and lifelong talent as a skilled short story craftswoman before, during and after the Harlem Renaissance. In 1999, Lionel Bascom wrote an assessment of West’s contributions to the Federal Writers’ Project of New York in the 1940s. In A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Voices of an American Community, Bascom locates unpublished writings by West held at The Library of Congress Federal Writers’ Project Archives and calls attention to West’s little-known literary contributions to African American literature of the Depression era. Bascom has also edited several of West’s short narratives written about Harlemites struggling through the Depression. As critical interest in West gains momentum, three other pivotal critical studies of West’s life, novels, and short stories have served as catalysts in the Dorothy West revival. Trudier Harris Lopez’s ‘‘Strength as Disease Bordering on Evil: Dorothy West’s Cleo Judson,’’ provides a provocative study of The Living Is Easy protagonist, Cleo Judson, as ‘‘a strong black female character who lives up to the stereotype of being destructive and domineering’’ (101). By way of this acerbic analysis of Cleo, Lopez draws attention to West’s social views about the black upper-class society and its snobbery and pretentiousness. In the book Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West (2002), Sharon L. Jones devotes a chapter to a study of West and ‘‘the multiplicity of voices and aesthetics’’ (119) that she represents to readers and publishers. Such multiplicity presented misperceptions of West to readers and publishers, for as Jones argues, ‘‘West truly functions as a closet revolutionary, for while on the surface her work and her life seem to reflect the black bourgeoisie, her novels, short stories, and essays reflect a proletarian stance’’ ( Jones 119). Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis, in 2004, published an anthology of West’s selected writings from 1930 to 1950 with the inclusion of short stories by West and an unpublished novel about aging and lesbianism called Where the Wild Grape Grows.

DOROTHY WEST

609

Mitchell and Davis present a startling revelation about West’s personal life that had never surfaced before in critical studies of her life. Despite the talk in critical circles that West may have had an affair with Langston Hughes at some time in their literary friendship, Mitchell and Davis argue that West had a lesbian relationship with Marian Minus, who at one time assisted West with the editing of the New Challenge literary journal during the 1930s. Certainly Mitchell and Davis’s findings will warrant further critical investigations into the life and times of Dorothy West. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Dorothy West The Living Is Easy (reprint). New York: The Feminist Press, 1982. The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences. New York: Anchor, 1995. The Wedding. New York: Anchor, 1995.

Studies of Dorothy West’s Works Bascom, Lionel. A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Voices of an American Community. New York: Avon Book, 1999. Dalsgard, Katrine. ‘‘Alive and Well and Living on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard: An Interview with Dorothy West, Oct. 29, 1988.’’ Langston Hughes Review 12.2 (Fall 1983): 28–44. Ferguson, Sally Ann. ‘‘Dorothy West.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 76. African American Writers, 1940–1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 187–95. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. ———. ‘‘Dorothy West and Helene Johnson in Infants of the Spring.’’ Langston Hughes Review 2.2 (Fall 1983): 22–24. Jones, Sharon L. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Lopez, Trudier Harris, ed. ‘‘Strength as Disease Bordering on Evil: Dorothy West’s Cleo Judson.’’ In Saints, Sinners and Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, 57–79. New York: Palgrave, 200l. Mitchell, Verner D., and Cynthia Davis. Dorothy West: Where the Wild Grape Grows, Selected Writings, 1930–1950. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Perry, Margaret. Silence to the Drums: A Survey of the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976. Peters, Pearlie. ‘‘The Resurgence of Dorothy West as Short Story Writer.’’ Abufazi 8.2 (Spring/ Summer 1998): 16–21. Roses, Lorraine. ‘‘Interviews with Black Women Writers: Dorothy West at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, July, 1984.’’ SAGE 2.1 (Spring 1985): 47–49.

Pearlie Mae Peters

PHILLIS WHEATLEY (1753–1784)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Phillis Wheatley was one of America’s first African American female poets. She was born in Senegal, Africa. At the age of seven, she was sold in a slave market. John and Susannah Wheatley of Boston bought her as a household servant and as an attendant for Susannah. They treated her as a member of the family, and she was raised with the Wheatleys’ other two children. Mary, the Wheatleys’ daughter, took it upon herself to teach Phillis how to read and write English. Phillis surprised everyone by her quick and sharp intellect. By the time she was twelve, Phillis was reading Greek and Latin classics, and passages from the Bible. By fourteen, she had become a poet. She had some minor household duties, but was free to write whenever inspiration struck. The Wheatleys introduced her to the Boston Literary Circle and she soon became a literary sensation. Through this literary and theological circle, Wheatley was exposed to a wide variety of books and religious texts. Her poetry is clearly influenced by the Scriptures. Major English poets, Milton, Pope, and Gray also exerted a strong influence on her verse. Although she was free to write anything that she wanted, Wheatley was frequently called upon to write poems for special occasions. Many of her elegiac poems were borne out of such requests. Her first poem was published in the Newport Mercury newspaper in 1767. In 1770, she wrote a poetic elegy for the popular Rev. George Whitefield. Although this elegy made her an overnight sensation in Boston, Phillis and the Wheatleys were unable to get her poems published in Boston. About the same time, Countess Selina of Huntington invited Wheatley to London to assist her in the publication of her poems. In 1773, thirty-nine of Wheatley’s poems were published as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. The governor of Massachusetts, her master John Wheatley, and dozens of other clergymen and dignitaries from Boston wrote a signed letter to the public vouching the text as Wheatley’s original work. In addition to the Wheatleys and Countess Selina, Obour Tanner, a former slave who made it through the middle passage journey with Wheatley, was also one of the strong supporters of her poetry. Eventually, Wheatley returned to America to take care of ailing Mrs. Wheatley. Back in America, she was rewarded—perhaps her greatest gift, with freedom from slavery. Mrs. Wheatley died in 1774. The Revolutionary War changed Wheatley’s life quite dramatically. Mr. Wheatley and his daughter Mary died in 1778. Soon afterward Wheatley married John Peters, a free man from Boston. Due to either a lack of personal qualities or racial prejudices and the lack of opportunities, John Peters was unsuccessful as businessman and was unable to support his wife and their children. They moved briefly to Wilmington, Massachusetts. Two of their children died during this period. Wheatley was able to publish a few poems during this period; a few were published as pamphlets. In 1776, while her owner was still alive, Wheatley wrote a poem to George Washington, praising his appointment as commander of the Continental Army, and it was well received. After her marriage, she addressed several other poems to George Washington. She sent them to him, but he never responded again. Wheatley was a strong supporter of

PHILLIS WHEATLEY

611

independence during the Revolutionary War. She felt that the issue of slavery separated whites from true heroism. Eventually John Peters deserted Wheatley, and, to support herself and her surviving child, she took a job as a maid in a boardinghouse. She died on December 5, 1784; hours after, her surviving child also died.

MAJOR WORKS Phillis Wheatley displays a classical quality and restrained emotion in her poetry. Two plausible explanations of this restraint can be offered. First, she was influenced by classical poets such as Milton and Pope, and second, she was very aware of her status as a slave and was unable to speak freely. Examination of her works and her essays indicates that she was not a meek person. Phillis Wheatley’s strongest antislavery statement is contained in the letter to the Rev. Samson Occom dated February 11, 1774. She writes, ‘‘. . . for in every human breast God has implanted a principle, which we call ~ it is impatient of oppression, and pants for deliverance.’’ This shows that the reason for her poetic restraint was the influence of her classical literary training, and not any lack of courage. Christianity was a very important theme in Wheatley’s poetry. Her first published poem, about two soldiers who barely escaped drowning, demonstrates Wheatley’s Christian spirituality. The poem states that the soldiers were saved by the grace of God alone. Most of her poems are occasional pieces, written on the death of some notable person or on some special occasion. Wheatley uses classical mythology and ancient history as allusive devices. She maintains that people of all races need salvation. One example of this is Wheatley’s most anthologized poem: ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa.’’ On the surface, this poem seems like an enthusiastic response of a sincere convert. But later in the poem Wheatley expresses that, according to the Christian message, God makes no distinctions between blacks and whites, and that all believers are promised redemption. This was a subtle but powerful message against prevailing racism. She comments on her being brought from her pagan land to the Saviour and to redemption by mercy. She thus turns her kidnapping and enslavement into a positive experience, an act of mercy, an act willed by God. She thus denies any power to the people who kidnapped and sold her. The choice of the word benighted is also an interesting one: it means, ‘‘overtaken by night or darkness.’’ Metaphorically, it means ‘‘being in a state of moral or intellectual darkness.’’ Thus, she equates her skin color with her original state of ignorance of Christian redemption. She describes her race as sable. Sable is very valuable and desirable. This word is directly in contradiction with the phrase diabolic die used in the next line. Here she is able to make the readers question their belief that slaves are an inferior race. She uses the verb remember in the form of a direct command, thus, assuming the role of a teacher or a preacher. The first poem in her published collection is ‘‘To Mæcenas.’’ She invokes the male muse to grant her permission to speak. Wheatley addresses her muse as sire. Mæcenas lived in 70 BC and was a friend of the emperor Augustus. The fact that Wheatley chooses to invoke the wealthy, white male Roman as her muse is important. She sees herself as helpless without the white male master and muse. Only after obtaining permission, can she speak her mind. She thus gains power by subjugating herself to the forces stronger than hers. In later poems such as ‘‘An Hymn to the Morning,’’ Wheatley claims that Bright Aurora demands her song, thus claiming that the forces more powerful than her master

612

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

exist, and that she is governed by those. In some ways she is claiming freedom from her master’s will. In ‘‘On Imagination,’’ Wheatley announces the power of imagination; she calls the imagination the leader of the mental train. Yet another power that is higher than the powers any humans can ever exert. Alas, the flights of fancy are short and the poet must cease her song. Death is a major theme in Wheatley’s numerous elegies. She treats death and the rewards of an afterlife as a continuum of the life itself. In ‘‘On the Death of the Rev. Dr. SEWELL,’’ she calls on the mourning crowd to come and watch the saint ascend to his native skies, implying that he had been there before. She thus invokes the theme of a ‘‘circular pattern’’ of life and afterlife.

CRITICAL RECEPTION The historical significance of Phillis Wheatley as one of the first African American woman poets sometimes overshadows her poetical achievements. From the beginning, Wheatley had a bifurcated audience. The signatories of her first volume of poetry assured the readers that Poems on Various Subjects was indeed ‘‘written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.’’ When Wheatley arrived in Boston after the publication of her book, the Boston Gazette, the newspaper of revolutionary, lauded the young slave woman as ‘‘the extraordinary Poetical Genius.’’ Several critics have noted the significance of the book’s frontispiece as a skillful marketing tool. Betsy Erkkila refers to this portrait as the emblem of ‘‘Wheatley’s complex position as a black woman slave in revolutionary America.’’ Mukhtar Ali Isani notes that in the four months following the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, ‘‘nine British periodicals reviewed the work, usually contributing space in generous amounts. . . . All [the] reviews were favorable.’’ Regarding the quality of her poetry, two respected people of the time had two entirely opposite opinions. Voltaire announced that her poetry is the proof of the facts that: the genius exists in all parts of the world, and the perfectibility of the Negroes. Thomas Jefferson on the other hand declared that her poetry proved that the Negroes lacked imagination and her poetry was ‘‘dull, tasteless, and anomalous.’’ There is similar disagreement about the politics of her poetry. Critics like John Shields maintain that Wheatley uses her poetry to comment on white oppression through expert use of classical and biblical references. Philip Richards and others contend that Wheatley used her poetry to embrace the dominant white culture and tried to assimilate into it. Shields maintains that the poems ‘‘To Mæcenas,’’ ‘‘On Imagination,’’ and ‘‘On Recollection’’ carry a subversive message. Richards claims that her public poems such as her elegies are the evidence of her wish to assimilate into Colonial America. One thing most critics agree on is that her use of language, meter, and the rhyme scheme is flawless. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Phillis Wheatley ‘‘An Elegiac Poem on the Death of the Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Late Reverend, and Pious George Whitefield, Chaplain to Right Honourable the Countess of

PHILLIS WHEATLEY

613

Huntingdon,’’ 1770. The Project Gutenberg Etext of Poems by Philllis Wheatley. http:// www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/whtly10.txt (accessed January 3, 2005). Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, London: A. Bell, 1773. ‘‘To His Excellency General Washington.’’ 1775. The Project Gutenberg Etext of Poems by Philllis Wheatley. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/whtly10.txt (accessed January 3, 2005).

Studies of Phillis Wheatley’s Works Bly, Antonio T. ‘‘Wheatley’s ‘To the University of Cambridge, in New-England.’’’ Explicator 55.4 (1997): 205–8. Choucair, Mona M. ‘‘Phillis Wheatley (1754–1784).’’ In African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 463–68. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Erkkila, Betsy. Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Finch, Annie. ‘‘Phillis Wheatley and the Sentimental Tradition.’’ Romanticism on the Net 29–30 (February–May 2003). Flanzbaum, Hilene. ‘‘Unprecedented Liberties: Re-reading Phillis Wheatley.’’ Melus 18.3 (Fall 1993): 71. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. ‘‘Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro.’’ In Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, edited by William H. Robinson, 215–33. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1982. ———. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003. Hayden, Lucy K. ‘‘Classical Tidings from the Afric Muse: Phillis Wheatley’s Use of Greek and Roman Mythology.’’ College Language Association Journal 35.4 (1992): 432–47. Isani, Mukhtar Ali. ‘‘The Contemporaneous Reception of Phillis Wheatley: Newspaper and Magazine Notices During the Years of Fame, 1765–1774.’’ Journal of Negro History 24.3 (September 2000): 565–66. Kendrick, Robert. ‘‘Re-membering America: Phillis Wheatley’s Intertextual Epic.’’ African American Review 30.1 (Spring 1996): 71–89. Mason, Julian. Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. Nott, Walt. ‘‘From ‘Uncultivated Barbarian’ to ‘Poetical Genius’: The Public Presence of Phillis Wheatley.’’ Melus 18.3 (Fall 1993): 21. Richards, Phillip M. ‘‘Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization.’’ American Quarterly 44.2 ( June 1992): 163–91. Rizzo, Betty M. ‘‘The Poems of Phillis Wheatley.’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.3 (1995): 345. Robinson, William H. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. ———. Phillis Wheatley: A Bio-Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. ———. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Shields, John C., ed. ‘‘Phillis Wheatley’s Struggle for Freedom in Her Poetry and Prose.’’ In The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. ‘‘Wheatley’s ‘On the Affray in King Street.’’’ Explicator 56.4 (1998): 177–80. ———. ‘‘Wheatley’s ‘On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age.’’’ Explicator 58.1 (1999): 10–13.

Pratibha Kelapure

PAULETTE CHILDRESS WHITE (1948– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Paulette Childress White, a poet and short-story writer, was born on December 1, 1948, in Hamtramck, Michigan, to Norris Childress, a welder, and Effie (Storey) Childress. White grew up in Ecorse, Michigan, a small segregated suburb of Detroit, and attended public high school in the same town. She married Bennie White, Jr., a postal worker and artist, and has five sons—Pierre, Oronde, Kojo, Kala, and Paul. After her divorce from Bennie White in 1989 and wanting to feel closer to her origins and identity, White changed her name back to Paulette Childress. White began her writing career at the age of twenty-four. In 1998, she received her Ph.D. in English from Wayne State University. White currently serves as English instructor at Henry Ford Community College. Most recently and for the third time, she has been honored in Who’s Who Among American Teachers, 2004. White writes about female cohesion and everyday urban living. She stated in Contemporary Authors Online, 2002: ‘‘I write from a sense of irony, because I want to make sense of my experience of life. I am also a painter. I write and paint because I have a need to give substance to my ideas, feelings, and experiences, and because I believe it is good and important work.’’ MAJOR WORKS Lotus Press, a nonprofit literary organization, still publishes both of White’s major works of poetry—Love Poem to a Black Junkie (1975) and The Watermelon Dress: Portrait of a Woman (1983). White’s short story ‘‘Getting the Facts of Life’’ (1989) was anthologized in three different publications from 1991 to 1993. Love Poem to a Black Junkie, a collection of twenty-six poems, describes White’s personal and political experiences as an African American woman—from following leaders as they marched against injustice to talking to her son about slavery. The collection also bestows respect upon several African Americans, including Nina Simone and Malcolm X. The Watermelon Dress, a poem spanning from the 1950s through the 1980s, narrates the journey of a woman and her dresses. Sometimes wearing a calico dress, sometimes a cotton dress, and eventually wearing stretch pants, the speaker discovers that her clothes do not fit; that is, her position as a political activist, homemaker, and lover does not always satisfy. In the end, she proudly discovers her life as an artist. Twelve-year-old Minerva Blue, the protagonist and narrator of the autobiographical ‘‘Getting the Facts of Life,’’ encounters the urbanized bureaucracy of the welfare system in 1960s America, as well as the impending responsibility of a female life defined by domesticity and sexuality.

PAULETTE CHILDRESS WHITE

615

CRITICAL RECEPTION White’s work has received minimal critical attention. Gerald Barrax, in ‘‘Six Poets: From Poetry to Verse,’’describes her writing in The Watermelon Dress as ‘‘pleasant, easy, accessible verse that might be understood and enjoyed even by people who ordinarily ‘don’t like poetry’’’ (265). While noting that some of her poetry does not include functional metaphors, he credits White’s work with ‘‘an intensity and control (a masterful combination of forces)’’ (268). Despite the lack of critical attention, White’s writing garners recognition for its cultural relevance, subtle humor, and questioning of the African American female condition. Connecting art with her own spiritual development, White stated in January 2006: ‘‘The work of other artists and the creation of my own art have been among my most profound spiritual experiences. Creating a thing of value and beauty satisfies my soul.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Paulette Childress White ‘‘Alice.’’ In Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers, edited by Mary Helen Washington, 8–11. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980. ‘‘Bessie.’’ Callaloo 16 (1982): 18. ‘‘The Bird Cage.’’ In Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers, 33–41. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980. ‘‘The Boulevard House.’’ Callaloo 16 (1982): 19. ‘‘Claudie Mae.’’ Callaloo 16 (1982): 130. ‘‘Getting the Facts of Life.’’ In Memory of Kin: Stories about Family by Black Writers, edited by Mary Helen Washington. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1991. Love Poem to a Black Junkie. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1975. Rev. of Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale, by John Steptoe. New York Times, June 28, 1987, A27. ‘‘This Chain.’’ Callaloo 16 (1982): 129. ‘‘Three Seconds before Sleep.’’ Callaloo 16 (1982): 131. The Watermelon Dress: Portrait of a Woman. Detroit: Lotus Press, 1983.

Studies of Paulette Childress White’s Works Barrax, Gerald. ‘‘Six Poets: From Poetry to Verse.’’ Callaloo 26 (1986): 248–69. Davis, Ella Jean. ‘‘African-American Women Writers of Detroit.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1990. Washington, Mary Helen. ‘‘Commentary on Paulette Childress White.’’ In Memory of Kin: Stories about Family by Black Writers, edited by Mary Helen Washington, 140–42. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1991.

Jessica Margaret Brophy

BRENDA WILKINSON (1946– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Children and young adult fiction writer Brenda Scott Wilkinson was born on January 1, 1946, in Moultrie, Georgia, to Malcolm Wilkinson and Ethel Scott. After graduating from Hunter College of the City University of New York, Wilkinson became a published author of children’s books. Between 1976 and 2003, she served as staff writer for the United Methodist Church’s Board of Global Ministries in New York. Recently, she participated in the Medgar Evers College Center for Black Literature 7th Annual National Black Writers Conference: A Tribute to and Symposium on John Oliver Killens (2004). Wilkinson is a National Book Award nominee, a Georgia Writers Hall of Fame nominee, and a recipient of School Library Journal Best Children’s Book, New York Times Book Review Outstanding Children’s Book of the Year Award, and American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults Award. She is divorced and has two daughters: Kim and Lori. MAJOR WORKS Wilkinson is best known for her 1975 debut novel, Ludell, and its sequels, Ludell and Willie (1976) and Ludell’s New York Time (1980). In the first book of this coming-ofage trilogy, Ludell Wilson navigates the pros and cons of African American life in Waycross, Georgia, during the 1950s. The book begins with Ludell daydreaming in her fifth grade class. She dreams about her mother, Dessa, sending a television from New York and wonders ‘‘what clouds taste like.’’ One of Ludell’s dreams is realized, and Dessa sends to the Wilson household a television. Ludell subsequently suffers a disappointment that serves as an initiation into the reality of southern African American life outside of school. However, her imagination and flair for sensory details carry her through hard times and, often through her own creative works, enable her to balance reality with idealism. In Ludell and Willie, the trilogy explores the more complex issues that affect teenagers. Ludell no longer moves in a world where clouds have a taste, and the maturity she developed at the end of the first book is tested and refined. Ludell is now a high school senior in the late 1950s and her dream is to graduate; marry Willie, the high school football hero who has been Ludell’s neighbor and friend since childhood; and leave Waycross. However, the couple confronts many obstacles. Mama, Ludell’s grandmother, imposes strict, old-fashioned rules that circumscribe the relationship. Mama does not want Ludell to end up like Dessa or like Willie’s oldest sister, both of whom ran away and left their children with their mothers to rear. Ludell and Willie also have to deal with poverty. Their financial situation partly determines whether Willie will stay in high school instead of going to work, and his only chance to get to college is based on winning a football scholarship. In parallel, Ludell enters an essay writing contest that will award a scholarship to the winner. However, none of the plans work out. Mama becomes sick and

