One of the most powerful books I have ever read, and re-read, is Frederick Douglass’s autobiography from 1845. The passages that still stand out to me include his learning to read and his yearning for freedom, looking at the ships on Chesapeake Bay. This book should be required reading not just for Americans, but for all.

Continue reading →

Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” first published in 1929.

Larsen, who lived from April 13,1893 to March 30, 1964, was a member of the Harlem Renaissance of writers, credited with writing two novels (the earlier books is Quicksand) and short stories. She later became a nurse.

Her writing is credited for delving not only into issues of race, but also of gender and sexuality.

From a textbook publisher’s guide to Passing:

The most obvious tradition in which to situate Larsen’s novels must be the novel-of-passing, which problematized questions of race. Deemphasizing “biology,” the novel-of-passing provided convenient ways to explore race as a construct of history, culture, and white supremacist ideology. Equally important is the tradition of the novel of manners, as well as the romance.

From the jacket copy of the Penguin edition:

Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. Fair, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, but refuses to acknowledge the racism that continues to constrict her family’s happiness. A chance encounter forces both women to confront the lies they have told others-and the secret fears they have buried within themselves.

For more information:
http://www.literarytraveler.com/literary_articles/nella_larsen_passing.aspx
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/nlarsen.html
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5001379362&er=deny

The previous authors and writings featured on this blog:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Nothup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson

This is a new book, probably the newest one that will be highlighted this month as part of Black History Month, but the book by Mat Johnson, who teaches at Bard College, fits in well with the African-American literary tradition, namely in that it, according to Publishers Weekly:

convincingly re-creates New York City’s stratified colonial society in 1741, while reinterpreting the only historical account of the rumored slave revolt, hysteria and kangaroo trial that led to the executions of many black New Yorkers. (The uprising was also chronicled in Jill Lepore’s New York Burning.) Narrated by a modern-day black man who acts as defense attorney for the executed, this account painstakingly refutes Daniel Horsmanden’s 1744 book, The New York Conspiracy, in which the trial’s judge, prosecutor and court recorder sought to justify the jailing of about 160 Africans, the hanging of 18 and the burning of 13 more at the stake. Johnson’s strength is his ability to breathe movement and motivation into Horsmanden’s witnesses, though trotting out one intimidated witness after another bogs down the latter half of the narrative.

You can hear an interview with Mat Johnson on NPR. This is from the NPR Web site:

In 1741, Manhattan’s white elite lived in constant fear of a race revolt. When the homes of several prominent New Yorkers mysteriously burned, nearly half of Manhattan’s male slaves were jailed, and dozens had been hanged or burned alive. Author Mat Johnson recounts the tragic events of 1741 in his book The Great Negro Plot.

And you should also check out his Web site here. Of note is Johnson’s blog and his “Ladies and Lords of the Niggerati,” which is here, and which he describes as follows:

the term was coined by either Zora Neale Hurston or Wallace Thurman during the 1930s Harlem Renaissance (I tend to think it was Thurman’s, it’s more his style). It sarcastically described the then new breed of black literati storming American letters. While tongue-in-cheek, the word managed to take a slur and make it regal, using it to describe a new caste of Talented Tenth meritocrats. It is both self-effacing and self-aggrandizing, an in-group word that only one ethnic group can comfortably speak aloud. But that just adds to its exclusivity.

Over the next few months, it is my intent to create a listing, by era, of those Lords of the Niggerati that have made the African American literary dialogue such a rich one. If you are looking for encyclopedia entries, go elsewhere. These will be love songs.

So far, there’s nothing in his list, but maybe some of the authors and writings included on this blog could help.

This blog has highlighted:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Nothup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer

From the publisher, Norton:

A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.

“By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, Cane ranks with Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a measure of the Negro novelist’s highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style.” —Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America

From the Modern American Poetry Web site:

While many critics have credited this work with ushering in the Harlem Renaissance, noting the book’s representations of African-American characters and culture, others have located it within the Lost Generation, owing to its literary experimentation, its romantic primitivism, and its critiques of postwar values. Part one of the book presents portraits of six women of the rural South, in a style reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s gallery of grosteques in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Part two shifts to the urban North, using paysage moralisé settings in Washington, D.C., and Chicago to depict the modern world as a postwar wasteland. In Part three, “Kabnis,” the setting shifts back to the rural South and dramatizes a portrait of an artist struggling to represent the parting soul of the African-American past in art.

For more info:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/toomer/life.htm

http://www.dclibrary.org/blkren/bios/toomerj.html

Special thanks goes to Barbara Smith, author and member of the Albany Common Council, for her suggestion.

This image of Langston Hughes (1902 to 1967) was taken by Gordon Parks in 1943 and copied from the Library of Congress.

Langston Hughes was one of the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He was a poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer and newspaper columnist.

This is one of his most famous poems (from the Poetry Foundation Web site). It was first published in 1951:

Harlem
by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

More information about Hughes is available:
Poet.org
Thompson Gale
Red Hot Jazz

W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folks, 1903.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Mass., and by the time he died in 1963 had become one of the most influential black writers ever in America, due largely to the work he is known best for, The Souls of Black Folks.

The collection of essays in the book is both a seminal work in the field of sociology and in the study of African-American culture. In it, Du Bois coins the term “double-consciousness”

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

The complete text of this book is available for free from such sources as Project Gutenburg and Bartleby.com.

Special thanks goes to Barbara Smith, author and member of the Albany Common Council, for her suggestion.

Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography, “Twelve Years A Slave.”

In Saratoga Springs, a plaque near the corner of Congress Street and Broadway memorializes the kidnapping of Solomon Northup. In 1841, the Saratoga County man was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. A delegation from New York some of them affiliated with Union College in Schenectady was eventually able to get Northup released. He returned to the Capital Region and wrote of his experiences in the book “Twelve Years a Slave.”

The first chapter of the book speaks of his family’s history, which he traces back to a Northup slave-owner in Rhode Island.

The second chapter begins innocently enough:

ONE morning, towards the latter part of the month of March, 1841, having at that time no particular business to engage my attention, I was walking about the village of Saratoga Springs, thinking to myself where I might obtain some present employment, until the busy season should arrive

Then he relates his abduction and being sold into slavery in New Orleans.

The full text is available online here.

Northup’s story was also made into a movie.

The film starred Avery Brooks and was directed by Gordon Parks.

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.” This autobiographical novel was published in 1859 and was written by Harriet E. Wilson.

Though published in the 19th century, the novel didn’t gain wide recognition until it was rediscovered, authenticated and published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Gates suggests in his introduction to the book that it can be read as a response, and a critique, of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The text of the book, which is available online at the University of Virginia, is introduced on that site this way:

It some respects it evokes the story Stowe’s novel chose not to narrate: the experiences and opinions of Topsy in New England. As a victim of racism and abuse at the hands of a white woman, Frado (or “Nig”) poses a direct challenge to Stowe’s valorizations of the domestic and the feminine. Although in her Preface Wilson denies any desire to “palliate slavery at the South,” her emphasis on the sufferings of a nominally “free black” in the North was a theme repeatedly developed by the white pro-slavery authors of the ANTI-TOM NOVELS that also contested Stowe’s ideological assumptions. Some of those novels were popular. This novel, on the other hand, was apparently ignored when it first appeared, and remained invisible until 1982.

“Our Nig” isn’t without controversy. Most notably, an Oct. 28, 2006, NYTimes article talks about the publication of another “rediscovered” novel that claims to be the first novel written by an African-American woman:

“The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride,” is believed by some scholars to be the first novel ever published by an African-American woman.

Julia C. Collins, a free black woman who lived in Williamsport, Pa., serialized “The Curse of Caste” in 1865 in The Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. This month it is being published for the first time in book form by Oxford University Press.