BRENDA WILKINSON

617

dies. Dessa returns and takes Ludell to a school in New York. Ludell’s optimism and determination reign strong despite hardship, and her dream changes only slightly: Willie will join the army after his high school graduation, come to New York to marry Ludell, and then take her away. In Ludell’s New York Time, Ludell has the opportunity to reconcile her relationship with Dessa and also her rural southern background with the urban north. Now that Dessa is a full-time mother, she determines to give Ludell the opportunities she never had. Like Mama, though, Dessa imposes upon Ludell rules and regulations she believes are in Ludell’s best interest. In response, Ludell remains detached from her environment. The only thing of importance to her is marking time until Willie comes to take her back home. Again, Ludell’s dream comes true. However, it is at a cost. While growing up in Georgia, Ludell was part of history. In Ludell, she experiences segregation and her life partly was constructed in accordance with Jim Crow laws. In Ludell and Willie, she experiences and is a proponent of school desegregation. In Ludell’s New York Time, Ludell meets people who represent the issues of the civil rights era in the north: a young family struggling to make financial ends meet, a young man unable to obtain gainful employment due to racial ideology and who speaks about civil rights and African heritage, and a sexually uninhibited girl who revolts against rules. Ludell’s focus, though, remains on Willie, and she fails to be fully present in her New York life. The balance between reality and idealism shifts as Ludell closes her eyes to the significance of the present in favor of a dream. However, it is because of this shift that Ludell’s New York Time remains a testimony to the power of dreams and determination in the face of obstacles. Other books by Wilkinson focus on themes raised in the trilogy. Definitely Cool mirrors Ludell in its depiction of the rocky world of childhood and the accompanying family matters, peer pressure, friendships, and romantic relationships. Jesse Jackson: Still Fighting for the Dream and African American Women Writers profile individuals who significantly impacted African American history. In Not Separate, Not Equal, seventeen-year-old Malene Freeman experiences integration in Georgia during 1965 while The Civil Rights Movement: An Illustrated History pictorially examines the civil rights movement. CRITICAL RECEPTION Wilkinson’s books are successful because she recreates the world of children without interference from the adult persona. She skillfully develops her characters, right down to their very nuances and idiom. Critics note that Wilkinson portrays ‘‘the day to day give and take between kids and the jumble of sassy perceptions and vague misunderstandings’’ that children often have (Kirkus Reviews). Critics also note that the characters in Ludell and Willie ‘‘are developed believably; their dialect . . . and interplay with one another and with the rigors of Black life in a small Georgia town before desegregation are portrayed with honesty, immediacy, warmth, and humor’’ (Silver 128). Lending to this social realism is the incorporation of thematically multilayered plots. In the trilogy, Wilkinson develops the themes of love and romance; female relationships and friendship; and ‘‘race’’ and poverty within the domestic, rural, and urban spheres. Rather than being didactic or rhetorical regarding controversial personal and social issues, Wilkinson records the issues and weaves them into the characters’ daily lives. Primarily because of Wilkinson’s focus on African American life, Addison Gayle compares Ludell with Richard Wright’s Native Son. Gayle draws comparisons between

618

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

the two writers. Among other things, he notes that ‘‘[t]he members of the Wright school . . . were moral warriors who believed that the novel should function as an instrument for improving the human condition’’ (470). Ludell, with its focus on love and caring as the foundation of the black family, functions to improve the human condition by suggesting ‘‘that the black novel will return to an explication of the ethics and values which have assured black survival in this society’’ (471). Although Ludell makes a significant contribution to African American society and African American literature, the issue of balance that partly characterizes Ludell’s New York Time recurs in Wilkinson’s work. This time, the issue appears when the marriage between character and plot falters as one or the other becomes too dominant. Pamela Pollack notes that Ludell’s New York Time is ‘‘all talk and no action,’’ and Roger Sutton states that Definitely Cool is ‘‘basically plotless.’’ Conversely, Gerry Larson states, ‘‘Readers will find [Not Separate, Not Equal] an action-packed account and a palatable history lesson (115). Reflecting this conflicting split between character and plot are the types of books Wilkinson wrote: fiction featuring characters living through historical events, and plot-heavy nonfiction about historical events or historical figures and their contributions to society. This split was resolved when Wilkinson eventually stopped writing fiction in favor of plot-heavy work, and she became known as a chronicler of African American history. In African American Women Writers, Wilkinson remarks that she wished as a child for books that contained characters and experiences to which she could relate. Her own books seem to be responses to her pre–civil rights southern childhood and the lack of African American characters in literature during that time. Her characters’ believable perspectives personalize history, making it accessible to young readers even as they fill that literary lack. Like Ludell, Wilkinson fulfills her dream. Ultimately, her works, which are ‘‘rich in events, feelings, and customs of the time, . . . provide a record, positive and negative, or an era of black frustration’’ (ElLaissi 3). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Brenda Wilkinson African American Women Writers. New York: Jossey-Bass, 1999. Civil Rights Movement: An Illustrated History. New York: Gramercy, 1996. Definitely Cool. New York: Scholastic, 1995. Jesse Jackson: Still Fighting for the Dream. Englewood, New Jersey: Silver Burdett Press, 1990. Ludell. New York: Harper, 1975. Ludell and Willie. New York: Harper, 1976. Ludell’s New York Time. New York: Harper, 1980. Not Separate, Not Equal. New York: Harper, 1987.

Collaborative Works Haskins, Jim, Clinton Cox, and Brenda Wilkinson. Black Stars of Colonial Times and the Revolutionary War: African Americans Who Liver Their Dreams. New York: Jossey-Bass, 2002. Haskins, Jim, Eleanor E. Tate, Clinton Cox, and Brenda Wilkinson. Black Stars of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Jossey-Bass, 2002. Wilkinson, Brenda, and Tom Feelings. Teacher’s Guide to Under the Boab Tree: Children of Africa. New York: The United Methodist Church General Board of Global Ministries, 2000.

BRENDA WILKINSON

619

Wilkinson, Brenda, and Tom Feelings. Under the Boab Tree: Children of Africa. New York: The United Methodist Church General Board of Global Ministries, 2000.

Studies of Brenda Wilkinson’s Works ‘‘Books.’’ American Visions 8.6 (December 93/January 94): 35. Boyd, Herb. ‘‘Wilkinson Captures Civil Rights Movement in Pictures.’’ New York Amsterdam News 87.49 (December 7, 1996): 24. ElLaissi, Bobbie. ‘‘Ludell and Willie.’’ Masterplots II: Juvenile and Young Adult Fiction Series (1991): 1–3. MagillOnLiterature Plus. Gayle, Addison. ‘‘Ludell: Beyond Native Son.’’ Nation 222.15 (April 17, 1976): 469–71. King, Cynthia. ‘‘Children’s Books.’’ New York Times Book Review (August 3, 1980): BR5. Kirkus Reviews. Ludell. Brenda Wilkinson. New York: Harper, 1975. Kornfield, Matilda R. ‘‘Ludell.’’ School Library Journal 22.4 (December 1975): 62. Kutenplon, Deborah. Young Adult Fiction by African American Writers, 1968–1993: A Critical and Annotated Guide. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. 304–13. Larson, Gerry. ‘‘Not Separate, Not Equal.’’ School Library Journal 34.8 (April 1988): 114–15. Lindsay, Leon W. ‘‘Growing Up and Going to School in the South.’’ Christian Science Monitor (November 5, 1975): 38. McHargue, Georgess. ‘‘Children’s Books.’’ New York Times Book Review (May 22, 1977): 263. Meisner, Sylvia V. ‘‘Book Review: Grades 3–6.’’ School Library Journal 39.3 (March 1993): 202. Norris, Jerrie. ‘‘Love Story Set in Harlem.’’ Christian Science Monitor (April 14, 1980): B7. Pollack, Pamela D. ‘‘Ludell’s New York Time.’’ School Library Journal 26.6 (February 1980): 73. Silver, Linda. ‘‘Ludell and Willie.’’ School Library Journal 24.2 (October 1977): 128. Sutton, Roger. ‘‘Definitely Cool.’’ Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books 46.7 (March 1993). Thompson, Betty. ‘‘Books.’’ Christian Century 114.5 (February 5, 1997): 171–74. Washington, Idella. ‘‘Reviews: Fiction.’’ Book Report 12.2 (September/October 1993): 50.

Tamara Zaneta Hollins

FANNIE BARRIER WILLIAMS (1855–1944)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Journalist, orator, sociologist, schoolteacher—these are just a few of the influential roles that Fannie (Frances) Barrier Williams assumed during her eighty-nine years. She was born in Brockport, New York, and died there, but lived much of her adult life in Chicago (1887–1926). There she and her husband S. Laing Williams, an attorney, were leaders in the Prudence Crandall Club, a literary society that aggressively promoted social activism on behalf of African Americans and whites alike. Williams was born on February 12, 1855, to Harriet Prince and Anthony J. Barrier. Of her formative years in western New York, Williams writes that ‘‘[w]e suffered from no discriminations on account of color . . . and lived in blissful ignorance of the fact that we were practicing the unpardonable sin of ‘social equality’’’ (New Woman 6). At the State Normal School in Brockport she pursued both academic and classical coursework, and graduated in 1870 with a certificate to teach school. Her education was profoundly impacted by the transcendentalists, especially the writings of Emerson and Thoreau (New Woman xvi). Seeking adventure and wanting to contribute to sweeping historical change, Williams moved south during Reconstruction to be a schoolteacher. Her insulated northern childhood proved poor preparation for the level of racism she encountered while traveling and teaching in the southern states. Nevertheless, she stayed true to her mission for a number of years, eventually ending up in Washington, D.C., where she became acquainted with many black intellectuals and activists. In 1887, at the age of thirtytwo, she married, and the newlyweds moved to Chicago. During their Chicago years, the Williamses worked and socialized with a plethora of distinguished African Americans, including Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. DuBois. Williams’s speech, ‘‘The intellectual progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation,’’ at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 put her in the national spotlight for the first time. That same year Williams and Mary Church Terrell were instrumental in the establishment of the National League of Colored Women, and three years later they worked to found the National Association of Colored Women. Williams began writing newspaper articles in 1895 when she became a correspondent for Woman’s Era, the first publication for and by African American women. In the summer of 1904, Williams’s ‘‘A Northern Negro’s Autobiography’’ appeared in the widely read journal the Independent. Williams was reacting to a series of articles the journal ran in the spring that she thought gave the impression black women lived only in the south. In 1905 and 1906, the New York Age, an important African American national newspaper, published several articles by Williams. Also about this time Williams wrote columns for the white Chicago Record Herald. Williams was a pioneering sociologist, focusing on issues related to the home and education, and she associated with other ‘‘feminist pragmatists’’ in Chicago, including Jane Addams, Mary McDowell, and Celia Parker Woolley. As such, Williams was

FANNIE BARRIER WILLIAMS

621

actively involved with each one’s social project: Addams’s Hull-House, McDowell’s University of Chicago Social Settlement, and Woolley’s Frederick Douglass Center. Williams’s work in sociology, which focused not only on black women but on other disenfranchised groups as well, was marginalized or dismissed entirely by the white male-dominated field as it developed after 1920 (New Woman xxxvi). Williams’s last major accomplishment was in 1924 when she became the first female and the first African American to be named to the Chicago Public Library Board. She held the position for two years before resigning to return to Brockport, New York, where she lived out her remaining years with her sister. Her husband died in 1921, after having survived a serious automobile accident the previous year. MAJOR WORKS Williams’s articles and reprinted addresses are difficult to come by as virtually all were published in newspapers and journals long defunct; however, in 2002, Northern Illinois University Press published The New Woman of Color: The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893–1918. Skillfully edited and introduced by Mary Jo Deegan, the collection includes many of Williams’s more significant pieces, including her 1904 ‘‘Autobiography’’ and her speech at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. There are twenty-four of Williams’ pieces all together, and among them are eulogies for Philip D. Armour and Susan B. Anthony. The prose of ‘‘Autobiography’’ is lively and much more akin to the economical style that would continue to evolve in the new century, showing little of the floridness often associated with writers of the 1800s. Though brief, Williams recounts her racism-free childhood and tells of her family’s history. Then, via a series of personal anecdotes she discusses the overt bigotry of the south versus the more Machiavellian practices of northern racists: ‘‘. . . I can but believe that the prejudice that blights and hinders is quite as decided in the North as it is in the South, but does not manifest itself so openly and brutally’’ (10). In particular, Williams talks about trying to find employment for young black women in companies owned by white men. She baldly criticizes churchgoing whites, both men and women, who claim to have Christian values but are bigots in their daily lives. She closes her autobiography, however, with restrained optimism: ‘‘I dare not cease to hope and aspire and believe in human love and justice, but progress is painful and my faith is often strained to the breaking point’’ (13). Williams had expressed many of these same ideas a decade earlier when she spoke at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In the speech, originally published in The World’s Congress of Representative Women (1894), she identifies Christianity and education as the keys for women of color to achieve equality in American society. ‘‘[O]ur women,’’ she writes, ‘‘find congeniality in all the creeds, from the Catholic creed to the no-creed of Emerson’’ (19). And she says that for ‘‘thirty years education has been the magic word among the colored people’’ (19). Her interests in sociology are clear from the beginning of the address when she notes that ‘‘[l]ess is known of our women than of any other class of Americans’’ (17). She further claims that ‘‘[t]he power of organized womanhood is one of the most interesting studies of modern sociology’’ (20).

622

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

CRITICAL RECEPTION Scholarship on Williams has been meager, owed in large part to the scarcity of her published work prior to the 2002 collection. Deegan asserts that Williams was controversial in her lifetime and is to this day. Various historians have characterized Williams as an ‘‘accommodationist,’’ an ‘‘elitist,’’ and as a ‘‘dilettante’’ (xiv). In her autobiography, Williams tells of having to pass as a Frenchwoman while in the south to avoid being subjected to Jim Crow laws, especially while traveling by train. According to Deegan, some biographers have blown Williams’s admission out of proportion to make it seem as though she habitually misrepresented her ethnicity. Deegan writes, ‘‘Such a harsh interpretation of Williams, who did not pass as white in her everyday life and who fought for African American rights, ideas, and history throughout her life, blames the victim of discrimination instead of the oppressor’’ (xvi–xvii). As far as the charge of elitism, Williams does differentiate between black women who are educated and moral, like herself—primarily northerners—and those who are ignorant and lacking a sense of Christian morality. She does not criticize the women of the south themselves, but places blame on the institution of slavery and its tenacious aftermath (21). She also charges that African Americans of her day have difficulty living and working in harmony: ‘‘For peculiar and painful reasons the great lessons of fraternity and altruism are hard for colored women to learn. Emancipation found the colored Americans of the South with no sentiments of association’’ (20). Williams does say, though, that black women have taken a leading role in trying to bring communities together for the common good (21). Moreover, her 1893 address shows anticipation of great contributions to American literature, art, and music by African American women of the coming generation (20). As far as being a dilettante, there is no question that Williams’s father was a well-to-do man of business who made sure his children were well educated and well cared for, and Williams’s husband was a successful attorney—so she did not suffer the same ignorance, poverty, and indignities that plagued most African American women of her day. Williams, therefore, could have lived a quiet, comfortable life in New England or Chicago, but instead she worked on behalf of the downtrodden, regardless of race and gender, and risked her personal safety to do so. She moved south as a schoolteacher while still a teenager, and after making a name for herself nationally with her pen and voice, Williams went on lecture tours throughout the south. Deegan writes, ‘‘It is not her flaws that fascinate me: it is her frequent transcendence of her own limits that is exciting’’ (lvi). BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Fannie Barrier Williams The New Woman of Color: The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893–1918. Edited by Mary Jo Deegan. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Note: All works listed below are collected in The New Woman of Color. ‘‘Club Movement among Colored Women.’’ In Progress of a Race: The Remarkable Advancement of the American Negro, edited by J. W. Gibson and W. H. Grogman, 197–281. Naperville, IL: J.L. Nichols, 1912. ‘‘The Club Movement among the Colored Women.’’ Voice of the Negro 1.3 (1904): 99–102. ‘‘The Colored Girl.’’ Voice of the Negro 2.6 (1905): 400–403. ‘‘Colored Women of Chicago.’’ Southern Workman 43 (October 1914): 564–66.

FANNIE BARRIER WILLIAMS

623

‘‘Do We Need Another Name?’’ Southern Workman 33 ( January 1904): 33–36. ‘‘An Extension of the Conference Spirit.’’ Voice of the Negro 1.7 (1904): 300–303. ‘‘The Frederick Douglass Centre.’’ Southern Workman 35 ( June 1906): 334–36. ‘‘The Frederick Douglass Centre: A Question of Social Betterment and Not of Social Equality.’’ Voice of the Negro 1.12 (1904): 601–4. The History of Woman Suffrage. Eulogy of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 5 (1900–1920). 1922. Edited by Ida Husted Harper. New York: Arno Press, 1969. ‘‘Industrial Education—Will It Solve the Negro Problem?’’ Colored American ( July 1904): 491– 505. ‘‘The Need of Social Settlement Work for the City Negro.’’ Southern Workman 33 (September 1904): 501–6. ‘‘The Negro and Public Opinion.’’ Voice of the Negro 1.1 (1904): 31–32. ‘‘A New Method of Dealing with the Race Problem.’’ Voice of the Negro 3.7 (1906): 502–5. ‘‘A Northern Negro’s Autobiography.’’ Independent 57 ( July 14, 1904): 91–96. ‘‘Philip D. Armour.’’ Eulogy. Southern Workman 30 (May 1901): 24–25. ‘‘The Problem of Employment for Negro Women.’’ Address delivered at the Hampton Conference, July 1903. Southern Workman 32 (September 1903): 432–37. ‘‘Refining Influence of Art.’’ Voice of the Negro 3.3 (1906): 211–14. ‘‘Religious Duty to the Negro.’’ In The World’s Congress of Religion, edited by J. W. Hanson, 893– 977. Chicago: W.B. Conkey, 1894. ‘‘Report of Memorial Service for Rev. Celia Parker Woolley, April 7, 1918, at the Abraham Lincoln Centre, Chicago.’’ Unity 81 (April 18, 1918): 116–17. ‘‘The Smaller Economies.’’ Voice of the Negro 1.5 (1904): 184–85. ‘‘Social Bonds in the ‘Black Belt’ of Chicago: Negro Organizations and the New Spirit Pervading Them.’’ Charities 15 (October 7, 1905): 40–44. ‘‘Vacation Values.’’ Voice of the Negro 2.12 (1905): 863–66. ‘‘The Woman’s Part in a Man’s Business.’’ Voice of the Negro 1.11 (1904): 543–47. The World’s Congress of Representative Women. Edited by Mary Wright Sewell. Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1894, 2: 696–711.

Studies of Fannie Barrier Williams’s Works Fishel, Leslie H., Jr. ‘‘Fannie Barrier Williams.’’ In Notable American Women, edited by Edward T. James, 3: 620–22. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University, 1971. Lamping, Marilyn. ‘‘Fannie Barrier Williams.’’ In American Women Writers, edited by Lina Mainiero, 432–33. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1982. Logan, Rayford W. ‘‘Fannie Barrier Williams.’’ In Dictionary of American Negro Biography, edited by Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, 656–57. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982. Riggs, Marcia Y. ‘‘Fannie [Barrier] Williams.’’ In African American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Dorothy C. Salem, 556–58. New York: Garland, 1993. Smith, Jessie Cary. ‘‘Fannie B. Williams (1855–1944).’’ In Notable Black American Women, edited by Jessie Cary Smith, 1251–54. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Spear, Allan H. ‘‘Fannie Barrier Williams.’’ In Dictionary of American Biography, edited by Edward T. James et al., 827–28. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

Ted Morrissey

SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS (1944–1999)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Most widely acclaimed for her 1986 novel Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams played an important role in twentieth-century African American literature as writer, teacher, and scholar. Williams, groundbreaking in her first-person representations of rural and poor African American women, wrote one of the first neo-slave narratives that followed Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, with Dessa Rose appearing just prior to Morrison’s 1987 Beloved. One of the pioneers who established a place for African American literature in academia, Williams’s literary criticism highlights matters including the changing ideology of the African American heroic figure and the impact of the blues on the literary tradition. Her poetry and fiction often reflect the life she and her three sisters experienced as the daughters of agricultural workers who followed the crops in California’s San Joaquin valley. As a writer, she filled a void that had frustrated her younger self by depicting in books the girls and young women who grew up and lived in such a world. Williams combined her work as a poet and fiction writer with her ongoing scholarship as well as with the teaching of African American literature as a professor at the University of California, San Diego, from 1973 to 1999. Williams was born on August 25, 1944, in Bakersfield, California, and spent her early years in the projects in Fresno. Her father, Jesse, died of tuberculosis when she was eight and her mother, Lelia-Lena, died when she was sixteen. Williams’s older sister Ruby, who at eighteen had returned home with her daughter following the breakup of her marriage, cared for Williams following their mother’s death. In the introduction to her story ‘‘Meditations on History’’ in Mary Helen Washington’s Midnight Birds, Williams attributes much of her early success to Ruby’s support. Her early short stories, ‘‘Tell Martha Not to Moan’’ (1968) and ‘‘The Lawd Don’t Like Ugly’’ (1974), drew characters and language from the poor, rural California environments where she grew up, where the ‘‘heroic young women’’she knew ‘‘who despite all they had to do and endure laughed and loved, hoped and encouraged, [and] supported each other with gifts of food and money’’ (‘‘Meditations’’ 197). Though she found few representations of women like her sisters and herself in the books at her school library, she did find autobiographies by Eartha Kitt, Katherine Dunham, Ethel Waters, and Richard Wright that inspired her to endure. Her early literary influences also included Louisa May Alcott, Frank Yerby, and Sterling Brown. In Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, she found a representation of the language she knew and which she ultimately incorporated into her own fiction and poetry. A woman of letters in every respect, Williams braided writing into her life as a mother, scholar, and teacher. She earned her B.A. in history from Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) in 1966 and attended graduate school at the Fisk University (1966) and Howard University (1966–1967). She taught adult education at Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama, in the midsixties and worked as a community educator in Washington, D.C., from 1970 to 1972. In 1972 she received her M.A. in

SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS

625

American literature from Brown University. The same year, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature was published and she returned to Fresno with her young son, Malcolm, to take a position as an associate professor of English. In 1973 she became assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, where she served as department chair from 1976 to 1982. Her first book of poetry, The Peacock Poems, was published in 1975, and her second, Some One Sweet Angel Chile, in 1982. In 1984, she was senior Fulbright lecturer at the University of Ghana. Her two children’s books, Working Cotton and Girls Together, appeared in 1992 and 1999, respectively. She continued to teach at the University of California, San Diego, until her death from cancer on July 6, 1999. MAJOR WORKS Williams first gained recognition as a poet. The Peacock Poems (1975), her earliest collection, speaks of giving birth and motherhood, of relations between African American women and men, of driving the roads of the San Joaquin Valley, and of the power of words and poetry. Frances Smith Foster, who refers to these poems as ‘‘so technically perfect that technique seems non-existent,’’describes them as ‘‘first of all about a woman, all women, and black women especially.’’ This is especially evident in the opening poem, ‘‘Any Woman’s Blues,’’ and in ‘‘I Sing This Song for Our Mothers.’’ The theme of the blues emerges more explicitly in Williams’s second book of poetry, Some One Sweet Angel Chile (1982), in homage to Bessie Smith. The first of its three sections is Williams’s ‘‘Letters from a New England Negro.’’ Written in the voice of a Negro woman who went south following the Civil War to teach those freed from slavery, the ‘‘Letters’’ reemerged as a full-length, one-woman drama performed at the 1991 National Black Theatre Festival and the 1992 Chicago International Theatre Festival. The central section evokes Bessie Smith’s life, her influence, and her music through the poems ‘‘Regular Reefer,’’ ‘‘The Hard Time Blues,’’ and the widely anthologized ‘‘I Want Aretha to Set This to Music,’’ a blues lyric that echoes the ‘‘one-sided bed Blues’’ of the Peacock Poems. The final section returns to an autobiographical voice; the most poignant, ‘‘the wishon line,’’ tells of a journey to visit her father before he died of tuberculosis. Give Birth to Brightness (1972), Williams’s first published text of literary criticism, established her engagement with the nature of the African American hero. This rich text, written at a time when the neo-black literary movement was taking shape, traces the types of African American heroic figures in America, from the slave rebel and the trickster figure through the street man and the modern revolutionary hero, noting the ways that the historical and social situations of African American life in America produce different kinds of heroes. Williams reads Amiri Baraka’s early works, The Dutchman and The Slave as examples of where African American literature has been, and James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie and Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as evidence of a newly emerging neo-black hero that represents African American life for African American audiences, rather than as a subtext to white America. She explained later in an interview with Shirley Jordan that ‘‘[w]hen I wrote Give Birth to Brightness, Toni Morrison said that the book was very masculine. . . . If I had found women [in literature] who fit my subject—a certain kind of heroic black character—I would have dealt with that too’’ (210). Indeed, her short story ‘‘Meditations on History’’ and her novel Dessa Rose were inspired by an abbreviated historical account of just such a heroine.

626

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Williams first encountered the story that became Dessa Rose in Angela Davis’s 1971 ‘‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,’’ which includes an account of a slave woman who led a rebellion from a slave coffle. In tracing Davis’s account of Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts, Williams came across the story of a white woman accused of harboring runaway slaves on her plantation. She framed her novel with an opening in which Dessa’s viewpoint counters and reveals the inaccuracy of an invented white male ‘‘researcher’’ and writer of guides for slaveholders. In part, the historically fictional Dessa Rose is a response to William Styron’s controversial reimagination of Nat Turner’s revolt as he renders it in The Confessions of Nat Turner. However, Williams’s primary objective was to represent a historical voice that she had been unable to find in the books she read growing up in California: the voice of the African American woman. At the same time, the latter sections of Dessa Rose contain subtle allusions to canonical white male authors, with the ghosts of William Faulkner and Mark Twain haunting the novel—Sutton Glen, Williams’s setting for the middle section, parodies Faulkner’s Sutpen’s Hundred and the third and final section invokes Twain’s picaresque style and recalls the tragicomic selling and rescuing of Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Williams was working on a sequel to Dessa Rose when she died. In the spring of 2005, a version of Dessa Rose by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty appeared as an Off-Broadway production at the Lincoln Center in New York City. During the 1990s, Williams composed two children’s books. Working Cotton, illustrated by Carole Byard, is a selection from The Peacock Poems’ ‘‘The Trimming of the Feathers,’’ which represents a girl’s-eye view of a family working in a field from sun-up to sun-down. Williams’s second children’s book, Girls Together (1999), with illustrations by Synthia Saint James, is a simple but compelling story of a group of girls playing together in the projects—climbing a tree, sharing a bicycle, and taking a flower home for a friend. Recognized most often for her poetry and fiction, Williams was also a brilliant literary scholar. Just as Give Birth to Brightness was an important critical work at a time when African American literature was beginning to receive attention, Williams’s more recent work in literary criticism has been timely and important. Between them, her introductions to the 1978 reprint of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and to a 1996 edition of Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson mark the dramatic changes that the field of literature saw during her career. The first introduced readers to Hurston’s rural African American heroine, Janie, whose language and experience resonated with that of the rural African American culture Williams knew from her own life. The second, less a critical celebration and more a case of hard-nosed praise for an already canonical writer, calls Twain’s text ‘‘a clever, ironic, and caustic rebuke of the notion of the Negro’s ‘inherent’—that is natural—inferiority’’ (xxxii). ‘‘Some Implications of Womanist Theory’’ (1986) is Williams’s entry into the conversation about the role of African American women as literary scholars in relation to the whole of a black aesthetic and in relation to feminist projects that largely failed to address the position of African American women in society. This essay, which builds on her work in Give Birth to Brightness, traces the changing nature of the heroic quest of the African American male character. It is notable especially for its attention to the nature of the African American male literary hero prior to 1940, a hero whom she identifies as notably nonviolent, with his heroism dependent on moral superiority or ‘‘intellectual parity’’ and his care for family and others. ‘‘The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-

SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS

627

American Poetry’’ (1997) and ‘‘Returning to the Blues: Esther Phillips and Contemporary Blues Culture’’ (1991) define the importance of the blues to contemporary African American literature and culture, while ‘‘The Lion’s History: The Ghetto Writes B(l)ack’’ (1993) stakes a place for African American writers to write their own stories. ‘‘The Lion’s History’’ is, in part, a response to criticism of Dessa Rose, and there Williams outlines in greater detail her impetus in writing the novel, claiming her need to write those like herself into history, ‘‘even though [she] seemed to have no place there except as slave and savage’’ (247). She observes that ‘‘‘History’ is often no more than who holds the pen at a given point in time’’ (258). Williams wielded her own pen compellingly, claiming through her writing a place in history for herself, for African American women, and for all women. CRITICAL RECEPTION In 1976, The Peacock Poems garnered nominations for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Some One Sweet Angel Chile was likewise nominated for the National Book Award, and a televised reading from the collection won an Emmy Award in 1982. Dessa Rose was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times in 1986. The children’s book Working Cotton was selected as both a Caldecott Honor Book and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book in 1993. David Bradley, reviewing Dessa Rose for the New York Times, notes Williams’s skill as a novelist. He describes Dessa Rose as ‘‘an absorbing fusion that is both elegant poetry and powerful fiction’’ and draws a parallel between Alice Walker’s storyline in The Color Purple and Williams’s story of ‘‘a liberating relationship between two women.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Sherley Anne Williams ‘‘The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.’’ Massachusetts Review 18.3 (1977): 542–54. Dessa Rose. New York: Morrow, 1986. Dessa Rose. Musical. Adapted by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. Dir. Graciela Daniele. Perf. La Chanze and Rachel York. Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center. New York, 2005. Foreword to Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, v–xv. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Girls Together. With Illustrations by Synthia Saint James. San Diego: Harcourt, 1999. Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature. New York: Dial, 1972. ‘‘In Time: The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson.’’ Introduction to The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, by Mark Twain, xxxi–xliii. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ‘‘The Lawd Don’t Like Ugly.’’ New Letters 41.2 (1974): 15–37. ‘‘The Lion’s History: The Ghetto Writes B(l)ack.’’ Soundings 76.2–3 (1993): 245–60. ‘‘Meditations on History.’’ In Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers, edited by Mary Helen Washington, 200–248. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1980. The Peacock Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975. ‘‘Returning to the Blues: Esther Phillips and Contemporary Blues Culture.’’ Callaloo 14.4 (1991): 816–28. ‘‘Some Implications of Womanist Theory.’’ Callaloo 27 (1986): 303–8.

628

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

‘‘Someone Sweet Angel Child.’’ Massachusetts Review 18.3 (1977): 567–72. Some One Sweet Angel Chile. New York: Morrow, 1982. ‘‘Tell Martha Not to Moan.’’ Massachusetts Review 9 (Summer 1968): 443–58. Working Cotton. With Illustrations by Carole Byard. San Diego: Harcourt, 1992.

Studies of Sherley Anne Williams’s Works Bradley, David. ‘‘On the Lam from Race and Gender.’’ Rev. of Dessa Rose. New York Times, August 3, 1986, late city final edition, sec. 7:7. Foster, Frances Smith. ‘‘The Line Converges Here.’’ Rev. of The Peacock Poems. Callaloo 5 (February 1979): 151–52. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. ‘‘Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery.’’ Callaloo 19.2 (1996): 519–36. McDowell, Deborah E. ‘‘Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom—Dessa Rose.’’ In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Mitchell, Angelyn. The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. ‘‘Reading Mammy: The Subject of Relation in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose.’’ African American Review 27.3 (1993): 365–89.

Gretchen Michlitsch

HARRIET E. WILSON (1828?–1863?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Very little is known about the life of Harriet E. Wilson, the first African American female novelist and author of Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. After its first printing in 1859, the novel and its author disappeared from American literary consciousness. In 1983, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reintroduced Wilson and her text to American readers. Three letters included in the original appendix of Our Nig provide some biographical details about Wilson. The text of Our Nig can also be mined for information on Wilson. However, scholars emphasize that the novel cannot be read as purely autobiographical. Gates determined that the author of Our Nig was a black woman named Harriet E. Wilson. She was born Harriet Adams near the town of Milford, New Hampshire, around 1828. She was subsequently abandoned by her mother and indentured in the home of a white family until her eighteenth birthday. David A. Curtis provides two sources that confirm Wilson’s birth date and location: the 1850 federal census for the state of New Hampshire, and the marriage record of Harriet Adams and Thomas Wilson, dated 1851. Barbara A. White discovered the identity of the family to which the child Harriet Adams was indentured: the family of Nehemiah Hayward. Wilson worked as a slave for the Hayward family, and she was often physically and mentally abused. According to the novel, from the age of six, the narrator worked for Mrs. ‘‘Bellmont’’ as a field hand and house servant. She was often whipped at her mistress’s whim. White asserts, ‘‘Documentary evidence regarding the Haywards shows that many of Wilson’s stories in Our Nig are literally true’’ (ix). Ironically, the Hayward family had strong connections to the abolitionist movement. According to the novel, the letters of the appendix, and historical information uncovered by White, Wilson’s descriptions of the abuse she endured in the Hayward home can be believed. Wilson managed to survive until her eighteenth year, but her health had been severely damaged by the hard life she had lived. After she escaped the Haywards, Wilson found work in the home of a local family in Milford, whose identity is not yet ascertained. The 1850 Milford town records list Wilson among the poor supported by the town during the previous year. The 1850 federal census states that Wilson was a resident of the Boyles family and that she was twenty-two years old. Wilson soon moved to a town in Massachusetts to find work. ‘‘Allida’’ writes in her letter in the appendix that the town’s name begins with a ‘‘W’’ and that it had a straw hat industry. According to ‘‘Allida,’’ Wilson lived in the home of a Mrs. Walker and earned her room and board as a straw-sewer. Shortly after her arrival in Massachusetts, Wilson met a black man named Thomas Wilson, who claimed to be a former slave and lectured to abolitionist groups. They married in 1851 in Milford, according to the town’s marriage records. A few months later, shortly before the birth of their son, Thomas abandoned his wife. Wilson’s son George was born in May or June of 1852 in the county poorhouse. After George’s birth, Thomas returned for a short while, but then abandoned his family again for good. Unable to support her son in Milford,

630

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Wilson left George first in the poorhouse, then in a foster home with a white famly. According to the letters of ‘‘Allida’’ and ‘‘Margaretta Thorn,’’ this new foster family treated George well. The 1855 and 1856 Milford town records indicate that Wilson again was supported by the town the years prior. Wilson moved to Boston in 1855 or 1856. The Boston city directory lists a Harriet Wilson, widow, living in the city from 1856 to 1863. Wilson published Our Nig in 1859 in Boston. She states in her preface that she undertook the project to raise money to support her child. According to his death certificate, George died on February 15, 1860, within six months of the publication of Our Nig. He was seven years, eight months old. Harriet Wilson disappears from official records in 1863. MAJOR WORKS Harriet E. Wilson self-published Our Nig anonymously in 1859, through the Boston publishing company George C. Rand and Avery. Scholars believe this initial printing was the only edition of the novel before its first modern printing. The 1983 edition is accompanied by a long introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. His 1983 research has been supplemented over the years, and has yielded another edition in 2002. These modern printings contain facsimiles of the original 1859 edition. The facsimile includes the preface, written by Wilson, and the appendix containing three letters in support of Wilson’s project. The novel’s title page reads: ‘‘Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a free Black, in a two-story white house, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. By ‘Our Nig.’ ’’ The page prior to the title page indicates that a Mrs. H. E. Wilson entered the copyright for the novel at the District Court of Massachusetts. Our Nig is the narrative of the life of Alfrado, a free black woman living in New Hampshire. It begins with the marriage of the heroine’s parents and ends with the birth of her own child and subsequent abandonment by her husband. The narrative is told primarily in the third person, removing it from the traditional autobiography genre. Yet its semiautobiographical nature is attested by the author in the preface and by the three letter writers in the appendix. From the very start, Our Nig is highly complex. The novel opens with the marriage of Alfrado’s mother Mag, a white woman, to Jim, a black man. Theirs is not a marriage of love, but rather a business transaction. Jim wants a white wife, as whiteness is valuable property in the economy of the novel. In return, he provides Mag a home and food, saving her from poverty. In its portrayal of an ordinary marriage that happens to be interracial, Wilson’s novel is radical. After the birth of a few children, Jim dies. Mag forms a relationship with another man, Seth, although they do not marry. Unable to support the children, they leave six-year-old Alfrado at the home of a neighbor family, the Bellmonts. From the age of six to the age of eighteen, Alfrado, or Frado, works as an indentured servant in the Bellmont home. She is abused physically and mentally by Mrs. Bellmont and her youngest child, Mary. Mrs. Bellmont works Frado like a slave. Frado does all of the household labor and helps with the farm labor as well. Mrs. Bellmont brutally punishes Frado, and the author describes these punishments in awful detail. Mrs. Bellmont whips Frado with a rawhide, gags her with rags and pieces of wood, starves her, and locks her in closets. Other members of the Bellmont family try to protect Frado: Mr. Bellmont, his maiden sister Abby, and other Bellmont children. They are unsuccessful, though, and Frado lives in misery until she turns eighteen.

HARRIET E. WILSON

631

After Frado leaves the Bellmonts, she takes a position in the home of Mrs. Moore as a seamstress. Mrs. Moore is kind to Frado, but soon Frado’s health begins to fail her. She becomes an invalid as a result of the difficult labor she performed since early childhood. She works some, then returns to the Bellmont home when she is struck by illness. She recovers, finds work, but again becomes ill. She is taken in by a woman who is paid by the town to care for invalids. Frado then travels to Massachusetts to a town where ‘‘girls make straw bonnets’’ (124). She finds a job and starts a pleasant life. In the final chapter of the book, Frado meets Samuel, the man she marries. He claims to be a fugitive slave and makes a living giving speeches about slavery on the abolitionist circuit, but it turns out he never was a slave at all. Frado and Samuel return to her home town to marry, and then Samuel abandons his pregnant wife. She puts herself on the charity of the town and bears her child. Her husband then returns for a short while, but soon leaves her again. He meets his death by yellow fever in New Orleans. The book ends with the narrator reiterating that Frado seeks the reader’s support: ‘‘Reposing in God, she has thus far journeyed securely. Still an invalid, she asks your sympathy, gentle reader’’ (130). A major theme of this text is the power of speech: who has it, and who controls it in others. In one scene, Mrs. Bellmont believes that Frado has told others about her cruelty, and punishes Frado for speaking out. She forces a piece of wood into Frado’s mouth, symbolically and literally silencing her, and then whips her. Mrs. Bellmont tells Frado that she intends to ‘‘cure her of tale-bearing’’ (93). Mrs. Bellmont recognizes that Frado’s only power lies in her ability to tell others of Mrs. Bellmont’s horrid behavior and therefore seeks to control Frado’s speech. In another scene, Mrs. Bellmont tells Frado not to pray, because ‘‘prayer was for whites, not for blacks’’ (94). Frado is not even allowed to ask her God for assistance. Frado’s moment of rebellion against Mrs. Bellmont finally comes in chapter ten. Mrs. Bellmont lifts a stick to strike Frado, and Frado yells, ‘‘Stop!’’ (105). She warns Mrs. Bellmont, ‘‘Strike me and I’ll never work a mite more for you’’ (105). Frado realizes that ‘‘she had a power to ward of assaults.’’ This power consists solely of her voice: she never makes a move to strike Mrs. Bellmont in return. She performs a vocal, not physical, rebellion. CRITICAL RECEPTION Our Nig was not well received at the time of its publication. White abolitionists comprised the primary audience of the work of African American authors. Indeed, slave narratives were tools of the abolitionist movement to persuade other northern whites to support the cause. Wilson’s narrative resembles a slave narrative in form, but differs in one significant respect: the ‘‘slaveowner’’ in Our Nig is a northern white woman. Furthermore, it is now known that her real-life counterpart had ties to the abolitionist movement. Thus, Wilson seems to have deliberately alienated her readership. Eric Gardner has done excellent research on the publication history of Our Nig. He writes: ‘‘My research . . . suggests not only that abolitionists knew about the book but that they may have consciously chosen not to publicize it’’ (227). Wilson seems to have been aware of the consequences of her actions. In the preface to the novel, she writes that her northern mistress was ‘‘imbued with southern principles,’’ an apparent attempt to win northern readers. And, in the last paragraph of the preface, Wilson appeals to her ‘‘colored brethren’’ to support her, perhaps anticipating rejection of her text by white people. However, Gardner has discovered that although ‘‘Wilson clearly addresses a black readership in her preface, this readership may never have been reached by the original

632

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

edition of Our Nig’’ (227). Gardner continues, ‘‘[I]t appears that it instead attracted primarily white, middle-class readers who lived close to Wilson’s home in Milford, New Hampshire’’ (227–28). According to Gardner, it is probable that Wilson distributed the book herself to her friends and neighbors in Milford. In her novel, Wilson radically combines the two prevailing genres available to her in the 1850s: the woman’s sentimental novel and the slave narrative. Gates writes, ‘‘By this act of formal revision [of the white woman’s novel], she created the black woman’s novel’’ (xlvi, emphasis in original). In her essay, ‘‘Excavating Genre in Our Nig,’’ Julia Stern observes that ‘‘Our Nig marks a transitional moment in the history of American women’s narrative’’ (439). She continues: ‘‘[W]hile the novel’s sentimental frame attempts to function as a structure of containment, it cannot quite suppress, and indeed underscores, the gothic protest seething beneath the narrative’s surface’’ (439). Furthermore, Wilson’s novel ‘‘raises important questions about what Gates has called ‘the innocence of the mother-daughter relationship’’’ (440). Thus, Our Nig should be considered radical, in both a literary and political sense. BIBLIOGRAPHY Work by Harriet E. Wilson Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. 3rd ed. Edited by and Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Vintage, 2002.

Studies of Harriet E. Wilson’s Work Ellis, R. J. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: A Cultural Biography of a ‘‘Two-Story’’ African Novel. Kenilworth, NJ: Rodopi, 2003. Ernest, John. ‘‘Economics of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig.’’ PMLA 109 (1994): 424–38. Gardner, Eric. ‘‘‘This Attempt of Their Sister’: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig from Printer to Readers.’’ New England Quarterly 66 (1993): 226–46. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and David Ames Curtis. ‘‘Establishing the Identity of the Author of Our Nig.’’ In Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Leveen, Lois. ‘‘Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.’’ African American Review 35.4 (2001): 561–80. Stern, Julia. ‘‘Excavating Genre in Our Nig.’’ American Literature 67.3 (1995): 439–66. White, Barbara A. ‘‘Our Nig and the She-Devil: New Information about Harriet Wilson and the ‘Bellmont’ Family.’’ American Literature 65.1 (1993): 19–52.

Katie Rose Guest

SARAH ELIZABETH WRIGHT (1928–?)

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born on December 9, 1928, to Mary Amelia Moore and Willis Charles Wright, poet and novelist Sarah Elizabeth Wright grew up one of nine children in Wetipquin, Maryland. Wright’s parents raised their nine children with love, care, and dignity, although their lives were often a struggle. In addition to overseeing her children’s education, Wright’s mother worked on the family’s farm and in a local factory; her father was an oysterman, a farmer, and a barber. Their example of hard work and care, laborers outside and inside the home, stayed with Wright and appear as major themes in her writing. Encouraged by teachers and the school librarian, Wright began writing poetry during her early elementary school years. At age sixteen, she left home to enter Howard University to study under the tutelage of poet Sterling Brown. While there she added to her writing experience by working as a contributing editor/reporter at the 49er, the Hilltop, and the Stylus, developing her understanding of the symbiotic relationship between writing and society, particularly as writing affects the lives of African Americans and their search for a positive self-identity. It was at this point that she began a lifelong involvement in social activism. At Howard, Wright also had the opportunity to meet Langston Hughes, who once wrote a poem in her honor and remained a mentor until his death. Wright moved to Philadelphia in 1949, leaving Howard without graduating. She found a job at a small publishing/printing firm owned by the Kraft family. Her interest in social issues and injustice is reflected in her poetry of this time, as seen in the volume titled Give Me a Child, which she published with Lucy Smith in 1955. In 1957, she moved to New York, where she worked with Maya Angelou, Abbey Lincoln, and Rosa Guy to found the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage. The association’s purpose was to promote and affirm black women’s natural beauty—Wright herself had abandoned the practice of straightening her hair and conforming to white standards of beauty while attending Howard. The movement for social justice for African Americans frequently meant black men sought to increase their power by making attacks on black women. Wright sought to balance gender inequities and create positive role models for black women as she believed black women’s self-respect was a prerequisite for race reform. During this time, Wright also joined the Harlem Writer’s Guild and turned her attention to fiction. The result is her novel This Child’s Gonna Live, published in 1969, in which she shows how racism and sexism are interconnected and come from the same source. In the final years of the twentieth century, Wright continued to write poetry and articles, to argue for a black power movement grounded in gender equity. Wright is currently working on a sequel to her novel with the working title Twelve Gates to the City, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Wright married Joseph Kay in 1959. They have two children, Michael Wright and Shelly Wright Chotai. The couple lives in Manhattan.