But the republication has stirred a dispute between its editors — William L. Andrews, an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Mitch Kachun, a history professor at Western Michigan University — and the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who says that “The Curse of Caste” is not, as stated on the jacket, the first novel by an African-American woman.

Mr. Gates says that honor belongs to “Our Nig” (1859), by Harriet E. Wilson, which he himself brought to light in 1982.

Moreover, the book jacket of “The Curse of Caste” proclaims that it has been “rediscovered.” Mr. Gates said that he published it in microfiche form in 1989 as part of “The Black Periodical Fiction Project.” At Mr. Gates’s request, Mr. Andrews and Mr. Kachun added a footnote to the book acknowledging this.

(In 2001, Mr. Gates also announced the discovery of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” written sometime before the Civil War and said to be by a former slave, Hannah Crafts, though Ms. Crafts’s identity has never been established. The first known novel by any African-American is “Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter,” by William Wells Brown, in 1853.)

The dispute between the scholars centers on competing definitions of what constitutes a novel.

I bring up this dispute to show that the notion of history is not fixed. Disputes arise that force people to question assumptions or past knowledge. Just as Gates’ republication of “Our Nig” added to the notion of what constitutes the African-American literary tradition, so, too, does “The Curse of the Caste.”

This book was also part of the slave narrative course I took at the University of Pittsburgh with professor Ronald Judy.

In addition to the links above, another interesting link is the Harriet Wilson Project in New Hampshire.

Is there a book, play or essay you think is a vital part of the African-American literary tradition, especially something that has touched you personally? E-mail your idea to me at mjanairo@timesunion.com.

August Wilson (1945 to 2005), playwright.

It’s hard to find enough superlatives to described what Wilson has added to American theater with his 10 plays chronicling the black experience in the 20th century:
* 1900s – Gem of the Ocean (2003)
* 1910s – Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984)
* 1920s – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982) – set in Chicago
* 1930s – The Piano Lesson (1989) – Pulitzer Prize
* 1940s – Seven Guitars (1995)
* 1950s – Fences (1985) – Pulitzer Prize
* 1960s – Two Trains Running (1990)
* 1970s – Jitney (1982)
* 1980s – King Hedley II (2001)
* 1990s – Radio Golf (2005)

Of note, Amazon.com lists a new hardcover set of all ten plays to go on sale in April (list price is $200):

Series introduction by John Lahr with individual volumes introduced by Laurence Fishburne, Tony Kushner, Romulus Linney, Marion McClinton, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Phylicia Rashad, Ishmael Reed, and Frank Rich.

The last play I saw was the Broadway revival of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, with Charles S. Dutton as Levee. Though the play begins in a Chicago recording studio, the mood and tenor of the piece — based on Levee’s thwarted ambitions and the complexities of his relationships with his fellow musicians and the record company owners — pack an emotional wallop that elevate the play into the realm of great drama, connecting the experience of these musicians in the 1920s with the timelessness of all human experience.

The Village Voice obituary for Wilson, who suffered from liver cancer, includes the following:

His is an epic of people, in which the grand historical movements of the larger world are not preached upon but reflected through the lives of distinct, graspable individuals, usually in an enclosed space: a boardinghouse parlor, a recording studio, a modest front yard, a corner diner. The world is vast and beyond our control, but the humans in it live for individual needs, within a constantly evolving cultural pattern. This dynamic tension between history and the individual is reflected in the plays’ aesthetic tension, for though each of them has the superficial look of a traditional well-made play, each of them is really a free-flowing river of poetic impressions and musings, a point often lost on those who mistake August for (or would have liked him to be) a conventional Broadway realist. What he was really about was what all great tragic poets are about: the transfiguration of reality.

Here’s a YouTube clip from Gem of the Ocean:

Here are some links:
Paris Review Interview
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Wilson timeline
AugustWilson.net
Post-Gazette’s collection of links
Village Voice obituary

Is there a book, play or essay you think is a vital part of the African-American literary tradition, especially something that has touched you personally? E-mail your idea to me at mjanairo@timesunion.com.