634

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

MAJOR WORKS Wright’s goal in her writing is to define and reclaim the ‘‘black experience’’ from the myths and misconceptions perpetuated by the media. Social injustice toward black Americans and the gender inequities suffered by black women are the major themes in her work. Because of the positive influence of her parents, her work also shows an optimistic bias that equity is a possibility if people work together. Wright utilizes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to get her message across. Wright’s first love is poetry, and her interest in social activism informs Give Me a Child (1955), which was cowritten with Lucy Smith. The poems encompass the daily lives of African Americans, the struggles in their lives dealing with injustice and violence in a society fighting for democracy abroad yet ignoring racial inequity at home. Yet, her poems have a sense of optimism and pride in race and their abilities and accomplishments. This Child’s Gonna Live (1969) is set in a small harbor town called Tangierneck, where the African American residents struggle to raise their children and improve their futures for their families while fighting a culture of poverty, racism, and sexism. One of the remarkable aspects of the novel is the blending of African and American spiritual beliefs in Mariah’s (the main character) religion. The novel is told in third person, primarily from Mariah’s perspective, although several chapters are from the main male character, Jacob’s, perspective. The double perspective allows for an inclusiveness that is missing in most novels. Wright’s aim is to reveal the gendered and economic history of her characters while she exposes the economic, racial, and sexual oppression of the surrounding white society. A. Philip Randolph: Integration in the Workplace is a nonfiction account of the life of Asa Philip Randolph. The article is a continuation of her dialogue on African American culture.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Wright does not have a large body of work, her literary endeavors have been well received and she is a respected member of the literary community. She is considered a voice of the Harlem Renaissance as well as a contemporary voice portraying the black experience. Much of Wright’s recognition is for her novel. This Child’s Gonna Live has been in print continuously from the time of its publication. Some reviewers writing when the novel was first published found it to be a ‘‘local color’’ story and the heroine to be poor and desperate, but reviewers such as John Killens and Henry Du Bois praised Wright for the depth and complexity of her narrative and her portrayal of the black experience in a white, racist and sexist society. In a critical analysis of the novel written in 1997, Jennifer Campbell writes that the novel endures for current audiences because Wright ‘‘shows how subtly entwined are racism and sexism, and how both are deployed in the service of capitalism by monied white men who stand to benefit.’’ The strengths that made the novel ‘‘the most important book of 1969’’ (New York Times, June 29, 1970) are the strengths that critics see in the novel today, issues that society still faces today. Wright has received several literary honors for her work, including an award from the American Women Writers of Color in 1997; a plaque from the Harlem Writer’s

SARAH ELIZABETH WRIGHT

635

Guild, honoring the thirty years of continuous sales of her novel, in 1998; and the Zora Neale Hurston Award for Literary Excellence in 1999. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Sarah Elizabeth Wright A. Phillip Randolph: Integration in the Workplace. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Silver Burdett Press, 1990. ‘‘Black Writers’ Views of America.’’ Freedomways 19.3 (1979): 161–62. Give Me a Child. With Lucy Smith. Philadelphia: Kraft, 1955. ‘‘I Have Known Death.’’ Tomorrow 10 (November 3, 1950): 46. ‘‘Lament of a Harlem Mother.’’ American Pen 4 (Spring 1972): 23–27. ‘‘Lorraine Hansberry on Film.’’ Freedomways 19.4 (1979): 283–84. ‘‘Lower East Side: A Rebirth of World Vision.’’ African American Review 27 (1993): 593–96. ‘‘The Negro Woman in American Literature.’’ Freedomways 6 (1966): 8–10. ‘‘The Responsibility of the Writer as Participant in the World Community.’’ Zora Neale Hurston Forum 3.1 (1988): 35–39. ‘‘Roadblocks to the Development of the Negro Writer.’’ In The American Negro Writer and His Roots. New York: American Society of African Culture, 1960. This Child’s Gonna Live. New York: Delacorte, 1969. ‘‘Until They Have Stopped.’’ Freedomways 5.3 (1965): 378. ‘‘Urgency.’’ In Beyond the Blue, edited by Rosey E. Pool. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1971. ‘‘Window Pictures.’’ In Beyond the Blue, edited by Rosey E. Pool. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1971.

Studies of Sarah Elizabeth Wright’s Works Campbell, Jennifer. ‘‘‘It’s a Time in the Land’: Gendering Black Power and Sarah E. Wright’s Place in the Tradition of Black Women’s Writing.’’ African American Review 31.2 (1997): 211–26. Guilford, Virginia B. ‘‘Sarah Elizabeth Wright.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, 33: 293–300. Ann Arbor, MI: Gale, 1984. Killens, John O. ‘‘An Appreciation.’’ In This Child’s Gonna Live, edited by Sarah Elizabeth Wright, 277–78, 282. New York: Delacorte, 1969. White, Linda M. ‘‘Sarah Elizabeth Wright.’’ In Contemporary African American Novelists, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 500–504. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Althea Rhodes

SHAY YOUNGBLOOD (1959– )

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1959, Shay Youngblood was educated at Clark College (now Clark-Atlanta University) in Georgia, where she received her B.A. in mass communications in 1981. Youngblood was raised communally after her mother died in the early sixties. At the time she did not appreciate the experience, but now feels that she actually grew up in a very rich world. She gleaned stories from women and men with advice as various as ‘‘You catch more flies with honey,’’ and ‘‘You punch them before they punch you!’’ Youngblood says these different voices, from her family and other ‘‘big mamas’’ in her community, helped her figure out how to shape herself as a young woman in the world. Youngblood says she learned to be very, very quiet . . . if I wanted to get the good stories. But as they got older and I got older . . . I would ask them to tell me their stories. And they would say, ‘‘Aww, nobody wanna hear about all that!’’ But I’d say, ‘‘Well I think it’s important.’’ So in a way I wrote out of sense of wanting to give them a voice. Because I thought they had done an incredible job raising me, this whole community of people raising me, both men and women, and I wanted to tell their stories. ( Jake-ann Jones)

According to Youngblood, she always loved words and after college wrote her first published story in the Dominican Republic, where she served as an agriculture information officer for the Peace Corps. The story, titled ‘‘In a House of Wooden Monkeys,’’ was published in an anthology of African American fiction edited by Gloria Naylor. After several years of taking odd jobs to support herself while she wrote, Youngblood landed a contract to publish her first book, The Big Mama Stories. It came together fortuitously. She met Nancy Bereano, the publisher of Firebrand Books at a conference, and Bereano expressed interest in Youngblood’s writing and asked her to send a manuscript when she felt she was ready. Youngblood worked on the stories for three months and sent off the manuscript. Two weeks later, she had a contract. Firebrand Books published Big Mama Stories in 1989. While she was working on the book manuscript, she adapted the material into a play, Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery. Horizon Studios in Atlanta had told her she had a gift for dialogue and they would be interested in producing a play if she ever wrote one. Shakin’ the Mess opened at Horizon in 1988, directed by Glenda Dickerson. Writing the play also provided Youngblood with the last story in Big Mama Stories: ‘‘They Tell Me, Now I Know,’’ in which the narrator is named as a rite of passage. After this very successful period, Youngblood was in and out of artists’ retreats and still working odd jobs. Then a friend recommended that she apply to Brown University’s M.F.A. program to study playwriting with Paula Vogel. Youngblood says Vogel kept her fed with inspiration and confidence that allowed her to see her possibilities. She received

SHAY YOUNGBLOOD

637

her M.F.A. in creative writing in 1993, and by then she had already seen two of her plays produced. Youngblood has won a number of awards. She won a Pushcart Prize for ‘‘Born with Religion’’ in Big Mama Stories; an NAACP Theatre Award in 1991 for Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery; a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award in 1993 for Talking Bones; and a Paul Green Foundation National Theatre Award for Square Blues in 1993. Youngblood believes part of her responsibility is to pass on the love she received from her ‘‘big mamas,’’so she encourages young writers to commit to their work and take themselves seriously as writers, to read and then go write the books they want to read. Part of Youngblood’s giving back is in her teaching, which she has done in places ranging from the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institution for Women to Brown University. She has also taught at the Syracuse Community Writers Project and at the New School for Social Research in New York. MAJOR WORKS By her own account, Shay Youngblood grew up obsessed with words, a passion that is reflected in her novels. Mariah Santos, the protagonist of Soul Kiss, eats words—not only because they bring her closer to her mother, but also because they taste delicious to her. She reads the dictionary and caresses the words on her tongue. She plants scraps of paper with words written on them and hopes they will grow. Mariah comes from an uncertain childhood, in which she was raised with the absolute (and sometimes boundary-crossing) love of her mother, who taught her how to see beauty in the world, who tucked words into her lunch bag, and who shared soul kisses with her every day. Then Mariah’s mother begins to mysteriously degenerate, losing interest in the world and even in her daughter. Only later will Mariah recognize these as effects of heartbreak and drug addiction. Mariah and her mother take a trip on a Greyhound bus from their home in Manhattan, Kansas, to visit her mother’s aunts Faith and Merleen in Columbus, Georgia. Mariah’s mother leaves and Mariah ends up staying with Faith and Merleen for seven years. Much of Soul Kiss is Mariah’s attempt to come to terms with her mother’s absence, her father’s absence, and her own growth into womanhood against the backdrop of the civil-rights-strained sixties. Mariah’s burgeoning creativity leads her into experiments with her own erotic feelings, and her loneliness keeps her constantly looking for love. Mariah thinks she has found the solution to the missing love in her life when her father agrees to let her live with him in Los Angeles. Mariah and her father try to make their family work, but they both miss her mother, and Mariah’s resemblance to her mother and her own incipient longing for erotic fulfillment make the union tricky to navigate. In Soul Kiss, Shay Youngblood deals with issues that she will continue to evocatively limn in Black Girl in Paris and that she began sorting out in Big Mama Stories—What kinds of love are there? How much love is enough? How are creativity and imagination helpful and harmful to a young woman? Creativity seems at times to betray Mariah, making her invest in things that those with less giving imaginations would steer clear of. Finally, the novel deals with the value and weight of innocence. Youngblood writes about the world in a knowing and clever way that has sometimes struck critics as slightly too knowing for her often young protagonists. From Big Mama Stories: ‘‘One Sunday Maggie got saved. During the call to sinners she walked that slow, sexy, smelling-the-roses walk of hers right up to the preacher, looked him dead in the

638

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

eye, and shouted, ‘Save me!’ Then she leaned into Reverend Waters arms like a fallen angel’’ (86). Youngblood’s language delights and the observations of the small town’s wide cast of characters draw the reader into the world that Rita (more often referred to as Chile or Daughter in the book) inhabits. Rita, like Mariah, Eden in Black Girl in Paris, and Youngblood herself, is an effective orphan, but is raised by a cast of women who teach her the intricacies of the world. Their stories contain love as well as a warning of boundaries. In the story ‘‘Snuff Dippers,’’ Big Mama tells Rita about the maids’ bus that drove the route from the poor side of town, where it picked up the African American maids—of which Big Mama and her friend Miss Emma Lou were two—and took them to work in the wealthy suburbs. Youngblood handles this story in a masterful and poignant manner. Big Mama and Miss Emma Lou ride the bus and Emma Lou chews tobacco. She has forgotten her snuff cup and so she spits tobacco juice out the window. It lands on a white couple in a convertible. Up to this point, Youngblood through Big Mama has made the story a light comedy, mildly embittered by its contact with the reality of racially based division and economic disadvantage. But then Youngblood moves the tale into nightmarish humiliation as the driver of the convertible makes the bus pull over and has each of the grown women line up by the side of the road so the man can spit in their faces one by one. Youngblood relieves the horror of this injustice and humiliation by having the man’s convertible battered by a truck as he pulls back onto the highway, but the reader feels changed along with Rita by this revelation of cruelty. This is Youngblood’s art, to bend a deceptively simple story into a multilayered commentary on injustice and power. In Black Girl in Paris, Youngblood deals with similar issues but with an older narrator. Eden is a young woman who wants to be a writer and dreams of going to Paris to join the ranks of the great African American writers who flourished there. But the Paris that she finds is troubled by terrorism, poverty, and racism. Eden is the protagonist with the most advanced years in Youngblood’s work to date, and her differences from Mariah are telling. She, too, is looking for family, but she takes Mariah’s search one step further by looking for a made family, a family of words—those who produce them, like her idol and patron saint, James Baldwin, and the words that she hopes to illuminate her own world with. She goes to Paris with little money and many romantic hopes for what her stay there will bring. Eden must work her way through the reality of Paris, which for her means fear that she or one of her new friends will be dismembered or killed by the bombs planted on buses and in squares in protest of France’s racist practices. Paris for Eden also means low-paying and sometimes humiliating jobs as an artist’s model, poet’s helper, and nanny, and when these jobs are depleted, hunger. Eden must also work out her own trades in love. She barters sex for street education in her alliance with Indego, an older African American poet who lives by his wits and understanding of Paris’s back ways. She explores sympathy and fascination with Ving, a white saxophone player with whom she must try to answer the question of how much their skins matter, and she finds a surprising sense of home at her lowest moment in the company of Luce, a girl like herself, on the edge of giving in to poverty. It seems that if Eden can overcome these things she can overcome anything, and earn the right to write the words that will shape her life. Youngblood’s writing is sexually frank and intimately rendered. She explores various kinds of longing, including that between parents and children. But this probing is in the service of a deep kind of honesty that her characters hope will help them to shake off the chains of the world they have been delivered into in exchange for the keys to a world

SHAY YOUNGBLOOD

639

they can make for themselves. Youngblood’s novels and plays are essential contributions to the literature of African American female awakening and are sensitive to the challenges of consciousness and creativity. For Youngblood, imagination is always a hard road well-traveled, one that leads through its pitfalls to a better understanding of the self and the forces of the world. CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics largely praise Soul Kiss as a searing and poetic novel; it was named as an alternate selection for the Book of the Month Club, as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and was included in Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writers series. Some critics, however, find its subject matter unpleasant and claim that the novel borders on the pornographic. Critics call Black Girl in Paris ‘‘stirring and engaging’’; it, too, has received largely positive reviews, though some complain that the plot is episodic and that the language at times is almost too insular. Several critics have made the mistake of reading Youngblood’s sometimes difficult characters as entirely autobiographical. Youngblood denies this claim, saying that though the emotions are real, the situations are entirely created. It is a tribute to her talent that her intimacy with the characters’ inner lives can seem so effortless. Critics often point out Youngblood’s ear for poetry and her fresh and interesting dialogue. Her talent for dialogue led her into playwriting, and though her plays receive mixed reviews—some rejoice in their ability to speak their own language, others feel that they do not break new enough ground—critics and audiences alike seem eager to hear more from Shay Youngblood. BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Shay Youngblood Amazing Grace. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1993. Big Mama Stories. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1989. Black Girl in Paris. New York: Riverhead Books, 2000. Black Power Barbie in Hotel de Dream. 1992. Unpublished. Communism Killed My Dog. 1991. Unpublished. ‘‘In a House of Wooden Monkeys.’’ In Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, et al. Boston: David R. Godine Publisher, 2000. Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1993. Soul Kiss. New York: Riverhead Books, 1997. Square Blues. 1992. Unpublished. Talking Bones. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1993.

Studies of Shay Youngblood’s Works Coyne, John. ‘‘Talking with Shay Youngblood.’’ April 2005. http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/ pages/2000/0007/prntvers007/pv007talkyngbld.html (accessed April 2005). Jones, Daniel Alexander. ‘‘Shay Youngblood Flying Solo (Interview).’’ Lambda Book Report 8.7 (February 2000): 15. Jones, Jake-ann. ‘‘Interview with Shay Youngblood.’’ April 2005. http://www.brown.edu/ Departments/Literary_Arts/youngblood.html (accessed April 2005).

640

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Jones, Joni L. ‘‘Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood.’’ In Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo walker, and Gus Edwards, 227–35. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Waugh, Debra Wiggin. ‘‘Delicious, Forbidden: An interview with Shay Youngblood. (Interview).’’ Lambda Book Report 6.2 (September 1997): 1(3).

Samira C. Franklin

APPENDIX: LIST OF AWARDS AND AUTHORS

Academy of Arts and Letters Award Shirley Graham DuBois

Art Seidenbaum Award Carolyn Ferrell

Agatha Award Barbara Neely

Associated Writing Program Poetry Award Brenda Marie Osbey

Alain Locke-Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Excellence in Literature Mari Evans American Academy of Arts and Letters Award Adrienne Kennedy Toni Morrison American Book Award J. California Cooper Edwidge Danticat Adrienne Kennedy Audre Geraldine Lorde Paule Marshall Colleen J. McElroy Gloria Naylor Brenda Marie Osbey Jewell Parker Rhodes Sonia Sanchez American Library Association Award Doris Jean Austin American Library Notable Book Citation Eloise Greenfield American Writers of Color Award Sarah Elizabeth Wright Anisfeld-Wolf Award Toi Derricotte Shirley Graham DuBois Jamaica Kincaid Art Book for Children Award Alexis De Veaux

Audelco Award Pearl T. Cleage Kathleen Conwell Collins Patricia Joann Gibson Barbara Deming Award Jewelle Gomez Barnes and Noble Writers Award Marita Golden Terry McMillan Beard’s Fund Award Jewelle Gomez Best Books for Young Adults Award (American Library Association) Brenda Wilkinson Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award Grace Edwards-Yearwood Helene Elaine Lee Jewell Parker Rhodes Black Playwright of the Year Award J. California Cooper Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Patricia McKissack Mildred D. Taylor Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book Sharon Bell Mathis Bronze Jubilee Award Pearl T. Cleage

642

APPENDIX: LIST OF AWARDS AND AUTHORS

Caldecott Honor Book Sherley Anne Williams CAPS Award for Fiction Sarah Elizabeth Wright Carl Sandburg Award Barbara Chase-Riboud Rita Dove Carter G. Woodson Book Award Eloise Greenfield Children’s Book Award (African Studies Association) Joyce Hansen Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award Julia Fields Mae Jackson Carolyn Marie Rodgers Coretta Scott King Award Candy Boyd (Marguerite Dawson) Alexis De Veaux Eloise Greenfield Rosa Guy Joyce Hansen Sharon Bell Mathis Patricia McKissack Mildred D. Taylor Joyce Carol Thomas Mildred Pitts Walter Coretta Scott King Honor Book Sherley Anne Williams DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship Award Doris Jean Austin Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award Toi Derricotte Doris Abramson Playwrighting Award Aishah Rahman Dudley Randall Award for National Contributions to Literature Toi Derricotte Edgar Allen Poe Award Virginia Hamilton

Emmy Award Lucille Clifton Wanda Coleman Sherley Anne Williams Fannie Lou Hamer Award Alexis De Veaux Safiya Holmes-Henderson Fisk Fiction Award (Boston Book Review) Jamaica Kincaid Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Award Toi Derricotte Ford Fellowship Jewelle Gomez Margaret Walker Frances Steloff Award for Fiction Gayl Jones Free Spirit Award Alice Randall Fulbright Fellowship Colleen J. McElroy Margaret Walker Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award (American Library Association) Audre Geraldine Lorde Golden Pen Award for Best Short Story Collection Lisa Teasley Golden Plate Award Rita Dove Guggenheim Fellowship Wanda Coleman Toi Derricotte Adrienne Kennedy Nella Larsen Paule Marshall Gloria Naylor Ntozake Shange Alice Walker Paulette Childress White

APPENDIX: LIST OF AWARDS AND AUTHORS

Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction Eugenia W. Collier Gwendolyn Brooks Center Award Barbara T. Christian Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award Ellease Southerland

Lifetime Achievement Award (National Black Writers Conference) June Jordan Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts Margaret Walker

Harmon Award Nella Larsen

Lillian Smith Award Pauli Murray Gloria Naylor Dori Sanders Alice Walker

Harriet Tubman Award Doris Davenport

Literary Lion Award J. California Cooper

Horatio Alger Award Maya Angelou

Loring-Williams Prize (Academy of American Poets) Brenda Marie Osbey

Hans Christian Anderson Award Virginia Hamilton

Hugo Award Octavia Butler James Baldwin Writing Award J. California Cooper Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize Barbara Chase-Riboud Jean Stein Award Andrea Lee John Dos Passos Award for Literature Paule Marshall John Golden Award for Fiction Ellease Southerland Julian Messner Award Shirley Graham DuBois Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction Jewelle Gomez Langston Hughes Award Elaine Jackson Lavan Younger Poets Award Rita Dove

643

Lorraine Hansberry Playwrighting Award Alexis De Veaux Shay Youngblood Louise Patterson African American Studies Award Barbara T. Christian Lucille Medwick Memorial Award Toi Derricotte Lucretia Mott Award Sonia Sanchez MacArthur ‘‘Genius’’ Award Virginia Hamilton Paule Marshall Suzan-Lori Parks McCavity Award Barbara Neely MLA Melus Award Barbara T. Christian

Leila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award Suzan-Lori Parks

Moonstone Black Writing Celebration Lifetime Achievement Award Kristin Hunter Lattany

Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize Wanda Coleman

Morton Dauwen Zabel Award Jamaica Kincaid

644

APPENDIX: LIST OF AWARDS AND AUTHORS

NAACP Image Award Pinkie Gordon Lane NAACP Theatre Award Shay Youngblood National Association of Black Journalists Award June Jordan National Award for Achievement (College Language Association) Pinkie Gordon Lane National Book Award Lucille Clifton Virginia Hamilton Joyce Carol Thomas Alice Walker National Book Critics Circle Award Toni Morrison National Endowment for the Arts Award in Fiction Jewell Parker Rhodes National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award Mari Evans National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Wanda Coleman Toi Derricotte Elaine Jackson Colleen J. McElroy Terry McMillan Gloria Naylor Brenda Marie Osbey Ntozake Shange Paulette Childress White National Institute of Arts Award Paule Marshall

Newbery Medal Virginia Hamilton Mildred D. Taylor New York Daily News Blue Fiction Prize Dorothy West New York Drama Critics Award Lorraine Hansberry New York Times Book Review Outstanding Children’s Book of the Year Award Brenda Wilkinson New York Times Most Promising New Playwright Award Suzan-Lori Parks New York Times Notable Book of the Year Tina McElroy Ansa Connie Porter Sherley Anne Williams New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year Citation Rosa Guy Nobel Prize Toni Morrison Notable Book Award (American Library Association) Rosa Guy Sharon Bell Mathis Obie Award Maya Angelou Alice Childress Adrienne Kennedy Ntozake Shange Outer Circle Critics Award Ntozake Shange

Nebula Award Octavia Butler

Pacificus Literary Foundation Best Short Story Writer Award Lisa Teasley

Newbery Honor Virginia Hamilton

Parent’s Choice Award Joyce Hansen

APPENDIX: LIST OF AWARDS AND AUTHORS

Paul Green Foundation National Theatre Award Shay Youngblood PEN/Faulkner Award Paule Marshall PEN-Laura Pels Award for Excellence in Playwrighting Suzan-Lori Parks PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award Mary Monroe Jewell Parker Rhodes Mona Lisa Saloy Pierre LeComite duNouy Foundation Award Adrienne Kennedy Ploughshares Zacharias Award Carolyn Ferrell Pulitzer Prize Gwendolyn Brooks Rita Dove Toni Morrison Alice Walker Pushcart Prize Toi Derricotte Colleen J. McElroy Shay Youngblood Robert F. Kennedy Award Toni Morrison Rockefeller Fellowship Elaine Jackson

June Jordan Adrienne Kennedy Opal J. Moore Aishah Rahman Rosenthal Award Alice Walker Rosenwald Fellowship Margaret Walker School Library Journal Best Children’s Book Award Brenda Wilkinson Stanley W. Lindberg Award Tina McElroy Ansa The Story Prize Edwidge Danticat T.S. Eliot Prize Mona Lisa Saloy Walt Whitman Citation of Merit Audre Geraldine Lorde Whiting Writers’ Award Suzan-Lori Parks William Carlos Williams Award Safiya Holmes-Henderson Yale Series for Young Poets Award Margaret Walker Zora Neale Hurston Award for Literary Excellence Sarah Elizabeth Wright

645

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS

Andrews, William L., ed. Classic African American Women’s Narratives. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2003. Bailey, Frankie Y. ‘‘Telling Our Stories: African-American Women Writers and the Mystery Genre.’’ Mystery Scene 73 (2001): 14–17. Baker, Houston A., Jr. ‘‘There Is No More Beautiful Way: Theory and the Poetics of AfroAmerican Women’s Writing.’’ In Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond, 135–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. ———. The Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Bassard, Katherine Clay. ‘‘Gender and Genre: Black Women’s Autobiography and the Ideology of Literacy.’’ African American Review 26, no. 1 (Spring1992): 119–29. Bell, Roseann P., Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and Bettye J. Parker. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. New York: Anchor Books, 1979. Berlant, Lauren. ‘‘Cultural Struggle and Literary History: African-American Women’s Writing.’’ Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 88.1 (August 1990): 57–64. Bollinger, Laurel. ‘‘‘A Mother in the Deity’: Maternity and Authority in the Nineteenth-Century African-American Spiritual Narrative.’’ Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 29.3 ( June 2000): 357–82. Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Brown, Martha H. ‘‘African-American Women’s Autobiography.’’ In Fissions and Fusions, edited by Lesley Marx, Loes Nas, and Lara Dunwell, 32–40. Bellville, South Africa: University of the Western Cape, 1997. Carby, Hazel V. ‘‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory.’’ Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 262–77. Christian, Barbara. Black Feminst Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985. ———. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976. New York: Greenwood Press, 1980. ———. ‘‘Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women’s Fiction.’’ In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 233–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Connor, Kimberly Rae. Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Dalke, Anne. ‘‘Spirit Matters: Re-Possessing the African-American Women’s Literary Tradition.’’ Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 12.1 (1995): 1–16. Davies, Carole Boyce, ed. ‘‘Black Women’s Writing: Crossing the Boundaries.’’ Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society 3.6 (1989). Decure, Nicole. ‘‘In Search of Our Sisters’ Mean Streets: The Politics of Sex, Race, and Class in Black Women’s Crime Fiction.’’ In Diversity and Detective Fiction, edited by Kathleen Gregory, 158–85. Bowling Green, OH: Popular, 1999.

648

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS

duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Ellmann, Maud. ‘‘The Power to Tell: Rape, Race and Writing in Afro-American Women’s Fiction.’’ In An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, edited by Rod Mengham, 32–52. Cambridge, England: Polity, 1999. Evans, Mari. Black Women Writers, 1950–1980, a Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor Books, 1983. Fabre, Genevie`ve. ‘‘Genealogical Archeology: Black Women Writers in the 1980s and the Search for Legacy.’’ Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 11.30 (November 1986): 461–67. ———.‘‘Selected Bibliography of Essays on Black Women and Black Feminist Criticism.’’ Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 11.30 (November 1986): 501–2. Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Foster, Frances Smith. ‘‘Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.’’ In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 25–38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. ———. ‘‘Between the Sides: Afro-American Women Writers as Mediators.’’ Nineteenth-Century Studies, 3 (1989): 53–64. ———. Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. ‘‘My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.’’ In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, 63–89. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. ———. ‘‘Slavery, Race, and the Figure of the Tragic Mulatta; or, the Ghost of Southern History in the Writing of African-American Women.’’ In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, 464–91. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. ———. ‘‘Southern History in the Imagination of African American Women Writers.’’ In The History of Southern Women’s Literature, edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks, 156–63. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. ———. ‘‘To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women.’’ In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, edited by Shari Benstock, 161–80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press, 1995. Harris, Trudier. ‘‘From Exile to Asylum: Religion and Community in the Writings of Contemporary Black Women.’’ In Women’s Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, 151–69. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. ———. ‘‘What Women? What Canon? African American Women and the Canon.’’ In Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, 90–95. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. ‘‘Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.’’ In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 343–51. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Hernton, Calvin. ‘‘The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers.’’ Black American Literature Forum 18.4 (Winter 1984): 139–45. Hobson, Janell. ‘‘Early African American Women Writers.’’ In The History of Southern Women’s Literature, edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks, 87–96. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Holloway, Karla F. C. Moorings & Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS

649

———. ‘‘Revision and (Re)membrance: A Theory of Literary Structures in Literature by AfricanAmerican Women Writers.’’ In African American Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by Winston Napier, 387–98. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Hull, Gloria T. ‘‘Rewriting Afro-American Literature: A Case for Black Women Writers.’’ In Politics of Education: Essays from Radical Teacher, edited by Robert C. Rosent and Leonard Vogt, 99–109. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. New York: Feminist Press, 1981. Kafka, Phillipa. The Great White Way: African American Women Writers and American Success Mythologies. New York: Garland, 1993. Kiah, Rosalie Black. ‘‘African-American Women Writers of Adolescent Literature.’’ Journal of African Children’s and Youth Literature 3 (1991–1992): 80–92. Levin, Amy K. Africanism and Authenticity in African-American Women’s Novels. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Liddell, Janice Lee, and Yakini Belinda Kemp, eds. Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; 1999. Lindberg-Seyersted, Brita. ‘‘The Color Black: Skin Color as Social, Ethical, and Esthetic Sign in Writings by Black American Women.’’ English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 73.1 (February 1992): 51–67. Logan, Shirley Wilson, ed. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. Lynch, Acklyn. ‘‘Notes on Black Women Writers of the Past Two Decades.’’ In In the Memory and Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women and Writing, edited by Juliette Bowles, 45–52. Washington, DC: Institute for the Arts & the Humanities, Howard University, 1979. Mason, Mary G. ‘‘Travel as Metaphor and Reality in Afro-American Women’s Autobiography, 1850–1972.’’ Black American Literature Forum 24.2 (Summer 1990): 337–56. McCaskill, Barbara. ‘‘‘To Labor . . . and Fight on the Side of God’: Spirit, Class, and NineteenthCentury African American Women’s Literature.’’ In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, edited by Karen L. Kilcup, 164–83. Malden, MA: Blackwell; 1998. McDowell, Deborah E. ‘‘The Changing Same’’: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. McKay, Nellie Y. ‘‘The Narrative Self: Race, Politics, and Culture in Black American Women’s Autobiography.’’ In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 96–107. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. ———. ‘‘Reflections on Black Women Writers: Revising the Literary Canon.’’ In The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy, edited by Christie Farnham, 174–89. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Mehaffy, Marilyn Maness. ‘‘Shifting Canons: African-American Women Writers, 1746–1910.’’ College Literature 22.3 (October 1995): 132–36. Mittlefehldt, Pamela Klass. ‘‘A Weaponry of Choice: Black American Women Writers and the Essay.’’ In The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher and Elizabeth Mittman, 196–208. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Moody, Joycelyn K. ‘‘On the Road with God: Travel and Quest in Early Nineteenth-Century African American Holy Women’s Narratives.’’ Religion and Literature 27.1 (Spring 1995): 35–51. Mullen, Bill. ‘‘A Revolutionary Tale: In Search of African American Women’s Short Story Writing.’’ In American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Julie Brown, 191–207. New York: Garland; 1995. Nankoe, Lucia. ‘‘To Keep the Memory of the Past Alive: A Theoretical Approach to Novels of Black Women Writers.’’ In Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English: Cross/

650

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS

Cultures, edited by Geoffrey V. Davis and Hena Maes-Jelinek, 481–97. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. Nash, Margaret. ‘‘Patient Persistence: The Political and Educational Values of Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell.’’ Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association 35.2 (April 2004): 122–36. ———. ‘‘Reflections on Black Women Writers: Revising the Literary Canon.’’ In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 151–63. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. O’Connor, Mary. ‘‘Subject, Voice, and Women in Some Contemporary Black American Women’s Writing.’’ In Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, edited by Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry, 199–217. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Pierce, Yolanda. ‘‘African-American Women’s Spiritual Narratives.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, edited by Philip Gould and Dale Bauer, 244–61. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers, ed. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Roses, Lorraine Elena, ed. Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Shockley, Ann Allen. ‘‘Afro-American Women Writers: The New Negro Movement, 1924–1933.’’ In Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, edited by Lisa Rado, 123– 35. New York: Garland, 1994. Smith, Barbara, ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Stover, Johnnie M. Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Tally, Justine. ‘‘History, Fiction, and Community in the Work of Black American Women Writers from the Ends of Two Centuries.’’ In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, 357–68. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum Intl Pub Group, 1984. ———. ‘‘On Black Literary Women and the Evolution of Critical Discourse.’’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (Spring 1986): 111–23. ———. ‘‘Reshuffling the Deck; or, (Re)Reading Race and Gender in Black Women’s Writing.’’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 7.1 (Spring 1988): 119–32. Wade-Gayles, Gloria. No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Gender in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Caledonia, MN: 1984. Walker, Melissa. ‘‘The Verbal Arsenal of Black Women Writers in America.’’ In Confronting the Crisis: War, Politics, and Culture in the Eighties, edited by Francis Barker, et al., 118–30. Colchester: University of Essex, 1984. Wall, Cheryl A., ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. ———. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Ward, Kathleen L. ‘‘Creating a Legacy: Black Women Writing for Children.’’ In Images of the Child, edited by Harry Eiss, 229–44. Bowling Green, OH: Popular, 1994. Washington, Mary Helen. ‘‘The Darkened Eye Restored: Notes for a Literary History of Black Women.’’ In Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, 442–53. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. ———. ‘‘New Lives and New Letters: Black Women Writers at the End of the Seventies.’’ College English 43.1 ( January 1981): 1–11.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS

651

———. ‘‘Teaching Black-Eyed Susans: An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers.’’ Black American Literature Forum 11.1 (Spring 1977): 20–24. Wilentz, Gay. ‘‘Toward a Diaspora Literature: Black Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.’’ College English 54.4 (April 1992): 385–405. Willis, Susan. ‘‘Black Women Writers: Taking a Critical Perspective.’’ In Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, 211–37. London: Methuen, 1985.

INDEX

Bold-faced page numbers indicate main entries. Abby (Caines), 71 Abramson, Doris, 82 Adams, Elizabeth Laura, 1–5 ‘‘Adventures of the Dread Sisters, The’’ (De Veaux), 156–57 Affrilachia, 141 Africa Dream (Greenfield), 227 African American Women Writers (Wilkinson), 618 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 366, 367, 527, 565 After the Garden (Austin), 23–24 Albert, Octavia Victoria Rogers, 7–8 All-Bright Court (Porter), 470 Allen, Clarissa Minnie Thompson, 9–10 Allen, Eunice, 554 Allen, Samuel, 130 All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (Angelou), 16 All Saints (Osbey), 454–55 American Daughter (Thompson), 561–62 American Negro Theatre (ANT), 79 American Play (Parks), 459, 461 American Smooth (Dove), 166 Anaporte-Easton, Jean, 97 And Do Remember Me (Golden), 220, 222 Anderson, Kamili, 500 Anderson, Mignon Holland, 11–12 Anderson, T. J., III, 122 Andrews, William, 297, 419 Angelou, Maya, 13–17, 23 Anna Lucasta (Childress), 80, 81 Annas, Pamela, 458 Annie Allen (Brooks), 50 Annie John (Kincaid), 343, 345 Ansa, Tina McElroy, 19–21 Anthologies on black women’s literature, 237, 238 ‘‘Apocalypse,’’ 429 Argall, Nicole, 484 Art, 187. See also Black Arts Movement Asim, Jabari, 534

Austin, Doris Jean, 23–25 Austin, Gayle, 81–82 Autobiographical writings, 95, 219, 264–65, 301, 335–38, 342, 344, 345, 369, 370, 374, 399, 402, 457, 480, 508–9, 514–18, 540, 581, 629–32. See also Memoirs; Slave narratives Autobiographies, 13–16, 46–47, 51–52, 145, 207, 289, 303, 416–19, 442, 472, 473, 477–79, 508–9, 527–28, 550–51, 561–62, 604; fictional, 50, 51; spiritual, 182–84, 204–5, 366–67 Autobiography of My Mother, The (Kincaid), 344, 345 ‘‘Autobiography’’ (Williams), 621 Awkward, Michael, 431 Babylon Sisters (Cleage), 89 Baby of the Family (Ansa), 19 Baggett, Paul, 509 Bailey, Cathryn, 114 Bailey’s Cafe´ (Naylor), 446, 447 Baker, Houston A., 500 Baker, Nikki, 26–27 Baldwin, James, 404, 459 Balshaw, Maria, 40 Bambara, Toni Cade, 28–33 Barras, Jonetta, 239 Barrax, Gerald, 615 ‘‘Bars Fight, The’’ (Terry), 554–55 Barton, Rebecca Chalmers, 4–5 Bascom, Lionel, 608 Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (Keckley), 331–33 Belafonte, Harry, 570 Bell, Bernard W., 323 ‘‘Belle Isle’’ (Hodges), 271–72 Beloved (Morrison), 246, 427–31 Benjamin, Shanna Greene, 32 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 35–37 Berg, Allison, 243 Beryl Weston’s Ambition (Tillman), 563

654

INDEX

Betsey Brown (Shange), 514, 516–17 Big Mama Stories (Youngblood), 636–38 Biographers, 227. See also specific authors Black and Beautiful (Summers), 540 Black and White of It, The (Shockley), 523, 525 Black Arts Movement (BAM), 122, 187, 188, 223, 379, 436, 457, 493, 497, 499 ‘‘Black English’’ (Bambara), 29–30 Black experience, 186–88 Black Feminist Criticism (Christian), 85 Black Girl in Paris (Youngblood), 637–39 ‘‘Black Man, My Man, Listen!’’ (Stokes), 29 ‘‘Black,’’ meanings of, 188, 189 Black Notebooks, The (Derricotte), 151–53 Black Southern Voices (Killens and Ward), 24 Black Unicorn, The (Lorde), 372 Black Woman: An Anthology, The (Bambara), 29, 33 Black Women Novelists (Christian), 85 Black Women Writers at Work (Tate), 544–45 Black Women Writing Autobiography (Braxton), 46, 47 Blair, Amy, 568 Blessing the Boats (Clifton), 96 Bloom, Lynn Z., 418 Blue Blood ( Johnson), 312, 314 Blues for Alabama Sky (Cleage), 89 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 423–26, 428–30, 444 Blundell, Janet Boyarin, 534 Bond, Jean, 256–57 Bonner, Marita, 39–41 Book of Light (Clifton), 96 ‘‘Bottled’’ ( Johnson), 317–18 Bowers, Susan, 429 Boyd, Candy Dawson, 43–44 Bradley, David, 627 Bramen, Carrie Tirado, 324 Brand Plucked from the Fire, A (Foote), 204–5 Brathwaite, Kamau, 475 Braxton, Joanne ‘‘Jodie’’ Margaret, 46–47, 304, 551, 562 Breaking Away (Lattany), 357 Breast cancer, 370, 373 Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat), 132–34 Bright Road (film), 570 Bronx Is Next, The (Sanchez), 498–99 Bronze ( Johnson), 313–14 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 49–54, 574 Brothers, The (Collins), 108, 110 Brown, Elizabeth Barnsley, 297 Brown, Kimberly, 124

Brown, Linda Beatrice, 56–58 Brown, Patricia, 496 Browngirl, Brownstones (Marshall), 382, 383, 385 Bryan, C.D.B., 33 Bryan, Violet Harrington, 177, 455 Bryant, Cynthia, 120 Bryant, Janice K., 239 Buckman, Alyson R., 584 Burton, Annie Louise, 59–60 Bush, Vanessa, 584 Bush-Banks, Olivia Ward, 61–62 Bush-Banks School of Expression, 61 Butler, Octavia, 64–68 Butler-Evans, Elliot, 585 Byerman, Keith, 323 By the Light of My Father’s Smile (Walker), 581, 584 Cade, Miltona Mirkin. See Bambara, Toni Cade Caines, Jeanette Franklin, 71–72 Campbell, Bebe Moore, 74–75 Campbell, Jennifer, 634 Cancer Journals, The (Lorde), 370, 373 Caribbean cultures, 475 Carroll, Mary, 221 Carter, Steven, 257 Carver, George Washington, 599 Carver (Waniek), 598, 599 Catholicism, 1–3 Chapman, Abraham, 358 Chase-Riboud, Barbara, 76–77 Chewed Water (Rahman), 480, 481 Childress, Alice, 79–82 Chilly Stomach (Caines), 71–72 Chinaberry Tree, The (Fauset), 196 Chopin, Kate, 176, 177 Chosen Place, The Timeless People, The (Marshall), 382, 383 Christian, Barbara T., 85–86 Christianity, 59–60, 118, 182–84, 205, 303, 304, 309, 366–67, 391, 523–24, 536–37, 542, 564, 565. See also African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; Spiritual autobiographies Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters (McKissack), 397 Civil rights activism, 174–76, 238, 239, 252, 439, 441, 442, 579, 582, 633 Clancy Street (Tillman), 563–64 Clarence and Corinne, or God’s Way ( Johnson), 309, 310 Classism, 417. See also Social class

INDEX

Cleage, Pearl T., 88–90 Cliff, Michelle, 92–93 Clifton, (Thelma) Lucille Sayles, 94–98 Clover (Sanders), 503–6 Clurman, Harold, 82 Cole, Johnetta, 573 Coleman, Wanda, 101–2 Collier, Eugenia W., 103–4 Collins, Janelle, 404 Collins, Kathleen Conwell, 106–10 Color, Sex and Poetry (Hull), 40 Color complex, 221 Colored Girl Beautiful, The (Hackley), 242–43 Color Purple, The (Walker), 579, 584, 585 Comedy (Fauset), 196 Coming of Age in Mississippi (Moody), 416–19 Common Woman, The (Grahn), 515 Contending Forces (Hopkins), 279–80 Conwell, Kathleen. See Collins, Kathleen Conwell Cook, Martha, 215 Cooper, Anna Julia Hayward, 112–14 Cooper, J. California, 116–20 Corregidora ( Jones), 322, 323 Cortez, Jayne, 121–24 Coward, David, 431 Creole culture, 175–77 Crossing Over Jordan (Brown), 57–58 Crouch, Stanley, 122 Daddy Was a Number Runner (Meriwether), 402, 404 Dandridge, Dorothy, 570 Dandridge, Rita, 411–12 Danner, Margaret Esse, 127–30 Danticat, Edwidge, 132–37 Dark Symphony (Adams), 2–4 Daughters (Marshall), 384–85 Davenport, Doris, 141–43 Davies, Carole Boyce, 386 Davis, Angela Yvonne, 145–47, 626 Davis, Arthur P., 197 Davis, Cynthia, 608–9 Davis, Thadious M., 194, 195, 586 Death, 612 Deegan, Mary Jo, 621, 622 Delaney, Lucy, 149–50 Derricotte, Toi(nette) Marie, 151–53 Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (Osbey), 454 Dessa Rose (Williams), 625–27

655

Detective fiction, 26–27 De Veaux, Alexis, 155–58, 376, 525 Dew Breaker, The (Danticat), 135 Diaries, 176, 200 Dias, Risasi-Zachariah, 266 Didacticism, 117–18, 188 Dillard, J. L., 29 Dillou, Amadou, 299 Disappearing Acts (McMillan), 399, 400 Dive (Teasley), 552, 553 Dixon, Edwina Streeter, 161 Domestic Allegories of Political Desire (Tate), 545 Domestic violence, 579–81. See also specific writings Don’t Erase Me (Ferrell), 200 Don’t Play in the Sun (Golden), 221, 222 Dorsey, David, 188 Double-voiced strategy, 1 Douglass, Frederick, 490–91, 601, 602 Douglass’ Women (Rhodes), 490–91 Dove, Rita, 163–66 Dowdell, Jennifer. See Baker, Nikki Driftwood (Bush-Banks), 61–62 Drinking Gourd, A (Hansberry), 254–56 Drumgoold, Kate, 169–70 Dubey, Madhu, 68 DuBois, Shirley Graham, 171–72 DuBois, W.E.B., 113, 171, 246, 461 Dugan, Olga, 82 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 50–51, 62, 174, 175 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 174–78 Duster, Alfreda M., 604 Dust Tracks on a Road (Hurston), 289 Duval, John, 431 Dystopian fiction, 67 Easton, Yvonne, 541 Ebonics. See ‘‘Black English’’ Eder, Richard, 82 Edge of Heaven, The (Golden), 221, 222 Education, 417, 595 Edwards, Solomon, 188 Edwards-Yearwood, Grace, 180–81 Eisenbach, Helen, 525 Elaw, Zilpha, 182–84 Ellerby, Janet Mason, 400 Ellison, Ralph, 466 Embree, Edwin R., 5 Empowerment, 40 Enchanted Hair Tale, An (De Veaux), 157 End of Dying, The (Anderson), 11

656

INDEX

Enomoto, Don, 362 Erickson, Peter, 328, 447 Erotic, the, 373. See also Sexuality and sexual politics Essays (Plato), 468, 469 Essex, Mark, 336 Esther (Vroman), 569–70 Evans, Mari, 96–97, 186–89 Eva’s Man ( Jones), 322, 323 Everett Anderson’s Goodbye (Clifton), 95 Existentialism, 417 Fabio, Sarah Webster, 191–92 Fabricated absence, 461 Family (Cooper), 119, 120 Farming of Bones, The (Danticat), 134–35 Fashion industry, 540 Father Songs (Wade-Gayles), 574 Faulkner, William, 626 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 193–98 Female genital mutilation, 579–80 Feminist issues and writings, 113–14, 146, 175, 177, 232, 233, 237–39, 274, 430–31, 434, 499, 518, 537–38. See also Lorde, Audre Geraldine; Womanism ‘‘Feminist pragmatists,’’ 620–21 ‘‘Fence’’ (Moore), 421 Ferrell, Carolyn, 200–201 Fields, Julia, 202–3 Finney, Brian, 432 Fires in the Mirror (Smith), 529, 530 First Cities, The (Lorde), 370, 371 Fish, Cheryl, 509 Fisher King, The (Marshall), 385, 386 Fledgling (Butler), 67–68 Florence (Childress), 80, 81 Flyin’ West (Cleage), 88, 90 Foote, Julia A. J., 204–5 for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (Shange), 514, 515, 517, 518 Forgiveness, 391–92 For My People (Walker), 589, 593 Foster, Frances Smith, 8, 367, 537, 625 Friendship, The (Taylor), 548 From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom, 149–50 ‘‘Fucking A’’ (Parks), 459, 460, 462 Gaines, Patrice, 207–8 Gardner, Eric, 631–32 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 324, 447, 632

Gather Together in My Name (Angelou), 15 Gay and lesbian issues, 457, 458. See also Lesbian literature and lesbian politics Gender issues, 40, 101, 195, 196, 373. See also Feminist issues and writings; Sexuality and sexual politics Gender Talk (Guy-Sheftall), 238, 239 Genital mutilation, female, 579–80 George, Lynell, 541 Gibson, Patricia Joann, 209–10 Gifts of Power ( Jackson), 303 Gilbert, Mercedes, 211–12 Gilda Stories, The (Gomez), 224–25 ‘‘Gilded Six-Bits, The’’ (Hurston), 286 Giles, Freda Scott, 90 Giovanni, Nikki, 124, 213–16, 440, 593 ‘‘Girl’’ (Kincaid), 342–43 Glow in the Dark (Teasley), 552 God Bless the Child (Lattany), 355–56, 358 God Don’t Like Ugly (Monroe), 413, 414 God Still Don’t Like Ugly (Monroe), 413–14 Goin’ Someplace Special (McKissack), 397 Golden, Marita, 218–22 Gomez, Jewelle, 223–25 Gone with the Wind (O’Hara), 483, 484 Good Times (Clifton), 95 Good Woman (Clifton), 96 ‘‘Gorilla, My Love’’ (Bambara), 30 Gorilla, My Love (Bambara), 29–31 Gospel of Cinderella, The (Thomas), 558 Gottlieb, Annie, 447 Grace Notes (Dove), 164, 165 Graham, Maryemma, 590, 593 Graham, Shirley. See DuBois, Shirley Graham Grahn, Judy, 515 Graven Images (Meriwether), 408 Greenfield, Eloise, 227–28 Grewal, Gurleen, 430, 431 Griffith, Ada Gay, 376 Griffith, Paul A., 599 Grimke´, Angelina Weld, 229–33 Grimke´, Charlotte Forten, 113 Guerrero, Ed, 431 Gunning, Sandra, 576 Guy, Rosa, 235–36 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 237–39 Hackley, Madame Emma Azalia Smith, 241–42 Hagar’s Daughter (Hopkins), 280 Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, A (Potter), 472–73

INDEX

Haiti and Haitian Americans, 132–36, 155–56 Haley, Alex, 77 Hamilton, Denise, 27 Hamilton, Virginia, 244–47 Hand I Fan With, The (Ansa), 20 Hanley, Karen, 389 Hansberry, Lorraine, 251–57 Hansen, Joyce, 259–60 ‘‘Happy Story, A’’ (Moore), 420–21 Harlem, 402, 606, 608 Harlem Renaissance writing, 318 Harlem Summer (Vroman), 569, 570 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 261–62 Harris, Janet, 389 Harris, Trudier, 120, 430, 576 Harris, Will, 232 Harrison, Juanita, 264–65 Hatch, James, 232 Healing, The ( Jones), 322, 324 Heart of a Woman, The ( Johnson), 312–14 Heart of a Woman (Angelou), 15–16 Helford, Elyce Rae, 68 Henderson, Mae G., 585 Henderson-Holmes, Safiya E., 266–67 Hernton, Calvin, 518 Heroes, 625, 626 Her Own Place (Sanders), 503–6 Herron, Carolivia, 268–69 Hershman, Marcie, 324 Hirsch, David, 233 History of Mary Prince, The (Prince), 474–75 Hodges, Frenchy Jolene, 271–72 Holiday, Billie, 157, 358 Home Coming (Sanchez), 497, 499, 500 Homegirls & Handgrenades (Sanchez), 497, 499–500 Homeplace (Waniek), 598, 599 Homophobia, 523. See also Lesbian literature and lesbian politics Honey, Maureen, 231 hooks, bell, 273–75 Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth, 278–81 House Arrest (Smith), 530 House of Bondage, The (Albert), 7, 8 How Stella Got Her Groove Back (McMillan), 399, 400 Hughes, Langston, 129–30, 186–88 Hughes, Sheila Hassell, 53–54 Hughes, Virginia. See Rahman, Aishah Hull, Gloria, 40, 231 Humanism, 592 ‘‘Human Spirit, The’’ (Guy), 235

657

Hurston, Zora Neale, 118, 283–90, 558, 583, 626 I Am a Black Woman (Evans), 186–87 Identity, 156, 157, 186–89, 321–22, 328–29, 351, 375; national, 529 I Dream a World (Summers), 540, 541 If I Should Die (Edwards-Yearwood), 180 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou), 13–16 Imani All Mine (Porter), 470 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (Parks), 459, 463 Incest, 424, 580 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ( Jacobs), 306–7 I Need a Lunch Box (Caines), 72 In Love and Trouble (Walker), 582 In Praise of Our Teachers (Wade-Gayles), 574 In Search of Satisfaction (Cooper), 118 In the Blood (Parks), 459, 463 ‘‘In the Face of Fire I Will Not Turn Back’’ (Anderson), 11 In the Midnight Hour (Collins), 108–9 In These Houses (Osbey), 454 Isani, Mukhtar Ali, 612 Jackson, Angela, 292–94 Jackson, David Earl, 267 Jackson, Elaine, 296–97 Jackson, Mae, 299–300 Jackson, Mattie Jane, 301–2 Jackson, Rebecca Cox, 303–4 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 305–8 James, Cynthia, 475 Jay, Karla, 525 Jazz (Morrison), 427–28, 432 Jazz aesthetic in drama, 481 Jazz poetry, 123, 124 Jefferson, Thomas, 612 Jesus and Fat Tuesday and Other Stories (McElroy), 394 Johnson, Amelia E., 309–10 Johnson, Dianne, 548 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 312–15 Johnson, Helen, 317–19 Johnson, James Weldon, 37 Johnson, Joyce, 97 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston), 284, 286–87, 289, 290 Jones, Gayl, 321–24 Jones, Sharon L., 608

658

INDEX

Jones, Suzanne, 506 Jordan, June, 326–29 Jordan, Michael, 227 Joyce, Joyce Ann, 53 Jubilee (Walker), 589–93 Juhasz, Suzanne, 215 Just Us Women (Caines), 71 Kali, 95 Kaplan, Carla, 1, 3, 4 Karrer, Wolfgang, 119 Katutani, Michiko, 470 Kaufman, Ellen, 152 Keating, AnnaLouise, 375 Keckley, Elizabeth Hobbs, 331–33 Keller, Frances Richardson, 114 Keller, Lynn, 455 Kelly, Katherine, 41 Kennedy, Adrienne, 334–39 Kent, George, 12 ‘‘Key to the City’’ (Oliver), 451 Kincaid, Jamaica, 341–45 Kindred (Butler), 65–66 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 499 King, Rodney, 394, 529–30 Kinnamon, Keneth, 440 Kinnell, Galway, 151 Knopf, Marcy Jane, 197 Krasner, David, 232–33 Krik? Krak! (Danticat), 133, 134 Kubitschek, Missy Dehn, 447 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 490 Landlord, The (Lattany), 356, 357 Lane, Pinkie Gordon, 347–49 Larsen, Nella, 350–54 ‘‘Last Supper, The’’ (Adams), 4 Lattany, Kristin Hunter, 355–58 Laughing in the Dark (Gaines), 207 Lee, Andrea, 360–62 Lee, Helen Elaine, 364–65 Lee, Jarena, 366–68 Leibovich, Lori, 386 Leonard, John, 534 Lesbian literature and lesbian politics, 26, 27, 156–58, 223, 225, 229, 446, 449, 522–25. See also Gay and lesbian issues; Lorde, Audre Geraldine Les Blancs (Hansberry), 254, 256 ‘‘Lesson, The’’ (Bambara), 31 Lester, Neal A., 518, 519 Let the Circle Be Unbroken (Taylor), 548

Let the Lion Eat Straw (Southerland), 532–34 Lewis, Derrick C., 297 Lewis, Rudolph, 496 Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature ( Jones), 322, 323 ‘‘Liberation literature,’’ 245–47 ‘‘Life of Lincoln West, The’’ (Brooks), 52 Lincoln, Abraham, 459, 460, 462 ‘‘Lincoln’’ (Ray), 486 Lindberg, Kathryne V., 53 Linden Hills (Naylor), 446 ‘‘Literary folklore,’’ 430 Loeffelholz, Mary, 177 Logan, Shirley Wilson, 391–92, 538 Long, Octavia, 379–80 Long Distance Life (Golden), 220, 222 Long Time since Yesterday (Gibson), 209 Long Walk, The (Brown), 56–57 Long Way Home from St. Louie, A (McElroy), 394, 395 Looking for Harlem (Balshaw), 40 Lopez, Trudier Harris, 608 Lorde, Audre Geraldine, 157–58, 223, 369–76, 457, 583 Losing Ground (Collins), 107, 110 Lot’s Daughters (Moore), 421 Lotus Press, 379 Love (Morrison), 428–29 ‘‘Love Poems’’ (Parker), 457 Loving Her (Shockley), 522–23, 525 Lowe, John, 455 Lucy (Kincaid), 343–44 Ludell (Wilkinson), 616–18 Lynching, 230–31, 314, 601–3 Madagascar, 394, 395 Madgett, Naomi Long, 378–80 Mahone, Sydne, 481 Major, Clarence, 41 Malcolm X, 16, 299, 336, 499, 614 ‘‘Malcolm X’’ (Brooks), 52 Mali Anderson Mysteries, 180 Mama Day (Naylor), 446, 447 Mama’s Promises (Waniek), 598 Mandela, Nelson, 49, 51 Mandela, Winnie, 49, 51 Mangeango, Azande, 481 Marked by Fire (Thomas), 556, 557, 559 Marshall, Barbara, 119 Marshall, Paule, 382–86 Marsh-Lockett, Carol P., 21 Masculinity, 238

INDEX

Mathis, Sharon Bell, 388–89 Matthews, Victoria Earle, 391–92 Maud Martha (Brooks), 50, 51 Mayberry, Katherine J., 432 McCluskey, Audrey, 97, 239 McDowell, Deborah, 196, 197 McDowell, Margaret B., 215 McElroy, Colleen J., 393–95 McKenna, Bernard, 509 McKissack, Patricia L’Ann Carwell, 397–98 McLendon, Jacqueline Y., 195, 197–98 McMillan, Terry, 399–400 McWhorter, Deane, 221 Meier, Joyce, 232, 481 Melhem, D. H., 122, 499–500 Melitte (Shaik), 511–12 Memoirs, 94, 96, 97, 152, 182–84, 274, 394, 395, 480, 481, 503, 561–62. See also Autobiographical writings; Autobiographies Memoirs (Elaw), 182–84 Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days (Burton), 59 Men of Brewster Place, The (Naylor), 444, 447 Menstruation, 336 Mental illness, 74, 75 Mercer, Lorraine, 509 Meriweather, Louise, 402–4 Middle Massage Project, 47 Migrations of the Heart (Golden), 219–21 Miller, Ericka M., 233 Miller, Frank, 570 Miller, James, 141, 142 Miller, James A., 324 Miller, Jeanne-Maria, 231–33 Miller, Kent, 395 Miller, May, 406–9 Millican, Arthenia J. Bates, 411–12 Mills, David, 124 Miracle Every Day, A (Golden), 221, 222 Misunderstandings, 255 Mitchell, Verner D., 608–9 Mojo and the Sayso, The (Rahman), 480, 481 Moments of Grace, Meeting the Challenge to Change (Gaines), 208 Monroe, Mary, 413–14 Montgomery, Helena Louise, 142 Moody, Anne, 416–19, 419 Moore, Alice Ruth. See Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore, Opal J., 420–21, 538 Morris, Willie, 419 Morrison, Emily, 50 Morrison, Toni, 247, 423–32, 460, 625

659

Mosquito ( Jones), 323, 324 Mossell, Gertrude Bustill, 434–35 Mostly Womenfolk and a Man or Two (Anderson), 11, 12 Motherhood, 230. See also Rachel Mother Love (Dove), 165 Mothers, single, 221 Mourning and allegory, Benjamin’s theory of, 232–33 ‘‘Movement in Black’’ (Parker), 457–58 Mulattos, 194, 198. see also specific writings Mules and Men (Hurston), 287–88 Mullen, Bill, 41 Mullen, Harryette, 436–37 Munk, Erika, 463 Murphy, Beatrice, 439–40 Murray, Pauli, 441–42 Music, 242, 480–81 Musser, Judith, 41 My Great, Wide, Beautiful World (Harrison), 264–65 My Mama Needs Me (Walter), 595 My Soul Is a Witness (Wade-Gayles), 573–74 Mystery novels, 26, 180, 449, 450, 488 Mystic Female, The (Kincaid), 348, 349 Na-Ni (De Veaux), 157 Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written by Herself (Prince), 477–79 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 80 Naturalism, 417, 447 Naylor, Gloria, 210, 444–47 Neely, Barbara, 449–50 ‘‘Negro Novel,’’ stereotype of, 358 ‘‘Neighbors’’ (Oliver), 451, 452 New Negro, 5 New Orleans, 174, 175, 177, 453–55 Newton, Huey, 146 Nielsen, Aldon, 437 ‘‘Nigger,’’ 351–52, 548 No (De Veaux), 157, 158 Nouvelle Soul (Summers), 540, 541 Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (Walker), 581–82, 584 Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self (Hopkins), 280–81 Ohio State Murders, The (Kennedy), 337 Oliver, Diane, 451–52 ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa’’ (Wheatley), 611

660

INDEX

‘‘On Being Young–a Woman–and Colored’’ (Bonner), 39–40 O’Neale, Sondra, 16 On the Bus with Rosa Parks (Dove), 165–66 Oppression, 255–56 Ordinary Woman, An (Clifton), 95 Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), 292, 493 Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA), 121 Original Poems (Bush-Banks), 61 Osbey, Brenda Marie, 453–55 Oseye, Ellease Ebele. See Southerland, Ellease Dozier Othering, 65 Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Wilson), 629–32 Over the Lip of the World (McElroy), 394, 395 Page, Philip, 429–32 Page, Thomas Nelson, 8 Painter, Nell Irwin, 545 Paper Dolls ( Jackson), 296–97 Paquet, Sandra Pouchet, 475 Parable of the Sower (Butler), 67 Parable of the Talents (Butler), 67, 68 Paradise (Morrison), 428 Parent-child relationships, 411 Parker, Pat, 457–58 Parker-Smith, Bettye J., 494, 585 Parks, Rosa, 165, 166 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 459–63 ‘‘Pa Sees Again’’ (Dixon), 161 Passing (Larsen), 351–53 ‘‘Passing,’’ racial, 40 Patternmaster (Butler), 64, 65, 68 Peacock Poems, The (Williams), 625–27 Pennington, James, 469 Peterson, Carla, 537 Petry, Ann, 465–66 Plato, Ann, 468–69 Plum Bun (Fauset), 195–96 ‘‘Poem’’ ( Johnson), 317–18 Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (Harper), 261–62 Poems on Various Subjects (Wheatley), 612 ‘‘Poems to My Father’’ (Lane), 348 Poetry for the People program, 327 ‘‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’’ (Lorde), 372–73 Poetry magazine, 128, 129 Porter, Connie (Rose), 470–71

Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker), 580–81, 584 Postmodern discourse, 68, 362 Potter, Eliza Johnson, 472–73 Power, 352 Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall), 382, 384, 386 Prettyman, Kathleen Collins. See Collins, Kathleen Conwell Prince, Mary, 474–75 Prince, Nancy, 477–79 Printz, Jessica Kimball, 181 Prisons, 207, 208 Prostitution, 224–25 Proud Shoes (Murray), 441, 442 Psychic phenomena. See Supernatural phenomena Psychoanalysis and Black Novels (Tate), 545, 546 Pushed Back to Strength (Wade-Gayles), 573 Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (Randall), 483, 484 Quicksand (Larsen), 352–53 Quilting (Clifton), 96 Rachel (Grimke´), 230–33 Racial ‘‘passing.’’ See ‘‘Passing’’ Rahman, Aishah, 480–81 Rainbow Roun’ Mah Shoulder (Brown), 57 Rainbow Signs (Fabio), 191 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry), 252–56 Randall, Alice, 483–84 Randolph, Asa Philip, 634 Rape, 14, 15, 331, 335, 336, 424, 470, 578, 580; lynchings and, 601–3 ‘‘Rape’’ (Cortez), 124 Rat’s Mass (Kennedy), 336 Ray, Henrietta Cordelia, 486 Raymond, Harry, 81 ‘‘Raymond’s Run’’ (Bambara), 30–31 Red Beans and Ricely Yours (Saloy), 495, 496 Redmond, Eugene, 124 Reed, Ishmael, 496 Reid, Mark A., 110 Religion. See Christianity; Spirituality ‘‘Remember Him a Outlaw’’ (De Veaux), 156 ‘‘Rememory,’’ 245, 246, 429 Reminiscences (Taylor), 550–51 ‘‘Requiem for Willie Lee’’ (Hodges), 271 Resilience, 590–92 Revius, Alesia, 227

INDEX

Rhodes, Jewell Parker, 488–91 Rich, Adrienne, 375 Rich, Frank, 110 Richardson, Judy, 389 Richardson, Mattie, 177 Richardson, Thomas, 176–77 Richardson, Willis, 406–7 ‘‘Riddle of Egypt Brownstone, The’’ (De Veaux), 156 Ridin’ the Goat (Meriwether), 408 Rishoi, Christy, 418–19 Rocks Cry Out, The (Murphy), 439, 440 Rodgers, Carolyn Marie, 493–94 Rogers, Curtis E., 518 Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Taylor), 547–49 Romantic escapism, 468 ‘‘Room 1023’’ (Austin), 24 ‘‘Rootbound’’ ( Johnson), 318–19 Rose, W. L., 551 Rosemont, Penelope, 123 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 538, 603 Russia, 607 Russian Journal (Lee), 360 Sadomasochism, 374 Sally Hemings (Chase-Riboud), 76, 77 Saloy, Mona Lisa, 495–96 Salt Eaters, The (Bambara), 31–32 Salvaggio, Ruth, 68 Sanchez, Sonia, 497–500 Sanders, Dori, 503–6 Sanford & Son (TV sitcom), 104 Sarah Phillips (Lee), 360–62 Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (Grahn), 515–17 Saving Our Sons (Golden), 221 Say Jesus and Come to Me (Shockley), 523–25 Schroeder, Patricia, 232 Science fiction, 64 Scratches (Meriwether), 408 Seacole, Mary, 508–9 Searle, Elizabeth, 201 Seeds beneath the Snow (Millican), 411, 412 ‘‘See How They Run’’ (Vroman), 569, 570 Segregation, 74 Self: reclamation of, 425–26. See also Identity Sell, Mike, 500 Serpent’s Gift, The (Lee), 364, 365 Sexual abuse, 14, 15, 322. See also Incest; Rape Sexuality and sexual politics, 101, 196, 238, 353, 373, 442, 446, 579–81. See also Lesbian literature and lesbian politics Shadow Dancing (Meriwether), 403

661

Shaik, Fatima, 511–12 Shakespeare, William, 447 Shakhovtseva, Elena, 21 Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery (Youngblood), 636, 637 Shange, Ntozake, 514–19 Shine, Ted, 232 Shinn, Thelma, 466 Shockley, Ann Allen, 9–10, 281, 522–25 Short stories, 32–33. See also specific authors Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The (Hansberry), 253–54 Simone, Nina, 614 Sinclaire, Abiola, 463 Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (Angelou), 15 Sisterhood, 156 Skaggs, Merrill, 177 Slave Girl’s Story: Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold, A (Drumgoold), 169, 170 Slave narratives, 7, 59–60, 67, 149–50, 169, 170, 259–60, 301–2, 306, 307, 331–33, 473–75. See also Beloved; Gilda Stories; Jubilee; Our Nig Slavery, 66, 145–46, 195, 254–55, 391–92, 611. See also Underground Railroad Slavery and the French Revolutionists (Cooper), 113 Sleeping with the Dictionary (Mullen), 437 Small Place, A (Kincaid), 343, 345 Smith, Amanda Berry, 527–28 Smith, Anna Deavere, 529–30 Smith, Patricia, 506 Smith, Valerie, 239, 361, 362, 431 Social activism. See Civil rights activism Social class, 194–97. See also Classism Social system, 103–4 Sojourner Truth (McKissack), 398 Sollers, Werner, 338 Some People, Some Other Place (Cooper), 119 Sommers, Sally R., 82 Song in a Weary Throat (Murray), 442 Song of Solomon (Morrison), 423, 425–26, 429–31 ‘‘Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem’’ ( Johnson), 317–18 Soul Brothers and Sister Lou, The (Lattany), 356, 358 Soul Kiss (Youngblood), 637, 639 Southerland, Ellease Dozier, 532–34 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 16

662

INDEX

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (Wells-Barnett), 601–3 Southern Horrors and Other Writings (Royster), 603–4 Southern writers, 21. See also specific writers South Side Community Art Center (SSAC), 127–28 Speech, power of, 631 Spiritual autobiographies, 182–84, 204–5, 366–67 Spiritual individualism, radical, 184 Spirituality, 573–74. See also Christianity; Supernatural phenomena ‘‘Spunk’’ (Hurston), 283, 285 St. John, Janet, 142–43 Stephens, Judith, 233 Stewart, Maria W., 536–38 Stokes, Gail, 29 Storm, William, 232 Stover, J., 551 Street, The (Petry), 465–66 Street Lights: Illuminating the Tales of the Urban Black Experience (Austin), 24, 25 Sula (Morrison), 423, 425, 431 Sullivan, James D., 54 Summers, Barbara, 540–41 Supernatural phenomena, 19–21, 532 Surrealism, 122 ‘‘Sweat’’ (Hurston), 283, 285–86 Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin, 197 Tapahonso, Luci, 584 Tapestry, The (De Veaux), 157 Taranto, James, 143 Tar Baby (Morrison), 423, 426, 429, 431 Tarry, Ellen, 542–43 Tate, Claudia, 310, 313, 544–46, 565 Tate, Linda, 506 Tawa, Renee, 583 Taylor, Mildred D., 547–49 Taylor, Susie King, 550–51 Teachers, 574 Teacup Full of Roses (Mathis), 388–89 Teasley, Lisa, 552–53 Temple of My Familiar, The (Walker), 580, 584 Terry, Lucy, 554–55 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 288–90 There Is Confusion (Fauset), 194–95, 197 Third Life of Grange Copeland, The (Walker), 579–80, 584, 585

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldua), 29 This Child’s Gonna Live (Wright), 633, 634 Thomas, Joyce Carol, 556–59 Thomas, Lorenzo, 496 Thomas and Beulah (Dove), 163–65 Thompson, Era Bell, 561–62 Those Bones Are Not My Child (Bambara), 32 Tillman, Katherine Davis Chapman, 563–65 Todd, Ruth D., 567–68 Toe Jam ( Jackson), 296, 297 Topdog/Underdog (Parks), 459–60, 463 ‘‘To Usward’’ (Bennett), 36 Travelling Music (McElroy), 393–95 Treading the Winepress (Allen), 9 Trouble in Mind (Childress), 80–82 Truth, Sojourner, 408 Tubman, Harriet, 408 Turner, Nat, 626 Twain, Mark, 626 Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Smith), 529–30 Two-Headed Woman (Clifton), 95–96 Ugly Ways (Ansa), 20 Ullman, Leslie, 96 Underground Railroad, 245, 278 Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land while a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (Rahman), 480, 481 ‘‘Urban minimalism,’’ 534 Valentine, Victoria, 118 Vampire stories, 224 Venus (Parks), 459, 463 Violets and Other Tales (Dunbar-Nelson), 174, 176, 177 Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, A (Cooper), 112–13 Voodoo Dreams (Rhodes), 488, 489 Voodoo/Love Magic ( Jackson), 293 Vroman, Mary Elizabeth, 569–70 Wade-Gayles, Gloria, 572–76 Waiting to Exhale (McMillan), 399, 400 Walk, Lori L., 375 Walker, Alice, 373, 578–86 Walker, David, 537 Walker, Margaret Abigail, 589–93 Walker, Pierre, 17 Wall, Wendy, 585

INDEX

Wallinger, Hanna, 113–14 Walter, Mildred Pitts, 595–96 Waniek, Marilyn Nelson, 598–99 Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (De Veaux), 157–58 Washington, George, 610 Washington, Harold, 52 Washington, Helen, 113 Washington, Mary Helen, 40 Water Marked (Lee), 364 Watermelon Dress, The (White), 614, 615 Watkins, Gloria. See hooks, bell Watkins, Mel, 534 Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, The (Walker), 581, 584 Wedding Band (Childress), 81, 82 Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell, 601–4 West, Dorothy, 606–9 What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (Cleage), 89, 90 What Use Are Flowers? (Hansberry), 255 Wheatley, Phillis, 610–12 White, Mark, 97 White, Paulette Childress, 614–15 Whitley, Edward, 97 Wilderson, Margaret B., 297 Wilentz, Gay, 429 Wilkerson, Margaret, 481 Wilkinson, Brenda Scott, 616–18 Williams, Bettye, 484 Williams, Dana A., 297 Williams, Fannie (Frances) Barrier, 620–22 Williams, John, 110 Williams, Sherley Anne, 624–27 Wilson, Harriet E., 629–32

663

Wind Done Gone, The (Randall), 483–84 Winfrey, Oprah, 90, 460, 608 Winona (Hopkins), 280 Witness to Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography (Chalmers), 4–5 Wolf, Miriam, 553 Womanism, 110, 118, 119, 219, 484, 579, 583, 585, 626 ‘‘Womanist model,’’ 119 Woman’s Place, A (Golden), 220 Women of Brewster Place, The (Naylor), 444, 445, 447 Women’s club movement, 176, 177 Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (Seacole), 508–9 Wood, Susan, 222 Work of the Afro-American Woman, The (Mossell), 434–35 Wright, Richard, 466 Wright, Sarah Elizabeth, 633–34 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 307 Yellow Bird and Me (Hansen), 259, 260 Yellow House on the Corner, The (Dove), 163, 165 You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (Walker), 582 You Know Better (Ansa), 20–21 Young, Patricia, 233 Youngblood, Shay, 636–39 Zaidman, Laura, 506 Zami (Lorde), 369, 374 Zandy, Janet, 267 ‘‘Zimbabwe: Women Fire’’ (De Veaux), 155

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Yolanda Williams Page is coordinator of collegiate success at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Prior to that position she worked at Dillard University, where she served as assistant dean of Humanities and was an associate professor of English. Yolanda has published bio-bibliographical essays in African American Playwrights: A Sourcebook and African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook; and a historical essay in Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature. She has also published an interview in August Wilson and the New Black Arts Movement. Megan K. Ahern is currently a graduate student of comparative literary and cultural studies at the University of Connecticut. She received her B.A. in women’s and gender studies from Dartmouth College and is interested in questions of gender, ethnicity, and language within literature. Jessica Allen received a master’s degree in English from the University of Washington, where she specialized in twentieth-century literature. She currently works as an editor in educational publishing and writes freelance articles and book reviews in New York City. Joseph A. Alvarez resides in Charlotte, NC. Lena Marie Ampadu is an associate professor of English and vice-chair of the English Department at Towson University, where she teaches African American literature, African women writers, and composition and rhetoric. She has scholarly work published in Callaloo, Composition Studies, African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives, and Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering. Her current research interests include the rhetoric of nineteenth-century African American women, the rhetoric of masculinity, and oral traditions in the literature of women of African descent. Christopher J. Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate in American religious studies at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. His dissertation explores early-twentieth-century U.S. Protestant missionary expositions. He is an instructor of history and religion at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Asbury Theological Seminary. Bridgitte Arnold is an English Ph.D. candidate and graduate teaching assistant at the University of Texas at Arlington, where her studies are concentrated on American women’s literature. She completed her M.A. in English at Southern Connecticut State University, focusing on twentieth-century African American literature and twentiethcentury southern women’s literature. Prior to her Ph.D. work, she was a member of the English faculty at Nyack College, teaching American literature and composition.

666

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Marlo David Azikwe is a McKnight doctoral fellow in English at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She received her master’s degree in liberal studies from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where she completed her thesis, ‘‘Folklore and Oral Culture in Black Women’s Fiction, 1925–1975.’’ Her research interests include African diaspora literatures, speculative fiction/Afrofuturism, African American vernacular expression, and gender and sexuality. Iva Balic is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of North Texas, where she is writing her dissertation on utopian fiction. She has presented at various conferences and published an article on spatial politics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Sue E. Barker holds an M.A. in English language and literature from the University of Chicago. She has contributed articles on American literature to several reference works. Sharon L. Barnes is assistant professor of Interdisciplinary and Special Programs at the University of Toledo, where she teaches academic writing as well as women’s studies. Her areas of research include African American women poets and teaching writing to underprepared students. She is currently at work on a book-length manuscript about the work of Audre Lorde. Jane M. Barstow is professor of English at the University of Hartford, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century and contemporary women writers and on African American literature. She is the author of One Hundred Years of American Women Writing, 1848–1948 (Scarecrow Press, 1997). Her most recent articles include ‘‘Reading in Groups: Women’s Clubs and College Literature Classes,’’ in Publishing Research Quarterly (Fall 2003) and ‘‘Edwidge Danticat’’ in Cyclopedia of World Authors (Gale Press, 2003). Lopamudra Basu is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. She received her Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She completed her undergraduate education and received an M.A. from the University of Delhi, India. Her scholarly interests include postcolonial literatures of South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean; Asian American studies; transnational feminist theory; and the contemporary world novel. Ann Beebe, Ph.D., is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Tyler. She is currently working on a short article on Langston Hughes as well as an essay on counterfeiting in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper. Adriane Bezusko is currently pursuing her master’s degree in English literature at the University of North Texas and plans on pursing a Ph.D. in English literature concentrating on feminist theory. Amy L. Blair is assistant professor of English at Marquette University. Her work on latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature focuses on the ways readers concerned about social and financial upward mobility read and productively misread texts critical of American success culture.

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

667

Sophie Blanch recently completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Warwick, UK, where she also works as a part-time teacher. Having a masters degree in gender, literature, and modernity, she explores in her doctoral thesis the dialogue between female modernisms and feminist revisions to psychoanalysis in the 1920s and 1930s that effectively rewrote the narrative of the modern woman. She has published articles on a range of Anglo-American women writers of the modernist period, including Antonia White, Nella Larsen, Vita Sackville-West, and the little-known poet and novelist Emily Holmes Coleman. Blanch’s postdoctoral research interests are aimed at exploring the strategic uses of comedy in early-twentieth-century women’s writing. Ruth Blando´n has written extensively on feminist issues, which include the articles ‘‘On Drag, Gender and Fashionable Stupidity: An Interview with Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam,’’ and ‘‘Cinderella Dreams—Silence, Ignorance and AIDS in America.’’ She is currently working on her dissertation, ‘‘Trans-American Modernisms—Latin America, the United States and the Politics of Being’’ at the University of Southern California. Sarah Boslaugh received her M.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts and her Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation from the City University of New York. Dr. Boslaugh is a senior statistical data analyst at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where she frequently publishes on public health and information technology topics. Patricia Kennedy Bostian teaches at Central Piedmont Community College, where she is editor of the Wild Goose Poetry Review. She has published articles on many poets such as Lorna Dee Cervantes, Garrett Hongo, and Joy Harjo. Barbara Boswell is a doctoral student and Fulbright Fellow at the University of Maryland’s Department of Women’s Studies. She has an M.Phil. degree in women’s and gender studies from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her research interests are black South African women’s literature, South African feminisms, and diasporic women’s writing. Kimberly Downing Braddock received her B.A. and M.A.I.S. from the University of Houston-Victoria and her D.A. from Idaho State University. She currently teaches rhetoric and composition at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. Jana Evans Braziel is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Lisa Pertillar Brevard is an internationally-recognized scholar and creative artist, specializing in the study of African-American traditions. Active in music and poetry, her most recent project to-date is a novel set in New Orleans, called, Sugar Free. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of English at Roanoke College. Gabriel A. Briggs is currently an instructor and English Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kentucky. Briggs’s research/teaching interests include African American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African American literary criticism and

668

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

theory, and early American literature. Briggs is particularly interested in nineteenthcentury women writers of protest literature (abolitionist and suffragist). Jessica Margaret Brophy, a New Jersey native, is currently working toward her Ph.D. in English literature at Morgan State University. Her interests include nineteenthand twentieth-century aesthetic philosophy and twentieth-century African American literature. Tenille Brown is a southern writer whose short fiction has been featured online and in several print anthologies including Chocolate Flava, Amazons: Sexy Tales of Strong Women, and Glamour Girls. The short-film adaptation of her story ‘‘Her Mama’s House’’ will be released in the summer of 2006. She keeps a blog on writing on her Web site, www.tenillebrown.com. Josie A. Brown-Rose is assistant professor of English and director of the Minor in African American Studies at Western New England College. She received her Ph.D. from Stony Brook University, focusing on African American, Caribbean, and black British literatures. Jacqueline Imani Bryant is associate professor of English and an affiliate faculty member of African American studies at Chicago State University. Her presentations center mainly on the life and works of Gwendolyn Brooks and selected literary works of early black women writers. Publications include articles and reviews in Journal of Black Studies, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, and College Language Association Journal. Her book The Foremother Figure in Early Black Women’s Literature: ‘‘Clothed in My Right Mind’’ is a part of the Studies in African American History and Culture Series (1999). She is the editor of the book titled Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha: A Critical Collection (2002). Additionally, her chapter appears in the book titled African American Rhetoric(s) (2004). Finally, she is editor of the forthcoming work Gwendolyn Brooks and Working Writers. Christina G. Bucher is associate professor of English, rhetoric and writing at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature, African American literature, and women’s literature. She has published articles and book reviews in Mississippi Quarterly, the North Carolina Literary Review, and the CATESOL Journal, and has entries in The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance and The Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Joi Carr is assistant professor of English in the Humanities and Teacher Education division at Pepperdine University. Warren J. Carson is assistant dean of Arts and Sciences and professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, M.A. in African American studies from Atlanta University, and Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina, where he wrote his dissertation on the early career of Zora Neale Hurston. He has published many essays and reviews on works by African American writers including Hurston, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright.

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

669

Adrienne Carthon is a doctoral student at Howard University. She is a graduate of Howard University (B.A., Journalism) and North Carolina State University (M.A., English). She is also a teacher, and her research interests include women’s literature by African American, Caribbean, and Hispanic writers, as well as cultural studies. Teresa Clark Caruso is editor of ‘‘On the subject of the feminist business’’: Re-Reading Flannery O’Connor, a collection of essays that focuses on a feminist reevaluation of O’Connor’s fiction. She received her Ph.D. in literature and criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She serves as secretary for the Pennsylvania College English Association and currently teaches literature, women’s studies, and composition at Penn State’s Behrend College in Erie, Pennsylvania. Adrienne Cassel is assistant professor of English at Sinclair Community College. She received her M.F.A. in poetry from Bennington College. Her poetry has appeared in the Northwest Review, 5 A.M., Nexus, Amulet, and the Bennington Review. She lives in the historic Wright-Dunbar neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio, with her husband and two dogs. Heejung Cha is a doctoral candidate in the English department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly interests broadly range from postcolonial and multicultural literature, to cultural studies, to women’s studies and pedagogy. She wrote a book review of Greg Garrard’s Ecocricism and many entries on Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Carol Lee Sanchez, Linda Hogan, and others. Denisa E. Chatman-Riley is a writer and lecturer in southern California. She received a B.A. in English from the University of California at Riverside and a master’s degree in English from Claremont Graduate University, where she is presently a Ph.D. candidate. She is currently doing research for her dissertation on racial, gender, and social passing as an American construct. She has written biographies and book reviews for various publications and the media. Her research interests include African American women writers, science fiction, and mythology. Cameron Christine Clark received her B.A. in English-creative writing from Western Michigan University and her M.A. in English from the University of Florida, where she specialized in cultural studies. She wrote her master’s thesis on the depictions of trauma and testimony in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. She is currently working on a collection of poetry. Tanya N. Clark is assistant professor of English and Africana studies at Rowan University. She teaches a variety of courses on African American literature and culture, American literature, and women’s studies. A graduate of Temple University having received her doctorate in English in 2004, Clark is currently revising her manuscript titled ‘‘Quilting the Race: Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, The Colored American magazine, and the African American Family, 1900–1905.’’ Kevin L. Cole is associate professor of English and chair of Humanities at the University of Sioux Falls.

670

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Meta Michond Cooper is currently doing her M.A. in English and African American literature at Howard University. As a Mississippi resident and Tougaloo College undergraduate, Meta’s interest was piqued by Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi. She is pursuing her interest in Moody’s autobiography for her thesis project as she explores Moody’s reinscriptions of canonical authors such as Harriet Jacobs and Richard Wright. Moreover, Meta explores ways in which Moody rewrites history and paves the way for black women writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Freda Fuller Coursey teaches World Literature, Cinema and Violence, Technical Communication, and other courses at Binghamton University in New York. Coursey publications include: reviews of books on Edna St. Vincent Millay in Phoebe: Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory and Aesthetics; an article on Henry Adams in the European Journal of American Culture; and an article on incorporating technology into the English/Writing classroom in the Louisiana English Journal, plus numerous additional book reviews, short stories, essays, and poems. Coursey has Masters degrees in English and History, and has completed the coursework for a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Binghamton-SUNY. She also has completed an as-yet unpublished biography of Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Ginette Curry obtained her Ph.D. in English at the Sorbonne University, Paris III, specializing on African American and postcolonial literatures. She is the author of Awakening African Women: The Dynamics of Change (2004), which is a comparative study of African novels and films about women’s issues in contemporary West Africa and their role in the development of Africa. She is a professor in the Department of English at Florida International University. Delicia Dena Daniels, a native of Houston, Texas, is a poet, writer, and educator. She is currently an instructor in the English Department at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing at Chicago State University and her B.A. in English at Dillard University in New Orleans. Adenike Marie Davidson is associate professor at Fisk University. Her research interests include black nationalism, feminist theory, African American literature, and turnof-the-century American literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript on black nationalism and the African American novel. Amanda J. Davis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses through the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research. Her dissertation focuses on autobiographical texts written by incarcerated women. Carol Bunch Davis is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Southern California and a lecturer in English at Texas A&M University–Galveston. Her dissertation, Troubling the Boundaries: ‘‘Blacknesses,’’ Performativity and the AfricanAmerican Freedom Struggle, considers how the performance of visual and textual ‘‘blackness’’ in the drama produced during the 1960s mediate, rehearse, and constitute

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

671

multiple black identities or ‘‘blacknesses’’ in dialogue with the social and political upheaval of the African American freedom struggle. T. Jasmine Dawson is a staff writer for Black Reign News and is a contributor at Upscale magazine. She completed her B.A. at San Francisco State University and M.F.A. in creative writing at Mills College. She has taught at Mills College, guest lectured at Louisiana State University and McClymond’s High School. She is currently working on a novel. Marla Dean completed her masters degree in theater history and criticism at the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. in theater at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She is an award-winning playwright and director of some forty plays and musicals. Marla is currently a professor of theater at the University of Montevallo in Alabama and is a consultant with Remembrance through the Performing Arts in Austin, Texas (a theater group that specifically develops new plays.) Her articles have appeared in Being Native/Native Being and Modern Drama. She has presented at numerous conferences and is a scholar of ancient indigenous ritual and performance. Marla is currently writing a book on the development of the new play in academia. Mary G. De Jong, associate professor of English and women’s studies at Penn State Altoona, has published several articles on American hymnody. She is particularly interested in styles of performance and autobiographers’ uses of hymn texts to tell their stories and affirm their values. Gerardo Del Guercio is a Montreal born freelance writer whose research interests lie greatly in American literature, and race and gender studies. He received his B.A. in English from Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) and M.A. in English from the universite´ de Montre´al. Currently, he is publishing book reviews for Cercles and is working on his first book manuscript. Firouzeh Dianat is a Ph.D. candidate at Morgan State University. She received her M.A. at the Tehran Azad University and B.A. in English from Kurdistan University. Having spent most of her life in Kurdistan, Iran, she is in the process of publishing a book of folktales of her people. She taught English as a second language at the Kurdistan Medical University, Teacher Training Center, and high schools. Her research interests are children’s literature, race, American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and religion. Tamra E. DiBenedetto is associate professor of English at Riverside Community College, Riverside, California. Helen Doss is a tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Communications and Fine Arts at Malcolm X College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. She teaches intermediate composition and literature courses, particularly research writing, Shakespeare, Beowulf to Johnson, contemporary American and English literature, and women’s literature. She received her undergraduate degree in anthropology from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Dr. Doss completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation considers the connections among Milton’s

672

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

‘‘Paradise Regained’’, messianic prophecy, and early-Restoration experimental science. Dr. Doss’s scholarly interests include pre- and early-modern studies, the history and philosophy of science, Victorian literature, and the writings from the African and American diasporas. Judy Massey Dozier is associate professor of English and chairperson of the English Department at Lake Forest College. She is currently at work on a novel as she markets her dissertation, Conjure Women: Culture Performances of African American Women Writers, for publication. She is also a member of OBAC Writers Workshop. Kalenda C. Eaton received her Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in twentiethcentury African American literature. Her research interests include African American literature and culture, social protest writing, the black power movement, and women’s studies. She has taught at universities in Ohio and Florida, and is currently assistant professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Julie Ellam teaches in the English Department at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. She is currently writing a book, which is provisionally titled Love in Jeanette Winterson’s Novels. Her other research areas include literary theory, writing by women, and contemporary fiction. Kate Falvey holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University, where she taught for many years. She currently teaches at New York City College of Technology at the City University of New York. Her specialty areas are race and gender in literature, women’s narratives, and the literary gothic, and she has published work on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women writers. Alex Feerst holds an A.B. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in English from Duke University. Rebecca Feind, M.L.S., is reference librarian and the outreach coordinator for San Jose State University at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Library in San Jose, California. She served on the steering committee of the 2004 Furious Flower Poetry Conference held at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Ben Fisler holds a Ph.D. in theatre and performance studies from the University of Maryland and is currently director of the theater program at Otero Junior College in La Junta, Colorado. He has published articles with The Puppetry Yearbook, Theatron, and Research in Drama Education. Other biographical entries of his appear in sources related to African American literature, Native American literature, modern drama, and Enlightenment culture and arts. Jean Forst is a Ph.D. candidate in later American literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has taught courses in literature, film, rhetoric, and business writing. Samira C. Franklin is working toward her Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction writing from New York University and is currently at work on her second novel. She lives in Oakland with her husband, Christopher Perrius.

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

673

Imani Lillie B. Fryar teaches at Lemoyne-Owen College in Memphis, TN. Linda Garber is associate professor of English and women’s and gender studies at Santa Clara University. She is the author of Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the LesbianFeminist Roots of Queer Theory (2001). Roxane Gay is a graduate student in the Rhetoric and Technical Communication program at Michigan Technological University. Her writing can be found in many anthologies as well as in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature and Writing African American Women. Elissa Gershowitz is an editor in the Boston area. She holds a master’s degree in children’s literature, and is a freelance writer of children’s book reviews. Sarah Estes Graham teaches poetry and composition at the University of Virginia. She is currently at work on her first book of poems Fall Gently to the River. Miranda A. Green-Barteet is a doctoral student at Texas A&M University. She recently completed her coursework and is in the initial stages of researching her dissertation, which will explore nineteenth-century constructions of domesticity and sentimentality as they were employed by ethnic American women. Her interests include nineteenthcentury American literature, African American literature, American women writers, as well as issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. Jeremy Griggs is an instructor of English at Lewis & Clark Community College in Godfrey, Illinois. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Edwardsville, where he studied under poet Eugene B. Redmond and was editorial assistant for Drumvoices Revue. Katie Rose Guest is a doctoral student in English, her areas of interest being rhetoric and cultural studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She earned her J.D. in 2003 from the University of North Carolina School of Law. Shayla Hawkins is a freelance writer and editor. Her poems, essays, and book reviews have been published in magazines and journals throughout North America and Europe, including Poets and Writers, Carolina Quarterly, Windsor Review, Calabash, and Paris/ Atlantic. Hawkins served as an events coordinator for the 2001 United Nations/Rattapallax Press worldwide poetry readings and was featured in the ‘‘Poets Among Us Series’’ at the 2002 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She is a graduate of the Cave Canem Workshop/ Retreat for African American Poets and lives in Detroit, Michigan. DaMaris Hill is a professor at Towson University and Sojourner-Douglass College and a member of the National Writing Project. She is a graduate of Morgan State University with an M.A. degree in English. Her story ‘‘On the Other Side of Heaven—1957’’ won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award for Short Fiction. The majority of her poetry is spiritually based on and addresses issues of gender, race, and identity in a capitalistic society. She is also working on a novel about slavery and social identity in Bermuda. Some of her writing has been published with African American National

674

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Biography Project, Warpland, Women in Judaism, and The Sable Quill. In addition to her creative pursuits, she is currently aiming to document the lives and careers of African American women. Kevin Hogg is originally from British Columbia and holds a B.A. degree from the University of Lethbridge. He is currently working on his master’s degree in English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. His main research interest is twentieth-century dystopian literature; he also has a strong interest in African American history, which stems from living in Mississippi when he was younger. Tamara Zaneta Hollins is a professor and healer living in Pennsylvania. She holds degrees in art, writing and literature, cultural studies, and English. Her creative writing, scholarly writing, and art have appeared in various publications, and she has presented scholarly papers at several conferences. Her research interests include the production and construction of identity as well as spirituality and self-authenticity. Peggy J. Huey received her Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida. She currently teaches in the Department of Speech, Theater and Dance at the University of Tampa in Florida. She has previously published work on the Breton Lay, Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘‘The Squire’s Tale,’’ Jane Austen’s Sanditon, as well as numerous book reviews. Forthcoming are articles on Thomas Heywood, John Steinbeck, E. A. Robinson, Persia Wooley, Harry Potter, and John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano. Richard A. Iadonisi is visiting assistant professor at Grand Valley State University. He has published articles on the poetry of Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, and Robert Frost. Judy L. Isaksen, an associate professor of English and Communications at High Point University in North Carolina, teaches rhetorical theory and writing, visual rhetoric, media theory and production, communication and cultural studies, and literature. Her scholarly interests primarily focus on the intersection of rhetoric and race, with print publications on critical race theory and whiteness studies as well as an audio documentary on black voices on public radio and a video documentary on D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Katarzyna Iwona Jakubiak is a Ph.D. candidate at Illinois State University. Her dissertation explores the benefits of using translation theory in the study of African diaspora literature. She has translated a collection of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry into Polish and recently contributed to the Callaloo special issue on Komunyakaa. Raymond Janifer is an associate professor of English and Director of the Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Minor at Shippensburg University in PA. He has recently published articles in the Encyclopedia of Multiethnic Literature Vols. 1 & 5 on Ed Bullins and John Edgar Wideman and an article on Howard Dotson, Curator of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the Encyclopedia of African American Literature. David M. Jones is assistant professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. His writing examines social movements and popular culture

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

675

using tools from critical race studies. His essay on Lorraine Hansberry and sexuality in the civil rights movement is collected in Growing Up Postmodern (2002), and he is working on a full-length manuscript on the Black Arts Movement as well as essays on blues and social change in American culture. Regina V. Jones, Ph.D., is visiting assistant professor of Afro-American studies and an adjunct assistant professor in women’s studies at Indiana University Northwest. She is interested in the writings, narrative voices, and culture of African American women from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Dr. Jones has written on African American women for Black Women in America, Encyclopedia of African American Literature, and the forthcoming African American National Biography. Dr. Jones is currently working on a book about the resistant voices of nineteenth-century narrative women. Heather Hoffman Jordan is a Ph.D. student in rhetoric and technical communication at Michigan Technological University. Jordan recently completed a review of Shirley Brice Heath’s ArtShow2Grow DVD and became an editorial and production assistant for Community Literacy Journal. Tatia Jacobson Jordan, a Ph.D. student in Florida State University’s English Department, specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Exploring issues of race and gender within texts, Jacobson Jordan earned her M.A. in 2004 from Georgia State University. She teaches composition and literature in Tallahassee, and is an active member of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, The Modern Language Association, and the American Studies Association. Nancy Kang is completing her doctorate study at the University of Toronto Department of English. A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellow, Chancellor Jackman Graduate Research Fellow, and Sir James Lougheed Scholar of Distinction, she focuses on ethnic American literature and culture in the twentieth century. Pratibha Kelapure lives in the San Francisco Bay area California where she has spent most of her adult life. Nita N. Kumar, reader of English at Shyama Prasad Mukherji College, University of Delhi, has a Ph.D. in African American drama. Her recent publications include ‘‘The Logic of Retribution: Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman’’ in African American Review (2003), ‘‘Black Arts Movement and Ntozake Shange’s Choreopoem’’ in Black Arts Quarterly (2001), and several other essays and reviews on African American and postcolonial literatures. She has been granted a Mellon Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin, to work on Adrienne Kennedy papers. Her forthcoming works include an essay on Kennedy in Journal of American Theater and Drama and an essay titled ‘‘The Colour of the Critic: An Intervention in the Critical Debate in African American Theory on Interpretive Authority’’ in White Scholars/ African American Texts, edited by Lisa Long. Joy M. Leighton received her Ph.D. in English from SUNY Buffalo. She is an assistant professor at Auburn University. She teaches and researches on nineteenth-century U.S. literature, Asian-American literature, and multiethnic literature.

676

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Jeehyun Lim is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her primary interest is ethnic literature of the United States. She is a contributing editor to The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature. Katherine Madison is an undergraduate English major at the University of Sioux Falls. She will pursue graduate studies in literature. Elizabeth Malia earned a B.A. (Whitworth College, 1976) and an M.A. (Eastern Washington University, 2004) in English literature. She also holds an M.A. in librarianship and information management. Over twenty-four years, she has worked in a wide variety of public and academic libraries in Colorado, Kansas, and Washington State. She is currently employed at EWU in the Kennedy Library as manager of the Curriculum and Media Center and the Tech-Eze student support desk. Elizabeth Marsden, a native New Orleanian, is a former assistant professor of English at Dillard University. She has lived in Texas since Hurricane Katrina. Besides loving her profession, she rescues animals and works with several humane no-kill shelters. A published poet, she is one of the 100 poets featured in From the Bend in the River: An Anthology of 100 New Orleans Poets. Tinola N. Mayfield is a photographer, poet, and activist. She currently teaches sociology at Owens Community College and will be starting art school in the fall at Bowling Green State University. Tinola received her undergraduate degree in women and gender studies and her master’s degree in sociology, both from the University of Toledo. Babacar M’Baye teaches black studies at the Evergreen State College. His publications include ‘‘The Image of Africa in the Travel Narratives of W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’’ (BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, Fall 2003, 153–177) and ‘‘Dualistic Imagination of Africa in the Black Atlantic Narratives of Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Martin R. Delany’’ (The New England Journal of History, Spring 2002, 15–32). Joan McCarty is the author of the plays A Time to Dance and Last Bus to Stateville. She has also written a collection of short stories titled Through My Windows. She is a contributor to the Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature, This Day in the Life—Diaries from Women Across America, and Life Spices from Seasoned Sisters, an anthology of life stories. She received the first place short story award from the Georgia Writer’s Association in 2003. Formerly a faculty member at Spelman College, she is currently assistant professor at Savannah State University. Trimiko C. Melancon is visiting assistant professor of English at St. Lawrence University, where her teaching and scholarly interests lie primarily in African American, American, and Africana literature and culture, critical race and feminist theory, and gender and sexuality studies. She has received numerous grants and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and Nellie Mae Foundation. Currently, she is working on her book manuscript, which examines post–civil rights representations of unconventional black women in the literary imagination.

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

677

Gretchen Michlitsch is assistant professor of English at Winona State University in Minnesota, where she teaches multicultural American literature. She recently completed her dissertation, Expressing Milk: Breastfeeding in Contemporary American Literature, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published articles on the works of Sherley Anne Williams and Nalo Hopkinson. Maria Mikolchak is currently associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and in the English Department at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature and a Graduate Certificate in women’s studies from University of South Carolina. Her research interests include women’s studies, critical theory, and comparative studies of the novel as a genre. Shamika Ann Mitchell is a doctoral student in the Department of English at Temple University. Her area of study is contemporary black and Latino American fiction, with a focus on constructions of identity. Tabitha Adams Morgan is currently an American Studies doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts. She is an instructor at the University of Massachusetts and at Holyoke Community College. Her primary research interest and dissertation centers in exploring working class and immigrant women’s artistic and cultural productions as social protest discourse, 1880s–1930s. Ted Morrissey teaches in the Division of Languages and Literature at Springfield College in Illinois, including an introductory course on women authors. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in English studies at Illinois State University, where he is concentrating on postmodern American literature, especially Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. His articles on literature pedagogy have appeared in Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction, and his own fiction has been in Glimmer Train Stories, Paris Transcontinental, and Eureka Literary magazine. Nanette Morton is a lecturer at the Brantford, Ontario, campus of Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She is in the process of completing a book on the African Canadian west. Chandra Tyler Mountain is chairperson and associate professor of English at Dillard University in New Orleans. Her research centers on Africana women’s literature. A. Mary Murphy works primarily in life writing, particularly literary biography, and twentieth-century poetry. She also publishes as a poet. She has a Ph.D. from Memorial University of Newfoundland and teaches film and literature in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Joy R. Myree-Mainor is assistant professor of English at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in literary theory and criticism, African American literature, world literature, and composition. She earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Kentucky, completing a dissertation titled ‘‘Rereading the Social Protest Tradition: Progressive Race, Class, and Gender Politics in the Fiction of Ann Petry and Dorothy West.’’ She specializes in black women’s literature from the late nineteenth to the midtwentieth century with an emphasis on social protest

678

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

fiction and race, gender, and class issues. Her forthcoming essay is on nineteenthcentury black women writers and activists in the forthcoming Sparks of Resistance, Flames of Change: Black Communities and Activism. Currently she is completing a manuscript on Dorothy West. Debbie Clare Olson is a lecturer in English and films at Central Washington University. Keren Omry lectures, has published, and continues to explore science fiction and the popular narrative, with particular focus on the work of Octavia Butler, investigating how the dialogue between aesthetics and technology is articulated in terms of gender and genre. Omry was awarded her PhD in English Literature at the University of London, where she explored the relationship between jazz and African American literature of the twentieth century. She is currently developing her investigation of racialised discourses in contemporary Jewish American and African American texts, writing on the intersections of popular imagination and culture with constructions of ethnic identity. Born in Australia, Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama and theater arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has published essays on black British writers including Roy Williams, Lemn Sissay, Kwame Kwei-Armah, and Winsome Pinnock. Her research focuses on late Victorian motherhood and colonial ideology, and she also writes about women spies in World War II. Laura Gimeno Pahissa holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English philology from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain) and teaches American history and literature there. Her research interests are African American literature and autobiography. Gimeno Pahissa was awarded a research grant in 2005 at the Freie Universita¨t-John F. Kennedy Institut fu¨r Nordamerikasstudien in Berlin, Germany. Louis H. Palmer, III, is assistant professor of American literature at Castleton State College in Castleton, Vermont. He teaches genre and survey courses in American literature as well as general education courses and courses in African American literature and women’s writing. He received a Ph.D. from Syracuse University. He serves as a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Popular Culture and serves as the Gothic chair for the Popular Culture Association. His research interests include Southern literature, popular cultural studies, and environmental literature. Valerie Palmer-Mehta is assistant professor of communication in the Department of Rhetoric, Communication and Journalism at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Her research focuses on the intersection of hegemony, ideology, and the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality in public discourse and the media. Roy Pe´rez is a doctoral candidate in English and American literature at New York University, where he is studying society and aesthetics in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury minority writing. He has published entries on Gloria Anzaldu´a, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and June Jordan. Pearlie Mae Peters is professor of English at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and is author of the book The Assertive Woman in Zora Neale Hurston’s Fiction, Folklore and Drama.

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

679

Hermine Pinson is an associate professor of literature at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ashe and Mama Yetta and Selected Poems and a cd, Changing the Changes in Poetry & Song in special collaboration with Yusef Komunyakaa. Her fiction and essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including Callaloo, Paintbrush, Mississippi Quarterly, and African American Review. Julia Marek Ponce is a graduate student at Purdue University Calumet, where she also teaches composition. Her research interests include women’s literature and using technology in the classroom. Myisha Priest is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA. She is completing a manuscript examining the relationship between adult and children’s works in African American literature. Gerri Reaves is a freelance writer and editor living in South Florida. Her publications include Mapping the Private Geography: Autobiography, Identity, and America (2001), and her critical essays, creative nonfiction, and environmental pieces that have appeared in Southern Ocean Review, Passages North, Literature/Film Quarterly, ZCPortal, and others. She also contributed an essay to Footnotes: On Shoes (2001), titled ‘‘The Slip in the Dance Slipper: Illusion and the Naked Foot.’’ Althea Rhodes teaches at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Maria J. Rice is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her dissertation studies the experience of postmemory and migration in contemporary African American and ethnic American literature. A former high school teacher, she has taught literature and composition at all secondary and undergraduate levels. She is currently an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow and is a former Mellon Fellow in humanistic study. Bennie P. Robinson received her B.A. from Tougaloo College and M.L.S. from Atlanta University. She is a reference librarian and collection developer for black studies and women studies at the University of Akron, where she also serves on the Black Studies Advisory Council and the Women’s Studies Advisory Council. Frank A. Salamone, Ph.D., is chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department of Iona College and an instructor at the University of Phoenix. He has authored and edited more than twenty books and 100 articles. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Religious Rituals and Performances (2004), and Gods and Goods in Africa, Popular Culture in the Fifties, among others. Joshunda Sanders is a writer and journalist who has written for the Houston Chronicle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and most recently, the San Francisco Chronicle. The Bronx native is at work on her first book and resides in Oakland, California. Shawntaye M. Scott is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in information science and technology. She is currently a research

680

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

associate for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Scott’s poems have been published on the e-zines Holler, Subjective Substance, The Writers Crib, Now and Forever, Nubian Mindz, MagNetique, Timbooktu, The Soul of Pittsburgh, Confused in a Deeper Way, and the Canadian e-magazines Poetry Stop and 3 Cup Morning. Kelly O. Secovnie is completing her Ph.D. in writing, teaching, and criticism in the English Department at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research and teaching interests include West African Anglophone literature, African American drama, transatlantic diasporic studies, and postcolonial and feminist theory. Denise R. Shaw earned a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. Her dissertation is titled ‘‘Lowly Violence: Rape, Loss, and Melancholia in the Modern Southern Novel.’’ Her areas of interest are twentieth-century American literature, specifically the modern and postmodern novel, Southern literature, and African American literature. She has published articles in African American History Reference Series (volume 2); The World of Frederick Douglass, 1818–1895; Voices of Infanticide: Toward a Global Understanding; Cleave: A Journal of Literary Criticism; Journal for the Association of Research on Mothering; and Stepping through the Looking Glass: Reflections on, Revisions of, and Premonitions about English Studies in the 21st Century. Angela Shaw-Thornburg is an assistant professor of English at Newberry College. Gloria A. Shearin is an associate professor in the Liberal arts Department at Savannah State University Sharon T. Silverman is a native of Chicago. She earned her B.A. at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and her M.A. from the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign in library and information science. She is currently employed with the University of Illinois at Chicago as a visiting professor and professional library associate. During her leisure time, Silverman enjoys fiction novels written by African Americans, and comedies and drama/suspense movies. Karen S. Sloan is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Tyler, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature and bibliography. She has published articles in the Explicator and ANQ, and has authored entries in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Dorsia Smith is a Ph.D. student in Caribbean literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Rı´o Piedras. She has several forthcoming articles in La Torre and has presented at conferences in Tobago, Tortola, and Puerto Rico. Her primary interests are the Caribbean writers V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid. Rochelle Spencer earned her M.F.A. from New York University. She is the recipient of a Burke-Marshall fellowship (sponsored by Paule Marshall), a Hurston-Hughes fellowship (sponsored by Alice Walker), and a Starr fellowship (sponsored by Teachers and Writers Inc.). Spencer was a finalist for the Chesterfield Writers Program fellowship, and her writings have appeared in the African American Review; Cake Train; Stickman Review; Upscale; Sweet Fancy Moses; and the anthology Sometimes Rhythm, Sometimes

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

681

Blues: Young African Americans on Love, Relationships, and the Search for Mr. Right (Seal Press 2004). She currently teaches English at Spelman College. Tarshia L. Stanley is an associate professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. She teaches courses in Film Studies and visual imagery particularly as it pertains to images of women. She has authored several articles critiquing black women in African American, African, and Caribbean cinema as well as black female iconography in popular culture. Heidi Stauffer received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Michigan State University and her Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Central Florida. Her areas of interest are nineteenth-century literature, regionalist literature, and African American literature. She is currently teaching English at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida. Eric Sterling earned his Ph.D. in English at Indiana University. He is Distinguished Research Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery. He has published two books and dozens of articles. He is currently writing a book on the drama of August Wilson. Susan M. Stone is assistant professor of American literature at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature by and about African Americans, Native Americans, and women. Her recent scholarly work includes publications on the Transcendentalists William Dean Howells, Susan Warner, and Lucretia Hale. She is currently working on two projects, one about rhetoric and writing in nineteenth-century HBCUs, and a second about the plays and poetry of Josephine Preston Peabody. Cammie M. Sublette is assistant professor of English at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. She teaches African American literature, popular culture, genre studies, composition, and literary theory. Karen C. Summers is in the Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, specializing in medieval literature. Additional scholarly interests include gender issues in literature and intersections of literature and history. Claire Taft, presently an English lecturer at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, has also taught at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Ave Maria College of the Americas in Nicaragua, and Centro Colombo Americano in Bogota, Colombia. Ordner W. Taylor, III, is a doctoral student at Morgan State University. He is particularly interested in comparative criticism that encompasses British romanticism and literature from the black diaspora. Lynnell Thomas earned a Ph.D. from Emory University’s Graduate Program of the Liberal Arts and is currently assistant professor of American studies at Umass Boston. Her teaching and research fields include African American studies, American literature and culture, and the history and culture of New Orleans. She is a native New Orleanian whose research focuses on race and tourism in New Orleans.

682

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Rhondda Robinson Thomas is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation, ‘‘Exodus: Literary Migration of Afro-Atlantic Authors, 1760—1903,’’ explores how African Americans appropriated fragments from the biblical story of Exodus, Moses leading the children of Israel to freedom in the Promised Land, into a literary tradition that challenged white Americans’ embrace of the narrative and enabled them to forge persuasive arguments for freedom and equality. She has also contributed an essay on Lucy Bagby Johnson to African American Lives. Bridget Harris Tsemo is assistant professor of rhetoric at the University of Iowa. She is presently working on a book that focuses on American democracy as an essentially racist project that began at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and still continues today. Aimable Twagilimana is professor of English at the State University of New York College at Buffalo (Buffalo State College). He teaches African American literature, world literature, postcolonial theory, literature of continental Europe, and comparative literature. Some of his publications are Race and Gender in the Making of an African American Literary Tradition (1997), The Debris of Ham: Ethnicity, Regionalish and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide (2003), Heritage Library of African Peoples: Hutu and Tutsi (1998), In Their Own Voices: Teenage Refugees from Rwanda Speak Out (1997), and Manifold Annihilation: A Novel (1996). Aimable is currently working on two book manuscripts, A Historical Dictionary of Rwanda and Romancing the Past: Toni Morrison’s Historiography. Jasmin J. Vann is currently working toward an M.A. in English and American literature at the University of Houston, where she also teaches English composition I. Sathyaraj Venkatesan is a doctoral student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, India. His current research interests are literary theories and African American women literature. He has published articles in both international and national journals. Wendy Wagner is an assistant professor of English at Johnson & Wales University. She wrote her dissertation on nineteenth and twentieth century African American woman writers and has published an essay on Amelia E. H. Johnson in The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (Rutgers University Press). She has recently been working on papers on Harriet Jacobs and on feminism and popular culture. A doctoral candidate in twentieth-century literary studies, Terri Jackson Wallace holds a B.A. in English from Dillard University and an M.A. from the University of Vermont. She is currently completing the final stages of her dissertation prospectus in which she discusses the depiction(s) and definition(s) of blackness in the works of William Faulkner and various Harlem Renaissance authors. Rebecca Walsh is currently visiting assistant professor of English at Duke University, where she teaches critical theory and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. She has guest-edited a special issue on global diasporas in the international postcolonial journal Interventions, and has also published on feminist locational theory. Her current

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

683

book project, Modernism’s Geopoetics, explores representations of space and place in a range of African American and Euro-American long poems, while other projects explore space and Native American identity in contemporary film. Rachelle D. Washington is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, Department of Language Education and Literacy. Her areas of interests include oral narratives, black women’s schooling narratives, children’s literature, black feminism/women’s studies, critical pedagogy,ss and reflexive practice. Rachelle is an instructor of preservice teachers at UGA. Mary McCartin Wearn is an assistant professor of English at Macon State College. Her research interests include American literature, gender studies, and abolitionist writing. Dr. Wearn has articles published or forthcoming on Adrienne Rich, Harriet Jacobs, and Sarah Piatt, and she has a book forthcoming on literary representations of motherhood in nineteenth-century America. Kellie D. Weiss is a student at Howard University, where she is pursing a Ph.D. in multicultural literatures in America and teaches composition. She is currently working on the study of Asian American literature and has a publication in progress on the scholarship of teaching and learning at minority serving institutions. Chandra Wells is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Connecticut. Her dissertation is titled ‘‘Befriending the Other(ed) Woman: Fictions of Interracial Female Friendship.’’ Her article ‘‘‘Unable to Imagine Getting on without Each Other’: Katherine Anne Porter’s Fictions of Interracial Female Friendship’’ is forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly. Jacob Nelson Wilkenfeld is a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, concentrating in nineteenth-century American and Brazilian poetry. Laura Madeline Wiseman is an award-winning writer currently teaching in the southwest. Over 100 pieces and two chapbooks of her work have been published. Her works have appeared in 13th Moon, Poetry Motel, Vs, Fiction International, Driftwood, Familiar, Spire magazine, Colere, Clare, 42opus, Dicey Brown, Flyway Literature Review, Nebula, Altar magazine, and other publications. In addition, she is a columnist for Empowerment4Women and the literary editor for In the Fray. Deborah M. Wolf is an English literature major in the CUNY Honors College at the City College of New York. Her current research focuses on temporality in the neo-slave narratives of contemporary African American women writers. In addition, she is the contributing editor of a forthcoming collection of feminist folk tales, fairy tales, and fables titled The Heroic Young Woman. She is particularly interested in the relationship of formal and thematic elements of folklore to the American (and, more specifically, the African American) literary tradition(s). A single mother of a small child, Ms. Wolf is also currently working to organize a network of resources and support for City College students with children.

684

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Loretta G. Woodard is an associate professor of English at Marygrove College, where she teaches African American literature, writing, speech, and interdisciplinary studies. She is also president of the African American Literature and Culture Society. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a number of scholarly works, including African American Review, Obsidian II & III, The Journal of African American History, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary African American Novelists, African American Autobiographers, Women in Literature, African American Dramatists, Writing African American Women, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature, and The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel. Amanda Wray completed her M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky and currently teaches in the Department of English and Theatre at Eastern Kentucky University. She is newly acquainting herself with motherhood, taking advantage of late night feeding sessions to tackle the stack of feminist theory texts on her nightstand and to peruse Maya Angelou’s cookbook. Dave Yost is currently pursuing an M.A. in fiction writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Mali, and the Burmese Volunteer Program in Thailand. Su-lin Yu is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. She has contributed chapters and entries to numerous scholarly reference works and published scholarly articles on ethnic American Literature in a variety of journals, including Jouvert, The Journal of Southwest, and Critique.